Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2 (10 page)

‘I’m not sure how amenable the owner is to selling.’

‘I suspect you’ll find a way to convince him.’

‘I suspect.’

‘And I’m sending you four more men.’

‘Yes.’

‘I would send you more if I had them.’

‘I know that, Brother Pyre.’

‘That man in there is the spark. That man in there is the most important thing in all of creation.’

‘I know it, Brother Pyre,’ Redemption said seriously. ‘I know it.’

T
hey called Oscan the Silver City, because its towers and buildings were quarried from the same stone as the slate mountains that rose up behind them, and because of the great wealth it had gained as the key trading post between the Commonwealth and Salucia. Even in the west, Bas had heard rumours of its markets, where steel and slaves and furs from the Marches met the silk and sugar traders coming down from Salucia. Twenty years since the demons had given it to Salucia in compensation for Aeleria’s invasion, but they had done nothing to impoverish the city. What did the people of Oscan, far from the pretensions of Senate or Queen, far from the themas or the Eternal, care for the politicking of the great powers? There were always fortunes to be made by clever people who did not scruple to make a fetish of patriotism, who were more interested in trade than empire.

Until empire comes knocking.

The pillaging that had followed Oscan’s capture had been no more savage or brutal or cruel than usual, which was to say that by the end of it a native would have been hard pressed to recognise his home. The fires had begun the second day, the product of sabotage by a Salucian partisan, or brutality on the part of a hoplitai drunk on blood and liquor, or perhaps simply of an overturned candle, an errant spark that had found no one to extinguish it. When it had finished burning most of the west city was ash, more corpses by far than had been made in the city’s capture. Plague came next, and was worse, as inevitable as the fires, men and women and children now homeless, ill-clothed, drinking fouled water, winter’s approach in the air, and what food arrived in the city was commandeered swiftly by the themas. Belatedly, Konstantinos had attempted to restrict the evacuation of the citizens north towards the Salucian heartland, to make some effort to hold on to the human capital that had made Oscan a prize worth winning, but it saw no great success. Two months after its capture Oscan was no more a city than a skeleton is a man. Some pale fraction of the former population remained, picking through the debris, surviving as best they could, scavenging through the wasteland or accommodating the invaders.

As for those invaders? The three thema were not enough to fill the vastness of the dead metropolis. In the eastern portion of the city, where the army was garrisoned, there was some rough simulacrum of civilisation, small bazaars selling black-market goods, makeshift bars and whorehouses of course, always whorehouses. But in the hinterlands beyond it was still and quiet as a cenotaph. After the early days of plunder and rapine, the army had fallen into an unquiet and deleterious routine. They drank. They gambled. They fought each other and anyone else. They waited for the remaining themas to join them from the west, and they waited for whatever exactly it was they would do with those themas.

The smell of ale and of sawdust and of unwashed flesh. The rattle of dice against a hewn wooden table. A laugh, a shout. A woman’s voice, sultry or trying to be so. A man’s, cruel as men’s often are.

‘Let us see if the gods grant you luck,’ Hamilcar said, ‘having offered so little else by way of kindness.’ Hamilcar was the leader of the Dycian contingent of the Aelerian forces, a few thousand men with recurved bows and long knives and a willingness to kill with either. They had been happy enough to turn those weapons on Aeleria, and they had been happy enough in the years since Dycia’s fall to use those weapons in the service of their one-time enemies. Or at least they knew enough not to complain outright. He was of average height but somehow seemed taller, in part the product of his garish clothing, a disparate arrangement, borrowed from the dozen nations he had lived in or travelled through: heavy furs from the Marches, a bright silk scarf from his homeland, thick gold armbands, a jewelled necklace that he had not been wearing the day before Oscan’s capture. But mostly it was because he talked constantly, incessantly, as if fearful of the silence, and because what he said was usually clever and always very loud.

‘Your mother was a whore,’ Isaac began in response. He was one of the ugliest men that Bas had ever seen, and the themas were not known as great showcases of physical beauty. Bas thought he would have been very ugly even if he hadn’t had his ears cropped off some quarter-century earlier, partial payment for a crime of which Isaac had never spoken. The rest of his scars had come from the remainder of his restitution, the long years he had spent doing Aeleria’s killing, working his way up from the ranks to become Bas’s adjutant. He was tough as boiled leather and less mean than he might have been, given what he had done and seen. He was as competent as any man living, a better logistician than Bas, and if he feared death that fear was always far away when battle was joined. ‘And your grandmother a temple whore, and your great-grandmother the biggest, blackest whore Dycia ever saw.’

