The Immortal Emperor Returns novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Block

Chu walks to the execution block, breaks the blade without a kill, and the Princess's seal suspends the sentence.

They did not even bother to carry torches into Meridian Square.

The Court of Review's soldiers had lit it from the rim, two hundred braziers, so the whole great paved space shone gold and black in the small hours.

Chu walked out of the east gate in a white robe with his hands bound in front of him.

The rope was real hemp.

He could have burned it off with a thought, and he did not.

Thousands of people filled the Square anyway.

The bell had woken the capital, and the capital had come to see a marshal die.

They pressed against the soldiers' spears in silent rows.

Some of them were weeping.

Chu looked at their faces, and for a moment something old moved in his chest.

Nine thousand years had not made him forget that these people had once cheered his name.

At the far end rose the execution dais, black wood hung with white cloth.

On it stood the block, the executioner with his broad curved blade, and a long table where three people sat.

Chancellor Gu on the right, in dark silk, one hand resting on a small bronze incense burner.

Han Yuanqing on the left, in full Northern Army armor, with a black band tied around his arm.

And in the center, in the scarlet robe, Ning Shuang, with the sentence scroll under her palm.

She did not look at him as he came up the steps.

She was looking at a point somewhere above the crowd.

The executioner shoved him to his knees at the block.

The wood was cold against his chin.

"Grand Marshal Chu Xun," said the herald, his voice rolling across the Square. "You stand condemned for conspiring with the Bei Rong khan, by your own hand, in a letter of your own writing. The Court of Review has heard the witness. The sentence is death."

Chu lifted his head.

"Let the Marshal speak," murmured someone in the front row.

"The prisoner has no leave to speak," said Gu, quite pleasantly.

"I think he does."

That was a different voice, a woman's, low.

Every head turned.

Shuang had not moved, but her eyes were on Chu now.

They were amber, and as steady as a drawn bowstring.

"The Founding Law gives the condemned one sentence before the blade," she said. "I have read it myself."

Gu's smile thinned.

"Then let him say it quickly, Highness."

Chu looked out at the Square.

He did not shout.

He had not needed to shout since the second century.

"I have never written to the Bei Rong," he said, and his voice reached the back of the crowd as clearly as if he stood among them. "The letter was forged. The man who forged it is on this dais. And he will walk off it in chains."

A ripple went through the Square.

"Executioner," said Gu, without raising his voice.

The big blade rose.

Chu sighed.

He drew one thread of strength through the rope, through the wrists, down through the stone of the dais into the earth, and then back up into the air above his own neck.

It cost him a splitting pain behind the eyes.

Blood ran from his nose again.

The blade came down.

It stopped a finger's width from his skin, as if it had struck a pane of glass, and then the bright steel rang and snapped in the middle with a sound like a whip.

The top half spun away over the crowd and stuck in the edge of the dais.

The executioner stared at the stump in his hands.

Then, very slowly, he opened his fingers and let it fall.

Nobody in the Square said a word.

The rope had come apart at Chu's wrists.

He rose to his feet, brushed a fleck of steel from his sleeve and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

Han Yuanqing was on his feet, white as paper, with his hand on his sword.

"Sorcery!" Han shouted. His voice cracked. "He is a demon! Archers!"

Fifty bows rose around the Square.

"Do not shoot," said Shuang.

"Highness," Gu said sharply, "the prisoner has attacked the Court."

"The prisoner has been struck at by an executioner. He defended himself." She rose, unhurried, and the red hem of her robe swept the boards. "And the sentence has not been read to the end. There is a flaw in the writ."

Gu stared.

"There is no flaw."

"The Founding Law says a sentence for treason must carry the Emperor's own brush in the last line." She turned the scroll to the crowd. "Where is it?"

The Square leaned forward.

On the page, at the bottom, there was a seal of the Chancellery.

There was no imperial brush.

Chu felt the old calm settle on him, as it did in a hard fight when the enemy finally made a mistake.

Gu had been so eager for a quiet end that he had skipped the one thing the Emperor, drugged and asleep, could not give.

"This is a clerk's oversight," Gu said evenly.

"Then the Chancellery has a great many clerks." Shuang took the Court of Review's seal from her sleeve, a heavy red jade block with a coiled dragon, and held it up where the braziers could catch it. "By the seal of the Director of Review, this sentence is suspended until the Emperor wakes and signs it. The prisoner is in my custody."

A murmur rose in the crowd, then a roar.

Gu's thumb ring clicked against the bronze burner.

"Highness, you cannot."

"I have just done it."

She came down the steps, a tall woman in red, and stopped in front of Chu.

She was close enough that he could smell plum blossom.

Her hands were quite steady.

There was an iron manacle in them, with a short chain, and she snapped one half around her own slim wrist and the other around his.

The links chimed together.

"The prisoner is mine," Ning Shuang said, loudly enough for the whole Square to hear.

Then, in a voice meant for him alone, so low it barely moved the air: "Walk with me, Marshal, and do not kill anyone yet."

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