Hollow Empire

by Sam Hawke

  Kalina’s eyes drifted to his arms, just as mine had done, searching for answers, but while his arms were heavily tattooed, it was not with Guild or family bands but rather a complex design from shoulder to elbow. He wore no Darfri charms or any other jewelry. In short, nothing about his appearance told me anything of much use.

  “What does that say?” Tentatively, she took a step closer, and I put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Careful.” But he only stared flatly at us.

  “Raise your arm,” she said to him, and he gave no sign he’d even heard. She glanced back over her shoulder at me. “There are words there. In the tattoo pattern. At least, I think.”

  “Raise your arm,” I repeated, this time pointing the knife a bit more threateningly. But I might as well have said nothing, for all the reaction I got. Kalina moved a fraction closer, tilting her head.

  “Never mind. Obey … to … ascend?” she read. “Is that what it says?”

  I frowned. “The book says something like that.”

  “The book?”

  The only thing he’d carried besides a small armory, it was a slim volume made of a rough-grained leather and well worn from use. Kalina picked it up, but kept her eyes on the man. He flinched when Kalina took it. So that’s important. She’d noticed his reaction too, and looked thoughtful as she opened the book. For just a second I thought he was going to leap at her; for the first time since I’d gotten him tied up he gave a sign of real emotion. But he didn’t move, just continued to watch us, assessing.

  “Anything in there?” I asked Kalina. The weapons hadn’t been anything distinctive, but the book, perhaps, if it was important to him, could help us.

  “It’s printed.” Disappointment rang in her voice; like me, she’d probably hoped to find a notebook or diary, something that might lead us further along. “I’m not sure what kind, though. It’s weird. The printing’s kind of wonky.” She traced the title with one finger. “You’re right. ‘Obedience for ascension,’” she read aloud. “Looks like—”

  “Over here,” I heard, and turned. Three Order Guards, including the one who’d helped me with him before, were making their way across the rubble. “Everything all right, Credo Jovan? Credola Kalina?”

  “He hasn’t given us any trouble,” I said. I glanced at Kalina. Without saying anything, she slipped the book away into her clothing so when she turned to face the Order Guards with a grateful expression, she seemed never to have been holding anything.

  “We’ll take him from here,” one of the Guards said. “If that’s all right with you.”

  I hesitated a moment. We still didn’t know if there were any other traitors among the Order Guards. Part of me didn’t want to let the man out of my sight, not even for a second. The Order Guard, perhaps guessing at my reluctance, added, “You can come along with us, Credo, if you prefer? Only I know there’s still a lot to do out there to get everyone safely out, and I imagine there’ll be an emergency Council meeting called, if there isn’t one already.”

  “No, you take him,” I said, forcing a smile. There was still an awful lot to do, and there could still be Hands or other agents of our enemy out there trying to sabotage our efforts. “Just be careful, and don’t take any chances with him.”

  “No, Credo, we won’t,” he assured me.

  We walked together behind them as they led him out, all alert and weapons out, watching for any sign of trouble. As we broke out into the open, despite everything, the terrible aftermath and all of the new things to face, I felt a tiny prick of optimism. One more piece of the puzzle had come into our hands. Now we just had to hope we could assemble it in time.

  * * *

  Several times throughout that hellish night and morning, I rested my eyes for a fraction too long and each time when I jerked awake there was a confused period where the horrors of the night might have just been a dream. Perhaps it was the exhaustion, or wishful thinking, but as the night wore on these moments grew longer and longer and my sense of reality grew indistinct. Sometimes, it felt like no time had passed and we were back under siege, the city panicking and grief fresh in my heart.

  It wasn’t just my tired brain and body that called to mind the siege, though. Moest had called up the army and set roving patrols around the city and scouts out in every direction. The wall guard was quadrupled and messenger birds sent to the three border cities to call their garrisons and be on full alert. Double the usual blackstripes were accompanying Tain everywhere he went and every Councilor had been allocated additional protection. If we felt once again like a city at war it was because we were, even if we still didn’t understand with whom we were at war.

  On the other hand, perhaps because of our history, the city fell easily into organizing around the disaster. Come morning the rescue and cleanup crews found renewed energy along with the lightness of the sky, clearing rubble and searching for survivors we might have been unable to get out during the dark. Manor staff and a number of city eatery proprietors had been making hot food for the volunteers, and people unable to shift rubble were helping with less physically onerous tasks such as running food to the various work crews.

  Dee and Kalina were unloading trays of buns and meat on skewers onto a hastily assembled bench in the arena. “Have they found anyone yet?” I heard Dija ask. “I was thinking there’d be a chance, wouldn’t there, that some people could have been knocked out or something, so they couldn’t cry for help, or maybe we couldn’t hear them?” Tain and I sat together on overturned buckets beside the table. We had just finished combing a section with a group of volunteers and found nothing but stray body parts, but neither of us felt inclined to share that with my niece. Erel had been beside us all morning and his young face had taken on a terrible haunted look I’d no desire to see on hers. Tain closed his eyes and tipped his head back, breathing heavily, and I used the wet cloth they’d laid out to clean my filthy hands and face, stuck with sweat and dust and ash and fortunes knew what else. Normally it would have bothered me more to be so dirty but I seemed to have exhausted my capacity to feel anything, even the usual obsessions and anxieties. “Or maybe the way the structure fell there’d be parts covered up but with gaps, so the people under weren’t crushed.” Dija’s response to trauma and stress was apparently a very vocal one; I wasn’t sure she’d stopped talking for more than a few minutes since I’d woken.

