Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1 (50 page)

‘No three men alive,’ Bulan said confidently. ‘No five men. But ten? Twelve? Twenty? War is not a series of duels, is not fought on groomed land as tomorrow’s contest will be. There are more Aelerians under arms than there are wasps in a hive, and no wasp has anything on them for savagery.’

And perhaps what he was saying seemed plausible enough to make Calla angry. ‘You speak nonsense. No human army has ever defeated Those Above, not in all the time that ever was, not before the Founding or since.’

‘Everything is impossible, until it happens.’

‘The Roost is more than Those Above. There are hundreds of thousands of humans in this city, countless numbers – do you imagine they will stand idly by while their homes are destroyed?’

‘The Roost is the most perfect thing in existence,’ Bulan admitted. ‘There is nothing that has ever been built to rival it, and I doubt greatly that there ever will be. Built with five-fingered hands, built with their toil, maintained by their labour, their sweat, their blood. Well and good,’ he went on swiftly, cutting off Calla before she could object, ‘it is the way of the world. My galleys are crewed by debtors and foreign slaves, captives taken in war. But I do not suppose them my friends, or the evil I do to them a kindness. They would have my head if they were able to take it, and I could hardly complain of ill-treatment.’

‘Do you think me a slave?’ Calla asked, almost startled at the concept. She turned her hand towards the east gardens, the warm spring breeze carrying with it the smell of holly and rose petal. In the distance Calla could hear the soft strains of a psaltery, sweet and faint and desperately beautiful. ‘This is paradise, Bulan. This is what you foreign-born would call heaven.’

‘And you cannot leave it.’

‘I do not want to,’ Calla insisted, though she knew this was not quite the same thing.

‘Do you think every human in the Roost is the Seneschal of the Red Keep? When the Aelerians come anyone not living on the First Rung will rise up with them, and the fine things you have will mark you as their enemy. The Roost will drown in blood, and you with it.’

‘You’re wrong,’ Calla said. ‘The Roost is eternal.’

‘Nothing is eternal,’ Bulan hissed. ‘All that is green will one day grow black. I have heard stories of what the Aelerians did to Dycia, Calla. I would not have you suffer the same.’

And now they were well past the point where Calla could pretend that her lover was a madman, or a fool. What he said made more sense than Calla wished – perhaps even echoed currents of her own thoughts, currents she had ignored or suppressed. She thought for a moment of the boy the Shrike had killed, and then she thought about how long it had been since she had thought of him. Was the whole city like that? A den of animals, made brutal through mistreatment, held at bay only through the naked threat of force?

It couldn’t be. She did not believe it. She would not. ‘This has been the home of my family since before the Aelerians came from the south. Before the first cornerstone was laid in Dycia, before the Salucians yet knew the working of metal.’ Calla leaned in, allowed Bulan to take her in his arms, kissed him smoothly and with all the passion she could summon. He seemed to sense that this would be their last embrace, responded in kind. When it was over she took a small step backwards, stared up into his deep, brown eyes. ‘The Roost will never fall,’ she said. ‘But if it does, I will be buried in the rubble.’

Bulan looked at her for a moment, breathed in deeply as if to continue the argument. But then he exhaled, his shoulders sinking downward, and they stared at each other for a long, silent moment. ‘Farewell, Calla of the Red Keep,’ he said at last, then turned abruptly and headed back the way he had come.

‘May the sun shine on you, Bulan, son of Busir!’ Calla said to his back. But he did not turn to look at her, or make any sign that he had heard.

It had been a long night, afterwards. There were many reasons she should be unable to sleep and she counted all of them, staring up at her ceiling until the first flickering rays of light shone in through her window.

Calla brought her mind back to the present, fought through the clinging scraps of memory. It was undignified, a woman of her age being upended by the disappearance of a lover. Who was Bulan, to have affected her so? How many men had she brought to her bedchamber over the years, handsomer and of finer quality? At the end of the evening, there was only so much one could expect from a foreigner.

