Hollow Empire: Episode 1 (Night of Knives)

by John McGuire & J Edward Neill

  “Tell us another one! Tell us another one!” the children chanted. “Please, Murgul! Just one more story!”

  How can I resist? He looked at their smiling faces, so pink and flush with life. A few weeks ago, most of them had been dying. They had come to Tolem’s hospice to finish their suffering in peace, yet all of them had recovered. Luka’s potions had worked unforeseen miracles, curing little Kasia’s rotlung, melting sweet Lys’s tumors away, sparing Jacek from an infected sword wound, and saving eleven others from various horrific maladies. Even Luka had been surprised. Murgul swiped away a tear of joy and tried to remember another story. And nothing surprises Luka.

  “Ahem…” He arched his aching back, the bones in his spine popping. “One more story then. Let me think. I suppose you’d all like something grim. You always do, don’t you?”

  “Yesssssssssss!” the children shouted all at once.

  “I thought so.” He settled onto the curved-back bench. “So where do we begin? Ah yes, the Dead Days. If you had mothers and fathers, they would be angry with me for telling you this, but here we are, just you and me. I’ve told you all how it all ended, so to finish it we’d best go back to the beginning…”

  As the sun set and shadows invaded the rot-roofed enclosure behind the old hospice, he told the children how the Dead Days had begun. The spread of the Lichy had been a dread thing, with whole cities devoured and entire populations destroyed. He meant to spare the children no details, no matter how gruesome, for though they were young, not one among them was soft-stomached. All of them had survived their own personal plagues, and for that he owed them the truth.

  “…it was only a year after the Lichy started that I caught it,” he told them a short while into the tale. “I was fifteen, sturdy as an ox, or so said my pa. We were on our farm an hour’s walk west of Vernam. I’d already seen it turn my sisters inside out. Karenna, Murtha, and Irina, oh how I adored my sisters. They were the stars in my sky, my three pretty moons. But the Lichy didn’t care. It bloated their eyes, turned their bones into porridge, made their fingers fall off, and stole their minds. Father had to burn them in the end, so as not to let the Lichy escape. The fires broke my heart, they did, but pa made me swear I wouldn’t cry. ‘Crying lets the Lichy in,” he’d say, and I believed him. I just wished he’d let me hug them before they died. It’s all I wanted.

  “When the sickness came for me a week later, I tried to hide it. I wanted to believe it couldn’t catch me. I was wrong. I lay in bed one night, and when I got up to make water, I felt my toenails slide right off. I wore three pairs of socks the next day, and pa didn’t see. But the next night, my elbow joints burst and the pox marks striped my face. I hid in the barn and cried my wee heart out, hardly brave for a boy of fifteen. The next morning I went to tell pa. But he was already dead, you see. He’d tried to hide it, same as I. I found him lying in his bed at dawn, pox-riddled from neck to shin, his teeth all fallen out. I was all out of tears by then. He hadn’t let me hug him either. It was too late for goodbyes. The sun shined on his face, and I knew by the next morning it would shine on mine.”

  “But you lived, Murgie,” blurted Lys, youngest of the lot.

  “I did, didn’t I?” he said it as if it still amazed him. “But no one else in Vernam did. After a week, I was a monster. My legs barely worked, same as today, but somehow I crawled to the city. I saw what the Lichy did, and I knew it’d be the same for all the other cities in Vhur. There were fire pits from where they’d burned the bodies. There were some huddled in their houses, whole families who’d died together. Still others had been murdered before they’d even caught it. I saw the remains in gutters, in bathhouses, and even in the street, all cut up by the axes and swords. Worse were the animals and the children. There were puppies, foals, kittens, ravens, lambs, and babies. All of them looked different, but all of them looked the same.”

  The children sat in silence, waiting for more. If they were horrified, they hid it well. See, the truth is best, he reassured himself. Lying to children teaches them nothing, and it’s a sin besides. Best they know what’s real and what’s not.

  “Vernam took the worst of it, or so they say,” he continued. “It was…oh, maybe nineteen years ago, maybe twenty. Best count your blessings none of you were even born yet. By the time the Lichy was done, all the cities except Othis and Eos were hollowed out. I met a few survivors here and there as I wandered, and as far as I know they’re still alive, but everyone else is gone. The Lichy had no mercy. It ate and ate until it ran out of food.”

