Page 1 of The Immortal’s Mark

Chapter 1

The Emperor Who Wouldn’t Die

Chapter 642: In which our heroine discovers that emperors are significantly harder to kill than advertised.

The palace smells like incense and money.

I hate both.

Incense because it reminds me of temples, and temples remind me of the century I spent pretending to be a nun. Money because it reminds me why I’m here—clinging to a rooftop in the dark, fingers raw from cold stone, about to kill a man I’ve never met for a sum that would make a lesser assassin weep with joy.

I’m not weeping. I stopped doing that around century three. The tear ducts still work; I just can’t remember why I’d bother.

My ribs ache from the climb. The eastern wall has fewer handholds than my contact promised, and whoever built this palace apparently never considered that assassins might appreciate a bit of decorative stonework at convenient intervals. I’m going to have words with my contact later. Pointed words. Possibly accompanied by pointed objects.

Below me, seventeen guards patrol the outer perimeter. Twelve visible, five rotating through the shadows in patterns so predictable I could set a water clock by them. The closest one scratches his nose every thirty seconds. The one by the garden gate is half asleep on his feet. Amateur arrangements. The kind of security that looks impressive to visiting dignitaries and dies easily when tested.

I’ve tested a lot of security in eight hundred years. This won’t be the worst I’ve cracked.

Won’t be the best either.

The Autumn Moon Festival unfurls across the palace grounds like silk spilling from a merchant’s cart—banners catching lantern light, music threading through the cold autumn air, the particular hum of an empire pretending it isn’t rotting from the inside. Sweet osmanthus incense drifts up from the bronze braziers stationed along the walkways. Somewhere, someone’s playing a pipa, something mournful and beautiful about lost love or dead heroes or whatever else court musicians think will make nobles feel cultured.

The kind of song that makes people feel things.

This is the part where a normal person would get emotional. I count exits instead.

I shift my weight on the roof tile. Gently. These tiles are older than three of my deaths. I count the shadows between me and the servant’s passage. Eight good ones. Plenty. The moon’s full enough to be inconvenient, but the lanterns create deeper pockets of darkness between them.

Someone’s paid handsomely for tonight’s work. Emperor-killing rates aren’t cheap—I should know, I’ve been setting them for longer than most dynasties last—and whoever wants this particular emperor dead wants him very dead. The kind of dead that costs more than most provinces earn in a decade.

The contract came through three intermediaries, each more paranoid than the last. Anonymous. Untraceable. The payment already waiting in a temple three hundred miles from here, enough silver to buy a small estate and disappear for a few decades.

Not that I’ll stay anywhere for decades. Never do.

Not my business why they want him dead. Never is. Just my business to deliver the corpse.

I check my knives. Four. Should be enough for one man, even an emperor. The watered steel one for close work—good edge, holds well, feels right in my palm. The ceramic for throwing. Two plain iron for backup, because sometimes quantity matters more than quality.

If the knives fail, I brought poison.

Always bring poison.

It’s the professional’s fallback. Any amateur with a grudge can stab someone. It takes real experience to kill them quietly, from across a room, with a cup of wine they never thought to question.

The guards rotate again. Gap opening in the southeastern corner, just like the pattern promised.

I move.

The servant’s passage is where I remember it.

Three hundred years ago, give or take a decade, I infiltrated this palace for a different emperor. Different dynasty, different name I’ve long since forgotten, different reasons that stopped mattering the moment the payment cleared. The architecture’s the same. The arrogance is the same. The bones of power don’t change—just the faces wearing them, just the names they carve into the history books before the next set of faces tears them down.

Empires rise. Empires fall. I keep climbing walls.

I slip behind the silk hangings—dusty, neglected, the kind of thing nobody looks at twice—and into the gap between walls. Dust and old wood and the skitter of mice who’ve made their home in the space between grandeur and rot.

The panel opens exactly where it should.