Hollow Empire

by Sam Hawke

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I demanded of Il-Toro. My muscles were shaking.

  The administrator, who had been nodding along, crossed his arms over his chest and raised his chin. “I forgot about the boy. It was ten years ago, I wasn’t administrator at the time—”

  “Eight,” the woman corrected him again, “’less you think I don’t know my own children’s ages, Toro esImudush.”

  “—and besides, there was never any proof it had anything to do with the gas. It was only speculation because he would not speak and say where he came from. They found him a week or so later, out on the road south, not anywhere near the blast site. Oh, yes, at first there was some speculation that his guardian had been killed by one of the blasts, but they never found any evidence of that, and there would have been evidence! There was no body, no animals or packs or anything to back it up. I think everyone concluded in the end that he had been lost from somewhere else and wandered over here. It was only coincidence it was a similar time to the blasts.”

  “Thin enough he was, and hungry, too,” the first man said. “Could have been wandering for a while. He couldn’t tell us, poor little thing.”

  “Jovan? Jovan, we are in a hurry.”

  I became aware that Hadrea was looking at me, and that I was pacing, my legs carrying me back and forth, back and forth, without me even noticing, as my mind made the connections. I was mumbling, swearing, under my breath without being aware of it. “How old was the boy? What happened to him?” I forced myself to ask, but I already knew the answer, because I had finally remembered why I knew the name of the village, why the story of the Imudush disaster had been relevant, with a personal connection.

  “Well, we couldn’t say for sure, could we, on account of him not talking,” the woman said. “But I’d say seven or eight. Only a wee lad. And, why, it was the scribe who found him who took him in in the end.” My heart plunged like it had been caught up in an icy waterfall all the way to my feet. “Such a nice fellow. He’d come up to report on the updates on the site and found the little fellow on the way. He felt so sorry for the boy and we still hadn’t any idea where he’d come from so when the scribe finished writing up his report, like, he ended up taking the lad home with him. Said he was going to use his connections in the Guild to see if he could trace the mother, but it was obvious he’d taken a real shine to the poor lost thing, and I heard later he’d just inked in the boy to his family instead. I do hope he ended up all right.”

  A good-news story, a heartwarming tale of perseverance. How a child with such a strange and tragic past had made himself invaluable, first to a family, then to a Guild, then to a Chancellor. “He ended up all right,” I muttered. “He ended up all the way to the Manor.”

  And I wanted to scream and rage and tear a hole in the universe to bring myself home in an instant, because that was still where he was, right now, a constant and trusted presence beside my best friend, all the way back in Silasta.

  INCIDENT: Poisoning of Theater-Guilder Macea Peralajo

  POISON: Feverhead

  INCIDENT NOTES: Intensely erratic and confused behavior of Theater-Guilder during production of The Adventures of Sunch the Golden Pen led to rumors about her suitability for the position. Physics treated Macea after collapse during opening night and suspect significant doses of feverhead; Theater-Guilder had been visiting private gaming room using atmospheric smokes. Order Guards visited gaming room, removed toxic substances, and fined operators. Theater-Guilder stepped down from position and retired to West Dortal with family. Note: follow up. Last election was hotly contested and there was significant controversy about listed plays this summer. Not convinced this was accidental.

  (from proofing notes of Credola Dia Oromani)

  24

  Kalina

  I burst into the Manor, causing Argo to stand abruptly at his desk and crack his knees. Scowling, he adjusted his spectacles with one hand and rubbed his knee with the other. “Excuse me, Credola Kalina, but this is hardly—”

  “We need Tain right away,” I said. I’d been too agitated to talk to Abae on the way up here, and she was visibly confused and terrified, but the Council and Tain needed to hear from her and I didn’t want to leave her behind anyway.

