Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1 (19 page)

Most days the docks were busy as hell, ships coming in and going out, porters lined up like ants. But even in high season the port wasn’t busy anything like it was during the Anamnesis. The entirety of the Fifth crammed itself along the piers, wandering joyfully, or at least aimlessly. Each of the guilds set up elaborate pavilions with games and prizes, vying with each other in friendly rivalry. The Society of Toters, by far the largest, offered Salucian fighting fish to any child under twelve who could lift the pack of a full man, as much a recruitment tool as it was recreation. Beneath a sign that read ‘Fifth Rung Traders’ Affiliation’, members of the Brotherhood Below passed out cups of grog and twists of rock candy for the children, thieves and killers forgoing their usual trades. The Association of Inkers set aside protocol to offer all comers temporary tattoos formed of some sort of plant dye that would start to run as soon as it got wet. For a few happy hours the penurious children of the Fifth Rung could pretend they were goldsmiths from the Third, or the scions of merchant houses quartered, so high as to be almost unimaginable, on the Second. Of course, there could be no question of these faithful artists conniving in the creation of a brand appropriate to those happy humans at the summit – there are limits to fantasy, as to everything else. Clowns juggled, minstrels sang, hawkers hawked, whores hung bare-titted out of windows, everyone danced. In the centre of a ring of laughing drunkards a Parthan held a chain leash attached to the neck of a black bear, led the beast in an awkward, shuffling step. Its fur was mottled and one of its eyes was dead. Onlookers laughed and threw coins. Thistle wondered where they went to celebrate on the Fourth, or the Third, if their festivities were as pitiful and pointless, if the people there enjoyed them as much as they did down here.

The Submission was the high point of the proceedings, when the neighbourhood children, weighed down by beads and tassels and bits of ribbon, would make their way in a slow processional down to the docks and offer themselves to Those Above. Of course no Four-Finger had been seen at the docks in generations beyond counting, and in their stead the neighbourhood had taken to choosing as a replacement the prettiest almost-virgin the Fifth Rung could provide. This year’s Prime sat on a small platform jutting out from a cupboard three times as tall as a man and equally wide. On it had been painted a scene from the Time Below, dark and cavernous, hellish looking, inspiring feelings of gloom and dread. Meant to inspire those feelings at least. Thistle didn’t know how long ago the cabinet had been created – long enough for the paint to start to fade, and the wooden facade to rot and crack. One day soon the workings of the machine itself would fail, and the whole ceremony would have to be reimagined. A happy moment that would be, Thistle thought, though presumably it would not come this morning.

The girl sat cold and imperious – part of the ritual, though looking at her Thistle didn’t think she had to put any great effort into faking it. Thistle had never seen a Wellborn, but he was pretty sure that none of them looked anything like the costume she wore, a long, flowing headdress of multicoloured streamers, ugly blue robes and a set of four-fingered gloves. Even made up so foolishly, she was stunning as a strand of sunlight. It made Thistle angry, that there were such things in the world, that they would be dangled in front of you just to be snatched away. A girl that pretty would find a match upslope, get an apartment and a few women like Thistle’s mother to take care of the household. Thistle hated her in that moment, hated and wanted her all at the same time, almost loved her.

The hour of the Eagle chimed loudly, the sun high in the sky, and the crowd started to quiet. Children shook themselves out from the mass and formed a line in front of the false Prime, the very young carried by their mothers or older siblings. The foremost child wore breeches and a coat with little brass buttons running up the front. Thistle wondered whose son he was, what he had done to earn the front spot. That little outfit must have cost half a solidus, maybe more. Whoever he was, he had clearly been made to practise his speech before this moment – Thistle could imagine him at some dinner table close to the Fourth, a fat mother rapping his knuckles after each error. ‘For the crimes that we have committed,’ he began, then corrected himself, ‘that I have committed, I ask forgiveness. And if it is given, I will swear myself in service to you, and labour … and labour all my life to repay the debt.’

