Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2 Read online

  ‘It was twenty years since the Aelerians last rose in rebellion,’ the Prime corrected. ‘Long enough for a generation to have been nursed on bitterness, and for those in charge of the Commonwealth to consider carefully their errors.’

  ‘Bitterness, certainly, though what else could be expected of the locusts? As for the suggestion that their defeat has led to wisdom, there I’m afraid I cannot agree. Humans are, in my experience, little capable of assessing a situation and even less of affecting an alteration. Though of course, the point is moot – for how could a mouse learn to defeat a hawk? What are the tricks or stratagems by which the deer might hunt and chase and devour the wolf?’

  ‘There were empty saddles when we returned to the Roost, sibling – the old Lord of the Ebony Towers, the Lady of the Aureate Seat—’

  ‘Among how many who descended from the summit? What irrelevant fraction of the whole? I have never been known for my talents or interest in war, and your expertise is of course by far the greater. But I recall that morning, the locusts unable to stand the sight of us, panicking and breaking before even we reached them with our lances. It would not have mattered how many they brought that day. An additional ten thousand men, or twenty thousand, would have only meant more corpses, more food for the rats and the vultures.’

  ‘That day,’ the Prime conceded. ‘Though that day was only that day, and not today, and certainly not tomorrow.’

  The master of protocol called in the next ambassador, from Gardariki to the far north, some distant and miserable northern hellhole, thatch huts beside an icebound sea. The ambassador was fortunate to be spending the winter in the temperate climate of the Roost, and twice-lucky were the ten slaves who would never again need to concern themselves with the fierce chill of their homeland. Or at least this was what Calla told herself.

  ‘You are wrong,’ the Prime said, ‘in thinking them beneath contempt. And if you are right now, you will not always be so. To keep the humans divided, to keep them weak, this was the policy of the Founders, nor has it diminished in wisdom in the ageless aeons since. Should Aeleria swallow Salucia, as it has Dycia and the border nations, there will be no further obstacles to their dominion. A few years with the wealth of Salucia and who knows what army it might amass?’

  ‘The road to Hyrcania stretches past the Roost,’ the Wright reminded him. ‘Should the Aelerians suppose to violate our directives and attempt to conquer Salucia outright, there will be plenty of time to repay their foolishness.’

  The ambassador from Gardariki held aloft a long stretch of ermine pelt, pure and unblemished white. His speech was rather less perfect, tumbling over the rote words in a thick and guttural accent. His slave couples were not, to Calla’s way of thinking, quite so lovely as had been those from the Baleferic Isles. Too broad and too pale, skin so fair that she could make out the blue veins beneath, bright shocks of red hair.

  ‘Time,’ the Aubade repeated, as if it was a word that had never developed a consensus of meaning. After a long and uncomfortable silence, uncomfortable for the humans below the podium, at least, Calla did have to signal; the slightest clearing of her throat but he noticed it, standing swiftly and repeating his portion of the ceremony. ‘Your crime was beyond forgiving, and law and honour enjoin us to proscribe you entire. But we are a merciful people, kinder than we are just, and your punishment shall be set back another year.’

  The ambassador seemed pleased to hear it, bowing and leaving the stage swiftly. After a moment the Lord of the Sidereal Citadel did the same, excusing himself to prepare for the evening’s merriment. The Prime alone was left – the Prime and Calla, and several dozen other human servants, and the representatives of the surrounding human nations, of slightly less account.

  ‘How many are left?’ the Prime asked, the first words he had directed at her and in the human speech.

  ‘Twelve, my Lord.’

  With one hand the Prime called for another glass of wine, and with the other he gestured at his slaves to continue their deference.

