Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2

by Daniel Polansky

  There was a decanter of something on the desk, likely not spring water, and Rhythm pulled the cork out and drank from it, savouring the taste as if suspecting he would not have another opportunity to do so. Then he set it back down on the table and began to laugh, a bellow that grew from his broad chest and escaped from his wide mouth and scattered to the far corners of the room. It went on a while, and when it was done Rhythm took another drink.

  ‘Something funny?’ Pyre asked softly.

  ‘It’s like your name – you think calling a thing something else changes what it is, but it doesn’t. Pyre, Thistle, the Five-Fingers, the Brotherhood Below – one’s the same as the other.’

  ‘You can’t be blamed for thinking that, I suppose. It took me a long time to realise that what the demons took from us, more than anything, is hope. Eternal, they call themselves, and if they are then so is everything else. Nothing can change, no point in trying.’

  ‘That’s a nice blade you’ve got there.’

  ‘It serves a function.’

  ‘You buy that yourself?’

  ‘Every human is called upon to do their utmost towards the liberation of the race. My part sometimes requires a blade. Others, no less vital, no less honoured, do their part with their purse, contributing what their means allow.’

  ‘What an interesting coincidence,’ Rhythm said, leaning back in his chair and tapping the hilt of his own weapon with two fingers. ‘I paid for mine with contributions as well. The dagger, my shirt, this bar, all the product of voluntary contributions from men satisfied with my service, happy to be labouring beneath the protection that I offer, happy to kick into the collective pot. It’s astonishing how generous people get when you hold steel to their throats.’

  ‘Your comparisons are surface-deep,’ Pyre said, seeming very nearly calm. ‘Every coin, every nummus and teratrum, goes to the species. It does not feed the coffers of slaves and whoremongers, silk-clad and sitting high on the Second Rung, gorging themselves on the misery of their own people.’

  ‘And when it’s all over, and the blood runs in the streets, and the seed-peckers have been cast down – when boys from the Barrow and porters from the Fifth nest in the castles of the Eternal – what happens then?’

  Standing behind Pyre, Hammer let out an unhappy grunt. There were noises coming from the evening outside, though no one paid them any attention. ‘There will be plenty of time to answer those questions after the redemption of the race.’

  ‘Yeah, you make sure you don’t start looking too far ahead, you might see something you don’t like. But Edom thinks about it, I can assure you. He goes to bed worrying over it and he wakes up doing the same.’

  There was a brief moment when Pyre could feel Thistle coming out, his left eye twitching, that bedrock core of anger, on which it sometimes seemed everything else about him rested, shuddering to the surface. ‘Don’t speak ill of Edom.’

  ‘Why? ’Cause he’s the boss? When I was the boss you didn’t speak ill of me either. You ever get to thinking that maybe there ain’t so much difference between the two of us as you’d like to pretend?’

  ‘No,’ Pyre said quickly. ‘I don’t.’

  ‘You were always good at not thinking about the things you don’t want to think about. They’ve made quite a weapon out of you, Pyre, a better job than I ever could have. A long blade, well-sharpened. Double-edged though, I hope Edom knows that much. Let me ask you something, Pyre, the First of His Line – what happens when there’s no one else to cut?’

  If Pyre had an answer, he was never able to give it. The tumult that had been growing outside the door, to which neither Pyre nor Rhythm, focused as they were on their conversation, had been paying much attention, reached a crescendo.

  ‘Is that your people?’ Pyre asked, knowing the answer.

  ‘You know it isn’t,’ Rhythm said, already out of his chair.

  The voice came from the street outside, through the exterior walls and the main room of the bar and into Rhythm’s office, as loud as a hunting horn though each syllable distinct, coherent despite the strange accent. ‘Will you die in the moonlight?’

  ‘By the gods,’ Hammer declared, and for the first time since he had taken on his new name Pyre thought he saw fear. ‘There’s a demon outside.’

  ‘Will you die in the moonlight,’ it continued, ‘or in your little cage of stone? It is the last decision you’ll ever make; perhaps you should take a moment and consider it.’