The Lord had left his tent to inspect the weapons that had been brought from the Red Keep. He seemed to settle on one, said something to the armourer and then moved to approach her. Even clad in his elaborate suit of armour he walked in almost unbroken silence, and Calla was so caught up in her thoughts that she didn’t notice him until they were nearly face to face.

‘The Lord of the Sidereal Citadel has agreed to take on the contents of the eyrie, animal and human, should it become necessary. The aquatic creatures as well, though he will need to add another wing to his property. I doubt there will be any interest in the apiary. It is not truly first-rate, I suppose, for all that I have worked to make it so. I am no kind of apiarist, if truth is to be valued more than kindness.’

‘You have many other qualities to boast of, my Lord.’

‘The Prime has of course agreed to take you into her service, should the circumstances necessitate it. I’ve spoken accurately of your quality, and am sure she will find you a suitable position. She would be a fine mistress.’

Calla would draw a razor across her wrist rather than spend the rest of her life as a toady in the house of the Eldest that had killed her master, though it would be a far easier lot than most of the rest of the Lord’s household would enjoy. Without a High to serve they would be banished from the First Rung, forced to seek what shelter they could find downslope. Some of the more skilled might find work on the middle Rungs, but the larger portion, the domestics and the labourers, would find themselves dragged down to the very roots of the city, forced to make ends meet any miserable way they could. The Red Keep would be stripped of what treasures the other Eldest decided to take and then left to rot, another once great estate lost to time. The gardens would be overrun with weeds, the flowerbeds would lie fallow, the animals unsecured. No banners would flutter from the Lord’s battlements, no songs grace his halls. The crows and pigeons would make their homes where gods had once resided.

The thought of this, and of the combat soon to come, seemed not to have caused the Aubade any discomfort. His eyes were unclouded; he betrayed no hint of worry or concern. He motioned to the servants who assisted him with his war gear: big men, brawny and dark-skinned. They led the Lord’s horse out from its stall, walking it at the very end of a long chain, careful not to get within reach of its hooves or its cruel-looking teeth.

The Aubade vaulted atop it without assistance, though it was even taller at the shoulder than he was. ‘Try and find a mate,’ he said, leaning down from his horse. ‘It would please me to think that your line will continue.’

It wasn’t until the Aubade had reached his mark that Calla realised this last comment, uttered quietly enough that only she could have heard it, had been delivered in the High Tongue.

The Wright had been agreed upon as an appropriate arbiter, and he stood on a dais in the centre of the field, to be removed once he had finished speaking. He was dressed plainly, or at least as plainly as Those Above seemed capable, his robes the colour of rain clouds. ‘Siblings,’ he cried, and his voice was tremendously loud, loud enough to be heard in the back rows and to injure Calla’s ears from where she was near the front. ‘A challenge has been offered. A challenge has been accepted. Can the challenge be retracted?’ He turned towards the Prime.

‘It cannot.’

‘Can the challenge be rejected?’

‘No,’ the Aubade answered, after a few seconds’ hesitation.

‘Then the challenge shall continue. May you walk in the footsteps of the Founders.’

The Wright dropped from the dais and took a spot among the crowd. A number of human servants, moving swiftly, disassembled the platform, leaving the field unobstructed. The Aubade motioned to one of his assistants, who brought over a shield large enough to shelter a bull from the rain, and an ash-wood spear tipped with glittering red steel. Across the way the Prime did the same. Her armour was one smooth and unbroken sheen of silver, and the diamond that was the symbol of her position perched in the crown of her helmet. Her hair-stalks trailed behind her like the comb of a rooster. Her lance was painted gold, and had three nasty-looking prongs at its end.

They remained like that for a moment that seemed far longer. Then the raven was released, swooped into the sky, and the combatants spurred their horses onward, like an arrow released from a bow. The ground quivered with each step – not exaggeration or metaphor but a literal truth, Calla could feel the stadium shake beneath her. The two riders crossed the distance between them so rapidly that Calla had no time to prepare herself for the impact. The Prime’s lance struck one corner of the Aubade’s shield and glanced aside, but the Lord of the Red Keep had aimed true, and with such force that the Prime’s shield all but shattered, fragments of coloured steel flying off in all directions. The sound was a thunderclap – the great force of their combined charges would have broken the bones of any human fool enough to try to withstand it, would have punctured a stone wall. The Prime rocked back and forth, but she remained in her seat, and by the time she had reached the other end of the course, and her attendants had replaced her shield and weapon, she seemed to have recovered altogether.