  Just in case, a tiny, hard voice whispered. Just in case she tells someone else what we know. I knew now who was coming for us, who’d always been coming for us, but they had had help. A foreign woman, supplying drugs and running the Hands on our enemy’s behalf. A foreign woman with money and connections and who must be able to speak Sjon and understand our culture. Not Abae, I told myself, but nor would I let her out of my sight.

  “I’ll explain it all to the Council, and you’ll understand then,” I had told her, and now I told Argo the same thing.

  “There is no time for me to go through it with you. Right now, Argo, I literally do not care what he’s doing. Honor-down, I don’t care if he’s in the middle of a shit.”

  “Credola!” A deeply shocked gasp at my crudity, such a visible display of emotion that I wished Jov were here to see it, given his ongoing battles to generate reactions out of the doorkeep.

  “I need to see him immediately, Argo. I know who’s attacking us.”

  He blinked, then rang a bell. A servant appeared at his left. “The Chancellor is in the elder room with the Warrior-Guilder. Please ask him to meet Credola Kalina in his study right away.”

  “Better make it the Council chamber,” I said. “And bring Moest. I’ll need urgent messengers to every other Councilor to get here right away as well.” I paused, considering. “And the captains of the Order Guards and the blackstripes. Oh, and when they get Budua, tell her to bring in Vesko from the diplomatic office, and the best historian she can find.”

  “Anything else, Credola?” He had never sounded so tart with me before, but I had no time to soften anything.

  “I suppose An-Ostada, too. That’ll do for now.”

  I let him take Abae’s details down in his tome, firing his disapproving over-the-top-of-the-spectacles look at me, shifting my weight and trying to think through all the implications of what Abae had told me. “The Council chamber, then, Credola,” he said, and directed a servant to lead me there.

  Tain came hurrying in before I’d even managed to take a seat, and for a moment panic seized my heart at the sight of him. His face was so thin it seemed skeletal, and his skin was entirely the wrong color. But when he gripped my hands with his, his voice was its usual comforting weight. “What’s happened?” Behind him, Erel followed, eyes wide, clutching his notebook as usual, and Moest behind him, his face grave.

  “I know who they are,” I said without preamble. “Tain, I know who’s been after us this whole time.” I swallowed, and took a breath. “Tain, it’s Crede.”

  “Who?” He blinked at me, gave a kind of half laugh, half snort. “Crede? What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” I said, trying to keep my voice level but failing. “That it’s Crede that’s been financing and running this whole show. It was always them. The rebellion, Aven, the drugs, the Hands. It’s them, it’s all them. Led, I would guess, by a Prince, and fueled by religious fanaticism.”

  A silence followed my pronouncement. “Credola Kalina,” the Warrior-Guilder said gently, placatingly, “you are talking about the ancient empire from where our ancestors fled, hundreds of years ago? That Crede?”

  “Some of our ancestors, yes,” I said, meeting Tain’s increasingly horrified gaze. “And some of us still bear refugee names. We were looking for some reason why three of the Families were getting struck at more consistently than the others? I think that’s why.” Oromani. Iliri. Leka. Of the very first founding council of Sjona, the earliest government of the freshly unified country, only three of the Councilors had been Credian refugees.

  I slapped the book down on the table in front of them. “I think this is a Credian religious text. It looks like Sjon because the refugees who came here brought their written language. But i
t’s been hundreds of years since then and the languages have moved apart, that’s why they don’t look exactly the same anymore. And that’s why the assassin they sent to do their dirty work here had tattoos and a book that looked like Sjon, but couldn’t speak it! Don’t you see? It fits! Remember what he called me? Thief, traitor? How can you be a traitor if you’ve never had some allegiance in common?”

