Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1 (12 page)

Tonight’s festivities aside, the Wellborn saw sex as a pleasant indulgence and little more. In and of itself it indicated no particular passion, or even affection, nothing beyond a brief spark of lust. Like their other customs, this had filtered down to the humans who served them, and to the higher reaches of the Roost more generally. Calla noticed no few members of other households drag smiling eyes over her body; found herself doing the same, nakedly and without shame. And why not? If ever there was a time for love to stand triumphant, was it not tonight?

She could see the Wright and the Lady Sweet Blossom talking quietly, standing near the southern bridge, and then the next moment they were eloping into the foliage. Here and there the woods played echo to the faint sounds of lovemaking, another strand to be added to the chorus of bell crickets and nightbirds. Calla drank a second glass of the cinnamon liquor she had been given at the start of their journey, and could feel it in her stomach and her cheeks and in the tips of her hair.

Amidst the soft bustle of joy the Lord leaned over one of the rails, staring out at the lake and the night beyond. He had not moved in a long time, and so Calla had not moved either, standing silently a short way off. There was much that made the Lord unique, Calla thought, even among his own kind. It was not only that he excelled in swordsmanship, in the strange and subtle movements of their dance, in the even stranger and more subtle workings of their poetry – indeed, it was these things least of all. The Lord carried with him, in a way no other Eldest could be said to, an ineffable sense of destiny, or of tragedy, which are perhaps the same thing. It was this that set him apart from the run of his fellows – not that he was their superior, but that he did not seem to value that superiority.

Calla was not the only one to notice it. Household servants shot him sidelong glances, lost themselves in the perfection of his face, stumbled as they walked and looked away, blushing. Sandalwood, his obligations discharged now that his lord had retired for the evening, stood silently within earshot, though Calla had to admit the possibility that it was she whom his attentions had fixed on, rather than her lord.

Nor was it the Five-Fingered alone on whom the Aubade exerted such a pull. The Prime herself broke off a conversation to approach him, a pair of human servants in her train. ‘Who could judge, between the moon and the Lord of the Red Keep?’

The Aubade took a long time to wrench free of his contemplation. ‘The Lord of the Red Keep will not be here to look at tomorrow evening.’

‘And how does that weigh the scales? Do we herald the Lord for his transience, or the moon for its fidelity?’

‘Is a thing not more beautiful because we know it will end? Indeed, is its end not what makes it beautiful?’

‘If past evenings are any indication,’ the Prime continued, the peerless diamond above her forehead reflecting the light, ‘the moon will leave us sometime before the morning. And we will have long hours to lament its absence, and to hope for its return. And when it blesses us again, what joy we will feel at its homecoming, how we will cherish its light, for ever constant in its inconstancy.’

‘Of the moon one may speak of for ever,’ the Aubade said. ‘But we who stand beneath it mark time with the beating of our hearts. Eternity is no blessing to us, as impossible as it is unwanted.’

‘Impossible, certainly – but unwanted?’ She brought herself to stand directly in front of the Aubade and set two fingertips against his chest. ‘Would it really be so terrible to spend an eternity in my arms?’

If the Lord thought so, he did not say it. They stood there, silhouetted against the evening, and Calla swelled with the beauty of it, of the night and of everything that she had seen over the last few hours. It all seemed so perfect that she thought just then of dying. And how wonderful the Aubade had been, and how glorious the Prime! And how much she hoped that they might perform the night’s ceremony themselves during her short span, and imagine the festivities that would accompany such a union!

Calla sighed. Sandalwood looked up at her sharply, then back at the lake.

The two Eternal remained still for a moment, silhouetted against the night but somehow beyond it. And then the Lady took the Lord’s hand and led him off the bridgework and further into the evening.

Calla held the cuff of her robe up to her eyes for a moment. Sandalwood, ever decorous, avoided noticing. When the Lord and Lady were well out of earshot, however, he leaned over and spoke quietly. ‘You grow careless,’ he said. ‘It is not enough to be a mute observer, you must be a deaf one as well.’

‘They must know that we understand
something
,’ Calla responded.

‘Who knows what they know? It was not so long ago that the Seneschal of the Iron Mistress was put to death for overhearing his lady.’

