Hollow Empire

by Sam Hawke

  “Yes,” I said, unsure what else to say, and finding it hard in any case to form words past the sudden lump in my throat.

  “Merenda didn’t come,” Tain said absently, his attention suddenly focused on something in the distance. “She should have been at the Manor. Hold up—messenger.”

  “No,” Moest was saying, “we sent someone to the Manor to get a head count. The Heir wasn’t there.”

  “She has to have been,” Tain said, as the messenger clambered up toward us. “She isn’t in here, she’d have found us by now otherwise. She’d know to check in, so she can’t—”

  “Honored Chancellor!” the messenger’s cry rang high with urgency or panic.

  It seemed as if all three of us felt it at the same moment, as Tain’s correction faded away. The messenger’s face was grim, even for the circumstances, and she sunk her head low, briefly covering her face with her hands before straightening and looking straight at Tain. By the time she spoke, my chest was heavy with dread, and I knew from Tain’s sudden stillness and Moest’s groan that we all predicted the words before they even came out.

  “Honored Chancellor. Devastating news. I am so sorry, but your Heir, the Credola Merenda…”

  Oh, no.

  The messenger gulped. “She’s been found, Chancellor. Unfortunately—”

  “Where?” His voice was tight and tense, his body rigid. “Take me.”

  The messenger gestured to the site farthest from us. “It looks like a number of people in the highest seats were thrown from the back by the blast. No one found the bodies at first because they were a … they were outside, a distance from the arena.”

  Moest bowed his head and put his hand on Tain’s shoulder. “Honored Chancellor. A terrible blow, I am grieved to hear it.”

  Tain gave no sign he’d heard. “She wasn’t supposed to be here,” he blurted. “Why would she come? She wasn’t like that. She was smart, she was sensible. Why didn’t she listen?”

  I couldn’t summon the energy to appreciate the irony. “I imagine she took guards, and thought she was safe. Same as you.” Merenda had been sensible, eminently so; indeed, several on the Council had expressed their doubts as to whether she had sufficient charisma or gravitas to inspire the people as Chancellor (naturally, their knives delivered hidden in bouquets; Karista had frequently commented on her “manner of the people” and ability to relate to the common person, and Sjistevo on her “charming transparency”). Had she simply decided our fears were warrantless? Or thought herself clever enough to avoid attention in the arena? “Maybe she had a good reason. We can’t know what she was thinking.” Now we never would.

  “Honored Chancellor?” the messenger prompted, and he nodded, stiff.

  “Please lead the way.”

  Moest patted him on the shoulder one last time and Tain and I followed the messenger in heavy silence, and after a moment’s hesitation Erel scrambled along behind us. The sounds in the arena seemed to recede as we walked, so I could hear the crunch of our steps and the rasp of Erel’s breath and the pulse of blood in my ears. Yet another blow, when we’d already had so many.

  “Who’s that? Another messenger?”

  As we crossed over to the last of the explosion sites, I squinted. Someone was approaching with haste. The messenger leading us broke into a trot to meet them, and I frowned. The runner was closer now and they weren’t wearing a messenger sash, but were clearly headed for us. I reached surreptitiously into my pouches and retrieved a small dart, and took a wary step in front of Tain.

  But it was my name I heard in the wind. “Jovan! Credo Jovan!”

  I knew the voice, and a moment later as they lifted their chin I recognized their face in the moonlight. “Sjease?” A hot, fearful sensation took root in my chest and began to expand, filling the gaps between my ribs, making it hard to breathe. “Sjease! What’s wrong?” I was running, too, leaving Tain and Erel and the messenger behind, because Sjease should have been safely at home, had been told not to leave the apartments for any reason, and yet here they were. I didn’t want to know what that meant, and at the same time I needed to know what that meant.

  They stumbled, out of breath, panting and disheveled like I’d never seen them. They seized my shoulders, frantic. “Jovan! I’ve been looking everywhere, I tried to find you, but there’s so much…” They looked around hopelessly, helplessly, at the chaos surrounding us, their words a mess of panic. “Where’s Merenda? Where’s the Heir? Jovan, she followed, and I didn’t realize until it was too late, and Jovan, is she with you? They wouldn’t let me in at first but I checked the hospital and I asked so many people. No one’s seen her. Honor-down, is she with you?”