  Other Councilors were arriving now, in various states of urgency, muttering among themselves as they tried to follow along with what we were saying. “We all know the story,” I said. “A bunch of desperate refugees, scientists and writers and artists and philosophers, suffering under a brutal and tyrannical religious regime in the old Credian Empire, staged a daring escape and fled from their oppressors across the Howling Plains. They found welcome and shelter and shared values with the ancient and nomadic culture already here, and together all our people built a new unified country, free from the oppression the refugees had faced. Sounds familiar? We hear it in schools, don’t we? The founding principles of our country were those shared values, and we are all here descended from a mix of bloodlines, whatever our family names are. That was how it was meant to be. No religious regimes dictating how people lived or loved. A culture celebrating learning and arts and personal freedom. Sjona was meant to be a beacon for the rest of the world.”

  “Except it was not,” Il-Yoro pointed out roughly. “As everyone in this room well knows.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” I agreed. “But that’s our shared story, the one we tell, isn’t it? The story of the Credian refugees and the culture that welcomed and incorporated them? That’s our vision of Sjona.”

  There were cautious nods and mutterings of agreement around the room. I took another shaky breath. Since I had put this together I’d had the sensation of being on moving ground, like everything could shift out beneath us again, the way it had when we’d started to uncover the truth of what our Council had done and who we’d hurt before. “But do any of you know any more than that? Like Il-Yoro says, we have our rosy tales of our Bright City and we all know how manipulated they turned out to be. What do we really know about Crede? The refugees didn’t just flee an empire for a better life. They fled across the most desperate and dangerous place on the continent, and then they helped create a new society with military defenses wildly out of proportion with the dangers from any of the surrounding civilizations. The early Sjons weren’t afraid of the Doranite tribes, or the ever-shifting western clans, or even the growing empire to the north. We’d been living here in relative peace for generations. So the new society didn’t decide to fortify Silasta to withstand a siege from any of their neighbors. They built it this way because whatever the circumstances in which the refugees fled Crede, they expected to be followed one day, and their countrymen were sufficiently convinced of that risk to agree to it.

  “But what we don’t know is why they were so frightened. Less than a hundred refugees survived the trip here. Why would a great and powerful empire care about a handful of artists and scientists who weren’t valued by their society anyway?”

  I turned to Budua and the historian she had brought with her. “Scribe-Guilder, you were a scholar first. Tell me, why aren’t there books about Crede in any of our library collections? We know less about this evil empire than the villains in a children’s story. Where are the accounts of the daring escape written by the people who lived it? How did they get a few score people across the Howling Plains, when not so much as a kitsa or a bindie can survive out in those conditions? Three of the people who led that party ended up on the very first Council. Where are their stories? Why don’t we know who they were, except in the vaguest possible terms?”

  Budua looked thoughtful, her companion intensely uncomfortable. She shifted in her chair, twisted a bracelet around and around her wrist. She cleared her throat. “Er. Well. It was apparent from what we learned two years ago our ancestors were sometimes … er … reluctant to set things down in writing. They wanted a fresh start, it was always assumed. They did not devote time or energy to recording much detail about the historical cultures of the past, whether in this land or the one some of them had come from. It is a shortcoming in our early records, true.”

  “A shortcoming that was almost our downfall before, and which might still be,” Tain said. “Credo Jovan’s stood before all of us dozens of times over the past two years and told us how all the evidence points to someone incredibly well financed with a deep and personal grudge against this country. If that someone is the Credians, then I think we’re missing a critical part of the story, don’t you?”

  “You think Crede is seeking some kind of revenge?” Moest looked less condescending now. His brows were drawn in and he was staring at me like he was contemplating a particularly difficult puzzle. “I’ve always understood our ancestors were fleeing oppression and terror. That is the story, like you say. Even if the regime there at the time was angry they fled, that was generations ago. All those people are long dead, and their children, and theirs. What possible interest would remain?”

