Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2 (17 page)

‘The bar is yours?’ Pyre asked, coming upright from the corpse he had made, chest heaving at the struggle, eyes bright against the darkness. ‘The neighbourhood is mine. The Rung. The city. The world. Ours, had you cared enough to look, had you not been blinded by greed and cowardice into betraying your own species.’

Hammer cleaned his blade, put it back into its wrist sheath, then went to check on Saviour. After a moment he looked up from over the corpse, his one good eye fixing on Pyre, and he shook his head.

‘May his blood soak the roots,’ Pyre intoned, ‘may it herald the new age.’

‘For the dawn to come,’ Hammer repeated, standing.

Ink’s blood stained the powdered white make-up on the chancellor’s face, and added a third hue to his particoloured hair. He was too frightened to speak, not that there was much to say.

‘Saviour heard the word, and was redeemed. He sits at the hand of Enkedri, and he watches over us as do all our fallen brothers. But there are some who cannot hear the truth though it be shouted in their ear,’ Pyre said, scattering droplets of crimson into the corners, turning towards the chancellor to draw more. ‘And there are some who hear the truth only too late.’

M
oonlight fell soft against the windows of the Red Keep and the snow struck near as soft, curls of frost bright from the heavens, rime gathering transient against the panes. Outside there was the night and the cold and the sea far below, dark and wild and enticing. Inside braziers of damask and sterling silver spread light and warmth and the sweet smell of camphor, illuminated the Lord’s study, the ebony walls, the mosaics of garnet and electrum, the patterns abstract and unknowable. The Prime sat bent-legged on a nest of silk. His robes, patterned in the house colours of crimson and aureate, lay half-open, his chest broad and smooth and hairless. His instrument was pear-shaped, rosewood inlaid with gold. He ran an ivory plectrum against the strings and recited a poem that had been ancient a thousand years before the Founding of the Roost, in a past so distant as to be scarcely conceivable – before the crime, when the Eternal lived uncaged, free to wander the length of the continent. The words were archaic, a formal and all but forgotten dialect of the Eternal tongue, but the story was as it had always been. Of loss; of things that were and would not be again.

Calla stood quietly beside him, a soft smile on her face.

The words slowed, the music grew softer and then silenced entire. Calla closed her eyes and savoured the final strands of melody, and then savoured the memory of that sound.

‘I have been thinking of death lately,’ the Prime observed.

‘Yes, my Lord.’

‘I suppose it must be something you think of constantly, given how near you are to it.’

‘I suppose.’

‘Like a guest waiting just beyond the threshold. How can you stir yourself to anything else, anticipating such an arrival? How meddlesome, to think at any moment he might intrude on your business, render the entirety of your workings null.’

‘We do not … conceive of things in exactly those terms, my Lord. Knowing nothing else, it seems no very terrible hardship.’

He continued as if he had not heard. ‘I suppose it must be something of a kindness. The rot overtakes your kind so swiftly, aching knees and weakened limbs, a steady softening of the mind. Scarce ten years you have served me, and already I can see age’s wither, in the lines around your mouth and towards the corners of your eyes.’

Calla would stare at herself in the mirror when she returned to her room, stare hard and long and perhaps not like what she saw. ‘As you say, my Lord.’

‘And what time does not take will be scavenged by accident or disease. Your father was very fond of your mother, though I confess I never quite saw the appeal. Still, he was distraught almost beyond reason when she died. It was months before he could manage his duties competently, and I daresay he never truly recovered from the blow.’

‘He … loved her very much, my Lord.’

‘Our kind thinks ourselves so different to yours, though the more I consider the less I am sure. Death is for ever, after all. And measured against eternity, what is time? I have known seven of your line, can recall the smile your father’s mother’s father’s father’s father offered when we left the Roost to take up our office abroad, can remember your father’s mother’s betrothal ceremony with perfect fidelity, could close my eyes and limn it on ricepaper without error. I might know seven more, or seven times seven, could shepherd your children and their children through future generations. But what is that against the void?’ Staring down at her with his golden eyes unblinking, as if she might even have an answer! ‘Against infinity, what is a hundred years? Or two, or three, or five? How is it possible to continue on, staring implacably at the full weight of that chasm? And why should it matter that this inevitability is further into the distance for some than others?’

