Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2 Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Daniel Polansky

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Daniel Polansky was born in Baltimore, Maryland. He can be found in Brooklyn, when he isn’t somewhere else. His Low Town novels, The Straight Razor Cure and its sequels, Tomorrow, the Killing and She Who Waits, received great acclaim. The Empty Throne duology is his first epic fantasy.

  www.danielpolansky.com.

  @DanielPolansky

  Also by Daniel Polansky

  The Low Town Novels

  The Straight Razor Cure

  Tomorrow, the Killing

  She Who Waits

  The Empty Throne

  Those Above

  Those Below

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by

  Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Daniel Polansky 2016

  The right of Daniel Polansky to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 1 444 77997 4

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Peter Backof, Michael Rubin and

  Robert Mason Rickets III. Blessed to know you.

  1

  Two men came walking past first, porters or one-time porters, thick legs and bent backs and mean eyes. They spent a long moment silently scrutinising Seed and Dray and Quail. They didn’t make any threats, except in so far as their presence was a threat; their very existence was a threat.

  Seed made sure to look straight back at them, without blinking or bowing his head. They were looking for moles, agents of the Those Above, and Seed was most certainly not that – just your average Fifth Rung slum kid, about at that age when it was time to get marked as a porter, or to get work on the plantations outside of the city. No different from ten thousand others on the lowest levels of the Roost, strutting about in worn pants during the late afternoon, faces dirty, looking to get forget-yourself drunk. He was big and he was tough, but there were plenty boys bigger and plenty men tougher; the Fifth Rung was the sort of place that bred rowdies and brutes and straight-up killers in great profusion. The only thing that made him noteworthy – and this might have been stretching the point – was his busted eye, the lid drooping, the iris lazy and unresponsive. He had never been a handsome man but there was a difference between being homely and being deformed, a difference he had had a long time to ponder in the two and a half years since a Barrow boy had beaten the scars into his face.

  Dray and Quail couldn’t even claim that distinction, if being made ugly enough that you couldn’t get a woman to look at you without a couple of tertarum in your hand was a distinction. Seed did not think it was; in fact he thought it was quite the opposite. Seed thought what had been done to his face was the sort of thing worth holding a grudge about, and he thought also that there was no point in holding on to a grudge when you could even it up. This was the reason that he was standing against the wall of a run-down building a few minutes’ walk from the docks, getting eyeballed by a pair of Dead Pigeons.

  One of the soldiers nodded, and then they both headed back upslope, and a moment later Thistle came strutting past, and whatever doubts Seed had about his errand were forgotten at the first sight of that arrogant smile, those eyes that were heavy and cold as a stone unearthed from the bottom of a riverbed. ‘Hello, brothers,’ he said. Seed couldn’t remember if he had ever heard him talk before; Seed didn’t think so. Seed didn’t like the fact that he liked his voice, which was deep and slow and seemed to emanate from somewhere far within his chest. ‘Walk with me.’

  Thistle turned and headed east, headed east without looking back, and Seed hated him all over again, hated him as much for his arrogance as for what he had done to Seed’s eye.

  Of course they’d been hearing rumours about the Five-Fingers for years – you could always find men foolish or mad enough to dream and even speak of retribution and rebellion and revolution, as you could find men foolish or mad enough to speak of climbing up the sky and casting the sun down to earth. The Fifth Rung had no shortage of inebriates and lunatics. But then, you couldn’t exactly call them madmen, not this last year, not with half the docks attending their secret rallies, not with all the whispers you heard of bulging coffers and gangs of well-trained hard boys. Rumours are like smoke of course, but still, you smell enough of it and you’d be wise to start looking for fire. And amidst the many other stories that spread swift across the lower Rungs, there was one of Pyre, the First of His Line, leader of the militant wing of the Five-Fingered.

  Dead Pigeons they were called, after their preferred form of intimidation, birds left bleeding on the doorsteps of their opponents. To murder an avian was a capital offence in the Roost, as far as the authorities were concerned one more serious than theft or assault, worse than rape, worse even than carrying a weapon. A man mad enough to do that publicly was a man mad enough to do anything, and moreover a man who knew where you lived.

  If this lesson went unheeded, they had other ways of making their point. A Cuckoo on the Fourth Rung renowned for a particularly severe brand of sadism was found butchered one morning in the whorehouse that he had frequented. A notoriously corrupt bureaucrat, famed even by the standards of his kind for avarice, cupidity and licentiousness, went missing on his way upslope one evening. He showed up two days later absent the small fingers on both of his hands and talking of nothing but redemption, of his own evils and what he would do to make up for them, talking of it loudly and frequently in the main thoroughfare running along the docks, having traded wealth and iniquity for the life of a penniless preacher. There were others –
men disappeared into the sewers and men made silent from fear of such, and soon the Cuckoos, the Roost’s human guard, had come to speak quietly rather than with their characteristic belligerence, and would not go out in the evening except in the company of their fellows, eyes roaming and hands tight about their ferules.

