Hollow Empire

by Sam Hawke

  Oof. I took her hand. “I know exactly what you mean.” That day at the Guardhouse, it had felt like a tipping point. Like we finally had the tools to tackle the problem, enough information to solve the mystery. And yet I’d found no revelation in the library, no enlightening conversation with a colleague to connect a mysterious religion with our family or the Darfri or even Aven. Jov had trusted me to think this through, and every day that passed without me doing so I felt more of a desperate failure than ever. The Hero of Silasta, I thought bitterly, well, where are my acts of bravery and brilliant intuition now?

  “Oh, hello,” I heard Dee say suddenly, and I glanced up; this time it had been me caught up in my thoughts. We were standing face-to-face with Abae Runkojo, and blood rushed to my face with embarrassing rapidity. She was a suspect, like everyone from her delegation, conveniently absent from the closing ceremony with shaky excuses—hadn’t I myself seen her, perfectly healthy, that afternoon at the markets?—whom I should regard with appropriate caution. And yet the first reaction upon seeing her was an involuntary but pleasant tightening in my gut. It’s that smile, I thought defensively.

  She seemed not to notice my awkward reaction, but instead beamed as though greeting her dearest friends. “Hello, Credola Dija, Credola Kalina!”

  “Hello,” I said, returning her smile, cautious. “I thought your delegation might have left Silasta by now, like most of the other visiting officials?” Why would you stay in a city that has been attacked so ruthlessly? Why, unless you had some nefarious purpose?

  “Oh, no,” she said seriously. “The High Priestess offers her prayers and her good works to the people of Silasta. In this time of tumult and fear, she feels she has been sent by the gods to bring light and faith. She would not abandon the people hurt for the sake of her own safety.” She indicated the bag she carried over her shoulder with a small shrug. “I have been purchasing papers and inks and writing utensils so she may spread her word and the word of the heavens to those in need.”

  “I think those in need might need more than words,” I replied, a little more tartly than I’d meant, and unfairly, since last I’d seen her she had been offering far more practical assistance at the hospital. But Abae seemed to take no offense.

  “Of course,” she said, ducking her head in acknowledgment. “And I know you do not share our religion. But there are many Perest-Avani and other wetlanders here in your city, and few places of worship for them. I believe they may take comfort from the prayers of the High Priestess, if nothing else.”

  It would be easier to believe her a spy or a ruthless conspirator if her eyes were not so honest, her manner almost childlike in its earnestness. “And you? You are not of the Order, you told me. Do you not want to go home?”

  “I am afraid,” she admitted, and I noticed Dija was regarding her with a peculiar expression I couldn’t quite identify. Abae squeezed her eyes shut, and when she opened them tears gleamed at the edges. “Unless I am instructed otherwise, I must stay and assist. But I confess it, I am afraid. If I were given the chance I would turn tail and run home.” She looked around us as if fearing someone might overhear. “I am not brave, like you both.”

  “I’m not brave,” Dija muttered, just as Abae’s apparent sincerity prompted me to answer honestly.

  “Abae, I promise we’re afraid, too. That’s the right thing to be when people are trying to tear you down. But we don’t have anywhere to run to.” My mouth twisted, the taste in my mouth a little bitter, a little satisfied. “Besides, I spent a lot of my life only doing what I was expected to do, and now I’ve broken the habit it seems a shame to go back, especially for the sake of someone who means me ill.”

  More than one someone. Did her admiring gaze hide a shrewd interior? Did she know I suspected her? Or had Moest been right when he said the Perest-Avani were an easy target for misdirection? Marco had been a traitor to us, but loyal to Aven, not his home country, whose more oppressive lifestyle requirements for military men had ill-suited him. Could a small nation that didn’t even share our borders really be tied up in such a grand and brutal plan? Honor-down, Abae seemed so genuine. Part of me yearned to accept her at face value, but I couldn’t trust that part, not with everything at risk.

  There was a long pause, and when I glanced up at her face it was drawn in a very serious line. To soften my earlier words, I said, “I finished the poetry book last night. I think the final one was my favorite.”