  8

  It was a nondescript building on the Fourth Rung, or at least Pyre so hoped, a red brick townhouse owned by one of their supporters, a man from the Second who had come to a meeting and been blessed by the truth, left desperate to give anything he could to the cause, his wealth and his goods and his children, the very blood in his veins. It was the sort of neighbourhood one walked past quickly, without paying attention to what one saw. The cafe across the street was the same as five others in the immediate vicinity and a thousand others on the Rung. The two men who sat at the outside table were nearly as unassuming, perhaps a bit larger than average, and a bit more serious, and if you were to hang around long enough you might notice that they did not make any serious effort to finish their pot of tea.

  Pyre turned quickly into an inner courtyard and towards an exterior door. A very dark-skinned young man lounged in the dust beside it, one more downslope loser without anything to occupy his afternoons, sitting on a loose roll of aged fabric and swigging from a wine jug.

  In the jug was water. In the bolt of cloth was a knife. ‘You’re late,’ said Redemption, the First of His Line.

  ‘I spent the last two hours criss-crossing the docks, making sure I didn’t see any familiar faces in my wake.’

  ‘You think the Cuckoos are clever enough to set a tail?’

  ‘No. But in matters of such importance …’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘All has been clear from your end?’

  ‘Yes, Brother Pyre,’ Redemption said quietly. ‘Though he gets tired of being cooped up.’

  ‘It’s for his own good,’ Pyre said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Where do you think? In the back.’

  ‘How long are you keeping the boys at the cafe?’

  ‘We rotate them through every few hours.’

  ‘And the owner?’

  ‘He doesn’t know nothing.’

  ‘People know more than they pretend,’ Pyre said quietly, then nodded and headed further into the building.

  Redemption let out a loud whistle, and the men with knives waiting behind the front door opened it and waved Pyre in, rather than murdering him and shoving his body into the slurp. Pyre passed through a long, dark passageway and then through a second door.

  In the moment before Pyre stepped into the back garden his mind was filled, as it was almost all the time, by the responsibilities of his office; Tower’s cell had been silent the last three days, long enough for worry to turn to grim certainty. No doubt at this very moment Tower was in a windowless room with a ferule ringing against his skull, one more victim of the demons, and may his blood hasten the age to come. There was a crate of blades at the docks that needed to make its way to the far corner of the Fourth, beneath the noses of the custodians who had grown in the last months to take their jobs with unforgiving seriousness. Across the Third they were at something like open warfare with the Brotherhood Below, two clashes the last night alone and neither had gone well. Back on the Fifth, one of their better lay preachers, spreading the truth to the lower Rungs, had gone missing the night before and no one was sure whether he’d been snatched up by the Cuckoos or if he was holed up with a girl or if he had fled the city or if he had fallen into the slurp.

  A host of concerns, a concatenation of worries, but they went silent when he saw Edom. The smile that never wavered, eyes that promised forgiveness. Late autumn and the gardens were all but bare yet he tended to them anyway, with the same diligence and care with which he had nurtured the truth these long years. Edom turned from his work long enough to take Pyre’s hand. The sun was bright and unseasonably warm, and fell pleasantly against the back of Pyre’s neck.

  ‘Pyre, the First of His Line.’

  ‘Father.’

  ‘You had said the hour of the Eagle.’

  ‘The demons and their servants grow more clever. Not much more clever, but … I wanted to make sure I wasn’t being followe
d. Your safety cannot be risked.’

  ‘And your safety?’

  ‘My value to the species lies only in so far as I am willing to risk it – your situation is a different one entirely. There are many who could be Pyre, but there is only one Edom.’

  ‘Who would make so much of an old man, weak and enfeebled as I am?’ Edom asked, work robes tight against his broad chest.

  ‘Anyone who had ever met him. Anyone who ever heard the truth of that man.’

  ‘Few are able to hear the truth, any more.’

  Pyre sighed. ‘There were spies in the last audience. There were spies of the Cuckoos and the demons themselves. They have grown to fear you, Father, they have that much wisdom in them at least. There are others who can give voice to the truth, not as well or as fully, but to a parched man a drop of water is better than none. I know it grieves you to sit idle. I know you loathe having others do work best done by yourself. But it is necessary, Father. You are too precious to risk.’

