Hollow Empire

by Sam Hawke

  I knew that name. “Ectar mentioned aragite, too. He thought the head of the company was Sjon and wanted help getting an introduction. I bet they’re not Sjon.” I’d missed the clue. And I suddenly felt certain the retired Guild member who’d died had meant to tell me something about that company, too.

  “And the Void presumably came from them, too,” Eliska said. “But they must be manufacturing it somewhere closer to here. In Izruitn, maybe?”

  Chen shot me a sidelong look, somewhere between embarrassment and defensiveness. “The Guard Sukseno told us it was a foreign woman who gave the orders and supplied the drugs and money. We thought he might be covering up for Aven, but the Hands did have him killed. Maybe he was being honest. The Credians would have needed locals for cover to do business from the Empire. This mysterious woman could have been their cover.”

  “She’s here in the city,” I said quietly. “Didn’t he say that, too?” I didn’t look at Abae. Not her. Someone else.

  “With the Talafan delegation?” Chen gave me a sharp look. “Don’t you have a Talafan woman stalking your family, Credola? My Guards have been on the lookout for her for days.”

  “I—” I frowned. My instinct was to disagree. Mosecca was after me for entirely personal reasons, was she not? And the attacks on the city might have been mixed up with Darfri magic but the witch connection seemed unique to her. But then, could I really say that for certain? “There is, but I don’t know…” I shook my head. “Maybe. Either way, yes, we still have the Hands to contend with.”

  “And what do we expect from these Credians, then?” Sjistevo demanded. “Will there be an army coming? Are we prepared to defend ourselves?”

  “The Howling Plains cannot be crossed,” An-Ostada stated with certainty. “We have been safe here for hundreds of years. If they have found another way to come, they cannot do so without crossing another country.”

  “Talafar wouldn’t let a foreign army use it as a thoroughfare, no matter how pissed they are at us,” Tain said. He threw a helpless glance at Vesko. “Right?”

  “I do not believe so,” Vesko said. “Not unless the empires are working together, Honored Chancellor. One does not simply allow a foreign army to freely enter one’s borders.”

  “Not to mention what kind of state an army would be in if it had to travel that far,” Moest pointed out. “The logistics of moving any large numbers of troops is a complex matter. And Crede is not on any map I have ever seen, which means it is distant or inaccessible enough by other routes that transporting an army which is then expected to be able to fight immediately would be completely untenable.”

  “Which is likely why they’ve used other kinds of attacks against us,” I said. “They have money, and time, and motivation, but they don’t have brute force, not directly. So they use explosives and assassinations and drugs and criminal gangs to separate and frighten and damage us.”

  “And some twisted perversion of Darfri magic, do not forget,” Salvea said, with an almost challenging tilt of her chin at An-Ostada, though she did not look at the Speaker directly. “They have a variety of weapons, it seems.”

  But the Speaker only nodded gravely. “They will be using foul perversions of our sacred arts,” she warned them. “We must stand ready to defend this city.”

  “Well, how do we protect against that?” Lazar roared, with sudden and surprising ferocity. “What are we supposed to do?”

  An urgent tap at the door, and a Manor servant showed in an army messenger, his face slick with sweat.

  “There’s smoke! In the distance!” The messenger, slightly out of breath, stepped in and addressed the room at large. “Three massive plumes of it; two to the north, one to the west. It’s black. It’s like … it’s like the sky after the arena went up.” He looked at Tain, then at Eliska and me, and finally at Karista. “Best early guess is there’s been some kind of big explosion at three different locations. Sorry to be bearing the tidings, Honored Credolen, but from the direction of it, it looks like the Oromani, Iliri, and Leka lands. Lieutenant Jay’s ordered runners out to look in person and we’ve sent urgent birds to Telasa and West Dortal to ask for reports from closer. It’s likely the birds’ll be faster given the distances, but you know it’s deceptive out on the plains at times, and with the winds…”

  People scrambled to their feet.