  “‘The Long Grass’?” She squeezed her eyes shut in delight. “I love that one.”

  “I did not know a word at the end.” I searched my memory. “When she lay among the grass. Manassma, I think it was?”

  Abaezalla tilted her head, considering. “It is a Talafan word for … it is the sensation you feel, when you are very small, a tiny part but an integral one. When you stare at the sky, and see the stars. She lies very low in the long grass, so that she can see nothing but long stems in every direction, and she feels alone, but connected. This is manassma.”

  I repeated the word, liking its sound in my mouth.

  Abae glanced up at the sky. “It looks like it might rain.” With a regretful downturn of her lips she added, “I should return to the High Priestess with the materials she wanted, before they get wet. It was good to see you both.” She turned her smile first on Dija and then, with a hint of mischief, on me. “Perhaps you can come and visit me sometime. If you are in need of prayer.”

  We parted ways and began our passage along the crowded route once more. “Do you think she’s working with them? The enemies?” Dee asked me suddenly, and it was my turn to quickly look around to make sure we weren’t being overheard. “It’s just that she’s awfully nice.”

  “I don’t know,” I said wearily. She was nice. But so too had Marco been. A memory came back to me all of a sudden. I had sat with Marco in a deserted building, spying on the street below, and he had shared deep truths about himself with me. And he had never treated me like an invalid when the rest of the Council had done so. Honor-down, whoever our enemy was, they had ruined good people as well as bad ones.

  The sky had indeed turned an ominous rich indigo hue near the horizon. “Let’s go to the bathhouse,” I suggested on a whim. There was one with a children-and-families tub not too far out of the way home, where Etan and my mother used to take us when we were young, before she left the city. “Sometimes a good soak makes it easier to get your thoughts together.”

  She hesitated, looked down at her feet. A kitsa, a stray by its thin looks and the bald patches in the fur around its scaled spine, was weaving in and out of the pedestrians, and it rubbed against her legs. She scratched it absently with one foot, and said nothing.

  “Is something wrong? We don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

  “No, it’s just…” She swallowed and her voice went higher. “I know the one you mean. Merenda used to take me sometimes.”

  “Oh, Dee.” I squeezed her against me on impulse. “I’m sorry. We don’t have to—”

  “No, I want to. I like it there. And it’s nice to re … remember good things.” She raised her chin to give me a quavering smile, then she turned to continue walking.

  It happened so fast.

  Someone going in the other direction jostled us and the kitsa suddenly swerved underfoot, just where Dee tried to step to correct. She tripped over it, stumbled, and fell. Directly out into the street.

  My heart in my throat, I flung one arm out and caught the back of her scarf, yanking her back toward me, just as a huge oku, lumbering far too fast for a city street, crashed along past us, the wind of its swift passage whooshing into us in a puff of scattering dust and rock. The driver, standing up at the reins, shouted something frightened and angry, though whether it was directed at us or at his rogue beast, I couldn’t have said.

  Dee and I looked at each other, wide-eyed. We were both panting, I realized, and closed my mouth, but still the pounding of my pulse thundered in my ears. Dija’s open-mouthed breathing altern
ated with a spluttering cough.

  “I’m sorry, Auntie!” She stepped back almost up to the nearest building, her eyes still huge, adjusting the scarf my grip had pulled against her throat hard enough to choke. “I didn’t see the kitsa there!”

  My eyes tracked the animal; after the oku cart skidded up the road and finally slowed down, a flash of fur and glint of scale showed through the continued traffic as it crossed the road in apparent calm and headed down an alley. I glimpsed, just for a moment, a figure scooping it up like a pet, before disappearing. My blood seemed to slow and chill in my veins and my saliva dried up in my mouth so I thought I might choke. At last, I recognized that pale figure.

  “Who was that?” Dee asked, gripping my hand a little tighter. “Auntie?”

  I forced a smile and tucked her scarf back around her neck. “No one. Just a trick of the light. Come on, that wind’s cold.”

