The Immortal Emperor Returns novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Midnight Cup

Chancellor Gu brings a poisoned cup and boasts too much, then the dawn bell rings an hour early.

Han Yuanqing's face went the color of tallow.

"Brother, I do not understand."

"You do." Chu kept his voice mild. "You gamble. You owed eleven thousand taels to the Golden Dice House in the spring. In the summer you owed nothing."

Han's grip loosened on the bars.

"Someone paid it for you," Chu said. "And now you stand in my sentence like a man standing in warm water."

"You are tired. They have drugged you."

"Go and tell Gu that I said good night."

Han opened his mouth.

For a moment Chu thought he would say the true thing.

Instead Han wiped his cheeks with the heel of his hand and put his armored shoulders back.

"I will pray for you," he said stiffly, and walked away.

His footsteps were too fast for a man grieving.

Chu watched the torchlight take him.

He could have killed Han with one breath from where he stood.

The thought arrived calmly and sat there.

Not yet, he told it.

A dead brother was only a body.

A brother who confessed in front of the army was a weapon.

He sat down against the wall with the four pieces of iron in his lap and began to turn them over, one at a time, until his breathing slowed.

The bleeding in his nose had stopped.

The ache in his arm had not.

He measured the strength he had in the jar.

A single thread, safely.

Two threads, and his left hand would split.

Three, and he would die on this floor, and no one would ever know that an emperor had come home.

So he would be clever.

He was good at it, when he bothered.

The torch burned lower.

Past midnight, the corridor filled with the dry rustle of long silk and the clatter of mail, and a voice he had hoped never to hear again spoke outside the door.

"Open it."

The key turned.

Chancellor Gu Boyan came into the cell with the grace of a man entering his own study.

He was fifty-eight, thin as a heron, with a pointed grey beard and sleeves so long they hid his hands.

A jade ring shone on his thumb.

Two palace guards followed him, and one of them carried a small tray.

On the tray sat a single porcelain cup.

"Grand Marshal," Gu said, with real warmth. "I could not let you spend your last night without a visit."

"Chancellor." Chu did not rise. "You honor a condemned man."

"The Emperor honors you. He has ordered me to bring you something to ease the hour."

"The Emperor is asleep."

"He is resting. The Emperor rests a great deal these days."

Gu said it lightly, and the guard at his shoulder looked at the floor.

Chu noticed that.

He noticed everything now.

Gu took the cup from the tray himself and held it out.

The liquid inside was pale gold and smelled faintly of honey.

Under the honey was something else, a dry smell like ash after rain.

Chu knew that smell.

In the Upper Realm he had sat for four hundred years beside a poisoned spring, learning every venom a mortal world could make.

This was not a sleeping draught.

It was a quiet ending, built to look like a fever in the night, so that no crowd would gather at dusk to hear the Grand Marshal's last words.

"It is kind of you," Chu said, and took the cup.

Gu's thumb ring tapped once against his sleeve.

Chu turned the cup in his fingers, then tipped it, slowly, onto the stone floor.

The gold liquid ran across the flagstones and sank into a crack.

A wisp of grey smoke rose.

The crack widened by the width of a finger, and the stone around it turned the color of cold ashes.

Neither guard moved.

Gu looked at the spreading stain for a long moment.

Then he laughed, softly and with real pleasure.

"You were always sharper than they said."

"I was always sharper than you said."

"Do you know what the Court of Review calls that wine? It does not call it anything. It is not in any book." Gu walked a slow circle around him. "I would have liked to see your face if it had gone down. Instead I will see your head tomorrow."

"At dusk."

"At dusk." Gu smiled. "And the Emperor sleeps through it, as he will sleep through the Winter Offering, and through the new year, and through everything after. You were such a faithful servant, Chu Xun. You will be spared the sight."

The guard beside him drew a short breath.

Gu did not seem to hear it.

He was enjoying himself too much.

"Twelve days," he went on. "That is all the old man has. A cough in the incense, a stumble on the altar steps, and the Great Yuan will weep and crown a sweet boy of fifteen who does exactly what he is told. And the Northern Army, which your dear brother has already promised to keep warm for me, will march where I point."

Chu said nothing.

He was memorizing every word.

"I tell you this because you will carry it nowhere," Gu finished kindly. "It is a gift, between old colleagues."

"Thank you."

"Not at all."

Gu turned toward the door, then stopped, and lifted one finger.

"Though I find I do not care to wait for dusk."

He spoke to the guard without looking at him.

"Ring the morning bell. Now."

"Chancellor, it is the middle of the night."

"Then the Square will be quiet," Gu said. "How considerate of it."

He went out.

Far above the cell, through yards of stone, a great bronze bell began to ring.

Each stroke fell on the dark.

Chu stood up with the iron pieces in his fist and listened.

At the end of the corridor a door banged open, and the tramp of the executioner's men began to come down toward him.

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