Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2 (6 page)

‘On your knees,’ Hammer shouted, louder than necessary but this was his first action, and Pyre could forgive him his excitement. ‘On your knees!’ he said a second time, and this time the men were not slow to obey, long robes trailing in the dust.

Grim and three of his men came walking swiftly eastward. One of them was Agate, and one of them was the boy who had thrown the stone, and the last had his blade free, and it was slick with the blood of a stranger.

‘Any problems?’ Pyre asked.

Grim shook his head vigorously, broad-smiling, turned his attention to the lackeys arraigned before him. ‘Which one of you is bossman?’ Grim asked. Grim was born closer to here than the Fifth, but he liked to affect the downslope slang, and since apart from that he was tough and fearless and utterly reliable, it was the sort of foolishness that could be overlooked.

None answered, knees bent against cobblestone, eyes firmly on the ground.

‘Obey and this will go swiftly and without bloodshed,’ Pyre said quietly. ‘Hinder our objectives in any way and I will set your mothers to weeping. These are the words of Pyre, the First of His Line, and by the Self-Created I will stay true to them.’

It was as much Pyre’s name as Pyre’s threats that got them to react. Even here, a seeming world away from the Fifth, they knew of the Dead Pigeons and of the savage young man who ruled them. ‘I’m the manager,’ one of them said, looking much like the rest, a little older perhaps, a little fatter, one of the faceless multitude of the fettered, thinking themselves free because they did not notice their chains.

Hammer pulled him upright and sent him tumbling back into the building. Agate followed along, though Pyre waited a moment before joining them.

‘We’ll be done before reinforcements arrive,’ Pyre said to Grim, who had taken up position by the door.

Grim smiled. ‘Take as long as you want. There aren’t enough Cuckoos in the city to bring us down.’

A lie – what was true, however, what Pyre knew to be true without consideration or rumination, was that if the Cuckoos managed to amass a sufficient force to break through they would do so over the corpses of Grim and his men. There was not anyone in the Dead Pigeons who he could not count on to perform likewise.

The interior was ugly, banal, no different from a thousand other such offices on the Rung, places that built nothing, forged nothing, created nothing, nodes of finance, leeches draining life from the body politic. The fire was still smouldering, but it didn’t seem to be spreading very fast. If the clerks had been braver they might well have been able to put it out themselves, but then again they’d have no reason to suppose themselves the target of an attack. That had been part of the brilliance of it, to strike in a spot where the demons and their servants imagined themselves protected.

Part of the brilliance, but not all of it. Hammer and Agate had corralled the manager between them, and were staring at him in a fashion that would have alarmed his wife or mother. As if to forestall any abuse, he pointed towards a door and said, ‘The vaults are that way. But all the silver is in bars – you won’t be able to carry it anywhere.’

‘We aren’t going to the vaults,’ Pyre said quietly. ‘Your records – where are the records kept?’

He went white-faced then, and for the first time Pyre felt like hurting him, that fierce, oily rage boiling itself up from somewhere around his cock, because there wasn’t anything to these upslopers but greed, that was all that mattered to them, not even silver or gold but rows of ciphers on paper, scratches of ink more important than the lives of their fellows and more important than their own even, they’d lose a limb before seeing their ledgers unbalanced.

Pyre shoved it back down. Hatred, anger, these were the feelings of a boy named Thistle, and not the man he had become. ‘Make me repeat the question, and I’ll make you scream the answer.’

‘Down the hall to the right,’ the man answered swiftly, ‘down the hall to the right.’

‘After you,’ and Hammer gave him a good hard shove in the direction he had indicated. Pyre tried to figure how long had elapsed since they’d set the fire, but time was a tricky thing in moments like these. They came to a locked door and this time the manager did not need to be threatened, reached into his pocket and pulled out a long key.

It was a large room. It needed to be, containing records for half the transactions on the Fifth Rung, debts owed by storekeepers and shop-owners, bartenders and porters, managers of small restaurants, mothers pawning their beds and their clothes and their bodies and the bodies of their offspring and anything else that might find value upslope. Ignorant, unlettered, capable of counting to twenty if they took off their shoes and if they hadn’t suffered an accident, setting their mark down on a piece of paper that promised they’d spend their lives trying to repay some modest sum.

