The Immortal Emperor Returns novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: The Nameless Lamp

The note said not to follow her, and Chu read it twice, folded it and put it inside his coat.

Then he followed her.

He was not proud of it.

He was also not stupid.

A woman did not leave a bed that warm before sunrise to pray.

The Ancestral Hall stood at the back of the palace grounds, behind three gates and a courtyard of white stone.

Snow had drifted on the roofs.

He went over the third wall in the first gray light, quiet as a cat, and found that the strength in him moved easily now, with none of the grind of yesterday.

His body was whole.

It was very strange to be whole.

The great hall was lit by lamps.

Thousands of them stood on tiers of black wood that climbed to the ceiling, each a small bronze dish with a wick, each marked with a name in gold.

They were the lamps of the dead of the Ning family and of the high ministers, and priests in gray robes tended them in silence.

A low hum filled the air, a chant so old that nobody remembered the words.

Chu slid behind a pillar.

Shuang stood at the far end of the hall.

She had put on the scarlet robe again.

The priests bowed to her and drew back.

She went past the tiers of the great ancestors, past the ministers' shelves, to a corner behind a screen.

There stood one lamp by itself.

It was small, plain, and made of dull pewter.

There was no name on it.

A flame burned in the dish, thin and blue-white, and Chu felt it from across the hall in the back of his teeth.

It was not a flame of oil.

It was something else, something that drank, and it was burning low.

Shuang knelt in front of it and folded her hands.

She spoke so quietly that he could hear only the shape of the words.

He moved closer along the pillars.

"Seven days," she was saying. "Seven more. It is enough. It has to be." Her voice cracked. "Hold on. He is alive. He is out there, and he looks at me as if I were still the one in the Square. But he is alive."

The lamp wavered.

Chu stood very still with his hand on the cold wood and the hair rising along his arms.

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