‘The wrong you have done is terrible beyond imagining,’ the Prime said. She had an ugly voice, Thistle discovered then – Thistle and everyone else in the crowd – a squawking, hectoring thing, without dignity or purpose. ‘But we are a people kinder than we are just, and we will accept your worship.’

Thistle heard the grinding clockwork gears twist into motion, watched as the cabinet unfolded around her. The small dais on which the Prime sat was pulled inward, the cavernous backdrop replaced by a depiction of the Source itself, the wings stretching to reveal rows of happy-looking human caricatures, an awning spreading out to offer the Prime shade. ‘And we will repay your service with protection, today and until the end of days. And we will feed you and clothe you, and give you law, and shelter you as a father does their children, today and until the end of days.’

Thistle’s fists clenched at his sides. Every fucking year he did this to himself, every gods-damned, every worthless, misbegotten, cunt of a year. And it was always the same and every year he swore he wouldn’t do it the next and then every year he did.

The Prime opened her mouth to continue, bright-eyed and beatific. A drop of red bloomed suddenly on her forehead. When she looked skyward the entire crowd joined her. Dangling from the roof of the chamber was some sort of a bird – not a pigeon or a gull, but a proper raptor, an eagle maybe, or a hawk. Whoever had hung it had slit its throat before doing so, and thick beads of blood dripped down from the wound.

The Prime screamed then, silenced only when the slow leak of red fell into her mouth, went gagging and stumbling off the stage and into the crowd. As if infected by her terror the masses began to scream as well, first the adults and then the children. The Cuckoos milling about the area seemed as helpless as the throng, stared wide-eyed at the bird, holding their cudgels tight in their fists.

The dead raptor swung back and forth like a pendulum, drops of crimson leaking from its severed neck. Behind it, imprinted clearly against the faded vellum, were five-fingered handprints done in red paint.

In that very moment Thistle didn’t know what he felt, couldn’t have said for certain. But he knew that it wasn’t what the mob of people below him seemed to feel, that sudden squirt of fear that was swiftly overcoming them, that would soon turn their celebration into something little short of a riot. To kill a bird was a crime on a par with holding a weapon, though one that was a good deal less frequently committed. To murder an avian in public like this was a species of madness that Thistle had never seen before, hadn’t imagined possible.

Everyone was screaming by now, though Thistle suspected it was mostly in demonstrations of innocence rather than true horror. The Cuckoos were in the same boat as everyone else, half drunk and confused and having no clear idea how to handle what was happening. Distantly, Thistle realised it was a good thing he wasn’t in the middle of the scrum. Pretty soon the Cuckoos would move from confused to violent; it was all they knew. Best to leave before then.

But still it was a long time before Thistle managed to break himself away from the scene, climb up the pipe and head back the way he came. From the main thoroughfare a block over he could hear the crowd frantically trying to flee, though from what and to where? What had begun here would echo out in the weeks and months to come, there would be casks of blood to add to what the bird had given, Thistle was as certain of that as he had ever been of anything.

It wasn’t till he had got home that he remembered Shrub, and the beads. What with all that had happened, however, no one was in any particular mood to ride him about it.

I
t was Phocas who had taught Eudokia the nuances of
shass
, in those first halcyon days after their marriage. A game of strategy and high cunning, an import from the Others in fact, one of the many traditions that the Commonwealth had quietly adopted. Phocas had been fifteen years her elder, perhaps the most revered man in Aeleria. Second only to Jon the Sanguine in military fame, descendant of one of the oldest families in the Commonwealth. Handsome, rich, recently widowed, young Konstantinos the fruit of that previous union. Eudokia had been twenty, and if she had not been beautiful her wealth and lineage would have been enough to make a wise suitor pretend otherwise. But she
had
been beautiful, as well as charming as a budding rose, and their wedding had been the most celebrated event of the year, a love match between two of Aeleria’s most prosperous and noble families. Happiness seemed assured.

And indeed, for a time it had been. They toured his familial estates on the southern coasts, and they toured her familial estates in the foothills west of the capital. They threw galas and attended them, they partook of all the pleasures that could be afforded to the highest Commonwealth gentry. But mostly they fucked, rigorously and with passion, Eudokia a girl discovering the joys of womanhood.

