Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2 (35 page)

‘True enough.’

‘Though not immediately relevant. Let us assess the situation further. Eudokia is in touch with the Five-Fingered. To what end? Simple enough. One hardly needs to be in my privileged position to see that the Revered Mother has been working to bring about war against the Empire for the better part of five years. Far more than that, in fact, but the last five years it was obvious to anyone who thought to pay attention. Indeed, I have often found myself wondering, given the nakedness of her provocations, why the Roost did not think it fit to retaliate.’

‘They are lazy,’ Calla said quietly. ‘They have grown so used to their strength that they cannot imagine it would ever be challenged. And they do not suppose you a threat.’

‘Their arrogance may yet be justified,’ Leon admitted. ‘Though my aunt is scarce familiar with defeat. Regardless. The Aelerian army is on the march. I have no head for military affairs but it is said to be quite the largest force ever assembled, twice the size of what was brought to bear against the Roost in the last war. In a few days, or perhaps a week, they will arrive at the walls of the Roost. When they grow close enough for Those Above to concern themselves, they will assemble en masse, and ride down from the Source, and slaughter my countrymen like scythed wheat in autumn. A certain massacre, you say, as do the Prime and the rest of the Eternal, as does every wag in every bar and cafe and bazaar from the top of the Roost to the middle. Murdered to a man, and then Those Above will march into Aeleria and make of it a wasteland. It would be a curious fact indeed if, alone among the creatures of the Roost, Four-Fingered and Five, Eudokia Aurelia alone did not see what was coming.’

‘Perhaps she has more faith in your armies than the Eternal. Everything that has happened these last months, and still it is impossible for them to imagine that you present a threat.’

‘They are the most madly arrogant things that were ever bred, but that is neither here nor there. And besides, my aunt prefers her contests more certain. I do not suppose that she is willing to risk everything on a simple clash of steel. No, she has another card to play, one that your stroke of memory seems to have laid bare. Something involving the Five-Fingered, but what exactly? My understanding is that apart from their recent provocations they are everywhere on the run, the Eternal and their patrols on the lower Rungs proving effective in battering them into submission. Indeed, from this perspective their naked attack on the Prime can be seen as a last desperate attempt by forces nearly defeated. Or it could be seen as an unpleasant augury of things to come.’ He was not smiling but there was good colour in his cheeks, and he sat fully upright, rubbing the palm of his good hand against his forehead, as if to tease out some excess strand of thought. ‘There are too many variables,’ he said finally. ‘The broad outline of the thing is clear, but the specifics remain unknowable. The only option remaining is to find this Steadfast.’

‘Easier said than done – I know his assumed name, and could pick him out of a crowd, but I’ve no idea where he lives, and I don’t suppose he calls himself Steadfast in mixed company.’

‘To set that question aside for a moment, in favour of two of my own.’

‘Which are?’

‘First, why have you not already brought this matter to the Aubade?’

‘What would I tell him? That I suspect the Revered Mother of malfeasance? I more than suspect it, I am certain of it. But suspicion is not proof.’

‘He would trust you.’

‘He would trust me,’ Calla agreed. ‘And he would listen to what I tell him. And he might, perhaps, kill your aunt, and he might kill you, but regardless that would do nothing to stop whatever machinations have already been put in place.’

‘It would be quite pointless,’ Leon admitted. ‘As well as being personally unpleasant. Though speaking of such consequences, I am forced now to ask my second question – why would I be interested in helping you, Calla of the Red Keep? Whatever else Eudokia is, she is my aunt, and Aeleria my country.’

Calla said nothing for a long moment. Then she reached out and stripped the covers off him. He flinched but made no move to return them. His pointer and long finger were severed roughly down near the knuckle, and the first joint of his ring finger jutted out awkwardly.

‘Far from lovely,’ Leon admitted, affecting a sneer. ‘But I’ve had a few weeks to grow used to it.’

‘A spare month was sufficient for you to forgive the men who savaged you?’

Leon laughed bitterly. ‘I admit the end is rather fuzzy, but my impression is that they were well paid for any injury they did me.’

‘And their masters who sent them? Do you not suppose their actions warrant a response?’

‘Yes, what a glorious thing revenge is. How wise and how fruitful!’ He drank most of the water in his glass, wiped his chin with his savaged hand. ‘Do you know that I killed a man, Calla of the Red Keep?’

