Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2

by Daniel Polansky

  ‘I would again advise you to do nothing which would worry Jahan,’ Eudokia said, a small dash of concern in her voice, ‘it would set my plans back terribly if you had to be killed. He’s very protective of me, dear Jahan,’ she continued, setting a hand on the giant’s shoulder that served to return the weapon back to its sheath. ‘Where were we? Yes, Edom, the First of His Line. When I met him he was calling himself Samite, though I very much doubt that was ever his real name. A runaway from the plantations, according to the men I sent to look in on the matter, slipped off with a passing merchant, preferred a life on the roads to one in the fields. By the time he reached Aeleria he’d morphed into one of those countless street-corner visionaries one finds wriggling round the Senate Hall, hoping to trade future prospects for coin in the moment. He was immodest and pushy, but he spoke well, and he gave the strong impression of believing what he said. There was some hint of promise. I cleaned him up, I gave him a stipend and helped him return to the Roost to peddle his dreams. In truth he’s achieved far more for himself than I’d ever thought him capable of. Had you told me ten years ago that this clipped-copper hustler would have been instrumental in the overthrow of the Eternal, the dream of hungry-eyed man for the better part of for ever …’ She smiled, shrugged. ‘I admit freely, that was beyond the range of my vision. But that’s what it is, you see. You set a hundred plots within motion in the vague hopes that two or five of them might take hold. Like scattering seed in the dust.’

  Pyre’s body continued in its rhythm, moving forward by momentum and reflex, feet rising and falling without any conscious intent, which was good because in that moment Pyre found that he could not hold within his mind even the simplest of thoughts, and they walked another hundred steps before he managed to respond. ‘Madness,’ he said, convincing no one. ‘You would suggest you developed the creed of the Five-Fingered? That it was your hand that has brought about the dawn?’

  ‘Not everything,’ Eudokia admitted, ‘only the wiser bits. I was not, for instance, made aware of Edom’s decision to have you killed until the deed had already been attempted. Though of course that proved fortuitous enough in the end. More proof, as if it was needed, that to be wise is not to be omniscient, that we all follow along in the tread of history.’

  Pyre had been awake for perhaps seventy of the last seventy-two hours. He had raised the standard of rebellion in the very heart of the Roost, and defended that standard with such vigour as to have stalemated the demons themselves. He had come to or near to the final culmination of his dreams. He could no longer think with very much clarity. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You are careful, yes boy? You are clever? You move through the city as a fish through the rivers? Did you not think to ask how the custodians knew of your location? To be certain enough as to bring in the assistance of an Eternal?’

  ‘The Birds have spies everywhere.’

  ‘Everywhere, yes, everywhere, exactly. They have spies in your bedroom and your chamber pot, they have spies within the inner council itself. One member of the inner council in particular, who heard your name on every man’s lips, scarred by strangers on alley walls. Every revolution needs its martyrs, and who better than Pyre, the First of His Line? Cut down in the prime of his strength, and the city needing to avenge him? Pyre, the First of His Line, brave and strong and above all, loyal?’

  The truth slid slowly, comfortably, neatly into place. He thought now that perhaps he had already known, known and refused to consider it.

  ‘The Five-Fingers,’ Eudokia said, interrupting his thoughts. ‘And what will you call yourselves now?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Five-Fingers, to contrast with those less generously endowed. What happens when there is nothing here in the Roost, nothing across the breadth and length of the world, that can walk and speak and hate as men except for man himself? It is a concept given definition by its opposite, without whom it will wither and collapse.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of it.’

  ‘Edom has, I assure you. Why be a prophet when you can be a king? Someone has to be in charge, of course; or did you suppose the death of the Eternal would usher in a new age of enlightenment, that without its ancient enemy mankind would have no need for line or law or leader? The Eternal did not teach us to kill, Pyre, the First of His Line. Nor to desire, not to lust, nor to hate. Their annihilation will save no man from the sins which haunt him. There must be someone who can stand above the fray, who can keep his evil in check.’ She shrugged. ‘Perhaps too great a task. Who can focus it, at least. Edom, needless to say, would be that someone. It was that which he was thinking of when he revealed your location to the Cuckoos, the night you killed the Lord of the Ebony Towers. He was thinking of your name, and how to murder it before it grew too large.’

  ‘Why would you tell me this?’

  ‘Really, child, isn’t it obvious? Because Edom is too slippery a character to build atop, and I’d rather be dealing with you than I would with him. And because now that your eyes have been opened, now that you understand who it is that you’ve sworn obedience towards, this man who has sought your death, you will be sure to do the same of his – though, I suspect, with more success.’

  ‘You’re lying,’ he said, though it might have been a question.

  ‘A pointless affectation, dishonesty. For the weak and less than clever, a vice we sowers of discord have little reason to indulge. Quite the opposite, in fact. Do you wish to see the towers torn asunder, to see blood run in the streets? Give every man true knowledge of his neighbour. The world would become an abattoir within the hour.’