Hammer smiled wide, knew what needed to be done without Pyre saying so. He had two more bottles hooked against his belt and he hooted loudly and tossed one over to Agate, who caught it one-handed and tore off the cap, opened one of the larger drawers and started to dump it over the parchment inside.

‘What are you doing?’ the manager asked, though he must have known by then.

‘I am filing the bars of a cage,’ Pyre said. ‘It is the primary occupation of the Five-Fingered.’

‘But … but … these are the records for the entire Fifth Rung! Every loan and financial transaction, tens of thousands of debts!’

‘Do you think we came here by coincidence?’ Agate asked, laughing, upending one of the drawers against another, the crescendo of wood against the stone floor, paper scattering across the room. ‘The Five-Fingered will free their brethren of the yoke of credit, and shove a nice finger into the eye of all of you upslope trash.’

‘These are legitimate transactions!’ the manager protested, and Pyre was surprised as he always was at the willingness of the bound to fight in service of their own subordination. It was a peculiar kind of courage, preferring to risk injury or death rather than face bluntly the facts of their own slavery. A potent thing, the truth, and there were men who would rather die than hear it. ‘You have no right to do this!’

‘You gave an eagle to a man fifty years ago, and you have his children’s children still paying interest.’ Hammer had finished preparing the inferno, faced up against the manager, breathing heavy and with one hand on his blade. ‘We ought to clip him right now, let everyone know he’s a traitor to the species.’

‘He’s ignorant,’ Pyre said, making a swift motion with his hand to forestall any violence. ‘As you were, as I was. Perhaps this will be the moment when the truth reaches him. If not,’ Pyre turned suddenly on the man, ‘we will meet him again on the morning of the new age.’

‘We doing this?’ Agate asked. Most of the bureaus were knocked on the ground, their financial secrets spilled across the floor and wetted down with alcohol.

‘Hammer, do the honours,’ Pyre said.

Hammer turned his snarl from the manager, grabbed a lantern off the walls and dashed it against the far corner of the room. The fire started swiftly and burned fast, dry parchment as good an accelerant as coal oil. They left immediately after, and already the smoke was black and billowy. Back towards the front entrance and the second blaze was hot and high, intended as a distraction though it had gained its own momentum, as fires and causes often do. They would feel this, men on the Second and their demonic masters on the First; it was one thing to kill a Cuckoo in some distant corner of the Roost, to throw graffiti on walls, to hold rallies and demonstrations. To strike at the purse, though, was to take aim at the very essence of the city.

‘Any trouble?’ Pyre asked Grim once they were all back outside, breathing deep of the early evening air, free finally from the smoke.

‘No, but you can hear it coming.’

And indeed you could, rattling downslope, the loud droning of ratchets. The Cuckoos had been alerted and were coming in force, the shock troops of Those Above, ill-trained and worse-armed but there would be plenty of them, there would be enough. Pyre turned swiftly to the functionaries and petty bureaucrats kneeling in the dust, the smoke from their business growing thicker even from the outside. They refused to look back at him, eyes bent and neck bowed, a position with which they had long familiarity.

Though Pyre preferred to see them free of it. ‘You are blind, each and every one of you. You suppose yourself free by virtue of the small luxuries afforded you, but this is a lie, and now is the moment of your deliverance. The demons parcel out your birthright, and you are so pathetic as to feel grateful. But a reckoning is coming, brothers, for the demons and for you as well. What was stolen will be returned, what was taken will be replaced. The scales will be righted.’

‘By the will of the Self-Created,’ Grim said.

‘Until the dawn of the new age,’ Hammer echoed.

‘Leave, or stay, as is your want,’ Pyre said, though between the fire and the smoke and the coming certainty of violence they were not slow to make their escape, on their feet and hurrying off as fast as they were able.

‘You’d best do the same,’ Pyre said to Grim.

‘I will see you downslope, or at the foot of Enkedri’s throne,’ Grim said, smiling.

‘You’ll see me downslope,’ Pyre corrected. ‘I haven’t given you permission to die.’

Grim slapped his hand against his chest and extended it with each finger unfolded. Then he and Agate and the rest of his men went roaring off west, to follow the Sterling Canal towards the Fifth. Pyre and Hammer headed in the opposite direction, eastward for a few long moments and then downslope towards freedom and home.

