The Rise of the Fallen (The Rotting Empire Book 1) Read online

  The Rise of the Fallen

  Peter Fugazzotto

  Copyright © 2017 by Peter Fugazzotto

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover Art by John Anthony Di Giovanni

  Cover Design by STK•Kreations

  To Maija and Splinter Dog,

  teachers of the blade and the stick

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Acknowledgments

  Thank You!

  About the Author

  Prologue

  “AND THE GIRL?” asked the torturer. “The same?”

  The Queen did not turn to her man’s gravelly voice. She did not want to see the smile playing across Bima’s scarred face or what he had done at her command.

  Instead, the Queen lingered on the balcony of the palace. Despite the slight breeze that she sought, the late afternoon heat caused her golden sarong to cling tightly to her ribs and the backs of her legs. She squeezed her hands on the teak railing to hide the trembling that threatened to overcome her body. The edge of the sky tumbled a dark gray, the front of the tropical storm rising like a wall. Shafts of light broke through causing the rice fields to glow such a bright green that she was forced to squint against the blinding sky. At the far ends of the valley, the jungle tangled dark and impenetrable. Chaos kept at bay but always threatening.

  Her world had become an endless mix of darkness and light, the two inseparable.

  She inhaled deeply trying to calm herself. She was the darkness, and the light rarely shone through. How had she become this way?

  Mixed with the sweet rot of the jungle, she smelled the salt of the sea. The scent evoked a memory of the day she too had arrived in Yavasa as a foreigner, a bridal tribute, but she repressed that feeling. Hiding her fears. Hiding her memories. How was it that the most powerful woman in the empire was forced to hide her true feelings? Maybe that’s where the darkness was born.

  The Queen turned to Bima where he stood with the girl, the choke cord already furrowing the flesh of her neck. He did smile behind his scarred cheeks. But the Queen’s attention was drawn to the boy crumpled on the floor. Bima’s cord had left a single, long red mark around the boy’s pale throat. His fur-lined cloak, a ridiculous garment in this heat, was soaked dark with his blood from the deep cuts and clever fillets that had made the boy talk, reveal the truth about the foreigners.

  The Queen looked at the girl, her skin pale like that of a ghost, her braided hair the color of bone. Such a contrast to the mahogany skin of Bima. Before the arrival of the foreigners from the North, the Queen had thought her own skin light-colored, but now she realized how mistaken she had been. Despite being a child, maybe a dozen years old, the girl was nearly as tall as Bima, her shoulders broad, those of a breed of fighters, these white demons from the fabled lands far to the North.

  They had drifted on their dragon ship after a month of misery on the Sea of Sorrows. A score of swaggering men. Thick-bearded. With wicked axes and tunics of metal chain. An army of such men could rule the archipelago. But the foreign warriors had fled. The God-Emperor’s assembled thousands made the Northerners realize that they had made a grave mistake landing their lone vessel. No easy pillaging in the empire of Yavasa.

  The Queen took a few steps across the balcony, returning to the cool shade of her chambers. The girl glared at her. The Queen could see the anger in her eyes, but there was also something else. A deep sadness, one that the Queen recognized. The despair of being left behind. The Queen again fought back a rising emotion.

  “Your name, girl.”

  Bima’s renewed pressing of his bloody knife against the girl’s ribs loosened her tongue. “I am Maja.” Her lips returned to their pursed state, a petulant look that made it seem as if any moment the girl would smile, or maybe unleash a war cry.

  “Are the things your friend told us true?”

  Maja’s gaze, her eyes the color of a calm shallow sea, did not turn from the Queen. “He was not my friend.”

  The Queen smiled. The girl had spirit. “Are you the cook’s helper too?”

  Now Maja broke her stare, glancing for a moment to look out over the jungle, in the direction of the coast. When she looked again at the Queen, her eyes were moist. “My father is the captain of the ship.”

  “No king’s daughter then?”

  “The jarl gave me no choice.”

  “Did he even bring his daughter?”

  “She hid below the decks.”

  “And your father let the jarl do this? He willingly left you here as a hostage? Allowed the jarl to present you falsely as his daughter? Knowing that lies only lead to death? He did not fight for you?”

  Maja blinked.

  “My father left me here too,” said the Queen. “Long ago. But I am the daughter of a king. I was no false gift.”

  “He’ll come back for me. My father,” Maja suddenly said, stepping forward. Bima yanked on the choke cord and she dropped to her knees.

  The Queen closed her eyes. Drops of rain pattered and hissed on the palm thatch roof. A breeze wafted from the balcony, the cool air touching the Queen’s ankles below the hem of her sarong. The storm had arrived. Darkness descending on the land. If only the rains could wash away the years of blood.

