Hollow Empire

by Sam Hawke

  It can’t be, I told myself, but my chest was tight with my lack of certainty. She wore a long dress, mask, and gloves, so I couldn’t see her skin or hair, but she had the same graceful poise, the same gliding walk. When she spun happily in time to the music her elegance made her stand out from the other merrymakers. And Hiukipi was nearby. My breath caught in my throat. I had taken a risk as it was, baiting the Prince, but I’d had no desire to begin a diplomatic incident. The woman was not engaging with the crowd, only drifting along with it, head swiveling to watch, like a person at their first karodee masquerade. I was almost on the brink of calling out, but then I breathed out in heavy relief as a man walking near the woman touched her shoulder and she turned and flung her arms around him. Thank the fortunes. Clearly the man was not a stranger. They continued walking together, and the man slipped a hand very familiarly around her waist as he bit into a karodee cake with the other hand. Definitely not a Talafan Princess, I thought, and smiled at my own foolishness.

  I followed the couple; not deliberately, but because they were heading away from the celebrations in the same direction as me. An otter, a Chancellor Telasa, and a pair of already half-undressed firebirds called out to me as I walked, but I shook my head and they faded away back to their own groups. On the nearest street, the couple stopped to prop against a wall near a lamppost, just outside the bright circle of its light, giggling and kissing with their masks half-on. The man in particular seemed frenetic in his passion, clumsily pushing up the woman’s skirt with one hand as he tugged up his own tunic with the other. I averted my head to give them privacy as I passed, but not before the woman’s bared leg caught in the light, and the pale exposed skin sent an icy chill of certainty down my body. Honor-down.

  They hadn’t noticed me, and I stood stationary, stricken, my mind temporarily buzzing and frozen. Shit, oh shit, oh shit. The man pushed her mask up and tossed his own to the ground, revealing a profile vaguely familiar, light skinned with a neat beard dusted with powdered sugar. My brain clicked with recognition. The Talafan soldier, the young one who had been patrolling outside the marquee, back and forth.

  That was enough to drag my thoughts back to coherence. Of course it was that guard. She’d not been staring idly as she spoke honestly to me of things denied her, she’d been staring specifically at him. And then she’d tricked me and, I assumed, at least some of her household as well, with a servant her own size and coloring in an identical outfit. Esma, the maid who had taken Josta’s costume from the room. Even now, perhaps, Esma sat outside in the garden with the other ladies, mask on, enough to fool the household manager. I shook my head, impressed despite myself at her cleverness.

  It wasn’t my business if a woman about to be sent off to live with some potentially hostile stranger in a conquered territory wanted to take some joy and passion where she could. I’d felt sorry for Zhafi before and I felt no less sorry for her now, cunning tricks aside. She wasn’t hurting anybody, and to be denied basic physical pleasures, and autonomy over her own body, was a cruel fate for anyone. My instinct was to let them be. On the other hand, they were being far from discreet; this street might not be filled with revelers but there were still dozens of people passing in various states of inebriation and high spirits, heading to and from the celebrations. What if someone else recognized them as I had, and word got back to the Talafan delegation somehow; the Crown Prince and the Foreign Minister had both witnessed me creating this opportunity for the Princess. Would they assume I was a willing conspirator? What would happen to Zhafi, if her reputation was publicly damaged and her value to the Empire suddenly diminished?

  I couldn’t do nothing, I decided, and risk someone less sympathetic finding her. The Prince himself might soon grow tired of being denied willing partners and return to the guesthouse; I couldn’t leave them here to be potentially exposed. But honor-down, this had to be handled carefully. They were well underway, and I could hardly just wander up and tap her on the shoulder. I sank back around the nearest building corner, amidst a small garden of flower bushes and decorative stones, and thought. Something to distract them, get their attention, so I could subtly warn her to go home. I could feign drunkenness and bump into them, or make a loud noise … Ah. I’d played a lot of bannerskids with Jov and Tain as children and was a decent shot with a small ball. I scooped up a fair-sized pebble from the little ornamental garden and took aim.

