Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2

by Daniel Polansky

  ‘How many of the men on your Rung can read? How many can sum? How many can speak or act coherently, how many have thoughts beyond the end of the day’s work, beyond the next drink, the next whore?’

  ‘And whose fault is that?’ Pyre asked quietly. ‘They kill our leaders and any who might become so. They deprive us of every hope of growth and of advancement, they lock us in a cage as proof we cannot grow.’

  ‘Perhaps you truly do think that,’ the chancellor said. ‘Perhaps you are so foolish.’ He waved his hand across the table, palm down, as if scattering seed. ‘No matter – the freedom you herald would destroy the Roost entirely, your people as much as mine. Happy for all of us that it will never come.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No,’ the chancellor echoed. ‘I am trying to be forgiving. It is understandable, even appropriate for a man born in your circumstances. Likely you’ve never been in the presence of an Eternal. Likely you’ve never even seen one.’

  False, though Pyre made no effort to correct him. The guard behind Ink, the bearded one, sucked at his crooked teeth.

  ‘You see the custodians and you think, in your ignorance, in your vast and infinite stupidity, that it is they against whom you contend. You think, perhaps, that having had such success against their servants every victory will be so easy to attain. I tell you, Pyre, and if you have yet believed nothing I have said then believe this – you are fabulously wrong. You are wholeheartedly and, in every particular, mistaken. You have won nothing, you have not even begun the contest. You could slaughter every custodian in the Roost, build a fire with the bodies and toss the entirety of the Brotherhood Below atop it, and you would have come no closer to ensuring this victory of which you dream. I have dealt with Those Above my entire life, and tell you in simple language so there is no confusion – they are everything they imagine themselves to be. The names they have given themselves, the names we have given them, they are apt, they are entirely accurate. The Eternal are superior in every fashion that one creature might be to another. Every man and boy you could arm and train would be insufficient to defeat a handful in open combat. The mote of grime you scrub from your eye in the morning is of more concern to you than you and all your people are to them.’

  ‘Then why have they not reached out with their four-fingered hands and …’ Pyre made a motion with his own five digits, as if crushing something fragile.

  ‘Because they are busy with their dreams. Do you think the ruckus you have made on the lower Rungs is loud enough to reach their ears? They, who have laid waste to armies since before time was time, since before there was such a thing even as man?’

  ‘They think me important enough to treat with.’

  ‘They have no idea I’m here,’ he said. ‘Any more than they are aware of the existence of the Brotherhood Below, or of our association with each other. So long as the water flows upward, and the goods and gifts with which they might play, the Eternal give no more thought to what goes on downslope than you might the tunnelling of the ants in the floorboards.’

  ‘And you think this ignorance to be a virtue?’

  ‘I think it reality, and one for which you ought to feel daily grateful. Should they ever concern themselves with what goes on beneath them, should you manage to one day prove sufficient distraction to draw their attention …’ Imagining this cataclysm, he smiled, and this time it did not seem false. ‘The blood would choke the fish in the bay, and be carried up through the pipes to the Source itself, and they would hold their conclave beside the crimson fountain and they would scarcely notice the stain. They are strong, yes, Those Above, they are stronger than you can possibly imagine – but they are even crueller than they are strong.’

  ‘And yet, here you sit. With a child of the Fifth Rung, born within the sound of the slurp, a slum child.’

  ‘I am not an Eternal,’ though Pyre thought he was doing everything he could to obscure the fact, the absurd robes, the strange and unbecoming eye-paint. ‘Do you need each particularity to be spelled out for you as a child? Fine. Those Above care nothing for what goes on beneath them. That is my job, and the job of those like me. To ensure that the Eternal may continue with their happy immortality, and that we beneath them might enjoy our limited span as much as possible.’

  ‘And the Brotherhood Below is part of this control?’

  ‘Everything is part of it,’ the man said plainly. ‘The Association of the Porters, the brands and the pass necklaces, each an interlocking piece of a system which was put in place thousands of years before your birth, Pyre, the First of His Line.’ The last was said sneeringly – most of the rest as well but the last in particular.

  The zither had stopped playing. Hammer sat unsmiling, fearless of death. The bearded man, still standing behind Ink and in front of one of the guards, shot Pyre a look that no one else was in a position to see.

