Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2

by Daniel Polansky

  ‘What are you doing?’ the manager asked, though he must have known by then.

  ‘I am filing the bars of a cage,’ Pyre said. ‘It is the primary occupation of the Five-Fingered.’

  ‘But … but … these are the records for the entire Fifth Rung! Every loan and financial transaction, tens of thousands of debts!’

  ‘Do you think we came here by coincidence?’ Agate asked, laughing, upending one of the drawers against another, the crescendo of wood against the stone floor, paper scattering across the room. ‘The Five-Fingered will free their brethren of the yoke of credit, and shove a nice finger into the eye of all of you upslope trash.’

  ‘These are legitimate transactions!’ the manager protested, and Pyre was surprised as he always was at the willingness of the bound to fight in service of their own subordination. It was a peculiar kind of courage, preferring to risk injury or death rather than face bluntly the facts of their own slavery. A potent thing, the truth, and there were men who would rather die than hear it. ‘You have no right to do this!’

  ‘You gave an eagle to a man fifty years ago, and you have his children’s children still paying interest.’ Hammer had finished preparing the inferno, faced up against the manager, breathing heavy and with one hand on his blade. ‘We ought to clip him right now, let everyone know he’s a traitor to the species.’

  ‘He’s ignorant,’ Pyre said, making a swift motion with his hand to forestall any violence. ‘As you were, as I was. Perhaps this will be the moment when the truth reaches him. If not,’ Pyre turned suddenly on the man, ‘we will meet him again on the morning of the new age.’

  ‘We doing this?’ Agate asked. Most of the bureaus were knocked on the ground, their financial secrets spilled across the floor and wetted down with alcohol.

  ‘Hammer, do the honours,’ Pyre said.

  Hammer turned his snarl from the manager, grabbed a lantern off the walls and dashed it against the far corner of the room. The fire started swiftly and burned fast, dry parchment as good an accelerant as coal oil. They left immediately after, and already the smoke was black and billowy. Back towards the front entrance and the second blaze was hot and high, intended as a distraction though it had gained its own momentum, as fires and causes often do. They would feel this, men on the Second and their demonic masters on the First; it was one thing to kill a Cuckoo in some distant corner of the Roost, to throw graffiti on walls, to hold rallies and demonstrations. To strike at the purse, though, was to take aim at the very essence of the city.

  ‘Any trouble?’ Pyre asked Grim once they were all back outside, breathing deep of the early evening air, free finally from the smoke.

  ‘No, but you can hear it coming.’

  And indeed you could, rattling downslope, the loud droning of ratchets. The Cuckoos had been alerted and were coming in force, the shock troops of Those Above, ill-trained and worse-armed but there would be plenty of them, there would be enough. Pyre turned swiftly to the functionaries and petty bureaucrats kneeling in the dust, the smoke from their business growing thicker even from the outside. They refused to look back at him, eyes bent and neck bowed, a position with which they had long familiarity.

  Though Pyre preferred to see them free of it. ‘You are blind, each and every one of you. You suppose yourself free by virtue of the small luxuries afforded you, but this is a lie, and now is the moment of your deliverance. The demons parcel out your birthright, and you are so pathetic as to feel grateful. But a reckoning is coming, brothers, for the demons and for you as well. What was stolen will be returned, what was taken will be replaced. The scales will be righted.’

  ‘By the will of the Self-Created,’ Grim said.

  ‘Until the dawn of the new age,’ Hammer echoed.

  ‘Leave, or stay, as is your want,’ Pyre said, though between the fire and the smoke and the coming certainty of violence they were not slow to make their escape, on their feet and hurrying off as fast as they were able.

  ‘You’d best do the same,’ Pyre said to Grim.

  ‘I will see you downslope, or at the foot of Enkedri’s throne,’ Grim said, smiling.

  ‘You’ll see me downslope,’ Pyre corrected. ‘I haven’t given you permission to die.’

  Grim slapped his hand against his chest and extended it with each finger unfolded. Then he and Agate and the rest of his men went roaring off west, to follow the Sterling Canal towards the Fifth. Pyre and Hammer headed in the opposite direction, eastward for a few long moments and then downslope towards freedom and home.