  A band of hooligans, downslope thugs making their first excursion above their home Rung in search of plunder and rapine, came out from one of the alleyways, saw Eudokia in her finery and laughed nastily. One of them carried a rug over one shoulder, woven of silk and threaded gold, one of them carried a large urn that seemed made of pure silver, one of them held a stout length of wood and the two others bits of sharpened metal. Flush with the day’s violence and the coming certainty of more, they did not seem to notice Pyre standing beside her.

  ‘What have we here?’ asked the one holding the club, a few years younger than Pyre, taller but thinner. A recent discovery of the simple efficacy of violence had made him very bold, but his eyes went wide at Pyre’s snarl, and the following blow sent him halfway to his knees, and before he had reached them Pyre’s blade was out from its sheath and its point perilously close to the downed child.

  ‘I am Pyre, the First of His Line, and this woman is under my protection, and by Enkedri the next thing out of your mouth will be an apology or what follows will be your life’s blood.’

  Damp red appeared on his lips, fear in the corners of his eyes. He swallowed hard, and held his hands up before him, the club forgotten in the mud of the thoroughfare. ‘Forgive me, mistress,’ he said, standing and backing down the way he’d come, his friends quick to follow him.

  ‘You grow to it already,’ Eudokia said, smiling.

  40

  The battle that Bas had missed while storming the Roost would go down in history as the Salvation. In fact history is the wrong word – it skipped swiftly past history and moved directly into legend, bards’ songs and mummers’ tales and the games of children. For generations and centuries to come boys would relive it with sticks as swords and broom handles as spears, argue over who would play the demons, who would play Konstantinos, the Gentleman Lion, who would play the Caracal, his red-handed subordinate. It could be compared to no other human conflict—for a corollary one needed to reach towards religion, to the great conflict that Enkedri and his siblings had fought before the beginning of time, against the chthonic forces that had hoped to dethrone him. This battle that had already, in the hours since it had been fought, attained an almost mythical status, that had firmly established Konstantinos – so far as popular opinion was concerned, and is there anything else that matters? – as the foremost captain of the age, that would once again c
onfirm Bas as the Empire’s greatest champion, even though he had not actually fought in it, that a thousand thousand braggarts and liars and fools from across the continent would claim to have participated in, this epic triumph, this signal victory, had lost the Aelerians five soldiers for every Other that was killed, the blood of fifteen thousand men watering the summer fields.

  And among this innumerable dead – perhaps not innumerable; you could count them, if for some reason such a task appealed to you, and you had a few dozen hours to spend looking over the corpses – was Isaac, Bas’s oldest friend.

  Bas could get no clear information about what had happened to him. A pentarche said that he had seen him ridden down in the first charge of the demons, another insisted that this was not possible, that the adjutant had rallied them after the third, when things looked all but lost, had led them surging forward into the heart of the Other front. Mostly the men of the Thireenth just shrugged and shook their heads sadly. How could anyone be expected to keep track of a single corpse, among such a vast assemblage? You might as well ask follow the passage of a drop of water through a river, through a bay, through the ocean.

  Konstantinos had evacuated his tent, every spread of canvas being needed to tend to the wounded, and still there was not enough and not nearly enough, long rows of the injured waiting to be treated, limbs stacked upon each other like firewood, left unveiled against the sun, which was, kindly and according to its fashion, dimming beneath the horizon. Bas found the Protostrator standing beneath a peach tree, a short way out from what had been his sleeping quarters and was now a silk-lined cenotaph. The greatest victory in the history of Aeleria seemed to have done the man very little good. He looked exhausted – he looked more than exhausted, he looked close to collapse. He did not bother to rise when he saw Bas, made do with a vague wave of his hand.

  ‘Hail, God-Killer,’ he said, and he dropped his arm back down, as if even this much had been too much effort. ‘I’m afraid that sobriquet is no longer so rare as it once was.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ Bas said, not really meaning it.

  ‘Yes,’ Konstantinos said, not really meaning it either. ‘I take it the fact that we faced four thousand Birds instead of six was your doing?’

  ‘It was,’ Bas said. ‘The Roost is in open rebellion. There are none on the lower Rungs who dare show for the Eternal. Our allies there have performed as promised.’

  ‘And the tower?’

  ‘Will hold,’ Bas said confidently. If there had been any chance otherwise Bas would not have left, for in the end there was nothing to him but duty, or perhaps that had been his defining feature for so long that he could not imagine himself doing anything else. Regardless, he had only descended from the Spire after the first wave of reinforcements had arrived from below, when it bristled with victorious hoplitai and the fractured remnants of the Eternal had returned to their homes at the top of the Roost for what was certain to be the last time. ‘The force I led into the city has now been supplemented by two more contingents of soldiers, as per the plan. There are a thousand hoplitai on the First Rung, and there will be two thousand before morning. Soon there will be enough to make a raid on the surrounding castles. Not that I suppose it’ll matter by then.’

  ‘No,’ Konstantinos agreed. ‘It’ll end tomorrow. Who’s in charge?’

  ‘Hamilcar, the Dycian.’

  ‘And why are you not with them?’

