Hollow Empire

by Sam Hawke

  I’d have preferred to bring it direct to Tain, but we didn’t have time to be running around town trying to find him. It was barely an hour until the gates would open at the arena and he would have to come back here first; if we already had his Captain briefed and ready to support us, that might make things faster in any case.

  The Captain of the blackstripes was a stern, practical woman with short curls more gray than black, a jawline hard enough to crack rocks off, and a gnarled set of scars down one cheek. She had been unfailingly polite in our interactions thus far, but we’d barely begun telling her our concerns when it became clear she was reaching the end of her patience with me.

  “Credo Jovan,” she said levelly, “I appreciate you’re very serious about this threat but I have already reassured you—several times—that I am taking your concerns on board. The Chancellor will be protected at all times. There will be three guards within an arm’s stretch no matter where he is, the whole ceremony. I will personally be there with him.”

  “We have new information,” I said without hesitation.

  “Since this morning?” She delivered it without audible exasperation but it was implied in the movement of her eyebrows.

  “Yes, since this morning,” I continued patiently. “We have good reason now to believe the former Warrior-Guilder has been cultivating a criminal network since she was incarcerated. The man I told you about earlier, Sukseno, he’s on prison duty and six months ago he did a stint at the mine at Stunted Rock, which is where—”

  “Which is where the Warrior-Guilder was working,” she finished for me. Her voice had dropped to a hoarser level. She blinked a few times. “I … can see how this is concerning.”

  “We don’t know whether he took the jobs to get close to her, or he got close to her because he was rostered near her, but either way, we have a Guard who’s also a Hand and who’s probably had more contact with our most dangerous criminal than any other person has since we caught her. There is absolutely no way this is chance.” I gestured to Kalina, looking clammy and out of breath beside me. “My sister talked to Aven and she didn’t even try to pretend otherwise.”

  Kalina added, “She intimated she had many Order Guards in her network, not just one. She laughed at me for thinking it was just one.”

  The blackstripe frowned, looking uncertain for the first time. “Well, that would be a problem, no lie about it. We’ll refer this straight to Captain Chen and she can doubtless find out more information about this Sukseno.” She nodded, as if convincing herself of something. “Thanks for the information. We won’t have any Order Guards near the Chancellor. Blackstripes only.”

  Kalina cleared her throat and I squeezed my hands into silent fists. “Captain, some of your blackstripes are army, too, aren’t they? Or ex-army?”

  She puffed up her chest. “You have the finest people at the Chancellor’s disposal here in my company,” she said, visibly affronted. “No one protects the Chancellor who I haven’t personally vetted.”

  “And none of them have friends in the Order Guards? In the army? We knew we’d never get all the loyalists out of the army ranks.” I tried to rein in my frustration. I needed her onside. Many—perhaps most—of Aven’s loyal supporters in the army had rather conveniently announced themselves after the siege by storming the Manor and attempting to burn the entire Council to death. Many had been killed, the rest captured, in that process, and one or two isolated incidents—two attempts to break Aven out of custody and a handful to attack Tain or the Council—since then had revealed a few others. But we’d always known there would be people who had not been part of that coup who nevertheless supported Aven and believed in her ideals. We’d not expected to ever identify them, but rather hoped we could regain their loyalty over time through building a better and fairer city, one that didn’t present so many reasons to seek revolution. I liked to think it must have worked for some. For others, perhaps, they’d found new ways to give voice to their dissatisfaction with the city. Whether Aven had found them or the other way around, we couldn’t risk giving anyone we didn’t trust entirely access to the Chancellor. “One of the reasons Aven even had loyalists was that she gave them something the city wasn’t giving. Power, prestige. Aven and people who supported her wanted respect, or fear, or both. If they couldn’t get it legitimately who’s to say they wouldn’t get it other ways? Like through a criminal gang?”

  “The Order Guards, maybe,” the Captain acknowledged, frowning. “But there’s none in my ranks who’d betray their honor. The blackstripes is a company people respect and honor.” A touch of pride in her voice. “It’s not like the old days. The Chancellor treats us that way, and the city’s followed.”

