Chapter 183: Aurelia's Undignified End
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Chapter 183: Aurelia's Undignified End
Five hundred years ago, in the palace in Dawn Song:
After my performance on her birthday, Aurelia knew what was coming. I'd already removed all the ministers who dared question Cassius and all the friends who dared confront him. Her greatest ally, Marcius, was dead and (partially) eaten. Her ladies-in-waiting had all been replaced with women who worshipped me.
One of them, the gingko tree spirit whose gown had so impressed me the first time I entered the palace, now sent me a warning note: The empress is conspiring with her father.
Ah, Imperial in-laws and their opinions: the bane of any emperor.
Unfortunately, since a lady needed massive amounts of political backing to be selected empress in the first place, her family tended to be influential. In Aurelia's case, I'd whittled away her relatives at court – her sister had been imprisoned for negligence as Minister of Transportation, her brothers had been executed for an assassination attempt on the Prime Minister (they hadn't come close to poisoning me, but the effort was entertaining), and her excessive number of cousins had been exiled or tortured to death.
Now only her elderly father was left on the family estate outside the capital. He'd long since retired from politics into one of those hermit-like existences wherein non-awakened humans pondered their mortality while painting terrible landscapes and composing worse poetry. Still, he had enough doddering old-people friends and, more specifically, doddering old-people friends with children at court, to present a threat to me.
Clearly, he and his daughter had to go.
My order to the guards went out: Stop any messenger sent by the empress and notify me at once, and soon enough, a blushing young guard won the honor of bringing me word that they had captured an underservant.
I had the spy brought before me. He was a gardener's apprentice, no older than Cassia Prima, and he was shaking like a maple leaf. Still, he denied conspiring with Aurelia, even after they tore open his collar and retrieved a message written in her own hand, in her own blood, on a strip of cotton torn from her own underskirt.
"It's not conspiracy to defend the Rightful Empress!" he shouted, and such was his fanaticism that I could hear the capitals. "You're all traitors! You've all betrayed her! Yes, all of you! Even if you put me to death, I will die without regret!"
I was happy to oblige.
That taken care of, I found Cassius in the garden, where he was playing elephant chess against a skillful courtier who was losing just the right amount. With every fur on my nine tails aflutter, I flung myself to my knees before the emperor. "Your Imperial Majesty, I have failed you! Exile me, banish me, send me away from your gracious presence forever!"
Cassius' hand jerked and knocked chess pieces off the board. They clinked on the stone table. "What brings you to make such an unexpected request of us, Piri?"
In both hands, I proffered the strip of cotton. "See what the empress has written! See what she intends! She pleads for her father to raise an army against you! If your own empress is conspiring against you, then clearly I have failed you as Prime Minister! Put me to death for my failure!"
Cassius snatched the message and scanned the rust-red words.
"She wrote it in her own blood!" I cried. "I can smell it! The gravest message anyone can write! I have failed you, my emperor!"
Through my lashes, I monitored Cassius' expression. His eyebrows pinched together, and his lips contorted into a ferocious scowl. "Go," he commanded his chess partner in a quiet, deadly tone, and the courtier leaped up. "Go," he commanded the rest of his retainers, and they all fled. "Go! Arrest the Empress!" he commanded his guards, and they clanked off with much rattling of their swords.
When we were alone, Cassius said, with the gentleness he reserved for me alone these days, "Rise, my faithful minister. How could I think for a moment that you have failed me? It is she – that treacherous, conniving traitor who was forced on me by my former advisers. If you had come earlier in my reign to advise me, I would never have married her. This would never have happened."
I sank into a sad, defeated huddle on the stone stool that his chess partner had vacated. "O, Imperial Majesty, how has it come to this? You are a great emperor, the greatest Serica has ever known. For so long as a single mortal or spirit lives to dip a brush into ink, your name will resound throughout the land. How can she not see this? How can she wish to rule through you, usurp you, when you are the rightful Son of Heaven?"
Thus I fanned Cassius' rage while the guards searched the Back Palace. Aurelia, however, had gotten wind of her messenger's capture and was nowhere to be found.
