The Immortal Emperor Returns novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Cell Nine
Chu Xun wakes in the death cell the day before his execution, nine thousand years older inside, and asks his sworn brother how much the Chancellor paid him.
Chu Xun woke on a stone floor with a chain on his wrist and nine thousand years in his head.
For a long breath he did not move.
The cell smelled of wet straw and old blood.
A single torch burned in a bracket across the narrow corridor.
He knew that torch.
He had watched it flicker on the last night of his first life, while he waited for the morning that never came for him in this place.
He turned his hand over and looked at it.
It was a young hand, long fingered, with sword calluses across the palm.
Twenty-seven years old, he thought.
The body of a man who had never yet been killed.
Behind his eyes lay the other memory, vast and quiet.
Nine thousand years in the Upper Realm, alone on a mountain of black stone, with only a sword for company.
He remembered the first sword form and the ten-thousandth.
He remembered the day the Nine Heavens bowed and called him Emperor.
Then he remembered a woman's voice, very far off, saying a single word that pulled him down through the clouds.
Back.
He sat up.
The chain on his wrist was black iron, as thick as a thumb, bolted to a ring in the wall.
A seal was carved into each link, glowing faint red.
It was the Soul Lock, the Court of Review's best work.
It was meant to hold a general who could split a boulder with one hand.
Chu looked at it with a mild, tired interest.
Then he touched one link with his forefinger and let a thread of his strength run through it.
Only a thread.
The iron rang once and fell apart in four neat pieces.
Pain went through his arm to the shoulder.
Something hot ran from his nose and dripped onto his white prisoner's robe.
He wiped it with his sleeve and frowned at the red smear.
The body was a cracked jar.
It had the shape of power in it, but not the walls.
Nine thousand years of strength were sitting inside a mortal frame, and the frame had just complained about it.
"Careful," he told himself, aloud, in a voice that sounded rusty.
Footsteps came down the corridor.
They were light and even, a woman's steps, not a jailer's.
He knew them too.
Chu lay back down on the straw with the broken links under his sleeve and closed his eyes.
A key turned.
The door opened and the smell of plum blossom came in with the cold.
"You are awake," said a low voice.
He opened his eyes.
Ning Shuang, Third Princess of the Great Yuan and Director of the Court of Review, stood in the doorway.
She wore the scarlet judge's robe with the black collar, and her hair was tied in a half knot with a silver comb.
There was a mole at the left corner of her mouth.
In the first life he had seen that face for exactly as long as it took her to read his sentence aloud.
She had not blinked once.
She carried a lacquered tray with a stone jug, two cups and a covered bowl.
Behind her a jailer hovered with his hands tucked in his sleeves.
"Leave us," she said.
"Your Highness, the prisoner is a danger."
"Then stand outside the door and listen for the screaming."
The jailer went.
Shuang set the tray on the stool and poured.
She did it without asking what he wanted, and she poured the wine into the left cup, the plain one, not the painted one.
Chu watched her hands.
They were steady.
Then she lifted the lid of the bowl, and steam rose from a pot of black tea so bitter he could smell it from the straw.
It was his tea.
He had drunk it every morning for ten years and told no one but his cook.
"You study your prisoners," he said.
"I study my files." She sat on the stool with her back very straight. "Plum wine, northern tea, no sugar. It says so in the register of your household."
It did not.
He had never written it down anywhere.
He let that go by and took the cup.
The wine was cold and sharp, exactly as he liked it.
"Grand Marshal Chu," she said. "Tomorrow at dusk, in Meridian Square, you will be beheaded for treason."
Her voice was flat, the voice of a woman reading the weather.
But the paper in her hand, the sentence scroll she had brought, was shaking.
She saw him look.
She put the scroll under her knee.
"Do you have anything to say?"
"Only that the Court of Review has very good wine."
Something moved in her face and was gone.
"I am sorry it is the last you will drink," she said.
It was a strange thing to say.
Chu studied her over the rim of the cup.
He had spent nine thousand years learning to read the thing under a face, and what lay under hers did not look like a woman at ease with a signature.
It looked like a woman standing in a house after the fire.
"Did you come to watch me weep, Princess?"
"I came to see whether you were still here." She stood quickly, like someone who had said too much. "Eat something. You will need it."
She went out.
The key turned in the lock.
Chu set the cup down and found that his hand wanted to follow her.
That annoyed him.
Another set of footsteps rang in the corridor, heavy and quick.
A voice he knew as well as his own cried out, thick with tears.
"Brother Chu!"
Han Yuanqing came to the bars in the torchlight.
He was twenty-nine, broad shouldered, handsome, with his armor dull and his eyes red.
He gripped the iron and sobbed.
"I would give my life for yours. I swear it on our oath. I tried to speak for you at the trial and they would not hear me."
Chu stood slowly and walked to the bars.
He looked at the man who had held his hand at his own sworn-brother ceremony, and at the man who had stood in the witness box and said he had seen the letter written.
"Yuanqing," he said gently.
"Yes, Brother."
"How much did Gu pay you?"
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