  “They’re coming now,” I said. My words were quiet but they carried over the hubbub. “There’s no more time.” I looked at the Warrior-Guilder. “Moest, your people need to be ready for anything. They might not be bringing an army, but they might not need one.”

  The Warrior-Guilder nodded, his alarm fading in the familiarity and comfort of strategy. “We’ll need to evacuate the external village first. Get everyone inside the city. Prepare the walls to full capacity.”

  “We still have the Hands to contend with!” Javesto said. His face had gone a strange color. “We’ll only be shutting ourselves in with them!”

  “Maybe with allies inside the city, Crede will be more reluctant to strike?” Even saying it aloud I wasn’t convinced. “I don’t know what to tell you, Javesto. The assassin told us our city was full of enemies and we were surrounded. He said they were coming. Well. They’re here.”

  * * *

  Over the course of the next few hours, refugees swarmed into Silasta from the surrounding villages and towns, bearing tales of thunderous cracks and shaking earth. Birds carrying messages from West Dortal and Telasa soon confirmed our fears; the Leka, Oromani, and Iliri estates had all been attacked by something that had torn apart the very earth. Explosions, even more destructive than the ones at the arena, had destroyed whole buildings and presumably killed dozens of people. I tried not to dwell on it, knowing the casualties certainly included family members who had been lucky to survive the seizure of the estates during the rebellion. Had my mother died in her laboratory, working on some new variety of tea, ignoring the world as usual? She had always been happiest there. I pushed the feelings away. There was no time for grief now.

  Some of the hysterical people making their way into the city swore the spirits had turned on Sjona and, unsatisfied with our attempts at reparations, were punishing the estates for their sins. A few weeks ago, I might have believed that. After all, the only thing we had seen capable of the kind of destruction the villagers and farmers were reporting was the Os-Woorin. But now we knew there were people who could wreak such damage on their own, without a spirit at all, and for whatever reason, they were in service of the “Prince.” These were no acts of angered spirits. They were announcements of intent.

  “At some point soon, we will need to consider closing the gates,” Moest said to Tain.

  “There are still people coming in from all over,” Tain said. “We have to keep them open while people are still coming.”

  Moest nodded patiently. “Yes, Honored Chancellor, but sooner or later we are going to see what caused those explosions, and we need to be able to close everything down as soon as we do.”

  “If they can blow up estate homes, are a few walls going to keep them out?” It was a rhetorical question and no one bothered answering.

  Now Moest looked at me. “Credola, the other matter we spoke about?”

  I swallowed, and my throat hurt with the effort of it. She helped us, I thought. She trusts me. But Sukseno had said the Prince’s Hands were run by a foreign woman, likely one who spoke Sjon and Talafan, and he hadn’t lied about anything else. “Do it,” I said, and he nodded.

  Tain looked at me quizzically and I shook my head. “Just a precaution.” Abae would be safe. She just wouldn’t be able to communicate with anyone else. Just in case.

  He took a drink from the flask and I frowned at him. “Now? Of all times?”

  “Now, especially,” he said. “I need to have my wits about me. And my strength. We don’t know what’s coming.”

  “I’m not sure poison restores your wits. You’ve been taking that for weeks now. I thought you were tapering off, li
ke you said Jov told you to?”

  “I am,” he said. “Consider it a taper with a long tail, all right? Lini, we don’t have time for this right now.”

  There was no time to argue further, because distant screams could now be heard, and soldiers on graspads came hurtling back to report that the Prince—and somehow it seemed his identity had spread, because that was how I heard him spoken about, in fearful tones—was coming at last.

  “Get everyone inside. Ready on the walls. Get those gates closed!”

  It was a nightmare made real, a sight unfathomable. I wanted to squeeze my eyes shut, to will it away, but like everyone else I was instead unable to look away. Barely able to blink.

