Hollow Empire

by Sam Hawke

  “What do we do about these?” I gestured to the pile.

  She shrugged. “I am not sure any of the physics have slept in days. I doubt they are taking breaks to eat properly.” So we dropped the posies of spring flowers and foliage by the sleeping patients in Hadrea’s room for something bright to waken to, and the food gifts with the clerk directing traffic. He marked Hadrea’s exit in a log and his hands shook a little; he darted little sidelong looks at her as he wrote, and swallowed with apparent difficulty. Opals and shaking hands; admiration and fear. The twin consequences of what she’d done.

  I glanced around as we walked. Lara was trailing us, keeping an eye on other pedestrians, but no one was close enough to hear. Still, my heart beat harder with nerves; usually I would never have dared ask a direct question about fresken. “What did you do that was so different? Why did it work when An-Ostada’s didn’t?”

  Hadrea walked on in silence for a short while, looking—to my intense relief—more thoughtful than offended at the question. “It is not easy to describe. The words are not right. It is like trying to say what red sounds like, or how sadness smells. The senses do not line up with our words.”

  “I think what An-Ostada seemed to be saying was that she was asking the spirits for help, but you were doing something else,” I prompted.

  “Yes. I suppose. Speaking is the art of communicating with the spirits. You might ask them for wisdom or for aid or a boon, or you might simply offer praise or honor…” She trailed off, frowning hard. “Offerings are hard to explain. It is about making yourself emotionally open, so the intensity of the things you feel are shared with the spirits. These connections are what become … a fuel, you might say. Like oil in a lantern. The fuel that powers the secondworld.

  “So. You must follow the rituals, and the spirit must know your presence or it will not answer. It is like if you hear a name called out in a crowd. If it is not your name, you do not turn. If it is your name, but when you turn you do not recognize the person calling, you might walk on.” She bit her lip. “So you build up a relationship with spirits by offering these things, regularly, ritualistically. Because you put yourself, your community, into the spirit, to fuel and nourish it, when you call upon it, the spirit knows you. It might lend you strength to perform certain acts. This is what happened during the battles at the siege. But if you neglect the spirit, and pay no respects to the land, no matter how skilled you are in fresken, your cries will go unanswered.”

  “So An-Ostada called on the lake spirit and it didn’t answer.”

  “Yes. She tried to call upon the lake spirit and then the spirit of Solemn Peak, and I lent my support to her, but it was not enough. They did not answer. They are deeply dormant, and it may be years until they are responsive the way our stories once described them.” She raised her chin. “So I entered the secondworld and used what they were offering myself.”

  We took a few steps in silence as I digested this. “You did what the spirits normally do. You used their power. Is that what…” I tried to remember the other terms I’d heard. “Is that what they call summoning? Sorcery?”

  “No!” She turned on me, breathing hard and furious, as if I’d accused her of some disgusting act. “Summoning is forcing a spirit to do your bidding. Using them like a puppet. It is a dark and foul act.” Her pace quickened, and I struggled to keep up.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just trying to understand. An-Ostada was so angry. What was it you did that she hates so much?”

  For a moment I thought I’d pushed her too far. She strode on, color high, lips pressed together. I pushed on after her, breath starting to hurt in my lungs. It was the sound of my breathing, I suspected, that made her stop, suddenly, and something like shame passed across her face. “I am walking too fast,” she said, by way of apology, and I took it as it was meant.

  We walked on together in silence for long enough that it was a surprise when she suddenly spoke again. “What I did at the arena is not so different from what I did two years ago. The drug. Void. It also makes it easier to act as a conduit for the power, and it is like…” She struggled for words again, moving her hands in frustrated expression. “The mind of a person who has opened themselves to the spirits and the secondworld is different from the mind of someone who has not.”

  I nodded understanding, though with a little sour turn of the stomach. Jov had experienced that opening, that sharing, but when faced with multiple people using Darfri magic, I had not felt the same pull. It was a strange thing to contemplate in the abstract, and a stupid thing to feel jealous about.