  The encounter unsettled me enough that I took Dee straight back home instead of stopping at the bathhouse like I’d originally intended. Suddenly the idea of sitting among strangers, vulnerable, was not at all relaxing.

  With everything that had happened over the past few days, I had neglected my research into Talafar and its witches. They had seemed tame in comparison to murder and explosions, a milder facet of a more serious campaign against us. Now, I wondered whether it had ever been related to the main attacks, or whether what we were looking at was its own unique thing, a case of one of the simplest motives of all: revenge for a terrible loss.

  Because the face I was almost certain I’d seen in the alley earlier was that of Lady Mosecca, Tuhash’s mother.

  * * *

  A lighter sleeper perhaps might have woken at the commotion, but I was too heavily gone and our apartments too far. I only knew something had happened when Sjease shook me awake; it was still dark and my eyes felt gummy, my limbs slow. Bad dreams clung to me still.

  “Credola, the Chancellor’s page is at the door,” they whispered. “He has an urgent message from the Chancellor.”

  Erel was indeed waiting in the entranceway to our apartments, his hair sticking up and rumpled from sleep and his eyes wide. “What is it?” I asked him, hurrying over.

  “Chancellor Tain bade me come straight to you to tell you in person,” he said, shifting his weight anxiously between his feet. “He’s gone straight down there but he wanted you to know immediately.”

  “Know what? Down where?” Honor-down, there’s been another attack?

  “The Guardhouse, Credola,” he gasped. “Someone’s set off another explosion and busted half of the Guardhouse up.”

  Oh, no. Dread deep in my heart, I grabbed my cloak and threw it straight over my sleeping tunic. “I want to go down there.”

  “Yes, Credola, he thought you might. I’ve a litter waiting, Credola.”

  I felt like an invalid, being carried down the hill and across Compact Bridge at speed, but I could be realistic about these things. There was no way I could run down there in the middle of the night.

  Devastation, smaller scaled but familiar, greeted us in the form of broken masonry, rubble and dust, and bitterly smoldering fires dotted here and there. Crowds, too, and a lot of noise. The Guardhouse was adjacent to the Warriors’ Guildhall and in the same neighborhood as several other key institutions, and enough people had still obviously been up and working in the various locations that the street around the broken building was full of alarmed crowds. A huge chunk of wall was missing on the east side of the building, but the majority of the Guardhouse still stood.

  “Was anyone killed? How many were hurt?” I asked anyone who would listen, but no one seemed to know for sure. I thought of Chen, and her gruff, kindly manner, and the leg that she’d lost and how far she’d come, and I was disgusted at myself for how I’d last spoken to her, in frustration and irritation at her lack of accommodation for our theories. What if she were blasted to pieces now, like so many others? Her crime being present late at night in her Guardhouse, utterly dedicated to her role?

  But to my immense relief, I soon found her, along with Tain, Eliska, and Moest, engaged in furious and intense conversation at the front of the building. Chen had clearly not been in the Guardhouse; she, like me, wore nightclothes and a coat thrust over the top. Her false leg gleamed in the moonlight. Tain spotted me and threw an arm around my shoulders, drawing me close. I leaned in, blinking back unexpected tears. I hadn’t cried for days and the one Order Guard I had a personal relationship with was here in front of me, distraught but uninjured. I didn’t understand why now, of all times, I should cry.

  “—planted it and got out of the way,” an Order Guard was reporting. He was very young, with a freckled face and plaited hair, and his voice shook. “A witness across the street saw the flame that must have been the wick. She started to cross the road to investigate, thinking it was an accidental thing, like, and then it exploded.” He threaded his fingers together, released them, threaded them again. Repeated it. “She was knocked over by the force of it but she’s all right. The physics have her now, she’s only got scratches and bruises.”

  “She see anything else?” Eliska asked. Her face was very sooty. She was still dressed in a paluma; I guessed she’d been working late as well.

  “At least a dozen people, with them masks, you know, the masks with the slits, the whisperer masks the Hands wear. They came rushing into the gap. She got out of the way, so she didn’t see what happened next, but by the time anyone come to help it was all over. They were gone.”