  ‘First came the bribe,’ Pyre said, ‘which I ignored. Next a threat, to which I gave as little credence. What follows?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ the chancellor asked, gesturing at the two armed guards who stood behind Pyre and Hammer. ‘If the promise of wealth does not sway you, if the certainty of retaliation from Those Above is not enough to enlighten you, then we will be forced to resort to other, more immediate options.’

  ‘This is my fucking bar, kid,’ Ink said, smiling for the first time now, back in his native element, a pig in loam, a maggot in rotted flesh. ‘You think you’ll ever leave it alive?’

  ‘Indeed,’ Pyre agreed, in response to the chancellor. ‘It was extremely obvious.’

  Ink was smiling when he died; he noticed the sudden flicker of movement behind him but did not bother to look, had been expecting it, had even signalled it, having no idea of where it was directed. The bearded man, his head of security, a hardened downslope thug who knew nothing but savagery and who, it was assumed, was capable of nothing more, pulled his curved knife from his waistband, and then there was a flicker-flash as the candelight shone against his steel, and then that self-same steel was buried down to the hilt through the hair and scalp and bone and brain of the last leader of the Brotherhood Below.

  Ink’s corpse collapsed face forward onto the table, flailing about like a fish removed from water, some dim biological instinct driving his fading body into a final spasm of motion. The chancellor screamed. The bearded man, whom Ink knew as Pebble but who had for two months answered in his heart only to Saviour, the First of His Line, turned his blade swiftly on the guard behind him, though Pyre had no time to watch the outcome.

  The two by the door were quick but Hammer was quicker, the shiv he had bolted up his sleeve swift buried in a throat. Pyre was a step slower but fast enough, his chair spinning into a corner and then his own line of steel set loose, launching himself at the only unoccupied guard. He was tough, the guard, and he was mean, and he did well enough considering the sudden shift of circumstance. By the time it was over Pyre had a thin cut running up his shoulder, shallow but bloody, and Hammer was disposing of the guard who had managed to kill Saviour, a big man but badly wounded, a thrust beneath the armpit and then silence.

  ‘The bar is yours?’ Pyre asked, coming upright from the corpse he had made, chest heaving at the struggle, eyes bright against the darkness. ‘The neighbourhood is mine. The Rung. The city. The world. Ours, had you cared enough to look, had you not been blinded by greed and cowardice into betraying your own species.’

  Hammer cleaned his blade, put it back into its wrist sheath, then went to check on Saviour. After a moment he looked up from over the corpse, his one good eye fixing on Pyre, and he shook his head.

  ‘May his blood soak the roots,’ Pyre intoned, ‘may it herald the new age.’

  ‘For the dawn to come,’ Hammer repeated, standing.

  Ink’s blood stained the powdered white make-up on the chancellor’s face, and added a third hue to his particoloured hair. He was too frightened to speak, not that there was much to say.

  ‘Saviour heard the word, and w
as redeemed. He sits at the hand of Enkedri, and he watches over us as do all our fallen brothers. But there are some who cannot hear the truth though it be shouted in their ear,’ Pyre said, scattering droplets of crimson into the corners, turning towards the chancellor to draw more. ‘And there are some who hear the truth only too late.’

  15

  Moonlight fell soft against the windows of the Red Keep and the snow struck near as soft, curls of frost bright from the heavens, rime gathering transient against the panes. Outside there was the night and the cold and the sea far below, dark and wild and enticing. Inside braziers of damask and sterling silver spread light and warmth and the sweet smell of camphor, illuminated the Lord’s study, the ebony walls, the mosaics of garnet and electrum, the patterns abstract and unknowable. The Prime sat bent-legged on a nest of silk. His robes, patterned in the house colours of crimson and aureate, lay half-open, his chest broad and smooth and hairless. His instrument was pear-shaped, rosewood inlaid with gold. He ran an ivory plectrum against the strings and recited a poem that had been ancient a thousand years before the Founding of the Roost, in a past so distant as to be scarcely conceivable – before the crime, when the Eternal lived uncaged, free to wander the length of the continent. The words were archaic, a formal and all but forgotten dialect of the Eternal tongue, but the story was as it had always been. Of loss; of things that were and would not be again.