‘It was a hundred years past.’

‘How much time do you think that is to them?’ Sandalwood put his hand atop hers. ‘I wish you would heed my advice.’

And herein lay the rub, because first and foremost, Calla knew, he wished that she would heed his advice regarding the proposal of marriage that had been standing between them for the better part of five years. The first man she had ever loved, and she could remember why – older than her but still handsome, his cheeks sharp lines and his chest the same. Clever and wise, which were not at all the same thing, and kindly, or as much as you could expect from a man. But Sandalwood had been her father’s protégé and best friend, and seemed bent on trying to fill his absence. Calla had loved her father, esteemed him immensely, missed him daily. But she did not think he required a replacement.

All the same it was such a beautiful night that there was no sense in feeling anything the least unpleasant, and by unspoken agreement the subject was dropped. The nightbirds had awoken to greet the rising moon, which was full in the clear sky. There was enough light to make out the skin of a lover, but not so much as to rob the evening of its secrets. Calla and Sandalwood sipped slowly from their drinks, and looked out over everything there was to see. And then, after a few minutes had passed, she took his hand as the Lady had taken the Lord’s, and walked him deeper out into the gardens, and they nested down amidst the wonder.

T
he Fifth Rung would see blood that night. It was too hot for anything else.

At street parties and in taverns guys looked at guys looking at their girls (or girls they wanted to be their girls), started cracking their knuckles and drinking to get mean. Long-suffering mothers stared across dinner tables at their progeny and saw voracious ingrates swallowing every groat they had and whining for more, nasty little brats that would get what was coming to them, ought to have got it sooner. Fathers looked at their wives over bowls of burnt stew, and how could you burn stew, worst cook on the damn Rung but she ate enough of it, must have gained two clove in the last year. Long-simmering feuds broke out into open violence, friends became enemies, enemies became corpses. There would be work for the Cuckoos come the morrow, if the Cuckoos ever did any work. Since they didn’t, there would be work for the gravediggers.

In the Barrow, Thistle and Felspar and Treble and Rat and the two Calc brothers and a couple of other hangers-on were getting drunk on black whiskey in the shadow of the pipes. The pumphouse had been out of use since before Thistle’s father’s father had been pushed out of Thistle’s father’s father’s mother. Two generations of hardbitten Barrow kids had been using it as a squat ever since, and left behind ample evidence of their existence. A cenotaph of cigarettes, a sepulchre of broken bottles.

It was two months since they’d had a good scuffle with the kids down by the docks, during the high-summer festival, and they’d come off worse from it, driven back to the Barrow in a hail of cobblestones and broken bricks. Course the dockers had been a few boys up on them, and had got lucky, it was universally agreed by those present at the pumphouse that evening, and anyway tonight was the night when they’d even up the tally, even up and maybe go a few ahead.

Thistle had a half-bottle in him and stood twenty links tall. Would have if he’d been standing, at least, though in actual fact he was sitting on a step, letting Petal braid his hair. Petal had hit womanhood before her fourteenth birthday, shot up two links and gained weight in the sort of places a fellow might notice. At the time it had been a source of intimidation to the boys, who were indisputably still that and not men. But a few years down the line Thistle felt distinctly differently about the flesh that was straining its way out of the cheap cotton dress she wore.

‘I don’t see why you’ve got to go down there at all,’ she was saying, hands threading Thistle’s black hair deftly. ‘Y’all just like to make trouble.’ Amber and Button echoed agreement, the latter seated happily on Felspar’s lap, the former wedged between the first and second Calc brothers. There might be some dispute over who was in charge among the males, but there was no such confusion for that equivalent portion of the Barrow’s fairer sex. Petal’s opinion was the law, and better than, because the Cuckoos didn’t generally bother to come this far downslope and ensure it was upheld, while Petal had no problem cracking the whip should anyone get out of hand.

‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Felspar said grandly, situating his hands midway between Button’s ample buttocks and small breasts. ‘We owe them for what they did to Rat.’

Rat stopped drinking long enough to buck up at the sound of his name. A month or so after the last big brawl he’d been caught by his lonesome somewhat too close to the water, got a pretty decent beating for his lack of caution. ‘They owed,’ Rat agreed.