  “The more you do it, the easier it is for you to do it again, yes? A leather strap grows easier to tie, over time. Void can accelerate that process. It builds a connection between people, also. Those of us who have experimented together are connected, we can find each other easily, even in a crowd, and they could assist me. There were many people in the crowd that night who have used Void too, I think, and whose energy was … there. Waiting and undirected, but connected to the secondworld and ready to be used.”

  Something about that sounded ominous. “So using Void leaves you more vulnerable to this? Like it leaves a hook or a trail or something to your mind?” Any trace of uncomfortable envy vanished in a puff.

  “It is no harm to anyone,” Hadrea said, bristling again. “It is no bad thing to be more readily able to make offerings to the spirits. Such is fundamental to our beliefs. An-Ostada does not mind that people offer their strength, she only expects it must first be filtered through a spirit.”

  We crossed a road, pausing in our talk as others moved within range. Two children chased a rogue ball into the traffic and were hauled back by their swearing, overanxious Tashi. A large black bird stole a berry from a woman’s basket of groceries and she batted it away. An Order Guard patrolled the street with a tired prowl. Everyday traffic, but with an edge of fear and tension. Once we were clear again, I dared ask, “And the woman? She had that urn thing?”

  Hadrea ran a ragged hand through her hair, looking genuinely discomforted for the first time. “Somehow she had stored power in that vessel. I do not know how. I did not know it was possible to do such a thing.”

  “She said something about being taught by ‘him.’ Did you know what she meant? Who is ‘he’?”

  Hadrea laughed, though it was a hard and bitter sound. “Kalina, I have no clue. I have stumbled through understanding my own heritage my entire life, and when I am finally given a teacher, she despises me. The things I do not know are boundless.”

  Oh, fortunes. Her hard edges could cut, but the hurt beneath … I seized her hand on impulse and squeezed it. She returned the grip, and bumped my shoulder with hers, and the silence between us was something comfortable and familiar now.

  Eventually she said, “It is An-Ostada, if anyone, who would know who could teach such a thing. There have never been as many male Speakers as female. If she feels so strongly about fresken being used this way, surely she would know if there is a man who is betraying the traditions so. She was less surprised than me at what that woman did.”

  I remembered something else I had wanted to ask her about. “There was a Darfri woman who tried to warn me at the hospital. She said something like … we didn’t protect the secondworld, and she’d tried to warn us the spirits were being murdered.”

  Hadrea stopped. “Murdered? I do not know how you would murder a spirit. Does she mean the spirits that have died around the estates?”

  “No idea,” I admitted. “I lost her in the crowd. I’m hoping she’ll try to find us again; she seemed to want us to listen, and she was upset. It sounded important.”

  “I will ask around in the lower city, and the outer village,” Hadrea promised me. “If this woman has something to say about Darfri matters she will find one of us, I am sure.”

  “That would be great.” I described her as best I could. I had asked at the hospital about a woman with an eye and ear injury but they weren’t keeping much in the way o
f records and there were a lot of people with those kinds of wounds. I hoped she’d been treated. “Could this—any of this—have something to do with some kind of … different religion?” I fished out the assassin’s book from inside my pocket. Over the last day I’d gone over it in detail, but learned nothing more; likely we’d need to ask language specialists in my Guild for help very soon. Hadrea looked at it blankly.

  “What is this?”

  “The assassin had it with him when Jov caught him. It’s our best clue about where he came from.”

  She flipped through the book, looking irritated again. “Reading is still not my skill.” Although initially keen, she’d proven an inconsistent and often impatient student, and from the sudden tension in her shoulders I suspected she was defensive about it. Instead of asking her if anything was familiar, I read significant passages out while she listened, her nose wrinkling and her frown intensifying as I did. The sections on punishments for transgressions were particularly absurd.

