The Devil’s Bargain
The Devil’s Bargain
The chains fall, and I’m not sure what to do with my hands.
Fair. I might.
I touch my throat instead. Smooth skin where there should be scar tissue, where there should be the memory of a crossbow bolt punching through cartilage and spine. Twelve hours ago, give or take. My body’s already forgotten. Erased the evidence like it never happened.
Eight hundred years of dying and regeneration still feels like cheating.
The guard who watched me die is the color of old parchment.
His hands haven’t stopped shaking since he fitted the key into the lock.
Poor bastard probably drew the short straw—someone had to unchain the prisoner who came back from the dead, and apparently that someone is a boy who looks barely old enough to hold his sword without cutting himself.
“Problem?” I ask.
He flinches. Doesn’t answer.
The emperor watches this exchange with the particular stillness I’m beginning to recognize as his default setting.
Standing at the cell entrance in black robes embroidered with dragons so subtle you’d miss them if you weren’t looking, hands clasped behind his back, every line of his body saying I have all the time in the world and I’m choosing to spend it here.
We’ve made a deal. In this cell, in the dark, with the smell of torch smoke and old fear hanging between us.
I agreed. Partly because the alternative was being executed every morning until I cooperated, and partly because—
Well.
Partly because he looked at me like I was a puzzle worth solving, and I haven’t been looked at like that in longer than I want to admit.
And there it is. The traitorous little part of my brain waving its little stupid flag: He sees us! He SEES us!
Shut up, brain. That part gets no vote. That part is why Death #89 happened. And #114. And the one in Jiangzhou I still can’t think about without wanting to drink.
“Shall we?” he says.
I rub my wrists where the chains were. Already fading. Always fading.
“Lead the way, Your Majesty.”
We walk.Up from the dungeons, through corridors that transition from rough stone to smooth, from damp to dry, from the smell of fear to the smell of incense and old wood and the particular mustiness of a palace that’s been standing since before my grandmother’s grandmother was born.
Assuming I had a grandmother.
Assuming I remember.
I don’t. The curse took that along with everything else.
The emperor walks like someone who’s never had to rush. Measured steps. Shoulders level. That impossible stillness even in motion. I fall in beside him—not behind, not ahead, beside—and wait to see if he objects.
He doesn’t.
Interesting.
Guards watch us pass. Their faces cycle through a predictable sequence: confusion, fear, more confusion, a flash of something like horror when they recognize me. Word has spread, apparently. The assassin who died is walking beside the emperor, unchained, unguarded, like she belongs there.
I catalog their expressions. File them away for later. The court will have opinions about this arrangement, and opinions in a court like this tend to have sharp edges.
“There’s one more thing,” I say as we climb another set of stairs. The air is cleaner up here. Warmer. The kind of warmth that comes from fireplaces and servants and the accumulated comfort of centuries of wealth.
“I expected there would be.”
“Archive access.”
His stride doesn’t break, but something shifts in his shoulders. Subtle. Barely there.
“The Imperial Archives contain sensitive material.”
“The investigation will need records. Payment trails. Supply manifests. Names.” I keep my voice light.
Reasonable. The voice of someone who definitely isn’t already planning what snacks she’ll bring to dig through eight centuries of bureaucratic dirty laundry.
“The money that paid for your death passed through three intermediaries. I know how to trace paper trails. But I need paper to trace.”
“You could request specific documents through proper channels.”
“I could...” I let the word hang. “Or I could work efficiently. Your choice.”
He’s quiet for a moment. We pass a corridor that branches east—I can smell old paper and dust drifting from somewhere nearby. Archives. Has to be.
I wait.
“Granted.”
The surprise must show on my face, because his mouth twitches. Not a smile—I’m not sure his face remembers how—but something. The ghost of amusement.
“You’re going to help me find traitors in my own court,” he says. “Restricting your access would only slow the process.”
He’s right. He’s also giving me access to material that could destroy him if I chose to use it. Either he trusts me more than he should, or he’s confident enough in his position that he doesn’t care.
Or he’s smarter than I thought, and there’s something in those archives he wants me to find.
I file that away too.
“The archives open at second bell,” he says. “I’ll arrange an escort.”
“An escort. Wonderful. Because nothing says ‘I trust you’ like a babysitter.”
“The archivist will need to know you have authorization. Unless you’d prefer to explain your presence yourself.”
He has a point. Damn him and his logic and his—
Nope. Not finishing that thought.
General policy: don’t think about the appealing features of people you recently tried to murder. It gets complicated.
We walk in silence for a moment. Not uncomfortable—not exactly. The silence of two people still taking each other’s measure. Still figuring out where the edges are.
I don’t do silence well. Never have. Silence means thinking, and thinking means feeling, and feeling means remembering people I’ve lost and centuries I’ve survived and all the reasons I should have stopped existing a long time ago.
We turn another corner, and the corridor opens into a wing I recognize from three centuries ago—different curtains, different servants, same bones. The guest quarters. Close to the emperor’s own chambers, if memory serves. Close enough to hear footsteps through the walls.
Close enough to be watched.
“Your rooms,” he says, stopping before a carved wooden door. “The servants will provide whatever you need. Clothing, food, writing materials.”
“And if I need a way out?”
“There are three exits.” He says it like he’s discussing the weather. “The main door. The window—though it’s a three-story drop. And a servant passage behind the wall panel.”
I stare at him.
“You’re telling me the escape routes.”
“You would have found them within the hour. I’m saving you the effort.”
Eight hundred years of dealing with powerful men, and not one of them has ever just… handed me the information I would have happily stolen. It’s like he’s playing a game where the rules are different from anything I’ve encountered.