‘I … am not sure, my Lord.’

‘Have you had occasion to visit my bestiaries this last week, Calla?’

Abrupt shifts in conversation were part of interacting with Those Above, but even so Calla found herself stymied for a moment. ‘I check in on it every morning, my Lord.’

‘Of course. Then you have seen this new species we have acquired?’

Seen it, by the Founders! Its cage alone, an aquatic enclosure the size of a Fifth Rung tenement, had cost twelve golden eagles, and twice that to capture the beasts and ship them to the top of the Roost. ‘Yes, my Lord.’

‘A peculiar thing – as strange an animal as I’ve ever encountered.’

‘From Chazar, my Lord.’

‘Far from lovely, in and of itself, to my thinking at least. Haired, four-legged. The females produce milk and, I am told, give birth to their young live.’

‘This was what the broker explained.’

‘And yet, it lives in the water, or mostly. They say it can even breathe it, as does a fish.’

‘So they say, my Lord.’

‘Life creates itself in the most curious and disparate fashion. Flesh bending and knitting and reforging itself to better suit its environment.’

‘A wondrous thing, truly,’ Calla said, because she had no idea of anything else to say.

‘In fact I think the creatures rather hideous, though that is nothing more than a peculiarity of taste. Regardless, it has inspired me to develop a certain hypothesis. Is it not perhaps the case that selective blindness is a necessary adaptation for higher life to exist? That, just as this … otter, has developed lungs to swim beneath the surface, and fur to subsist against the cold, we Eternal and you Dayspan have likewise developed in such a fashion as to remain unconcerned of death? Perhaps there were other species, who walked upright and spoke as we speak and who were, at the same time, braver or less dishonest than we, unwilling to accept the limitations of sentience. Who ran steel along their wrists, who dashed their children against the rocks, who walked arm in arm into oblivion.’

‘I … cannot say, my Lord.’

‘None can,’ said the Prime. They had no pupils, the Eternal, their eyes were like single facets of some great jewel. One could never tell what exactly it was at which they looked. ‘She was very beautiful.’

She was the last Prime, the Lady of the House of the Second Moon, whom the Lord had loved quietly for who knew how many human lifetimes, whom he had killed in bloody single combat, her corpse set out on the Cliffs of Silence for the birds to pick, her great estate gone fallow.

‘Marvellously so, my Lord.’

‘I tried my best to convince her.’

‘I know that, my Lord.’

‘There are some among my siblings who suppose I challenged her because I hoped for power, or due to some personal quarrel, out of jealousy or pique.’

‘I can hardly believe there are any Eternal so foolish as to believe such errant nonsense.’

‘You think too highly of us,’ the Prime said after a moment. ‘Perhaps we do as well.’

‘I know the truth, my Lord, whatever anyone may say, Eternal or otherwise. What you have done was done for the Roost.’

‘And what was the point of it? Assuming her position did nothing to bring my siblings to their senses. Still they bicker blindly, still they frolic amidst the growing inferno. Better to have played blind as well, and at least had the joy of her presence some short time longer. At least had her there beside me when the end comes.’ The moonlight fell on his high forehead, and on his golden eyes, heavy and sad and seemingly far-seeing. The snow fell more fiercely, the hoarfrost growing thick along the window.

‘Do you plan to attend the Lord of the Rose Hall’s spring gathering?’ Calla began, knowing the answer as she asked. ‘I have heard from his sensechal that he has acquired a species of pachyderm which has never before been seen in the Roost.’

But the Aubade had already turned back towards the window, and the dark, and his thoughts. ‘Thank you, Calla,’ he said. ‘But I think not. Please alert my sibling that I’ll be unable to appreciate his kindness.’

‘Of course, my Lord,’ and for some reason she found herself blinking away tears. ‘At your command.’