  The hum of the ratchets followed them through the dimming evening light, but this was an old game to Pyre, fleeing from the Cuckoos, this was an activity at which Pyre was well-practised, and Hammer too. There was a moment when Pyre looked at Hammer and Hammer looked at Pyre and they nearly burst out laughing, the noisemakers echoing louder and still nothing more than a spur to merriment.

  They turned out of an alleyway and onto a main thoroughfare and suddenly there were four of them. Pyre never learned if they had been called from upslope or if this was part of their usual beat and it didn’t matter anyway. He did not hesitate; that was perhaps the one quality he still shared with a boy named Thistle, there was no interlude for him between shock and violence, and in that brief instant before the Cuckoos accepted the sudden reality of the situation Pyre’s blade had cut a hole in a blue robe and a gash in pale flesh. The wounded man screamed and fell back and Pyre continued onward, knowing distantly that speed alone might prove their salvation, that any halt would mean death. His attack was so rapid and so savage that it embroiled two of the Cuckoos in trying to defend against it, backing away fearfully, but that still left the one, and that one was pulling his truncheon back to shatter Pyre’s skull when Hammer intervened, catching the blow near the hilt of his short blade, good Aelerian steel biting deep into the hardwood, and still moving he caught Pyre’s assailant by the shoulder and yet moving still he hurled the Cuckoo against the alley wall, bone against indifferent brick, and then the blade upright and entering through the ribcage. Ignorant of his reprieve, Pyre continued forcefully against the two remaining Cuckoos, though after a few seconds one retreated at a run and one expired slowly on the ground. Or perhaps he would survive – Pyre was no doctor – but at least he would not again have a left hand.

  They sprinted downslope without celebration, the narrow cloistered streets loud with the Cuckoos’ cries of warnings, cacophonous and distracting, Hammer turning for a moment and seeing that they were close behind him and then turning back round and not looking any more, Pyre just in front of him, legs pumping and chest straining. Through a small street market, dodging round a brazier frying onion and pig belly, the Cuckoos following after less agile, upending the grill, the proprietor screaming and the Cuckoos screaming also, Pyre and Hammer plunging through a clothing stand, carrying bright strands of cloth along with them for a dozen steps afterward.

  When they turned a corner and came up against a blind stone wall and no hope of escape, Hammer felt a first brief flicker of fear, saw Pyre smile beside him, felt it smother immediately. Death was a certainty but fear was not, fear was foolish, there was no point to fear. For a month and a half Hammer had known the truth, known the certainty of his own worth and purpose, and how many men could claim the same? None that Hammer had ever met, none apart from these, his new-found brothers, and how fine a thing it would be to die beside one of them! How fine a thing to die for a purpose! Perhaps better even than to live for one.

  The Cuckoos seemed as surprised to discover themselves in a blind alley as had been Hammer and Pyre, and not a happy surprise either, a half-dozen of them coming in two waves, the fatter ones trickling in late. The breed of Cuckoos that nested on the Third dealt mostly with citizens happy in their subjugation, and had no experience with the sort of casual cruelty that was the chief purpose of their fellows downslope. But violence was what was needed now, there could be no question otherwise, no question to Pyre or to Hammer at least, though looking at
the infirm faces of their pursuers it seemed no altogether settled question.

  Pyre’s blade was free and naked. ‘Well, brothers,’ Pyre began, smiling a smile that Thistle had sometimes worn, in that distant age when he had wished for nothing more than a skull to bruise a knuckle against. ‘This will be a happy death for Pyre, the First of His Line – can any of you say the same?’

  ‘You’re … you’re under arrest,’ said the bravest of them, though his voice wavered.

  ‘Pyre will walk out of this alley, or he’ll be carried.’ The steel like a finger pointing at the lead Cuckoo. ‘And not Pyre alone.’

