Hollow Empire

by Sam Hawke

  “Maybe they’re just practicing,” I said, and the thought filled me with dread. “You know, warming up on smaller things so that they can strike at bigger targets?”

  Hadrea looked sick at the thought. “It is pointless destruction. But I suppose everything these people do is about pointless destruction.”

  “What about something like what you did with Os-Woorin then? You battled it. Could they have used the murders to somehow help power themselves in a fight with these smaller spirits?”

  She gave me a look, but her tone was still mild. “No, Jovan. That is not what I mean by ‘battle.’ I did not harm the Os-Woorin, I only contained and calmed it.” She stared thoughtfully off down the road as the wagon bumped and trundled along. “But perhaps you are right about the women. They have found some way to store the energy they take from people, especially people using Void; you saw that at the party. They may be doing something similar out here. Though again, if so, why take only one person?”

  “They don’t want to attract notice. One person going missing—especially someone like Pemu, whose disappearance might be easier to explain away as an accident—well, we saw what happens. It doesn’t get the notice of the bigger towns and it never makes it anywhere near the cities. So they’ve been quietly lurking around the estates for months, maybe experimenting on people, I don’t know, not wanting anyone who’s looking for them to come start asking questions.”

  “Perhaps.” She leaned forward and rested her chin on her hands. “I suppose we will learn more at the next village.”

  Kakiu was next, and then Lot’s Rise, and then Salt, and the stories we heard at each were similar in some key respects. Always we found at least a few people who remembered a small group of women led by a handsome, aloof man passing through the area some time near when a person went missing, though no one had accused the party of any wrongdoing and it did not appear to have occurred to them that the two events were connected. Frustratingly, there was no real pattern to the victims, other than that they were women; of the three cases we heard directly and the four more anecdotally there had been a range of ages, professions, and family status. Jesta of Lot’s Rise had been the most prominent in terms of community standing, being the only Speaker, but not the only Darfri, but nor was that a pattern because only about half the victims had been from Darfri families. Our early theory that this had been a ploy to somehow capture and murder Speakers fizzled to nothing.

  In Salt we had heard a rumor that had sent us farther north, and three days later that was where we were headed. We had been unable to find a ride this time, and were back on foot heading toward a mining town in the far northwest of Oromani lands. The road was quiet, barely trafficked, and we had been free to talk as we walked, though our theories were starting to feel circular. There were never any bodies, and if anyone had witnessed either the victim or the mysterious visitors at the site of the dead spirit, they did not remember, or share it with us if so. Hadrea had felt no differences of significance at any of the locations; each time the spirit was simply gone as if it had never been there. In Kakiu locals had continued to leave offerings at the site, but only, Hadrea said, out of a desire to cling to familiarity. “It is like leaving milk out for an imaginary pet,” she’d said bluntly. “Your child might enjoy the game but it does no good and you would be better off using your milk on things that are real.”

  We walked on the road, after a long and tiring day where the Maiso had blown at cross-purposes until the midafternoon, stifling our conversation and requiring all the energy I might have used for thinking just to keep myself from being blown over by the roaring, powerful wind. Hadrea suddenly stopped, her face hard. I had been walking in something of a stupor, but her sudden tension made my mouth dry and my skin prickle. After days without incident, I’d let myself hope that whoever had sent the taskjer on our trail had had only one creature under their control, and grown complacent. Or could it be that despite our requests to village administrators and witnesses we’d spoken to, rumors about our presence on the estates had spread and our enemy had sent another assassin, or a Hand, or fortunes knew what? So my own hand sought out my version of weapons: a little poison dart tube, loaded up with a deadly center.

  “What is it?” I whispered.

  She stayed silent, but her hands slipped into a deep pocket of her skirt and she came out holding a sling. With one foot she deftly scooped up a large pebble and flicked it up high enough to catch with her spare hand. Moments later she had spun about and released the sling, so fast I barely registered what she’d done. There was a thuck of impact and something fell from the bushes. She padded over to it, already tugging her dagger from her belt.

  A fat black bird lay stunned or dead on the ground by the bushes. She prodded it tentatively with one foot, then, apparently unwilling to take a chance, struck down with one swift motion, decapitating it as if she’d been wielding an ax. The dagger, not really designed for the purpose, got a little stuck in the bird’s neck and as she yanked it free a blot of blood and gore splashed out. The taste of sharp vomit rose in the back of my throat.

  “Honor-down,” I said, crouching to wipe my arm on the grass in disgust. My stomach still roiled. “Was it, you know? One of them?”

  Hadrea shrugged. “I am not sure. It seemed to be looking at us.” She hoisted the bird up by its feet and gave me an amused grin. “Besides, I would like some fresh meat tonight.”

  Her skill as a hunter was far superior to her skill as a cook, though, so the task of preparing the bird fell to me. I plucked and cleaned it while she found us an appropriate hollow to shelter our fire and beds from the imminent return of the evening Maiso. How, I wondered, are you supposed to tell the difference between a bird and a Bird? Would there be any ill effects from eating the latter? I overcooked it a bit, just to be sure, deciding it was worth Hadrea’s grumbling about dry meat to give its flesh some extra time over heat.