  “Most of this makes no sense at all, it’s like it’s describing all of these cultural rules, but they’re not like any country I know of. But this bit, here, talks about how women are more suited to do something—I can’t read this word—because of their range of emotions, it says. That almost sounds like it could be related to Darfri practices, doesn’t it? What you said about women being Speakers more often, and also about how offerings work?”

  Hadrea shrugged. “Perhaps there is a similarity, but if your assassin could do what that false Speaker did, he would not have been skulking about poisoning wounded children. I am sorry, Kalina. I do not know what this means. Most of my life it has been difficult for people on the estates to engage with any of our heritage. I cannot imagine there is anywhere in Sjona where these sorts of rules could be enforced. We were not permitted to have shrines by our most ancient spirits if that interfered with the passage of traffic. Is there really a town where someone could make you wear a mask with no mouth if you are caught eating cooked food on the quarter moon days? This does not sound like any place I know of.”

  “Nor me,” I muttered. It had to be either a religion for some far-off place—making the assassin a devout man, to carry his sacred words with him at all times, but then, why would the book be badly translated into Sjon instead of being written in his native language?—or a fiction, some kind of false book disguising a code. I had tried writing out all of the symbols and letters that were unfamiliar or used incorrectly, in the hope I could see some pattern among them. I could not. Etan had once shown me how special codes could be devised if each party had a “key book,” but by itself the book was valueless.

  We had promised Tain we would ask for help if we hadn’t figured out what it meant quickly. So, I supposed, it was time to ask directly.

  * * *

  I went to the Guardhouse the following day, after a fitful night’s sleep, part abandoned in favor of rereading the strange book and speculating about its origins. Chen showed me to the cell, well apart from the other holding rooms at the headquarters. “He’s still not saying anything, not in Sjon or Trade. The determination council had people in here all day yesterday, trying to get him to speak, but they’ve had no luck. Hasn’t said a word.”

  I stopped walking. “Thank you for letting me talk to him. I know it’s only supposed to be their agents, but—”

  “But you got that book, don’t you?” She shrugged. “Jovan told me about it. He said you wanted a bit of time to see if you could figure out what it meant, and he explained why.” She hunched her shoulders a little, looking sideways at me. “I agreed no Councilors would be permitted entry, and no one at all without supervision. I might have implied I’d only let determination council agents in, but I don’t know as I recall asserting that precise thing.”

  “I’ll be quick,” I promised. “And I won’t say a thing to anyone.”

  “You’re here on official records to see Sukseno, given your connection to the former Warrior-Guilder and the fact that she talked to you before. No one could object to that.”

  “Thank you, Captain.” It was an undeniable comfort to have had Jov confide in Chen. Her solid, dependable presence radiated intelligence without cunning, honesty with discretion, and we had been alone with our theories and obsessions too long. She gave me a parental slap on the shoulders, and it gave me a boost of confidence as we approached the assassin’s cell.

  He was not only confined by the stone-walled cell itself, but also by a rope which bound both wrists to a metal loop fastened to the far wall. “Had to put that in specially,” Chen said quietly, following my gaze through the bars of the door. “Seems barbaric, but given he killed two cellmates with his bare hands, I’m not taking any chances with my guards or with you.”

  “I appreciate that,” I muttered honestly. My heart was already pounding, but I kept my face smooth as I approached the door. I would give him nothing without a price.

  “You want to stay out here?”

  I looked at the room. I could see in and talk through the door, the top half of which was blocked with heavy metal bars, but the light inside was poor, and shadows concealed the face of the man on the bench at the far side of the room. If I was going to show him anything in the book and gauge a reaction, I was going to have to be closer than this. “How far can he reach with those ropes?”

  Chen gestured to a mark on the floor. “Full stretch? The point marked with chalk just there. You’ll be fine if you stay on this side.” She jerked her head toward Lara. “If you’re going in, your houseguard goes in with you, armed. And she’s on the alert, yeah?”