The hum of the ratchets followed them through the dimming evening light, but this was an old game to Pyre, fleeing from the Cuckoos, this was an activity at which Pyre was well-practised, and Hammer too. There was a moment when Pyre looked at Hammer and Hammer looked at Pyre and they nearly burst out laughing, the noisemakers echoing louder and still nothing more than a spur to merriment.

They turned out of an alleyway and onto a main thoroughfare and suddenly there were four of them. Pyre never learned if they had been called from upslope or if this was part of their usual beat and it didn’t matter anyway. He did not hesitate; that was perhaps the one quality he still shared with a boy named Thistle, there was no interlude for him between shock and violence, and in that brief instant before the Cuckoos accepted the sudden reality of the situation Pyre’s blade had cut a hole in a blue robe and a gash in pale flesh. The wounded man screamed and fell back and Pyre continued onward, knowing distantly that speed alone might prove their salvation, that any halt would mean death. His attack was so rapid and so savage that it embroiled two of the Cuckoos in trying to defend against it, backing away fearfully, but that still left the one, and that one was pulling his truncheon back to shatter Pyre’s skull when Hammer intervened, catching the blow near the hilt of his short blade, good Aelerian steel biting deep into the hardwood, and still moving he caught Pyre’s assailant by the shoulder and yet moving still he hurled the Cuckoo against the alley wall, bone against indifferent brick, and then the blade upright and entering through the ribcage. Ignorant of his reprieve, Pyre continued forcefully against the two remaining Cuckoos, though after a few seconds one retreated at a run and one expired slowly on the ground. Or perhaps he would survive – Pyre was no doctor – but at least he would not again have a left hand.

They sprinted downslope without celebration, the narrow cloistered streets loud with the Cuckoos’ cries of warnings, cacophonous and distracting, Hammer turning for a moment and seeing that they were close behind him and then turning back round and not looking any more, Pyre just in front of him, legs pumping and chest straining. Through a small street market, dodging round a brazier frying onion and pig belly, the Cuckoos following after less agile, upending the grill, the proprietor screaming and the Cuckoos screaming also, Pyre and Hammer plunging through a clothing stand, carrying bright strands of cloth along with them for a dozen steps afterward.

When they turned a corner and came up against a blind stone wall and no hope of escape, Hammer felt a first brief flicker of fear, saw Pyre smile beside him, felt it smother immediately. Death was a certainty but fear was not, fear was foolish, there was no point to fear. For a month and a half Hammer had known the truth, known the certainty of his own worth and purpose, and how many men could claim the same? None that Hammer had ever met, none apart from these, his new-found brothers, and how fine a thing it would be to die beside one of them! How fine a thing to die for a purpose! Perhaps better even than to live for one.

The Cuckoos seemed as surprised to discover themselves in a blind alley as had been Hammer and Pyre, and not a happy surprise either, a half-dozen of them coming in two waves, the fatter ones trickling in late. The breed of Cuckoos that nested on the Third dealt mostly with citizens happy in their subjugation, and had no experience with the sort of casual cruelty that was the chief purpose of their fellows downslope. But violence was what was needed now, there could be no question otherwise, no question to Pyre or to Hammer at least, though looking at the infirm faces of their pursuers it seemed no altogether settled question.

Pyre’s blade was free and naked. ‘Well, brothers,’ Pyre began, smiling a smile that Thistle had sometimes worn, in that distant age when he had wished for nothing more than a skull to bruise a knuckle against. ‘This will be a happy death for Pyre, the First of His Line – can any of you say the same?’

‘You’re … you’re under arrest,’ said the bravest of them, though his voice wavered.

‘Pyre will walk out of this alley, or he’ll be carried.’ The steel like a finger pointing at the lead Cuckoo. ‘And not Pyre alone.’

The evening falling fast now, too dark to make out the Cuckoos except by their eyes, which were wide and uncertain. And this would be why they would win, Pyre knew, why he fell asleep every night exhausted but happy, why he woke in the morning without regret and brimming full of energy to spill in the name of the age to come. At bottom, the Cuckoos knew the truth, as Pyre had known even before he had taken his new name, as every human knew.