Hollow Empire

by Sam Hawke

  Mosecca placed the rough poppets on both Tain and Zhafi, over their hearts. “Hold her still,” she muttered, and I held Zhafi’s limp body close. Without further ceremony, Mosecca slashed a metal shard across the Princess’s neck, so deep and swift that her head lolled back at the split and my grip wavered as I fought the urge to be sick.

  Blood slurped out of the wound and thickened, darkened, the flow moving in a slow, unnatural pattern. Mosecca chanted softly, though I could not understand the blurred sequences of words or discern a tune, and all the while the blood gleamed oily black, forming thick trails like fat slugs. Zhafi’s body jolted, spasming, and my heart beat a tinny, nervous rhythm that pulsed through the strangest places—my lip, my temple, my fingers.

  But nothing was happening. Tain lay motionless while Zhafi’s blood flow grew weaker. “It’s not enough,” Mosecca said. “Her life force is weak and he is too far gone.”

  “You make it enough,” I bit back. “Take mine, too.” I held out my wrist, and she stared at me, then back up at the moon, then took it without comment. The swift, long cut she dragged down my forearm burned. But as my hand moved above one of the poppets she shoved it out of the way, grabbed my wrist again, sniffed my blood.

  “No,” she said. “No, this one is wrong. I feel it.” She rubbed the blood between two fingers. “There must be a … congruence. You do not have it. What about him?” she asked, gesturing roughly to Jovan.

  My brother had been sitting there, oblivious. He winced when I shook him and looked at me without recognition. I did not hesitate, all the same. “He’d give anything,” I said, and tears burned in my eyes.

  When Mosecca cut him he pulled his arm weakly away, but my reassuring whispers seemed to calm him back to his catatonic state, and he let us pull open the wound.

  “Not that one,” Mosecca said sharply, directing the dripping blood only into one of the poppets. “Now. Hold your brother still. This will hurt.”

  He did snap out of it, then, his eyes flying open and focusing with sudden clarity as the cut down his arm spread and grew into a black tree of strange gleaming threads.

  “Jov, hush.” I squeezed him tight. “You’ve got to stay still, all right?”

  He began to struggle, and the blood flowed faster, greedily, the black gleaming and reflecting light as it grew stronger and fatter. His body jerked and spasmed, like Zhafi’s, and finally, through the haze of madness that had been over me, I realized the danger I had put him in. “Jov, I’m sorry, please.”

  Mosecca’s song was quiet but urgent, and Zhafi’s flow had trickled off to nothing. She was dead, properly dead now. But apparently Mosecca was not satisfied, because she took the shard in both hands and drove it with full strength into the Princess’s chest. Jov cried out as though it had been his heart, his chest, and then jerked once and fell still. Then he blinked a few times, and seemed to come back to himself. “Did it…” he croaked. “Did something happen?”

  There was a long quiet. I counted hoarse breaths, and my hopes died away to nothing.

  “I’m sorry,” Mosecca said.

  I stood, my legs shaky, and hauled my brother to his feet. “You tried. Forget the debt, it’s paid.” I couldn’t look at his body and I couldn’t bear to be near her. It was time to go.

  * * *

  We went via the physics’ area, and found Thendra. “I have seen your family,” she said immediately, to my great relief. “Eliska, Dija, Al-Sjease, and the others. They are all fine. They will be waiting for news of you.” Her eyes raked over us, cataloging our conditions, heavy with unspoken questions.

  “The Chancellor is dead,” I said bluntly. “His body is up there. I couldn’t bring it down on my own and Jov is…” I shrugged. “Someone else will need to do it.”

  Thendra bowed her head. “I thought he must be,” she said. “I saw him leading the second charge before the landslide.” She took my hand in hers; I almost pulled away, so unexpected was the gesture. She had treated me for years and never offered physical comfort. “Credola. Credo. This is a terrible tragedy, yes, but you should know … you should know the Chancellor was already dying.” Her voice was so gentle it was unrecognizable. “He was in terrible pain. He could not keep food down at all, in the end.”