  My heart. My heart wasn’t beating properly. “Sjease!” It came out a shout. “What are you talking about?” But I knew, I already knew what they were talking about, and some part of me just wanted to keep talking, to delay the moment.

  Sjease’s eyes were red, their cheeks sticky and glistening, and they were gulping air like a drowning person. “The Heir came by the apartments looking for you. She said she needed to tell you something, urgently. She looked in a panic. And I said you were with Tain and she said she’d go straight to you, and Dee wanted to go with her and we wouldn’t let her, but she must have slipped out afterwards. I didn’t realize. I didn’t realize!”

  “Dija,” I whispered, choking it out, and nothing, nothing in my life had ever felt like this, this all-consuming, bowel-liquefying, desperate fear and dread, this pre-knowledge I simultaneously needed and rejected. I took a shaky breath to scream but nothing came out, and when I tried to run I fell over instead, and my legs were clumsy and heavy, but I got to my feet and I ran faster and harder than I’d ever run before. Dija, please, please, please don’t be dead.

  * * *

  I was vaguely aware of the messenger catching up behind me but I didn’t need her guidance to find the spot where they’d recovered Merenda’s body. People were gathered in a section of gardens near a large broken and collapsed part of the arena, and the air was tense and grim. I could hear crying. There were physics moving about, calling for litters, and—my heart starting pounding harder—the shapes of bodies on the ground. A vise clamped around my chest so tight I couldn’t breathe.

  Dija had been with Merenda.

  Dija had been with Merenda and Merenda was dead and I couldn’t see my niece in the crowd. Dija must have been here and there were bodies on the ground, large and small bodies.

  “Credo Jovan!” The messenger touched my arm. “The Heir is over here.” She must have thought my wild dash had been for Merenda’s sake, and I felt a burst of impatience, followed by guilt. I followed her to the bodies. The nearest was in plain clothing, but I recognized one of Merenda’s blackstripes. Her chest was flattened, her skull broken. My head swam and I stumbled back from her, searched out the next body. A dead man this time, oddly peaceful but for the loose position of his limbs. My heart felt like it was going to crack my ribs, it was pounding so hard. It seemed quiet now, even though moments ago people had been talking, shouting instructions, helping the wounded, but now everything was uncannily quiet. A large black bird had fluttered down from one of the trees and was edging toward the blackstripe’s body. I glared back at it and scared it away with a quick stomp in its direction.

  Oh, fortunes. Like a blow to the stomach, I recognized the next body. Merenda lay on her side, almost like a natural sleeping position, but her head, like her guard’s, was broken. I couldn’t get any air in my lungs and for a moment I was dizzy, disoriented, unable to process the awfulness of it. I tore my eyes from her body, blinked hard against the burning feeling there, and raked my gaze over the last of the bodies. My frantic pace of moments ago had crashed into a fearful, juddery halt. There was a smaller body at the end of the row, covered by someone’s coat, and I needed to look closer but I had never wanted to do anything less in my life.

  But Tain had caught my arm to stop me. “Not Dee,” he said, and I blinked at him blankly. “I
t’s not Dee!” he said, and the relief hit me almost as hard as the fear had, and my legs melted. I wobbled, almost falling, but he steadied me. Erel, panting, stood beside him, a weak grin on his face as he pointed. “Look!”

  A small figure was sitting on a rock at the far side of the crowd, with an elderly man leaning over her, arm around her shoulder, trying to get her to drink something. I knew her at once, and the horrible pressure in my chest loosened, like a tiny leak sprung in an overfull waterskin. “Dee!” I called out, louder than I’d intended. Her head snapped up, she wiggled free without hesitation, and hurtled toward me to fling herself into my arms.

  It was the first time she had hugged me, and the feeling of her small arms around my neck was such an unfamiliar and disorienting and precious thing that my eyes went hot and prickly with tears. I felt simultaneously fierce and horribly exposed.