  Bas shrugged. ‘Someone needed to report. And I suppose I wished to be there at the end.’

  Neither said anything for a while; they stood quietly, listening to the screaming coming from the tents, the sawbones with their hacksaws heating in the fire, the stray dogs collecting outside, lapping up the blood, carrying away loose cuts of man meat.

  ‘How many survived, do you suppose?’ Bas asked.

  Konstantinos shrugged. ‘A thousand, perhaps more. When it was clear the day was lost, the Prime managed to cut his way out and flee back to the Roost.’

  Was one of those Einnes, Bas wondered? Was she at the peak of the city just now, engaged in whatever desperate debate occupied the remnants of Those Above, searching for some dim means of escape, or accepting their bloody fate? Or was her corpse even now rotting amidst the vast ocean of dead, a crow pecking at her eyes?

  ‘I’d have thought they’d have died on the battlefield,’ Konstantinos said. ‘Rather than flee. Is there any chance they will try and make terms? Or take up position in the city, fortify the approach and make us starve them out?’

  ‘They won’t make terms, even if they thought we might accept them, which we wouldn’t. They’ll die tomorrow, outside the walls,’ Bas said, somehow confident. ‘They’re just figuring out how to do it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’d like to take charge of the Thirteenth.’

  ‘Only fitting,’ Konstantinos said after a moment. ‘Tell Nikephoros I gave the order.’

  Bas nodded. Another long pause.

  ‘What was it like inside?’ Konstantinos asked.

  ‘Beautiful,’ Bas said finally.

  ‘I thought it would be,’ Konstantinos said, gazing distantly at the Roost. ‘I thought it would have to be. I’m sorry about your adjutant,’ he added, as an afterthought.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He had lots of company.’

  ‘No. We all go alone, at the end.’

  41

  That night the Roost ran red.

  Blood gathered in little pools on cobblestone streets and leached into the rich black soil of the public gardens. Blood ran in trickles down alleyways and in torrents down the main thoroughfares. Blood soaked through silk bedsheets and plush carpets, blood dripped off the faces of screaming men and weeping women, blood clotted and dried and grew cold beside a thousand thousand bodies, dockers, tradesmen, porters, merchants, custodians, milliners, carpenters, cooks and maids and servants, brute thugs and crime lords, wealthy merchants and civic leaders. Rich crimson blood, and blood a shade darker, though blood all the same.

  Blood leaked out the nose and mouth and punctured stomach of a tradesman on the Fifth Rung— no supporter of the Birds, either open or covert, at least any more than virtually everyone had been in the day before the world was upended. But he had been wealthier, and was not that wealth evidence of complicity with the demons? Certainly the men laughing and standing atop his shattered corpse seemed to think so, though they were unlettered porters who had heard no word of the truth. On the Fourth Rung a custodian barricaded himself inside his house, he and his wife and his three children and the suckling that still nursed at her breast, propping every item of furniture he owned against the door frame, holding his ferule should anyone manage to break through. In the end it did no good though, the mob outside firing the house, the custodian and his wife and his three children and the suckling that still nursed at her breast. In the Perennial Exchange on the Third a woman sat amidst the ruins of the shop she had spent a lifetime building, dresses and shawls trampled in the dust, the mob that had passed through not bothering even to steal them, destruction itself a joy, and thinking on it for some time she went to search for a pair of scissors, deciding she had no taste for what was to come. On the Second Rung were such seeds of depravity, of rapine and cruelty and foulness as to make the Self-Created blush, as to make him turn away, as to make him wonder in what moment of foolishness he had seen fit to decree that base matter ought ever to organise itself into thinking creatures, irrespective of the number of their digits.

  And on the First? On the First?

  In between dropping Eudokia off at her safe house and finding himself at the Third, the afternoon had turned to early evening had turned firmly and fully to night. How had Pyre spent those hours? He could not say, not then nor at any point after. They were stripped from his memory in their entirety, never to return, a spot of history obliterated, only faint impressions of crimson, and of children crying, and of corpses left to rot in the moonlight. Downslope the battle raged onward, Pyre’s minions continuing on
despite the absence of their leader, the victory clear within sight. They had succeeded, they had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, had tapped deep into that simmering vein of rage of which Pyre himself had always been the truest and most vivid example. There were not a thousand official members of the Five-Fingered, and only four hundred of them able to wield a blade – four hundred two days earlier, of course; who could say what remnant of that now remained? A tiny drop of passion in a vast sea of indifference, or seeming indifference. And yet at a word, at the slightest suggestion, at the first glimmer of resistance, the city had risen up against the demons, giving vent to long-simmering hatred. Surely this could only be taken as evidence of the justice of the cause, that the truth was written, faded but legible, on the heart of all men – that freedom was theirs by right, that they need only be strong enough to take it.

  Or was it otherwise? Was it simply that most men are constrained by routine more than by any sense of morality, and that should these basic covenants ever break down, should it occur to them that they might not go to work in the morning, that they might not pay homage to their superiors and to the civil authority set over them, should this revelation ever strike, then blood and massacre and death are certain to follow?