Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1 (7 page)

The Aubade, twelfth scion of the Red Keep, perched motionlessly atop a tongue of granite jutting off the ramparts, perfectly naked, greeting the morning. His weight rested easily on the balls of his feet, his arms were outstretched, his eyes gazing out at the sea below and the sun just now reflecting off its waters. To maintain such a position without a tremor of movement, a human would have needed to be an exceptionally talented acrobat. To attempt to do so while resting precariously on a narrow length of stone set many cables above the sea, said human would have needed to be uncommonly foolish as well.

Calla was careful to make no sound that might disturb the Lord. Her silence was as much pleasure as duty – in truth she considered it one of the secret rewards of her position, that she was allowed to observe this moment in the Lord’s schedule, two perfect things giving each other greeting.

Abruptly, for no reason which Calla could identify, the Lord broke free from his reverie, dropped his hands to his sides and descended from his perch with a motion that was more jagged than fluid. All her life she had observed them, and at times it still surprised her, the abrupt brokenness of their movements – each one perfect in itself, but strangely separated from that which preceded and followed it. Two long steps and he was standing in front of her, gazing down through unbroken aurous pools.

‘Good morning, Calla,’ the Lord said. ‘I hope the sun finds you well.’

Broadly speaking the Eternal resembled Calla’s own species – two legs and two feet, two eyes, a head where you’d expect one to be. But somehow what was similar about them seemed only to accentuate the differences. It was not just that they were taller and more robust than humans, limbs long and even and fine. Not that their hands ended in four digits rather than five. Not the oddly oval shape of their faces, not the tiny, hooked noses, not even their eyes, monochrome pools without sclera or iris. Not that they smelled different, though they did, a slightly sweet fragrance, something like dried cinnamon. Not their hair, which from a distance resembled a bundle of vines spilled backwards over their heads, but up close was soft and fuzzy as velvet. There was an ineffable otherness about them that seemed more than the sum of these relatively trivial variations, as if, despite being bipedal and roughly hominid, they had no more in common with Calla than a hawk, or a stone, or the sky.

Calla offered the traditional bow of greeting, dipping her head down to the level of his waist and bringing her hands palm-up behind her. ‘May the light shine brightly on you today, my Lord,’ she said, meaning it.

The Aubade was tall even for an Eternal, and more heavily muscled, though the extra weight did not seem to affect his grace and agility. His eyes were a pure and vivid gold. He was still young by the standards of his kind, and the thick strands of his white hair stretched from his waist back up to his forehead – except for a gap in the centre of his plumage, one tendril notably absent.

After breakfast they would begin the long grooming sessions required to prepare the Lord for his day. First the dyer, carefully choosing which colours would grace the Lord’s hair that day, rich strands of ebony and crimson. Then on to his tailor, fifty years in service and his eyes were still as sharp as his sewing needle. They would consult on the day’s patterns, and a half-dozen of the Lord’s personal servants would help him don whatever costume he decided on. In his sense of personal fashion, as in everything he did, the Lord was perfect – but still, Calla had always thought him at his most exquisite before all that, in this moment of nakedness. A lifetime of observing him should have inured her to his charms, but it hadn’t.

‘Your meal awaits you, my Lord,’ Calla said. His morning robe hung over the wall, and Calla took the liberty of handing it to him. He shifted himself into it in one swift movement, covering his hairless chest and his dangling member, and then he strutted off to take his repast without another comment.

His name, of course, was not the Aubade. But the High Tongue, a language of whistles with rapid changes in tempo and tune, was entirely indecipherable to humans – or at least it was said to be so. Like all the First he had been given a name in the common human speech, a sobriquet that had become colloquial from long usage. The Aubade had been the Aubade since dim antiquity, before Calla’s grandfather’s father had quickened, and those qualities that had earned him his sobriquet were as evident in the present as they had been a century earlier.

Calla followed the Lord to another corner of the garden, one set near an elevator that rose up from the kitchens, steam-powered and mostly silent, large enough to carry up a live bull, though admittedly that particular fare had never been offered. The Lord’s table had been set moments before – there was a member of the staff whose sole job was to wait for Calla’s arrival, and to take that as the signal to begin putting out the feast.