"You're sure no one could have passed through, over, or under the palace walls?" I demanded of the captain who reported back.
"No, Prime Minister! Not a mortal or spirit could have left the palace!" he swore, crumpling to his knees in shame.
I thought for a moment. Where could Aurelia be? "Search the walls. If she is not within them, she must be inside them."
"Find her!" snapped Cassius. "Tear down the palace if you must, but I want that traitor found!"
The captain rushed off.
I whistled to the chimera to follow and invited Cassius up to my pagoda. With the chimera purring at my feet, we sipped smoky southern tea, transported at great expense across the Snowy Mountains, while we watched guards swarm through the palace with axes. My intuition proved accurate. Once they hacked open her bedroom wall, they found Aurelia squashed inside.
They dragged her out and threw her down at the foot of my pagoda. Her headdress was askew, half of her hair fell in tangles around her shoulders, one slipper was missing, her gown was ripped, and blood oozed from her shoulder where an axe had grazed her.
Next to me, Cassius shook with fury. He brandished the strip of cotton at her. "What is the meaning of this?"
"The meaning is precisely what is written there. I called upon my father to help remove her demonic influence from this court." Aurelia tried to stand, but the captain struck her across the shoulders with the flat of his sword, and she fell back down.
I clasped my hands before me and lowered my gaze in feigned sorrow. Then, when no one else was looking, I gave her a toothy grin.
"She is destroying the Empire, Cassius!" Aurelia cried. "Can't you see that her goal is to destroy you? She's removed anyone who dares speak the truth to you, anyone who is competent at their job! The ministries are full of bribery and graft. Weeds choke the canals! Bridges collapse for want of repair! Peasants starve during poor harvests because corrupt officials sold off the surplus grain that the Empire stores against famine!"
"Silence!" bellowed Cassius. He leaped up from the tea table and stormed to the top of the steps, the chimera padding by his side. "We are the Son of Heaven! We are the one granted the chimera, the sign of the Jade Emperor's favor! Did you or did you not conspire with your father to raise an army against us?"
"I have never and will never conspire against you! I wish only to save you!"
"By bringing an army to coerce us into behaving as you see fit? Is the Son of Heaven naught but a puppet in your eyes?"
"That was never my intent! I wish only to open your eyes so you can see that your people are suffering! Because of her!"
She was too dignified to point at me, but the hate-filled glare she sent my way had the same effect.
I said, in a wobbly voice, "Your Imperial Majesty, it was never my intent to drive a wedge between you and your empress, or to tear your empire asunder. Please allow me to submit my resignation."
"No." Cassius' ferocity made the guards flinch. "You have done nothing wrong. It is she who plots treason against the Son of Heaven and transgresses against the laws of Heaven and Earth. Beat her to death."
The captain was the first to raise his sword and bring its flat down on Aurelia's head, and then the other guards were there with their axe hafts. At first she stifled her cries, but her courage didn't last long.
Over her increasingly panicked pleas, I pretended to beseech Cassius, "Your Imperial Majesty! Surely this is not an execution becoming of an empress!"
"Yes. You are right." For a moment, I was afraid that he would end the beating and have her beheaded, but then he raised his voice so everyone could hear him: "Aurelia! I hereby strip you of your title as Empress of Serica and of your rank as nobility! I reduce you to commoner status!"
A tremor went through the courtiers who had gathered to watch from a safe distance. I waited for Cassius to strip Aurelia's children of their titles too, but he did not.
She wailed. "Cassius! Please! Don't!"
"Silence, commoner! How dare you address His Imperial Majesty?" snarled a guard.
The courtiers sucked in a sharp breath and held it. The birds and butterflies fled. The only sounds in the garden were Aurelia's whimpers and the thump-thump-thump of the axe hafts.
It was not a dignified death.
Afterwards, her corpse was tossed onto the midden heap. Her father and his entire household were beheaded.
And the very next night, the Jade Emperor recalled the chimera to Heaven.
