Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2

by Daniel Polansky

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘The Senate has considered the ultimatum put forth by the Conclave, that the Aelerian army return immediately to the capital and to their garrisons further west.’

  ‘Have they? Was there great debate, in your Senate House? Did the grandees and the wise men of your nation discuss the matter in vigorous counsel?’

  ‘How could I know, my Lord, not having been there to witness it?’

  ‘I would suppose your servants sufficiently trained not to require direct oversight. Regardless, continue.’

  Though she did not, not for a long moment at least; she savoured each detail: the sound of the warm rain that beat against the windows, the smell of camphor emanating from the braziers hanging in the corner of the room, and the smell of the Prime himself, clean and sweet and not at all unpleasant. ‘By order of the Senate, in response to the continued aggression of the Salucians, aggression that has been exacerbated and allowed by the Roost and Those Above, Aeleria does hereby declare ourselves independent, autonomous, owing fealty to no nation nor overlord. All past duties are extinguished, any future claim of fealty repudiated altogether. The Sentinel of the Southern Reach is no longer welcome in Aeleria, or in any land to which Aeleria holds claim. Whatever peace is to be made with the Salucians will be determined without the assistance or input of Those Above. The Roost is yours, and the plantations which surround it. Should the other human nations wish to continue in their servitude, that is their business as well. But never again will an Eternal think to claim Aeleria among their inheritance. Never again will Aeleria send tithe, nor obey the orders of the Conclave. The Commonwealth is sovereign, absolute and recognises no master.’

  The Eternal did not laugh – or at least, Eudokia, who had been watching them closely and for the better part of nine months, had never seen one laugh, not a chuckle, not the upturned corner of a lip. But some ineffable sense of levity overcame the Prime just then, limbs easing of tension, as if a weight had been removed from his shoulders. ‘I hardly need to take this to the Conclave. Your terms are entirely unacceptable. There is no such thing as Aeleria; it is a fiction which you have been allowed to maintain because we did not care to disabuse you. You own nothing, not the land that you stand upon, not the water you drink or the air that you breathe. All are received in trust from us, who came first, who were masters of the very earth while your kind were little better than dogs.’

  ‘So be it,’ Eudokia said. ‘Then there is only war left between us.’

  ‘That would seem to be the case,’ the Prime agreed. ‘Shall I speak freely with you, Revered Mother?’

  ‘There seems, at this point at least, little need for obfuscation.’

  ‘Indeed. The last three years have been the most difficult of my life, though they represent some bare fraction of my span. I have long been filled with the most abiding sense of … dread, I suppose, as if I was standing atop the Cliffs of Silence, staring down at the bay below. Desperately I have worked to convince the Eternal of the seriousness of the situation, of the need to marshal our forces against your Commonwealth. Continuously, my hopes have been disappointed. I do not mind saying, now that there is no longer any need for masks, that my people often seem to me foolish, frivolous, undeserving of their role and position. They are unified only in their pursuit of pleasure, in their unwavering desire to follow their own urges irrespective of the outcome. No warning I gave them was sufficient to convince them of the seriousness of the situation, no call to action loud enough to be heard above the sounds of their own merriment.’ The Prime opened the window again, two long fingers pushing against the clean pane, and the rich odour of summer entered the room, the ripening orange trees, the roses and the tulips and the dahlias. ‘Almost nothing, at least. What a gift you have given me in your foolishness, Eudokia of Aeleria. The madness of you locusts, to think yourself fit not only to subvert our wishes but outright to reject them! This will galvanise my people as no other thing might, this will, finally and fully, allow me to release the strength of Those Above against you who seek to stand against it.’

  ‘How happy a moment this must be for you then, my Lord.’