Finally exhausted, he would plead age and insist on a game and Eudokia would laughingly oblige him. It was to his credit that she hadn’t felt the need to hide her superiority at it, as she did with most things and for most of the world. Far from it – Phocas revelled in her talent, would brag to friends of her cleverness, insisted that there was no member of the Senate who could match her. She found the admiration flattering, though foolish – why give anyone warning?

‘Do I go too slowly, Auntie?’ Leon asked.

They sat over the wooden board at a stone table in a distant corner of her garden, enjoying the autumn sunlight, the bowed trees slowly shedding their colour. ‘The point of the exercise is to focus narrowly on a particular problem. Whether or not you come up with the correct solution determines whether your time has been well spent.’

‘The winner isn’t always immediately apparent.’

‘Clarity comes quicker than we sometimes expect,’ Eudokia said, advancing a wren.

Soon it wasn’t
shass
alone at which Phocas recognised her talent. He was Consul at the time, his first office in the civil rather than military sphere. One rises to the position of one’s incompetence, as they say, and Phocas’s was a case in point. A striking talent on the battlefield, in the Senate and the parlours he proved surprisingly maladroit – in his heart of hearts, there was a certain innocence to Phocas, an inability to understand the weakness in his fellow men that left him barely more than competent in the internecine feuding at the heart of the Aelerian political machine. It was this sort of optimism that she had come to love about the man.

Though, needless to say, it was not a burden beneath which she herself laboured. If Phocas wasn’t sure who to trust, the answer was altogether clear to Eudokia – no one, ever, only her, and only because he had to. She already knew everything that happened in Aelerian society; it was a little thing to transfer her network of gossips to a more practical purpose. Soon she had realised that the habits and customs which had brought her to the forefront of feminine society were not so very different from what was now required of her. One did kindnesses for one’s friends, injury to one’s enemies, quietly acquiring more of the former and fewer of the latter. With her silent assistance, Phocas proved as astute and capable a politician as the capital had ever seen. There seemed no heights to which he could not ascend, no honours or powers that would not, with time, accrue to him. Who knew? The Empty Throne had not always been so.

‘Do you imagine I’ve failed to identify your stratagem?’ Leon asked, ignoring the piece she had presented and moving forward on the other end of the board.

‘Do you imagine I’m only operating the one?’

‘I hear that Andronikos’s last speech went strongly with the Senate. A protest has been voted, to be sent to the Salucian Emperor, demanding a change in the status of the free city of Oscan.’

Eudokia sighed dramatically, swapped an eagle for a hawk. ‘What a lovely day it is, and how pleasant the company. And why would we want to spoil it by discussing the Senate, when we could be enjoying the game?’

‘Are they really so different?’

‘Politics has fewer rules.’

And then Phocas had died, the victim of a devil’s lance at Scarlet Fields. ‘I’ll be back before winter,’ he had told her, and she had seen in his eyes that he had even believed it, though of course she had not. The Seventh Other War, what foolishness! To have learned nothing from the first six, to have played according to the devil’s rules, as if it were a game of
shass
! The Senate drifting slowly and inexplicably towards conflict, one moment desperate for bloodshed, the next as unprepared and frightened as newborns. If only the moment had arisen five years later, she would have been in a position to direct it. But she had been too young, too weak, and the Commonwealth had suffered for it. She had felt no twist of shock when the news returned, only a dull despair, as though the world had been repainted in griseille.

Phocas had acquitted himself magnificently, she had been informed months after his death by one of the survivors, kneeling at her feet and all but weeping. It was very like a man to suppose that this last would be of some value – a noble death, and a name that lives on afterwards. Whatever lies a man might spew, it was for themselves and themselves only that they conceived such acts of self-sacrifice. A woman knows the truth – there are the living, and there are the dead, and what good is a name without arms to hold you in the evening, without seed for children? How pointless and futile and foolish it was, to lose. Inexcusable.

Leon moved, finally. Eudokia advanced with her eagle.