‘I take it you won’t try and make the point?’ Hamilcar asked. Bas had once seen Hamilcar cut two fingers off the hand of a man who had brushed past him disrespectfully while at table, but this sort of banter was so customary as to be barely noticeable.

‘I didn’t say that,’ Isaac said, sitting back down and grabbing the cup from Hamilcar. He rattled the dice loudly and began again to curse, exhorting the gods or lamenting the certainty of cruel fate. In this case it proved the latter, and his pile of coins diminished appropriately.

‘It’s your roll, boy,’ Hamilcar said, passing the cup to Theophilus. ‘Or would it perhaps be easier simply to hand me your money now, and go find some other way to occupy your time?’

‘I have memories of you, Hamilcar,’ Theophilus said, setting his flagon down, blond beard wet with ale, ‘in which you seem clever. Was that the folly of youth, or did you take a blow to the skull and not think to mention it?’

Isaac roared and beat his fist against the table. ‘Wit will not make you the point, master of horse!’ he said.

‘It is obvious to anyone looking that Isaac is the beaten dog of Enkedri and his children,’ Theophilus said, holding the dice cup in his hands for a moment. Hung round his neck was a chain of command, heavy gold linked with heavier iron, announcing to those who could decipher the customs of the themas that he was now head of horse for the Army of the East, reward in part for his good service in taking Oscan. ‘And equally clear to anyone looking at me, at my face and carriage, that I am simply one of those fortunate few who the gods have always favoured.’

Though in that moment it seemed they decided to desert him, the dice coming up an unhappy pair of pips. Theophilus cursed bitterly and Isaac laughed loudly and Hamilcar passed the cup over to Bas.

In truth, Bas did not care to gamble, or at least he did not care to gamble with anything so frivolous as gold, and he made his roll with a bare flicker of interest. Isaac, having backed Bas on his bet, cheered lustily. Hamilcar winced and pushed a few coins across the table to merge with the rest of Bas’s winnings, winnings he did not need and barely noticed.

Bas had seen the man from above the rim of his cup, standing near the counter and turning to look at their table every few moments, furtively, gathering up courage like a boy visiting his first whore. An Aelerian to guess by his colouring, though it didn’t matter; Bas’s celebrity had long since eclipsed national pride, in the past Salucians and Dycians and far-flung Chazars had approached him in the marketplace and the streets, asked for blessing as if he was a priest, or a lock of his hair as if he was a beauty.

‘Excuse me sir—’ the man began, crossing over to the their table.

‘Yes, I’m the Caracal,’ Hamilcar answered, puffing out his chest and adopting an expression of great importance. ‘The greatest swordsman who ever lived, the strong right hand of the Commonwealth, slayer of demons, champion of humanity, a cock the size of child’s arm. You can have my scrawl on a bit of parchment for two silver tertarum, or eighteen bronze nummu.’

Confusion, bewilderment. The world upended, right as wrong and up as down. ‘But … you’re black,’ the man said.

Hamilcar looked surprised, then offended, then made an elaborate impression of surveying what portion of his skin was not covered with fur or cloth or gold. ‘So it seems.’

‘The Caracal isn’t black,’ the man averred, after a moment’s consideration.

‘Yes, I am,’ Hamilcar said.

‘Yes, he is,’ Theophilus agreed.

‘Black as night,’ Isaac said. ‘Black as sin.’

‘Black as the winter moon,’ Theophilus added, straight-faced in an ash-blond beard.

‘But … the moon isn’t black, either.’

‘You’re very clever,’ Hamilcar said, emptying the dice cup and cursing at the result. ‘And you’re terrible luck. Go away now, you just lost me three silver. The Caracal is not pleased!’ he announced to the bar in a voice loud and fierce enough to send the fool scurrying, ‘bring more liquor!’

