Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1 (49 page)

‘Let it lie, Dycian,’ Bas said quietly.

‘The stories they tell of you, Caracal, of your victories and your accomplishments! And if some of the truth is lost, when the minstrels speak of the ash-skinned bowman who kills as he laughs, and the scarred subordinate, who walks ever beside you, what of it? We exist only to burnish your story, me and Isaac and Theophilus and everyone else in this entire damned camp. How many men have you led to death, do you think, Caracal?’

‘Stop fucking calling me that.’

‘A hit! A palpable hit!’ Hamilcar laughed and drank more. ‘I hope every one of these children finds themselves below the dirt before this war is over, Caracal. I hope their mothers weep and beat their breasts. I hope your Commonwealth crashes down on itself, leaves you all to starve among the wreckage.’ He finished off what was left in his cup, set it down in the dirt. ‘No, I don’t,’ he said, then, a moment later, ‘yes, I do.’

‘Get back to your quarters, Hamilcar,’ Bas said. ‘And sleep until you wake up feeling foolish. That’s an order.’

Hamilcar brought himself upright without stumbling, though he went slowly to make certain. Then he gave Bas a salute that was mostly mockery and walked to his tent.

Bas’s attention had been sufficiently taken up with the Dycian that he hadn’t noticed the commotion spreading through the camp, not until the cause of it dropped off her horse and beside him. Einnes had come unescorted, and his first instinct – one that surprised him, as he examined it later – was fear for her, because with the temper of the thema so high it was not at all difficult to imagine her arrival leading to violence.

They looked at each other for a moment. Having made the decision to trek all the way out here, Bas had assumed that she would speak first, but after giving her a full fifteen seconds to do so he determined it was better to take the initiative. ‘Sentinel,’ he said.

‘Strategos,’ she replied. And then she didn’t say anything for a while, just looked at him. He found himself, as he had on any number of past occasions, trying to determine the exact colour of her eyes. Were they mostly violet or mostly blue? Did they change, depending on the time of day, or her mood? Bas had never heard of anything like that among his own species, but who could say, when it came to the Others?

‘It seems Aeleria will go to war,’ she said finally.

‘Yes.’

‘And you will lead them?’

‘I’ll be at the front,’ he said, though he well knew this was not the same thing.

‘Then we’ll be travelling together.’

Very little about Einnes surprised Bas, in part because he generally did not find himself getting surprised, and in part because he had learned enough about her at that point not to expect her to conform to any normal standards of behaviour. This proved to be enough, however. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘I am the Sentinel of the Southern Reach. My territory includes both Aeleria and Salucia, and I will accompany your forces as an observer, to ensure that the continued interests of the Roost are respected.’

‘And if they aren’t?’

‘Then the wish I expressed that first night will be granted.’

Bas wanted to say something but he did not know what it was exactly. Perhaps Einnes felt similarly, because she stared at him a long time before leaving. Or perhaps she didn’t; it was impossible to say. She was as much a mystery to him as he was to himself.

Einnes was back on her horse and out of camp in the span of no more then a few moments. Bas watched until she had disappeared along the road leading back into the city.

A hoplitai ran past him laughing, slipped a toe in the mud and bumped into him, realised what he had done, apologised so profusely that Bas almost felt bad for the boy. Was this the calibre of men in his command? Children and incompetents? What would happen when he led them to war? Hard to say – he’d have given them no sort of chance against the Marchers, but the Salucians had as little in common with the lords of the plains than perhaps any other group of humans Bas had ever come across. But still, war is not a game, even when the sides are less than evenly matched. Hamilcar’s drunken tirades aside, Bas had no illusions of his own immortality, nor that the songs the minstrels had written for him would act as shield against spear, sword or arrow.