  Jov stared at her. “He was having trouble with food since the poisoning, but—”

  “It was more than trouble, Credo. His insides never recovered. He made me swear to keep his privacy but every day he was coughing blood, vomiting blood, excreting blood. He used certain substances to maintain his energy and attention but they were temporary fixes, and he had accepted that. Grievous as this news is, in a way, it is a blessing. He would have suffered more, before the end.”

  It felt as if someone heavy had sat on my chest. Some part of me had known something had been terribly wrong with him, but I hadn’t pushed him on it, hadn’t pushed him about the eating, or the lie about the darpar, perhaps because I hadn’t wanted to know the answer.

  Jov stared at me, his face twisted bitterly. One more failure in his eyes, that his friend had not told him the truth. A lifetime of defining himself by reference to his role and family honor was not easily thrown away. As if he’d read my mind, he muttered, “I once told Hadrea I was afraid to find out what I was when you took away the parts of me that counted. I guess this is it.” He gave an ugly little chuckle. “Even I’m disappointed in the results.”

  The words struck somewhere deep and vulnerable inside me, surprising me with their sting. “All the parts of you that counted?” He stared moodily at the ground, and my temper rose in place of the hurt, ferocious and swift. “You had another role before you were a proofer, before you were a friend. You were my brother first, Jovan Oromani, and I know what you did tonight, I know the choice you made, so don’t you dare tell me you didn’t choose to be a Tashi, too.”

  I ignored his flinch. “Guess what? You don’t get to give up. I just lost my best friend too and I’m not losing anyone else, you hear me?” My voice quavered. The anger was draining at the sight of his stricken, heartbroken face; I tried to grasp it, needing the energy it gave me. “We’ve defeated this Prince, but he was alone this time. There’s a whole Empire on the other side of the Howling Plains. We have to gather our friends around us, Jov, and make it up with all our neighbors, because if you think we’ve lost everything already, I’ve got news for you, baby brother; we still have plenty more to lose.”

  I started to cry, and the deep bone-weariness was seeping in once again. “Don’t make me handle this on my own, Jov,” I said, and suddenly his arms were around me.

  “Are you kidding me?” he mumbled. “You’re already the bloody Hero of Silasta. You can’t take all the credit again.”

  Half-laughing, half-crying, I buried my face in his shoulder.

  We found Hadrea comforting the kidnapped estate women; they were confused, exhausted, and frightened, but apparently uninjured. So too was Hadrea, who pressed her forehead gratefully against each of ours in turn. “You’re all right,” Jov whispered, clutching her arms with shaky intensity, his eyes wet. “You said … I was afraid you were…”

  “I am all right,” she confirmed. “It did not harm me.” There was something raw and frightening about the light in her eyes, something unsettling. I dropped my gaze quickly. Whatever she had done, she had saved the city again from catastrophe.

  Our losses, while small, were devastating: almost all the Darfri students in the city had died in one heartbeat. Miraculously, An-Ostada was still alive; surrounded by physics, she drew tiny, shallow breaths, her eyes two slits, moving, tracking our approach. Slimy gore, foul-smelling, slipped and slid out of her rent torso as two frantic physics tried to hold her together. She would not last long, but she had breath to whisper.

  “You watch that girl,” she said hoarsely. She raised her voice to a croak so Hadrea, who stood nearby with another of the rescued women, could hear. “I know where you took the power from, An-Hadrea. You did not find a new anything. You are a foo
l. Wiser, more trustworthy people have known for centuries. How do you think it got there in the first place? What did you think it was for?”

  Hadrea’s jaw was set, but she said nothing, and a tremor passed over her. Almost involuntarily, she turned her gaze slowly up the hill, past Solemn Peak and the mountain ranges stretching beyond under clearing skies and a full, bright moon. Past those mountains lay the Howling Plains, across which the refugees had fled, and into which no one had dared venture for centuries.