  Lara spat out the last of the janjan stick she’d been chewing and gave Chen a cheerful grin as she accepted the offered short sword. “Won’t take my eyes off him, Captain. On my son’s life.”

  Chen unlocked the door and I entered, trying to project calm confidence. Lara melted in behind me and Chen propped at the doorway, her own weapon by her side.

  The assassin had watched me come inside without any change in expression or movement. Now, his chin lifted and I got a full look at him. The reaction to the stinging substance Jov had used had receded, though the skin was still raised and red, if less angry. But for that, nothing about his face was noteworthy or remarkable. He looked like an average Sjon, perhaps forty years old. He had been stripped of his previous clothes and given a plain tunic, so the detailed artwork of the tattoo on his left arm was clearly visible. He had a hard, leanly muscled body like an athlete’s or a soldier’s, and a number of scars on his forearms and legs that looked like old combat injuries.

  “Hello,” I said, and his flat gaze traveled slowly over me, taking a long time as it focused on my various bandages, cuts, and bruises. As if he were searching out and noting down specific points of weakness. Self-consciously, I felt the urge to step farther away. Though he was tied securely, the prisoner radiated an air of malice and competence and barely leashed violence that reminded me, an anxious ball growing in the pit of my stomach, of Aven. His gaze traced a line across the floor between us as if measuring, counting, assessing. Did he want me to see him gently flexing his hands, testing the strength of his bonds, the tightness of the rope? I wouldn’t show him he was unsettling me. If he was like Aven, he’d enjoy my fear, and I didn’t feel like gifting him with anything.

  “Do you know who I am?” I said it in Sjon first, then Trade. Nothing. He barely blinked. But as I started to ask another question he spoke suddenly into the silence.

  “Oromani,” he breathed, and my stomach fluttered uneasily at the malice in his tone.

  “Where are you from?” I asked, half to myself.

  He smiled a wide, toothy smile. “Where from?” His voice was deep and melodious in accented Trade. “From hell.”

  More discomforted than I wanted to admit, I glanced back at the doorway at Chen, who had made a small sound of surprise, and in that second he burst into motion like a bird taking sudden flight, flinging himself toward me, teeth bared. I leapt backward in panicked i
nstinct and my back slammed against the far wall. My breath flew out of me and my skull rang with the force of my own collision. But of course he was too firmly secured. His lunge cut short by the cords around his wrists, he was yanked back gracelessly at their taut extent and fell to one knee. Lara, who had drawn her weapon and stepped between me and the assassin in barely a blink, brandished her short sword with a threatening growl, and he melted back to sitting on the bench seat without any apparent emotional response. His face returned to the neutral, bland expression. He had simply tested whether at a moment of distraction his bonds would hold, and now confident in their strength, he returned to captivity without any sign the incident had bothered him at all.

  Honor-down, who was this creature?

  “Do you want to kill me?” I asked him, curiosity overcoming the fear response. Chen had said he had not interacted at all with previous questioners. “You said my name. What’s so special about my family?”

  Nothing. As if attempting to attack me had been the only purpose of the engagement, he looked at the wall of the cell impassively and ignored me. I asked a series of questions, each time first in Sjon, then as best I could repeat in Trade, although it was too simple a language for nuance, and nothing garnered any interest or response, not when I asked him how he had been treated since his capture, how he knew who I was, why he had been murdering patients at the makeshift hospital, who he worked for, who was the Prince? No doubt these were all questions Chen’s people and the determination council officers had tried. But things changed the moment I pulled the book out of my pocket, and held it up. “Is this yours?”

  It was as though I’d reached inside him and seized his innards. A jolt of energy wracked his body and widened his eyes and he bared his teeth. Behind me, Chen sucked in her breath and even the implacable Lara gave a grunt of surprise. “Take your hands off,” he growled, with a voice so menacing it made the hairs on my arm stand up. A real religious text, then. He said something else I didn’t understand in a voice tight with rage.