Hollow Empire

by Sam Hawke

  “Then what do we do?”

  “We take your guards out, and then we join the fight,” Hadrea said simply.

  * * *

  We dragged the drugged, unconscious men and women out of the sewers, puffing and grunting and avoiding looking at one another. They don’t tell you, I thought, in the stories of adventures and dramatic battles and magic, that you’ll hurt your back dragging men through water and shit.…

  But that mundane frustration was quickly replaced by fear, deep in the bowels, as we helped one another to our feet and then looked around in horrified realization.

  The jolt we’d felt must have been the gate or the wall, because the noises of distant battle hadn’t been from outside the city. The Prince was already here.

  The clouds had finally cleared and in the bright hard moonlight the Prince’s force came like a tide, crumpling buildings as easily as they had torn up the soil. Stone, garden, people, all were flung aside with equal force, indifferent to weight or composition.

  “They have taken the power of many spirits,” Hadrea said quietly. “I do not know how we will stand against it.”

  We fell in with the crowds gathering to watch their approach; a terrible blanket of hopelessness seemed to fall with it. There was no order, no organization, no sign of Moest or any of our other leaders. I remembered, dimly, though it seemed laughable now, that Tain and I were supposed to be among those leaders. But what was the point, in the face of this?

  The Prince led the charge, flanked by a formation of women behind him, spread out in wings. I was struck by how different they were from Hadrea or An-Ostada. A ragtag group of all ages, they walked with their heads slumped and their shoulders rolled, feet dragging behind. Even from the other side of the lake I found myself trying to identify them. Surely that small figure must be Pemu, and the older woman behind the Prince must be Jesta. He had not needed long, it seemed, to bend them all to his command. Were they drugged, or had destroying the spirits destroyed their own sense of self?

  I looked at Kalina. “What Erel said about our families…”

  She didn’t return my gaze. “He called them Holy Vessels. I thought they were some kind of animal, but … now I think they must have been the women who could use fresken.”

  All the air in my chest seemed to have been pressed out. “And our ancestors poisoned them?”

  “Not even the Oromani diaries talk about Crede. Maybe they were so ashamed of what they did that they never could talk about it.” She gestured bitterly to the approaching wave. “Their Empire’s been breeding hatred for us into its children for generations.”

  “I offered you a choice!” The Prince’s voice boomed, mysteriously magnified to ring out over the lake and the gathered people, army and civilian alike. A beautiful voice, a terrible voice. “I am benevolent, I said. I gave you the chance to keep your city, to serve me as part of God’s great empire. All I asked was the delivery of a few pathetic lives, remnants of a past that should shame you. Yet you did not deliver. You breached the parley terms. You are betrayers, still. God is good, but He is proud, too, and when you reject my offer you reject His glory! So I think I must show you, once more, a display of my strength, and you will cower and you will beg for my forgiveness and my mercy before the end!”

  “Not today!” an equally booming voice cried, and there on the shores of the lake An-Ostada emerged, flanked by the Speakers and the trainees, all in full Darfri traditional wear, their bodies painted. Smaller figures, children on drums, beat the rhythm while the Speakers behind her started a chant. They all seemed to crackle with power. A ragged cheer started up, a cheer that gained momentum, that grew like a living thing, building, filling my chest and my heart. Despite everything, we would stand together, all of us, in the face of this. I felt the pull of it, the drag of my emotions, my head caught up in a rushing current, but it was a good feeling, an awe-inspiring feeling. We were honoring the Os-Woorin, and the Os-Woorin, as it had once raged against us, would rage now against this Prince.

  It started to rise. I felt it, and so did Hadrea beside me; caught up in the ecstasy and the majesty of its familiar form, a form that sang to my very soul, I barely registered that Kalina and Tain were not running toward the lake with us; why would anyone resist?

  Os-Woorin rose from the lake, taking immense, humanlike form, massive and glistening in the moonlight, accepting our offerings and offering its in turn, and I realized I was singing with An-Ostada’s song, the spirit’s song, singing and crying and pouring everything of myself into that beautiful current. This time the spirit accepted us, would fight for us, I could feel it. Grateful tears wet my cheeks and Hadrea squeezed my hand, her face turned up in joy.