The last, at least, was a sentiment with which Bas could agree. The proprietor of the nameless bar in which they were whiling away the evening as they had whiled away the better part of the winter had been one of the innumerable camp-followers the army drew along in its wake, a double-dealer, a con man, a scavenger and a cheat, clever and fearless in pursuit of his fortune. He had moved into the place after the sack, its original inhabitants dead or fled or in any case, being in no position to dispute ownership. He came over with another jug of bad ale, set it down on the table with a heavy thud. In the days immediately after the conquest it had been possible to drink the finest Dycian wines for a handful of copper pennies, but the riotous orgy of waste had reached its inevitable end and the last few weeks there had been no decent liquor for silver nor gold, nothing but the strong and unappetising barley wine.

Bas drank it anyway.

‘Do you ever wonder what it would be like to smile?’ Hamilcar asked. ‘Half my pot is now yours, and I’ve yet to see hint of a tooth.’

‘Have you ever known the Legatus to be full of cheer?’ Theophilus asked.

‘There were times when I found him less overwhelmingly depressing.’

‘I think he finds our accommodations insalubrious.’

‘There are worse places to winter,’ Isaac observed. ‘You know how many years I shivered beneath a horsehide yurt, peat smoke and a half-breed my only hope for warmth? I, for one, am not so quick to forget the virtues of a stone wall.’

‘It was cold,’ Theophilus agreed, ‘but at least it was clean. The rats grow large as dogs, and have begun to get ideas beyond their station. They say that in the far corners of the city they gather together in packs, pull down unwary children and devour them whole.’

‘Then they are the only thing so flourishing,’ Hamilcar observed. ‘A girl offered me her daughter for a loaf of bread, last evening.’

‘Hardly our fault,’ Theophilus said, still young enough to feel some semblance of patriotism, ‘if the smallfolk would bring their goods to market, none would need starve. Our supply lines are stretched feeding our own people – we can’t very well be expected to provide for three themas and the entirety of Oscan.’

‘I thought the Oscans were your people,’ Hamilcar observed. ‘and we were here to liberate them from the oppressive yoke of Salucia.’

‘But Hamilcar,’ Isaac brought his cup down from yellowed teeth. ‘We have liberated Oscan – can’t you tell by the smoke?’

‘We won’t be here much longer,’ Theophilus said. ‘The Salucians will come to terms soon enough. A drop in their tariff rates, a bowed head, and we’ll be back in Aeleria before the summer.’

‘You think so?’ Bas asked, his first words in a long hour, and he regretted them immediately.

His companions looked across at each other.

‘The Caracal knows something we do not,’ Hamilcar observed.

‘No certainties. Only suspicions.’

‘And what are those?’

‘Three themas have been ordered to Oscan by the Senate. The Fifth, the Eighth, and the Thirteenth.’ Isaac banged the table twice in recognition of their old thema, but Bas continued on above him. ‘When they arrive in early spring we will have amassed the largest army in the history of the Commonwealth. Do you suppose we have collected them for leverage at the negotiating table?’

‘And what does the Protostrator say of these things?’

‘Konstantinos keeps his own council,’ Bas said.

‘And his stepmother?’ Hamilcar asked.

Theophilus looked hard at Isaac, who looked hard at Hamilcar, who for once decided to shut his mouth further. Even among men well familiar with death, the Revered Mother’s was not a name with which to joke.

‘Are you the Caracal?’ asked a man from behind him, the next in the steady line of well-wishers and sycophants drawn to Bas like flies to carrion.

Bas’s shoulders slumped a bit but he didn’t answer, or turn to look at the new arrival.

‘Yes, he’s the Caracal, you can tell by the fact that he’s bigger than everyone else,’ Hamilcar said flippantly, ‘and he’s trying to get drunk, which given his size is not so easy a task.’

‘Piss, off,’ Isaac added, blunter in all things and more protective of his leader.

Bas’s cup was most of the way to his mouth and he had stopped paying much attention when something happened to Isaac’s face, eyes starting to swell, and then Bas with that dim instinct for survival that lived in the hidden areas behind his conscious mind had flung himself sideways off the chair, shoulder banging against the hard wood of the floor. The man he had not bothered to turn and look at was standing over him then, a bright bit of steel in his hand, his eyes mad and wide and hateful.

‘Murderer!’ he screamed. ‘Thief! Ravager! Killer of women and children, bastard son of a whore!’

‘How could he have known that last one?’ Bas wondered grimly.