Which was true as far as you figured it, but then, the Barrow boys had been owed for when Thistle had dropped a stone on one of the dockers from the third floor of an abandoned tenement. Been aiming for the boy’s head but hadn’t hit it – hit his leg, however. Which had been fun and all, but which you had to admit offered the crew downslope a legitimate grievance.

‘It’s a question of honour,’ Felspar finished, reaching over and taking a pull from Rat’s whiskey. They’d bought the liquor they were drinking using money Felspar had stolen from his mother’s purse while she was visiting the outhouse, though if anyone noticed the contradiction they kept silent on it.

It was an old game, but a good one. Petal might pretend otherwise, but she was as hot for blood as Thistle or Felspar or Treble, more maybe, cause at the end of the day it wasn’t her skin in the game. Petal was too much of everybody’s girl to ever be altogether Thistle’s, but she’d been seeing more of him this last month or two than she had anybody else. So far they hadn’t more than necked, endless hours pressed tight against each other, hours that had long gone from exciting to routine to flat dull, his tongue tired from overwork and his cock sore as a broken thumb. But that wouldn’t last much longer. She was ready, Thistle could feel it, the instinct of the species making up for his own personal ignorance. She’d preened herself before coming down to the pumphouse, and she’d manouevred Thistle’s back into the hollow of her breasts. If he returned with a docker’s blood slick on his fists she’d let him take her up to the roof and slide her dress up her legs and Thistle would finally get a shot at what he’d been dreaming of ever since he’d woken up one morning a few years back with sticky thighs. Come back from the docks a conqueror, and later that night he might even end up a man.

‘The dockers ain’t like us,’ Felspar was saying, more because he liked to hear himself talk than because he thought what he was saying made sense. ‘They’re not real Roostborn.’

‘The docks aren’t part of the Roost?’ Rat asked.

‘Of course the docks are part of the Roost. But the kids who live there, they’re all the bastard sons of whores and sailors, their blood is as foreign as a Dycian orange.’

‘What kind of sense do you think that makes?’ Rat asked. ‘Don’t none of us come from here, you go far back enough.’

‘Birdshit!’ Felspar pulled his hand off Button’s arse and slapped it against his chest. ‘My people go back since the Founding, since the Time Below.’

‘So you’ve been a slave the longest?’ Thistle growled. ‘Congratulations.’

Thistle found the pretence that they had a real reason for walking down to the docks and breaking down anybody they found there, that they needed a real reason, nonsense. Thistle didn’t have any true hate for the dockers, not hate like he had for the folk upslope, not hate like he had for the Cuckoos or the Four-Fingers. They weren’t any different to him, when it came right down to it; if any of the dockers had been born half a cable upslope they’d have been his brother, as much as Treble or Rat. But a man needs something to die and kill over, that’s what makes him a man – and if half a cable was all you had, then half a cable would have to do.

Been enough fucking talk, was what Thistle thought then, and he stood up from the step, grabbed the mostly empty bottle from out of Rat’s hand, made it all the way empty and dashed it against the wall. ‘Let’s go.’

A spark dropped on dry grass. Treble was up first, Rat a close second. Felspar gave Button a quick kiss on the neck, then scooted her up off his lap. The Calc brothers both tried for the same, but either Amber hadn’t made her mind up about which of the two she had it for, or she didn’t have it for either, cause she danced off, laughing merrily.

Petal stood up also, and in the moment Thistle didn’t notice her bad skin or the way her eye sort of drooped. He grabbed her by the back of the neck, pulled her into a firm kiss, pressed his mouth against hers, hard, too hard, heard her moan, pushed her away and started walking downslope, certain that he wouldn’t be walking alone.

Lock your doors and hide your ladyfolk, the Barrow boys were on the march.

Treble took the lead as usual, but Thistle was right behind him. Felspar had picked up a little wicker switch, was hooting and swinging it back and forth. Rat stopped every fifteen seconds to howl at the moon, low in the sky but getting higher. The Calc brothers were holding up the rear and helping fill in Rat’s chorus, hollering back and forth to each other.