The Rise of the Fallen (The Rotting Empire Book 1)

by Peter Fugazzotto

  “He saved us in the end.”

  “Over and over again, you spit out this drivel. He turned from us. We lay down our lives for him over the years. Blades touched our flesh, poison our lips before even a shadow would darken the sun from shining on him. Our whole lives we were ready to sacrifice for him, and then he gave us up to the Duke.”

  “He had no choice.”

  “How can you say that? He is the God-Emperor.” Wayan’s mocking laughter stretched out over the wide sea. “He can do anything. He has done anything he wanted. He made a choice to curry favor with the Duke, to give him a morsel so he would not bite the hand that feeds him. He chose to give us up. Don’t ever forget that. Don’t ever try to redraw the past. He betrayed us more deeply than any other person ever could.”

  “No,” Maja stood up and pointed at Wayan. “You don’t forget. He rescued us from the Hellhole. He brought us out before the murderers could finish their work with us. He saw the error of his ways. We just needed to learn a lesson.”

  Wayan’s body suddenly slumped. The waves licked against the side of the ship. Maja could no longer smell his musky odor. Instead the stench of seaweed flooded her nostrils. She suddenly regretted the words she had said. She had finally found Wayan again and she had let things deteriorate so quickly. But then she thought that maybe they needed to get these words out of the way in order for them to repair the tear between them. Maybe these harsh words and anger were the first steps in re-forming the bond that was once so strong between them. Out of pain and suffering redemption and rebirth.

  Wayan spoke again. His words soft, barely audible above the lapping of the waves against the side of the boat. “He never sent word. He would have let us die there.”

  “But we were freed. How could he have not sent word?”

  “The Queen spoke for us. You were the daughter she never had. She could not lose you.”

  “No, it was him.”

  Wayan stood up and took a step back towards the other end of the boat. “Believe what you want.”

  “But if this is true, why have you come with me? Why are you coming to rescue his son?” Wayan walked away. “Why?”

  A shout woke Maja at dawn. She uncurled from her spot on the prow and sat up squinting. The east was blinding.

  “A boat,” shouted Bui pointing ahead.

  White sails billowed.

  Ji barked out commands and the other Fallen fell to their tasks of playing out ropes and unfurling more cloth. Immediately the ship reacted to Ji’s touch and it jumped forward across the waves. Fish leapt out of the water pacing the quick-moving vessel.

  Bui scrambled across the decks to where Maja perched. “We’ll get them now. Catch these sons of bitches.”

  She squinted across the sea. She could make out small yellow-armored figures on the deck. She smiled. They had caught up with the soldiers. She wondered where Sri was. She hoped that Khirtan had not harmed him any further.

  “Can we push this boat faster?” Maja screamed back to Ji. The pilot shook her head, her white-streaked hair unfurled and billowing like a swarm of insects.

  The Duke’s ship crept close to the shore as if the men who steered it feared to take it out into deeper water. Maja wondered if there were dangerous shoals ahead and she thought about shouting something back to Ji but she had already turned the rudder and the ship veered to the left closer to the shore.

  Ji commandeered the boat well and Maja could sense the space between the boats being eaten up. They were still a far way off and maybe another half hour before the distance would be closed but she was reassured. She just hoped that Khirtan did not decide to take his anger out on Sri and the captured Fallen. There would be nothing that Maja could do to help.

  Maja watched the boat. She wished Ji could make their ship could go faster. She was tired of chase, weary of all the travel and fighting over the past several days. What was ahead would be a struggle. She knew that. But it would also be the end of things. The Fallen would descend on the Duke’s soldiers, split their heads with their swords, and take the boy back. Then it would be a matter of sailing north to the river mouth, skirting the Hellhole, and winding their way up to the capital. Her chest tightened at the thought of kneeling once again before the God-Emperor and the Queen. She could return home.

  The Duke’s boat turned around a promontory and disappeared from site.

  “You think they’re going to land?” asked Maja.

