Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2

by Daniel Polansky

  The smell of ale and of sawdust and of unwashed flesh. The rattle of dice against a hewn wooden table. A laugh, a shout. A woman’s voice, sultry or trying to be so. A man’s, cruel as men’s often are.

  ‘Let us see if the gods grant you luck,’ Hamilcar said, ‘having offered so little else by way of kindness.’ Hamilcar was the leader of the Dycian contingent of the Aelerian forces, a few thousand men with recurved bows and long knives and a willingness to kill with either. They had been happy enough to turn those weapons on Aeleria, and they had been happy enough in the years since Dycia’s fall to use those weapons in the service of their one-time enemies. Or at least they knew enough not to complain outright. He was of average height but somehow seemed taller, in part the product of his garish clothing, a disparate arrangement, borrowed from the dozen nations he had lived in or travelled through: heavy furs from the Marches, a bright silk scarf from his homeland, thick gold armbands, a jewelled necklace that he had not been wearing the day before Oscan’s capture. But mostly it was because he talked constantly, incessantly, as if fearful of the silence, and because what he said was usually clever and always very loud.

  ‘Your mother was a whore,’ Isaac began in response. He was one of the ugliest men that Bas had ever seen, and the themas were not known as great showcases of physical beauty. Bas thought he would have been very ugly even if he hadn’t had his ears cropped off some quarter-century earlier, partial payment for a crime of which Isaac had never spoken. The rest of his scars had come from the remainder of his restitution, the long years he had spent doing Aeleria’s killing, working his way up from the ranks to become Bas’s adjutant. He was tough as boiled leather and less mean than he might have been, given what he had done and seen. He was as competent as any man living, a better logistician than Bas, and if he feared death that fear was always far away when battle was joined. ‘And your grandmother a temple whore, and your great-grandmother the biggest, blackest whore Dycia ever saw.’

  ‘I take it you won’t try and make the point?’ Hamilcar asked. Bas had once seen Hamilcar cut two fingers off the hand of a man who had brushed past him disrespectfully while at table, but this sort of banter was so customary as to be barely noticeable.

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ Isaac said, sitting back down and grabbing the cup from Hamilcar. He rattled the dice loudly and began again to curse, exhorting the gods or lamenting the certainty of cruel fate. In this case it proved the latter, and his pile of coins diminished appropriately.

  ‘It’s your roll, boy,’ Hamilcar said, passing the cup to Theophilus. ‘Or would it perhaps be easier simply to hand me your money now, and go find some other way to occupy your time?’

  ‘I have memories of you, Hamilcar,’ Theophilus said, setting his flagon down, blond beard wet with ale, ‘in which you seem clever. Was that the folly of youth, or did you take a blow to the skull and not think to mention it?’

  Isaac roared and beat his fist against the table. ‘Wit will not make you the point, master of horse!’ he said.

  ‘It is obvious to anyone looking that Isaac is the beaten dog of Enkedri and his children,’ Theophilus said, holding the dice cup in his hands for a moment. Hung round his neck was a chain of command, heavy gold linked with heavier iron, announcing to those who could decipher the customs of the themas that he was now head of horse for the Army of the East, reward in part for his good service in taking Oscan. ‘And equally clear to anyone looking at me, at my face and carriage, that I am simply one of those fortunate few who the gods have always favoured.’

  Though in that moment it seemed they decided to desert him, the dice coming up an unhappy pair of pips. Theophilus cursed bitterly and Isaac laughed loudly and Hamilcar passed the cup over to Bas.

  In truth, Bas did not care to gamble, or at least he did not care to gamble with anything so frivolous as gold, and he made his roll with a bare flicker of interest. Isaac, having backed Bas on his bet, cheered lustily. Hamilcar winced and pushed a few coins across the table to merge with the rest of Bas’s winnings, winnings he did not need and barely noticed.