  The Prince and his Speakers approached the lake, and like last time, I felt the crackle and clash of two great powers meeting, two great forces battling for dominance. I raised my voice louder in song, clutched at Hadrea’s hand. We were connected, we were all connected, and our city and our spirits were one, and we would push back this intruder.

  And then, like a shift in sandy ground beneath me, something changed.

  I was still pulled, still hooked like a fish on a line, but the current had changed, and now I was swept in the undertow, and I was not singing anymore. The ecstasy, the completeness sharpened, soured, and suddenly it was a drain, not a connection; we were being drained away into something else. Not Os-Woorin.

  Into the Prince.

  The women behind him sank to their knees, collapsing face-first. I could sense the power that flowed, like the last water in a basin, away from their limp forms and into the Prince’s luminous one.

  He was the vessel now, and the tiny remaining conscious part of my brain understood what was happening, but I might as well have been a toddler railing against his mother’s legs as she stepped through the door.

  I can’t deal with him anymore, Etan. It’s too much. Why does he have to be like this? It’s too much! And I was small and abandoned and knew it was because of me that she left.…

  And she was dead, my mother was dead now, our estate home destroyed, and that grief and the gulf between us roiled and spiked, and then that too was gone, into the night, into the Prince.

  It was he who crackled with power now, and he stepped easily toward An-Ostada and the Speakers. Os-Woorin, instead of growing and resisting, was punctured and diminished, sinking and losing form until he was nothing but ripples in the dark surface of the lake.

  “Jov!” A tiny cry, as if from far away, but insistent. Voices I knew. Voices I loved. “Jov!”

  The Prince advanced further, and that small stubborn fragment in me clung to Tain and Kalina’s voices. “Fight,” I whispered. “Break loose and fight!”

  And I heard an echoed whisper next to me, clinging to me, buoying me. Hadrea’s hand tightened around mine. “Fight!”

  We found something, some anchor, in our shared presence, and together we yanked and all of a sudden we were free, and crumpling to the ground. I blinked, dazed, my gaze finding the line of Speakers. I willed them to resist.

  The Prince lifted a hand. Something gathered around it, some crackling, thickening air. He drew it lazily in a horizontal line, and as if he wielded an invisible saw spanning the width of the lake, he casually tore the Speakers in half, one at a time. They fell apart like paper dolls, their insides exposed, their torsos falling off their hips and tumbling into unrecognizable meat on the shore of the lake. Hadrea made a noise like she’d been trodden on; a breathy grunt of agony.

  An-Ostada he tore last, and even from this distance, and through the vomit filling my mouth and the blackening edges of my vision, I saw his pleasure in skewering her middle with his weapon of nothing, so that unlike her brethren she knew the ultimate terror and agony of a slow death. She fell too, in the end, and then the thickening air was gone, and there was only the Prince, smiling benignly.

  “Bow down before your Emperor, your God,” he said, and he laughed, and the laugh was knives in my ears and blood in my mouth.
>
  * * *

  “Get up, you idiot.” Among the swirling disaster of my thoughts his voice penetrated.

  “Tain?” I blinked.

  Tain and Kalina were hauling us to our feet. All around people lay flopped on the grass, unconscious or worse. The Prince walked across the very surface of the lake as if it were a road designed solely for him. He paid no heed to the bodies strewn around him, but strolled off the lake and past us, east into the upper city, his gaze turned up toward Solemn Peak.

  Something moved behind the top line of buildings in the city, some rippling and powerful force bending the bright moonlight, and we could only stand, open-mouthed, as black cracks splintered and shot across the face of the mountain.

  The Prince continued up the hill, his attention on the mountain. The power that had infused him seemed to leach away; the ground no longer trembled beneath his steps, buildings did not crumble. Whatever the connection he had forced on us, it was broken. He was a man again.

  But. “What’s he doing?” I said aloud.

  Hadrea stared after him. “I think I know.” She looked very grave, and beautiful in the moonlight.

