Hollow Empire

by Sam Hawke

  It suddenly clicked in my head with a flood of understanding. This was why the name of the town was familiar. I’d heard about those gas pockets; it was a unique phenomenon, and it being on our lands, our family had investigated it at the time. “They couldn’t figure out why it was happening, could they?” I said aloud. “I remember. Vaguely. There was some kind of horrible accident, the first time, wasn’t there?” The Imudush disaster. That was how I’d heard it described.

  Il-Toro nodded, bowing his head. “I fear so, yes. I was not administrator then, of course.”

  “I was just a kid,” I said. “It must have been—”

  “Twenty years,” he supplied. He looked out to the west, sighing deeply. “It was terrible. Twelve people died when the first pocket went off under a group of houses, some in the explosion and some in the collapse. We hold a memorial every year.”

  I was about to ask more, but Hadrea made a sudden noise, and we turned to see her blinking her eyes open. Her hands still pressed to the hollow, she shook her head at me. “It is the same,” she said. “The spirit is gone.”

  Il-Toro opened his mouth as if he were about to remind her that he had told her so, but the comment died unspoken at the look on her face, sad and furious. “There is nothing more to be done here,” she said flatly.

  But I hesitated still. The differences of this site to the others had to be significant. I found my gaze drawn back to the path to the west, and realized that my hands were clenching, one after the other. The anxieties had risen up like a slow tide without me paying mind. Ruthlessly I forced myself to calm, counting one-two-one-two-one-two between right and left, dragging the twitches back to a rhythm, matching my breath to eight squeezes. Il-Toro was staring at me, but I didn’t care. My subconscious had been working faster than I had. Finally, I was settled enough to squeeze my eyes shut, slow my breath again, and relax my hands.

  “Jov?” Hadrea asked. She put a hand on each of my shoulders. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.” I took a few tentative steps down the western path, thinking hard, and Il-Toro caught my elbow and pulled me back roughly. “Credo! I must insist that you do not endanger yourself.”

  I shook him off and Hadrea looked at me quizzically; I summarized what I had learned while she had been in her trance.

  “It is not safe!” Il-Toro insisted. “You are the head of the Oromani family, and my guest here! If you are hurt…”

  “When’s the last time there’s been a pocket burst? It must have been a long time, because if the phenomenon was still active I’d still be hearing about it, at least occasionally. Someone working for my family would have tried to find a way to make money off something like that.”

  He spluttered, wringing his hands. “Not for some time, I suppose. There was a bad one ten years ago, maybe a little less? But the geologists said they are unpredictable—”

  “No strangers came to town,” I said, switching my attention to Hadrea. “But they got to that spirit anyway, didn’t they? Tiny place like this, with a single route in and out? They’d have been noticed and remarked on if they so much as strolled down the main street. I trust your memory, administrator, and I believe you didn’t see them.” I gestured to the path. “But our friend here said there’s houses back there, or at least the ruins of some. I’m willing to bet there’s enough shelter for a few people to hole up for some time and to creep along here to get to the shrine at nighttime when there’s no one about. And they trust that your town’s got a good enough memory to stay out of there, just in case. You hold an annual memorial and everything, still, twenty years later. They’d be safe out there, wouldn’t they.”

  “Twenty years?” Hadrea said. Her eyes narrowed. “You said that before, also.”

  He frowned. “What do you mean?

  My heart started thundering in my chest and the pressure I had forced under control a short while ago threatened me again, knocking at my attention, grasping for my fingers and toes and thighs. “The Speaker,” I said slowly. “You said there hadn’t been a Speaker here for twenty years.”

  “Yes.” He folded his arms, like a child who perceives they are in trouble for a wrong they have not committed. “Because our Speaker died in the disaster.” At our expressions, he continued in a louder voice. “What has this to do with your questions and your investigation? This was twenty years ago! The spirit only died six months ago.”