  The evening falling fast now, too dark to make out the Cuckoos except by their eyes, which were wide and uncertain. And this would be why they would win, Pyre knew, why he fell asleep every night exhausted but happy, why he woke in the morning without regret and brimming full of energy to spill in the name of the age to come. At bottom, the Cuckoos knew the truth, as Pyre had known even before he had taken his new name, as every human knew.

  There was no discussion, no debate. The Cuckoo who had spoken looked round at his fellows, and when none met his gaze he swallowed hard and moved out of the way, and the rest of them soon did the same, ferules flaccid in their hands, Pyre and Hammer shuffling through the sudden aperture swiftly and with blades still drawn.

  ‘You’re always welcome at a meeting, brothers,’ Pyre said, just before turning to sprint downslope towards freedom, yelling over his shoulder, ‘The truth comes to all who are willing to hear it!’

  6

  The stars peeked through a cloudless autumn evening and into the great open hall that made up some modest, some minor, some negligible portion of the Aubade’s estate. Great braziers of scented wood were set out at even intervals, each tended by an immaculately dressed house-slave. Other servants – there were many, many servants, there seemed more servants dedicated to the party itself than there were in the entirety of Eudokia’s estate, and each was dressed in finery that would have shamed a noble, shamed them as much for the style and cut as for the expense – carried trays of strange and exotic food from guest to guest. Sweetmeats covered in green pistachio, smoked bacon wrapped round freshly cut melon, and where had they gotten freshly cut melon this time of year, Eudokia wondered? Specific sets of servants carried trays to the Others in attendance, though the food did not seem substantially different, or at least not different in any way that a casual glance could detect. To the north one could gaze out at the bay, and the infinite sea beyond, watch the light sparkle on the turning waves. Or one could go eastward a few hundred steps and stare out over the first Rung of the Roost, the innumerable watchtowers and citadels, the houses that were like cathedrals, perfection writ in stone.

  If Eudokia was not Eudokia, she might even have been impressed.

  Two days prior the Aelerian deputation had entered the Roost, met at the gates of the city and carried via palanquin to a guesthouse on the Second Rung, overlooking a wide canal bereft of boat or vessel, its disuse one of the innumerable small signs reminding passers-by that however many human souls resided within the Roost did so to the benefit of Those Above. Not, it had to be said, that this seemed any great imposition or dishonour to the people of the Second Rung. Quite the opposite, in fact – submission to the Eternal seemed a sign of social status, raised above even the most accomplished of the human establishment, the bureaucrats and high-ranking custodians, the foreign merchant princes, the banking magnates. So far as the Roost was concerned, that human responsible for cleaning the chamber pot of an Eternal was to be envied more than the wealthiest scion of the oldest family on the Second Rung, and both were to be regarded above everyone residing outside of the Roost’s borders, though he be Emperor of Chazar.

  Having seen the First Rung now, in all its splendour, this was a sentiment that Eudokia could appreciate if not share. The Red Keep, the Prime’s ancestral demesne, was quite the most spectacular building that Eudokia had ever seen. In terms of scope, the only thing Eudokia could think to compare it to were some of the castles along the border with Salucia, large enough to hold a small army and the provisions to sustain it for months or long years. But in intricacy and refinement it did not, in Eudokia’s estimation, resemble any edifice built by the hands of man; it could more profitably be compared to an engagement ring or a music box, to something tiny and precious and crafted out of love or at least vanity. And it was one of thousands of similar structures clustered about the First Rung, finer than many, perhaps, but essentially similar, a vast catalogue of unique and unfathomable wonders.

  Jahan stood a few steps behind her, a silent, brooding presence, squat and tight-muscled and ugly, alert as ever for any hint of danger to his mistress as he had been for the more than twenty years he had been in her service. He nibbled at a bit of finger food, but apart from that the wonders of the Roost held little interest, eyes dull and dispassionate.