  “Can you do something?”

  Hadrea looked at me for a moment, oddly wistful, but her eyes burned fever-bright. She kissed me, a chaste kiss on the forehead, like a mother to a child.

  “Please remember,” she said. “Whatever else. I was always on your team, Jovan.”

  And she closed her eyes, and sank to the ground, and through some remembered connection, no firmer than the impression of her lips on my forehead, I had the fleeting sensation of her reaching out, away, purposeful and swift.

  Now that the Prince had turned his attention from us, people were coming back to themselves groggily. Moest and a group of uniformed soldiers and armed civilians swept over Trickster’s Bridge and past us.

  “He’s just one man!” the Warrior-Guilder shouted. “He doesn’t have a dozen eyes anymore. No matter how powerful, we can take him! Join me! Together!”

  “Come on,” Tain cried, and he pulled me along. “If this is going to be the end of our city we aren’t facing it on the ground, bowing down to any Prince.”

  I pulled my arm loose. “Hadrea,” I said. She was vulnerable in this state, and I could not abandon her to it. Tain nodded in understanding, flashed me a grin, and raced after Moest. Kalina took my hand and we watched the charge. For a moment it seemed our forces would catch the Prince, for he had settled in the middle of a street in the same pose as Hadrea, apparently relaxed and oblivious to, or unconcerned with, the approaching Silastians. But as Moest’s charge narrowed into the bottleneck of the street, and before the first person could reach the Prince, figures melted out of houses, buildings, shadows, armed figures in masks, protecting the street from the high-ground position. The Prince’s Hands. At their rear, standing protectively over the Prince, was the black-clad figure of the Wraith.

  Tain, blocked by the thick of bodies, led a splinter group to the side. “This way!” I heard him cry, and half a dozen others broke off to follow him up an alternate route. They re-emerged on a parallel street, and then Tain was climbing the side of the building, clambering up to the roof, and others were following him. You clever, idiotic bastard, I thought, torn with admiration and despair at his bravery.

  Kalina shook on my arm, pointing. “Look!”

  “Honor-down,” I whispered.

  Now we knew what the Prince had been doing.

  A great mountain slide, a huge arrow of crumbling white rock, was dropping like a foamy breaking wave from the slopes of Solemn Peak down toward the city, too slow and deliberate for a natural slide. Kalina buried her face in my shoulder with a cry of disbelief as it plunged into the distant shape of the Manor, and ate it effortlessly.

  As it hit the Avenue it split into two parts, sliding down each side of the sweeping loop street on which all the Family apartments lay, and it crashed into those too, an insatiable monster. Kalina stared at the passage of the right-hand fork. “Jov,” she croaked, “it’s going to hit the jail!”

  Dee.

  “Hadrea!” I cried, urgent, but she was already rising, and something had changed. I felt no pull of connection, no thickening of the air, none of the sensations I associated with fresken. And yet. She looked at me, her eyes black and old and swirling with something alien. I quavered.

  “Do something,” I pleaded.

  Hadrea pivoted to face the mountain, raising her hands like she was lifting a child, and the rockslides simply … stopped.

  Instantly, the Prince shot to his feet, and across all the fighting he sought us out with his furious gaze. The Prince crouched, then exploded into the air like a bird taking flight. In one leap, buoyed by the air itself, he cleared the distance between us and landed in front of Hadrea.

  The soldiers at the rear pivoted and rushed toward the Prince, but bounced back as if they’d struck an invisible membrane. Kalina tested the barrier with a stick; it pressed into nothing and would go no farther.

  The Prince ignored the efforts to reach him. “Who are you?” he said to Hadrea, his voice resonant with power.

  Hadrea swept her hand and he was flung to the ground as if weightless.

  He bared his teeth and clenched his fists, and the ground beneath him rose like a pillar, lifting him. “I hold the spirit of Solemn Peak inside me,” he hissed. “This is the power of a god! Who are you to challenge me?”