  Bima’s rattling voice broke the calm. “Your pleasure?”

  The Queen opened her eyes to Maja tight in Bima’s arms. The choke cord bit into her neck, the flesh rising on either side of the leather. The knife had drawn a trickle of blood from the girl’s cheek, bright red against the unnaturally pale skin.

  It would be easy for the Queen to flick her fingers and then turn back to the expanse of the kingdom outside her balcony. She could revel in the gilded turrets, the carefully tended rice paddies, the white banners snapping against the iron-smeared clouds. The world would go on as it had for decades under the beneficent rule of the God-Emperor. Order returned. Chaos strangled.

  Before the fury of the storm smothered the palace, the bodies of the boy and girl would be gone. Of course, the bloodstains would be another thing. The servants would work for days on the wooden floor, bent with fungal sponges and brushes and buckets of water, and as hard as they would try the stains would never completely disappear.

  The Queen
turned her hands over and stared at her palms. Shadows slithered across her skin. She had scrubbed them. Every day she washed them in near boiling water, soaked them in lime juice, and scraped at the skin with lava stone. But as hard as she tried, the bloodstains always hid in the creases, leaping with the changing light, liquid, elusive. Not always visible, but itching deep beneath her skin.

  “He won’t come back,” the Queen said. “Your father won’t return for you.”

  “He will.” Spittle flew from the girl’s pale lips. “We are not like you. Murderers.”

  “Return her to her chambers.”

  Bima hesitated, blinking.

  The Queen felt tension rising in her hands. “She is mine now. Her life is mine, and she will serve me.”

  “She’s dangerous. A white foreign devil. A threat to Yavasa,” hissed Bima.

  “That is why I am keeping her.”

  Maja struggled and almost broke free of Bima’s grasp but he tightened the cord until she spasmed into unconsciousness and then he dragged her to the doorway where several soldiers in the white fungal armor of the God-Emperor picked her up.

  The rain suddenly sheeted from the sky, blurring the distances. The surface of the river foamed white. The Queen peered at the jungle-covered hills and wondered how far the foreigners had gotten.

  Did Duke Buranchiti permit them to sail out of the mouth of the river and into the bay where his ships waited or had he grounded them on the beach at the foot of the Eye of the East? She opened her palms. The shadows retreated to the creases in her flesh. Maja’s father would not return for her. The jarl’s daughter would never set foot on the icy shores of the lands of the North. None of the foreigners would. They would never reach the Sea of Sorrows. If they were not in the dungeon yet, they would soon be dragged down those steps, the Duke deciding which of the pincers, needles, and knives would reveal the secrets of the fiends from the North. Duke Buranchiti enjoyed it all too much.

  The Queen needed to talk to the God-Emperor about the Duke. He was becoming increasingly bold in his displays of power lately. Better to keep him close, and his son even closer. Chaos had no place in Yavasa.

  But later. Right now her palms were itching and she needed to sit down with a pumice stone. Maybe the fresh rain would wash the shadows away.

  1

  FIFTEEN YEARS LATER

  The stench of burnt flesh made Maja gag.

  She stopped in the middle of the village commons, hands on her knees, and drew in several deep breaths. The humid island air filled her lungs. With it came the smell of charred flesh and the smothering tang of blood. That only made things worse. Saliva filled her mouth. She swallowed hard, sucked in a few more breaths, and then straightened to standing.

  She covered her mouth with her palm but the reek of the dead pressed through.

  Black smoke twisted into the blue sky. One of the old longhouses, built of teak and palm thatch, surged with flames and then suddenly collapsed, the crack of the timbers echoing out over the calm waters of the bay where the Sea Eagle bobbed.

  Behind the village, the old trees of the forest towered, choked in vines and creepers, their broad leaves fluttering in the slight sea breeze. Maja wished a squall would blow in, darken the sky, and release a sudden shower. Clean the village. The whole island. The empire.

  A handful of birds, blindingly blue, glided in the gaps between the primeval trees. The blackened village – three longhouses and an assortment of shacks and storage houses – was bathed in bright light, the same sun burning Maja’s pale skin.

  At least the screams from the night prior had stopped.

  Last night Duke Buranchiti’s men had not only torched the buildings but everyone they could find. The screams had carried across the waters of the bay to where the Sea Eagle hid in an inlet. Maja and the other pirates had huddled on the unlit deck of their ship watching the massacre. Unwilling to get involved in the power struggle that bloodied the archipelago.

  And that suited Maja fine. She could not imagine herself on either side. Betrayed by both.

  Then the soldiers left. Just before dawn, after the Duke’s ships had caught a strong wind and vanished around a promontory to the south, Captain Pak set the crew to unfurling the sails and guided the Sea Eagle into the abandoned bay hoping that the mushroom houses hidden in the jungle behind the village had been overlooked. The Duke’s yellow-armored men had no use for dream spore.