  Calla stood quietly beside him, a soft smile on her face.

  The words slowed, the music grew softer and then silenced entire. Calla closed her eyes and savoured the final strands of melody, and then savoured the memory of that sound.

  ‘I have been thinking of death lately,’ the Prime observed.

  ‘Yes, my Lord.’

  ‘I suppose it must be something you think of constantly, given how near you are to it.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Like a guest waiting just beyond the threshold. How can you stir yourself to anything else, anticipating such an arrival? How meddlesome, to think at any moment he might intrude on your business, render the entirety of your workings null.’

  ‘We do not … conceive of things in exactly those terms, my Lord. Knowing nothing else, it seems no very terrible hardship.’

  He continued as if he had not heard. ‘I suppose it must be something of a kindness. The rot overtakes your kind so swiftly, aching knees and weakened limbs, a steady softening of the mind. Scarce ten years you have served me, and already I can see age’s wither, in the lines around your mouth and towards the corners of your eyes.’

  Calla would stare at herself in the mirror when she returned to her room, stare hard and long and perhaps not like what she saw. ‘As you say, my Lord.’

  ‘And what time does not take will be scavenged by accident or disease. Your father was very fond of your mother, though I confess I never quite saw the appeal. Still, he was distraught almost beyond reason when she died. It was months before he could manage his duties competently, and I daresay he never truly recovered from the blow.’

  ‘He … loved her very much, my Lord.’

  ‘Our kind thinks ourselves so different to yours, though the more I consider the less I am sure. Death is for ever, after all. And measured against eternity, what is time? I have known seven of your line, can recall the smile your father’s mother’s father’s father’s father offered when we left the Roost to take up our office abroad, can remember your father’s mother’s betrothal ceremony with perfect fidelity, could close my eyes and limn it on ricepaper without error. I might know seven more, or seven times seven, could shepherd your children and their children through future generations. But what is that against the void?’ Staring down at her with his golden eyes unblinking, as if she might even have an answer! ‘Against infinity, what is a hundred years? Or two, or three, or five? How is it possible to continue on, staring implacably at the full weight of that chasm? And why should it matter that this inevitability is further into the distance for some than others?’

  ‘I … am not sure, my Lord.’

  ‘Have you had occasion to visit my bestiaries this last week, Calla?’

  Abrupt shifts in conversation were part of interacting with Those Above, but even so Calla found herself stymied for a moment. ‘I check in on it every morning, my Lord.’

  ‘Of course. Then you have seen this new species we have acquired?’

  Seen it, by the Founders! Its cage alone, an aquatic enclosure the size of a Fifth Rung tenement, had cost twelve golden eagles, and twice that to capture the beasts and ship them to the top of the Roost. ‘Yes, my Lord.’

  ‘A peculiar thing – as strange an animal as I’ve ever encountered.’

  ‘From Chazar, my Lord.’

  ‘Far from lovely, in and of itself, to my thinking at least. Haired, four-legged. The females produce milk and, I am told, give birth to their young live.’

  ‘This was what the broker explained.’

  ‘And yet, it lives in the water, or mostly. They say it can even breathe it, as does a fish.’

  ‘So they say, my Lord.’

  ‘Life creates itself in the most curious and disparate fashion. Flesh bending and knitting and reforging itself to better suit its environment.’

  ‘A wondrous thing, truly,’ Calla said, because she had no idea of anything else to say.

  ‘In fact I think the creatures rather hideous, though that is nothing more than a peculiarity of taste. Regardless, it has inspired me to develop a certain hypothesis. Is it not perhaps the case that selective blindness is a necessary adaptation for higher life to exist? That, just as this … otter, has developed lungs to swim beneath the surface, and fur to subsist against the cold, we Eternal and you Dayspan have likewise developed in such a fashion as to remain unconcerned of death? Perhaps there were other species, who walked upright and spoke as we speak and who were, at the same time, braver or less dishonest than we, unwilling to accept the limitations of sentience. Who ran steel along their wrists, who dashed their children against the rocks, who walked arm in arm into oblivion.’

  ‘I … cannot say, my Lord.’

  ‘None can,’ said the Prime. They had no pupils, the Eternal, their eyes were like single facets of some great jewel. One could never tell what exactly it was at which they looked. ‘She was very beautiful.’