  ‘In fact, I find myself of two minds on the subject. On the one hand, there is this inescapable and abiding sense of relief. Of … joy, I suppose, though I am not altogether sure that this is an emotion which I possess, and if not whether we are incapable of it as a species or if its lack is a peculiarity of my own person. On the other, the dawning awareness, the continual and uncomfortable realisation, that perhaps of all these things that are said of me – that I am moribund, or war-loving, or so obsessed with my own person as to seek to create crisis I might then resolve, criticisms I have dismissed – are, in the light of this new information, revealed perhaps to be more valid than I had thought, or would wish.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m having some difficulty following the complexity of your logic, my Lord. A natural enough position, given the innate inferiority of my species.’

  ‘You mock, and yet I think never, in a lifetime which exceeds yours as yours does an insect, have I ever thought that to be more certainly the case. Eudokia Aurelia, the wisest and most clever of the Five-Fingered. Who rules Aeleria from the shadows, whose whispered words have destroyed mighty kingdoms. And till this moment, I confess, I nearly believed it. There is something about you, some strange quality which seems almost to make you an equal of one of my kind. Or at least, I was fool enough to suppose. Such madness,’ he said, as if the thing itself was impossible to believe. ‘Truly, I must reconsider my judgement on your species. Perhaps it is as my siblings have said, and an excess of empathy has led to error.’

  ‘Such is often the case, my Lord Prime – though I confess it is not a problem I have found in abundance here among your people.’

  ‘True, that at least is a personal peculiarity – as a species we are quite thoroughly brutal. And so I shudder to think of the cruelties it will mean for your own race, your nation, your hearth and your home.’ The Aubade paused for a moment, turned to look out the window at the rain cascading down towards the water below. ‘We can be very cruel. I am afraid that after we finish with the army you send against us, I will not be able to stop my siblings from marching on your capital, as we did in ages past. The … Lamentation, I believe it is called in the Commonwealth? When we brought fire and sword to your people, when we slaughtered your king and his line and anyone else who might hope to claim distant kinship? I wonder what name your grandchildren will give to the horrors that will soon befall you? I wonder if there will be any left alive still capable of such sentiment, or if the thoroughfares and avenues of your city will be emptied entirely, with none remaining to recall your name or the misfortune you caused. Such foolishness. Such madness. And all of it will lie at your feet, Revered Mother. The blood that will come, the torrent and the river, the rotting flesh and the weeping children, are on your head. There is nothing I can do now to halt the tide, not even if I wished to, not even if I thought it was undeserved. When mongrel dogs rut in your castles and sparrows nest in your temples, when your people weep and moan and subsist on stonecrop and goutweed and on the flesh of their own children, when the spines and viscera of your senators and generals and noblefolk are left drying on the broken walls of your city, know well that it will be due to the foolishness of Eudokia, Revered Mother.’

  ‘Whatever comes of this,’ Eudokia said, and for once the false humility that was her habitual garment was cast aside, and the bare audacity laid naked beneath, ‘It will indeed be by my hand.’

  27

  The brewing summer storm whipped her travelling coat east, towards the Roost, towards what was to come. She held the reins in a four-fingered hand, and the great beast at the other end pawed the ground furiously, snorted at the gale and the damp and the still-hateful smell of man. They were on the outskirts of camp, within the distant site of the last pickets.

  ‘Is it wise to travel alone?’ Bas asked. Einnes had dismissed the lifeguard of mercenary P
arthans that had been her occasional companions since he had met her years earlier. ‘There are many cables between here and your home, and the roads far from safe.’ Which was to put it mildly. Once word spread of Aeleria’s invasion – and word would spread, in all likelihood it already had – what little was left of civil authority in the territory they were marching through would collapse completely, the usual spread of banditry and chaos, one of the lesser misfortunes of war. ‘You might do better to travel with an escort.’

  ‘There are not so many cables,’ Einnes responded, a warning or a threat or a promise. ‘I shall be there in ten days, travelling alone. Mounted on what passes among your kind for horses, it would take them twice as long, perhaps longer. And as for the dangers of the road—’ the hilt of a long blade jutted above her shoulder, and a glance over at her stallion revealed any number of other weapons, a curved hatchet, a lance with three sharpened prongs, ‘—it will be good practice for what is to come.’

  Bas nodded.