  Bas had seen the man from above the rim of his cup, standing near the counter and turning to look at their table every few moments, furtively, gathering up courage like a boy visiting his first whore. An Aelerian to guess by his colouring, though it didn’t matter; Bas’s celebrity had long since eclipsed national pride, in the past Salucians and Dycians and far-flung Chazars had approached him in the marketplace and the streets, asked for blessing as if he was a priest, or a lock of his hair as if he was a beauty.

  ‘Excuse me sir—’ the man began, crossing over to the their table.

  ‘Yes, I’m the Caracal,’ Hamilcar answered, puffing out his chest and adopting an expression of great importance. ‘The greatest swordsman who ever lived, the strong right hand of the Commonwealth, slayer of demons, champion of humanity, a cock the size of child’s arm. You can have my scrawl on a bit of parchment for two silver tertarum, or eighteen bronze nummu.’

  Confusion, bewilderment. The world upended, right as wrong and up as down. ‘But … you’re black,’ the man said.

  Hamilcar looked surprised, then offended, then made an elaborate impression of surveying what portion of his skin was not covered with fur or cloth or gold. ‘So it seems.’

  ‘The Caracal isn’t black,’ the man averred, after a moment’s consideration.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ Hamilcar said.

  ‘Yes, he is,’ Theophilus agreed.

  ‘Black as night,’ Isaac said. ‘Black as sin.’

  ‘Black as the winter moon,’ Theophilus added, straight-faced in an ash-blond beard.

  ‘But … the moon isn’t black, either.’

  ‘You’re very clever,’ Hamilcar said, emptying the dice cup and cursing at the result. ‘And you’re terrible luck. Go away now, you just lost me three silver. The Caracal is not pleased!’ he announced to the bar in a voice loud and fierce enough to send the fool scurrying, ‘bring more liquor!’

  The last, at least, was a sentiment with which Bas could agree. The proprietor of the nameless bar in which they were whiling away the evening as they had whiled away the better part of the winter had been one of the innumerable camp-followers the army drew along in its wake, a double-dealer, a con man, a scavenger and a cheat, clever and fearless in pursuit of his fortune. He had moved into the place after the sack, its original inhabitants dead or fled or in any case, being in no position to dispute ownership. He came over with another jug of bad ale, set it down on the table with a heavy thud. In the days immediately after the conquest it had been possible to drink the finest Dycian wines for a handful of copper pennies, but the riotous orgy of waste had reached its inevitable end and the last few weeks there had been no decent liquor for silver nor gold, nothing but the strong and unappetising barley wine.

  Bas drank it anyway.

  ‘Do you ever wonder what it would be like to smile?’ Hamilcar asked. ‘Half my pot is now yours, and I’ve yet to see hint of a tooth.’

  ‘Have you ever known the Legatus to be full of cheer?’ Theophilus asked.

  ‘There were times when I found him less overwhelmingly depressing.’

  ‘I think he finds our accommodations insalubrious.’

  ‘There are worse places to winter,’ Isaac observed. ‘You know how many years I shivered beneath a horsehide yurt, peat smoke and a half-breed my only hope for warmth? I, for one, am not so quick to forget the virtues of a stone wall.’

  ‘It was cold,’ Theophilus agreed, ‘but at least it was clean. The rats grow large as dogs, and have begun to get ideas beyond their station. They say that in the far corners of the city they gather together in packs, pull down unwary children and devour them whole.’

  ‘Then they are the only thing so flourishing,’ Hamilcar observed. ‘A girl offered me her daughter for a loaf of bread, last evening.’

  ‘Hardly our fault,’ Theophilus said, still young enough to feel some semblance of patriotism, ‘if the smallfolk wo
uld bring their goods to market, none would need starve. Our supply lines are stretched feeding our own people – we can’t very well be expected to provide for three themas and the entirety of Oscan.’

  ‘I thought the Oscans were your people,’ Hamilcar observed. ‘and we were here to liberate them from the oppressive yoke of Salucia.’

  ‘But Hamilcar,’ Isaac brought his cup down from yellowed teeth. ‘We have liberated Oscan – can’t you tell by the smoke?’