‘I did not.’

‘I shoved a sword into his back, while his attention was otherwise occupied. No very admirable or heroic a feat, I admit. I don’t imagine it will ever be immortalised in song, though it has found firm purchase in my memory.’ He blinked twice. ‘You sit at the bedside of a murderer. Oh, I had my reasons, of course. He had been in the process of attacking my aunt. And no doubt he had, or thought he had, sufficient reason for trying to attack her. And no doubt she had sufficient reason for doing whatever it was that caused her to be attacked. And so on and so on, endless and pointless as one of your Eternal. Searching, one does not struggle to find a pretext for violence.’

‘It’s not simply a question of justice,’ Calla said softly. ‘War is coming. Do you wish to see your people made corpses? Or mine? All the wonders of the Roost destroyed, the Eternal expunged entire? Or the reverse, your countrymen slaughtered, your capital ravaged and broken? If we knew what your aunt was planning, perhaps we might find some way to avert it. Perhaps there is still some hope. Perhaps there is still time to stop it.’

‘I fear you are over-sanguine on the matter. What have you ever seen of my people, Calla, that made you think them irenic? What have you ever seen of anyone?’

The clocks chimed across the Second, announcing the evening and the hour of the Woodcock. Calla was seated on the edge of the bed, and she moved closer then, engaged him with her eyes. It was not a ploy, or if it was it was one so natural, so instinctive, that it could barely warrant criticism. ‘Then do it for me,’ she said. ‘Because I will not sit idly while my home burns, and I will not throw myself at the feet of the Revered Mother and beg for shelter. However slim the chances, I will venture them. With you, there is some hope of success. Without, I will surely die. Help me because I need you, and because I am asking.’

Below her Leon swallowed hard, gathering up his courage, managing finally, intertwining with arm and hand and tongue. It was not until she was beneath the covers that Calla realised Leon was a virgin, from the way his flesh quivered when she brushed against him. Impossible to imagine a boy of the First Rung reaching twenty-and-two without having taken a woman to bed – she had supposed it uncommon even in Aeleria – but it was indisputable, he betrayed his innocence in his excitement and his joy, in his hardness that pressed against her, in the thinness of his breath. Or perhaps it was more than that, for Calla, who had been no stranger to the sex act since her sixteenth year, found herself near as excited, each laboured touch sending frissons along her tanned skin and up her spine. His good hand fumbled with the back clasp of her robes, and then with her ripe breasts, unsure of himself. But what he lacked in expertise he made up for in passion, in sheer joy, shuddering at every brush of skin against skin, eyes wide and warm and kind. She lifted his ruined hand to her lips and kissed the wound tenderly, and he blushed and he moaned, for is that not the last and the kindest gift a lover gives? To forgive what is flawed and broken, more than forgive, to cherish?

Downslope the city moved swiftly towards conflagration, fanatics sharpening their knives and laying their plans for slaughter. Upslope the custodians and bureaucrats cracked down on any faint hint of insurrection, dispensing violence with an open hand. Higher still their Eternal protectors continued unceasingly their games and their dances, ignorant of what was coming if not innocent of its arrival. Everywhere, there was injustice, there was avarice and bigotry, there was fear and soon after fear, cruelty. But in the small room on the Second Rung, in a soft bed with silk sheets, there were only the two of them, and the world seemed still a place worth saving.

It had gone quickly – he was new to the thing, after all, one could hardly hope for expertise in a novice. But he had been tender, and that was the most important thing, that was the only thing that could not be taught or learned. In the kind light of the early evening they held each other close, and Calla knew only his scent, and the beat of his heart, and even forgot for a time the original purpose of her visit.

Though reality inevitably intervenes. ‘I fear now that I have thrown away my virtue too cheaply,’ Calla said mockingly, ‘for while I have given you good answer to your question, you have done nothing to answer mine. This Steadfast of your aunt, who you say is the critical piece to the whole thing – how in the name of your gods do we find him?’

‘Actually that part’s rather simple,’ Leon admitted, running his fingers through her hair. ‘He goes by Cobble, and he has a trading house on the Fifth Rung.’