  “Some of Aven’s supporters weren’t selfishly motivated, either,” Kalina put in quietly. “Some of them legitimately believed in the rebellion. They might not be Hands, but that doesn’t mean they’re not still working their cause. Aven was right—we didn’t fix everything with a few grand gestures, and there’s plenty of people who think we haven’t done enough.”

  The Captain narrowed her eyes. “Are you talking about this business with the boat? Because I don’t mind telling you, Credola, I worked for the Ashes for a while earlier in my career, and they make enough enemies as it is. I don’t think there’s any reason to suspect magical sabotage there.”

  Neither my sister nor I were so convinced there was nothing supernatural tied up in this mess, but I doubted we would convince the Captain. I glanced at Kalina to convey that we should move on and saw a strange expression, almost guilty, certainly furtive, pass over her face. A corresponding twist in my own stomach echoed it without me really understanding why. Did she suspect Hadrea’s disaffected Darfri friends might really have caused it? Did I?

  “Leave aside the Darfri for a moment, then,” I said. “I think it’s likely someone’s been working divisions where they can, but let’s say I’m wrong. Concentrate on tonight. I don’t know what’s planned for the closing ceremony, but we can be certain of a few things.” I ticked them off on my hands, trying to stay calm, stationary, rational. “The Hands made an effort to stop me going, and what I’m known for in this city, to friends and foes, is protecting the Chancellor. So we can assume if they didn’t want me there, he’s in danger. And we know, for sure, some key people involved in organizing today aren’t going to be there. And who is going to be there? Representatives—including armed people—from what, six other countries, any one of which could have been funding Aven two years ago!”

  Kalina added, “Aven is involved, and she’s got at least one Order Guard in her pocket, likely more. She knows what’s going to happen today, whether she’s the mastermind or just lending help. She was practically expecting me to turn up at the jail. Bring her in. Question her if you don’t believe me.”

  “It’s not a question of believing you, Credola,” the Captain said. “But forgive me, it’s just that the Warrior-Guilder’s grudge against you isn’t a secret. She’d have loved seeing you worried, and she’d say whatever she could to make it worse. Maybe she’s been turning a Guard or two sympathetic, sure. Maybe even some of them are going rogue, turning to crime. This gang is a problem and no mistake. But I don’t see as why a criminal gang has any special interest in murdering the Chancellor at all, let alone at a public event where he’ll be surrounded by protection.”

  “If they were just a gang, that might be true, but if they’re working for people who hate Sjona? The city’s full of strangers right now, and some of them will be right there with the Chancellor tonight.”

  “You work in diplomacy, Credola,” the Captain said to my sister, throwing her hands up. “Does the Guild think any of the visiting officials are our enemies? Far as I know, every country representative we invited here is an ally. Because I was assured when this was planned and we were allowing strangers into the city carrying weapons that these were allied countries that posed no threat. Was that untrue? Should we be stripping them of privileges and kicking them home?”r />
  “Not that we know, of course,” she said. “But someone supplied Aven with resources to fund her mercenary army. We know that much.”

  “No one showed up with a fresh army after the siege, but that doesn’t mean one or more of these countries wasn’t hoping for our downfall,” I said. “Whoever our enemy is has been working through intermediaries the whole time, and right now is no different. Quiet assassins and local criminals, and our own bloody ex-army commander. This is their style. We clawed this city back together but the Chancellor is the one holding all the pieces, you must know that, Captain. You spend enough time with him to see how important he is to stability.”

  “I don’t dispute it,” she said, still in the same infuriatingly calm manner, though something else bristled in her posture now. “And I’ll thank you to remember I’m personally committed to protecting him, on my life and honor.”

  Now it was my turn to be defensive. “I didn’t intimate otherwise, Captain. We came straight to you, didn’t we? You’re the person I thought we could most trust to focus on the Chancellor’s safety.”

