Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2

by Daniel Polansky

  Alas then, that there was still the war to be fought.

  Six months they had been forced to wait at the borders of the Commonwealth while the Roost gave its consent for two slave nations to wage war – fine, he could not be blamed for that, nor for the long winter that had after been wasted. And the first part of this year’s campaign had gone well enough. They had finally met the enemy at Bod’s Wake, and if the result was not the signal victory that Eudokia’s propaganda machine had proclaimed it, still it had been the Salucians who had found themselves in rapid retreat northward, towards the heartland and the nation’s capital.

  But that had been nearly four months previous, and the time since had been spent camped in front of Oscan, the themas diminishing daily and a second winter growing close. As the trees had budded and then blossomed and were now shortly to die away again, so had the gallant youth she had waved farewell to diminished. There was grey at his temples, a shade she found difficult to square with the immaturity he had somehow managed to retain from the first moment he had been presented to her, a tow-headed child of fifteen. He had on the same chain armour that he had worn while marching out of the capital, but it looked better used, no longer an affectation but as natural as the sallow skin it covered. His eyes were cramped, and uncertain.

  He sat at his desk, as if so engrossed in his work he had failed to notice her arrival. A pretence, and not a particularly good one either, meant to show how hard he was working, how seriously he took his task though his efforts had not yet been crowned with success. By the gods, how she yearned for a man, a true man, and not simply a long-limbed boy!

  ‘Revered Mother,’ he said, rising swiftly. At least he had not forgotten that much. He leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. ‘How was the journey from the capital?’

  ‘Tedious. As will be the next leg. How fares the child of my beloved Phocas, upon whom the hopes and prayers of Aeleria reside?’

  Konstantinos made an attempt at stoicism, but he wasn’t very good at it and also he didn’t try for very long. ‘It is no easy thing, being the leader of men.’

  ‘Do tell.’

  ‘The Salucians have bottled themselves up inside the city, and they have provisions to last out the winter. Every day we lose ten men from disease, and it won’t be long until we start losing more from the cold. If they’d only come out and give fair battle, we’d roll right through them, but …’

  It was almost as if they would prefer not to die, Eudokia thought. A clever people, the Salucians, but then again wit wasn’t everything. A well-timed jibe would not get you so much as a swift blow to the jaw, and whatever the poets might say, one doesn’t ride to battle holding a pen. ‘Heavy are the burdens required of great men. Broad must be their shoulders.’

  ‘It’s not like with the sea lords. The truth is they weren’t nearly so hard to kill as everyone made out. A ragtag bunch, and they had no walls to hide behind.’

  Not for the first time Eudokia wondered if it had been wise to arrange the short series of naval battles that had cleared the southern coast of pirates and established within the minds of the more credulous citizenry – a group that apparently included Konstantinos himself – her stepson’s reputation for invincibility. The Gentleman Lion, they had taken to calling him, and it seemed clear he had heard the name.

  ‘The Salucians send peace offerings weekly,’ he informed her, as if she had not already known, as if there had ever been anything, down to the contents of his meal and the specificity of his toilet, that Eudokia did not understand better than did her stepson.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘They have promised to make Oscan a free city, one without official ties to either of our nations. But I think if pressed, they would agree to allow for incorporation within the Commonwealth, provided we give sufficient guarantees that our expansion will cease thereafter.’

  ‘Honeyed words hide false promises. Weakened and tottering on the precipice, they offer something that is ours by right and soon in fact. In a few years, when they have rebuilt their walls and replenished their stocks, when they have hired mercenary armies from the east, we will see how firm their commitment to amity. We have not come to wound the Salucians, we have come to cripple them. To ensure that never again will the children of Aeleria fear the machinations of the bitch-Queen of Hyrcania.’

  ‘Every peace is temporary,’ Konstantinos said, and for a long moment he would not look at her. ‘And I sometimes wonder if the children of Aeleria would not be better served if their lives were frittered away less casually. At Bod’s Wake there were so many corpses that you could walk from one end of the field to the next without ever taking your boot off flesh. At night I dream of them, and I dream of Enkedri beyond them, and he asks me what was my purpose in leading so many to death, why my gain needed to be bought with their blood, and I have no answer for him, Mother, I have no answer—’

  The sharp slap echoed loudly within the tent. ‘Revered Mother,’ Eudokia hissed, ‘and by the gods you seem suddenly so fond of, do not again forget it.’

  It had been a calculated provocation, as was virtually everything that Eudokia did. And, like virtually everything Eudokia did, it had the intended effect. Konstantinos blinked twice, and the colour began to return to his face. He looked angry and ashamed, but at least he no longer looked like he was going to vomit on his trousers, or turn his knife against himself.

