Hollow Empire

by Sam Hawke

  A Doranite Chieftain, coughing and staggering, spotted me, and in a few powerful strides he had caught me under the arm, stopping me from falling, but his grip was rough. He said something, right up near my face, but I couldn’t understand; only faint sounds penetrated my abused ears. I understood the body language well enough, though.

  I shook my head, trying to clear my throat. “We found explosives under here.” I gestured down. “Where you were sitting, but—” I coughed, tried to stand straight, to look him in the eye. “There must have been more.…”

  He clearly couldn’t understand me either, but released my arm with an abrupt shake and turned back to his companions. Behind him, a hodgepodge of people were getting their footing; royals, Councilors, dignitaries alike, and beginning to grasp what had happened. I followed their frightened and horrified gazes back at the mess one section over. Beyond, through the smoke, even in the dark, I saw another mass of broken seating and fire, and farther still, another. The pops I had heard after the first blast must have been further explosions. A horrible guilt turned my stomach. We’d disabled one device, but it hadn’t been enough. They hadn’t been just targeting the supposedly important people, but all of us. How many people had been caught up in this? How many people were dead or injured? I couldn’t even fathom the scale of it.

  And then my slow brain processed it. Jov. He hadn’t stopped the explosions; could never have stopped three of them. Had he been right there, in the heart of the first blast? I stared at the ruin of the seating, then at the pit beneath it. How far had Jov run, how close had he gotten?

  Though I could barely make my left side work, though every step was an effort, I started clambering over the broken seating toward the smoking crater. “Jov!” I screamed. I think I screamed. My throat registered the burr but I still heard only a muted squeal. My eyes burned with desperate, terrible tears and I couldn’t summon any volume to my second scream through my clenching throat. Still, I kept trying, pointlessly, hopelessly. “Jov!” I coughed, my brain even now still registering the scope of what had happened. Not just Jov, but Tain too, where had Tain been? “Tain!”

  “Who is this?” Someone growled in my ear, in Trade. The Doranite again, clambering after me. I glanced back at him, still half-blinded by furious tears.

  “I’m Kalina,” I began, but he shook his head.

  “No, who is this?” He spread his arms to indicate the entire disaster, and I understood. Trade had limited tenses. He meant who was responsible for the explosion.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You are trying to get us out.” His voice was muffled by the noise in my ears, but understandable. They seemed to be clearing, though the ringing continued. “You know something is happening?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?” He pointed back behind him, to the crowds of guests, gesturing at the groups in turn. “Is this inside Sjona or is it Maru? Tocatica? Talafar?”

  I shook my head helplessly. “I don’t know,” I said again.

  Another noise managed to penetrate my thick head then, and both of us swung round at it—a tortured groan, as the metal supports under part of the seating buckled. People dangled from the broken edge, limbs flailing into the open space. The faintest ghost screams penetrated the overwhelming whine in my head. The Doranite Chieftain shouted something, and moments later I was buffeted by a thundering of boots and bodies pounding toward the wreck; the Doranites, in a pack, the King and Chieftains and servants, too. Racing toward the danger, I thought, when Jov had sent me here to get them out of it.

  Jov. The swell of fear and grief was so strong it was like my chest was threatening to tear into pieces instead. I staggered after the Doranites, who were leaping with impressive athleticism across the bent benches, heading up to the worst of the damage. My pace as I followed was slow and wonky. There were injured people—and worse—everywhere. The Doranites, making far faster progress than I, had formed a human chain to reach one of the people dangling into the opening.

  The horrible swelling in my throat and head intensified. Had Jov been down there, in that gaping hole?

  Blood and smoke and the smell of blackened flesh filled my senses as I got closer. People had been ripped apart by the force of the explosion. No one close to it could have survived.

  “Help,” I heard, and then louder: “Help!”