  “You burned it,” she muttered when I nudged her out of her trancelike state a short while later.

  “You’re welcome.” I sat beside her and blew on my own blackened piece. I’d tried some before waking her and detected no toxins or anything unusual in the taste.

  “I am just saying, Jovan. For a man whose Tashi was a cook, your food preparation can be … what is the city expression for it?”

  “Shit?” I supplied, grinning despite myself.

  “That is the one!” She winked.

  “Yeah. Etan used to say that, too. But I’ve always preferred bland food to food that kills you, so…” I shrugged, and Hadrea laughed, waggling her half-eaten leg at me.

  “Your problem, Jovan, is that you do not know how to enjoy a bit of risk. I think I would take a few poisonings rather than never eat lavabulb again.”

  We ate in companionable silence, and if we had just killed and eaten some kind of magical witch vessel, neither of us seemed to take any harm from it. I unfolded the map and stretched out beside the fire, tracing my finger along to mark out the final destination: Imudush North, a mining settlement in the far northeast corner of the Oromani lands. “Last one.”

  “First one,” she countered. It had not been on the list of places An-Ostada had visited, nor on the list of missing people, but a villager in Salt had had a cousin move down from there who claimed the mountain spirit overlooking the town had vanished more than six months prior. That made it, at least as far as our investigations had revealed, the earliest missing spirit. Though it was hard, after hearing so many similar stories, to expect anything different, it was possible that the first instance would hold a clue that the later ones did not. If this really was practice for something else, perhaps our enemies had made mistakes on their first try that they had not repeated.

  “I know that name,” I muttered, and Hadrea looked at me strangely.

  “It is on your lands. Of course you know the name.”

  “No, I mean … I’ve heard it, or seen it, or it’s got some significance.” Frustrated, I thought back, searching for
context, but I’d spent so much of my time poring over documents of all kinds, it could have been anything. But then again, perhaps it had come up in some business dealing or in the reparation process. I had a good head for information but even I could get overwhelmed with the quantity that had passed my desk in the last few years.

  Hadrea stretched, yawned, and wiggled her blanket beside mine by the fire. “Well. We will leave at first light and be there within a few hours at most. Perhaps something will jog your memory. Perhaps there will be something there that we have not found elsewhere.”

  Neither of us voiced it, but the shadow of our failure to solve this mystery hung heavy over us, and infected the rest of the night. Our coupling had an intensity and roughness that rose from desperation more than passion, and I lay awake for a long time afterward, feeling her body against my back, holding her forearms around my chest with the strangest sense that if she let go, we would lose each other forever.

  “Jovan, you are holding too tight,” she mumbled sleepily against my shoulder, and I loosened my arms obediently. I was, after all, just being maudlin.

  * * *

  Imudush North was built around a set of mines in the eastern mountain range; it was as remote a community as any, and my first suspicious thought as we finally crossed into it the following morning was that if ever there was an isolated place where a different language or culture might have developed, it would be somewhere like this. It made me more guarded than ever, scrutinizing the faces of everyone I saw.

  But truth be told, it was innocuous enough, and though the people we met had stiff country formality, if they were harboring some secretive cult then their concealment skills were superior. The stares we got were perhaps more surprised, more curious, by comparison to the earlier villages, but that made sense. Imudush North was not on the thoroughfare to anywhere. A single road led in and out of the town, which was bordered by the inhospitable mountains, east of which lay only the Howling Plains; though it might have been possible to cross into the Empire through that range on its northern side, there was little point bothering when one could simply travel back west to Telasa and cross at the border there. So Imudush North had no through traffic and no visitors other than periodic traveling services.

  The village administrator, a man called Il-Toro, told us all of this in somewhat bemused fashion. Visitors from Telasa were rare enough, but visitors from the capital, almost unheard of. He was helpful enough, though, and could offer a little detail about the spirit. He was a Darfri man himself, and the disappearance of the spirit of the mountain clearly still grieved him. “Things have been harder since then, Credo,” he admitted. “But you would know this from our reduced taxes. Your family has been very sympathetic, I do not mean to imply otherwise, always extending us understanding when the mines are less plentiful than they were, and accidents more common.”

  “Did you tell anyone about the spirit?”

  “Tell anyone? What do you mean, Credo? I am not following.” He smiled, but his forehead wrinkled in confusion as he looked between us.

  “We have heard of many cases of ancient spirits disappearing, dying,” Hadrea said. “But we never heard your town mentioned until very recently.”

  “Yes,” Il-Toro said, unconcerned. “Rumors rarely make it to our little corner of the world, you see. And when we do meet others for trade and services we would not ordinarily discuss sacred matters such as this.”

  “But you didn’t want to ask for help?”

  “For help?” He blinked. “Help from whom? The great spirit is gone. It has been gone for months and months. Some of us can feel the difference, even if the signs were not clear in the land.” He raised his chin, looking somewhat proud, and Hadrea cocked her head in a speculative expression and I thought I could guess what she was wondering. He was young by comparison to most other administrators we’d talked to; perhaps in his forties. Young enough that he could have been sensitive to fresken, a potential Speaker who’d found himself without anyone to teach him.