  Though Rhythm gave no sign of doing so, overturning a dresser leaning against the back wall, then shoving aside a stretch of thin wood to reveal a hidden ladder leading down to the basement. He scampered down it without another word.

  Pyre felt a hand against his back, not gentle, and Hammer shoved him onward. Hammer who had been Seed, Hammer who had decided already to die, Hammer who was smiling. ‘I’ll hold him as long as I can,’ he said, performing the salute with rare vigour. ‘Until the coming of the new age.’

  Pyre’s hand gripped the pommel of his knife so tight that he thought he might do himself injury, and his eye began to quiver, but after a long moment he released his grip and nodded. The cause and the cause and the cause were all that mattered; Pyre would have given his life for Edom in a heartbeat, not because he loved Edom – though he did – but because the cause demanded his survival, as the cause now demanded his own. ‘The species redeemed entire,’ Pyre answered, and decision made, he followed Rhythm through the false door and down the ladder.

  The cellar was dank and lit only by the few stray strands of light leaking in from upstairs. He was following Rhythm towards a far door when the screaming began, individual voices indecipherable amidst the tumult, a cacophony that began and peaked and ended horribly inside of fifteen or at the very most twenty seconds. Above them Asp’s thick neck was snapped in two, and Splinter’s cruel eyes stared up blank and open and ignorant. Harrier would never again pick up his lute, and Spindle who had survived twenty years as bullyboy, who had an easy half-dozen kills to his credit, proved unable even to slow the demon’s attack. The lock on the back door was stuck and after a half-second spent fiddling Rhythm cursed and planted a foot against the wood, another round of screaming, Hammer giving his life as he had promised, and with Rhythm’s second blow the door broke and they sprinted through the broken frame, up a back staircase and into the street.

  They were in a small alley that ran behind the bar, moonlight flat against the walls. ‘How the hell did it find us?’ Rhythm asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Yeah you do,’ Rhythm said, smiling hard and mean. ‘You been treasoned, boy. You been sold down the canal.’

  Which was impossible. No one but the Dead Pigeons knew about the night’s raid, and none of them would have betrayed Pyre, he knew that, he was certain, he was entirely certain. And anyway this was not the time to think about it. ‘We make for the sewers,’ Pyre said. ‘We might be able to lose him in the slurp.’

  But Rhythm wasn’t listening. He had a knife in his hands all of a sudden, one he might have stuck in Pyre had the evening gone different. ‘This is my bar, and it’s been my bar for fifteen years, and anyone thinking otherwise is going to have more trouble with me than they supposed, don’t matter if they got five fingers or four. You run along now, boy, and you think about what I said. Not everyone’s so honest as you are, and a man who stares at the horizon steps in a lot of puddles.’

  Pyre didn’t have anything to say to that, which was just as well because in that moment the thing rose up from the cellar like some chthonic god. Tall and perfectly formed even in the darkness, the moonlight reflecting off its single-faceted eyes and off its long white teeth.

  ‘You ain’t so tall as I’d figured you’d be,’ Rhythm said, spitting thickly into the dust. His knife was double-edged, and he held it bent back down towards his forearm.

  ‘A brave one,’ it observed of Rhythm in its curious atonal accent. ‘Unflinching despite the certainty of death. Then again, can it be called brav
ery? Are you capable of such a … complex emotion?’

  ‘Your mother was a whore,’ Rhythm said, almost cheerily. ‘We used to gangfuck her for three silver a throw, and she used to beg us after for more.’

  In the long pause that followed Pyre sprinted down the alleyway. ‘What is gangfuck?’ it asked, though it did not wait for an answer.

  Rhythm lasted longer than Hammer, judging by the sound, Rhythm laughing, then cursing, then screaming, but the screams the loudest and the longest. If it had been anywhere else in the Roost Pyre would be dead, but this was the Fifth, this was the Barrow, Pyre knew every inch of this neighbourhood as he knew the rough backside of his hand, as he knew the inside of his own mind. Better than the last. Sprinting out of one alleyway and turning swiftly in to another, downslope towards the nearest pumphouse. The entrance to the sewers was half-covered with a rusted metal grate, and Pyre lost a strip of skin against the brick as he slid beneath it, barely noticing. Three rungs down the ladder and he let himself drop, the fall longer than he had supposed, a pain in his left ankle as he landed; but he ignored it and sprinted further into the suck.