  It was to Pyre that this change was attributed, and the first bounty had gone out on his head a year past: five golden eagles, the Eternal currency, used only by those directly in their employ, the seneschals and high servants. Five golden eagles was more money than a man on the Fifth Rung would earn in a grim lifetime of labour, and though it doubled and then doubled and then doubled again, still it was not enough to bring word of Pyre’s location to the men who sought him harm. The Fifth did not give up its secrets so casually.

  Seed did not care about any of that. The Five-Fingers could hold hands with the Four and jump in the bay so far as he was concerned. Seed had never given a thought to politics, never even given a thought that someone might. Life at the docks was personal, it started with your best friend and it ended with your worst enemy, and the distance between them was a few minutes’ walk.

  Thistle led them towards one of the pumphouses, part of the vast engine that leeched water out of the bay and sent it, some several cables, some practical infinity, upslope. The pumps were what gave the Fifth its character, if by character you meant an unpleasant smell of wet and an ever-present slurping sound, like a drunken fart. Two men were half-lounging around outside it; not the sort of thing a passing Cuckoo would have flagged but Seed could tell them for what they were: more security for the boy-king of the Fifth Rung. One of them was large and dark and held Seed’s eyes unflinchingly, then opened the door swiftly and allowed them entrance.

  Inside was a small stone chamber covered with a thick layer of junk and debris, for in years past the pumphouse had been the gathering place of the neighbourhood children, to get drunk and to boast and to try to while away the impoverished hours of their pointless lives. There was a thick pallet in the centre of the room that Thistle was even then removing, revealing a hole leading down into the earth.

  ‘The sewers?’ Dray asked, voice wavering, and even Seed, for a moment, looked less than firm. Because despite living surrounded by this great web of piping the men and women of the Fifth had no real idea of how the thing worked, except that sometimes it was filled with water and sometimes it was not, and when it was full then anything inside it would most assuredly be dead. There was a pumphouse near where Seed lived; it was a rite of passage to descend beneath it and swim across the subterranean river below, a journey of no more than five minutes, tip to tail, but even so everyone made sure to do it just after the last heavy flow had subsided, when the risk of flood was minimal. Seed figured that most of the rest of the boys on the Fifth must have a similar sort of ritual, and most of them displayed the same sort of prudence. There were a lot of ways to die, as Seed reckoned, and none of them seemed very good, but there weren’t many that seemed worse than being caught below ground once the slurps started going heavy, the rats screaming and trying to escape, you screaming and doing the same and both of you failing.

  But Thistle didn’t hesitate, not for even a second, and it was this that made Seed capable of doing the same, though Quail and Dray blanched white as chalk and were a long slow time following them down.

  Seed descended hand over hand, and after a few rungs the darkness had grown all-consuming. He could not make out Thistle beneath him, nor the leather of his boots, nor the ladder in front of him nor the hands that held it.

  ‘Don’t fear, brothers.’ Thistle’s voice, ringing clearly from the black. ‘Our people have laboured beneath the mountain in days beyond memory, and she has not forgotten us. The demons live atop her and think they know her secrets – as if the owner knows more of a house than its tenant!’

  Thistle had a lantern lit and hung before Seed made it all the way down, but its dim light failed to reach to the high far corners of the chamber. At either end were heavy floodgates, drop-walls of thickly forged iron. At different points in the day, according to no particular rhythm that anyone on the Fifth ever managed to figure, those gates would close, and the chamber would be flooded. This was not Seed’s foremost concern at the moment, however. In the dim light he could see the waters rushing down towards the bay, and the stone walls covered with moss, and also that Thistle was carrying a knife long enough to reasonably be called a sword. It must have been hidden beneath the travelling cloak that hung now next to the lantern, and Seed stared at it so nakedly and for so long that he thought Thistle must now be certain of his purpose, if he hadn’t already deduced it.

  ‘I welcome you then to the abode of the Five-Fingers. Perhaps it does not look like much, but it is ours, brothers, yours and mine, and a shack freely owned is better than a mansion entailed.’

  There were three of them against Thistle’s one, was what Seed was thinking, and all three of them were carrying blades. But they were small things, shivs really, bits of sharpened metal they had found or stolen. The way Thistle rested his hand on his own weapon made Seed think that neither their knives nor their numbers would do them much good.