That was the last thing that Jon the Sanguine had taught Bas, taught him early one morning beneath a cattle-hide yurt amidst the endless and unchanging plains that only now, after he felt certain he would never see them again, Bas realised he thought of as home. A scream cutting through the air, and Bas sprinting into the man’s tent ahead of even Jon’s subaltern, and the boot on the ground and a reed-snake with Jon’s knife in it, a spectacular throw though it would do no good. Jon looking up at him with eyes full of fear, because he knew as sure as Bas did that there was no cure for what had just bitten him. Waiting for the leg to swell up, Jon becoming less and less coherent and more and more bitter until he couldn’t do anything but curse at the men he had spent his life beside, and the sun and the sky and the grass that he was soon to leave. And then even that being taken away from him, till he could do nothing but scream in agony, and then moan piteously. And then nothing, a ditch dug in a trackless flatland and a stone monument that would wear away before the winter.

Jon the Sanguine was a genius, and a legend, and perhaps even a hero, if you had Aelerian blood in your veins and you weren’t too careful about how you used the word. But most of all, Jon the Sanguine was dead. Dead in a strange land, dead without anyone to mourn him. A corpse, as Bas would find himself in the not so very distant future.

Well – it was the way of flesh, and in the meantime, Bas had work to do. He grabbed a passing subaltern. ‘Get Isaac and the rest of the commanders,’ he said. ‘Tell them to assemble in my tent in fifteen minutes. We have a war to plan.’

Einnes was to accompany them, was she? At the very least, Bas would make certain she got a show.

T
he morning was overcast and grey, as was appropriate to the mood and purpose of the gathering. Virtually the entirety of the Eternal population of the Roost had come out to watch the proceedings, a greater number than Calla had ever seen concentrated in one place. The atmosphere was one of subdued anticipation; if not quite festival-like, then too close to festival-like given what was to come. The Wright was there, and the Glutton. The Lord Bristle and the Lady of the Azure Seat and the Lord of the Verdant Gardens. The Lord of the Ivory Towers and the Lady of the East Estates sat near the front, twinned together since the night of their union. The Shrike had shown up early, not long after Calla had arrived, anxious to assure himself of the best possible seat. Not for the first time Calla realised how much she hated him, the taste sour on her tongue.

Calla stood on the side of the course, watching the Aubade make his final preparations. He had risen at dawn, as on any other day, eaten a light repast and left quickly for the armoury, a spacious hall located in the east wing. Though he had a reputation as one of the fiercest of all the High, the Aubade almost never visited his collection and had not added to it in Calla’s memory. Then again he hardly needed to; there was row after row of elaborate suits of heavy plate and display cases filled with different sorts of weaponry. The armourer was a grizzled man with copper skin and ugly eyes who clearly took the maintenance of the collection seriously. To Calla there seemed to be little difference between one suit and the next, but this she soon realised was sheer ignorance, as the Aubade and his smith quickly became engaged in a running discussion about the relative merits of each, how one would do better against the head of a mace but less so against a sword, and did the Lord know whether the Prime would be using a single-headed lance or one with several points, and she was widely famed for her skill with a flail, and perhaps a wider shield would be better. He had settled finally on one of the less elaborate pieces in his collection, interlocking plates of Roost-forged steel, a bright blue base with golden trim. Attached to the back was a framework of filigreed silver fitted with freshly plucked peacock feathers. His helmet was an unadorned basinet, with a small opening in the back through which his hair would be braided. Still unable to make a decision regarding his arms, he ordered the armourer to assemble a selection of different weapons and to cart them all to the courses.

Then it was on to his stable, to repeat the process with the chief groomswoman and her charges. Though here, at least, the choice was simpler. The Aubade had no particular favourite among his many instruments of death, but he had one horse that he prized above all others, a huge mare the colour of silver. The horses of the Roost were larger than any other breed, larger and far more fierce – the Red Keep had lost three equerries in the past five years to the seemingly random savagery of the creatures, and Calla made sure to stand as far from them as etiquette would allow.

And after all that bustle, they had journeyed by boat to the courses, the equipment and the beast to follow. The Aubade had spent a few minutes investigating the grounds, but then he had retired to a small pavilion at one end of the field. He had shut himself inside alone, and what he was doing there Calla couldn’t say. That had been the hour of the Starling, and little had happened since, giving Calla plenty of time for reflection – or at least enough time to exacerbate all of her worries and concerns, though unfortunately not enough to come to a resolution with any of them.