  One of the bodies on the broken benches was moving, the head turned toward me and the whites of their eyes bright in their face in the dark. I crouched to tug away the piece of twisted metal pinning their shoulder but gasped and dropped it with a curse. The metal was hot; I didn’t realize how hot until too late and the heat spread deep in my fingers and palm. I hastily wrapped my hand in a handful of my clothes and tried again. This time the metal gave and the woman, gasping with pain, pulled free. Her skin was puckered and burnt where the metal had pinned her but she seemed not even to notice.

  “My boy!” she whispered hoarsely, and the moment I’d levered the metal off, she rolled out and scrambled across to a smaller figure. I thought my heart might snap, it felt so brittle. But the boy, thank the fortunes, was alive, and crying, and scrambled into his mother’s embrace.

  I helped whoever I could, though it was often hard to identify the grievously wounded from the dead. Honor-down, it was grim work. There were dead and injured children, honored elders, people I knew from school and work and everyday life in the city. I realized, seeing a significant number of Credol Family tattoos, that this section had been where most of the Councilors’ families had been sitting. Where our own family would have been, had we not forced them to stay at the apartments. I could have been stumbling over their limbs, closing their eyes and avoiding looking at the things sticking into their chests.

  Finally I drew near the shaking broken edges around the main blast site, where the Doranites were working as an efficient team, hauling people out. Avoiding the burning sections, and trying not to get in their way, I peered down, silent with dread, my pulse thumping painfully in my ears. The Doranites were talking rapidly in their own language, gesturing at their next target for rescue, and blackstripes, Order Guards, and other citizens were joining their rescue attempts. Stinging smoke billowed around from the various fires, including from the wreckage under the collapsed section, masking my view of the worst-hit sections so I couldn’t tell who might be … I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to try to identify clothing or speculate about who was sitting where. It was all too obvious no one below the seating where the explosion had gone off could have survived.

  I would just have to hope with everything in me that Jov had not been below. After everything we had been through, after all the dangers he had prevented and survived, I couldn’t lose him now, not like this. I would not. He was not down there, he had been in a different section, and he would be busy, like me, helping the injured. We would find each other later. I assisted another person, their face smoke-blackened and a chunk of debris protruding from one arm, down to safety. I found I couldn’t answer their thanks; in fact I couldn’t get my breath out at all, it was trapped in my chest.

  “Are you all right?” Someone grabbed my arm to steady me.

  I started to nod then shook my head instead, and tapped my chest. Even after all these years, after so many attacks, it was so hard to wrestle with my brain, tell myself not to panic, to relax. The woman helped me to a stable section. “Lie down here,” she suggested, but I shook my head harder.

  “Stay … upright,” I gasped. Breathe, breathe, slow, in through the nose, out through the mouth.

  “The smoke will be making it worse,” I heard someone say, a male voice.

  The woman, who was peering over me anxiously, glanced over her shoulder and said, “What?” and only then did I realize he had spoken in Talafan, not Sjon. Dimly, I recognized Minister Kokush.

  “This condition, it can be triggered by smoke,” the Minister said earnestly. “You must get into clean air.” He looked at the woman and seemed to suddenly unders
tand the problem. He repeated it in slightly hesitant Sjon; she looked back with narrowed eyes.

  “Will you be all right if I go help?” I nodded. “You look after her then,” she added loudly, pointing an aggressive finger at Kokush, as if volume were the obstacle. He gave her a little bow and nodded.

  Kokush switched back to Talafan to speak to me. “Your physics are setting up a treatment area,” he said, gesturing down to the arena floor. “We should go there.” He put one of my arms across his shoulder and his around my waist, and led me away from the smoking, burning stand. A section of the field had been hastily marked out with broken benches and a makeshift flag of a physic’s blue sash. Several physics, sweaty and grim-faced, were treating the worst wounds, and other injured people were waiting in dazed groups to the side. No one paid me any heed as Kokush led me to join them and gently lifted my hands behind my head. “This opens up the chest, yes?” he said, and I nodded. He seemed both genuinely concerned and distracted; he kept looking anxiously back over his shoulder, inflated with questions he could not ask.