Present day:
If I hadn't stripped Aurelia of not only her position as empress but also her status as a noble, would she hate me less now? If I'd granted her the dignity of a heroic death, or at least a private one, would she have forgiven me before now?
Marcius had gotten his moment of glory before the court, when he had delivered a final, bombastic exhortation to Cassius to be a just ruler and then plunged his dagger into his own heart. Cassius had transformed his palace into the world's most expensive funeral pyre. Assorted virtuous ministers had won undying fame by dying by torture methods I devised: roasted by the Burning Column, drowned in the Wine Lake, bled to death when surgeons chopped off their limbs so I could prove to Cassius that bone marrow density corresponded to enhanced cold tolerance. (It didn't. I made that up. But it sounded good and kept him amused on a snowy winter's day when we were cooped up in the palace.)
Aurelia, though – Aurelia had been bludgeoned to death like the lowliest peasant. And now she was taking her revenge by setting me up to reprise my most infamous act in Heaven.
No, maybe it wasn't so much that she was as treacherous as Lady Fate, as that some things could not be forgiven. Maybe it was that some – I shied away from calling them "crimes – some things required redress. Heaven had already atoned by making her first a goddess, and then an influential goddess, but what had I done?
Flicker, can we swing by the Bureau of the Sky? I blurted out.
"The Bureau of the Sky? Why?"
I was already regretting my impulsiveness. Apologies weren't my style. And anyway, even if I did apologize to Aurelia now, she'd only interpret it as a power play. She'd never believe that I meant it.
That I meant it.
Imagine that. Me, wanting to apologize to Aurelia because I felt apologetic and not because I knew it would get me something I wanted.
Because I already knew that it wouldn't.
Never mind. Ignore that. Let's go negotiate with the Goddess of Life.
At least dealing with a selfish, slippery, scheming goddess who'd as soon ally with me as stab me, and whom I'd happily stab right back, was familiar ground.
A/N: Thanks to my awesome Patreon backers, Autocharth, BananaBobert, Celia, Charlotte, Ed, Flaringhorizon, Fuzzycakes, Ike, KalGorath, Kimani, Lindsey, Michael, TheLunaticCo, and Anonymous!
Five hundred years ago, in the palace in Dawn Song:
After my performance on her birthday, Aurelia knew what was coming. I'd already removed all the ministers who dared question Cassius and all the friends who dared confront him. Her greatest ally, Marcius, was dead and (partially) eaten. Her ladies-in-waiting had all been replaced with women who worshipped me.
One of them, the gingko tree spirit whose gown had so impressed me the first time I entered the palace, now sent me a warning note: The empress is conspiring with her father.
Ah, Imperial in-laws and their opinions: the bane of any emperor.
Unfortunately, since a lady needed massive amounts of political backing to be selected empress in the first place, her family tended to be influential. In Aurelia's case, I'd whittled away her relatives at court – her sister had been imprisoned for negligence as Minister of Transportation, her brothers had been executed for an assassination attempt on the Prime Minister (they hadn't come close to poisoning me, but the effort was entertaining), and her excessive number of cousins had been exiled or tortured to death.
Now only her elderly father was left on the family estate outside the capital. He'd long since retired from politics into one of those hermit-like existences wherein non-awakened humans pondered their mortality while painting terrible landscapes and composing worse poetry. Still, he had enough doddering old-people friends and, more specifically, doddering old-people friends with children at court, to present a threat to me.
Clearly, he and his daughter had to go.
My order to the guards went out: Stop any messenger sent by the empress and notify me at once, and soon enough, a blushing young guard won the honor of bringing me word that they had captured an underservant.
I had the spy brought before me. He was a gardener's apprentice, no older than Cassia Prima, and he was shaking like a maple leaf. Still, he denied conspiring with Aurelia, even after they tore open his collar and retrieved a message written in her own hand, in her own blood, on a strip of cotton torn from her own underskirt.
"It's not conspiracy to defend the Rightful Empress!" he shouted, and such was his fanaticism that I could hear the capitals. "You're all traitors! You've all betrayed her! Yes, all of you! Even if you put me to death, I will die without regret!"
I was happy to oblige.
