Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1 (8 page)

Felspar was handsome and clever, but more handsome than he was clever, a truth that he ignored to his frequent misfortune. By Thistle’s count, every third or fourth scrap they got into was on account of Felspar’s not being able to keep his mouth shut, relying on Treble’s size and Thistle’s savagery to save him from trouble. But then, down here in the Barrow, belligerence was not considered an unpardonable sin, and Thistle wasn’t the sort who minded a good brawl, or was particularly concerned as to what sparked one. What was the point of having boys if you couldn’t use them to bail you out, now and again?

Treble was big and dim and loyal, though you could never be sure of the degree to which the last was a function of the second, whether he would have your back from virtue or simply because he couldn’t imagine another option. Thistle didn’t suppose it mattered much. Treble’s character didn’t seem to be spoiling, and as for his wit, well – there were even fewer signs of change in that department.

Rat was as far from Treble as you could get, dark and always smiling. He hadn’t yet lost his baby fat. Thistle wondered at what point baby fat just became fat, suspected that Rat was fast approaching it. Rat wasn’t born in the Barrow – his father had been a baker up on the Fourth Rung – but when he had died of the plague his mother had lost the shop and had to move downslope. Perhaps it was this early brush with prosperity that was the cause of the Rat’s vague softness.

They were the core group, though you could add the Brothers Calc and a few others. Urn the Youngest, the third of his name still extant, had been a mainstay as well, but the previous winter he had humiliated himself in a dust-up with some boys from upslope, left Felspar to deal with three of them on his own, and so by the rough and reasonable code of conduct adhered to in the Barrow he was no better than a dog, his name unfit for mention.

‘It’s hot,’ Treble said.

‘That’s news to you?’ Thistle asked.

Treble shrugged. He’d done his best.

Between the four of them they had enough tobacco for two cigarettes, and they went ahead and rolled them, Felspar doing the honours. Thistle felt that he rolled better than Felspar but Felspar felt otherwise, and it was too hot to fight over it, Treble had got that much right. The sun brought a rolling sort of boil that made it impossible to do anything but rot. With a dozen Salucian pennies or even a few bronze nummus they could have bought a bottle of potato liquor and sipped their way into evening. But it was empty pockets all round, and nothing to do but stew.

‘They’re having a dig tonight up at the East Stay. Supposed to have a band and everything,’ Rat said.

‘Be three pennies a head, at least,’ Felspar answered.

‘We won’t keep them, we try and march our way to the East Stay.’

‘The coin, or our heads?’

An open question, not worth a response. Rat wasn’t really suggesting they go to the East Stay, he was just talking because there wasn’t anything else to do. There is a common misconception that poverty breeds crime, but in fact this skips a step. Poverty breeds boredom, and boredom leads to crime. Two hours of aimless waiting and Thistle and his boys were ready to pull a smash and grab just to relieve the monotony.

It took longer to figure out where to pull it, though. Couldn’t do it in the Barrow; their faces were too well known. Try rolling someone in the neighbourhood and you end up getting a visit from a member of the Brotherhood Below, some ornery motherfucker with a burn scar on his neck and a knife in his waistband. The Brotherhood was responsible for smuggling and prostitution and pretty much every other illegal activity on the Fifth, and they didn’t like having their monopoly challenged by a pack of kids, and they weren’t slow to make known their displeasure. Of course the docks were straight out, they were at open steel with the crew living there, wouldn’t be heading that way just for the lark of it. That left Seven Points or the North Straits, and there was a fair bit of back and forth as to which. Thistle might be the leader, but they were an anarchic bunch, cajoled and threatened rather than led.

They settled on the Points. There weren’t any particular troubles with the locals that way – that didn’t mean they wouldn’t find any, but it at least meant there wouldn’t be a crew of them waiting in an alley with sharpened iron. Course, upslope meant more money and that meant more chance of running into the Cuckoos, but the Cuckoos didn’t much concern Thistle – they were less of a concern than the other gangs, gods knew, that bunch of slow fat drunkards comfortable trading the hatred of their entire species for a gold eagle a season. And Seven Points was a good place to lose anyone following you, a handful of different pipes joining at one central location, hence the name.