  ‘Men die,’ Eudokia said simply, ‘such is the purpose of men – or did you suppose mortality some recent invention of your own? The themas are blessed to expire in service of their beloved Aeleria, in service of her national destiny. To die is their burden. To lead them into battle is yours, as it was your father’s, and it shames me to watch you quiver beneath it. The world is filled with men, the world shakes them off, daily, hourly, every moment, unmourned and unconsidered, as a mutt does fleas. Would you be more than just a man? Would you be great? This is the price asked of you, the price demanded. It is no small thing. It is too much for most.’ Eudokia laid her hand along the high cheekbones of her nephew, let it rest there a moment, for one does not rule by the lash alone. ‘Be at peace, my beloved child. A great task has Aeleria asked of you, and she will offer the tools to complete it. The Senate, in recognition of the importance of your duty, has voted you three more themas.’ And what arm-bending had that taken; two of them had come from the Marches and she had been forced to pay a call on every senator with an estate in the hinterlands, offering assurances that the Marchers had been well and truly obliterated. Which of course had been her purpose in provoking them into revolt some years earlier, making certain of her western flank before moving east.

  The news of his reinforcements spread across Konstantinos’s face like a shot of fine liquor, steadied his eyes and brought fresh bloom to his face. ‘Three themas?’

  ‘March-hardened veterans to a man,’ she said soothingly. ‘We’ll show these Salucians what it is to quibble with the might of the Commonwealth. Aelerian boots will echo on the cobblestone streets of Oscan, and you will be first among the throng. Your name will be sung centuries after your death, future generations of children will play beneath the shadow of the great statues they erect in your honour.’ Eudokia stretched her arm out, as if pointing to this vision in the distance. ‘All that a man would wish to possess, wealth and fame and fortune nation, all of it, yes, all of it, will be yours.’ Excepting power, of course – power would remain in the hands of that person most capable of wielding it, and Eudokia did not suppose there to be any question as to where that lay. ‘The strain upon you has been a terrible thing, and you have borne it manfully. But what great task was ever accomplished without sacrifice? One must wager to win, and the stakes in this game are not gold nor silver but blood and sinew and the spirit that animates them. The gods have set this task in front of you, and will not fail so long as you answer it.’

  Konstantinos was smiling now, not broadly but the hint of it at least, eyes filled with visions of a future in which the world knew him to be everyt
hing he had always supposed himself to be.

  Such a narrow thing, between arrogance and dejection! Best to bring him back down a notch. ‘And finally, you ought not let your guilt trouble you so, for the simple reason that you are not really in charge, and never were. If anyone will have to answer to the gods for this tally, it will be Eudokia.’ She smoothed out the folds of her robes. ‘Now if there’s nothing else, it’s been a very long day, and I could quite use a bath.’

  Konstantinos was up swiftly, off to speak to an attendant and see to the Revered Mother’s demands.

  3

  Coming through the basalt walls and into the Fifth Rung, Calla’s mouth had gone dry and her knees had started shaking like a drunkard’s hands. She had imagined that this was as frightened as she was capable of, that she had reached the very apex of her terror; indeed it was this ignorance that had allowed her to continue downslope, certain that she had reached her moment of truth, and that so long as she continued through it, pushed beyond it, she would find strength on the other side.

  For a time this was even true. Her steps eased, she enjoyed a growing sense of confidence. The men who gave her passing looks did so out of lust and not because they saw through her disguise, which was identical to that worn downslope, homespun robes and boots that were more comfortable than lovely. She would betray herself when she spoke, she knew, but then there was some fair portion of the Fifth who had once been servants or workers on the higher Rungs and had lost those positions from misfortune or misbehaviour. And anyway she wouldn’t need to do much talking, only to listen and to remember.

  But when Calla first heard the call of the pipes – like a fat man’s belch, mud leaking into boots, other, less pleasant things – and when they came into sight, splitting out from the depths of the sloping mountain on which the Roost was built, weaving through the crumbling tenements and one-room shacks and worn storefronts like the bleached bones of some long-dead giant, the full and unhindered force of her folly descended upon her. Alone, alone entirely, for the first time in her life beyond the reach of the Lord’s four-fingered hands, outside of the protection she enjoyed by virtue of who she was and where she lived, by virtue of being born in a portion of the Roost where the Eternal held a strict monopoly on the use of force.

  She pulled herself off the main thoroughfare, set her back against an alleyway, watched the shadows gather, wondering at the time. There were no road signs below the Third Rung, at least none that Calla could identify. The landmarks with which she used to navigate upslope, the Perpetual Spire on the easternmost edge of the Rung, the Source rising above that even, the centrepiece and the highest point of the city, were long since lost from view. On the First and the Second the great clocks rang out at regular intervals, but downslope there seemed to be no public timepieces of any kind, and Calla felt as lost temporally as she was geographically, unmoored entirely from her life’s ambit.

  When he had summoned her late the evening prior, Calla had known that there was something momentous afoot. For thirty-one years she had served the Aubade, Lord of the Red Keep, now the Prime, first among equals if not the outright leader of Those Above, and nearly ten of them had been as his chief seneschal. During none of them had he ever felt it necessary to call her after the end of her working day. At the very top of his vast citadel, illuminated by the fat autumn moon and its attendant stars, he had run through the situation, explaining the matter slowly, persuading rather than commanding.