  The lamp broke with a satisfyingly loud smash, causing passersby to yelp in surprise and, critically, the couple to jump apart at the sound. “We must have annoyed one of the spirits,” someone on the street suggested, and a few people laughed. I used the confusion, as the other people in the street diverted to avoid the broken glass and the apparent mischievous lamp-exploding spirit, to sidle quickly up to Zhafi and her guard companion, both of whom were looking at the lamppost in alarm.

  “Go home,” I whispered in her ear, and she jerked to face me. Her companion had taken a few steps away and was looking down the street anxiously as he readjusted his clothing. The commotion seemed to have reminded him exactly how dangerous his behavior could be. I didn’t like to imagine his fate if they were caught. “The Prince is walking the streets,” I hissed. “You could be seen.”

  “I…” She stopped, her hand flying up to her mask and tugging it in place. “Kalina? I don’t—oh, God forgive me. I just—”

  “Don’t explain, just get out of here.” I glanced at her partner. “And don’t eat any more of the powdered-sugar cakes.”

  Trembling, she dropped her hand, then nodded. “You … you won’t…?”

  “Of course not. But go, now.”

  Her man turned around just as I stepped away, and as I strode up the street I heard her say, “I am so sorry, Tuhash. This was a mistake.” I let myself breathe again. If the fortunes favored her, and me, she would get back into the guesthouse before anyone noticed anything amiss. And hopefully she would not be so foolish again.

  If I had felt tired before, I was positively drained now. I needed solitude and my bed, and a night free from nightmares for once. My diplomatic career seemed to be getting off to too exciting a beginning for my liking. Though, I thought, trudging weakly up toward our street, it was no small thing for a Princess to be in one’s debt.

  The others were abed already, but when I checked Dija’s room I found it empty, and Jov’s the same. Ana and Etrika, sharing space in the long disused part of the apartments we had hastily cleaned out for their visit, were awake by the sound of their breathing, but neither spoke when I checked in on them, and I felt the silent judgment of their daughter and granddaughter’s late night hanging awkwardly in the air between us. Perhaps Jov had relented and decided to take Dee somewhere fun—to the sculpture walk, perhaps, or an age-appropriate play. I had to maintain my own irritation with his irresponsibility—he did, after all, forget sometimes how young she was—because if I didn’t concentrate on the annoyance it started to turn to worry.

  I sat on my bed, exhausted, knowing sleep would not come until I’d heard them safely home.

  It was in a half-dozing state I found myself, and when a rap came on my window I jolted as if I’d been shocked awake. Someone was there, outside, despite the fact that our apartments were guarded. My mind leapt to assassins and dangers before I shook those foolish fears clear. Assassins did not knock. I climbed wearily out of bed and went to the window.

  “Hadrea?” Moonlight illuminated my friend’s face. I pushed the window open, my tired fog lifting with alarm. Hadrea was bare-chested, her body painted elaborately in Darfri symbols, and charms hung heavily around her neck. She might have been interrupted during the ritual itself, such was the air about her; sweat drenched her hairline, and she had a strange, buzzing energy about her, as if she were flush with power, slightly unstable, like one of Etan’s old chemical experiments bubbling away in a glass beaker in our little laboratory. More alarmingly still, Dija emerged from the shadows at her side, visibly twisted with anxiety as my brother at his worst. “Dee.
What on earth are you doing out there? Why didn’t you come to the door?”

  I rubbed my eyes and looked at her properly, taking in her shabby appearance swiftly. She had never changed into her costume; those were the same clothes she’d been in this morning. And they were covered in—“Is that blood?” My chest felt tight.

  She wiped a hand on her cheek with an impatient swat. “It’s all right, Auntie, it’s not—I mean, it’s not all right, but it’s not my blood.”

