Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1 (46 page)

Thistle slipped his blade into his back-sheath and pulled his shirt over it. He walked downstairs with slow, deliberate certainty, made sure to jump over the loose step that he had never fixed. Why hadn’t he fixed it, he wondered now? Had he been so damn busy? What had happened to all that time that he had slept and slunk and frittered away?

Mother was waiting for him when he came down, standing in front of their doorway, her eyes shifting nervously between Thistle and her feet.

‘Now’s not the time, Ma,’ Thistle said. In his mind that was the end of it, and he was somewhat surprised when she stayed where she was, had to stop himself short or he’d have run her down. A year ago they’d been the same size or maybe he’d had a few fingers on her, but now she barely came up to his shoulders and he made a point of being careful not to squeeze her too roughly when they embraced. Not that this came up much. ‘I gotta go, Ma.’

It always took her so damn long to speak, and then whatever she said was pointless, just something to fill the silence. ‘I know what’s going on,’ she said.

Thistle didn’t really think that was true, or at least not very much true. ‘All right.’

‘I know who you’ve been working for,’ she said.

‘It’s no kind of secret, Ma. The whole fucking neighbourhood knows.’

‘Don’t curse in front of me.’

Thistle figured it was pretty late in the day to be talking about profanity, with his knife pressing hard against his spine. ‘Sorry,’ he said anyway.

‘I know you’re working for Rhythm.’

‘You need to get out of the way now, Mum. I got someone waiting.’

‘They can wait a while longer,’ she said, and like he’d twisted a spigot she burst into tears, no preamble to it at all: one instant she was sad-looking but steady, the next in full-on mourning. ‘He can wait for ever!’

It occurred to Thistle that Spindle and his boys could probably hear his mother shrieking from outside; the walls weren’t thick enough to hush a whisper. And though Thistle knew he probably should be past the point where this mattered to him, the thought of the rest of his crew listening to his mother weep caused him a sharp stab of shame. ‘It’s my job now, Ma. I have to go and take care of it.’

‘What would your father think?’ she yelled at him, and Thistle thought, by the Time Below, she must be far gone if she supposes that old bastard has any more claim on me dead than he did alive. ‘I won’t let you go,’ she said, and she put her arms round him, somewhere between an embrace and a restraint.

Coming down the stairs Thistle had felt empty and steady and prepared for what was to come, as prepared as he was going to get, anyway. Looking at his mother now, worn lines around her eyes, he could feel himself starting to think again. And that made him angry, angry at himself as much as her, though she ended up getting all of it. ‘You took the money easy enough though, didn’t you, Ma? You weren’t worried when I was bringing home a slab of pork every day, didn’t ask where it came from. Didn’t wonder about Apple’s medicine, or the dresses I bought the girls.’

He regretted it as soon as he said it, not because it wasn’t true or because she didn’t deserve to hear it, but because she started weeping harder. ‘I should have said something six months ago,’ she said.

‘It’s not six months ago, it’s now. And this isn’t a good time to talk.’

Her hand was wrapped round his wrist, displaying more strength than he’d have thought she possessed. ‘Don’t go, by Enkedri the Self-Created, who watches over all of us. By Siraph his consort, by—’

‘Praying don’t work for Apple,’ Thistle said, and he threw everything he had into it. ‘Why the hell would it work for me?’

She wasn’t a strong woman, his mother, except in so far as she had held together a family of six for twenty years. But she couldn’t hurt anyone, which the Fifth Rung had taught Thistle was the only true measure of power. She forgot to keep crying in the moment after he had said it, her eyes went wide and she took a deep intake of breath like he had punched her in the stomach.

Thistle took off his purse and shoved it into her hands and hurried down the steps before she could say anything else. Spindle was waiting outside, and if he noticed that there was anything wrong he had the good sense not to mention it.

Rhythm had spent the last month floating between a network of safe houses, corner bars and small tenement rooms, moving every few days or even more frequently when he was feeling mistrustful. Only Spindle knew where he was at any given point, a set-up the specifics of which Thistle knew better than to question. They stopped in front of a random tenement building near the Sweet Water canal, random except that there was another thug waiting outside of it, an ex-sailor by the name of Chestnut. He nodded at Spindle and Thistle as they walked in, nodded at Thistle just like he had Spindle, acknowledging their superiority in the hierarchy. Another day and that would have puffed Thistle’s chest, but his mind was still taken up with what had just happened, and what was soon to, and he barely noticed.