That taken care of, I found Cassius in the garden, where he was playing elephant chess against a skillful courtier who was losing just the right amount. With every fur on my nine tails aflutter, I flung myself to my knees before the emperor. "Your Imperial Majesty, I have failed you! Exile me, banish me, send me away from your gracious presence forever!"
Cassius' hand jerked and knocked chess pieces off the board. They clinked on the stone table. "What brings you to make such an unexpected request of us, Piri?"
In both hands, I proffered the strip of cotton. "See what the empress has written! See what she intends! She pleads for her father to raise an army against you! If your own empress is conspiring against you, then clearly I have failed you as Prime Minister! Put me to death for my failure!"
Cassius snatched the message and scanned the rust-red words.
"She wrote it in her own blood!" I cried. "I can smell it! The gravest message anyone can write! I have failed you, my emperor!"
Through my lashes, I monitored Cassius' expression. His eyebrows pinched together, and his lips contorted into a ferocious scowl. "Go," he commanded his chess partner in a quiet, deadly tone, and the courtier leaped up. "Go," he commanded the rest of his retainers, and they all fled. "Go! Arrest the Empress!" he commanded his guards, and they clanked off with much rattling of their swords.
When we were alone, Cassius said, with the gentleness he reserved for me alone these days, "Rise, my faithful minister. How could I think for a moment that you have failed me? It is she – that treacherous, conniving traitor who was forced on me by my former advisers. If you had come earlier in my reign to advise me, I would never have married her. This would never have happened."
I sank into a sad, defeated huddle on the stone stool that his chess partner had vacated. "O, Imperial Majesty, how has it come to this? You are a great emperor, the greatest Serica has ever known. For so long as a single mortal or spirit lives to dip a brush into ink, your name will resound throughout the land. How can she not see this? How can she wish to rule through you, usurp you, when you are the rightful Son of Heaven?"
Thus I fanned Cassius' rage while the guards searched the Back Palace. Aurelia, however, had gotten wind of her messenger's capture and was nowhere to be found.
"You're sure no one could have passed through, over, or under the palace walls?" I demanded of the captain who reported back.
"No, Prime Minister! Not a mortal or spirit could have left the palace!" he swore, crumpling to his knees in shame.
I thought for a moment. Where could Aurelia be? "Search the walls. If she is not within them, she must be inside them."
"Find her!" snapped Cassius. "Tear down the palace if you must, but I want that traitor found!"
The captain rushed off.
I whistled to the chimera to follow and invited Cassius up to my pagoda. With the chimera purring at my feet, we sipped smoky southern tea, transported at great expense across the Snowy Mountains, while we watched guards swarm through the palace with axes. My intuition proved accurate. Once they hacked open her bedroom wall, they found Aurelia squashed inside.
They dragged her out and threw her down at the foot of my pagoda. Her headdress was askew, half of her hair fell in tangles around her shoulders, one slipper was missing, her gown was ripped, and blood oozed from her shoulder where an axe had grazed her.
Next to me, Cassius shook with fury. He brandished the strip of cotton at her. "What is the meaning of this?"
"The meaning is precisely what is written there. I called upon my father to help remove her demonic influence from this court." Aurelia tried to stand, but the captain struck her across the shoulders with the flat of his sword, and she fell back down.
I clasped my hands before me and lowered my gaze in feigned sorrow. Then, when no one else was looking, I gave her a toothy grin.
"She is destroying the Empire, Cassius!" Aurelia cried. "Can't you see that her goal is to destroy you? She's removed anyone who dares speak the truth to you, anyone who is competent at their job! The ministries are full of bribery and graft. Weeds choke the canals! Bridges collapse for want of repair! Peasants starve during poor harvests because corrupt officials sold off the surplus grain that the Empire stores against famine!"
"Silence!" bellowed Cassius. He leaped up from the tea table and stormed to the top of the steps, the chimera padding by his side. "We are the Son of Heaven! We are the one granted the chimera, the sign of the Jade Emperor's favor! Did you or did you not conspire with your father to raise an army against us?"
