Hollow Empire

by Sam Hawke

  “We’ll talk about this later,” she said abruptly. “Tell him what you need to tell him and then you’re going straight to bed.”

  I nodded. “Thank you.”

  We stepped a little way away and after a moment’s hesitation I took Dee’s hand again. She held on to it, hard, and some of the uncertainty inside me faded. I live here now, with him. Maybe the two of us did understand each other after all. “Dee, your mother’s right about you needing rest, but first I need to ask you about why you left the apartments tonight,” I said. “Is that all right?”

  “I’m sorry,” she muttered. “You said not to leave. I know I scared you and Sjease and everyone.”

  “I’m just relieved you’re all right,” I said. “But I know Merenda found something out, something important. Dee, I know this is hard, but I need to know what she told you. Do you know what she wanted to tell us?”

  She shook her head, like she was clearing it, and maybe she was. “Merenda—” Her voice squeaked into nothing, and fresh tears wet her cheeks. I gave her time to gather herself and she took some shaky breaths before continuing. “She came to find you. She said it was urgent, that she had to warn you and the Chancellor.”

  “About what?”

  “She said something terrible was going to happen at the arena, and—I suppose it doesn’t matter so much now because I guess it already did.” She was too young for that much bitterness. I squeezed her hand, and she pressed her glasses back up her nose and stared down at the ground. Her shoulders jerked suddenly and she hunched down, obviously trying to force back sobs. She had bonded well with Merenda in her time here and I knew the Heir had liked having her around, as she missed her own children. To have ended their relationship in these circumstances, for someone her age to have seen it happen … The only consolation was that the Heir’s death hadn’t been as brutal as some of the others. Dee hadn’t had to see her charge be torn apart by the blast, rent to pieces like poor Princess Zhafi, or burnt to a husk by magical fire. Or poisoned, dying slowly right in front of her. Oh, Etan. I’ll never stop missing you. My own eyes felt a bit hot.

  “If this is too much…” I began, even though my insides squirmed to know what had driven Merenda out tonight. What had she learned?

  “No, it can’t wait.” She sniffed, straightened up, cleared her throat. “She found something. A note, or a message? I don’t know how, but she found it and it was telling somebody to stay away from the arena, and that Tain wasn’t going to be where he was meant to be.”

  My mouth had gone dry now. “She found that somewhere at the Manor?”

  “She must have done, I think, because she said you’d told her not to leave but she had to warn Tain because whoever was planning the attack knew you’d told him not to be in the Council seats.” Dee looked up at me seriously. There were tears caught in her lashes but she was no longer crying. “She said it meant there was someone close to Tain who was informing his enemies.”

  I resisted the urge to spring up and start pacing, but only with great focus and control. Dee had gone through a lot; I had to keep her calm. “Did she say who she thought it was?”

  “She didn’t know. But it had to be someone who knew the Chancellor had been warned off tonight. That’s only really people close to him, isn’t it?”

  Shit. A horrible cold feeling spread through my chest. I didn’t want to do this again. I didn’t want to second-guess everyone around me, to see enemies in the Council, in the Manor, among my peers and friends. We had done that once and it had nearly broken us. “She found a message,” I said slowly. “Did you see it? Could you tell me anything about what it said precisely?”

  She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I don’t need to.” She reached into her paluma and retrieved a small paper packet. My mouth fell open.

  “Dee, you—”

  “I took it off her body,” she said, her voice tiny, and rushed. “I’m sorry, I just knew she had it and I was afraid it might get lost at the hospital or someone might take it on purpose. So I … when I went to see the body, I didn’t tell anyone and I stuffed it down my tunic. I’m sorry,” she added again.

  “I was going to say you did exactly the right thing.” I didn’t want to uncover another bloody traitor in our midst, but if there was one to be found, a head start on the bastard was no small matter. “Can I…?”

  She handed it over. It was on good paper, but not so good that only the rich could have afforded it, just good enough to hold the ink. The outside of the folds was unlabeled and so too was the note, frustratingly addressed to no one. The writing was in Sjon and the penmanship neat but unremarkable.