  Edom shrugged the praise off his shoulders, knelt back down into the dirt. A crop of weeds had sprung up from soil, and he began to worry at their roots with his spade. ‘I understand that your attack on the Slate Bank was successful.’

  ‘There was such joy on the Fifth, Father, as I think has never been equalled. I am told the feeling upslope is rather reversed.’

  ‘We do not celebrate their lamentation, Pyre.’

  ‘No, Father.’

  ‘They are slaves, as we were, as are all of those who have not yet heard the truth.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Though one would need to be a saint not to feel some sense of satisfaction.’

  ‘I am no saint.’

  ‘Nor I.’

  Pyre was not sure he agreed.

  ‘And it was false wealth, it was chickenfeed and not gold. They are better off without such a yoke of sin weighing down their souls.’

  ‘I suspect they would disagree.’

  Edom laughed.

  ‘Word has reached me from your benefactor,’ Pyre said.

  ‘And?’

  ‘She has arrived in the city, and wishes a meeting. Somewhere upslope, near where the demons have her quartered.’

  ‘Then you must arrange it.’

  ‘Are you certain she can be trusted?’

  ‘No,’ Edom admitted, struggling with a particularly tenacious strand of green. ‘I’m not certain of anything like that at all. But I can say with certainty that we need her.’

  Pyre dropped down beside Edom, brushed his hands away gently. One firm pull and the thing was loosed from the soil.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Pyre smiled and set it on the pile.

  ‘Our benefactor is not the only one who wishes to hold a meeting,’ Edom said. ‘The other members of the council grow concerned. It has been nearly three months since the last gathering.’

  ‘Things are … difficult, right now, Father, and a meeting of the council is not so easily provided. It is one thing to sneak you safely to one of our locations, and another to do the same for a dozen men from every corner of the Roost.’

  Edom handed the spade to Pyre, brushed loam up against the roots of a small fruit tree. ‘Pyre is a very clever young man,’ he announced, ‘and I have faith in his abilities.’

  ‘There are members of the council who may have the eyes of the Birds upon them unknowing. There are members of the council who may be the eyes of Birds themselves.’

  ‘I will not hear this again.’

  ‘Your safety is too important to be jeopardised stroking the egos of a handful of upslope financiers.’ Pyre realised that his fist was tight round the handle of the spade.

  Edom looked at him for a long time, then stood and led him over to a stone bench that bordered the nursery. For a few moments they observed the last of the late fall blooms, dahlias and purple salvia, Pyre taking Edom’s lead in silence, as he did in many things.

  ‘Did you sleep last night?’ Edom asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Long enough.’

  ‘Five hours?’

  Pyre smiled a little. He had not slept five hours in six months. He could recall a time in which he had spent the better part of the day lost in slumber, in which oblivion seemed the chief weapon by which he might combat life’s miseries, but it seemed one long distant. ‘Very nearly.’

  Edom grunted sadly. ‘I suppose the demons have committed worse sins than the theft of your youth. But I admit it is one for which I fear to answer the Self-Created.’

  ‘For once, the demons need not be slandered, and you know your regrets are equally weightless. There are no children on the Fifth Rung. If I were still Thistle, I’d as like be dead, or worse, damned entirely. You saved my soul when you found me.’

  ‘You heard the truth. Not all are willing to do so.’

  ‘Thank you, Father.’

  ‘But you are not the only one to have heard it.’

  ‘I know that, Father.’

  ‘The species did not come into being with Pyre, the First of His Line.’

  ‘Of course not, Father.’

  ‘There are men who suppose the enthusiasm with which you pursue our cause is more worrisome than laudatory. That behind your passion there is the budding seed of an usurper, who sees in the truth a path to power.’