  Bui sat hunched, squeezing the gunwale. The dark metal of his mask seemed to swallow the morning light. He glanced up. “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t see where we are?”

  Their boat suddenly arced wide away from the promontory and Maja turned back to Ji. “What are you doing? Stay close to the shore.”

  Ji barked out an order and the sails suddenly dropped and the boat simply drifted.

  “Don’t let them get away!” yelled Maja. “We’re almost on them. You’re letting them get away!”

  “Look, you fool!” said Bui.

  Their boat drifted further out to sea, allowing them to peer around the promontory ahead, revealing the river mouth and the keep on the cliffs. The keep, built of white stone shipped from lands months away, glowed pink in the dawn light. The building was a squat affair, constructed high on the cliffs with a commanding view of the sea and the river. None could pass through without coming under the watchful eye of the keep, none could come through laden with precious cargo without first paying a tax to the Duke.

  “The Eye of the East,” said Maja.

  “The Hellhole,” muttered Bui. “We came back.”

  31

  “WE CAN TURN back,” said Bui. He dug the tip of his sword into deck of the boat, burrowing out shavings of dark wood.

  “Don’t do that to my ship,” barked Ji.

  “It’s just a piece of wood. And you are just a piece of flesh.”

  After watching the Duke’s ship disappear around the corner and seeing the Hellhole, Ji had allowed them to drift south to a reef where they could anchor. Other boats had emerged from the shore and dropped fishing nets into the sea. A guard from the tower might have been suspicious of their vessel at first, but Ji had hoped that eventually they would be forgotten among the fishing boats.

  The Fallen gathered in the center of the ship beneath the shade of a partially pulled sail. Trilli had cooked a rice porridge with salted fish. Maja held the bowl in her lap. She was not hungry but she needed to eat. She spooned in a mouthful of the tepid porridge and swallowed it down.

  “Salted fish,” moaned Ji. “Here were are in the middle of the sea and we’re eating salted fish.”

  “I say we forget the boy,” said Bui. “We rescue our brethren. The boy is lost. Once we save them, we head back to Land’s End and they won’t know any better. They’ll leave us alone.”

  “I can’t abandon Sri. I made a promise,” said Maja.

  “I made no such promise.”

  “Enough of this bickering,” snapped Wayan slamming his bowl to the deck. “We’re here now. We’ve come for the boy.”

  “Now you want to return to the capital, proud fucking peacock scraping and bowing before the traitor emperor?” asked Bui.

  “The boy,” said Wayan. “We rescue the boy. We clean the slate. The Duke. Khirtan. We close that chapter of our lives.”

  “They’ll come after us. You think we can murder the Duke and not have them come after us? We’ll never be able to go back to Land’s End.”

  “We’ll go east. Chase Hanu’s pipe dreams.”

  Maja stood up. “But we promised to bring the boy back to the throne. He is the heir.”

  Wayan laughed. “I said I’d come with you and help rescue the boy. That’s it. Nothing more. I’m here now, blade ready. But after that, you’re own your own. The rest of us will sail free of this cursed land. It doesn’t deserve us.”

  “A greater call is beckoning us. This is about preserving Empire. All we’ve been through. The struggles. The pai
n. We have to make a choice to stand up for what’s right. That’s how our lives are defined. Not by the misdeeds. Not by the hesitation. Not by the cowardice, but by our actions.”

  Wayan moved his lips without talking and then spoke. All the others looked at him. “What’s right? What’s right is standing with your brothers and sisters of the sword. What’s right is knowing where your true loyalty lies. Is it with a cruel old man, his bastard child, and a cursed bloodline? You want to serve that? You want to lay your life down for that? Not me. I don’t bow before a man that threw me to the dogs. I don’t return to the life of some gilded monkey.” He swept his hand around the decks. “We all paid the price for that life. Paid the price for not failing in our duty. That life is a lie.”

  “So you’ll turn from me?” asked Maja.