  “There’s definitely a chance,” Kalina told her. “Let’s get the crews something to eat though, they must be hungry.”

  I’d sent her home for a few hours’ sleep, and though dark circles still made her eyes look bruised, she no longer seemed at risk of falling over. While people cleaned up and ate, she jerked her head to the side and Tain and I followed to the outskirts of the group, looking around warily to see if we were being observed. Other than Tain’s ever-alert blackstripes, who followed at a respectful distance, no one seemed to have the energy to pay us attention. “What’s up?”

  “I had a look at his book.”

  No need to wonder whose book she meant. We’d checked it briefly after they’d taken him away, and been unable to make immediate sense of it. Kalina had thought it might be a book of fables or some kind of religious text, and wondered whether it was a Darfri artifact, despite the man not being obviously Darfri. “What did you find?” I didn’t bother to point out that she’d been supposed to be resting, not reading.

  “More questions than answers.” She glanced around, slipped it out of a pocket, and showed us. “I’m not even sure it’s quite in Sjon. There are definitely Sjon words, but the lettering is weird, like the printer got a bit scrambled or something, look.” She was right; though I could mostly read the words it was like trying to read something written by a child with unpredictable and unreliable spelling, and left-handed by a right-hander. I flicked through the pages, seeing the same issues again and again. Words that didn’t make sense among ones that did. Spelling errors, misshapen letters. Awkward, ungrammatical sentence structures.

  “If t
his was a Talafan book I’d say it was a non-standard dialect. Regional variations in language happen, especially in big places like the Empire. But Sjona isn’t big enough, and we had centralized education for a hundred years. These differences are too extreme to have just appeared in the last few decades.” She sounded both frustrated and intellectually curious.

  “There are plenty of cultural differences between the cities and the countryside,” Tain pointed out. “Maybe there’s some remote villages with local dialects or something. Or a population near our border that’s adopted some of our language.”

  “Or it could be a code?” I suggested.

  “Not a very good one, if so,” Kalina muttered. “I can read most of it.”

  I checked around quickly; still, everyone was too involved in the rescue attempts to pay us any heed. “And what’s it about?”

  “From what I could make out? It’s kind of … a book of stories, moral lessons. Rules for behavior. There are all these references to some kind of authority figure, or something.” She flicked through a few pages until she found what she was looking for: a word made up of symbols I did not know. “My best guess is what I said yesterday. I think it might be a religious text. Rules from, I don’t know, a god? This could be the name of a god.”

  “Or a Speaker, or spirit?”

  She gave me a searching look. “Have you spoken to Hadrea yet?”

  I shook my head. She’d been sent for observation to the main hospital and I’d had word she was in an exhausted sleep. “The physics said it’d be best to let her wake up on her own terms.”

  “Do you think she’ll understand this?” Tain asked.

  “Honestly? No.” Kalina flipped through the book again, this time in obvious exasperation. “This isn’t Darfri. It’s not like any religion I’ve ever heard of. If these are real rules for life, they’re utter nonsense. What foods you can eat when, and what colors can be worn on what day, and a whole elaborate set of rules about tending to—this thing? This word. Which I think might be some kind of sacred animal, and these are the rituals for breeding and killing it, but there’s no picture, so the fortunes know what kind. It makes me think they’re an animal bred according to some kind of ritualistic method.”

  My first impulse was that it sounded crazy, but then, we had been raised to dismiss religion as a childish or old-fashioned concept, our city far too enlightened for such nonsense. That worldview had come crashing down two years ago but I couldn’t erase decades of habits in my thinking. I had simply not spent much time learning about the religions of the world or even of my own region, so was poorly placed to try to identify this one by its similarities to any others.

  “But none of that makes any sense if it’s Sjon, does it? Could it be, I don’t know, a book from another language someone’s tried to translate to Sjon, badly?”

  “Maybe.” She folded her hands around the book, biting her lip. “Should we be handing this in to the determination council, or Chen? This is important evidence about who he is and where he’s from. If he doesn’t talk, it might be our best way of working out who he is.”

  I hesitated, glancing at Tain. He shrugged. “The more people who look at it, the more likely we can find someone able to read it and tell us what it is. Like you say, Lini, Sjona isn’t a huge country. If this is a dialect or regional variation or something, surely there’s someone here in the city who’d know it.”