"I have never and will never conspire against you! I wish only to save you!"
"By bringing an army to coerce us into behaving as you see fit? Is the Son of Heaven naught but a puppet in your eyes?"
"That was never my intent! I wish only to open your eyes so you can see that your people are suffering! Because of her!"
She was too dignified to point at me, but the hate-filled glare she sent my way had the same effect.
I said, in a wobbly voice, "Your Imperial Majesty, it was never my intent to drive a wedge between you and your empress, or to tear your empire asunder. Please allow me to submit my resignation."
"No." Cassius' ferocity made the guards flinch. "You have done nothing wrong. It is she who plots treason against the Son of Heaven and transgresses against the laws of Heaven and Earth. Beat her to death."
The captain was the first to raise his sword and bring its flat down on Aurelia's head, and then the other guards were there with their axe hafts. At first she stifled her cries, but her courage didn't last long.
Over her increasingly panicked pleas, I pretended to beseech Cassius, "Your Imperial Majesty! Surely this is not an execution becoming of an empress!"
"Yes. You are right." For a moment, I was afraid that he would end the beating and have her beheaded, but then he raised his voice so everyone could hear him: "Aurelia! I hereby strip you of your title as Empress of Serica and of your rank as nobility! I reduce you to commoner status!"
A tremor went through the courtiers who had gathered to watch from a safe distance. I waited for Cassius to strip Aurelia's children of their titles too, but he did not.
She wailed. "Cassius! Please! Don't!"
"Silence, commoner! How dare you address His Imperial Majesty?" snarled a guard.
The courtiers sucked in a sharp breath and held it. The birds and butterflies fled. The only sounds in the garden were Aurelia's whimpers and the thump-thump-thump of the axe hafts.
It was not a dignified death.
Afterwards, her corpse was tossed onto the midden heap. Her father and his entire household were beheaded.
And the very next night, the Jade Emperor recalled the chimera to Heaven.
Present day:
If I hadn't stripped Aurelia of not only her position as empress but also her status as a noble, would she hate me less now? If I'd granted her the dignity of a heroic death, or at least a private one, would she have forgiven me before now?
Marcius had gotten his moment of glory before the court, when he had delivered a final, bombastic exhortation to Cassius to be a just ruler and then plunged his dagger into his own heart. Cassius had transformed his palace into the world's most expensive funeral pyre. Assorted virtuous ministers had won undying fame by dying by torture methods I devised: roasted by the Burning Column, drowned in the Wine Lake, bled to death when surgeons chopped off their limbs so I could prove to Cassius that bone marrow density corresponded to enhanced cold tolerance. (It didn't. I made that up. But it sounded good and kept him amused on a snowy winter's day when we were cooped up in the palace.)
Aurelia, though – Aurelia had been bludgeoned to death like the lowliest peasant. And now she was taking her revenge by setting me up to reprise my most infamous act in Heaven.
No, maybe it wasn't so much that she was as treacherous as Lady Fate, as that some things could not be forgiven. Maybe it was that some – I shied away from calling them "crimes – some things required redress. Heaven had already atoned by making her first a goddess, and then an influential goddess, but what had I done?
Flicker, can we swing by the Bureau of the Sky? I blurted out.
"The Bureau of the Sky? Why?"
I was already regretting my impulsiveness. Apologies weren't my style. And anyway, even if I did apologize to Aurelia now, she'd only interpret it as a power play. She'd never believe that I meant it.
That I meant it.
Imagine that. Me, wanting to apologize to Aurelia because I felt apologetic and not because I knew it would get me something I wanted.
Because I already knew that it wouldn't.
Never mind. Ignore that. Let's go negotiate with the Goddess of Life.
At least dealing with a selfish, slippery, scheming goddess who'd as soon ally with me as stab me, and whom I'd happily stab right back, was familiar ground.
A/N: Thanks to my awesome Patreon backers, Autocharth, BananaBobert, Celia, Charlotte, Ed, Flaringhorizon, Fuzzycakes, Ike, KalGorath, Kimani, Lindsey, Michael, TheLunaticCo, and Anonymous!