  “But Murgie,” Lys looked sad, her moonlike eyes watering in the corners, “what if we got the Lichy? Would it eat all of us?”

  A smile broke on his mouth, twisted and deformed, but a smile nonetheless. “Here’s the thing, my little friends; the Lichy is done and gone. I promise you that. It may be there’s a case or ten out on the frontier, but good King Dmitri and his godly friends have shut the plague out of the heartland. Now that you’re all well again, you’ve got a chance to live good, healthy lives. Don’t fret about the Lichy. There’re worse things these days.”

  “Where will we go?” asked Jacek, a lad of twelve nearly murdered by his brother over a half-loaf of bread. “When Luka boots us out, that is.”

  He thought hard on that one. The truth felt fuzzier here. “Well…I…it’s true; Tolem is a ruin. And with everyone on the mend, Luka will want to bring more children in.”

  “Which means we’ll have to leave,” Jacek interjected.

  “Yes, I suppose that’s so. If it were up to me, I’d take you all to the capital. Othis is a grand place, they say. But they’d never let me in, not with the way I look. They’d assume I had the Lichy, and they’d burn me.”

  “So we’re stuck here?” asked Kasia innocently.

  “It may be so.” He slumped. “But Tolem might not be so bad. Not many people get sick here, especially those who come to see Luka. They’ve even started building a second church. Perhaps you could all be servants of God. The priests are always…”

  “But I don’t want to be a Scarred Sister,” Kasia complained. “They scare me!”

  “You can’t be one,” he explained. “You have no scars. And you’re too young and too sweet besides.”

  Jacek made a sound like a whip snapping. “Or we could all be Bloody Monks. We’d chase everyone around with our scourges! Crack, crack, crack!”

  “You don’t want to be one of those either,” he explained. “They beat only themselves, not other people. I once saw a Monk whose whole back was peeling off his bones. And still he flailed himself, screaming about being some vessel for God’s anger. It’s madness, if you ask me. But there’re other ways to serve God. You don’t have to dress in filthy rags or whip yourself raw. You can serve quiet-like. Tolem is on the mend. Join the church, and they’ll feed you and give you a roof, and…”

  Somewhere in Tolem, a bell rang. It was dark now, and the city’s curfew was closing in. Murgul jumped at the noise. He dreaded curfew. I have to leave the children and crawl back to my cave.

  With smiles and giggles, the children fled back inside Luka’s hospice. He watched them go, murmuring each of their names as they walked past. He loved them so, and it hurt to watch them leave. Little Lys went last. She touched his hand, her palm like sunshine on his skin, her eyes twinkling with curiosity. “Why can’t you stay for supper, Murgie?” she asked the same as she had the last three nights.

  “Well…I…” The lump in his throat grew. “If I stayed for supper, my sweet, I couldn’t go home without breaking curfew. Luka doesn’t have room for me to sleep. He needs it for new patients and experiments.”

  “But you could sleep in my room. The floor isn’t too hard. I could give you my pillow.”

  “My sweet Lys.” Her innocence made him smile. “You know I’d love to stay with you children, but it’s not to be, not yet anyway. Luka lets me work and tell my stories, but he’s really afraid of me just like everyone else. He only keeps me around
for good luck, so he says, and because I keep you lot busy.”

  “Well I’m not afraid of you,” Lys declared.

  “And for that, I’ll always love you,” he said. “Now run off. It’s suppertime, and Luka promised soup.”

  Lys skipped away. He watched her vanish into the room past the enclosure, beyond which her friends were gathering for supper. Afterward he sat on his bench and beamed, but when the shadow emerged from the hospice, he stiffened. If anyone in Vhur was near as ugly as he, it had to be Luka, the old alchemist of Tolem. Luka was well past his prime, and the years have been almost as hard on him as on me. Wispy black hair grew in patches from the alchemist’s wrinkled scalp, and his nose looked like a beak, sharp and ready to peck. His mottled, skinny arms resembled a spider’s legs, while the backs of his hands were scarred from experiments gone awry. Murgul cringed when Luka’s shadow fell across him. Let it be a good night, he hoped, not a bad one. Luka is nice sometimes, but terrible just as often. I never know which one to expect.