  Breathe. Breathe. A fraction longer each time, the tiniest easing in my chest. Repeat. I was getting control back. “Good,” he said quietly. “That’s right.”

  I couldn’t talk yet, but he read my questioning look. “My mother,” he said, understanding what I meant. “We always had to look after her. She would do too much in the fields and my brothers and I would need to watch out that she had not worked her lungs to death. When they smoked the fields or if she got too close to the tanning equipment, it always made it worse.”

  He was looking back at the blast site again. I wondered whether there were any Talafan unaccounted for. I’d not been in the viewing box long enough to take stock but I’d had the impression of only a small Talafan group—I’d seen the Prince but no women, and no Ectar, either. I hoped he had not come at all, that he had not been elsewhere in the arena.

  “Go,” I wheezed, waving one feeble hand at Kokush. He nodded and turned back, running into the fray.

  Concentrate. Relax. No point obsessing over this now. I couldn’t help anyone until I could safely breathe again. Maddening, terrifying minutes passed in forced stillness. I managed a longer breath, and another. Patience was a skill learned in a hundred days of enforced bed rest, in canceled invitations and repeated excuses and missed opportunities. I would not forget it now.

  “Kalina!”

  Someone swooped up from behind and grabbed me in a fierce hug, momentarily constricting my breathing again. Fortunately I was quickly released and Hadrea pivoted me around to face her. Her eyes traveled over me, searching for injuries, even as I did the same to her. She looked unhurt, only slightly rumpled. “Where is Jovan?” she asked breathlessly.

  She read my anguish in an instant. A spasm of emotion passed across her face and she said nothing, just stared at me, mouth slightly open.

  “He was down … down under the tiers,” I said. “I don’t know whether he…” It was too much, my throat closed over. I shook my head and tried again. “I haven’t found him yet, but we will.” Then my own fear. “Where’s Tain? You were together.”

  “He is here,” she said, gesturing to the crowd of injured people lining up for care behind her, and my body sagged in gratitude. “We were lucky. There was an explosion in our section but we were in the bottom rows and did not get the full force. We were just knocked over.” She surveyed the mess of the arena, brows drawn tight. “Three blasts,” she said.

  “We stopped the first one, then Jov ran,” I said. I squeezed my eyes shut. Should I have gone with him? Tried to stop him?

  Hadrea pointed. “Look how they are spaced.” The three successful blasts were separated by one relatively unscathed section, immediately to the left of the first blast site. “Perhaps he stopped that one, too.”

  “Maybe.” I tried not to think about other alternatives. Then my chest constricted again. “Your mother? Davi? Have you seen them?” It had been such a terrible blur as I had stumbled up those cursed stairs, my legs traitorously slow, trying to bellow instructions from a stolen speaking trumpet, and I’d not registered who exactly had been in the main box. I couldn’t remember seeing Salvea, though I raked my memory for an image of her. Don’t let them have been in the family section. Please don’t let them.

  “Not yet.” She spoke with forced calm. “They were down there, near the front, last I saw them. I am sure they were out of the worst part of the force, the same as I was.” She shifted her weight between her feet and stared back at the burning wreckage of the arena. I read the impatience in her posture and put a hand on her arm.

  “Go look for them,” I said, and a smile cut across her face, gone in an instant.

  “I will find them all safe, and come back,” she promised, and leapt away.

  My breathing was feeling better and though the burn on my palm throbbed still, it wasn’t serious. I had just begun to move closer to the physics to assist when a crack splintered the air, followed by an animalistic groan of metal and wood from the structure. Everyone flinched, and as one we looked up at the tiers, where a new section adjacent to and above the nearest blast site, swarming with people, had started to collapse. People raced past, and I heard snatches of conversation.

  “… Got a bunch of the rescuers…”

  “—the Doranites! The King’s up there! We need something we can use as a ladder, quick!”

  A groan escaped me. There were people trapped up there, people who’d been trying to pull others out, and even as I watched, horror-struck at this new disaster, more of the seating crumpled away and fresh screams erupted. People streamed past me, scrambling up to help, but I felt rooted to the ground, unable to do anything but stare.