Spindle walked them up a set of crooked stairs to the second floor, which was dark and loud and miserable. The building had been subdivided away into almost nothing, whole families crammed into the closets. Spindle walked them through three consecutively smaller cells, tramping across the bedrooms of small children already well versed in despair, past their drunken mothers and squat, waddling grandmothers.

Rhythm was the most important man in the neighbourhood. He made more in a week than a family of porters made in a year, maybe a lot more. He could buy anything he wanted, or at least anything that anyone on the Fifth would want to buy. Men touched their foreheads when they saw him, made sure to speak well of him in public places, well and loudly.

The room he was sleeping in was big enough for a makeshift bed and very small table and an equally sized chair. It was windowless, which seemed like a reasonable security precaution but didn’t do much for the heat, which was sweltering, or the smell, which was more than sour. There was a bottle of liquor on the table and a heavy fighting knife beside it. Rhythm had swapped the garish costume that he preferred for worn trousers and a tunic, and he had been wearing them a while, to judge from the stain and the odour. He looked sallow, and anxious and savage. ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘Wish I could offer you a seat, but …’ He made a gesture at the room that Thistle supposed was meant to indicate that there wasn’t anywhere else to sit, though Thistle knew that already.

Thistle wasn’t sure how the hell they managed to cram him and Spindle and the three other guys into the room, it seemed like a job for a group of contortionists rather than thugs. But they did, even managed to close the door afterwards, and as soon as it was shut Rhythm started to speak.

‘I know some of you have been wondering why we waited to answer for Chalk. I had my reasons. No point in ending trouble in a way that’ll bring us more down the line. I needed to talk to some people, make sure hitting Pallor wouldn’t upset anyone that matters.’

Thistle imagined this meeting, Shade or maybe Shade’s boss sitting upslope a few cables in some well-appointed restaurant, him and a couple of men like him, eating fresh oysters and drinking bottles of wine worth more than a Barrow tenement. Sometime after the meal was over they’d have got round to discussing the trouble their subordinates were making in a part of the city as impossibly far away as the moon, debated the matter half-heartedly a while. And then one of them would’ve said something like, ‘hell, I don’t care, let him off the guy if he’s so keen to do it.’ And then Shade or Shade’s boss would’ve said ‘Fine, done, now what are we going to drink with dessert?’

‘I got the OK two hours ago,’ Rhythm said, smiling for the first time in the conversation, maybe for the first time in weeks. ‘Pallor disappears tonight, and we don’t need to worry about any older brothers coming to look in on him.’

‘Good,’ Spindle said. ‘Fucking great.’

‘Don’t get too excited,’ Rhythm said. ‘We’ve still got to go out and do the thing.’

‘Hell, boss,’ Spindle said, ‘that’s the easy part.’

Pallor hadn’t bothered to go to ground, arrogance that would be proved foolishness if Rhythm had his way. Instead he had holed up in the back room of his gambling house and added on a couple of extra hitters, just daring Rhythm to come and say hello.

Well, Rhythm was the risk-taking sort. The six of them – Thistle and Chalk and Rhythm and the three new heavies Thistle didn’t give a shit about – were going to go in full force, and make sure they were the only ones coming back out again. The plan was not exactly overwhelming in its complexity, and though Rhythm ran through it twice, they were out of the room almost as soon as they went into it. Which was all well and good as far as Thistle was concerned, since someone – Chestnut, he thought – had his elbow wedged into Thistle’s back, and the stench verged on overpowering.

Thistle was the last out, and before he could leave Rhythm put a hand on his shoulder. ‘You ready for this?’ Rhythm asked.

‘Do I look ready?’

Rhythm took a few seconds to answer, but then he nodded brusquely. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You do.’

They moved in three groups so as not to give Pallor any notice they were coming, one of the old guard with one of the new, presumably to make sure that no one scampered off – though what exactly Thistle was to do if Chestnut decided to do a runner was never exactly clear to him. It didn’t happen, anyway; Thistle figured Chestnut was probably too stupid for the possibility to even occur to him. They were the first to arrive, so Thistle took up a position in the shadow of a nearby alleyway.