  But I couldn’t help thinking about the information Merenda had died trying to deliver us. Someone in the Manor, someone close enough to Tain to have known his movements that night, was passing instructions or information or both to other enemies. Right now, the only people who knew we had it were the assassin himself and the three of us. If there was any head start to be gained, I was loath to surrender it. “You’re the Chancellor, it’s your call. But if it were up to me … I don’t know. I’d say let’s hang on to it for just a bit. Just until we can figure something out about it, or until we know who we can actually trust.”

  Tain looked faintly sick, and I almost regretted mentioning it. Delivering the news to him last night that there was another traitor in the house, one close to him, had been a grim and demoralizing task, not least of which because whoever it was had not just been involved in the explosions but had also been the direct cause of Merenda’s death. My friend hadn’t taken it well. Worse still, he’d not been able to make any more sense of the note than we had; so much for my hope he might recognize the handwriting. But he wiped a tired hand over his forehead and sighed. “All right. But if we can’t figure this out within a day or two, we give it to Budua.”

  I nodded. A few days’ head start, at least. That was something. Just a few days to unravel a conspiracy years in the making.

  “Auntie Kalina? We’re out of this lot,” Dee was calling, and Kalina glanced back over her shoulder.

  “I’d better go,” she said.

  Tain nodded. “Us, too. Our group’s done eating.” He rolled his shoulders and stretched out his arms with another sigh. It wasn’t worth telling him he needed to rest, too. While there was still any possibility of getting someone out alive, the Chancellor would be here with the rescuers.

  “Talk more later.” Kalina squeezed my hand and looked at me shrewdly. “Are you going to see Chen now?”

  She knew me too well. Whatever she’d told Dee, the chances of finding people alive were rapidly diminishing, and there were plenty of volunteers. “You go on,” I told Tain. “I want to see if she’s gotten anything out of the Hands or our mysterious friend.”

  “Be careful,” Kalina said, and I managed a twitch of the mouth that might have passed for a grin.

  “Always.”

  The Guardhouse was adjacent to the Warriors’ Guildhall and training grounds. It was quieter than usual, presumably because most of the Guards were out either on patrols or assisting with the cleanup. Chen had clearly not slept. Her face looked creased and her eyes red. She moved more gingerly than usual on her false leg, and snapped at a passing colleague who bumped her.

  “Any news on our assassin?” I asked her bluntly, sensing she was in the mood to get right to the point.

  Chen sank back into her chair and looked at me with an expression both tired and wary. “Ah, yes, this assassin you identified and caught.”

  “He’s the key,” I said, unable to tamp the excitement in my voice. “He’s not a Hand. He’s something different. You might not get anything out of those other two because they’re acting on local orders, but that one’s different. I was thinking, if he’s a hired assassin we might be able to make a deal, or—”

  “I won’t be getting anything out of those other two, no,” Chen interrupted, without a change in tone. She stacked the notepad she held onto a pile on the desk with excessive force. “Because with everything going on last night, the Guards who brought your man in housed him with the two you caught earlier. The ones who lit the devices. And then my people left them there to return to helping at the arena, because we kept a bare-minimum staff on at the Guardhouse last night, for obvious reasons.”

  A dark shroud settled over my enthusiasm. “And…”

  “And when someone checked on them next, your assassin had snapped both their necks.”

  “He what?”

  “He murdered them, Credo. Then he made a pretty good attempt on the door. I don’t know what in all the hells that creature is, but if we’d given him another hour he’d probably have had it down.”

  I blinked. “Chen, I—I told the Guards to be careful. He’s a killer. He’s been poisoning people, trying to set me up. He killed Bradomir—”

  “Funny, that I should be the Captain of the Order Guards but only now be learning about a murderer roaming our streets,” she said. I’d never seen her face quite so set, and realized I’d started pacing back and forth in front of her desk without even noticing. I had the sudden and frantic sensation of control being dragged from me, like I’d been caught in a strong current in the river.

  “That
’s not quite fair,” I mumbled. “I’ve been telling the blackstripes and the Council and anyone who’d listen that there was an assassin after Tain for months.”

  “But he doesn’t seem to have been after the Chancellor.” She shoved a stack of papers at me, and the top one fluttered almost off the desk. I snatched it up and read a list of names. My throat felt dry, so dry I could barely swallow. “That’s a lot of Lekas, wouldn’t you say? Credola Karista provided me with that list of the family members she lost either at the arena explosion or the hospital area afterward, and she’s not been the only one. I’ve been quite popular this morning. I’d say I’ve had more high-ranked visitors since the sun came up than I’ve had all year.”

  The rising wave lifted my legs from the ground, carried me out of my own control. I couldn’t get my footing. It felt like my body was a separate thing, a difficult, prickly thing that gave me nothing but trouble. I let the disconnect happen. Honor-down, I was so tired of being blamed. I was so tired of everything. “I caught him poisoning people and I stopped him.”

  Chen watched me moving back and forth, back and forth. “People are asking questions,” she said quietly. “About how a pampered nobleman with barely more martial training than the local baker was able to capture and incapacitate an assassin. A man who, only an hour later, murdered his two cellmates with his bare hands, apparently for sport.”