Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1 (30 page)

For a man who made some part of his living with a knife, there was very little choice left for Orodes. He nodded and looked down at his boots.

‘I offer no empty threats,’ Eudokia said, standing smoothly. ‘If you can convince our friend to stick to the agreement he long ago made with me, all to the good. And if you cannot,’ she leaned forward, still smiling, ‘if you cannot, then you would be wise to remove yourself from Salucia at whatever speed can be managed. Go to sea, take up service with a crew of mercenaries, join a mummers’ band and travel the length of the continent. It will not stop my vengeance – though it may delay it, for a time.’

Eudokia returned to her bedroom, brushing aside the open door. Heraclius was awake and sitting upright. She disrobed, watched his eyes widen as the robe struck the floor. ‘I find myself requiring your services once more,’ she said.

B
as woke up just after the dawn, coming to quickly, alertly, pointlessly. He stared at the ceiling until well after the sun had dragged a line of shadow past his bedpost. Occasionally he scratched himself. Mostly he lay very still.

Eventually he pulled himself upright, leaked last night’s liquor into the bedpan. Then he pulled his trousers off the bureau, sniffed at them uncomfortably. He visited the public baths every day, sometimes twice a day, sometimes for hours each time, but still the scent of the city seemed to have worked its way into him. Bas had no exaggerated regard for cleanliness – on the plains he had often gone weeks without bathing, dirt and sweat and sometimes blood accumulating till it was visible on his skin. But that was the honest odour of labour and perhaps death, not the fetid swelling of the metropolis, of too much flesh packed too closely together, of faeces and urine distributed inconsiderately beside cooking meat.

It had been two months since he had entered the capital, and Bas had spent most of it trying not to rot. The forces being accumulated for what seemed the increasingly inevitable war with Salucia were still filtering in from throughout the Commonwealth, and even after they arrived it would be several months of training before they were even capable of marching across a parade ground without accidentally spearing one another.

He dressed, he went to the kitchen, he ate a few pieces of dried jerky and a half a loaf of day-old bread, masticating grudgingly. He drank three cups of tepid water and stared out of the window at the alleyway that back-ended against his house, a little trickle of raw waste running down the middle, plump turds drying in the morning sun. He pulled his boots on and walked outside, squinting against the light.

Bas hadn’t known much about the capital when he’d chosen his quarters, and given that fact he supposed he could have done worse. If his neighbourhood had nothing to particularly recommend a visit, at least it seemed to have a slightly higher percentage of tradesmen and workers than it did pickpockets, broken-down drunkards and painted-up whores. No one had figured out who he was yet, or if they had they kept quiet on it. No, they hadn’t figured it out – there wasn’t anyone in this thrice-damned city that could keep a secret. If anyone had known who he was he’d be getting mobbed by attention-seekers and unexpected friends.

A twenty-minute walk east along the Way of Gold would take Bas to the centre of the city, to the shining monument to civilisation that was the Senate Hall, to the high white temples and squat grey offices that surrounded it. Bas did not walk east. Bas had not walked east one single time since moving to the capital. Some days he walked west, along the Way of Stone out towards the outskirts of the city, though you could perambulate until evening and never lose sight of the sprawl. Some days he walked north, on the Way of Timber towards the low rung of hills where the lesser nobles had their estates.

Today he walked south. It had been an easy winter, the ground was unfrozen and the road upturned mud, made worse by the endless procession of carts and palanquins. But still it was better than ducking through the alleyways, piles of refuse like caltrops, thoughtless housewives slopping buckets of shit out of second-storey windows. Or maybe it wasn’t better, because at least on the side streets you could avoid some of the hawkers and the vendors, the thieves and the conmen and the whores and the endless, faceless lines of beggars.

One of these grabbed at Bas’s sleeve as he walked by. ‘A bronze nummus, a single bronze, for a man who lost his sight in service of his country!’ His voice was plaintive and desperate and carried the stench of alcohol. ‘I served in the Eighth Thema under Phocas himself, when we marched against the Birds! Took a blow at Scarlet Fields, I did, and haven’t been able to see since!’ He pointed at the dirty gauze wrapped round his eyes.