Felspar was pushing for the Straits, but that was just because he was trying to bed a girl that lived there. ‘I’m not walking all the way to Ell Street just so you can not have sex with someone,’ Thistle said. ‘If I wanted to watch you not have sex with someone, I could just stay here.’

‘She’s ready to pop,’ Felspar insisted.

‘Only thing you’ll get out of that girl is a stiff cock.’

‘Or the drip,’ Rat added.

‘He ain’t smooth enough to get the drip,’ Thistle said.

‘Why you gotta be smooth to get the drip?’ Treble asked.

Thistle bit his tongue and shook his head. You could forget how stupid Treble was so long as he was staring silently at a wall, but even Treble couldn’t stare silently at a wall for ever, and once he opened his mouth it all came storming back at you.

Thistle dropped down from the crate he was sitting on and started off at the sort of speed that made it clear the conversation was over. The rest fell in behind him.

The broken pipe was the unofficial barrier of the neighbourhood, a length of metal tubing rising up from the mountain and over the road that had burst some generations previous and never been fixed. Of course it wasn’t on any map, but anyone living there knew what walking past it meant, knew you better quicken your step, pull your coat tight, keep your eyes wary but don’t get to staring at nobody. Past the border it was open season on you and anyone born in the Barrow, just as it was in the Barrow for anyone from anywhere else

Thistle wasn’t over-worried; not in the middle of the day, not with Treble and the boys with him – but he noticed just the same. They all noticed, the stroll turning to a march, Treble taking point almost unconsciously, because even the fiercest thug would take a good long second thought before taking a swing at him.

They’d been walking for half an hour when Thistle stopped in front of a small general store just off the main thoroughfare. No one said anything, but then it was an old game for the four of them, their parts well rehearsed. Felspar would be the distraction, because he had an even smile and eyes that might seem innocent if you weren’t looking closely, and if you were foolish enough to think there was still an innocent left on the Fifth. Rat and Treble would keep lookout, because they weren’t suited for anything more. And Thistle would make the grab, because he never flinched, or at least hadn’t yet. It was this last that Thistle supposed made him the leader. Treble was a better scrapper, and Felspar a louder speaker, which most of the world seemed to take as evidence of superior intellect. But Thistle did what needed to be done, did it without any trembling, of his hands or his conscience. That made him special, and despite what Felspar might croon to the halfwit slatterns who mooned after him, when something needed to be done he put his eyes on Thistle, like all the rest of them.

Felspar went in first. Thistle gave him thirty seconds and followed. It was a small market like any other you could find on the lower levels, the sort of place that sold anything and everything, goods uniform only in being overpriced and of poor quality.

‘Mother needs beef marrow,’ Felspar was saying to the man at the counter.

‘Ain’t got no beef marrow,’ said the proprietor, who was north of forty, grey-haired, fat and friendly-looking.

‘You’re the fifth shop I’ve tried.’

‘That may be the case,’ the merchant said affably. ‘But it doesn’t change the fact that I don’t have any beef marrow. Try Sickle’s butcher shop, it’s up two streets on your right.’

‘I tried Sickle’s,’ Felspar pleaded. ‘Sickle said to come here.’

Thistle had edged his way to the corner pantry, made like he was inspecting the stock. The trick with pocketing merchandise is that there isn’t any such thing – just make the snatch and don’t fuss around. It didn’t help that Thistle looked like the sort of kid who’d be up for a lift, but there wasn’t anything that could be done about that.

‘But if you don’t have beef marrow,’ Felspar continued, ‘and Sickle doesn’t have beef marrow, then how am I going to get my mother any beef marrow?’

The owner leaned against his counter, somewhere between annoyed and bemused. ‘I guess you’d better start looking for a cow.’

Thistle wedged the bottle into his front pocket, the owner all but ignorant of his presence, attention occupied with Felspar’s quest for goose marrow. They were in the clear. All Thistle needed to do was keep his head down, walk out casual, pass the thing off to Rat. They’d be drunk and happy inside of an hour. At the very least they’d be drunk.

But then Felspar muffed it, caught Thistle’s eyes as Thistle went to slip out the door, a second or two longer than he should have, long enough for something to click in the owner’s mind. ‘What are you doing there, boy?’