  ‘Did you know?’ she asked.

  ‘That the Senate would vote for war?’

  ‘That war was coming.’

  The wind shifted then, for a moment, carrying the sounds of camp towards them. The mobile forges, metal struck against metal, instruments of death being born. And the men who would carry them, laughing, swaggering, cursing, fearful, violent, uncertain. All the potential of a vast and disparate nation, focused and sharpened towards one single end. What was the point of making such a thing, if not to use it?

  ‘We both knew,’ Bas said finally.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘It was to be expected. Your lives are so short, so madly brief. It would be impossible to learn anything in time to put it into practice, and so each generation is left to recreate the idiocy of their forebears, to leap nimbly over the same cliffs’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Bas said simply. ‘I think we are more dangerous than you suppose. Take care, Einnes.’

  ‘I don’t suppose I’ll ever hear that name again,’ she observed, though with the flat and affectless way she said everything, Bas could not tell how she felt about it.

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘What possessed you to give it to me? Some old friend? Some old lover?’

  Bas had never had a woman for whom he had not paid, and none of them stood out in his memory particularly. ‘Not a lover.’

  ‘Then what?’

  Though when no answer proved forthcoming she paced back over to her steed. The flanks of her horse came up near to the top of Bas’s head, but Einnes mounted without assistance or difficulty; one hand on the pommel and she vaulted into the saddle.

  He made sure to look at her then, to look and remember, the stalks of trailing hair, that strange jut of a nose that altered the entire cast of her face, the cheekbones high and cruel, those eyes like, like, like—

  ‘On the last day, you will find me at the front vanguard,’ she said. ‘Beneath the sigil of the white heron.’

  ‘I’ll find you,’ Bas promised in a low voice that nonetheless reached her. ‘I’ll find you.’

  Her horse, ever hateful, ever furious, tore eastward at a thunderous pace, as if it had always been waiting to do so, as indeed perhaps it had. She did not look backwards, though Bas watched until he could make her out only as a black dot against the flat landscape, wishing in vain that he had told her what her name meant.

  A brave man, Bas. All of the songs said so.

  28

  Dusk descended on the Second, on boughs of trees thick with white blossoms, on scenes of joy, of frivolity, of ribaldry. Of men blushing and women laughing and lovers embracing passionately, in dark corners of warm bars and wedged tight on public benches and in the midst of crowded thoroughfares, the obstructed traffic accepting their misfortune with good humour, a small price to pay for being above ground, and that ground, the Roost! Liquor poured like the water from the Source, kegs of light ale and casks of dark, bowls of rum punch, flutes of pink cordial, snifters of buttery brown booze, and wasn’t this the time to break out that vintage Salucian red, and if not now, then when? And now it was. Every cafe, barroom, tavern, hostelry and restaurant had its own band, a complementary cacophony that somehow never devolved into bedlam, the competing strands united in the singular purpose of merriment. And if, among all this amusement, there was some distant scent of danger as of smoke, there was a vague glimmer of the violence that had engulfed the lower Rungs, there was perhaps even some slim cognisance that it might spread – was this not, in the end, only reason to embrace the evening more fully?

  Leon waited beside a sparkling stone fountain, watching the proceedings with a wide and reasonable grin, looking tall and handsome, dressed in the Aelerian style but with a touch of grace to him all the same. Or at least some of the other denizens of the Second seemed to think, a buxom brunette breaking away from her giggling and identical coterie, throwing a necklace of flowers over his shoulders and planting a kiss just off his mouth, a smudge of bright purple lip-paint, and then she laughed and sprinted off into the mob.

  ‘Come, Leon of Aeleria,’ Calla said, arriving a moment after, hoping her smile hid any distant tick of jealousy. ‘Let us escape, before the women of the Roost devour you whole.’