  ‘We won’t be here much longer,’ Theophilus said. ‘The Salucians will come to terms soon enough. A drop in their tariff rates, a bowed head, and we’ll be back in Aeleria before the summer.’

  ‘You think so?’ Bas asked, his first words in a long hour, and he regretted them immediately.

  His companions looked across at each other.

  ‘The Caracal knows something we do not,’ Hamilcar observed.

  ‘No certainties. Only suspicions.’

  ‘And what are those?’

  ‘Three themas have been ordered to Oscan by the Senate. The Fifth, the Eighth, and the Thirteenth.’ Isaac banged the table twice in recognition of their old thema, but Bas continued on above him. ‘When they arrive in early spring we will have amassed the largest army in the history of the Commonwealth. Do you suppose we have collected them for leverage at the negotiating table?’

  ‘And what does the Protostrator say of these things?’

  ‘Konstantinos keeps his own council,’ Bas said.

  ‘And his stepmother?’ Hamilcar asked.

  Theophilus looked hard at Isaac, who looked hard at Hamilcar, who for once decided to shut his mouth further. Even among men well familiar with death, the Revered Mother’s was not a name with which to joke.

  ‘Are you the Caracal?’ asked a man from behind him, the next in the steady line of well-wishers and sycophants drawn to Bas like flies to carrion.

  Bas’s shoulders slumped a bit but he didn’t answer, or turn to look at the new arrival.

  ‘Yes, he’s the Caracal, you can tell by the fact that he’s bigger than everyone else,’ Hamilcar said flippantly, ‘and he’s trying to get drunk, which given his size is not so easy a task.’

  ‘Piss, off,’ Isaac added, blunter in all things and more protective of his leader.

  Bas’s cup was most of the way to his mouth and he had stopped paying much attention when something happened to Isaac’s face, eyes starting to swell, and then Bas with that dim instinct for survival that lived in the hidden areas behind his conscious mind had flung himself sideways off the chair, shoulder banging against the hard wood of the floor. The man he had not bothered to turn and look at was standing over him then, a bright bit of steel in his hand, his eyes mad and wide and hateful.

  ‘Murderer!’ he screamed. ‘Thief! Ravager! Killer of women and children, bastard son of a whore!’

  ‘How could he have known that last one?’ Bas wondered grimly.

  Theophilus was nearest and moved to engage with this man whom Bas had never met before and who wished him dead as much as anything had ever wished for anything else, as much as parched earth wished for rain. Looking at him now as he had not a moment earlier, Bas could tell he was one of the Oscan upper crust, his clothes once fine but now faded, and also that he had no idea how to use his weapon, that he had probably not so much as held a fighting knife in the hours before his suicidal assault. But the curious thing about a knife is that it will cut as surely in the hands of an incompetent as in those of a master, and in the face of his unskilled but not ineffectual flailing Theophilus was unable to close.

  ‘A city of bones, Caracal!’ the man screamed, his blade whistling in the air, Theophilus dodging just out of reach, ‘and you the cause! What hell awaits you, Caracal! What torment the gods have in store for your soul! Monster, demon, sower of discord and hate!’

  Bas had not seen the blade in the moment before it landed, was unsure even after where Hamilcar had hidden it, though unsurprised that it existed and even less at the unerring accuracy with which it was thrown. There was a flash in the torchlight and then a pommel jutted from just below the man’s neck, and his eyes rolled back up into his head, and he tumbled backwards to join Bas on the ground.

  Theophilus moved to help him to his feet, checking him over for wounds, saw there were none and remarked, ‘Swift as ever, Caracal. Swift as ever.’

  Isaac stood over the near-corpse, watched the last fluttering of his chest with the cool disinterest of a professional, as a cobbler might inspect a bolt of leather. ‘A fine throw, seated as you were.’

  ‘With my off hand at that,’ Hamilcar said. He had come up from the table and dropped down beside the dying man, put one knee on the body, grunted and pulled the blade loose, being careful to dodge the spray of blood that escaped its release. ‘Though in truth, I’d be ashamed to miss him at such a range.’