  “Where is your nearest Speaker, do you know?” Hadrea asked, and Il-Toro frowned properly now.

  “We have not had a Speaker here for twenty years,” he said stiffly. “And as I said before, people do not tend to visit us.”

  “Did you notice anything strange around the time that the spirit vanished?” I asked to change the subject. I turned my teacup around carefully. “Any visitors to town, that sort of thing? You’d remember visitors here, wouldn’t you.”

  “We would,” he agreed. “So I can be sure that we did not have any.”

  Hadrea looked up sharply. Though we’d had to sometimes work to help people remember in the previous towns, that had been because visitors were not generally a noteworthy matter, so the timing of their comings and goings was difficult for most to recall. “Are you certain?” she said. “We are investigating this damage to the spirits, and one common factor everywhere this has occurred is particular strangers in town.”

  “We think they are involved,” I added unnecessarily.

  “Involved in destroying our spirits?” Disgust flickered across his face. “Who would want to do such a thing?”

  “We don’t know, exactly.” I leaned forward over my tea. “Administrator, this is the earliest example we’ve found. This may have been the first place they did whatever it is they’re doing. Did anything else unusual happen around the same time?” At the last few villages we had made it a policy to not put suggestions in their minds; it was too easy for memories to conflate events, and if we mentioned missing persons before they volunteered it, they might falsely associate an unrelated case to the time period. The desire to be helpful and the fallibility of memory was a dangerous combination when what we wanted—needed—was nothing less than the truth.

  In this case, Il-Toro still looked politely confused. “What is it you mean, anything else? There were a variety of incidents with the mine, and the mountain stream thinned to a trickle, and—”

  “Not to do with the mine. Anything else you remember happening in the town.”

  “No, Credo, I do not believe so.” He set his teacup down and made to stand. “I can look up the village meeting notes from that time.”

  “If you wouldn’t mind.”

  He returned shortly with a large tome and flipped through it, muttering. He stopped, scanned a few pages, then spun it around to face us. “There seems to be nothing of particular interest there,” he said. “I am afraid we do not have many villagers who can read or write Sjon—though we are now sending the children to the tutor in the town most mornings, and over to the big school in Telasa every week, as per the Compact! I do not mean to complain!—so the notes are a bit crude.” As I looked down the page, which was mostly simple Trade, the administrator added hastily, “I can read, and write, of course, but I am not always available for note-taking at the meetings.”

  I glanced at Hadrea. There was nothing of use here, and while I didn’t want to lead the man to a false answer, we couldn’t afford to miss anything here. This can’t be a dead end, honor-down, it can’t! She gave a tiny nod. “Has anyone from the village gone missing?” I asked directly.

  “Missing?” Il-Toro stared at me, his mouth open a little, blinking rapidly. “What do you mean, missing?”

  “We have seen people go missing. Mainly women. Same as the strangers in town, whenever we see a dead spirit we’re seeing a missing person along with it. They just disappear doing some routine chore and are never seen again. No bodies are found. They just … vanish.”

  “Well, I am happy to tell you there is nothing like that here.” He shook his head. “Fortunes, no.”

  “Are you sure?” I pressed. “Your spirit incident happened a while back. Six months or so. Maybe you’ve just forgotten? Or you thought it was an accident?”

  “We have had three deaths in the mines since then,” he said. “They weigh heavily on me.”

  “Were they all definitely mining accidents?” I asked. “Maybe a missing body, or…?”
/>
  “I buried each of them myself.” The stiff tone was back, as if I’d dishonored him.

  Hadrea and I looked at each other, puzzled. Why was this case different? How had they done what they’d done to this spirit without the stolen woman? If they didn’t need to snatch someone in order to do whatever they were doing to the spirits, then why bother?

  “Would you like to see where our shrine was?” Il-Toro asked after a long silence, and we agreed, because what else could we do?

  “I don’t understand,” I whispered to Hadrea as the administrator led us out through the far end of the village and up to the mountain itself. A large section, about as big and deep as a bath standing on its side, had been carved out of the pale rock face, leaving a hollow in which the remnants of a former shrine could be seen. Unlike in some of the other towns, where locals had maintained the shrine even after the spirit was gone, here there was no doubt that the town was certain their mountain spirit was gone. No one had left an offering here for a very long time. “Why is this one different?”

  Hadrea undertook her usual process of connecting herself to the earth and looking for any sign of the missing spirit or evidence of what had happened to it. She tried it each time even though she had yet to find a single trace. While she did so, I looked around, struggling for further conversation with Il-Toro to fill the silence. To the left of the hollow, off to the west, there was a small path that zigzagged off around the base of the stony rock edge and disappeared; it looked well worn. “What’s that?” I asked him, pointing. “Is there more of the village that way?”

  “Not anymore,” he said. “There used to be houses there but no one has lived in them for twenty years now, because of the gas.”

  “The gas?” My turn to be confused.

  “There are strange gas pockets underground east of the village,” he explained. “They can burst up through the earth sometimes; it is very unpredictable and dangerous. We had a geologist from Silasta declare the whole area unstable and unsafe. We do not even let our animals near it.”