Page 8 of The Immortal’s Mark

Interesting, Tianlong observes.

For once, the dragon and I agree.

She looks up when she hears my footsteps. Her eyes find mine through the bars—the same eyes that found mine across the celebration hall, sharp and unafraid and insufferably curious.

She does not rise.

Does not bow.

Does not show any of the deference an assassin shown mercy might be expected to display.

“Ah,” she says. “The unkillable emperor.” A smile curves her mouth—not nervous, not calculating, genuinely amused in a way that suggests I am the entertainment and she is settling in to enjoy the show. “I have been looking forward to this conversation.”

I find that I do not know what to do with my hands.

This is an unusual problem. Twenty-two years of imperial training have given me precise control over every gesture, every expression, every subtle shift of weight that might be observed and interpreted. My hands know where to rest—clasped behind my back for authority, folded before me for patience, still at my sides for warning.

None of those positions seem correct. I clasp them behind my back anyway.

“Leave us.”

The guard hesitates. I can feel his objection forming—this is irregular, this is dangerous, protocol demands witnesses and precautions and the sensible distance between an emperor and someone who tried to kill him hours ago.

I do not repeat myself.

After a moment, he bows. The keys rattle in his hands as he backs away. Footsteps echo down the corridor, then fade.

The door closes.

We are alone.

The silence changes texture. In the war chamber, my silences are tools—spaces I create and control, empty rooms I force others to fill with their uncertainties. This silence is different. She does not rush to fill it with explanations or pleas or the desperate bargaining that prisoners usually offer. She simply waits.

Watching me watch her.

“How many times have you died?”

The question comes out more directly than I intended. I had planned to begin with strategy—to establish authority, gather information, proceed methodically through the interrogation. Instead I have asked the thing I actually want to know, and now it is sitting in the air between us like an offering.

She considers the question. Tilts her head slightly, the way a bird might examine something that has caught its interest.

“Six hundred and forty-three,” she says. “You are my first resurrection of an assassination target. It is a memorable day for both of us.”

Six hundred and forty-three.

The number refuses to become reasonable. I turn it over, examine it from multiple angles, attempt to fit it into my understanding of how the world works. It does not fit.

Six hundred and forty-three deaths. Six hundred and forty-three returns. A span of time that I cannot properly conceptualize—my twenty-two years on the throne suddenly feeling like the blink of an eye, a brief flicker against the weight of centuries.

“You appear skeptical,” she observes. “Reasonable, I suppose. I am often skeptical myself. You would think that after the first few hundred, one would grow accustomed to the whole business. One does not. Every time, some small part of me thinks surely this time it will stick. It never does.”

She speaks of dying the way others speak of weather. An inconvenience. A recurring nuisance. Something unpleasant but ultimately manageable, like a headache or an annoying relative.

“Death number one was the most memorable, obviously. First times always are. Death number eighty-nine was the most creative—there were hooks involved, and a truly impressive amount of screaming, most of it mine. Death number three hundred and twelve was the most disappointing. I was very much hoping that volcano would do the trick. It did not.”

She is still talking. Words tumble out of her in a steady stream—jokes and observations and commentary that I suspect she could not stop if she tried. She talks the way some people breathe, constantly, as if silence is an enemy to be defeated with sufficient verbal force.

I recognize the strategy. I use silence for the same purpose.