  But the pirates could resell it several days voyage to the south at Badung, a port still untouched by the Duke’s insurrection.

  Easy pickings Captain Pak had said. Let the others do the fighting. Not our war.

  Maja agreed. But lately it had felt like ravens picking at the corpses.

  When the pirates had come on shore, they had split. While the others broke into three groups to scour the jungle for the mushroom houses, Maja and Hanu were to look for coin in the village.

  The easy task. Or it would have been if not for the corpses. The villagers who had not been burned in the fires had met cold steel and left to lay where they had fallen.

  Maja inhaled what smelled like seared pork and bile surged in her throat. She choked it back down. The odor was too much. She pulled a thin cigar from over her ear and slipped it in her mouth. Almost immediately her lips began tingling. She needed to light the cigar. The clove would mask the smell. Or at least she hoped.

  The remaining longhouses smoldered, wisps of smoke rising. A few of the yam houses still stood, but most of the village had been leveled by fire.

  Maja stared at the remains of the closest longhouse. A rooster – feathers singed – skirted its edge, pecking at scattered grains of rice that spilled out of a broken ceramic vessel. Behind the rooster, Maja saw a single arm, flesh blackened, poking out from beneath a fallen beam, the hand frozen in a claw-like shape, a sign of the last moments of struggle.

  These were villagers on a minor island, loyal to the God-Emperor, simple farmers and traders in fungus, men and women with spears and machetes, not soldiers.

  This war was going to be worse than she thought.

  “We should do something,” said a familiar voice behind her. She turned. Hanu squatted on the ground, his sarong hitched to expose his dark thin thighs. He scraped the hook that was his right hand over the paving stones. The edges of his leather vest armor were already dark with sweat.

  His gaze darted from the longhouse to the glittering sea then to the dark jungle behind the village. His bloodshot eyes flicked back and forth. He wiped his nose. Traces of dream spore clung to the skin above his lip.

  She frowned. Lately he always seemed to be under the influence of the spore.

  His eyes and nose were pinched as if against the glare of the sea, but that was his natural expression. The other pirates avoided him, thinking him not trustworthy with his addiction to dream spore, but he had not strayed from Maja’s side since they had left Land’s End. If anything, he was faithful and she valued that.

  “We are doing something,” said Maja. “We’re looking for pearls, coin. Me, more cigars.” Her pale skin was beginning to redden under the hot sun. She needed to retreat to the shade of the forest.

  “The Duke is murdering villagers. He’s evil.” Hanu sniffed hard and wiped at his nose with his forearm.

  “Not our business.”

  “We could make it our business,” he said.

  “What for? Get caught in the middle.” Maja rubbed her fingers on her temples. A headache was coming on. The stench. The heat. The pressure of her fingers did nothing to relieve the tightening above her ears. Hanu wasn’t helping things.

  “Don’t you miss what we once were? Heroes?” he asked.

  “A lot of good that got us.” She licked her lips. She needed to light the cigar. That would help with the headache.

  Hanu continued. “We could follow them to the next village. The Duke’s men wouldn’t be expecting us to swoop down on them. A little bit of revenge. We owe them that.”

  Maja stared at him, chewing
his lips. In the distance, gulls cried. “You’re serious, aren’t you? Why would we ever want to do that? What do we owe anyone at this point?”

  “The Empire is splitting, and what are we supposed to do? Not take sides?”

  Maja massaged the back of her neck. “If there’s nothing here, we should join the others.”

  “You have nothing to say?”

  “We can’t peel back time, Hanu.”

  “We could prove ourselves. They’ll see that they made a mistake.”

  Maja grabbed his hook hand and shook it. “And what? They’ll give back what they took? You think somehow they can give you your hand back?”

  “We did nothing wrong!”

  “The only side is our side. They all betrayed us!”

  “You don’t ever think about going back? The Queen. You’re like a daughter to her.”

  “Never.”

  “One of these days, you’ll need to get beyond all the feelings of pain and betrayal and believe in family again. If not, what are we?”

  “Survivors,” said Maja. “And that’s good enough.”

  But as Maja crossed the courtyard towards the closest longhouse, she knew she lied. The royal family had adopted her, gathered her beneath their protection, and raised her like a daughter. But then everything changed. After the failed assassination attempt, they cast her out, gave her over to the Duke and his torturer. The price for not stopping the death of the Duke’s son. In the weeks that followed, she had thought she would die in the pits beneath the Eye of the East. Then, on the tail end of a typhoon, she and the other Fallen had been freed by word of the God-Emperor.