  ‘The nightmares of fools and ingrates are of no concern to me,’ Pyre said, though the bile that rose up in his throat then belied his claim to indifference. ‘So long as this is no fear of Edom’s.’

  Edom put his hand on Pyre’s hand for a time, but said nothing.

  ‘I apologise,’ Pyre said after a moment.

  ‘Then you will arrange the meeting?’

  ‘Of course, Father,’ Pyre said. ‘Your will in all things.’

  To judge by Edom’s smile, this was a sentiment with which he could agree. ‘The blessings of the Self-Created upon you, this morning. May you live to see the dawn.’

  ‘So long as it comes, Father,’ Pyre said, ‘it does not matter if I am there to celebrate it.’

  Edom returned to his tasks, knees down in the dirt as if he were no more than a common manservant. Pyre watched him from the doorway for longer than he should have, given everything that he had left to do that day, given his long slate of duties. He entered the house smiling but by the time he was again out front his face had returned to its usual hardness, black and hard as a lump of coal.

  Redemption was where Pyre had left him, lounging languid against a wall, ready for swift murder should the moment demand it.

  ‘Purchase the cafe,’ Pyre said.

  ‘I’m not sure how amenable the owner is to selling.’

  ‘I suspect you’ll find a way to convince him.’

  ‘I suspect.’

  ‘And I’m sending you four more men.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I would send you more if I had them.’

  ‘I know that, Brother Pyre.’

  ‘That man in there is the spark. That man in there is the most important thing in all of creation.’

  ‘I know it, Brother Pyre,’ Redemption said seriously. ‘I know it.’

  9

  They called Oscan the Silver City, because its towers and buildings were quarried from the same stone as the slate mountains that rose up behind them, and because of the great wealth it had gained as the key trading post between the Commonwealth and Salucia. Even in the west, Bas had heard rumours of its markets, where steel and slaves and furs from the Marches met the silk and sugar traders coming down from Salucia. Twenty years since the demons had given it to Salucia in compensation for Aeleria’s invasion, but they had done nothing to impoverish the city. What did the people of Oscan, far from the pretensions of Senate or Queen, far from the themas or the Eternal, care for the politicking of the great powers? There were always fortunes to be made by clever people who did not scruple to make a fetish of patriotism, who were more interested in trade than empire.

  Un
til empire comes knocking.

  The pillaging that had followed Oscan’s capture had been no more savage or brutal or cruel than usual, which was to say that by the end of it a native would have been hard pressed to recognise his home. The fires had begun the second day, the product of sabotage by a Salucian partisan, or brutality on the part of a hoplitai drunk on blood and liquor, or perhaps simply of an overturned candle, an errant spark that had found no one to extinguish it. When it had finished burning most of the west city was ash, more corpses by far than had been made in the city’s capture. Plague came next, and was worse, as inevitable as the fires, men and women and children now homeless, ill-clothed, drinking fouled water, winter’s approach in the air, and what food arrived in the city was commandeered swiftly by the themas. Belatedly, Konstantinos had attempted to restrict the evacuation of the citizens north towards the Salucian heartland, to make some effort to hold on to the human capital that had made Oscan a prize worth winning, but it saw no great success. Two months after its capture Oscan was no more a city than a skeleton is a man. Some pale fraction of the former population remained, picking through the debris, surviving as best they could, scavenging through the wasteland or accommodating the invaders.

  As for those invaders? The three thema were not enough to fill the vastness of the dead metropolis. In the eastern portion of the city, where the army was garrisoned, there was some rough simulacrum of civilisation, small bazaars selling black-market goods, makeshift bars and whorehouses of course, always whorehouses. But in the hinterlands beyond it was still and quiet as a cenotaph. After the early days of plunder and rapine, the army had fallen into an unquiet and deleterious routine. They drank. They gambled. They fought each other and anyone else. They waited for the remaining themas to join them from the west, and they waited for whatever exactly it was they would do with those themas.