“You spent a great deal of time around the emperor. Your soul is familiar with his, much as the window frame is familiar with the stained glass. This is why I have to try out the seals on someone like you, and not on myself. When I stamp you, it’s like . . . it’s like I’m presenting to your soul a piece of something it should know. It only works if the piece is very small, but so long as it is—and so long as the soul considers the piece a familiar part of Ashravan, as I’ve indicated—the stamp will take for a brief time before being rejected.”
Gaotona regarded her with bemusement.
“Sounds like superstitious nonsense to you, I assume?” Shai said.
“It is . . . rather mystical,” Gaotona said, spreading his hands before him. “A window frame knowing the ‘concept’ of a stained glass window? A soul understanding the concept of another soul?”
“These things exist beyond us,” Shai said, preparing another seal. “We think about windows, we know about windows; what is and isn’t a window takes on . . . meaning, in the Spiritual Realm. Takes on life, after a fashion. Believe the explanation or do not; I guess it doesn’t matter. The fact is that I can try these seals on you, and if they stick for at least a minute, it’s a very good indication that I’ve hit on something.
“Ideally, I’d try this on the emperor himself, but in his state, he would not be able to answer my questions. I need to not only get these to take, but I need to make them work together—and that will require your explanations of what you are feeling so I can nudge the design in the right directions. Now, your arm again, please?”
“Very well.” Gaotona composed himself, and Shai pressed another seal against his arm. She locked it with a half turn, but as soon as she pulled the stamp away, the seal vanished in a puff of red.
“Blast,” Shai said.
“What happened?” Gaotona said, reaching fingers to his arm. He smeared mundane ink; the seal had vanished so quickly, the ink hadn’t even been incorporated into its workings. “What have you done to me this time?”
“Nothing, it appears,” Shai said, inspecting the head of the stamp for flaws. She found none. “I had that one wrong. Very wrong.”
“What was it?”
“The reason Ashravan agreed to become emperor,” Shai said. “Nights afire. I was certain I had this one.” She shook her head, setting the stamp aside. Ashravan, it appeared, had not stepped up to offer himself as emperor because of a deep-seated desire to prove himself to his family and to escape the distant—but long—shadow of his brother.
“I can tell you why he did it, Forger,” Gaotona said.
She eyed him. This man encouraged Ashravan to step toward the imperial throne, she thought. Ashravan eventually hated him for it. I think.
“All right,” she said. “Why?”
“He wanted to change things,” Gaotona said. “In the empire.”
“He doesn’t speak of this in his journal.”
“Ashravan was a humble man.”
Shai raised an eyebrow. That didn’t match the reports she’d been given.
“Oh, he had a temper,” Gaotona said. “And if you got him arguing, he would sink his teeth in and hold fast to his point. But the man . . . the man he was . . . Deep down, that was a humble man. You will have to understand this about him.”
“I see,” she said. You did it to him too, didn’t you? Shai thought. That look of disappointment, that implication we should be better people than we are. Shai wasn’t the only one who felt that Gaotona regarded her as if he were a displeased grandfather.
That made her want to dismiss the man as irrelevant. Except . . . he had offered himself to her tests. He thought what she did was horrible, so he insisted on taking the punishment himself, instead of sending another.
You’re genuine, aren’t you, old man? Shai thought as Gaotona sat back, eyes distant as he considered the emperor. She found herself displeased.
In her business, there were many who laughed at honest men, calling them easy pickings. That was a fallacy. Being honest did not make one naive. A dishonest fool and an honest fool were equally easy to scam; you just went about it in different ways.
However, a man who was honest and clever was always, always more difficult to scam than someone who was both dishonest and clever.
Sincerity. It was so difficult, by definition, to fake.
“What are you thinking behind those eyes of yours?” Gaotona asked, leaning forward.
“I was thinking that you must have treated the emperor as you did me, annoying him with constant nagging about what he should accomplish.”
Gaotona snorted. “I probably did just that. It does not mean my points are, or were, incorrect. He could have . . . well, he could have become more than he did. Just as you could become a marvelous artist.”
“I am one.”
“A real one.”
“I am one.”
Gaotona shook his head. “Frava’s painting . . . there is something we are missing about it, isn’t there? She had the forgery inspected, and the assessors found a few tiny mistakes. I couldn’t see them without help—but they are there. Upon reflection, they seem odd to me. The strokes are impeccable, masterful even. The style is a perfect match. If you could manage that, why would you have made such errors as putting the moon too low? It’s a subtle mistake, but it occurs to me that you would never have made such an error—not unintentionally, at least.”
Shai turned to get another seal.
“The painting they think is the original,” Gaotona said, “the one hanging in Frava’s office right now . . . It’s a fake too, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Shai admitted with a sigh. “I swapped the paintings a few days before trying for the scepter; I was investigating palace security. I sneaked into the gallery, entered Frava’s offices, and made the change as a test.”
“So the one they assume is fake, it must be the original,” Gaotona said, smiling. “You painted those mistakes over the original to make it seem like it was a replica!”
“Actually, no,” Shai said. “Though I have used that trick in the past. They’re both fakes. One is simply the obvious fake, planted to be discovered in case something went wrong.”
“So the original is still hidden somewhere . . .” Gaotona said, sounding curious. “You sneaked into the palace to investigate security, then you replaced the original painting with a copy. You left a second, slightly worse copy in your room as a false trail. If you were found out while sneaking in—or if you were for some reason sold out by an ally—we would search your room and find the poor copy, and assume that you hadn’t yet accomplished your swap. The officers would take the good copy and believe it to be authentic. That way, no one would keep looking for the original.”
“More or less.”
“That’s very clever,” Gaotona said. “Why, if you were captured sneaking into the palace trying to steal the scepter, you could confess that you were trying to steal only the painting. A search of your room would turn up the fake, and you’d be charged with attempted theft from an individual, in this case Frava, which is a much lesser crime than trying to steal an imperial relic. You would get ten years of labor instead of a death sentence.”