  ‘Did you know him, Caracal?’ Isaac asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘War drives men mad,’ Theophilus said.

  Though thinking on it, then and later that evening, restless on the soft bed in his stolen quarters, Bas found he could not dispute any of the charges his would-be assassin had levelled.

  10

  On a cold, sunny day in winter they set Apple into the bay.

  There were no graveyards in the Roost. The demons disposed of their dead by excarnation, leaving their bodies exposed on the cliffs at the top of the city to be picked dry by the birds. Those humans living upslope burned their corpses with little fanfare. In imitation of their masters they denied the existence of any divinity, supposed religion to be one of the many sorts of prejudices that they, alone among the species, were wise enough to be free of.

  Of course it was an open secret that the inhabitants of the lower Rungs still clung to a slim belief in the pantheons of the surrounding lands, some choosing to offer their prayers and small sacrifices to Enkedri and his siblings, others to Mephet, Bull-headed god of Salucia, but most to a syncretic combination of the two. So it was not a general lack of piety that prescribed all but the barest rites for the corpses of the Fifth Rung; it was that there was nowhere to bury them, not with so many living cheek to jowl, and having abided in such a fashion for thousands and thousands of years. Most did not have six square feet to occupy when they had been alive, there was no possibility of finding such space for them after death. And anyway, below the ground were the pumps, and the sewers – a few shovel-fills and you started hitting pipe.

  But still there was the sea. The canals were the exclusive province of the demons, but of the ocean itself even Those Above were not so mad as to think themselves owner. So it was that Mama and the three girls and Pyre and a handful of neighbours had taken Apple’s body from their house, cleaned and wrapped in white cloth, and carried it downslope to the small quay set aside for this purpose, which had seen who knew how many of Pyre’s ancestors sent out into the waves, an endless succession of flesh swallowed by the boundless sea. The craft they had purchased was waiting there for them, like a rowboat but smaller. They settled the body atop a bed of scrap wood and dry kindling, then set it adrift, Pyre himself throwing the torch. The smell of sea foam mixed with woodsmoke, and then with another smell, sweet and unpleasant, and then that was lost as well.

  Mama did not weep. Of course she had been weeping all the previous evening, and the day before, when Apple had breathed his last, and the week before, when it had become clear how little time her youngest son had left. She had wept for a long time prior to that as well, a torrent falling fruitlessly to the earth, salt water with which to poison the ground. The girls cried to make up for it, though Pyre thought that only Thyme and Shrub, the two eldest, really understood what was going on.

  Pyre did not cry either, though there was a moment, just before they put his little brother into the waters, his body so shrivelled and pale, when he very much wanted to. And this surprised him, because Pyre had rarely thought much of young Apple, now that it was too late to remedy the situation he could admit h
onestly that he had never been any sort of brother, not when he had been a boy, too caught up in misadventure and foolishness, and not now that he was a man. These last two years there had been barely a moment to dedicate to his family, and perhaps he had known also that there was nothing to be done, that Pyre had no more say in whom the gods chose to take than had Thistle.

  He held his mother’s hand on the short walk back to their tenement. The guests would arrive soon, adding plates of food to the feast that had already been prepared, and the people of the neighbourhood, who were decent despite what they had suffered, though sometimes Pyre had trouble remembering this, would do their meagre best to help a woman forget the death of something that had once lived inside her. It had been three months since Pyre had seen her, every waking minute since committed to the cause, to the mission, every waking moment and the better portion of his dreams, coming to fierce in the dead early hours of the morning, reaching for the knife hidden below his pillow in whatever safe house he was holed up in, realising it was not needed, not yet.

  Pyre would not stay. It had been dangerous, perhaps even foolish, for him to have come this far. There were men in the Barrow who remembered Thistle, and who had heard of Pyre, and who were yet so foolish as to think to better their lot by doing him injury. Unbeknownst to his mother Pyre had stationed a pair of his people in one of the other rooms in her tenement; hopefully they would provide some warning if the Cuckoos ever managed to figure out who she was.