  Her eyes were puffy and her cheeks wet, but her expression was one of resolute calm as she pulled back and looked at me. “I’d like to go home please, Uncle,” she said, her voice low and serious.

  I couldn’t even answer. All I could do was breathe, shaking, my heart slamming and my head spinning. Those heart-shredding moments had been like nothing I’d ever felt before, not when I’d found out Etan was poisoned, not when he died in front of me, not even when I’d thought my sister dead as well; this was a new flavor of terror. Humbling was the realization that, for all my fears that I made a bad guardian, that I was too slow to love, too awkward for a child to love back, she had taken my heart after all, even if it had taken a moment of thinking I’d failed her to realize how much that meant.

  * * *

  “You’re shaking,” Dija said suddenly into the silence. We were walking, hand in hand, away from the arena; I would need to take her to the hospital to be properly checked over but she had no obvious injuries other than scratches and bruises, and more than anything we needed a moment to breathe. I’d left a stricken Tain by his cousin’s body, unable to think of the right words of sympathy when I had found my heir safe and he had not.

  I forced a shrug. “It’s the darpar. Gives you muscle tremors.”

  She wasn’t fooled, but one of the things I liked best about my niece was how she didn’t push things that didn’t need pushing. “That explains the bad breath,” she said instead, and I snorted.

  Now the fear had passed, exhaustion took its place, both a reaction to the release of tension and the genuine effects of the darpar wearing off. It was as if there were roots growing into the ground and each step I had to pull my foot up like a stubborn weed. There was so much to be done still, so many more things to help with and to figure out.

  “Dija!” A small figure sprinted over from the darkness, half-stumbling, sobbing with relief. “Sjease said … thank the fortunes, thank the fortunes!” Ana scooped up her daughter in a crushing hug, almost knocking me over.

  “I’m all right, Mama,” Dee mumbled into her mother’s shoulder. Ana pushed her back, held her by the shoulders, examining her, touching her face, her arm, the back of her head with frantic but gentle fingers, then wrapped her in a hug again. Uncertainty twisted inside me as I edged away to give them room. Holding her hand as we walked from the site now seemed a callous and undemonstrative response, another failure of my guardianship.

  Ana wiped her eyes, attempted a tremulous smile, and set Dija down. “Darling, can you go with Sjease for a moment? I want to talk to Jovan.”

  Dija started to say something but her mother set a firm hand on her cheek. “Just for a moment. I’ll be right with you.”

  Dee nodded, looking uncertain, and rejoined Sjease, who also caught her in a hug and swung her around in a full circle. As their heads bent together to talk, Ana turned on me, raking me with a gaze of furious intensity. “I’m taking her home,” she said. She set her jaw, and with the look on her face and the shaved patches in her hair exposing her half-healed scratches from the bird attack, she looked surprisingly fearsome.

  I held up my hands in mollification. “Of course. I just need to talk to her about one thing and then you can take her home. She’s not injured.”

  “No, you’re not going to be talking about anything. I know what your conversations are like, and tonight of all nights she doesn’t need to be talking about national conspiracies and murder plots and fortunes know what else.”

  “Ana, I understand why you’d say that, but Merenda found something out, something urgent enough to come find us when she was ordered to stay at the Manor. Dee was the last person to speak to her. We need to know what she told her.”

  “She’s been through too much. She’s seen too much. You can ask her tomorrow before we leave.” I felt a dull thud of comprehension: I’m taking her home. Ana gave a hard laugh. “Yes, Jovan, I mean home, not your apartments. We’re going home to Telasa as soon as we can get out of this fortunes-forsaken city.”

  “Ana—”

  “She’s seen enough. She’s thirteen years old, by the fortunes, Jovan. Thirteen. I never liked her coming here and learning all your … all your potions and things. But this is too much. She was nearly killed tonight!”

  “We all could have been killed tonight,” I reminded her as gently as I could. “I know our family duty can seem like a burden a lot of the time, but it saved you all, didn’t it?”