A
t the far end of the docks there was a neighbourhood called Three Forks, consisting mostly of a complex of warehouses, out of use for much of the year. Vast structures, decaying, lightless except where the occasional spot of sunshine slipped through a broken windowpane. During the Anamnesis they were used to store the excess tithes that came in from the Commonwealth, salted cod and smoked ham, foodstuffs stacked to the rafters. Nine months later it contained another product of Aeleria’s abundance – five hundred hardened soldiers, killers to a man.

Nominally Aelerians, at least, though half were undiluted Dycian, darker even than Pyre, lean and wiry and rarely out of arm’s reach of their curved bows. The Aelerians themselves were paler, and broader, and they rarely smiled. The two groups were identical, so far as Pyre could tell, in their vulgarity and general meanness, as well as their love of gambling and drink – for three days they had done nothing but roll dice and swill sour wine, were most of the way through the provisions that Pyre had squirrelled away for them, heavy kegs that ought to have lasted a month.

Courage, the First of His Line, had been left behind as their liaison, and he was growing close to the end of his tether. ‘These are our allies in the struggle against the demons? These are the men who will bring about the age to come? Sots and murderers?’

There was much required of Pyre these days, the last of the old era, many tasks required if the dawn was to come. Across the lower half of the Roost the Dead Pigeons had gradually taken up their positions, waiting only for the word that would send them into battle, waiting only for the standard to be raised beneath which they would die. Pyre was needed everywhere, at every point of attack, to plan out each route and designate each target. For the first time in two frantic years of civil strife Pyre was approaching the end of his reserves. The night before, hidden in an alleyway across from one of the headquarters of the Cuckoos, he had fallen asleep standing up, a blissful moment of darkness and then sharply awake as his knee struck the stone wall. That had been ten hours earlier, hours he had filled with labour. He would need to find a spare moment for slumber soon, or be no good to anyone.

‘It won’t be much longer,’ Pyre said, rubbing the heel of his hand hard against his eyes.

‘They are without honour,’ Courage said disapprovingly. ‘Nothing but mercenaries. They deserve no share of the dawn.’

‘Edom knows his business,’ Pyre snapped, exhaustion as much as filial loyalty fuelling his anger. ‘And it is obedience required of you at the moment, not commentary.’

‘Of course, Brother Pyre,’ Courage said, eyes belying his name, ‘forgive me.’

As little concern as the demons gave to the lower Rungs, they were comprehensively more ignorant of the farms that extended out from the Roost, of the vast numbers of near-slaves who laboured there. Edom’s words had spread quickly amidst this ocean of grain and black-seeded cotton, men huddled around cookfires and in the great communal barracks in which they slept during those scant hours when they were not labouring. To bring the contingent of soldiers through them quietly, without giving notice to any of the demons’ few human agents, had required no very great excess of skill. The detachment from the main army had been met by one of Pyre’s scouts, shuttled through those plantations that he knew to be theirs entirely. Midnight three days prior had seen five hundred men appearing at one of the less-used gates on the far side of the Fifth Rung, then moved swiftly to their secret quarters nearby. In any human city it would have been absolutely impossible for so large a movement of armed men to enter undetected, but even with an army only a few days from the city, the demons still could not grasp the full extent of their danger. When the Aelerians arrived, they would destroy them, as they always had, as they had every band of men who had ever been sent against them. There was no need for strategy beyond that.

‘We must make use of the tools available to us,’ Pyre said, after a moment, in modest apology. ‘And by all accounts they have done well enough against the Salucians.’

Courage shrugged. What went on in the outside world was of no more interest to him than it was to Those Above, and like most of the rest of the Dead Pigeons he had only the most casual knowledge of the war that had been raging across the continent these last years. ‘The Salucians aren’t the demons.’

‘If it isn’t the young king himself,’ said a voice from behind Pyre. Courage’s eyes narrowed nastily. Pyre turned away from him.

The speaker was Hamilcar, the leader of the Dycians, tall and thin and darkly handsome. Standing next to him, not smiling, for he never smiled or at least Pyre had not yet seen it, was a hulking brute, dull-eyed, the most famous man alive or close to it. In the Roost as well they spoke of Bas Alyates, perhaps especially in the Roost, for even those who laboured beneath the demons’ lash, and even those who thought that lash a kindness, still there was some part of them that breathed for freedom, that revelled in the knowledge that the demons were flesh. Pyre could remember nights as a child on the roof of his building spent in blissful fantasy of slaughter, fighting back to back with the legendary Caracal.