Hollow Empire

by Sam Hawke

  “This one likes karodee a bit too much,” I heard someone say, and tried to answer, to shout again, but then the world was swinging confusingly again and I realized I’d been flat on my face, on the ground, and now I was back between my two captors, my wrists gripped so hard as they slung them over their shoulders it felt like they might snap in two. “First time on Void, you know the rich ones can’t handle it,” the Wraith said, and a few people laughed. “I’ll get him home, don’t you worry. Come on, Credo, you’ve had enough.”

  And the crowd was parting for her, I could feel them moving away, the good-natured jovial relaxation of it all, and I wanted to scream, but couldn’t. The knife in my ribs bit through my clothes, into my flesh. “I can get a corpse up the hill if I need to, Credo,” she hissed, not amused now. “Or dump it in the lake if it’s too heavy. But if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather you got through the night alive, eh?”

  Get through the night alive. I wished I could feel comforted. Another wave of pain washed over me as I stumbled on the bad leg, this time accompanied by a rolling nausea. A vivid and gruesome image of Credo Tamago, who’d choked on his own vomit after eating a toxic baked eel when I was fifteen, sprang to mind. Gagged and apparently masked, vomit would be a real risk right now.

  The agonizing, disorientating walk seemed to take hours. I could tell when we crossed Compact Bridge because they half-dragged me up some stairs and the wind picked up, the bells hanging below ringing in an insultingly cheerful manner. In one of my more aware periods I registered us walking uphill, but though I’d paced the streets of the upper city countless times, it didn’t help me work out where we were. My feet scraped on the ground as often as they stepped, and the mask and blindfold were thick enough that the only clue to my whereabouts was the faint increase and decrease in light as we walked. Lamps. So at least a few hours had passed since I’d been captured. I held on to this new bit of information, as if holding one thing in my head would help me piece the rest together. I counted the gaps between the brightest spots to try to estimate how far apart the lamps were. I focused on that and soon realized it was irregular. A spike of excitement. There was one section of the city where streetlamps had been added and there had been a mistake in the planning so they were not at regular intervals; it was near Potbelly Square and the old markets. That gave me something to work with. Thinking of escape gave me something to concentrate on, and made the painful, jolting walk more bearable.

  Then, all of a sudden, we stopped. The pressure on my wrists suddenly lessened and I was lowered off my captors’ shoulders against something hard and rough. They let me slump and slide down until I was sitting, back against a wall, injured leg out in front of me, panting with pain and fear. Then an increase in brightness and the welcome lick of fresh air on my cheeks as first the mask came off, then the blindfold. The soggy, unpleasant gag stayed put. I blinked into dusk light, half-dazed.

  “No yelling, now,” the Wraith warned. She crouched in front of me. Her mask and makeup still looked creepy, but not quite so nightmarish. I held on to that. This was just a woman, and what was addling my brain was just a drug. I could get through this. Think through it. If my pouches were still there—was that their comforting weight, pressing against my stomach?—then I had a purge. Maybe I could get some of this stuff out of my system. “I’m going to take this off, but things’ll go better for you if you don’t disturb any nice folks around here. Understand? Nod if you understand.”

  I nodded. The motion sent pain ricocheting down my neck and spine, and my vision blurred. She leaned in and loosened the knot at the back of my head. I spat the gag out.

  “That’s better.” She smiled, wide and gruesome. “Now, open up, you’re going to need something more to properly enjoy this particular party. No, no, don’t struggle.” Something different was forced against my face, a wet cloth carrying the distinctive smell of the sedative Art’s tonic. I tried turning away but it was no good. Already the pain was fading, my limbs growing heavy, my vision closing further. “Good boy. You relax there.”

  Dimly, I heard the rap of knuckles on a door. The sound of a door swinging open. I turned my head, heavy as an overripe melon, to see a woman in a sleeping robe, with tousled hair and a small lamp in one hand, blinking out at us. She took the Wraith in with a startled jolt. “Madam,” she said, ducking her head. The glimpse I had of her face looked cowed. Maybe even frightened.

  “Got a special guest for you,” the Wraith purred. “Gonna leave you my boy here to look after him, but I’ll be back.”