  She was the last Prime, the Lady of the House of the Second Moon, whom the Lord had loved quietly for who knew how many human lifetimes, whom he had killed in bloody single combat, her corpse set out on the Cliffs of Silence for the birds to pick, her great estate gone fallow.

  ‘Marvellously so, my Lord.’

  ‘I tried my best to convince her.’

  ‘I know that, my Lord.’

  ‘There are some among my siblings who suppose I challenged her because I hoped for power, or due to some personal quarrel, out of jealousy or pique.’

  ‘I can hardly believe there are any Eternal so foolish as to believe such errant nonsense.’

  ‘You think too highly of us,’ the Prime said after a moment. ‘Perhaps we do as well.’

  ‘I know the truth, my Lord, whatever anyone may say, Eternal or otherwise. What you have done was done for the Roost.’

  ‘And what was the point of it? Assuming her position did nothing to bring my siblings to their senses. Still they bicker blindly, still they frolic amidst the growing inferno. Better to have played blind as well, and at least had the joy of her presence some short time longer. At least had her there beside me when the end comes.’ The moonlight fell on his high forehead, and on his golden eyes, heavy and sad and seemingly far-seeing. The snow fell more fiercely, the hoarfrost growing thick along the window.

  ‘Do you plan to attend the Lord of the Rose Hall’s spring gathering?’ Calla began, knowing the answer as she asked. ‘I have heard from his sensechal that he has acquired a species of pachyderm which has never before been seen in the Roost.’

  But the Aubade had already turned back towards the window, and the dark, and
his thoughts. ‘Thank you, Calla,’ he said. ‘But I think not. Please alert my sibling that I’ll be unable to appreciate his kindness.’

  ‘Of course, my Lord,’ and for some reason she found herself blinking away tears. ‘At your command.’

  16

  Sitting alone in an adjourning waiting room, Eudokia found herself missing Jahan’s silent, heavy, reassuring presence, felt the least bit naked. Of course he had not been allowed into the Conclave; indeed they had not even allowed him to rise to the First Rung. So far as Those Above were concerned, Eudokia was a slave as any other, and there was no reason she needed to bring along one of her own. Just as well, really – today she was not the creature to whom half of Aeleria bowed and who the other secretly loathed, today she was not the Revered Mother, today she was an old woman far from home, weak and wavering and fearful. The costume reflected this sudden turn to modesty. Since coming to the city Eudokia had amassed a staggering array of clothing, curious Chazar headpieces, brightly coloured Roost-made robes that had no equal in Aeleria, a fact Eudokia could state with as much authority as anyone else alive. A hundred golden eagles’ worth of silk and samite and careful thread, and all of them packed neatly away. Today she made do in a costume of mottled grey winter robes that trailed down to her narrow ankles, unadorned save for a necklace of prayer beads that she had snatched up in a last flash of inspiration.

  She was playing with these loudly while sitting in a holding pen below the Conclave, agitating the master of protocol, a waspish, unpleasant-looking individual whose temper was not improved by the arrhythmic rattling. ‘Will it be very long, do you think?’ she asked.

  ‘It will be as long as the Eternal deem necessary,’ he said sternly.

  Eudokia offered a meek smile, or what she supposed was a meek smile. Her glass beads continued their retort.

  In fact a moment later a page entered and waved to the two of them, and Eudokia followed the pedant up a small staircase and through one of the side doors that buttressed the main room, and then onto a sort of witness stand. She took a seat, folded her hands on her lap, cast her eyes at the floor, tried to seem intimidated. This last was no very great task – the Conclave was, like every other piece of Eternal architecture she had seen, magnificent beyond all imagining. There was a rumour that the Senate Hall in Aeleria had been designed in imitation of it, and Eudokia could see at once that this was true and that in that task it was an abject failure, though one might at least applaud the audacity. Eudokia had by now grown some consideration for the vastness of the Eternal’s creations, but still the scale was astonishing, the domed ceiling only distantly visible. And against the immensity every detail was perfect, the walls plated to the depth of a finger-joint in gold, the arms of the bench on which Eudokia sat formed into outstretched wings of some or other bird of prey.