  My heart started up a tat-tat rhythm and my face burned with a sudden rush of heat. Jov. “What happened?”

  “You must come,” Hadrea said tersely. “Dee found me because it was easier than scouring a crowd full of masks. She did not want to alert the Guards.”

  “Hadrea, what happened?”

  “It is Jovan,” she replied, short and tight. “He is in trouble.”

  * * *

  Hadrea lent me her strong arms to lever me out the window. Panic fluttered hard inside me, like a live thing trying to escape my rib cage. I smelled a whiff of woody smoke on the air. “Where is he?”

  “He is in a house in the old market district.”

  “And he’s in trouble how?”

  Hadrea held up one hand to quiet me and pressed the other against my chest, holding me back. “Wait,” she whispered. She crept forward toward the edge of the garden and disappeared briefly from view in the line of plants beside the wall. Moments later she was back, beckoning us, and offered a boost to get up onto the wall.

  “Where are our guards?” Friend of the family or not, she should not have been able to get around to our sleeping quarters, and we should not be able to cross this wall without challenge.

  “Shh. It was not their fault.” Hadrea picked Dee up easily and placed her on the wall beside me. “I confused them.”

  She hoisted herself up and over, graceful as an acrobat, and I watched, uneasy, unsure what she meant. There was something odd about her manner, something almost furtive, like a child sneaking honey pastries in the middle of the night. She stretched out her arms and Dee slid easily down into them. I got down with considerably less grace. We crept out across the road and used the shortcut through the gardens between the Leka and Ash apartments. “All right, will one of you tell me what’s going on? Why are we slipping our own guards, and what’s happened to Jov? Is he hurt?” I sniffed the air. “Is there a fire?”

  “He is hurt, but it is not life-threatening,” Hadrea said. She hesitated, glancing back over her shoulder at Dija, so I dropped to look at the child directly.

  “Dee. What did you see? What is going on? You two never came back after the race—where did Jov take you?”

  “He didn’t,” she said miserably, scuffing one foot on the ground. “I followed him. He left the event when we were supposed to be there together, we were supposed to be watching the Chancellor and the Heir, and then he just suddenly left. So I followed.” Her voice was very small. “I wanted to see if I could track him without him noticing.”

  And we hadn’t worried too much about her absence, thinking she was with Jovan and therefore safe. What stupidity. My brother was perfectly capable of getting himself into plenty of trouble, and of course Dija would have made a game out of trying to get one up over her inaccessible teacher, to try to crack his facade. She was only thirteen years old, and while proofing was a deadly serious and significant role, aspects of the training involved games and tests of skill. I couldn’t blame her, and I was too worried about Jov right now to waste time dwelling on blaming him, either. “All right. So what happened to him and why is it so secretive?” My voice shook.

  Hadrea glanced back at me, her face grave. “We must be secretive because he is being set up to be dishonored. If we call the Guards he is going to be found in a compromising position. Kalina, we need to move now. We do not have much time.”

  My chest felt tight with the effort of staying calm, but I obeyed, following her as she strode downhill and south. “Compromising how?”

  Hadrea looked at Dee again, but the girl had her head down as she scurried along beside me, legs moving double the steps as compared to my friend’s confident strides. Hadrea sighed. “They have drugged him and left him with a dead body. Unless we get him out of there before the Order Guards find them, it is going to look like a karodee night gone bad.”

  I shook my head, as if that would settle the information into a coherent pattern. “Wait, what? Who’s drugged him?” Jov, of all people, being drugged? How would anyone trick a proofer into taking a drug? “Fine, we’ll go, but Dee, tell me from the beginning.”