  “That’s the piece of the story we’re missing, I think,” I said heavily. “I don’t think any of this makes sense if the refugees just ran. Something else happened. There were broader circumstances, and whatever they were, the people who lived them never wanted to speak about them again, or commit them to our histories.” I looked down at the book on the table, remembered the fervor in the assassin’s eyes, the intensity of his hatred for me, a stranger. “From what I can understand, this book details a culture and religion built around absolute obedience in exchange for eventual ‘ascension,’ and if this is how they live in Crede, it’s every bit as awful as an evil empire from a story. Fleeing from it makes absolute sense. But what if they did more than flee? What if they did something first?”

  The silence grew deeper, more frightening, more complex as shock and confusion turned, like a contagion spreading around the room, to something more like understanding.

  “Like what?” Karista had been still and uncharacteristically silent this whole time, blending into the background, but she spoke now, and none of her usual arrogance and Leka confidence were there now. She sounded small, alone, and frightened.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. Thief, he called me. Traitor. Whatever they did, it had religious significance, enough to fuel hatred lasting generations. Stole something? Destroyed something? Committed some act of blasphemy so unforgivable that the empire devoted itself to revenge?”

  “You said yourself this is an evil empire,” Sjistevo said. “Let’s not start blaming our founding families for some mysterious atrocities when the other side is patently—”

  “It’s not about blame,” I said. “It’s about understanding what our enemies want.”

  “They want our destruction! Not every war needs to be secretly our fault, you know!”

  “Honor-down, Sjistevo,” Eliska said furiously. “I don’t think anyone in the room is looking to sympathize with the people trying to murder us all. But not knowing why the other side is doing what they’re doing doesn’t help us, it helps them!”

  Tain was chewing his lip. “There’s more than one piece missing, I reckon,” he muttered. “Maybe the refugees did do something terrible in their escape, something that soured the story so they didn’t want to tell it. Or maybe it was terrible by Credian religious standards but not by ours, but their escape was so traumatic they couldn’t bear to remember it. We all lived through a civil war and more than one terrible disaster. I think we can understand there are some things too painful to want to relive.”

  Nods around the room at that, and a sudden simmering down of the tension among us. The bonds of shared trauma were strong, after all. “But what I’m wondering,” he continued, “is why now. If this grudge relates to something done generations ago, why didn’t they come for us then? What’s changed?”

  Lazar slapped the table. “Yes, yes, Honored Chancellor, Credola Kalina, this is all very fascinating, but isn’
t that the key point? Crede couldn’t come after the refugees because they fled over the Howling Plains! And, well, that old empire is on the other side of the Howling Plains! No one can cross them. People have tried! So where did they come from?”

  “The refugees got here in the first place,” I said. “So it’s possible, isn’t it? And it might have taken a long time, but eventually some Credians have made their way out, too. Maybe it took them this long to find where the refugees went and where their descendants still live. Maybe it just took them this long to find another way to this part of the continent, not across the Howling Plains, but via the north, somehow. Maybe by some incredible sea voyage, I don’t know. What we do know for sure is that some of them, with the same tattoos the assassin had, arrived in Izruitn ten years ago.”

  “And how do we know that?”

  Abae cleared her throat politely, but widened her eyes in alarm when everyone swiveled to look at her, some with confusion, others with mild hostility. A short time ago people, including me, were speculating about her country’s role in all this, after all. “I met some of them there,” she said, her voice small. “They were traders, newly arrived, from the ‘far east.’ I mistook them for your people but they did not understand me when I spoke to them in your language. Yet they had what seemed to be Sjon words on their arms.” She shrugged and spread her hands. “At the time, I thought nothing of it. The world is a vast place.”

  “The reports all concluded the rebellion plan started about that long ago,” said Moest, leaning forward, hand on chin, staring at Abae. “Suppose our Perest-Avani friend here witnessed an early party of Credians who had made it to this part of the continent.”

  Javesto nodded, catching on. “They could have brought new trade goods, different technologies, and built wealth quickly. What about that gemstone, aragite? All the rage for the last five years but the mine locations are a secret. My contacts say it’s controlled by a single company in Izruitn and it’s devilishly hard to get a meeting.”