  Wayan smirked. “No, I won’t. I made a promise to you, my blood sister, to rescue the boy, and we will. And I won’t abandon our brothers and sister. And I’ve made a promise to myself to cut Khirtan’s head from his shoulders. He never should have come within sight of the Fallen. He should have left us alone. He’s awakened my anger, my thirst for revenge, and he will pay the price. The Eye of the East will swim in blood. But after that, Maja, you’re the one with a choice to make. Fulfill your empty promise to a traitorous king or sail east with your only true family.”

  When evening came, the Fallen hoisted the sails and fell in with the returning fishing boats. Maja kept expecting black-hulled corsairs to stream from the river mouth. But instead the Fallen were able to glide in with the other fishing boats towards the small village south of the Eye of the East.

  They dropped anchor a short distance from the wide beach. If all went well, they would still need to flee. A horde of yellow-armored soldiers would be on their heels, hot with revenge, hot with the desire to gut the Fallen.

  Maja perched on the bow, watching the village. Children darted with the surf, their shouts and laughter rising above the sound of the gently breaking waves. Men and women dragged nets of silvery, flopping fish up the beach, pausing to shake out their hands and joke with each other. Small cook fires in front of the dozens of thatched huts sent tendrils of smoke against the forest.

  “Almost dark,” said Bui. “You think they won’t be guarding the sewers?”

  “Is this a life we could really be happy with?” Maja asked looking at the villagers and thinking about what they would find if they sailed east into unknown lands.

  “Happy? Us? The hope for a life like that has been cut out of us. Really just a question of how little suffering.”

  “Days on the sea, the untamed jungle forever at our backs, no ties to our old lives. How long would we last before we would give it all up and sail back?”

  He snickered. “Village life would be a bit dull. But you do know my vision of traveling east included robbing villages. Better to steal than to work.”

  “So you would make these people suffer?”

  “Ah, they’ve got enough to share. It’s all a game this life. It ain’t fair. We all suffer. But any way you look at it, whether I’m a dashing pirate or a boring villager, I’m done with the Empire, gave my fucking face to them, and not ready to give my life.”

  “I just think we would feel empty. Life would have no meaning. What would we serve?”

  “The fucking sun and the moon, the waves, the warm sand beneath my feet. Life doesn’t have to have some great purpose. The only purpose of life is to live, and out there we could live. Here, even if we stay at Land’s End, our days are numbered. They’re coming for us. By the cursed gods, I know that. Your old God-Emperor isn’t going to live forever and then that thin veil of protection would be gone. Sri’s a burden. A curse. And a little bastard in more ways that one, but the only thing he has been good for is waking us to the fact that we were living a lie, one that was going to end up with gulls tearing out of guts.”

  The sun had descended below the trees and sunk behind the mountains. Blackness raced across the eastern sea. The first stars emerged in the sky.

  The children had retreated to the fires, the families silhouetted in these last moments before darkness, safe within their parents’ reach. She stared along the short north of them to where she knew the sewer opened out of the cliff and led into the belly of the Eye of the East. Their way in.

  “Enough talk,” said Maja. “Let’s do this.”

  Maja shifted her gaze between the corpse on the ground and the dark entrance to the sewer. The faint light of the stars stretched the shadows, making her think killers were hidden in the gloom.

  “Seems like they should have posted more than one guard,” she said.

  “In front of a sewer?” The guard’s blood dripped from Ji’s sword. Maja kept expecting her to wipe the blood on the man’s sarong but Ji did not.

  “This is the sewer we fled through when we escaped. They would keep an eye on it.”

  “They got bars across it now,” said Wayan. He and the others waited in a line against the sea wall. They stood on uneven stones, pieces of the cliff wall that had broken off and shattered at the sea. The stones were slick with green seaweed. With a high tide, where they stood would have been underwater.

  Trilli climbed past the guard and tugged at the bar. The grate opened with a metallic squeal. He turned to the others and shook his head. “Unlocked.”

  “As if they were waiting for us,” muttered Bui.

  “Any excuse you can find to turn back, huh?” said Maja.

  “After Khirtan spits out his last breath,” said Bui. “Then you’re on your own.”