  “There’s for you, Maggot.” Luka jabbed a loaf of bread into Murgul’s hands and glowered. Though he lorded over Murgul like a thundercloud, the alchemist’s mood seemed less foul than usual. “And tomorrow you’ll be gettin’ your silvers. Now then, see yourself off my porch. If you get another whipping for breaking curfew, I’ll bring someone else in to do your work. You’re pitifully slow as is.”

  “Thu…thu…thank you, Luka,” Murgul stammered as he creaked to his feet. “Are the new children coming tomorrow?”

  “In two nights. And you know what that means.”

  “The cured ones have to leave.”

  “That’s right.” Luka’s lips looked sharp and pitiless. “All of them. My potions are near perfection, you see. In a few months, I’ll have all of Tolem healthy, the villages too. Dmitri will hear of it and send for me. I’ll drown in his silvers, I will. I’ll build me a tower on the side of Black Mountain and forget all about this place, your ugly face especially.”

  Luka’s abuse no longer wounded him. The alchemist’s japes were far less cruel than what the rest of Tolem heaped on him. “So you’ll just leave?” Murgul dared. “What if more children get sick?”

  “They can buy my potions just like everyone else. Luka’s Red for the wounded, Luka’s Brown for the ill, and Luka’s white for…well…you know. In case the you-know-what comes back.”

  “Do you think…?”

  “No,” Luka snapped, “I don’t. Now get off my porch. I can’t have you sleeping out here. You’re a good worker and all, and the children don’t seem to hate you, but you’re harder to look at than a Scarred Sister’s poxy arse. It’s a wonder the guardsmen haven’t slaughtered you just for that.”

  Later that night, as he sulked in his rot-walled shanty and chewed on his bread in the gloom, Murgul considered himself for the thousandth time. He wished he had a shard of mirror and a sliver of moonlight, if only to look at his face. The Maggot, he dwelled on the name Luka often called him. It suits me, doesn’t it? For leaving me alive, the Lichy must’ve hated me above everyone else.

  It was hard to argue with the horrid things people said about him. Of all the creatures in Vhur, he reckoned his disfigurements were foulest, his countenance hardest to look upon. His twisted face was a ruin. His lips rent his chin like an ugly pink gully, and his nose jutted from his face, a craggy grey mountain with an ugly blunt top. His left eye sagged where his cheek should have been, and his right eye was as clouded as chamber pot water. If he could have grown a beard, he would have, anything to cover up the scabrous skin piled like putty upon his skull.

  Fouler still was his body. Hunchbacked, the huge bulbous scars upon his shoulders rolled like hills. His arms and legs, though thick and corded with muscle, looked like cattle’s meat left a week in the sun and ready to slide off the bone. He had neither fingernails nor toenails, and only four teeth stuck in his gums. His every other movement was agony, and sleep most nights was all but impossible. He was stronger than most men could ever hope to be, but utterly lacking in endurance. After a time even the simplest labor wracked his muscles with such pain his only relief was to cry.

  But at least my hands work. He held his thick fingers up to his face, almost able to see them in the dark. Farmer’s hands, these are. Pa would be proud, or maybe not. No. If Pa were here, he’d probably kick me like all the others. That was his way. No room for the weak. No mercy for the sick.

  For the first time in a month, he slept deep enough to dream that night. In his one-roomed, slat-roofed hovel at the end of Tolem’s gloomiest, filthiest alley, he set his head down on the moldering floor and felt his mind fall between the shadows. He was healthy in his dream, and as handsome as he used to be. He ran beside the stallions on his father’s farm, chased his sisters through the orchards, and waded like a bull across the high-grassed fields lying in Vernam’s shadow. The grand city looked beautiful again. Its parapets soared like white spears, green and grey pennants flapping in the sunshine, the trumpets blaring to announce the baron had returned home from a hunt. It was just as he remembered it, and exactly as he wanted it to be again.