S
itting alone in an adjourning waiting room, Eudokia found herself missing Jahan’s silent, heavy, reassuring presence, felt the least bit naked. Of course he had not been allowed into the Conclave; indeed they had not even allowed him to rise to the First Rung. So far as Those Above were concerned, Eudokia was a slave as any other, and there was no reason she needed to bring along one of her own. Just as well, really – today she was not the creature to whom half of Aeleria bowed and who the other secretly loathed, today she was not the Revered Mother, today she was an old woman far from home, weak and wavering and fearful. The costume reflected this sudden turn to modesty. Since coming to the city Eudokia had amassed a staggering array of clothing, curious Chazar headpieces, brightly coloured Roost-made robes that had no equal in Aeleria, a fact Eudokia could state with as much authority as anyone else alive. A hundred golden eagles’ worth of silk and samite and careful thread, and all of them packed neatly away. Today she made do in a costume of mottled grey winter robes that trailed down to her narrow ankles, unadorned save for a necklace of prayer beads that she had snatched up in a last flash of inspiration.

She was playing with these loudly while sitting in a holding pen below the Conclave, agitating the master of protocol, a waspish, unpleasant-looking individual whose temper was not improved by the arrhythmic rattling. ‘Will it be very long, do you think?’ she asked.

‘It will be as long as the Eternal deem necessary,’ he said sternly.

Eudokia offered a meek smile, or what she supposed was a meek smile. Her glass beads continued their retort.

In fact a moment later a page entered and waved to the two of them, and Eudokia followed the pedant up a small staircase and through one of the side doors that buttressed the main room, and then onto a sort of witness stand. She took a seat, folded her hands on her lap, cast her eyes at the floor, tried to seem intimidated. This last was no very great task – the Conclave was, like every other piece of Eternal architecture she had seen, magnificent beyond all imagining. There was a rumour that the Senate Hall in Aeleria had been designed in imitation of it, and Eudokia could see at once that this was true and that in that task it was an abject failure, though one might at least applaud the audacity. Eudokia had by now grown some consideration for the vastness of the Eternal’s creations, but still the scale was astonishing, the domed ceiling only distantly visible. And against the immensity every detail was perfect, the walls plated to the depth of a finger-joint in gold, the arms of the bench on which Eudokia sat formed into outstretched wings of some or other bird of prey.

Magnificent beyond words, and also mostly empty. The innermost rungs of benches were loosely occupied with Eternal and their servants, but the middle and outer reaches were barren entirely. Was it always this way, Eudokia wondered, or was her arrival among them simply not a matter of much interest? Not for the first time Eudokia felt the fear and the secret thrill of competing against opponents of whom she remained essentially ignorant, a rare pleasure after a lifetime spent dissecting human motivations with the callous efficiency of a butcher with a hog.

She set herself studiously then, as she had at every interval since arriving at the city and for that matter long before, to observation and deduction. The Prime was in the midst of an oration, the particulars of which Eudokia would have to remain ignorant of, her best attempts at comprehending the speech of the Eternal having thus far failed entirely. It was indecipherable, barely even identifiable as language. Blindfolded she might have assumed it some curious natural phenomenon, the rustle of the wind or the tide breaking against an uneven shoreline. But it was clear, at least, that her own personal ignorance was unshared or only partially shared by the other humans present. It was not difficult to make out the half-hidden signs of awareness, this or that body-servant leaning forward as the monologue developed, subtle but distinct indications of understanding. Calla sat beside the Prime, looking fetching as ever, and in the intensity of her attention she might as well have been listening to some rapturous chorus. It was only by the fortuitous obtuseness of Those Above that her renegade erudition was not sniffed out immediately.

Eudokia realised she was smiling, swallowed it back down between narrow lips. The Revered Mother was, she reminded herself, a meek and unprepossessing woman, forced into a situation at once terrifying and beyond her capacities. Good humour was entirely inappropriate.

The master of protocol, sitting stiffly at the end of the bench, looked over and gave her a swift wave. Then he stood and announced, in a loud voice that still did not extend very far into the vastness of the room, ‘Eudokia Aurelia, of Aeleria, offers formal greetings to Those Above.’

Eudokia stood and did just that, so deeply that it strained her injured knee, performing the Eternal greeting with a rare display of awkwardness, her hands placed inexpertly and her posture less than perfect. She remained silent for a long moment afterward, as if too in awe to speak.