  Under our helpless gaze from the top of the west tower, they came, not quickly, but casually, unhurried, up the main road through the external village as if strolling by the lake on a lazy morning. His crown gleamed in the morning light, his clothes in rich fabrics and glinting with inlaid jewels. Yet he could not be mistaken for anything but the brutal architect of years of our country’s trauma; his frame was tall and powerful, a warrior’s frame, and he held an enormous blade as if it weighed nothing. And behind him, women, women of all sizes and ages, a dozen, more, walking in concert, fanned out like a formation of birds in flight, and everywhere they touched, they wrought destruction.

  The ground rippled and tore under their gestures like a great hoe dragging through the earth, tearing up the dirt and tossing stones aside like the bubbles rolling off a boiling pot. Buildings collapsed as their foundations burbled and in their wake a great dust cloud rose beyond. “I am come!” the man cried, and somehow his voice reached us, though he carried no speaking trumpet. It was as if it was the voice of the very wind, it carried so far and so effortlessly. The village crumpled away from the direction of the women behind him, as easily as paper crushed in a fist.

  Then the Prince held up a hand, and the women dropped theirs. The earth quieted and settled, and silence fell. The Prince pulled something from inside his cloak.

  A green flag unfurled, was caught up in the crosswinds, and whipped back and forth where he held it aloft. When the wind flapped and stretched it a black sigil was visible. “Peace?” Tain whispered, giving me an incredulous look. “He wants peace? He’s just murdered the fortunes know how many people on the estates, and he pretends he wants peace?”

  Moest was conferring with his lieutenants. “What do you want to do, Honored Chancellor? Councilors?”

  “I seek only to speak,” the man called out, his voice still ringing up easily. “I can even speak from outside, for now. You need only listen. I will harm no one while you listen. I am a courteous man.”

  “What’s to speak about?” Moest yelled down, even as the frightened chatter on our side of the wall cooled and quieted. “You’re killing our people and cutting up our land. Seems like it’s about time to cut you down.”

  “Tut tut! That is no way to treat a flag of parley! Where is this so-called ‘honor’ your country loves to brag about so much?”

  Tain slammed his hands on the stone and leaned down. “Say your piece then!” he shouted. “We’re listening!”

  There was a pause—it seemed to me, for dramatic purpose—and then the man’s voice came up, even louder, slipping through the stones, ringing ears and vibrating muscles, the boom of a drum and the whisper of a lover all at once.

  “I am the Prince.”

  “What Prince?” someone on the wall shouted back, and a faint ripple of rebellious laughter passed through the crowd.

  Peering down at him, though, through the crenels, I fancied I could see his face, and it was smiling. “Why, your Prince, of course,” he said, and again his voice carried as if he were speaking a few treads away, and the laughter died out like a snuffed candle. “Prince of Crede, God’s Empire, second son of the one and true Holy Emperor. Prince of the Sun, Prince of the Words, Prince of Vengeance.”

  But vengeance for what? Listening to him felt like a dangerous enchantment, but I could not deny that part of me craved his words. Oromanis, after all, were bred for intrigue and secrets and solving mysteries, and my curiosity about what had happened so long ago it could cause war generations later was intense. And I was not alone. All along the battlements, we hung, staring, listening, unable to stop.

  “My people. Long have you hidden yourselves from God’s wrath for your sins. Long years passed, and your crimes became stories, and hopes for our vengeance faded. But I alone did not give up on you! I alone, among all my fair brothers, knew that when strife and famine fell upon our beloved Empire, a new leader could rise and take us to glory!” He raised his arms as if to an adoring crowd of cheers, apparently oblivious to the cold and fearful silence. “And only I was brave enough to pledge our revenge at last. Only I was wise enough to find you. Only I clever enough, strong enough, to destroy you even in the face of your protections.

  “But I have found you, as I pledged I would! I, your Prince! So I say this to you now, my children. Open your gates to me, and extend to me the humility and deference of my position, and I shall extend to you my benevolence. You need not die.”

  Moest looked down the line. “Silastians? Shall we give this so-called Prince a taste of our ‘humility and deference’?”

  There was a slight pause. Then Tain smiled, a faint, crooked thing. “Yeah, I think we should.”