  As a child he had played in the sewers, all the Barrow kids had, though not when their mothers were around – even that indifferent breed were not so callous towards the well-being of their seed. Some of the day it was quiet and cool, some of the day it was flooded with raw sewage or baywater. A few children a year lost to it, unable to resist the temptation, drowning in a suddenly filled chamber or disappearing in the subterranean vastness, going mad with the dark and the fear.

  If it hadn’t bothered to take its time with Rhythm, if it had preferred efficiency over cruelty, Pyre would never have managed his partial escape, the thing would have ran him down without difficulty. But it had enjoyed ifself with Pyre’s old employer; when it finally came down into the sewers there was blood on its hands and blood on its shirt, there was blood on its pale face and there was blood thick in the long tendrils of its hair, as if it had torn Rhythm limb from limb and then drizzled itself in the falling ichor.

  ‘Who are you that so many would die in your defence?’ it asked. ‘Someone important, I gather? Or someone that people imagine to be important? The latter, most assuredly. The life of one of you matters no more than the life of a cockroach or an ant, though you call yourselves Prince or King or Emperor.’

  It was too dark to see much but Pyre could tell by the tilt of the ground and the swift-moving sound of the water where it was he needed to go, sprinting forward, indifferent to the gloom and the heaving of his chest. Ahead a few flickers of moonlight escaped through the broken walls of the viaducts above, tinting the perfect black of the sewer a very very dark brown, the corridor opening onto one of the flood chambers that occasionally broke the monotony of the sewer passageways.

  ‘Do you think to hide from me, locust?’ The demon’s words were clipped and abrupt and yet somehow entrancing. ‘I can smell your stink through the shit, and it smells worse.’

  Pyre stopped running some ways before he entered the chamber, turned back to face the thing coming for him. It was very quiet underground, the only sounds the water trickling back towards the bay and a quiet, growing rush from far above, and then the rustle of steel against leather as Pyre pulled loose his weapon.

  ‘Another brave one,’ it said, and Pyre got the sense that it could see clearly despite the dark. ‘I like brave ones. They scream longer.’

  Of course the demon knew nothing of the Fifth Rung, knew nothing of the slurp, knew nothing except for the majesty and grandeur in which it was born, the shimmering towers and the spires, this world that Pyre had imagined but never glimpsed. Why would the demon bother to learn about the extraordinary contraption that brought water to its home, that was the very lifeblood of the city? A bird nests in the boughs of the tree, they give no thought to the roots.

  ‘Do you know the colour of your liver?’ it asked, an unpractised smile, pale white against the grime-caked walls and the subterranean moss that grew over it. ‘Do you know the scent? Do you know the taste?’

  The sound louder now, though the demon did not notice it or did not pay attention, every fibre of its being caught up in the thrill of torment, relishing Pyre’s fear, or the fear it imagined Pyre to be feeling. Pyre was backing away slowly, slowly, and his breath tightened in the instant when he passed beneath the gate, for it would be soon now, it would be very soon, Pyre could tell by the sound of the slurp. ‘I fear no demon,’ Pyre said loudly, discovering by the echo that this was even true, his voice even and unwavering. ‘The gods themselves watch over me, and will shield me from evil.’

  ‘There are no gods, you speck of dust and grime, you imbecilic and arbitrary arrangement of flesh. There is nothing waiting to judge or to redeem you, no hell for the sinner nor paradise for the faithful. There will be the pain I bring you, and then there will be nothing, an eternal blackness. Though perhaps it may seem paradise, after what comes before.’

  ‘I am Pyre, the First of His Line,’ he intoned, blade steady as Rhythm had taught him in that distant past when he had been Thistle, still backing away slowly, slowly, and the demon following after him as if they were two participants in a dance. ‘And to me was promised the world.’