Thistle figured it was best not to wait around and discuss it, pushed past his bumbling confederate and made for the exit with all the speed he could manage. Felspar picked up a second behind him, almost knocked Thistle down coming out of the door, and the owner started to shout, and the whole thing went sideways.

That they’d been noticed at all was Felspar’s fault. That there were two Cuckoos making their way upslope as Thistle came outside, strutting down the middle of the street just like they’d been waiting for him, that wasn’t nothing but bad luck. Officially they were the custodians, though everyone on the Fifth, which is to say everyone Thistle knew, just called them the Cuckoos, after those treasonous avians known to lay eggs in the nests of other birds, which then hatch early and destroy their clutch-mates. You almost never saw one so far downslope – there were always plenty hanging out by the docks but they were just there to make sure everything went smoothly with their pay-off, not to hassle anyone. What in the hell reason they had for being in the Points that day, Thistle never did learn.

Nor did it matter. ‘Bolt,’ Thistle ordered Treble and Rat as soon as he’d stepped outside, and they didn’t need him to say it twice.

As a breed the Cuckoos were not renowned for their competence, but then you hardly needed to be to notice four boys sprinting off in separate directions while a shop owner screamed at them. The first Cuckoo was old and fat, and Thistle didn’t have any worries about losing him. But the second was young and trim, with the slicked-back hair that they wore on the upper Rungs, and Thistle thought he might prove more trouble. They were both dressed the same, of course, in simple blue robes, and carrying a stout wood ferule with a noisemaker at the end that gave off a croaking sound when it was twirled.

Thistle figured he still had a decent chance of it; the Cuckoos might decide to pounce on Rat or Treble, or they might just not give a shit at all – it wouldn’t be the first time a Cuckoo had decided not to do his job, wouldn’t be the first time by a long shot. And indeed, the fat one didn’t seem in any great hurry to chase after anybody, made do with yelling warnings at Thistle’s back. But the younger was all hell-bent on running after someone, and for whatever reason he seized on Thistle as quarry.

As soon as he was out of view Thistle tossed the bottle, heard the glass shatter and the hopes of an evening drink with it. Still he had a smile on his face and felt something close to euphoric. He buzzed through back alleys and ducked down side streets, till every heartbeat throbbed so hard it was like being punched in the chest. The Fifth was his, you could keep the rest of the Roost and the rest of the damn world. There wasn’t no way in hell they’d catch him here, not if he had to run for the rest of the day and night. He knew it like the back of his hand, every side alley and brown-water canal, every pipe and every tenement.

Then he turned a corner and standing there was the fat Cuckoo, and closer up he seemed more stout than fat, especially when he gave Thistle an open-handed slap strong enough to land him on his arse.

It wasn’t the force of the blow that put Thistle on the ground so much as the shock of the thing. The fat man was sharper than Thistle would have credited a Cuckoo, let alone a Cuckoo whose man-breasts heaved up and down at having jogged for three solid minutes. But in those three minutes he had managed to deduce Thistle’s destination and cut him off without a breath of trouble.

‘Where’s the bottle?’ the Cuckoo asked, in a languid sort of drawl, as if he weren’t excited about the matter either way.

Thistle spat a stream of blood against the alley wall, leaned against it as he worked himself upright. ‘Don’t have no bottle,’ he said. It would take more than a smack to loosen the truth.

‘That a fact?’

‘You can search me,’ Thistle said, not remembering until he said it that he was still carrying his shiv. And for the first time that day Thistle knew real fear. Getting caught with the bottle wouldn’t have meant more than a walk up to the Cuckoo’s headquarters and a good beating, and neither for the first time. But carrying a weapon, even Thistle’s makeshift blade? That was a heavy piece of sin, as reckoned by the Cuckoos and their four-fingered overlords. Theft, vandalism, even a good assault – none of these the Cuckoos found very interesting, so long as the victim was another denizen of the Fifth. A weapon, on the other hand, was counted as a close cousin of rebellion, a crime against the Eternal, against the Roost itself.

He’d go underground for this, into the roots of the mountain. Down into the suck, hammering away at the pipes, hard labour to make sure the water kept running, in the dark until they let you out or you died. Most men it was the latter, and it didn’t take so long. The hardest thug didn’t talk about going below casually, and it was widely agreed that it was better to find a way to die before they took you underground, if you could manage it.