  “Are we doing this?” asked Ji. “You didn’t just make me kill this man for nothing, did you?”

  “Like you’ve ever needed an excuse,” hissed Bui.

  Maja climbed the rocks past Trilli and squeezed into the mouth of the tunnel. It stunk. Like piss and shit. And blood. Maja’s stomach convulsed. How could the tunnel smell like blood? How many people were slaughtered daily in that chamber deep in the bowels of the Eye of the East so that it would reek of blood? She thought the Empire had entered a time of relative peace. The chamber should have been nearly forgotten. Unless the God-Emperor had more enemies than she imagined. Or unless the Duke had his own set of enemies he needed to eliminate.

  She heard the scrape of steel against flint, a few shared curses, and then a light flared behind her. Ji called and then handed a torch to Maja. The head, wrapped in fungus, pulsed with bright light, and would burn for another hour or so. More than enough time to get them through the tunnel and back into the torture chamber.

  She crept forward, not waiting for the others to file behind her. She knew they would come.

  The tunnel was rough carved into the cliff and led upwards at a steep angle. The walls glistened from the light of the fungal torch revealing notches and cuts where men long ago had burrowed a passage between the fortress and the sea.

  Soon she was short of breath, panting, and her thighs aching from the efforts. Sharp pain tore across her thigh and she feared she had torn open the wound again. Her shoulder began aching from holding the torch overhead.

  The sounds of the sea died away and were replaced by the steady trickle of water, and the hard panting of those behind her.

  The sewer tunnel broke into three smaller tunnels. She followed the leftmost passage towards the Hellhole. The tunnel constricted, dark walls pressing in, forcing her to squat, and the pain burned not only her thighs but also her lower back. She was more than a dozen steps into the tunnel when she realized that she should have drawn one of her swords. The space was cramped and she would be hard pressed to pull her swords quickly enough if they were suddenly attacked.

  A light flickered through a hole in the ceiling. The entrance to the Hellhole. She doused her torch in the foul trickle at her feet and then waited. She half-expected the metal grate ahead to be lifted and an army of yellow-armored soldiers to pour into the tunnels, weapons drawn, shouts bursting from snarled lips.

  But she was only met with silence.
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  Bui crouched behind her. “What are you waiting for? Let’s get this over with.”

  “Too quiet,” she said.

  “It’s night.”

  “We should hear them.”

  “Who?”

  “The ones still here,” she said. “The ones strapped to the devices. The ones with their limbs severed. The ones with the hot brands inserted into their bodies. We should hear theirs moans, their screams, their begging to be killed.”

  “What choice now? Turn back?” His laughter was feral. “If the boy is anywhere in this castle, this is where he is. Maybe he’s dead now. He was just a child. Be fine with me. Spit on his corpse and then get the hell out of here.”

  Maja inched forward until the light seeping through the grate stretched over her. She froze and listened. Did she hear a scuttling? Her belly tightened. What if this were a trap? A trap designed to get the Fallen back into the Hellhole? Had they been freed only to be tricked into willfully returning?

  She gathered her breath and then moved directly beneath the metal grate. Some mixture of water, blood, and shit dripped over the edge. She slowly rose. She recognized the ceiling, the iron rings bolted into the dark stone, the pulleys, the chains.

  She rose until her cheek pressed against the ice cold metal. She could see the tables, the cages, the shackles. Against the wall the various tools were lined up neatly, the metal glistening, whetted and ground to impossibly thin edges and fine points, tools well kept.

  It was all as she remembered it. But the Hellhole was empty. The tables, cages, and shackles empty as if waiting for them.

  Maja turned back to the others, their eyes lit. “Shit. He’s not here.”

  32

  “HE SHOULD HAVE been here,” said Maja. She stood, swords drawn, in the center of the Hellhole. Giant Trilli was the last of the Fallen to climb out of the sewer. His palms and knees were covered in shit and blood from where he had been forced to crawl through the small passage.

  “Looks like the mission is a failure,” said Bui. His voice echoed in the cavernous torture chamber.