  “Describe her,” I said. “In as much detail as you can remember.”

  He blew out his cheeks, clearly baffled, but his eyes rolled up and to the left as he thought back. “Her name was An-Aralina esImudush. She was born here, and she was apprenticed to the Speaker over in the Sho Valley, I cannot recall her name now, and took over the region from her eventually. I was only young then. At the time An-Aralina died she was forty, forty-five, I suppose. I do not really know for sure.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “She was attractive. Quite big and powerful. The kind of person you always looked at when she came into a room, though I suppose that was her presence more than her looks. Charismatic, you would call her. She had a beautiful voice for storytelling and singing, very deep, and when she spoke, everyone always listened.” Il-Toro shifted, uncomfortable. “I do not know what else I can tell you.”

  “Her hair?” Hadrea pressed urgently. “What was her hair like?”

  He shrugged. “Long. She wore it in braids back then, we all did, it was the fashion. Oh! She used to have a few white braids. Because she cracked her head helping little Timeo when he was trapped in the well when I was a boy, and the scar made her hair go white in that spot.”

  “It’s her,” Hadrea whispered. “That was the woman at the arena.” Our eyes met in shared horror and as one we set off down the path toward the settlement.

  “She is dead! Dead for decades!” he called after us in open frustration. “What are you doing?”

  “I bet there were never any gas pockets here,” I said as we moved along the path. “No wonder the geologists were baffled.” They’d seen the after-effects and not the phenomenon itself, and of course they had struggled to understand it.

  The remains of the settlement were soon visible. A spooky, quiet outline of a miniature dead town with half a dozen buildings in various states of ruin; most were roofless, all damaged. Blackened remnants of fire and several blast sites showed among the overgrown weeds and reclaimed fields. Not just among the houses, though an epicenter of damage was identifiable even twenty years later, but also in various spots in the earth, marked out with decaying fencing. Within a dozen treads of the place it was obvious, though, that it had not been abandoned for twenty years. Despite its overall air of ruin, as soon as we drew closer, signs of habitation were apparent; a vegetable bed was nestled in a sunny spot on the far side, several vines grew on trellises up the side of one of the most intact buildings, and behind a makeshift short wall of reclaimed stones there was sign of a regularly used firepit. A trampled section with short grass surrounding a fence post suggested animals had been tied here.

  “They’ve been living here,” I said, and Hadrea nodded. “Not just when they killed off the spirit. This has been empty a few days at most, not months. I think this is where they’ve been hiding.”

  “So this An-Aralina faked the gas bursts twenty years ago and ran away?” Hadrea squatted by the firepit, testing for residual warmth. “Why? And who are the others?”

  The slap-slap of feet on the path sounded. Il-Toro, apparently unable to resist his curiosity, was approaching along the path, dancing anxiously and looking jerkily about him as if he expected the ground to explode any moment.

  “I don’t know what happened twenty years ago,” I muttered. “She’s dead now, for real, so maybe there’s no way we’ll ever know. She started experimenting, maybe, and things went wrong? She got a bunch of people killed by accident and then panicked and fled? Maybe she was even kidnapped and drugged and forced to help someone else. But I’d guess that she’s spent that time lea
rning new things to do with fresken, things that weren’t allowed when she was a proper Speaker. And whether An-Aralina recruited the others or the other way round, now there’s more of them. An-Aralina doesn’t match the description of the women who were seen near the missing spirits at any of the other sites.” I let out a low exclamation. “You can tell, can’t you, when someone has potential? Like Il-Toro, here.”

  He gave us a startled look, but I ignored him. Hadrea raised an eyebrow. “Yes,” she said. “I could feel him instinctively reaching for the spirit at the mountain. And he was so certain that it was gone.”

  “So what if they’re not using the people they take for some horrible sacrifice or rite? What if they’re not dead, just ‘disappearing’ the same as An-Aralina did twenty years ago?”