It was no small task, either. Breakfast for the day was dumplings filled with muskrat liver, candied quince in plum liquor, slow-roasted pork belly and numerous other delicacies, each plate arranged neatly on a swivelling circular platform raised just above the table. The Lord sat cross-legged on a green cushion in front of the feast and brought a bit of watercress to his mouth.

‘And how went your evening’s entertainment?’ the Aubade asked, after sampling a few of the plates.

Calla had spent her one free evening that week having dinner with the head chef from the Estate of Gilded Stone. ‘Well enough, my Lord.’

‘But not splendidly?’

Calla smiled. ‘Splendidly, my Lord.’

‘What a high bar you set for your prospective mates, Calla.’ He spent a moment in consideration. ‘Not that you aren’t worthy of excellence.’

‘Thank you, my Lord,’ she said. He did not acknowledge her response and she had not expected him to. Those Above had no notion of flattery, nor of dissimulation generally. A thing was said because it was meant, not in hopes of eliciting a reaction.

The Aubade turned his attention back to his feast, though not with any great relish. He expected an elaborate table, but in truth the Lord seemed to take little excitement in it. Those pleasures which inspired his passion tended towards the more abstract. ‘I had thought of visiting the courses today,’ he said idly, forking a caramelised prawn.

‘Of course, my Lord. Your ship awaits you.’

‘And the Lord of the Sidereal Citadel sent me a message last night, insisting that he has hit upon a new design for an aerial that is unique in its conception.’

‘The Lord of the Sidereal Citadel is a fine craftsman.’

‘The finest, though why he imagines I’ll be of any use in turning his conception into reality is utterly beyond me.’ The Lord seemed to think the matter over for a moment, though Calla had been among the High long enough to know that you could never really say with any certainty what their pauses meant, or if they meant anything.

He brushed his mouth with a silk handkerchief and stood abruptly. ‘Still, he always has some fine pieces of steamwork to display. Send a messenger to his estate, ask if I might call at the hour of the Starling.’

The food lay unfinished on the table, and there were six more dishes soon to be making their way up in the elevators. Now it would all be burned in the central fires of the Keep – nothing intended for the use or consumption of an Eternal could be wasted on a lesser species, be it it ant, dog or human.

‘Of course, my Lord,’ Calla said, bowing deeply. ‘At your command.’

T
histle woke up well past the hour of the Eagle, the sun beating down shamelessly, though he didn’t know the time at first and didn’t care when he did.

He didn’t know because his sleeping quarters were a windowless shack built atop the slum tenement he lived in with his mother, siblings and a dozen-odd other families. He didn’t care because he had nothing to do, no labour to occupy the morning, no toil to carry him through until evening. So far as the world was concerned, he could have gone on sleeping until nightfall. Could well have never woken up.

The shack had been a pigeon coop. When he’d assumed residence in the spring, Thistle had spent three solid days – perhaps the only three days of work he’d put in over the sixteen years he’d drawn breath – removing the cages and various bric-a-brac, washing the floors over and over and over again. It hadn’t done much good. He could still smell them, the dander from their wings, the thick white goo of their shit. Thistle hated birds. He hated a lot of things, but he particularly hated birds.

Still, it was better than his mother’s apartment, two rooms separated by a wall the width of his little finger, four children packed into the front, his mother and little Apple in the back. The coop was his at least, and there wasn’t much else in the world he could lay sole claim to. In a few months it would be too cold to sleep there and he’d be back sharing a pallet on the floor. Best enjoy it while he could.

Thistle stretched, yawned, pulled himself up and out into the early-afternoon sun. He took a long piss off the side of the building, watched the stream of urine fall against the alleyway below. This time of day there was little chance of watering a passer-by, though Thistle held out hope.

He was about average height for a youth from the lowest stretches of the Roost, which would have made him short almost anywhere else on the continent. His face was coarse, his mouth brutish. The last year he’d grown a patchy bush of black hair thick around his neck and above his lip but sparse everywhere else, peach-fuzz unsure if it was ever to become a beard. He’d been an ugly child, become an ugly youth, and in all likelihood would end up an ugly man. His one distinguishing feature was his eyes, which were so dark a brown you could be forgiven for mistaking them as black. If you passed him you’d walk faster, and maybe take a quick backwards look once you were safely past.