  Without apparent effort, Hadrea swatted him again, and he tumbled into a heap, rocks and soil from his pillar raining down on him. She drew her hands together and the debris drew in around him, caging him, smothering him. The Prince fought back, clawing the cage apart, gasping for breath. He spat dirt, tensed, and air buffeted around him, creating space in his prison. Hadrea, indifferent, expressionless, moved her hands and the rocks closed in.

  “What did you do?” he grunted. He flung his hands out suddenly, abandoning the struggle. For a moment I thought he’d given up, but then far up the hill, a rumble sounded as the rockslides released again. This time they plummeted at unnatural speed, the very mountain sagging, burying buildings in its wake.

  Hadrea, flustered for the first time, stopped both flows, but it cost her concentration on the Prince. Free of his prison, he hurled himself at her. She captured him again in his rocky cage before his clawing hands reached her, but again he seized on her distraction and the rockslides groaned back into motion.

  “Jovan,” she said through gritted teeth. The apparent effortlessness of her work had been an illusion; veins and tendons now stood out on her neck and arms. “I cannot hold them both. I must let one go.”

  I pounded at the barrier surrounding the two of them, but it might as well have been solid glass. We couldn’t protect Hadrea from the Prince if she burnt herself out preventing both rockslides. I started to gesture to the left, because the right-hand fork would devour the jail, where my family sheltered. Then my mouth went dry. I couldn’t get a breath. I traced the trajectory of the left-hand fork and next set of buildings it would flatten, and saw the figures on the roof realizing the same thing, shouting, trying to scamper down, and I had never known fear like I knew in that moment.

  Tain, my best friend, my Chancellor, was in one direction. Dee, my niece, my responsibility, my heart, my child, was in the other.

  A horrible noise came out of my mouth, an animal’s cry, and I couldn’t stop making it. I cried a single instruction to Hadrea, and then, as she gasped in release, the Prince’s resistance disintegrated and the barrier protecting him fell away into nothing beneath my beating fists. He had just time to look up to see me launch.

  I smashed into him with my shoulder, sending him flying and me crashing heavily on top, the remains of his dirt prison exploding around us. I pummeled into his face, pounding it with every bit of my clumsy pent-up fury and impotence and fear. I pummeled him so hard that the wild blood pounding in my head and the horrible sounds of crunching bones—in his face, in my hands—almost drowned out th
e crashing of the rockslide above.

  INCIDENT: Poisoning of Krisover Sjivano / attempted poisoning of Chancellor Jennyon Iliri

  POISON: Unknown Update: suspect potentially “Esto’s revenge” (see p f41), poison unknown at time of entry and evidence not retained, but likely part of broader campaign

  INCIDENT NOTES: Krisover was a blacksmith undertaking several personal projects for Chancellor Jennyon, found dead in home of heart failure (signs of seizure, niece and nephew report victim complained of sore ears before bed). Personalized bottle of Swift Slopes kori discovered in Krisover’s home and recognized as a gift to the Chancellor from foreign musician Esto Ramasta. Speculate Krisover may have stolen kori intended to poison Chancellor during recent meeting? Order Guards and spies set to locate Esto.

  (from proofing notes of Credola Leife Oromani)

  26

  Kalina

  Was it possible to become desensitized to devastation, even on this scale? My limbs, my neck, my head were heavy and sluggish, like I was walking through a thick liquid, but the only internal feeling I could summon was a dull relief. Hadrea had saved us from the worst of it. The Prince had injured many but killed far fewer than initially feared. We had lost the Manor, and all the Families’ homes, and a streak of beautiful historic buildings and streets, but there had been limited fighting and most of the destroyed buildings had already been evacuated.

  Small consolation in the wake of what I’d lost.

  Tain had been on the roof of a building demolished by the slide and doubtless the rocks had swallowed him, too. Even so, I wandered the edges of the wreck in the dark, searching, because if I stopped looking and sat down, I would have to confront what had happened.

  I was truly alone for the first time I could remember in months. A kind of peace came over me as I searched, though I also had the sense of being watched—whether by curious onlookers or even my stalking witch I could not say, and did not much care. It was a full moon. Mosecca could do what she would. If she thought our family had not suffered enough, she had not been paying attention.