  Out of the corner of her eye Eudokia watched the Prime sitting silently on a throne reserved for that purpose, still and idealised as a statue or a poem. Nearer, two Eternal conversed in their incomprehensibly beautiful speech, a male and a female though it was difficult to tell the difference, each a near reflection of the other’s perfection. Her own species, Eudokia did not scruple to admit, had little to gain by comparison. In one corner Senator Gratian was talking to a Roostborn girl, not one of the household servants. It had taken them two and a half months to traverse the distance between the capital and the Roost, covered wagons on well-made roads, a large escort of hoplitai, and Gratian complaining every single moment of it; Eudokia had forced herself to keep silent despite her annoyance, as Jahan was an obedient servant and an errant word on her part would require a swiftly dug grave and all sorts of frantic manoeuvrings.

  Which was not to suggest that the notion of arranging some … accident for the senator was one with which she had entirely dispensed. Back in the capital the senator’s follies and foolishness were easily covered up, particularly in so far as his was not a caste known for their discretion. Indeed, by the standards of some of the rest of his august fellowship, he was virtually a monk – he had never tried to make his boy lover third consul, for instance, and his nose had not yet rotted off from the pox. Regardless, here in the Roost they had rather thinner room for error. It was Eudokia’s understanding that Those Above were utterly amoral in terms of sex, had no notion of it as sin, perhaps had no notion of sin at all – but they certainly had a notion of etiquette, and of style, and by the gods, if that fat-titted little sybarite did something to embarrass her in front of the demons, he would find himself not waking up one morning. It was an eventuality that Eudokia had planned out well before accepting this mission to the Roost. Half of his staff were hers, a few drops of something in his drink, a few weeks wearing black, of course they would need to send for another senator, though it would be months and months before he arrived, and in the meantime Eudokia would simply have to muddle through as best as she was able, by default becoming Aeleria’s sole representative within the Roost.

  Eudokia closed her mind around the fantasy of homicide. It was a dangerous thing to start thinking too far in that direction – one began to look around and see all sorts of people that the world did not, strictly speaking, require the continued presence of, began to to count them off one after another, how much simpler the machine would run with a few dozen less souls in it.

  Gratian caught her looking and waved, wrist fat wobbling. She smiled and nodded in return.

  Eudokia turned her attention to one of those few members of the assemblage whose presence was neither indifference nor burden, indeed, one of those few individuals on the breadth of the planet who could claim this happy distinction. Her nephew Leon leaned against the balcony, enraptured by the beauty of the First Rung – or, perhaps by the long-necked woman who stood next to him. The son of a cousin she scarce recollected, whose death had introduced him to her household when he was still a child. She had brought Leon because she had thought it mi
ght be good for his education, and because, and this was a truth that Eudokia could only vaguely bring herself to admit, she actually enjoyed his presence, found his combination of quick wit and boyish innocence to be a pleasant seasoning with which to take the day.

  ‘And what captivating creature have you stolen away this time, dear nephew?’ Eudokia asked.

  ‘I have the honour to present Calla, Sensechal of the Red Manor,’ Leon said. ‘Calla, this is my aunt, Eudokia Aurelia, Revered Mother.’

  ‘May the moonlight illuminate your path,’ the girl added.

  No, not girl, woman, Eudokia thought after a moment, recognising metal when she saw it. She was young enough, and she had the bright eyes and high bosom of someone on the kinder side of thirty. But one did not rise higher than sensechal to the Prime, not if one had five fingers on one’s hand at least. And also she met Eudokia’s eyes coolly, civilly but without any excess of kindness, and no one who could long bear the gaze of the Revered Mother could justly be called a child.

  ‘It was my understanding that the women of Aeleria held no titles, and had no role in the workings of the state,’ Calla said.

  ‘We are a modest lot,’ Eudokia assured her. ‘And my rank is ceremonial in nature. It indicates I am the head priestess of the cult of Enkedri, and entitled to certain … exaggerated honorifics on his behalf.’

  ‘You are a long way from the temples of your god, Revered Mother.’

  ‘But the Self-Created does not reside only in the great stone of his cathedrals. He has another citadel, preferred and longer lasting – the righteous heart of his followers.’

  ‘How … pious,’ Calla said, as if not liking the taste. ‘But still I have difficulty in understanding why the servant of your god, however widespread his powers, would be required as part of the peace embassy that Aeleria has sent to the Roost.’