  The demon saw the gate in the instant before it struck him, nearly enough time for it to make a dash – nearly but not quite, not even with its inhuman alacrity. Somewhere far upslope the locks had gone into effect, the flow of the water reversed, thousands of clove of stone dropping tight and seamless into its niche. It was enough weight to crush a boulder, enough weight to bend a bridge, though apparently not enough weight to kill the demon outright; half its torso and its long neck and one crippled arm and its perfect head and its beautiful eyes were left blinking at Pyre, still furious, still hateful, though dimming rapidly.

  It was not until the demon was trapped that Pyre got a proper look at it, a look at it as more than a demon, more than the despised thief of Pyre’s identity and future, more than as the implacable and absolute enemy of his race. And in that instant Pyre felt a profound sense of confidence wash over him; more than confidence, a sense of destiny, a certainty that most men, hopes taken up with thoughts of wealth or women, are never bold enough to dream. Because the demon that had been chasing him through the sewers, the demon that he had trapped beneath the falling gate, was the same demon that had killed Rat three years earlier, that had murdered Pyre’s best friend out of pique or cruelty or sheer boredom, that had, as much as anything, set Thistle on the path to becoming Pyre. And what more proof could Pyre need that the demon had been wrong, its last words as false as everything else it had ever spoken? For not only did the gods exist but they smiled down upon Pyre, found favour in his actions, had made him an agent of providence, the herald and executor of divine justice, justice so long denied.

  The demon was still not dead, an unbelievable truth but a truth all the same, a thousand clove of stone severing its spine, blood bubbling up through its mouth, a burnt maroon that was darker than the blood of a man. It did not scream and it did not quiver, not even in the instant when Pyre brought the point of his blade down through the back of its neck, severing its spine and killing it instantly, man or demon that was an injury from which no creature could survive.

  The thing that emerged from the sewers was soaked red down to his shoulders, and carried in one hand an unbalanced sphere of pink, the spindly white of bone trailing below it. The road was empty so late in the evening, but it would be busy tomorrow, it would be filled with porters on their way to the docks, and then locals coming to see the impossibility made manifest, and shortly after the Cuckoos, wide-eyed, worthless, cleaning up and barring the way because they had no other idea what to do.

  But then there was only Pyre, First of His Line, splattered with blood and shit, missing one boot from the struggle – and, by coincidence, a youth of the Fifth, come back from or on his way to some errand of petty foolishness or malfeasance. A child who might have been Thistle, who might one
day even be Pyre.

  ‘What are you?’ the boy asked.

  ‘The future,’ Pyre informed him, then slipped back down into the slurp.

  22

  There was no way to avoid the escort that had been arranged for them, an officer and three custodians, large but soft. Indeed, they seemed very much like children to Eudokia, in their silly-looking robes, ill-fitting and ugly, with their ferules more like toys than weapons. Their leader had introduced himself with an obeisance better suited to an expensive courtesan than a master of arms. Jahan had stared at him for a long moment, heavy eyes dull as ever, then he had snorted and sucked at the end of his moustache and returned to being studiously indifferent to the world around him, declining to join Eudokia and Leon in the palanquin, shuffling along behind.

  As a rule, new things did not happen in the Roost, and so the news of the Shrike’s death had spread through the city like a tenement fire. A week since his body, or some part of it, had been left to rot on the Fifth, and still no one could speak of anything else. For three days there had been a curfew enforced across the Roost; upslope there was nothing but shuttered windows and bolted doors and even the Perennial Exchange had been closed. As for what was going on downslope, no one seemed to be able to say with certainty. There were reports of massed groups of Cuckoos marching through the streets, stiffened with the occasional Eternal, searching for the Shrike’s killer and not being particularly careful about whether they found him.

  Leon leaned against the soft leather seats of the palanquin, holding the silk curtains with one hand, sunlight and a general aura of misfortune leaking in. They passed a group of Cuckoos, looking dirtier and meaner and rather more savage than those who were escorting them, had a line of youths faced up blindly against a wall. For half a minute as they progressed downslope Eudokia could make out strands of speech: ‘wasn’t me, wasn’t us, don’t know nothing, never heard of him, never heard of anyone,’ the common refrain to be made out in any slum anywhere in the world.