  “It is possible,” she agreed slowly. “We know one was a Speaker. There have been some very powerful Speakers who had the condition the administrator described in Ista, the condition Pemu had. They were all women, and some Speakers have very particular views about women being more suited to the work, in general. It is possible they identified someone who appeared to have potential and kidnapped them.”

  I stared around at the settlement. The place was sinister in its silence, nature slowly reclaiming it but leaving the scars of past trauma there to see. And there was something else, something bothering me. The flicker of a memory, of an idea. There was something else about the story of the Imudush disaster, something missing from the story. Some context I was missing. When, specifically, had I learned about the disaster? It felt far fresher than a twenty-year-old story I might have overheard as a child, so I must have read an account more recently than that.

  Il-Toro joined us, his mouth hanging open. He still looked jumpy, but his attention was fully captured now by the same things that had caught ours; I saw his eyes take in the signs of habitation. “Someone has been living here?” he muttered. “Impossible! Who would be so foolish? It is clearly marked with warnings.”

  “Is there anything else you didn’t tell me?” I asked him. “Anything else about the story? You didn’t find An-Aralina’s body, did you? Who else died?”

  He flinched, eyes haunted. “I helped clean up out here. It was a terrible, terrible day. Three families who lived here died. The speculation was that they were sharing a meal at the time, because the gas pocket burst around the communal oven, and that is where we found … that is where we found all the parts and bodies.” That sounded familiar. I was sure I’d read that, perhaps seen an illustration of a group of smiling people of all ages gathered around roasting meat, oblivious to their impending doom. I shivered.

  Hadrea, meanwhile, was tracing her hand gently over the mossy stone of a wall, talking softly, so that I had to move close to hear her. “So she left, but then she came back six months ago. Whatever they did here, it worked, and so they moved south. Closer and closer to Silasta, perhaps getting better at whatever it is they are doing. To what end?”

  Something Il-Toro had said earlier popped back into my mind. “Did you write the account?” I asked.

  He blinked. “What account?”

  “I’ve read an account of what happened here. I’m sure I have. The Imudush disaster, I was too young to remember it properly when it actually happened, so I must have read it in my family records, or the library, or something. But you said barely anyone here could read or write well. Did you write a report for the family, or do you know who did?”

  He frowned. “It was not me, no. Your family sent someone all the way from Silasta. A proper scribe from the Administrative Guild, though I would have to look up his name. He came up and recorded it in detail, I remember him interviewing us all. He was a very nice man, very sympathetic. The same fellow came back again years later when there was more activity at the site. He remembered us all. Very thoughtful.” He went back to staring at the houses, his gaze distant.

  Meanwhile, Hadrea was still walking and talking out loud. “No one outside this region even knew they had destroyed this spirit,” she said, glaring at me in frustration as if I were the source of the mystery. “This is not like the arena, causing devastation to make us panicked and afraid. These wounds they tried to hide. What are they getting out of it?” She looked back to the mountains, chewing her lip. “What have they…” And her face changed, then, with a slow loosening and tightening of muscles, and her eyes grew wide, wider still, and her hand on the stone started to shake. “Oh…” she breathed. “Oh, no. Oh, no, they can’t have.”

  A deep chill raced over me at the horror and fear on her face. “What is it? Can’t have done what?” When she didn’t respond I grabbed her arm, shook her gently. “Hadrea!”

  “I … I thought that they were using Void to draw people’s energy.” Her voice was a hoarse whisper. “The way that I did, to defeat An-Aralina. And that they had learned how to store that energy.”

  “Yes, that’s what you said before. That vase, urn thing. The one she had at the party, and then at the arena again. That Lini broke.”

  “I am sorry, I do not understand,” began Il-Toro, but Hadrea ignored him, her anguished expression for me alone.