  But over the now-dull ringing in my ears and the shouts and cries of people on the structure rose an unexpected and distracting sound. A dozen people had formed a pack near the base of the seating and were chanting in a rhythmic fashion: the Darfri, led by An-Ostada at the center, proud and tall. A ripple of reaction spread out from them. “About time!” snapped the physic nearest me. “Let’s see if the bloody spirits are good for anything but destruction.”

  I hadn’t been there for the big feats of Darfri magic in the siege. Hadn’t been capable of fighting on the walls and witnessing the strange winds and the terrifying disembodied hands of dirt and stone. Hadn’t seen the great Os-Woorin tearing apart its false idol and wreaking havoc on the city. Jovan had tried to explain to me what had happened, how the spirit had drunk in the emotional energy of the terrified people fighting around the lake. Was I about to see it now? My heart beat hard in anticipation. There was certainly terror aplenty here today. Were we about to see a spirit coming to our aid?

  I wasn’t the only one watching in anxious anticipation; others also stopped what they were doing and stared, looking frightened but hopeful, everyone’s attention split between the Darfri group and the gaping angry hole and dangling edges of the falling arena. I stood ready, waiting for the sensation Jov had described, and to assist the way he had apparently once been able to do for Hadrea. After a few long moments of attempting to open myself up to it, all I felt was my burning lungs, the throbbing of my palm, and a creeping sense of awkwardness. If I should have felt something as the Darfri asked their boon, I didn’t. I felt nothing at all. Just the same physical complaints, the same sting of smoke in my eyes and cold in my heart, the same rising tide of dread and desperate anger at what was happening to us.

  As I watched, Hadrea emerged from the ruckus and approached at a trot. “Nothing,” she said before I could ask. “I cannot get under there. One side has collapsed over the entryway and it is not safe to get in the other side. Beams are buckling and falling. There is a lot of fire down there. I called out for him, but…” She shook her head. “Nothing.” Her head snapped suddenly over toward An-Ostada and her group. “What are they trying to do?” she muttered.

  I covered my mouth with a loose part of my paluma as we moved closer, trying to see clearer witho
ut getting in anyone’s way. “They’re trying to help. The Doranites—the King, the Chieftains—got caught up in that last collapse.” I had left Jov in order to get the Doranites to safety, and now it might have been for nothing. Guilt and rage battled inside me. The sheer unfairness of it made me want to scream. “I guess An-Ostada and her group are asking the spirits to do something? Can you … I don’t know, help them?” It had never been clear to me how Darfri magic worked, but if a spirit could come hurtling out of the water to destroy the city when angry, could an appeased one not help us now? Or could Hadrea, hero of the battle, not do something similar and bend it to her will?

  Certainly whatever An-Ostada’s group was attempting wasn’t working. We stopped just behind them, and even as they chanted and moved in unison, An-Ostada’s hands rising and falling with her pleas, new flames inexplicably burst from the seating, as though it had been doused with oil and lit. Hadrea flinched, frowned, and looked between the flames and the group with narrowed eyes. “What?” she muttered. More shouting and screaming followed and another crash of broken wood and metal. The chanting of An-Ostada and her Speakers grew louder in response, a desperate edge to their voices now.

  “Do something,” I begged her, and Hadrea closed her eyes and raised her hands. Her mouth moved silently, but her chest rose and fell in time to the rhythm of the Darfri group’s chants. A moment later, An-Ostada visibly stiffened and twisted back. She saw us immediately and in the mixed light I couldn’t read her expression—anger? Gratitude? Relief? She turned back to face the seating without speaking.

  I watched, anxious. Surely, surely their magic could help somehow. As if willed into existence a faint breeze rose and the flames seemed momentarily to dampen; my heart lifted. But it went no further. The chain of people trying to reach the Doranites, half of whom seemed to be dangling on the partially collapsed section, were still being defeated by the unreliable, dangerous footing in the crumpling sections, and the new fires blazing beyond expected levels.