  Ana scoffed, her eyes hard. “Maybe it did. But answer me this: Would my daughter be safer in Telasa with us, or here with you?”

  I had known it was coming. It had seemed like a good idea, inviting Ana and the rest down to the capital to see that Dija was content and safe here, getting an impressive education and learning the responsibilities of the family. It just hadn’t really worked out that way. Ever since the masquerade day I’d known Ana would try to take her daughter back north with her. I’d only hoped to delay it a little longer.

  “If we don’t figure out what’s happening and stop it, there’ll be no place safe in this whole country,” I said honestly. “But I can promise you Dija’s safety is as important to me as anything in the world. You have my word.”

  “More important than the Chancellor?” Her hands balled into fists at my sudden silence. “No, I didn’t think so. You talk about family duty, Jovan, but that’s not supposed to only turn outward, is it. Honorable families should not treat their members as tools. What about your duty to my daughter? What kind of guardian are you being if you put her safety behind your work?”

  I couldn’t blame her for her anger, but nor did I fancy being lectured about family duty by a person who had lived a comfortable life away from the treachery and pressure of the capital, who never had to make the hard decisions or the personal sacrifices my position demanded of me, and Kalina, and Dija. The scars dotted around my body, the knowledge that my mistakes could cost the lives of those I loved most, the pressure of trying to do the right thing when the right thing could be a complex and deceptive thing. The hole where Etan had been. All the reminders that there was no place for me to run, no way to turn my back on this place.

  I held up my hands. “Look, Ana, I’m just saying, we don’t know where’s safe yet. Until we know who attacked us, we won’t know the safest place to be. If I thought sending you and Dee and the boys back to Telasa right away would ensure your safety, I’d do it in a heartbeat. But whoever did this has motive for doing it. Maybe they want people to flee the city. Maybe there’s an army coming from any direction and people are going to run straight into it. What if the other cities have been attacked, same as us?” Before she could finish drawing breath I plowed on quickly. “We need this information to keep you safe. Right now, we have a fortified city, we have guards around our house and we’re about to have more. This is the safest place we can be, within reason, right now.”

  “The safest place?” She whirled on the spot, gesturing to the chaos around us. “This city is nothing but death. We’ll take our chances in our home, as far away from this as possible. She’s my daughter and I’ll make the decisions about her safety.”

 
; “Dee’s in my care,” I said, battling the terseness that rose at her words. “I’m her guardian, not you. But if she wants to go home with you, I won’t stop her or try to persuade her otherwise.”

  A rustle behind her turned Ana’s attention: Dija, tugging Sjease behind her by one hand and pushing her glasses on her nose with the other. She raised her chin. “I’ve got some important things to tell Uncle Jovan, Mama,” she said firmly. “And I’m not going back to Telasa. I live here now, with him.”

  “It’s too dangerous here.”

  “Our family doesn’t run away when the Chancellor is in danger,” Dee said. She wasn’t speaking loudly, but her voice quivered with emotion. “The Oromanis are the Iliris’ first and closest friends. That’s always been the way. Ever since our families came here. And when the Chancellor is in trouble, when the country is in trouble, we stand up and fight for it. That’s what we do. It’s what we’re for. Otherwise, what’s the point?”

  “Dija, the—”

  “No! We can’t have everything we have, and control land and people and be in the Council and live like this, if that’s not what our family’s for.” She had pulled free of Sjease’s grip, as though her words needed physicality. “You can’t run away when you’re needed. I wouldn’t do that. I said I’d come here, I said I’d do the job, and I know what that means, and it’s important, and you’re not taking it away from me. It wouldn’t be honorable, it wouldn’t be right. You know that. You know that.”

  Ana was, if possible, looking even angrier than before. She turned her gaze very slowly and deliberately away from her daughter and to me. “There is no honor in endangering a child,” she said clearly, and it landed as it was meant to, like a hook in my chest. There was an ugly silence. Sjease stared at their feet. I stayed quiet; Ana’s fear and anger was completely understandable, but there was nothing to be done to assuage it for now.