  Chancellor is on alert, will not be stationary. Plan will proceed in full. Do not be at the ceremony or your safety will not be guaranteed. Advise you leave the country as soon as possible, and await further instructions. Service to the Prince is always rewarded.

  I read it three times. Merenda had been right—the informant, whoever it was, had known Tain had changed plans. “Service to the Prince,” I said aloud. Which Prince? Hiukipi? One of the Princes of Tocatica? The coldness in my chest intensified. The Prince’s Hands. The crown graffiti outside the warehouse. Perhaps they weren’t local criminals giving themselves airs, but genuine agents of a foreign ruler, infiltrating our streets right under our noses. Our streets, and perhaps the Manor itself. Who had written this note—and just as importantly, to whom was it written?

  INCIDENT: Cosmetics poisonings (numerous)

  POISON: Sweetface (skineater)

  INCIDENT NOTES: Numerous reports surfaced of members of wealthy families (incl. at least two Credol Families; see Cs. Ormac and Aijai Brook, C. Megann Reed) having unexpected and unpleasant side effects from medical treatments; further investigation revealed a spate of skin necrotizing apparently resulting from un-Guilded medical “beauty” treatments to remove unsightly moles, skin tags, etc. Traced to Darfri herbalist in lower Silasta going by name of An-Alixae. Note: I strongly suspect further work of woman previously posing as herbalist in Harrow village (see earlier entry, Harrow village poisonings); deploy resources to tracing her as a priority (use K for information gathering?)

  (from proofing notes of Credo Etan Oromani)

  16

  Kalina

  “How are you holding up?” Jov, blinking wearily, put a hand on my shoulder. I realized the physic had finished with the patient I’d been assisting with and given her some pain relief, and I was just standing there, holding her slack hand and staring into space. I smiled at my brother to show him it was nothing to be concerned about, and placed the girl’s hand gently onto her chest. Two people swooped in to transport her to the hospital, and I let them go before turning back to scrutinize Jovan.

  He looked bad. He had no specific injuries I could see, but he was moving so heavily and awkwardly I suspected he had a lot more than he was letting on. “I’m all right, what about you?”

  He shrugged, avoided looking at my face.

  “Hadrea’s sleeping still. You got Dee home safe?”

  “Yes. She was asleep between Ana and Etrika when I left.” He rubbed his forehead. “Ana was so relieved to have her there, she even forgot to be pissed at me. Honor-down, Lini. We were so lucky not to lose our niece.”

  The team who had pulled her out had estimated that if she had been standing even a few treads over she would have been thrown off the area with the others and almost certainly killed. We’d been more than lucky not to lose her. Luckier than a lot of families tonight, too. “Stay here with me a while,” I urged him. “We still need hands and you could use a break from lifting heavy things. Here, help me cut some bandages.” Strangely, Jovan’s visible distress helped me relax a little into a routine. I recognized the signs; he was reliving every perceived bad decision, imagining how he could have done things differently, and worse, dealing with the insidious voice inside him whispering that he must not have even wanted to save everyone. Those dark thoughts were bad enough for him where the scale of the mistake was small;
in a disaster like this, I was surprised he was even capable of standing under the weight of that burden. But this was something I could do, and do better than anyone. I knew how to be his big sister, helping him deal with an episode, distracting his brain from one of its obsessive “what if” spirals by teaching it something else. There was no point rehashing how we could have prevented this disaster. What we needed now were clear heads so we could work out what was coming next.

  He visibly calmed as he worked at the repetitive task. “Listen, Lini,” he said, his voice low as he bent over the bandages. His manner had become furtive, as if he feared being overheard. “Merenda found something before she—before coming here. She was trying to tell us we had a traitor in the Manor.”

  I looked at him sharply. “What do you mean? What did she find?”