Dangerous, I think. This one is very, very dangerous.
“The connecting door leads toward my chambers,” he adds. “For proximity.”
For surveillance, I don’t say.
“Second bell,” he says. “Archives. Don’t be late.”
Then he’s gone. Walking away with those measured steps, that impossible stillness in motion, leaving me standing in front of a door that leads to a cage made of silk and sandalwood and the emperor’s absolute certainty that he can keep me where he wants me.
I step inside.
The day passes.
Second bell comes. A nervous young woman arrives to escort me to the archives—she introduces herself as Jing, junior archivist, and her hands are shaking almost as badly as the guard’s were. Apparently word has spread about the immortal assassin. Wonderful. Just the reputation I was hoping for.
I don’t bite her either.
The archives smell like old paper and dust and the accumulated knowledge of centuries.
I spend hours there, pulling records, tracing payment trails, following the money backward through the bureaucracy that keeps an empire running.
Three intermediaries. Anonymous drops. But nothing is really untraceable. Not if you know where to look.
The payment was too high. That’s the first thing that bothers me. Standard assassination rates, even for an emperor, don’t reach numbers like this. Someone wanted him very dead. Desperately dead.
And then there’s the escape route. Someone talked. Someone knew where I’d be, when I’d be there, which corridors I’d use. That kind of information doesn’t leak by accident.
Someone inside the palace fed information to my contacts.
And someone inside the palace made sure I’d be caught.
Same person? Different factions?
I make notes. Fold them into my sleeve. Say nothing to the nervous archivist who hovers nearby, ready to fetch whatever I need.
The emperor doesn’t come to check on me. I tell myself I’m not watching for him.
I’m lying.
Evening comes. Servants bring food to my chambers—delicate, beautiful, the kind of meal I would have killed for in some of the hungrier centuries. I eat without tasting it. My mind is elsewhere, chewing on the edges of the conspiracy like a dog with a bone.
Night falls.
I don’t sleep.
The bed is too soft. The silence is wrong. Too long sleeping with one eye open, one ear tuned for danger, and suddenly I’m supposed to relax in silk sheets while the emperor sleeps somewhere nearby?
Not happening.
I lie in the darkness and stare at the ceiling I can’t see and wait for morning.
And then I hear it.
Footsteps. Through the wall. Measured, steady, repetitive.
Pacing.
He’s pacing.
I go still. Stiller than I’ve been all day. The sound filters through the stone—muffled but unmistakable. Back and forth, back and forth, the particular rhythm of someone who can’t make their mind quiet.
I know that rhythm.
I’ve walked it myself, through countless rooms in countless centuries. The insomniac’s prayer. The midnight march of people who have too many thoughts and not enough night to outrun them.
What keeps an emperor from sleeping?
The question surfaces before I can stop it, and I hate that I’m asking. I should be planning. Cataloging information. Preparing for tomorrow. Instead, I’m lying in silk sheets listening to a man walk circles in his room, and I’m wondering.
The pacing sounds like loneliness.
I know the shape of it. You learn to recognize it in other people—the particular weight in the shoulders, the quality of silence between words, the way someone walks when they’re the only person in the room and they know they’ll be the only person in the room forever.
He’s been emperor for twenty-two years. He understands loneliness.
I shouldn’t care about this.
The armor has a crack. I pretend I don’t feel the draft through it.
The pacing continues. Back and forth. Back and forth. I count the steps without meaning to—seventeen one way, seventeen the other, a precise circuit that speaks of practice. How many nights has he done this? How many years of walking the same path in the dark, waiting for a sleep that doesn’t come?
I should be thinking about the investigation.
I’m thinking about him.
Somewhere past midnight, the footsteps stop.
Silence.
I still don’t sleep.Dawn finds me at his door.
The antechamber is already occupied when I arrive—he’s at a desk, scrolls spread before him, tea untouched and cold. The steam has long since stopped rising from the cup. He’s been here for hours.
Has he slept?
The shadows under his eyes suggest not.
Neither did I, I don’t say.
“Shadow reporting,” I say instead. Keeping my voice light. Professional. Like I didn’t spend half the night listening to him pace through the walls.
He looks up.
For a moment—brief, nearly invisible—something flickers across his face. Recognition? The same sleepless night, the same walls between us, the same darkness that wouldn’t lift?
Then it’s gone, and he’s the emperor again.
“The archives open at second bell. I’ve arranged—”
“I went yesterday. Your archivist is very helpful. Very nervous and very helpful.”
His mouth twitches. “Jing. She’s new.”
“She’s terrified of me.”
“Most people are.”
“You’re not.”
It comes out before I can stop it. Direct. Honest. The kind of observation that slips past my armor when I’m tired.
He meets my eyes. Holds them. That stillness again—the mountain stillness, the kind that makes you feel like you’re the one moving even when you’re standing perfectly still.
“No,” he says. “I’m not.”
Something shifts in the air between us. Something I don’t want to name.
I look away first. Pretend I’m studying the scrolls on his desk.
“So,” I say. “First assignment. Find out who paid for your death.”
“And try not to cause an international incident before lunch.”
His voice is flat, but I catch it—the almost-humor. The ghost of a joke buried under all that imperial composure.
There you are, I think.
Then I catch myself thinking it.
“No promises,” I say. And mean it as armor.
He almost smiles. Not quite—never quite—but closer than yesterday. His armor has a crack.
Matching cracks. That’s not romantic. That’s structural damage.
I can’t afford this.
The shadow work begins.