  The woman peered around the door at me, and raised an eyebrow. “All right, darling,” she said. “Come on down, then.”

  I couldn’t hold my head up, let alone stand, but the big man hauled me to my feet. She ushered us inside, closed the door behind us, then took off her robe and hung it by the door. Under the robe she was wearing a very filmy sort of dress. She smelled cloyingly sweet and her eyes looked glazed. My own felt heavy. I closed them just for a second, but when I opened them, everything had changed.

  I was on a pile of cushions. The atmosphere was cloying, stifling, pungent, a room resembling a large underground gaming room. People drank at low tables lit by colored-glass lamps and oil braziers burned all over the room. Several instruments provided background music and two men were singing in intoxicated harmony. But it was all twisted slightly, like the way in which a subtle wrongness in a familiar place can bend a dream into a nightmare. The people weren’t quite people, they were animals and monsters and mythological creatures—masquerade masks, I told myself, just masks, but it was so hard to hold on to a coherent thought. Instead of playing riddles or muse or betting on dice, people were gathered around a fight between two small animals tearing bloody chunks from each other with low growls and snarls. Another group was half-undressed and having what looked like fairly frenetic sex in another corner. It was hot, so hot, and a dull, smoky haze hung over the place.

  I couldn’t remember what I was doing here, only that something was wrong. A battle raged inside my body, which was both desperately shouting alarms but also sliding into a kind of deep, hot-bath state. I worried my heart might be failing, the way it lurched between acceleration and deceleration. Once I thought I saw a familiar face, round and serious, peering round a doorway. Dee? But I blinked and it was gone, just another hallucination.

  Smoke from the brazier made my head fuzzier with the scent of snakeleaf oil, a relaxant, and something floral. There was someone beside me on the cushions, his hot skin pressed against mine; a handsome man with a generous white smile in his smooth dark face. He brought a honeyed pastry to my lips and I obediently took a bite. It tasted terribly sweet. There was something wrong, though, I remembered suddenly, and stopped eating, and tried to push away from him, but my body was sluggish and noncompliant.

  “Have another drink,” the man suggested, and there was a cup in my hand I had no memory of accepting, and my mouth was sticky with the taste of kori and sugar syrup. “Some more!”

  Though I didn’t like the drink, it seemed polite to sip again. The room had darkened, the music notes twanging closer, vibrating around the space. It was too hot. And people were too close. I tried to stand, but my leg hurt, and my chest and head. The smiling man was right beside me, helping me up, and a pretty ebony-skinned woman was on my other side, her hair rippling over my arm and chest, offering me another drink, or would I like to dance?

  “I need some air,” I tried to say, but my tongue was too big for my mouth. I staggered away from the pair of them and moved through the crowd, looking for a door. Lots of people were smiling at me, and I didn’t know any of them. My heart was pounding but I also felt on the verge of falling asleep. Why can’t I remember? My body wouldn’t cooperate as I tried to find an exit. Other people were laughing and relaxed, dancing lazily around me, but this hypersensitivity, all this accidental touching, triggered every anxious response in my body. I felt even stranger, dizzier, and it was more than just whatever the intoxicant was in
the air, there was something else, a peculiar, draining feeling.

  Something drew my attention to an alcove at the far side of the room, from which emerged low laughter and astonished gasps, like the audience at a show, and the slow beating of a skin drum. I shrugged off my companions and stepped toward it, feet stumbling as if some unseen force propelled me. It was a dark corner of the room, the space lit only by candles, and a small group was gathered around a woman sitting in front of a painted clay urn and gesturing and talking quietly to the group of onlookers. She was naked and her skin was covered in swirling patterns too thick and glossy to be tattoos. At her feet sat a small boy playing a drum. I staggered, dizziness intensifying, my ears ringing so I couldn’t hear what she was saying. The sight of it, combined with what I felt, made me desperately afraid.

  A hand seized my arm. I turned and there he was, the big masked whisperer, looming before me, expressionless and passive, implacable. He took hold of one of my arms and moved me back to the pile of cushions as if I weighed no more than a kitsa. I stumbled down, understanding flooding back, and with it the panicked recrimination for forgetting. How long have I been here? What do they want from me? And more frightening still: Why had no one come? What happened to Dija?