  “Five people died in the blast, best we can tell,” Chen said, looking over at me. “Then two Guards were attacked and killed by the Hands who stormed the breach.”

  “What did they want?” I asked, mouth dry, even though I already knew the answer.

  “Sukseno,” she said grimly. She rubbed her forehead with one hand, closed her eyes, and let out her breath. “The blast broke open his cell and most of the others, too. They obviously knew the layout of the building perfectly, knew where to let off the device.”

  “Where is he?” I asked. Tain’s body had gone very still and stiff against mine.

  Chen jerked her head off to the side and I followed her gaze. Inside the Guardhouse, in a section exposed by the blast but still protected from the weather, corpses lay out on the ground in a cleared space. “They cut his throat. Ear to ear. Left him there in his cell.” A crack of thunder sounded, making us all jump, and a moment later a heavy, drenching rain hissed out of the sky and fell around us. She raised a weary arm to shelter her face from the sudden downpour. “The three other Hands we had in custody are gone. Escaped with their comrades.”

  We’d done that, I thought. We’d threatened him that we’d leak that he was talking to us, and the leak had happened whether we wanted it to or not. Now we’d never get anything out of him, not about Aven, not about the Wraith, not about anything. I wanted to scream, or be sick, or something, anything, to expel the feelings inside my chest.

  But I didn’t do any of those things, just asked in a voice so calm I wasn’t sure it was mine, “And the assassin?”

  Chen frowned. “He wasn’t their concern, apparently. They didn’t touch him.” She glanced over to the pile of bodies again, and my heart skipped.

  “Then what—”

  “His room got a lot of … collateral damage, I suppose you’d say. Your assassin’s alive, but his legs got pinned under about a boat’s weight worth of stone. Totally crushed.”

  The sensation in my chest, the clawing feeling like something alive, something conscious, intensified. “How bad is it?”

  “He’s with the physics, and he’s not conscious last I saw.” Someone else pulled on Chen’s arm for attention and she gave me one tired glance. “Maybe you can talk to him in the morning, if he lives through the night.” She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again. She looked twenty years older as she stomped off into the rain.

  * * *

  Tain and I looked at each other, the rain stre
aking down around us. “If he dies too, and we get nothing out of him…”

  “Then we’re back where we started. With no information and no way of getting more.” He sounded calm but abruptly he spun and kicked a rock so hard it struck a building that must have been twenty treads away. There was something so wild and brittle in his face at that moment that I shivered. “Every time!” His voice wasn’t loud, but it carried the weight of a shout with its intensity. “Every time we get close to answers they’re ahead of us.”

  He stamped off, leaving me scrambling to catch up. I stopped and glanced back. Poor Erel was standing, bewildered, his hair plastered to his face, obviously unsure of what he should be doing. “You should go back to the Manor,” I told him, but he set his jaw and folded his arms across his chest with a stubborn pose so reminiscent of Tain that in that moment he could have been his nephew, not just a faithful page, and I almost smiled, despite everything. “You can come back afterwards,” I said. “Get one of the house servants to get some blankets, maybe some hot food and drink, and you can bring it back here. I promise we won’t be going far, and you know he won’t take care of himself if we don’t help him.” Perhaps in his mother’s absence my firm tone was an acceptable substitute, because he ducked his head and agreed in a small voice. One more traumatized child, I thought, watching him scamper off. What would become of all these children growing up in such violence and turmoil? What kind of shapes were we forcing them to grow into?

  I clambered over slippery stones, trying hard to keep my balance, to follow in the direction Tain had gone. A crew of brave—or foolhardy—people were up on the roof of the Guardhouse now, just visible through the sheets of rain, rolling oilskins over the gaping hole in the building to try to provide some cover from the elements. I spotted Tain standing a little ways off, watching them as he fiddled with a water flask at his side; Jov had made him promise he would take no drink from any other vessel, and would let it leave his body only to be refilled by me or Dija.