“I don’t recognize this piece,” Gaotona said, still looking at the table.

“Why should you?”

“I have studied ancient arts extensively,” he said. “This is from the Vivare dynasty?”

“No.”

“An imitation of the work of Chamrav?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“Nothing,” Shai said with exasperation. “It’s not imitating anything; it has become a better version of itself.” That was a maxim of good Forgery: Improve slightly on an original, and people would often accept the fake because it was superior.

Gaotona stood up, looking troubled. He’s thinking again that my talent is wasted, Shai thought with annoyance, moving aside a stack of accounts of the emperor’s life. Collected at her request, these came from palace servants. She didn’t want only the official histories. She needed authenticity, not sterilized recitations.

Gaotona stepped back to his chair. “I do not see how transforming this table could have taken hardly any work, although it clearly must be much simpler than what you have been asked to do. Both seem incredible to me.”

“Changing a human soul is far more difficult.”

“I can accept that conceptually, but I do not know the specifics. Why is it so?”

She glanced at him. He wants to know more of what I’m doing, she thought, so that he can tell how I’m preparing to escape. He knew she would be trying, of course. They both would pretend that neither knew that fact.

“All right,” she said, standing and walking to the wall of her room. “Let’s talk about Forgery. Your cage for me had a wall of forty-four types of stone, mostly as a trap to keep me distracted. I had to figure out the makeup and origin of each block if I wanted to try to escape. Why?”

“So you could create a Forgery of the wall, obviously.”

“But why all of them?” she asked. “Why not just change one block or a few? Why not just make a hole big enough to slip into, creating a tunnel for myself?”

“I…” He frowned. “I have no idea.”

Shai rested her hand against the outer wall of her room. It had been painted, though the paint was coming off in several sections. She could feel the separate stones. “All things exist in three Realms, Gaotona. Physical, Cognitive, Spiritual. The Physical is what we feel, what is before us. The Cognitive is how an object is viewed and how it views itself. The Spiritual Realm contains an object’s soul—its essence—as well as the ways it is connected to the things and people around it.”

“You must understand,” Gaotona said, “I don’t subscribe to your pagan superstitions.”

“Yes, you worship the sun instead,” Shai said, failing to keep the amusement out of her voice. “Or, rather, eighty suns—believing that even though each looks the same, a different sun actually rises each day. Well, you wanted to know how Forgery works, and why the emperor’s soul will be so difficult to reproduce. The Realms are important to this.”

“Very well.”