  “And I’d give my life before I let anyone near him,” she said. She sighed, and scratched her scarred cheek. “But one part of my job is to make sure keeping him safe doesn’t get in the way of his governing, either. He’s always made that clear. He doesn’t want to be some emperor figure like they’ve got up north, sitting on a throne and hidden away from the people. He’ll let us be with him, protecting him, but I’m not in charge of dictating where he can and cannot go.”

  “I know.” I did sympathize. Tain had grown up in a world vastly different to the one we now inhabited—we all had. Being surrounded by visible protection at all times was galling, jarring, inconvenient, and invasive. But we’d all had to make concessions for the dangers our positions carried with them. To accept the power to effect positive change in society meant recognizing he was more than just a man, and his safety meant more than the average person’s. “But he won’t be doing any governing at all if he’s dead.”

  We were all silent for a moment. “Look,” I said, “the safest thing to do would be to fake something going wrong—some damage to the infrastructure at the arena that makes it unsafe, or something—and cancel the ceremony altogether. If we don’t know what they’ve got planned, or how many people they have, or what they’re planning to strike at, how do you protect the Chancellor or anyone else?”

  But she was already shaking her head again. “I don’t have the authority to pull something like that off, Credo. You get the Council to agree, I’ll not get in your way. But I gotta tell you, I don’t see how you could even find the Council before the closing ceremony starts, let alone get them to agree on anything. You’ve given me plenty to be concerned about, and it’s possible there could be an attack, but what you’ve not given me is any proof it’s more than a handful of people who hate your family and the Chancellor behind it, and that we aren’t a match for them. Hells, even if you’re right about everything, and one of these kings or princes or priestesses or what have you is planning an assassination assisted by Darfri and Hands and half the bloody Order Guards, I will still back my blackstripes to protect the Chancellor.” She leaned across to me, earnest. “You can trust us,” the Captain said firmly. “Even if you don’t believe my word on it, you can trust them for one simple reason: if you had blackstripes working against the Chancellor who wanted him dead, he’d be dead already, if you don’t mind me saying, Credo.”

  I forced a breath, and another. A fair point, but more importantly, it was obviously going to be her last word. We wouldn’t get any further here. “Look,” I said. “If I can get Tain and the Council to agree to cancel, will you back me?”

  “I’ll do what I’m told,” she said. “If they want to play it safe and keep him out, or call the whole thing off, I’m happy enough. But I don’t like your chances. This festival’s been a triumph for them and they’re not going to want to end on a sour note.”

  That, I thought, would have to do. “Thank you,” I said, trying not to sound stiff, trying not to sound afraid, but I met Kalina’s eye as we left and saw my own fear reflected there. I was afraid, deathly afraid, we were hurtling toward disaster and the two of us were the only ones looking straight ahead.

  * * *

  Tain returned to the Manor with several Guilders and regional representatives in tow, so there was no proper time to talk to him privately; we had to rudely pull him aside to his study, leaving the others waiting, and hurriedly explain what we’d learned.

  “You talked to her?” he said, a strange twist to his lips. “You talked to Aven?”

  My heart hurt for the pain he was trying to hide. He had never forgiven himself for the Warrior-Guilder. Not just his infatuation, or for being taken in and used by her after her original plan failed. It was more than that. It was facing that he had admired someone, respected her methods and her manner, who had been capable of the kinds of atrocities we had seen. It had shaken his confidence in his judgment in a fundamental way.

  Kalina was regarding him not with sympathy or understanding, but with something harder. “Yes, I did,” she said. “She didn’t so much admit to this as brag about it. She’s tied up with the Hands, Tain. Whether she’s behind them or just helping, it doesn’t really matter. But she knows whatever they have planned today, and she’s confident enough to not bother pretending otherwise to me. She was…” She cleared her throat, looked away a moment, then back. “She was pleased I’d come. Like she’d been waiting for a chance to crow about it.” She looked at Tain with that same odd expression again, something almost accusing. Her lips parted, then closed again, and she shook her head just the tiniest fraction. I was missing something here, but I had no idea what it could be, and we had no time for subtlety in any case.