  ‘I know what I’m asking of you,’ he had said, standing still against the evening, his four long fingers bent round themselves, shoulders straight, tendrils of hair like strong hemp twisting down to his ankles. ‘And would have you understand the same. It could be – it will be dangerous. But there are currents at work in the Roost that must be investigated, and they stir in corners of the city where no Eternal could be seen. I have put my trust in your line for half a dozen generations – will you give me the same honour?’

  Calla would have said yes to anything at that moment, would have said yes out of sheer pride, even if she did not sense as well as the Aubade that her city was angled atop a precipice, even if she did not have, whatever he might think or know, as deep and profound a love for her home as did any Four-Finger.

  Calla thought of that passion then, tried to recall some flicker of it, to kindle that flame into a light strong enough to illuminate a path forward. Late afternoon and the porters were making their last run of the day, bent-backed men carrying goods and foodstuffs upslope without complaint – or, anyway, with no complaint they thought worth voicing. The children of the evening were just beginning to shake themselves out from whatever holes they scuttled into during the day, the men dressed better than the porters and standing conscientiously and stiffly upright. Two women who could only be, even to Calla’s unpractised eyes, whores, lounged on the steps of a tenement; blank faces and bedroom eyes, not yet covered in the paint they would use to attract their evening coin.

  A fat man coming out of a bar noticed her air of uncertainty, lurched over with a rooster’s gait. ‘Everything all right there, girlie? You lost or something? You need some help, maybe?’

  Looking at him, unpleasant smile and chicken fat greasing back stringy hair, Calla was reminded again of who she was. ‘You might move downwind, and relieve me of your stench.’

  The lounging whores laughed loudly and without kindness. The fat man scowled nastily, lust to cruelty in three snaps of a finger, like most of his sex. Calla ignored him and continued onward.

  She could find the docks; anyone could find the docks, one needed only to walk downslope until one could walk downslope no more, until the mud streets gave way to cobblestone, the vast quay that girdled the eastern base of the mountain and stretched into the bay. On a different day, in different circumstances, it would have been something to see. Even early in the evening it bustled, foreigners and Roostborn. Silk-clad Parthans and servile Salucians and unsmiling Aelerians. Here and here alone among the vastness of the Fifth there seemed to be some semblance of order, the occasional custodian dressed in blue robes and carrying heavy ferules. As little interest or control as the Eternal and human authorities of the Roost had for the lower Rungs, the docks were a different story. Most of the Roost’s food came from the plantations outside of the city, the only avenue of work for a downslope youth who refused to turn porter, but everything else – ore and raw materials, trade goods, wine and ale – came from the surrounding nations, as tribute or trade, swallowed in the bellies of the towering wooden ships that obscured her view of the sea, transported thousands of cables across the Tullus coast, spat back out again here at the bottom of the Fifth Rung.

  The docks, at least, were clearly signed, and Calla walked swiftly east along the wharf, then over a high-arching, white stone bridge, above a canal of water that had begun its journey as a droplet from the Source. Back on solid ground she turned upslope, following along with the portion of the Lord’s directions she had memorised. The Aubade had not told her how he had learned the location of the meeting – as the Prime he had access to whatever rudimentary intelligence service the Roost could claim – but however he had acquired it, Calla found it authenticated almost as soon as she had passed out of range of the docks. The Five-Fingered wore rough canvas trousers and colourless wool-spun shirts, and they wore them as if they were badge or armour, caging a potent and terrible force, one that might erupt into brutality at any moment. They stood at even intervals, watching the passer-by with a more than casual interest. About the same time she realised that her movement was no longer entirely self-directed, that without realising she had gotten caught in a current of pedestrians. They were feeding themselves into a vast warehouse a short way upslope, one of the massive standing structures built for holding stock, though this evening it seemed to have been repurposed. The current slowed and then stopped, the guards at the front inspecting each entrant.

  With forward motion stilled it became impossible not to notice the innumerable contrasts that
marked her out as alien. Not only her costume, which despite its rough make was finer than anything any of the other women in line were wearing, but her demeanour itself. The crowd stood in a fever of anticipation, nervous and enthusiastic, speaking with expectant happiness to the newly discovered friends in front and behind. Meanwhile Calla’s fear had again grown so loud in her mind that she felt certain it must draw attention, that at any moment the packed mass would turn as one and stare at her, first revealing and then punishing her deception.

  Before she could make up her mind to leave, Calla found herself at the front, two men guarding the entrance and looking at her with serious attention.

  ‘Greetings, sister,’ said the smaller of the two. ‘You have come for the meeting?’

  She nodded and looked aside awkwardly.

  ‘Do you know the word?’

  ‘I did not know I needed one,’ she said quietly, trying to appear meek and unsure of herself, a girl far from home, trying and not finding the guise particularly difficult.

  The guards looked at each other, wary though not unfriendly. ‘May we see your brand, sister?’ said the larger of the two, still smiling but forceful, and coming towards her as he spoke, reaching his hand out to take hers.

  She pulled it back quickly, turned her head behind her in the same moment, saw the line of people who were now staring at her with wary concern, knew that there could be no escape.