But this last must not have been very thick, because when Bas turned his gaze on him – an unfriendly gaze, since Bas well knew that the Eighth Thema had not left the capital during the war against the Wellborn, had been garrisoning the city for half a century – he shivered back into his ditch.

The Marchers were masters of subterfuge, double-talk and outright dishonesty. Theirs was a culture that held that a man’s only purpose lay in the conquest of other men, mental victory being preferred to physical as it left your victim alive to bear scorn. Bas had spent many an hour warming himself by a counsel fire, getting drunk on some chieftain’s liquor, swearing friendship and loyalty, only to find a week later that selfsame chieftain had gone ranging, taking scalps and women. Duplicity was not the sole province of the capital, Bas knew, but the honest inheritance of the entire species. Still, there was something about that particular brand of falseness as was practised in the capital that set his teeth grinding against each other and turned his hands into fists. At least on the Marches you might knife a man for lying to you – here it was the coin of the realm, and you were the odd one for not accepting it.

He walked on, and around him the city got nastier and dirtier, got grimmer and greyer and duller. Hard men, and boys striving to be so, eyeballed him, but none for very long, not even the crews of adolescents that lazed in the afternoon sun, mean and scrawny and looking to make a meal of anything. A big man, and not particularly well dressed, and did you get a look at his eyes? Flat and empty and unblinking, and how much you think he could have on him, not more than a couple of tertarum, and you won’t be getting those without a good fight. No – this one was not prey.

So Bas spent his afternoon, as he’d spent many such since returning to the capital of the Commonwealth whose standard he had planted atop the burnt-out remnants of a half-dozen lands. At nightfall he found himself near the docks, in one of those neighbourhoods that rarely saw anyone lucky enough not to reside within its confines, where even the most virgin traveller would quickly realise themselves unwanted.

He could have walked into any tavern in the area and it would have been the same. The bartender looked up, narrowed his eyes, went back to doing nothing. The space he owned, or at least managed, bisected the bottom floor of a larger building, narrow and long and dark. There were tables, and chairs for those tables. There were holes in the walls for the evening to leak through. There was a fire in one corner, but it wasn’t big enough to warm the place.

Bas took a seat at the bar. One leg of his stool was shorter than the others. ‘Whiskey,’ he said.

The bartender gave him a look like he’d have preferred to serve Bas a few strong fingers of hemlock, but then he reached beneath the counter and pulled out an unlabelled bottle and a dirty glass.

‘Leave it,’ Bas said.

If the bartender hadn’t already been scowling, he would have started then. ‘Let’s see your coin first.’

Slowly, deliberately, Bas loosed his purse from his belt, dropped it onto the counter with a thump and a jangle. The bartender’s face flickered all the way from contempt to avarice. Bas pulled a silver tertarum out and placed it next to the bottle, making sure to open the drawstring wide enough for the publican to get a look at the solidus that remained behind.

After an hour the bottle was empty and the place had started to fill, with dockworkers and sailors and anyone else who had a few bronze nummus to rub together and a desire to forget themselves. Labourers trying to wash away the day’s sweat, men enjoying their narrow window of freedom. Bas did not like them.

He got up from his chair and made his way towards the back. A longer walk than he would have thought; the bar seemed to stretch on and on, the flickering candlelight rendering the patrons wall-eyed and slack-jawed and chinless. Perhaps that was not just the flickering candlelight.

Bas watered the little patch of dirt outside, then returned to his seat. In the interim three men had slipped in and taken up a position at the opposite end of the counter. In the interim lots of people had probably slipped in, but it was the three men that Bas marked out as being worthy of notice. The first had a Salucian-style dagger at his hip, and he kept resting his hand on it, like he was afraid it might run away. The second was a fat man who thought himself a big one. The last was dressed well, better than he should have been, better than anyone working an honest job in this part of the city could hope to dress.

It took a longer time to get the second bottle of whiskey than the first, not because it was busier, though it was, but because the bartender was pretending he didn’t see Bas waving. But he brought it over, finally, and Bas pulled out his purse and gave over another tertarum, though the first should have covered it.