  I had never really questioned why.

  “You will be all of our deaths, in the end,” An-Ostada whispered. Blood bubbled at the corners of her lips.

  “You are agitating her,” a physic chided us, and we stepped away, disquieted.

  “An-Hadrea,” Thendra called, striding over. “I left you on a bed, did I not? You wish to collapse on your feet? Go, now.” To my surprise, Hadrea bobbed her head, chastened.

  “We’ll talk later. Get some rest,” Jov said. “Lini, we should find Dee and the others. We have to tell them what—”

  He broke off at Thendra’s exclamation. “Oh! But you said…?”

  My brother’s cry was guttural, and he staggered, legs buckling. I was two steps toward him, thinking him injured or ill, when I saw the cause. And then it was me staggering.

  Tain walked toward us, walking, breathing, living. He looked dazed, exhausted, thin, confused, but he was there, alive in the suddenly bright light of the moon.

  Jov stood frozen. I walked toward our friend, steps jerky, disbelieving. Relief, joy, fear, doubt, all swirled within me. Jov raised a shaking hand to his chest, across his heart, like a Talafan standing to their national song.

  “Please excuse me, Thendra,” Tain said. His voice shook and he took tentative steps as if unsure his legs would hold his weight. “I’m afraid I don’t feel … quite my best.”

  As his body melted and tumbled down, Jov and I were there, under each shoulder, to catch him. “We’ve got you,” I said.

  “Always,” Jov added.

  For just a moment, under my brother’s palm and across his heart, I glimpsed something, a raised shape, outlined under the cloth. But I blinked, the moon passed under a cloud, and in the dim starlight, it vanished.

  * * *

  The three of us sat together, shoulder to shoulder on the grass as dawn rose over our partially ruined city. There was no rush to go home, not least of which because none of us had one anymore.

  “I don’t think the Families can recover from this,” I said. I glanced back up the distant hill, which the avalanche had left bare of its landmark buildings: the Manor, all the Family apartments on the avenue, the bank.

  Tain shrugged. “I don’t think so, either.” The hint of a smile played around his lips. “But maybe that’s a good thing. If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that concentrating power and wealth on a couple of bloodlines brought nothing but trouble.”

  “You’re still the Chancellor,” Jov pointed out.

  “I think the title passes on when you die,” he retorted, and I flinched. We hadn’t spoken of what Mosecca had done, and I wasn’t sure we were ready to. Maybe we’d never be ready. Certainly she seemed not to want to discuss it with us, because no one had seen sign of her since.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked tentatively.

  “Fine. Good.” He paused. “Uh, better than good, actually. Everything feels … like I used to.” He shot me an anxious, darting glance, as if expecting admonishment. As if there would be any point demanding answers for his concealment. All three of us knew why he’d done it. We’d always been like this, protecting and hurting one another as we wound tighter together, and perhaps we always would be. I didn’t know whether to be worried or comforted by that.

  Tain continued, sounding thoughtful. “So. If we can pull ourselves out of this, I think we’re going to have to think differently about the system.”

  Jov gave him a strange look. “You’re talking like a revolutionary.”

  Tain grinned, his sparkling eyes gleaming, unclouded by pain for the first time in two years. “You know what? Maybe I am.”

  A smile tugged rebelliously at my own lips. “So what are we going to do?”

  “Well, for starters, we’re going to make it up with our neighbors. I don’t think we’ve seen the last of Crede. Maybe it’ll take another few decades, maybe another hundred years, but they’ll be back. Guess we’ll need some good diplomacy, eh?” He flung an arm around each of us. “We’ll handle it by working together, won’t we?”

  I looked at him, still unsure what feeling it generated when I did. He was dead. He was dead, and gone. But he was also real, and his warm body pressed up against mine. My second brother. “Of course we will. We’re family, right?”

  Jovan laughed, a little shakily. His hand strayed back to his heart, rubbing his chest as if something there bothered him. “Family,” he agreed.