Thistle lived in the Barrow, far down on the Fifth Rung, a short walk upslope from the docks. His building was the tallest in the neighbourhood, five storeys in crumbling red brick. To the east could be seen one of the great pumps leeching water from the bay and sending it on its long journey skyward. Of course it could be heard wherever you were , an unpleasant slurping sound like an old man farting. Didn’t smell much different to that either, gave the whole Rung a strong whiff of mildew and worse. Sixteen years Thistle had lived in the echo of the suck – he figured he ought to have got used to it by now, but he never had.

As far as Thistle was concerned the world was the Roost, and the Roost was the Fifth and the Fifth was the Barrow and the few neighbourhoods surrounding it, east to the pumps, south to the harbour, upslope towards the Points. Beyond that, Thistle’s perceptions of place grew hazy, vague impressions of privilege and soft silks.

Thistle pulled on his trousers, noticed the shaky job he’d done during his most recent repatching, told himself to borrow some thread from his mother and take care of it later that evening, knew he wouldn’t get round to actually doing it. It is a curious fact that the less one has to do the less one does, a vicious cycle that if uninterrupted leads to torpor. He went back into his hutch and pulled up a loose stone from the back corner. From inside the alcove he removed a thin bit of pig-iron, one end sharpened into a point, the other shoved into a piece of cork. The shiv was worn and ill-made, but like anything else that might be used as a weapon it was strictly illegal – humans were forbidden to own any blade larger than a cooking knife, even the Cuckoos had to make do with their knobbed ferules. Thistle told himself he carried it for protection, in case a rival crew caught him alone in a back stairwell or an alley. This wasn’t quite a lie, but it wasn’t quite the truth either. Thistle liked holding the shiv in his hand, liked feeling its weight when he walked. He shoved it into the back of his trousers, pulled his belt tight around it, put on his boots and started out into the afternoon.

Down the crumbling stairs, jumping over the third step on the second landing, crumbling now for half a generation, a trap for the forgetful or foreign. He skirted the door of his own apartment, quickly and quietly as he could. Mother would be down at the water, doing the day’s wash. Inside would be his sisters, Thyme and Shrub and little Ivy, three years come winter and still couldn’t quite walk right. And of course Apple, sharing the back room with the small altar their mother kept to Siraph, coughing his life out against the thin walls. In truth it had been Apple that had led Thistle to taking up his spot on the roof, the ever-constant hack, an intake of breath and two sharp ejections of phlegm. Thistle’s shack was dirty and often damp and always smelly, but it beat listening to your brother dying all night, every night. Secretly Thistle sometimes found himself wishing that Apple would stop mucking around already and just get to it. What was it exactly he had to live for? Thistle wondered. What was the point of prolonging such a miserable existence?

But then that same question could be asked of everyone – at least everyone Thistle had ever met.

Outside the Barrow was busy as ever, lines of porters like ants carrying goods up from the ships, laden double with bolts of raw silk from Chazar or chicory from the Baleferic Isles or Dycian oranges. From the Source at the top of the First Rung a complex and elaborate series of canals ran down through the city and back to the bay. But only the Eternal could use them, and since no seed-pecker ever came down to the Fifth, the waterways were empty of anything but fallen leaves. What goods made their way from the docks were taken to their destinations on the back of one of the city’s endless supply of human chattel. Most of the men on the Fifth that had jobs – a modest majority, if you were being kind – worked in such a fashion, unloading cargo from the huge caravels that floated into the harbour, hauling it upslope, back and forth from morning till nightfall.

Thistle found the boys at their usual spot, in a long-abandoned pumping station a few blocks towards the docks. It was a small stone building beneath one of the main pipes, an access hole leading down into the bowels of the mountain. As children they had dared each other to explore it, crawling into the dark with a candle nub for guidance, but when they had been eight little Crimson, Bandage’s second cousin, had gone down and never come back up, and that had been the last of the game. Still, it made for a good place to kill time, if you could get past the smell and the dark. ‘What’s gospel?’ Thistle asked.