The Impossible Assassin #2
“Death number one was the most memorable, obviously. First times always are. Death number eighty-nine was the most creative—there were hooks involved, and a truly impressive amount of screaming, most of it mine. Death number three hundred and twelve was the most disappointing. I was very much hoping that volcano would do the trick. It did not.”
She is still talking. Words tumble out of her in a steady stream—jokes and observations and commentary that I suspect she could not stop if she tried. She talks the way some people breathe, constantly, as if silence is an enemy to be defeated with sufficient verbal force.
I recognize the strategy. I use silence for the same purpose.
“Medieval populations had very limited problem-solving skills,” she is saying now.
“Anything they could not explain with demons or divine punishment, they simply burned. I was burned forty-seven times in the thirteenth century alone. After a while, I stopped trying to explain and simply let them get on with it. Faster that way. Though the smell of burning hair never quite—”
She stops. Her eyes narrow slightly, focusing on something in my face.
“You almost smiled.”
I did not.
“The corner of your mouth. Just there.” She gestures with her chained hands. “Most people do not notice. You are very good at not showing what you feel. But I have had eight hundred years to learn how to read people, and you, Your Majesty, were almost amused.”
Something shifts in my chest. An unfamiliar pressure. My mouth wants to curve, wants to acknowledge that something about her relentless absurdity has cracked through the wall I maintain between myself and the world.
I do not let it.
She notices anyway.
“Ah,” she says softly. “There you are.”
I am afraid that she is right.
For a moment, neither of us speaks. The silence is not strategic. I do not know what it is.
She has been alive for eight centuries. I have been emperor for twenty-two years. Both of us, I realize, have forgotten what it is to be truly seen by another person. To be looked at without fear, without agenda, without the careful calculations that power demands.
She is the first person in twenty years who has looked at me like I am a puzzle worth solving rather than a throne worth fearing.
The realization is inconvenient.
You like her, Tianlong observes.
I do not dignify this with a response.
Liar.
I step closer to the bars. She does not flinch—if anything, she leans slightly forward, as curious about my approach as I am about her existence.
“You know who paid for my death.”
“I know who paid me,” she corrects. “Not the same thing. The money passed through three intermediaries. Whoever actually wants you dead is clever enough to maintain distance. But the trail exists. Trails always exist, if one knows where to look.”
“And you know where to look.”
“I have eight hundred years of practice following money. It is a remarkably consistent skill. The currencies change, the methods evolve, but greed leaves the same greasy fingerprints across every century I have witnessed.”
She speaks with a confidence that should irritate me. It does not. There is no arrogance in it—just the simple certainty of someone who has had longer than most dynasties to learn her craft.
She watches me. Waiting. Not nervous—curious. As if she has all the time in the world.
She does, I realize. She has had all the time in the world for eight hundred years.
I have considerably less. But perhaps, for once, that is an advantage.
“You tried to kill me,” I say. “You failed. By every law of the empire, you should be executed. Publicly. Painfully. Made an example of, so that others who might consider treason will remember what the throne does to its enemies.”
She nods. “A reasonable approach. Traditional. I have been executed by empires before. It is, as I mentioned, ultimately ineffective, but I appreciate the theatrical commitment.”
“I am not going to execute you.”
The words surprise me as much as they seem to surprise her. I had not planned to say them. I had not made this decision—or if I had, I had made it somewhere beneath the level of conscious thought, in the quiet space where instinct lives.
She tilts her head. Something in her expression shifts—still amused, but watchful now. Calculating.
Good.
I can work with calculating.
“You are going to help me find who paid for this,” I continue. “The trail you mentioned—you will follow it. The conspirators in my court, the money that funded this attempt, the source behind the sources. You will uncover all of it.”
“And in exchange?”
“You live.”
She considers this. Her chains clink softly as she shifts position on the bench.
“An interesting offer,” she says. “Unusual, for an emperor. Most rulers in your position would simply torture the information out of me. More traditional. More satisfying, I imagine, for someone who was recently poisoned.”
“Would torture work?”
“No.” She smiles. “But they usually try anyway.”
“I do not waste time on ineffective methods.”
“Ah.” The smile widens. “A practical emperor. How refreshing.”
I should end this conversation. I have made my offer; she can accept or refuse, and either way I should return to the war chamber, to my advisors, to the endless work of ruling an empire that someone is actively trying to destabilize. I have indulged this… whatever this is… long enough.
I do not move.
“Why?” The question escapes before I can stop it. “Why take the contract? Why risk coming here?”
She is quiet for a moment. The longest she has been quiet since I entered. When she speaks again, the relentless humor has dimmed—not gone, but banked, like a fire settling into coals.
“Because I have been alive for eight centuries, Your Majesty. Because I have died six hundred and forty-three times and woken up six hundred and forty-three times and not one of those deaths has been permanent.” She pauses.
“Because I am very, very tired. And I thought, perhaps, an emperor with dragons might finally be dangerous enough to make it stick.”
The words land like stones in still water. I watch the ripples spread.
She wanted to die. She came here hoping I would be capable of giving her the one thing she cannot give herself.
And instead, she killed me. And I did not stay dead. And now we are two impossible things, facing each other across dungeon bars, both of us failures at the one death that should have mattered.
Interesting, Tianlong says again. But this time, there is no humor in it. This time, the word carries the weight of something ancient and knowing—a dragon’s recognition of significance beyond mortal understanding.
What do you know? I ask him.
Not enough. Not yet. A pause. But I will say this, little flame: do not let her leave.
I was not planning to.
The thought surfaces before I can examine it, and I push it aside. There will be time later—for the journal, for meditation, for the quiet work of understanding what is happening to my controlled existence.
For now, there is only this. Her. The offer hanging in the air between us.
“I have a proposition,” I say.
She leans forward slightly. The torchlight catches the angles of her face—the sharp features, the sharper eyes, the mouth that seems perpetually on the edge of a joke she has not yet told.
“I am listening.”
“You will be assigned as my shadow. Where I go, you go. Access to the court, to the records, to everything you need to trace the conspiracy. In exchange, you help me find the traitors, and when it is done…”
“When it is done?”
“We discuss what comes next.”
Not freedom. I do not offer that. But not execution either. Something undefined. A future that neither of us can predict.
She studies me for a long moment. I let her look. Let her see whatever it is she is searching for.
“An emperor who survived my poison,” she says slowly. “A proposition instead of execution. Access instead of chains.” Her mouth curves. “You are not what I expected, Your Majesty.”
“Nor are you.”
She laughs. The sound is startling—bright and genuine and nothing like the calculated amusement she has been displaying. It echoes off the dungeon walls, out of place in this space designed for suffering.
“Very well,” she says. “I accept your proposition.” She lifts her chained wrists. “Shall we begin?”
I gesture for the guard. He returns, pale and confused, to unlock her cell.
As she steps through the door—alive, whole, impossible—something shifts in the careful architecture of my existence. A crack I did not intend. A light I did not expect.
I do not know yet what it will cost me.
I find that I want to find out.