  He said something in response but it was too loud for her to hear it, as it was too dark to see his blush. The street lights by common consent were dimmed during the Blossom Festival, to offer a better view of the budding efflorescence and the moon above, and the fireworks that would crown the public spectacle, and finally also to allow for any private entertainment that might be best preserved beneath the cover of darkness. Calla took his hand, because it was so busy, of course, because there was otherwise a chance of him getting lost, and then she led him to a just slightly less crowded side street and into a bustling tavern. The main floor was packed, but the proprietor was an old friend and had kept a table waiting for the Prime’s seneschal.

  Not just a table but the best table, in fact, a little alcove just above the street. Calla ordered a flagon of red but promised herself she would only drink some of it.

  ‘Captivity seems to suit you,’ she said.

  ‘It is true; for a citizen of a nation with which the Roost is technically at war, I have found my privileges little curtailed. We are forbidden from leaving the city, and my aunt has had some people posted to watch her. That seems to be roughly the limits of the Roost’s interest. And where, may I ask, is the architect of these policies? Has the Prime changed his mind regarding the evening’s excursion?’

  ‘The Prime’s word, once given, is as certain as the rising sun or the coming of the new moon, is as certain as anything you can imagine.’

  ‘Unfortunate,’ Leon said with a smile that showed teeth. ‘I had hoped to have you alone for the whole evening.’

  Calla laughed, feigned wide-eyed surprise. ‘And where would you have me, Leon of Aeleria?’

  And now the light was good enough to make out the blush clear, though to Calla’s eyes it made him no less fetching. The server came back then with their wine, and Leon thanked her with a courtesy that was just the proper side of elaborate.

  ‘You’ve an impressive grasp of our language.’

  ‘Auntie insisted. Roost, Salucian, Dycian, a smattering of Chazar, though I’ve never used it outside of my study. I admit that at one point my … facility with languages was a source of pride, though no longer.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Relatively little difference between them, all things considered, flowerings of the same essential root. Having no comparison to the complexity of the Eternal’s tongue, and the truly mammoth task that would be required to comprehend it.’

  ‘More than mammoth – impossible.’

  ‘Truly?’

  Calla looked around sharply, but it would have required more than a casual aside to interrupt the evening’s revelry. ‘A curious attempt at humour,’ she said finally. ‘No human is capable of grasping the nuances of the Eternal’s speech, not to the faintest or vaguest degree. Ev
en the suggestion of such is a blasphemy of the most … profound and hideous kind, of the sort which perhaps no foreigner could fully appreciate.’

  ‘Then you ought to be rather more careful about how you display your erudition,’ he said.

  Calla looked down into her cup. She should have been fearful or at least concerned, but in fact in that moment what she felt was pride and the sly good humour of a disobedient child. ‘When did you notice?’

  ‘That first night I met you,’ he said. ‘Those Above do not look at us when they speak, a happy bit of discourtesy, in your case at least. If ever they thought you worth their attention, I fear your deception would not last an evening.’

  ‘And you, Leon?’

  ‘I find it hard to place my eyes elsewhere,’ he admitted.

  Outside, a soft summer wind trailed the blossomed limb of a cherry tree against their window, the soft white bud, the moonlight beyond. Inside, Calla’s heart fluttered.

  She told him of the Book. Passed down from her grandsire six times removed, a secret compendium of the High Tongue, of its fluid consonants and ethereal vowels, of its esoteric grammar, syllables shifting based upon the time of day and the placement of the moon and the seasons and whether you were standing up- or downslope of your interlocutor. Of the assiduous observations made over the course of a century and a half, a bequest of knowledge stretching back through the generations. Endless hours spent behind barred doors, sifting through its secrets, adding to them when she was certain of her conclusions. Words muttered with curtains drawn on moonless nights, endless practice after long days of work, falling asleep exhausted and numbed, having dreams in which she and the Aubade conversed casually in her secret tongue. She told him of her facility, which was near to fluency, an accomplishment that was her chief pride, that was unequalled in the human history of the Roost; which on point of death need always remain a secret.

  She had never spoken of it before, not so fully at least, not to anyone. He did not answer for a long time afterward, considering the matter with the serious interest that she found one of his most attractive qualities. ‘No one else knows of your expertise?’