  * * *

  “Will you go straight north?” I asked Etrika a short time later, as we walked toward the temporary accommodation shelter. Dee walked hand in hand with Jov a few paces ahead, Sjease and her brothers on her other side. Tain was talking animatedly, and Dee was giggling. The incongruous sound was both shockingly wrong, and a pleasure to hear.

  Etrika frowned. “My home’s in Telasa,” she said. “I’m too old and too tired for this nonsense. But I daresay a few more visits will be in order.” She gave me the ghost of a smile.

  Ana, a few steps behind, was watching Jov and Dee, the latter matching her steps to the former, and she wore a strange expression. As Etrika quickened her pace, I fell back beside her daughter.

  “My uncle has never been the most attentive Tashi to the youngsters,” she said, as if the target of her conversation was the gravel crunching beneath her feet. There was a long pause. “I don’t think Dija will miss his guidance too much. Now that she has … well. Now that she has a Tashi who cares for her properly.” She pressed her lips together and shot me a fierce look, daring me to challenge her. Instead, I took her free hand, touched. What it must have cost her to come to that decision, in light of everything.

  “She’s got a lot of family who love her and want the best for her,” I said, and she blinked rapidly, flustered, but returned the squeeze of her hand. Then she cleared her throat and dropped it, striding up ahead to catch the others. Someone was pointing Jov to our overnight shelter and I watched them go in, my family, homeless, proud and determined, and felt a surge of love, but also a kind of loneliness.

  I stood there, hesitant but unsure why, for a moment. Then I saw the figure up ahead, and my chest tightened. Abae, tall, graceful, still as a flag without a breeze. I approached her slowly, unable to label the feelings flooding me. Gratitude, that she was unharmed. Fear, that she would hate me for failing to trust her when it counted.

  “Hello, Kalina,” she said uncertainly.

  “Hello.” She was lovelier than ever. I wanted both to send her away and to kiss her, intensely, and instead I did nothing but stand beside her and turn my face away from the wind. The silence stretched out between us. She scuffed one foot on the ground.

  “You have had so much taken from you.” She made a little gesture, as if to take my hand, but stopped. The wind felt cold off the mountains. I thought of An-Ostada’s ominous warning, and resolutely turned my head so I could see no part of the ranges. Crede was a problem for tomorrow. “Perhaps now is only a time for grieving, and for being with family?”

  Abae caught my cheek with long, gentle fingers, and pushed the coils of hair out of my face. I flinched. She dropped her hand and I immediately regretted it, wished to snatch up the hand again and hold it close.

  She looked at me closely—could she read the conflicted feelings in my face?—and her liquid dark eyes held mine. “You know, I understand now. No one ever asked me what I wanted until you.” She smiled, her eyes distant, and took a steadying breath. “I will respect what you feel, and what you want. If you want to be alone, after all of this
…”

  She bowed her beautiful face over her knuckles, and turned to walk away. A suffocating pain twisted in my chest, as if someone were wringing out my rib cage like wet clothing.

  “Wait!” I called out.

  Abae turned back.

  “The Council will want to build relationships with our more neglected neighbors,” I said.

  She cocked her head to one side, regarding me curiously. “Yes?” she said. She looked like a skittish animal about to bolt.

  “Yes. So. We will need a Perest-Avani diplomat. One who speaks Sjon.”

  The smile she gave me was as warm as a summer dawn. “I might know someone.”

  I turned back to my temporary home, a kernel of optimism stirring inside me. I opened the door. “Come inside. That breeze is chilly.” The icy wind off Solemn Peak whipped my hair on my face again as we went inside together, and I shivered. But Abae’s hand was soft and warm in mine as I closed the door behind us.

  Acknowledgments

  As always, a team of people contributed to bringing this book together. On the professional side, a big thank-you to Tor Books and the team who worked on the U.S. edition, including:

  Diana Gill

  Acquiring Editor

  Steven Bucsok

  Production Manager

  Laura Etzkorn