  And Moest opened his mouth and roared, and we roared back, from the tower, along the line, into the depths of the city itself. Moest and his lieutenants dropped their arms, calling out the command, and arrows plunged down in a thicket of deadly rain from the walls.

  But the women raised their hands in response to the barrage, and the arrows skidded and bounced and deflected, like dancing hail on a rooftop. Only there was no roof; there were only the Speakers, or whatever we were to call them. They were in Darfri garb but they sang no songs, no chants; there was no music in what they did now. They were far below us, and I could not make out any detail, but it seemed to me there was something strange and wrong in their postures. Unlike the commanding Darfri woman who had attacked us in the arena, the women looked almost cowed. Nevertheless, they were single-handedly creating some kind of invisible hardened air barrier, protecting them all from what should have been certain death.

  “Hold fire for now!” Moest called, and the Prince swept his hand sideways, and the women behind repeated the gesture; the hundreds of spent arrows tipped off in piles on either side of the party. And then, just as the Warrior-Guilder was readying a new attempt, the Prince began to laugh, and once again the sound seemed to reach inside my very bones.

  The Prince spread his hands, gesturing to the arrows scattered harmlessly to either side of him. “Is this your courtesy? I welcome it, for how are children to learn but by failing?” He laughed again as the arrows were nocked and bows drawn along the line. “You are, of course, welcome to try again, if you think your luck or your aim has improved. But I think perhaps it is time for a display of my strength.” He turned his head and gave some direction to the women behind him, and all of a sudden their group was surrounded by a swirl of wind that lapped around the edges of their formation, picking up dirt and debris and whipping them around as effortlessly as a stray leaf caught in the Maiso.

  And then they lurched, as one, in a crude lunge of their bodies, toward us, and the wind hurtled up at the wall. The power of it knocked me sideways into Tain, but we had caught only the edge of it. The main force of the blast crashed into the length of wall to our right, and like a great invisible lasso it tore a dozen archers from their places, whipping them up into the air, spinning and tossing them as helplessly and dreadfully as the dirt and rubble, pulled too fast and too rough to even hear their screams. We staggered back to our feet, shock stealing even the cries from our mouths.

  The Prince gave another command and the windstorm spun one final, terrible, circular motion, and then it was gone into nothing, and the archers fell like poppets flung by a child, boneless and broken, thirty
treads to the ground below.

  “The greatbow!” Moest yelled grimly. “Now!”

  We moved out of the way as the greatbow, already loaded and aimed, was released. Its massive bolt, as long as a cart, punched down toward them, but some part of me, of all of us, had already expected what would happen. The great bolt was somehow diverted by the invisible force of thickened air so that instead of striking into the Prince or the women beyond, it slipped to the side and hammered deep into the earth, sending up another huge spray of dirt and debris.

  Terror and hopelessness sank into my heart, and I saw it reflected in all the faces around me. Crede did not need an army if it had this kind of power at its disposal. I looked around, down the line. Where was An-Ostada? Were she and her Speakers coming?

  Oh, fortunes. Where is Hadrea? My eyes drifted north. Somewhere out there was the only person who’d shown herself capable of matching the kinds of feats these women were performing. Had she and Jov seen the explosions and guessed what was happening? Were they racing back to the city even now? Or had they been caught up in it themselves?

  “My children!” the Prince called, and this time he sounded reproachful. “You have shown me your ‘strength’ and I have shown you mine. I trust this matter is settled, unless you would like a further demonstration?”

  This time there were no defiant cries back. The splayed figures of our archers were spread out like scattered crumbs on the ground below. The rest of us were hunkered down, fearful. Some people were pushing off the walls, fleeing into the city, others had turned their backs on the parapet and were crouched in tight balls.

  “Good. Now you understand. For God does not forget crimes against Him or His people. He does not forget or forgive, and He has been patient, but He is patient no longer. This city, this country, this haven of sin and debauchery, is a place built by murderers and thieves and blasphemers and those who gave shelter and refuge to them. I am His agent, at long last come to deliver Him the vengeance He has so long been denied.