  “She intercepted this letter.” He passed me a note and I scanned it quickly. “We don’t know who wrote it or where it was going. She might have known more, but … well. We can’t ask her.”

  “But this is something,” I said. “Service to the Prince? Do you think the leader of the Hands is an actual Prince, then?” A shudder ran over me as I thought of the Talafan camp. Oh, fortunes, poor Zhafi. “Surely not Hiukipi. He was there in the box, he can’t have been behind the bombs.”

  “I guess not.” Jov shrugged. “There’s a Tocatican Prince here, too. Is that it? The Doranites have a king but they don’t do hereditary titles so there aren’t any princes.”

  “If this ‘Prince’ has his Hands here working for him then he doesn’t have to be here, though, does he,” I said. “Why bother to come to a city you’re trying to destroy if you can just pay people to take it down from the inside?” I remembered something. “Wait. Service. The woman who attacked Hadrea, she said something like that. Not about a prince, but she said…” I searched my memory, trying to recall the exact words. “She was demanding to know how Hadrea was using fresken without calling on the spirits. She was really shocked, like she thought it shouldn’t be possible for Hadrea to do what she was doing. And she said no Darfri Speakers would have taught Hadrea that and she could only have learned it through service to him.”

  Jov rubbed his forehead, looking suddenly guarded. “Hadrea can do things other Darfri can’t. We knew that.”

  “Well, maybe the other side didn’t understand that. Maybe that’ll help us. More importantly, could this ‘him’ be the Prince in the note? It was the same sort of wording, and the way she said it, I thought she was talking about a god or something, but this”—I prodded the note—“is the closest thing we’ve got to a clue.”

  “But both people who might be able to tell us about it are dead,” he pointed out. “We don’t even know how Merenda got the note.”

  “It’s something,” I insisted, and he shrugged wearily.

  “One more thing to try to understand.”

  I stayed near him until he was settled into a routine and his twitching was less obvious. When the bandages were done there remained plenty more work; none of the physics would let a person stand idle and get in their way tonight. Everyone here, no matter their birth or occupation, was a physic’s assistant, and that was probably for the best. Jov wasn’t the only one who needed a distraction tonight. I left him with Varina’s younger brother, Credo Arran, a good-natured and popular man, if not the brightest of our peers. Last time I’d seen Arran he’d been dancing, drunk and high on the dosed sugar cakes at the masquerade, handsome and energetic, and it was an ugly shock to see him sweating, clutching at the stump of his right leg, which had been tied off and bandaged by one of the physics, and moaning like some kind of wild animal. Emergency assistants like me and Jov weren’t supposed to be giving out pain relief but I caught Jov slipping a small amount of a clear fluid to Arran, and guessed he’d raided his personal supplies to give the poor man a moment of relief.

  I found myself handling basic aid for the less-urgent cases, giving simple treatments and then sending them to the main hospital to be seen later. “They’ve got to do the priority cases first, obviously,” I told the latest, a young man with a series of bad grazes down his torso and leg but no serious bleeding. I had cleared the gravel and dirt out as best I could in the light conditions but they would be able to do a better job at the hospital. “But they’ll get to everyone, you just need to be patient. Head over to the main hospital and walk gently, all right?”

  The man hobbled off. Next in the line was a familiar figure, tall and broad, wincing with her slightly uneven walk. “Captain Chen,” I said. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she grunted. “So far as anyone is, at any rate.”

  I closed my eyes a moment. “Yeah.” The immediacy of first aid at least gave my brain something to do other than dwell on all the horrors we’d seen, but they could be conjured up all too easily on command.

  “But I understand it could have been a lot worse.” She clapped a heavy hand on my shoulder and looked at me directly, her honest face only a handsbreadth from mine. “If you and your brother hadn’t done what you did—”

  I looked away, uncomfortable. “We didn’t do enough, though.” Two out of five blasts. If only we’d acted sooner, if only we’d guessed what they would try.