  But it was too late to back out now – probably Thistle wouldn’t let him leave, anyway, and there were still those men waiting outside, likely with the same kind of weapon as Thistle was carrying, likely no less skilled. And then the thought of seeing the sun again, of the light shining on Seed and on the shame as yet unanswered, proved enough to spur him onward.

  ‘I guess you don’t remember me.’ He had said it a thousand times in his mind, a thousand times a thousand, and it had never sounded so foolish or so hollow.

  ‘Of course I remember – did you think that I would lead three strangers into our headquarters, what with half of our besotted species still doing the work of the demons?’ Thistle slipped his blade from its sheath so cleanly and so swiftly that Quail and Dray jumped clear back, and there was an instant when Seed felt sure that he would die in the sewers beneath the Rung, that his body would be food for the rats or float listlessly out to sea, his body and the bodies of his friends.

  So when Thistle flipped it to him, hilt first, Seed was so startled that he nearly dropped it into the sewer water; and what a shame that would have been, something so beautiful and so deadly lost amidst the dark. He managed to catch it by the very tip of the pommel, found it was heavier than he had imagined, found that he now had no idea what to do with it.

  ‘You wish revenge,’ Thistle said. It was a statement but Seed heard it as a question. ‘I cannot blame you. It is all we are taught to do, violence, all we believe ourselves capable of. The demons prefer it that way, prefer us weak and broken and foolish, know that if we ever stopped feuding among ourselves we would recall our strength, as in days of old, and be capable of greatness.’

  ‘Stop talking like that,’ Seed said.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like you’re on stage, like you’re giving a speech, like you’re so damn special.’

  ‘You’d rather I dip into that downslope chatter, ’ey boy? Rather I grab a few bullyboys so we can get a good scrap going? You’d rather I turned my sword on you, as I would have when I was Thistle, turned it against you and had half a dozen men waiting down here to do the same? I’m afraid I cannot do so. I have been reborn, consecrated in the service of something a thousand times larger than myself, something so vast and so beautiful that before it my life is as a scrap of paper near a flame.’

  ‘This is birdshit,’ Seed said, and when he said it his voice cracked, and when his voice cracked he swung the blade upright. ‘You might have the rest of the city conned, but I know you, I know you down to your bones. You’re a brute, same as me, same as any of us. Two years ago you was part of Rhythm’s crew, going to get the Brotherhood’s scar on your shoulder, a pimp and a thug.’

  ‘It is true, my ignorance was vast. For a time, before I heard the truth, before my light was kindled, I was everything that you say.
I carried a blade in the service of a man, I leeched from my people, I was a thief and a thug. But no longer, brothers, no longer. Now I carry a blade in service of men, to restore their freedom, to lead them, bleary-eyed and blinking, into the dawn to come.’

  ‘You won’t be around to see it,’ Seed said, the tip of the sword pointing at the tender flesh of Thistle’s breast.

  ‘Perhaps. But it will arrive just the same.’

  Seed found that his fingers were curled so tight round Pyre’s sword, Thistle’s sword he meant, this little Barrow cunt could call himself whatever he wanted but it wouldn’t put Seed’s eye back into place, would it? Wouldn’t make him pretty like he’d used to be, wouldn’t make the girls in the street stop turning away when he brushed down the boulevard. And fine, it wasn’t as if Seed hadn’t done things similar; there was that one dust-up with one of the crews to the east where he’d ended up breaking a bottle over some kid’s head, and Seed had never seen him again but had heard he didn’t talk so well any more – but so what? This wasn’t a question of fairness, this wasn’t a question of justice, this was a question of revenge, this was a question of clearing a slate, that was the only justice a boy from the Fifth knew anything about, could ever know.

  The sword clattered loudly against stone.

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Seed.’

  ‘Seed is the name they gave you,’ Pyre said, smiling and shaking his head. ‘Boy they called Seed – there is someone you should meet.’

  2

  Eudokia had last seen Protostrator Konstantinos Aurelia, her stepson and the leader of the Aelerian armies in Salucia, eighteen months earlier, marching at the head of his themas down the great trunk road that led north out of the capital, the entirety of the city thronging the streets, shrieking their love of him until it seemed almost a physical thing, a brisk wind, a strong current. He had accepted the adoration with dignity, if not quite enthusiasm, as if this was one more trial to be overcome, and he would prefer to save his strength for those ahead. He had looked marvellous, absolutely marvellous, dressed as a typical hoplitai with chain armour and a standard short sword, but so broad-shouldered and gorgeous that women were said to faint as he passed by, to faint and be crushed beneath the uncaring hooves of the crowd. It had been the crowning achievement of his life to that point, the moment he had been fitted for nearly since birth; if it had been the end of his labours he could have retired knowing that no man had ever performed so skilfully.