  My head hurt and my vision wavered. Whatever they’d dosed me with had been strong. The pain from my various injuries pulsed away in the distance, but muted. But I had enough presence of mind to slowly work a hand toward my stomach. It was hard to say how closely the whisperer was watching me since his eyes were obscured by the strange flat mask. He didn’t react. I let my head slump backward as if lacking the strength to hold it up, and crawled my hand in through the concealed gap in my clothing.

  My fingers found familiar shapes and relief coursed through me. They hadn’t found the pouches. Perhaps they’d assumed if I’d had a weapon it would have been in my hand. I was still afraid, still confused, but I wasn’t without weapons or defense, not entirely. The order of contents had been jumbled at some point so I couldn’t be sure exactly what was what, but my slow, groping fingers closed around a paper packet and a small cloth bag. A weapon and a defense. Agonizingly slowly, I worked one of the little compressed chew cubes out of the bag. Vomiting might get some of the drug out of my system, but if the whisperer saw me being sick he’d just dose me again. Would they let me go to relieve myself? Honor-down, I still didn’t grasp what they wanted. They’d beaten me, but left me with no serious injuries. They’d drugged me, but so far only to keep me at a party half–passed out. What was it all for?

  I flopped my head forward. “Need to…” I slurred, my tongue fat. I coughed and when the whisperer stood, I said, “Need to piss.”

  The mask tilted to one side, as if he were considering. Then his rumbly, low voice came through. “No one’s stopping you.”

  Hardly daring to believe my luck, I struggled to sit up again, but the big man pushed me back down. “Didn’t say you could go anywhere,” he said flatly. “Shit yourself if you want to.”

  My fingers closed around the first packet. Whatever their plan was, I didn’t want to stay here and find out. The guy was a lot bigger than me but after a face full of powdered stingbark he’d not be in a position to chase me down, clumsy or not.

  “Getting bored?”

  My brief spike of energy and determination washed away. The Wraith was back. No one else seemed alarmed by the specter stalking through the room—just another karodee costume. “Don’t worry. I found you a friend,” she said. “I told you you’d have a good time tonight.”

  She tugged a man along from behind her. He had a sweet face, pale, with a brown beard and big, liquid eyes, and he grinned stupidly at me and said something I couldn’t understand. Talafan, I thought, he’s from the Empire, and though my head hurt too much to understand why, a heightened sense of danger and anxiety threatened to choke me.

  The Wraith looked over at the whisperer man. “The boss suggested it,” she said, with none of the silky tone she’d used on me. “He’ll do nicely.”

  The Talafan man’s movements as he looked around the room looked wrong, twitchy and awkward. The Wraith smiled indulgently. “Why don’t the two of you get to know each other? It’s too crowded in here. Let’s go somewhere a bit more private.”

  The whisperer twisted my left arm up behind my back and drove me forward. The pain in my shoulder sent more waves of black over my vision, more strange lightness. I stumbled up the stairs, my bad leg throbbing with pain from the ankle up. There were no Order Guards coming to rescue me. Maybe I had never seen Dija back at that building, just imagined her like I’d imagined her here a short while ago. Maybe no one knew I was here. All these people, they could all see me, but no one was reacting. What is wrong with everyone? I wanted to scream.

  They got us up two flights of stairs and then, smothering my attempts to struggle, into a small room, a regular sleeping chamber. The flickering lights and distant sounds of karodee filtered in through a narrow open window. The Talafan man, oblivious to the danger, flopped dramatically on the bed, spread-eagled. “I want more!” he moaned in Trade, very obviously utterly out of his mind on whatever they’d given him. Given us.

  “Of course you can have some more,” the Wraith crooned. “It makes you feel so good, doesn’t it?”

  “Good,” he agreed, his smile beatific.

  “Don’t take that,” I warned him, as the Wraith slunk closer. If he heard me he gave no sign. She scooped a pale amber powder from a packet onto one finger, which the man eagerly took into his mouth, licking and sucking like a baby animal at the teat. My stomach turned.