Chestnut was nervous and jittery and wanted to talk to Thistle. Thistle was nervous and jittery and wanted Chestnut to keep his fucking mouth shut.

‘I guess this is it,’ Chestnut said.

Thistle thought even Chestnut would be able to figure out the answer to this question.

‘How many men you think they got in there?’ Chestnut asked.

‘Sixty-seven,’ Thistle muttered.

Spindle and his partner showed up a moment later, shutting down any further conversation, and Rhythm and his man came by not long after that. No one said anything but Rhythm shot Thistle a look like ‘get ready’ and then he nodded at Spindle, who nodded back and strutted up to the entrance.

Spindle rapped twice on the door, heavy blows with his huge hand. The door opened and a face stuck itself out and then Spindle’s knife stuck itself into the man’s throat, a masterful bit of work, the man dead before he could even scream. Spindle clambered over the corpse and Thistle found himself the next one through the door.

Sprinting inside, weapon out, pulse echoing so loudly in his head that it took him a moment to realise he was screaming. But that was fine, surprise was out now, they were going for sheer terror, and if you didn’t feel a little spurt of ice in your veins at the sight of Spindle and his bloody knife tearing through the place, you had to be made of stone. Pallor’s few patrons that night were not made of stone, it turned out, and they scrambled away from the gambling tables as fast as their stubby little legs could carry them. A towering heavy was standing guard next to a back door, and he yelled a warning at the same time as he pulled his own weapon. He and Spindle circled each other for a swift handful of seconds and then Spindle went at him fast and hard, and Thistle didn’t exactly see what happened but whatever it was it left Spindle standing and his opponent dying on the ground.

So far Thistle had not done anything to justify his presence there, or the long hours he had spent practising the knife, but that was about to change. A back door opened and three men came out of it, blades drawn, and they roared and went after Spindle, and Thistle did not think even Spindle could handle three men at once.

On the long walk over, and in the endless interminable hours before, Thistle had developed for himself a simple, thuggish maxim. All he needed to do, he would tell himself, was to take his man – to square accounts, to make certain that one unfortunate counterpart went into the next world before he did. If someone got him afterwards that was all right, that was nothing to be ashamed of, everybody went at some point. Just make sure you put someone there to welcome you.

The thing was that Thistle’s man didn’t seem to know that he was Thistle’s man, hadn’t got the message, was focused on Spindle to the exclusion of anything else. The other thing was that Thistle’s man wasn’t that at all, wasn’t more than a boy, younger than Thistle even. And though Thistle knew full well that he had no business thinking about anything in that moment save the moment itself, being as fast and perfect as he could possibly be, the truth was that all Thistle could think about was why in the hell had Pallor brought a boy to something like this? What kind of an asshole, what kind of a worm-souled half-witted scrounging piece of filth would bring a boy to something like this? It made Thistle so fucking angry that he was glad he had someone in front of him to kill.

The knife stole into the boy’s ribcage, just to the side of his breast, like Spindle had showed him, easier than Thistle had expected. It wasn’t difficult, the blade seemed to yearn for it. Thistle pulled it out and put it back in again, and the boy whose name he didn’t know turned towards him, mouth opening and closing like he was trying to tell Thistle something. And in that strange, desperate moment, it seemed the most important thing in the world to Thistle that he find out what it was – he wanted to grab the boy and shake him, demand he reveal his secret, though the boy was already dying and then he was just dead.

It wasn’t until Thistle felt a hand on his shoulder that he remembered there were other participants in the drama, and he whirled round with such frantic speed that he nearly cut Spindle with his knife, dripping red onto the floor and all but forgotten.

‘Be cool, kid,’ Spindle said, ‘it’s done.’

Some of the blood that was on Spindle was Spindle’s, but to guess from the three dead men littering the ground, three plus the one Thistle had done, which made four men, four men on the ground, most of it was not.

Rhythm inspected one of these corpses with an expression of bemusement. ‘I can’t say I’m surprised to see you like this, Pallor,’ he said. ‘I always thought you had a little too much bitch to you.’ When Pallor didn’t answer Rhythm laughed and then kicked the body and then laughed again. ‘Hell, boy,’ he said, walking over and slapping Thistle on the shoulder. ‘You didn’t think to leave any for us?’