  But then Luka rode in on an Iritul horse, its flesh maggoty, its jaw wasted, and its pale ribs bared to the sunlight, and he knew it was a dream. The alchemist leapt down from his horse, in fouler spirits than ever. “Did you see that, Maggot?” Luka shouted at him. “My horse has gone and died. Everyone in Vernam is dead just the same. I saw it. Did you, you stinking pus-bag? They’re all piled in the city square, they are. That’s what the trumpets were for. They blew ‘em to announce the burning, and any minute now we’ll see the smoke. It’s your fault, it is. If you hadn’t gotten sick and wandered into town, they’d all still be alive, and you’d be dead.”

  “But Luka, I…”

  Luka smacked him across his lips, breaking all but four teeth. The nightmare hurt as much as real life. “Quiet, Maggot!” the alchemist hissed. “Did you hear what I said? If not for you, they’d still be alive, and you’d be dead. They’d still be alive! And you’d be dead! Better that way for everyone, especially the children!”

  The rain woke him. The grey dawnlight crept in through his door of rags, and the water ran in through more cracks in his ceiling than Tolem had buckets to catch. He sat up in a miserable state of mind, his pain punishing him for daring to sleep. With spit running down his chin, he ate his soggy bread and drank what rain he could funnel down his throat, and then he left for Luka’s hospice. The children, he thought as he slogged through the puddles in his alley, they’ll help me out of this state of mind. One of Lys’s smiles, a few of Jacek’s jokes, and it’ll all be well again.

  The walk through Tolem was not as bad as most days. The rain had driven many of his usual tormentors inside, and the guardsmen were oddly absent. He lumbered through the maze of alleys in the same order as every morn. Sullen Street, Lichy Lane, Dead Men’s Corner, the Gravemaster’s Pub. He named each place he came to. Someday they’ll rebuild this place, and give everything a prettier name. Sun Street, Lys’s Lane, Golden Corner, and Murgul’s Pub.

  By the time he came to Tolem’s thoroughfare, most of his hurts had subsided. The walk had loosened the lumps upon his back, and the scars between his joints felt lubricated. His gait was still as slow as a hobbled horse’s, but at least I walk half as fast as most men, instead of a quarter. He shambled along through the falling rain, pretending the crumbling dwellings on either side of the streets were in perfect order. Stone houses gutted long ago by fire became mansions in his mind, and towers without their tops still soared into the clouds. Graveyards were no longer full of weeds and grey headstones, but stuffed to their brims with flowers, while the names on the tombs were for great-grandfathers instead of little children, young mothers, and men ravaged by the Lichy. It was a pleasant fiction, all the way until he turned a corner, crossed a courtyard filled with fallen statues, and approached Luka’s hospice.

  There stood a dozen guardsmen in the rain, and behind them, all the ch
ildren beneath an awning.

  “There’s the Maggot!” one of the guardsmen pointed a spear in his direction.

  “Get him!” shouted another. “Don’t pop any of his boils, or he’ll infect us!”

  All at once, they came for him. He saw Lys weeping in the background, and brave little Jacek gulping out of fear. He wanted to tell them it would be alright, that another beating was nothing out of the ordinary, but when the first guard swept him off his feet with the haft of his spear and the second one crushed what remained of his nose with a cuff from his mailed fist, he knew everything was wrong.

  “Why?” he sputtered on the ground, and one of his four teeth ran with the blood right out of his mouth.

  “Don’t play the fool with us, Maggot!” spat the guard with the spear.

  “You know what you did!” shouted another.

  His head felt full of slush. The scars on his back screamed at him. He wondered what he had done and whether the guards meant to murder him in front of the children, my children. But as the blood boiled from his nose and he tried to shape the words upon his twisted lips, the captain of the guard stood over him. Captain Vas, hardest soul in Tolem, laid his silver-bladed sword in the hollow of Murgul’s throat. “What’ve you to say for yourself, Maggot?”

  “I… What did…? I mean… Did I do wrong, Sire? I meant no harm. I came to care for the children.”

  “Murgul the Maggot.” Vas gazed down at him, grey-eyed and compassionless. “For the most gruesome slaying of Luka Emure, alchemist and advocate for Tolem’s cherished offspring, I sentence you to death. The sentence will be carried out on the morrow. There will be no noose for the Maggot, only a chain, a cage, and God’s cleansing flames.”

  Rainier