Bas left his purse on the counter after he’d paid, sitting next to the whiskey. Halfway through the bottle he pulled out a small pile of solidus and started to play with them, stacking and restacking them, shuffling them through his fingers absentmindedly, or perhaps purposefully. Bas could feel the tension growing just behind his eyes, like a bad headache. It had been building for days, a background hum at first but getting louder and louder until now it seemed to drown out even the nearby conversations, not that Bas imagined any of these to be worth listening to. Bas wasn’t sure if he was drinking whiskey to try and quiet the sensation or to bring it to a head, but either way he kept on drinking.

At the other end of the counter the bartender and his three friends were conversing quietly and shooting Bas sidelong stares of indeterminate enmity. Bas ignored them, shuffling the thick octagonal solidus, letting them ring out against each other. When he’d made a ghost of the second bottle Bas turned it on its side and stood up from his seat. He wasn’t sure if the stumble he took while leaving was deliberate or feigned.

Outside the air was cold, would be unpleasantly so in a few minutes, but overheated from the whiskey and the fetid air of the bar Bas enjoyed it, wrapped himself comfortably in the evening. The moon hung so low that he worried it might scrape its belly raw on the chimneys and steeples of the skyline. He heard them coming out of the tavern behind him, but still he waited a few seconds before turning, savouring the night, anticipating the moment to come.

There were four of them, they had picked up an extra hand before they’d walked out of the bar. That was smart. Smart of the three that had been watching him, Bas meant, not smart for the one who had joined up belatedly. Maybe not smart for any of them. Bas had been planning on leading them into an alleyway, making them come at him one by one, but in the end he didn’t do that, perhaps because he didn’t want to leave the moonlight.

The four men who were coming to hurt Bas aligned themselves in a semicircle in front of him. The one with the dagger pulled it out and pointed it at Bas and started to say the things one says in that situation, but Bas didn’t hear or wasn’t listening.

There came a moment when the speaker with the nice-looking dagger realised all a-piece that Bas was bigger than he’d thought, bigger or perhaps just more frightening. And his eyes went wider, just round the edges, but Bas was waiting for it, had seen it on a dozen-dozen men across the length of the continent. And Bas smiled on the inside and struck out with his hand, going for the man’s knife – which wasn’t a smart move, really, wasn’t the sort of thing any master of arms would teach, try to disarm a man barehanded. But foolish or not, all of a sudden the knife was spinning out into the ether, a quick flash of moonlight against steel and then it was lost in the muck.

The speaker stopped speaking then, except to make a sort of grunting sound when Bas broke most of the teeth in his jaw and left his nose a mass of raw pulp. If the other three had moved on him just then they might have had a chance, especially as one them was flourishing a boot knife. But that isn’t really the way it works, not in this sort of a situation at least. The most important thing in any fight is to get the other man thinking about what will happen if he loses it, because once that fear sinks in he already has.

Bas caught the second thug with a shot on the chin that was as close to perfection as you’ll find this side of heaven, or hell, the ideal punch, a punch that sent the unfortunate recipient comatose before he had hit the ground, eyes dull and senseless. He landed badly, Bas heard a sharp crack that was probably the man’s neck, though he wasn’t certain and anyway didn’t really care.

The one who had been speaking and had been holding a knife but was now not doing anything but bleeding tried to run away then, run away or maybe try to retrieve his lost weapon, Bas wasn’t sure. In the event it didn’t matter – Bas grabbed him by the scruff of his long hair and jerked back sharply, and some of the hair came out but not all of it, and what didn’t come out was attached to the unfortunate man’s head, as hair often is, and then the man was lying on the ground. Bas gave him a short, savage kick against the temple and he stopped moving.

Bas took a strong shot to the skull then, hard enough to send his vision blurry. The fat man had thrown it, though Bas had to admit that looking at him closer there was some muscle beneath all that flab. Bas had met a few men in his life who were stronger than he was, stronger like they could take him arm-wrestling or carry a heavier load, but a fist-fight wasn’t either of those things, and what counted more than anything was hand speed and ferocity. When Bas had been a young man he’d been marvellously fast, had performed feats of agility that had, quite literally, been immortalised in song. He wasn’t fast like that any more, hadn’t been fast like that for ten years at least – but for a person his size he was still quick as all hell, and certainly he was much quicker than the big man, who had probably been getting through fights his whole life by bearing up to a guy and falling on him. That was what he tried to do then at least, and it wasn’t a bad bit of strategy, wrap Bas up so his friend with the boot knife could get a lick or two in.