The previous night Calla had seen what she was confident would be the last of Bulan, son of Busir. Tourmaline had knocked on her door well after dinner, when Calla had been released to her quarters. Calla had the book in front of her but wasn’t able to work. For once she was happy for Tourmaline’s interruption.

‘Your sir is at the entrance, mistress,’ she explained breathlessly. ‘The gatekeeper won’t mind keeping it a secret, miss, but you’d best hurry, as he gets off soon and the night man is a drunkard and a gossip.’

Calla wrapped a shawl round her shoulders and went out to discover what it was that had brought Bulan to her home so unexpectedly. ‘You forget yourself, sir,’ she said playfully when she saw him, standing in the shadow of a side entrance. ‘You’ll give me quite the reputation, showing up so late in the evening.’

But for once Bulan seemed in no mood to banter. ‘Leave here with me,’ he said.

‘That’s very little of a joke, and I am renowned for my sense of humour.’

‘Do not pretend you think me such a fool as to have bribed the guards to enter the First Rung after nightfall, then sneaked here like a common footpad out of some misplaced sense of coquetry. I know you find this intrusive. I’m hoping you’ll forgive the violation. Indeed, I am hoping you will make a more serious one.’

‘Which is?’

‘Leave here with me, tonight. Pack no bag and tell no one. Take my hand as if we were to go for a stroll. I have a palanquin waiting to take us to the docks. One of my galleys lies in port at this moment. In three hours we can be at sea, bound for my homeland,’ he said, ‘our ship piloted by a captain who would die before revealing my secrets, and a crew too ignorant to have any idea who you are. I would rather not speak of the life we might have there – you have known me long enough not to be ignorant of my qualities, good or bad. But if you require guarantees of some sort, know that I would make them without hesitation.’

‘What has possessed you to speak such foolishness? I am the Seneschal of the Lord of the Red Keep himself, my home is the stuff of dreams. What could you possibly offer me that could match the splendour that is mine by birth?’

‘Survival,’ Bulan hissed. ‘It is very bright here, and very beautiful. But do not let it blind you to the future, which comes more swiftly than we realise, and which is often more terrible than we imagine.’

‘I take it you have heard the results of Conclave,’ Calla said. ‘And it is true, the Prime is known to be a deft hand with a lance. But there are none to match the Aubade with blade or axe, and I would be a poor servant indeed if I removed myself from his service in the hour of his greatest need.’

‘This duel is a pinprick compared to the river of blood that this city will see in the coming months.’

It took Calla a struggling moment to pick her way through this. ‘You mean this war that Aeleria has declared?’ She shrugged her shoulders. In truth she had all but forgotten the cause of the fight, so absorbed was she in the fact of it. ‘What of it?’

‘The Aelerians will march into Salucia, and the Eternal will be drawn in against them.’

‘Yes, yes, as they did twenty years ago.’

‘This time will not be like the last. The Aelerians will shatter Those Above, and then they will take the Roost and everything in it.’

Calla spent a moment reflecting on two unpleasant possibilities. The first was that Bulan was quite irreparably mad, and somehow she had missed the signs during the half-year of their acquaintanceship, despite the long hours spent gossiping over wine and the longer hours spent cocooned in bed. A horrifying circumstance, because of what it said about Bulan and because of what it said about her. The second possibility, of course, was far more disturbing; that Bulan was as clever as she had always taken him to be, and that his predictions contained more than a grain of truth.

Calla chose to believe the former. ‘You speak nonsense.’

‘How many Eldest are there in the whole city?’ Bulan asked. ‘Six thousand? Eight? How many are born each year? There are more men in one thema than there are Four-Fingers above ground. They have not yet reached out and crushed you because they are slow to realise their strength, like a boy just grown to manhood.’ He took her by the shoulders and forced her gaze upwards, to his. ‘But they will not remain so ignorant for long. The Aelerians will be at the gates of the Roost within two years, mark every word I speak. And they will be inside them soon after.’

She put her hand up against his chest, pushed him away softly. ‘No doubt the Aelerians thought the same the last time. But they were wrong then, as now. You have seen them,’ Calla continued, as if trying to explain something obvious to a child. ‘They are better than us, stronger and more perfect. Who is there to match the Lord in might, in speed, in fierce purpose?’