  “He was so bereft when I got hold of him, you know,” she told me conversationally. She stroked between his legs while he continued to suck on her fingers. “He’d been rejected, you know, and his whole karodee spoiled. I’m doing him a favor, really. Or should I say, you’re doing him a favor.” She increased the rapid movement of her hand and glanced back over at me. “Do you want to help? No? I hear you weren’t so stuck-up an hour ago, darling.”

  The man’s grip on my wrist never slackened, but I dragged together every skerrick of my self-possession. I might only get one chance at this. The purge and the poison were still clutched in my closed palm, twisted behind my back. With this leg and my disorientation I’d never get out the way we’d come. How far was the drop to the street, if I could make it to the window? I tried to remember the number of stairs we’d come up.

  If my captors noticed my frantic assessment, they didn’t react. The Wraith was still pleasuring the now almost completely incapacitated Talafan man. “You two silly boys,” she said, smiling at me with her skeleton smile. “You shouldn’t have had so much. Didn’t anyone warn you not to combine highs? Things got out of hand, didn’t they? Oh dear. You’ll live through the night, Credo, I told you, but I can’t promise you’ll have a good day tomorrow.”

  It had to be now. I maneuvered my free right hand behind me to the base of my spine, closed my eyes, calling in any good fortune I’d ever earned, and opened my left fist.

  The soft contents dropped and I felt them brush my open, stretching fingers, but my reflexes were too slow. My palm closed on nothing. But no time to swear or hesitate; I took a sudden staggering step forward, clearing a space between us, then pivoted sharply back in toward my captor, driving my free elbow into his face. He grunted and I wrapped my arm under his and up behind his shoulder, forcing him forward in a bow, straight into my waiting knee. He released my wrist at last and I dove straight for the powder I’d dropped. My hand closed around something just as pain exploded in my jaw and my head cracked into the wall.

  The Wraith’s foot came down on my chest, all her playfulness gone. Dazed, head ringing, pain radiating from my jaw, I squeezed my fingers around my last weapon, but knew by the terrible solid feel of it that I’d grabbed the wrong thing. I had a purge, only a purge. I’d lost my only chance. “Enough,” the Wraith said coldly. “Do it now.”

  It took a moment to realize she wasn’t
talking to me, but to her comrade, and he had the Talafan man’s neck in his massive hands. Shit, shit, no, I thought, but I was out of energy, out of coordination, out of tricks. “No,” I croaked, but the Wraith only watched me impassively as the weak gurgles and thrashing on the bed slowed and eventually stopped.

  INCIDENT: Poisoning of Lord Niceames, son of the 2nd Duke of Maru

  POISON: Graybore

  INCIDENT NOTES: Lord Niceames visited Silasta on a recreational trip and took to life in the city, thereafter refusing to return to his duties in homeland. Presented to the hospital with a bloody cough and hair loss after apparent weeks of increasing illness. Physics diagnosed graybore poisoning but Niceames died shortly thereafter. Traces of graybore later found in the man’s favorite perfume bottle. Political background suggests manservant may have been instructed by the Duke to carry out the gradual poisoning. Servant left Sjona soon after the man’s death and determination council elected not to pursue further.

  (from proofing notes of Credola Thoraiya Oromani)

  6

  Kalina

  It transpired that bribery was more than enough to overcome the initial protests of the costumer who had made my masquerade outfit. Several hours after the boating, and considerably poorer, I had ensured the Talafan noblewomen had dresses and masks from his private stocks. While I might have been rash in antagonizing the Prince, it hadn’t been a fruitless gesture; the ladies had insisted on bringing me back with them to the Leaning Lady, the guesthouse that had been commandeered for the Royal Family’s visit. Perhaps I could learn something more about the Prince from his household. Or about Brother Lu.

  We had returned to Zhafi’s private room at the guesthouse after our shopping, and the ladies’ servants fussed around assisting the women into their dresses. Reuta had a coral-and-red firebird mask with a beautiful spray of feathers and a slightly sinister beak, and Mosecca a brown kitsa. The Princess, who was having her nails carefully filed by a yellow-haired servant kneeling by the bed, held her mask up to her face. It was green with mottled gold scaling across the cheeks and brow, and thin glass panels in the eye sockets. “What did you say this was called, Kalina?”