  She scoffed. “You did more than anyone else did, and a lot of people round here are only standing because of what you did. Like as, you won’t hear as many thanks as you ought, but I’m here to give mine.” She sighed, straightened to her full height, and looked around the hospital area. “Did you see what happened with the Darfri?”

  I shrugged. “I saw it. Can’t say I really understand it though.”

  “These things aren’t for us folks to understand.” Chen shook her head. “Magic and spirits and fires coming out of nowhere—that’s beyond us, I reckon. Now this mess with explosives, that’s something we can deal with. And thanks to you two, we’ve got two of the bastards who set this up. They’re stewing in the jail right now.”

  “What about Sukseno?”

  “We’ll find him. He can’t go home, can’t go to his friends. Once we’ve got everyone safely out of here, he’ll be a priority. And a certain former Warrior-Guilder, too.”

  Aven’s smug smile flashed through my mind. She’d been so fucking confident, like she’d known we’d find out enough to come asking questions, but not enough to stop it happening. “She was taunting me,” I said softly. “Which means she’ll be expecting us to come running.”

  Chen opened and closed the fist on her right hand as if testing its strength. “Don’t worry, Credola. We won’t play her game. She can answer to us when we’re ready.”

  “She’s not going to tell us anything,” I said, and even though I’d been the one to talk to her before, I knew it to be true. “Why should she? She’s held out this long and she’s finally seeing her people take control again. What can we hold over her now that she hasn’t already lost?” A sudden thought occurred to me. “Get someone watching the jail. Not your people, just in case. Ask the blackstripes. I’d bet my family honor breaking Aven out is part of the plan, whether now or later. Someone’s going to try, maybe Sukseno or one of her other plants. You might be able to flush out some Hands by being ready for that.”

  Someone called out to Chen from a few treads away, and she nodded to me. “You take care, Credola. I reckon we’ve had enough excitement for the day, eh?”

  “I reckon,” I agreed, forcing a smile as she set off to the Guard who’d hailed her, rubbing irritably at her thigh above her artificial leg as she walked.

  I looked around for Jov, and found him wiping the gravelly wounds of a young woman from the Builders’ Guild. I dropped off a bucket of water to the fire for heating and stopped by my brother to pass on what Chen had said. But I’d barely finished relaying the conversation when we were interrupted by a horrible, gargling cry.

  Arran thrashed in place, spit flying from his open mouth. “Hey, someone come quick!” Jov cried out, but the man stopped convulsing before a physic could assist, and
slumped back to lie still. Too still. “Oh, shit,” Jov murmured, and I squeezed his shoulder. The first patient to die right in front of me had been an old man with a terrible stomach wound and burns over half his body; he’d never even managed to see a physic before his body had given up. Arran’s deterioration had been unexpected, and Jov had obviously been unprepared.

  “We can’t always tell how badly they’re hurt,” I told him gently. He looked so drained, so emotionally bereft. He had seen death, but there was a particular horror to the helplessness of this grim little zone. I squeezed his hand and went back to work.

  A woman in country garb with one eye almost certainly lost to shrapnel, and a bleeding ear I didn’t like the look of, was next in the line. “You’ll need to see the physics,” I told her, sizing up the head injuries with a frown. “I’ll get you to sit—” But before I could finish, she seized me by the arm, and I gasped in pain at the pressure on the still-healing cuts on my bicep. She wasn’t the first person in pain to try to hold on to me, but honor-down, it hurt. I tried to pull away, unpeeling her fingers with my other hand, but she only gripped harder, and yanked my head down close to hers, so I could feel and smell her breath on my face as she hissed in a furious whisper, “You have to listen to me! No one is listening!”

  “I’m listening,” I said, still trying to free myself. I looked around for someone to assist me but no one was looking.

  She yanked me again so we stood nose to nose, almost touching. “Then listen! We are cursed, this country. The spirits have not forgiven us.” Her good eye flashed around manically, taking in my face, darting to the smoking remains of the seating in the stands beyond, and back again, and with her free hand she clutched at the Darfri charms around her neck, matted with blood.