Three more lances were broken in turn, each as long as a sapling but a good deal thicker. By the fourth pass one could almost imagine that the two combatants were beginning to feel the stress of the thing, that they had slowed down slightly but perceptibly.

On the fifth pass the Prime demonstrated what had earned her renown for spear work. She began her charge as she had the first four, but in the instant before striking she shifted the point upward so that it caught the Aubade directly on his crown. The force knocked him clear from the saddle, ripped him free of his moorings, sent him careening skyward and then firmly into the dust. The silver frame of his false wings snapped in half, peacock feathers hanging in the air.

Calla screamed.

While in the armoury earlier that day Calla had picked up one of the array of helmets the Aubade had collected, marvelling at the weight of it, almost too much for her to lift, let alone carry atop her head. The entire suit would have weighed twice what she did, but all the same when the Aubade rose he did so with astonishing agility. Two of his house servants came hurrying over from the sides, each carrying one end of a massive broadsword, taller than any human Calla had ever met. They knelt down as they reached the Aubade, and with one swift movement he freed the weapon from its sheath, revealing a shining blade of Roost-forged steel, red-flecked and flared at the tip.

The Prime dismounted, again with a smoothness and dexterity that Calla could not have managed naked. She gave her mount a slap on the rump that sent it galloping back towards the sidelines. Her own servants approached, offering her chosen weapons, and a moment later she was prepared to continue the contest. In one hand she carried a long blade as bright and clean as a ray of sunlight, and with the other she kept the glittering chain links of a morning star swinging swiftly above her head, like a falcon circling a kill.

The Aubade nodded at the Prime. The Prime nodded back. The battle was joined.

Calla knew nothing of swordcraft, though even had she been an expert she would have had difficulty following the exchange of blows, so swift and seamless was each movement. The Prime worked to hinder and trap the Aubade with her chain, in hopes of moving in swiftly and finishing him off with her sword. For his part the Aubade seemed willing to remain on the defensive, dodging out of the way of the fluttering couplings, waiting for an offered opportunity. When he did attack it was with a speed that would have been astonishing even had he carried a much smaller weapon, but which seemed impossible with his blade the length of a young tree. Whatever injuries he had sustained in the fall, he gave no indication that they were affecting him, or no indication that Calla could see. Here and there a strike managed to get through the other’s defences, but each time it deflected off the thick plate. For a while it seemed like a game, no different than some of the training matches she had seen the Aubade take part in – so much so that when the end came Calla was utterly unprepared for it, lulled into a false and foolish sense of comfort.

In one instant the two were facing off as fiercely as ever, as if their toil had not depleted their energy one jot or tittle. Then there was a flash of movement, but who had moved, or what that movement had accomplished, Calla could not say.

Then the Aubade was turning away, settling his sword across the wide arch of his shoulders, stalking back to the lines. Calla’s eyes turned back to the Prime, upright but standing strangely, stiffly. And then her sword fell into the dust, her silver armour stained a heavy red about the chest, and then Calla caught one quick flash of what had caused it; the Prime’s sternum broken, the neck sheared through and the spine laid clear.

The Prime collapsed. There was a gasp from the assembled throng, followed quickly, almost immediately, by vigorous and sustained applause.

Why not? It had been a marvellous display, the finest duel seen in generations, two of the foremost warriors Those Above had ever produced fighting and dying for the diversion of their people. Even those Eldest who had been firmly in the Prime’s camp, who had supported her in the Conclave and who were hoping for her victory, could not help but recognise that they had just been witness to a masterful performance, two artists at the height of their craft. And who could grudge the victor his success? Who could fail to recognise the greatness of the Aubade? Was he not the grandest, the most perfect, the noblest specimen, everything that was good and righteous and ideal?