  “You see what this means,” I said. “She could have a bunch of operatives working the Order Guards, the army, whatever. Your blackstripes. We can’t risk you being there.”

  “Not the blackstripes,” Tain said automatically.

  Kalina laughed, a breathy, exasperated sound. “Of course she could have someone in the bloody blackstripes, Tain. There’s barely a trained fighter in this city who never trained under her or Marco. Didn’t we learn from Marco that people who seem otherwise to hold themselves with honor can be murderers and traitors, if you’re on the wrong side of their loyalty and honor? Didn’t you learn, Tain?”

  He didn’t seem to want to look directly at her, and the sense of missing information was too great to ignore this time. “What’s going on?” I directed the question at my sister, and she bit her lip, clenched her hands into fists. “What? Spit it out.”

  “Aven said you’ve been visiting her,” Kalina said bluntly, and it was like she’d punched him in the stomach; he folded in on himself somehow.

  “Tain?” I squeezed my eyes shut, as if I could erase the reaction and the confirmation. “Have you?”

  “Once or twice,” he admitted, barely audible. “I thought if I could get something from her, it could cancel out what happened. What I did.”

  “Honor-down, Tain, we told you after it happened. You had a momentary lapse in judgment and it didn’t gain her a thing. She never got to use you.”

  “But she could have. For all this talk about how important I am, you know as well as I do she would have used my weakness to her own ends, and if it hadn’t been for you two, we’d not be here. She’d have had Lini killed the second she found out she was alive, and no doubt she’d have disposed of you too, Jov. What kind of decisions would I have made without you two advising me? What kind of weakling fool would this city have been saddled with?” There was a wild, feverish look in his eyes now.

  I was right, he really hadn’t forgiven himself. For all I’d worried about his health over the past few months, I’d assumed it was related still to the poisoning that had damaged his insides. Kalina had been smarter than me, again, as she ever was; she’d tried to talk to me about his mental state and I’d brush
ed it aside.

  “All right, so you thought you could reverse some of the potential harm you could have caused,” I said, trying to salvage the conversation with some desperation. “But she didn’t tell you anything. Why’d you go back?”

  “I knew she thought I was an idiot,” he said. “I thought if I played that up, she might underestimate me, give me something we could use.”

  “That’s not it, or you’d have told us,” Kalina said. Her anger was a tightly coiled thing, contained in her shoulders and her neck, rarely provoked and never unearned, and Tain was right to flinch away from her. But he was not a liar. Call him anything, but he was not a liar.

  “No,” he said. “I also thought, or maybe just wanted to believe, it couldn’t all have been show. The things I’d admired. She inspired fierce loyalty in her army, and in the Guild. She might have hated the Council, hated the rich families and how they treated her Guild, but she didn’t hate our country. And some of that was fair.”

  “She didn’t hate it because she believed in equality,” Kalina said, and her voice had an edge sharp enough to scratch glass. “She didn’t believe in the rebellion. She used it to gain power, that’s all she wanted. There was a lot to dislike about Silasta’s classes but she only cared because it meant she wasn’t treated by everyone she met the way she was treated in the army.”

  “But she also fought her whole life for Sjona. She betrayed whoever paid her off, didn’t she? They wanted the two armies to tear each other apart, to destroy the country, and she turned on them.”

  “For her own reasons!” As Tain’s voice had gotten louder, hers had quieted. Her lips were barely moving. I had rarely seen her so furious. “She didn’t give a flying shit about the Darfri oppression except how she could use it as a weapon. When she found out it was real magic she would have been quick enough to either use it for her own purposes or stamp it out. She didn’t battle her way out of the lower classes or the estates, she grew up in the bloody Reed apartments, in unimaginable luxury, same as the rest of us here. You’re worth fifty of her, you always were, even at your stupidest, Tain Iliri, because you didn’t look at the reality of Silasta and wonder how you could turn that to your personal advantage, you kicked the rock over and you’ve been doing your best to stamp out the grubs ever since.”