  “Out here in the country,” she whispered. “Out here they do not have these parties, these huge public events. The Speaker in the town was using the energy from the crowds because that is available, and easy to access. Out here…” She looked back at the mountain, and finally I understood what she meant, and understood, too, the horror of it, even though I was not Darfri myself. “What if they have found a way to drain the spirits themselves? To drain them and store their power in vessels to be carried and used?”

  The administrator’s mouth had fallen open. “Blasphemy,” he choked out, and Hadrea rounded on him.

  “The worst kind. I think someone murdered your spirit, administrator, murdered it and took its power. And I think that they are planning to use that power against our country.” She rounded on me, her eyes alight. “We have to get back to the city to warn everyone. Right away.”

  We started running, the administrator scampering after us, calling out confused questions. “What is the fastest way we can get back to the capital from here?” Hadrea demanded as we pounded, panting, back into town. “You need to help us with everything in your power, or something terrible is going to happen.”

  We scooped up our packs from where we’d left them at the administrator’s office while he frantically conferred with a few other citizens, pointing out animals, carts, shouting frightened ideas at one another. Our sense of panic and urgency had infected them all, even if they did not understand why.

  But my brain was my brain, and when it had an idea that was picking at it, chip-chip-chipping away, not even that level of fear could drown it out entirely. There was still something missing from the story, something that I knew about the event. A scribe from Silasta had written the account, so it had been an outsider, not someone involved, no reason to suspect the account had been manipulated or tampered with, then. But why had I read it? I was no scientist, and gas pockets had no particular significance to my studies or interests. But there had been a personal connection, something about it that had been of interest, and not twenty years ago, much more recently.

  “Are you sure you don’t remember the scribe’s name?” I asked Il-Toro, who gaped at me as if he couldn’t believe anyone could be so idiotic as to be asking about such matters in the face of an actual disaster. Hadrea, though, was watching me with narrowed eyes and nervous anticipation, recognizing how my brain worked. “Who it was?”

  “No,” he said, indignant. “I do not remember. Why should I? It was twenty years ago, Credo Jovan.”

  “Wait.” I stopped, thought back. “You said he came back. You said there were more explosions, that the most recent was what, ten years ago, and he came back. What happened then?”

  “Well, nothing, Credo,” he said. “The land had been dormant for a long time, and I think there was talk that Credo Etan might send some scientists back to see if the land h
ad stabilized. But then there were a few more explosions and it was decided there was no benefit in risking anyone’s life for the sake of scientific curiosity.”

  But I shook my head. “There’s something missing from your story. Twenty years ago people died, your Speaker among them, and geologists came and studied things and you closed it off. Then ten years ago it happened again, but no one died that time? Did anything else happen? Anything to do with the spirits, anything unusual at all? Anyone else go missing, anything else happen?”

  “No. The scribe came back, made a visit, wrote an update for your uncle, but there was no one hurt. Nothing unusual happened.”

  “Oh, ah,” said the man with the graspad standing beside him. “That’s not quite true. That was when they found the boyo, too, remember?”

  “They found what?” My heart was in my throat. This meant something, it connected something, I just wasn’t sure to what. “The boy?”

  “Oh, yes, the boy,” a woman in the group said. “That was definitely at the same time, because there was some as wondered if he’d a parent killed in one of the explosions. And it wasn’t quite ten years ago because I’d just had my twins then, and I was nursing, and too tired to even think about taking on another child. Eight years, must have been.”

  Eight years ago. About the same time the research and audits suggested that Aven had begun hiring mercenaries, slowly beginning to fan her rebellion.

  The first man took his janjan stick from the corner of his mouth, spat, and looked at me. “Mmm, the boy, the little one. Found him on the road, all alone. No one knew where he came from. Didn’t say a word.”

  “Traumatized, poor little laddie,” the woman said, shaking her head. “Terrible thing it was. Couldn’t even tell us his name, let alone where his Tashi or his mother or anyone was. They thought he must have at least seen an explosion, and it shocked the life out of him.”