  With her head down and voice low, Dija gave me as much detail as she could about what had happened. It had started as a game, an exercise, but she’d quickly figured out he was following someone himself, and then everything had gone horribly wrong. I guessed who he must have been following; the only reason Jov would abandon Tain was if it related to the person he considered the greatest direct threat to the Chancellor—the mysterious assassin figure he kept seeing everywhere. My chest felt tight. By the time Dee had realized what was happening, she was isolated, far from anyone else who could help. She’d been too afraid to intervene and once they had moved him, she’d been unable to seek help or risk losing them.

  “I thought they were going to kill him,” Dee muttered. “So many times. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have anything with me and I was just too scared. I didn’t—” She stopped, composed herself, adjusted her glasses. “I was too scared. He was on the floor and they were kicking and kicking, and I just did nothing but watch. And then when they realized who he was, one of them left to get instructions, and I didn’t want to follow him, but I couldn’t think of any way to help. And then in the house, I got in and I could even see him from the back stairs, but I couldn’t think of a way to get close enough to do anything.”

  “That is all you could and should have done,” Hadrea interjected. She held us back in a shadowy side street as a group of people passed up the street, singing, their arms slung over one another’s shoulders. “If you had intervened directly at any point, what do you think would have happened, little one? We would be finding you somewhere terrible in the morning. And Jovan would be no better off.” The people moved out of earshot and she urged us on. I patted Dee’s shoulder reassuringly. The thought of her creeping into a strange house and spying on the people who were torturing my brother made me feel sick. What would they have done if they’d caught her? We took two more turns down increasingly narrow streets into the old market district, where what had originally been the city’s main commercial area had been converted into a meld of higher-end shops, offices, and residences. “Is this it?” Hadrea asked in a low voice, indicating the building across the lane.

  There was no indication of a party. The building was dark and the windows gave no hint of life. But Dee was completely confident as she pointed to the first-story window. “He was in there,” she said, equally softly. There was no one on the street—we hadn’t seen anyone for a while—but that window, at least, was open, and sound carried.

  “You are sure?” Hadrea asked her. She looked grim. “If it is the wrong room, this could get ugly, little one.”

  “I’m sure. It was the only one open, that’s how I got in.” Dee pointed to the gnarled crangelter espaliered against the north wall of the adjacent building in its small garden. “I climbed up there.”

  Despite the urgency, I stared at the gap between the buildings. It was three treads at least, maybe more. Dee was a clever and dedicated child, but an athlete she was not. “You didn’t jump?”

  She peered up at me through her glasses gravely. “Of course not, Auntie. Look.” I peered into the black space where she indicated and made out a post wedged between the bricks of the two. “I borrowed it from their garden. I’ll put it back after we get him out,” she added, as if I’d chastised her for stealing. Rather, I was both deeply impressed and horrified to think of her risking her weight to that stake. Hadrea clapped her on the shou
lder and gave a faint grin.

  “That was well done. Perhaps you should have been in the Games.”

  Despite everything, Dee turned toward that praise like a flower to the sun, and a little stab of referred guilt pierced me. We must be starving her of compliments. She was such a hard little worker Jovan rarely faulted her for anything as an apprentice, but the distance I’d been worrying about earlier might also have made him a teacher she was growing desperate to please. What if she had gotten hurt trying to impress him and prove herself tonight?

  “Can you manage it?” Hadrea asked me, and I shuddered. I was already so worn out, and I didn’t trust my coordination when my energy was this low. But Dee had not been able to rouse or move Jov, and strong as she was, Hadrea would need help getting an unconscious body out a window. I nodded, and she accepted it briskly, moving into the garden. That was her way; she never questioned or asked twice. Me saying I could do a thing was all the evidence she needed to be confident it was handled. It was one of my favorite things about her, in fact. I smiled at myself in the dark as I recognized the same response in myself that Dee had just shown. Hadrea was my friend—a difficult person to be close to at times, but we had grown close all the same—but even after years of knowing each other I still retained the desire to impress her. She had turned the tide of a war, she had fought and subdued something very like a god. Who could not be a little bit like the flower to the sun around a person like that?