Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2

by Daniel Polansky

  Steadfast swallowed hard but did not answer.

  When the captain came back a few minutes later, Leon in his train cursing with a fluent vulgarity that she had not supposed her nephew to possess, Eudokia sat on the low stone wall overlooking the bay. Jahan helped her to her feet, and she dashed forward with a speed surprising in a woman of her age and infirmities, cane rapping loudly against cobblestone.

  ‘Oh, by the gods! Oh, by the gods, by every one of them!’ Her high voice wavered between anger and tenderness, deciding finally on the latter, pulling her nephew down against her breast. Blue eyes peered over him at the captain, blue eyes heavy with gratitude. ‘I can’t thank you enough, Captain. I don’t know what I’d ever do without him.’

  23

  Bas was an indifferent rider for all his time in the saddle, but even if he had sat a mount like a March lord he would have been no match for her, as his horse was no match for the writhing stallion that raced neatly below the fruiting orange trees, which seemed with all its essence to wish for nothing more than to gallop onward to the horizon and beyond, which was only restrained by her will and her hand. She pulled up short at the crest of the hill, the mount stilled by her silent command. When Bas joined her a moment later she had not moved, her focus occupied entirely with the view. The vista was of the flatlands of eastern Salucia, green and rich in this high summer, and the great river below, flat and blue and sweet-looking, curling its way towards the sea.

  ‘A thing worth seeing,’ Einnes admitted after a long time.

  Her hair was bound tight, reaching upward and then cascading past her shoulders, like the sprouting top of some strange bush. She wore dark blue robes of some fabric Bas had never seen before, thin as gossamer.

  ‘Yes,’ Bas agreed.

  ‘How did you know of this place?’

  ‘I scouted it last time I was here.’

  Which had been a quarter-century past, two weeks before Scarlet Fields had seen slaughtered the cream of the Aelerian army, and six weeks before a lucky shot with a war-hammer at Ebs Wood had made Bas the most celebrated combatant in the Commonwealth and well beyond, the people happy for some hook upon which to hang their pride, some sliver of hope to take from the comprehensive defeat that was the outcome of the last war against the Others. Twenty years or twenty and one; Bas’s exact age was a matter of mystery to him, the bastard son of a hoplitai whose name he had never learned and a Marcher half-breed whose name he pretended to have forgotten, both dead while he was still young. A childhood – to the degree that he could be said to have had one – spent in the company of men of the Thirteenth, viciousness with a veneer of sentimentality; they would come back from some savage punitive measure against a Marcher village, the smell of ash and blood still thick on them, and tussle his hair, sit him on their laps. When he was old enough to hold a pike they had shoved one in his hand and made him swear the oaths, to the Empty Throne, and the Senate, and most importantly to the Thirteenth itself, to the three-legged wolf that was their standard, ravaged and wounded but never beaten. Five years garrisoning the Marches, savage skirmishes that would never earn a line in a history book, warring against an entire nation of men for whom battle was the highest and finest and indeed only purpose of existence; and thank the Self-Created that they never learned how to forge steel, and that the only thing they loathed more than the Commonwealth was each other, every clan and every village against every other. And then the news that they would be heading east to make war against Salucia, and against their Eternal masters who Bas and most of the rest of the Thirteenth had largely supposed fictitious. Bas’s first time amidst the great civilisations of the coast, cities one quarter of which held more people than resided across the entire vast length of the Marches, more wealth and more people and more despair than he had known in twenty years being raised with the legion, wonder and reek nestled so close atop one another that they often proved indistinguishable. He was not a ruminative man, little given to nostalgia, but still he remembered this distant period with fondness; before he had become the Caracal, when he was just a pentarche, no different or not much different from any of a thousand others, unappreciative of the anonymity that was soon to be lost.

  ‘I had forgotten,’ Einnes said, ‘this is not the first time you’ve invaded Salucia.’

  ‘It’s something of a national pastime.’

  ‘Is it all like this?’

  ‘I’ve never been past Hyrcania,’ Bas admitted, ‘and even then only to burn it. But I believe most of the north is swampland.’

  ‘Swampland?’

  Near two years he had known her and still sometimes the sheer vastness of her ignorance overwhelmed him, particularly in contrast to the absolute certainty that she possessed in her own judgement. ‘Where the earth is near level with the sea, and the two mix unevenly. Floods easily. They grow rice, I am told, and barley. But not much else.’

  ‘I do not think I would like the swampland,’ Einnes said after a moment’s consideration.

  ‘Nor I,’ Bas admitted.

  ‘Then again, I suppose there is little chance I will ever have to see it.’

  ‘Not much, I would think.’

  ‘Are the Marches like this?’

  ‘Not really,’ Bas said. ‘They are flat, flat like the top of a table. From a hill like this you could see from the Pau River to the salt wastes. They are not beautiful, I suppose. At least they are not considered beautiful, not as the coast of Dycia or the Baleferic Isles. The winters are …’ he shook his head, remembering, ‘you have not known cold until you’ve spent an evening beneath horsehide yurt, the wind travelling a thousand cables to strike against it. The summers are not much better, heat to kill a pack mule, grass brown and dying. The only time you see water is when the storms come, lightning bright enough to see for ever, and then the dark again …’

  ‘And yet?’

  ‘There is a month or two before summer comes, when there is no colour but green, a thousand different kinds of green mixing together, the grasses high enough to swallow a child, a man can sit in the silence and watch the breeze rustle through them. The Roost is beautiful, you say, and I do not doubt it – but you do not love the Roost because it is beautiful. You love the Roost because it is your home. It is a lie that we choose what we love, as if making a wager. The opposite is true. We love something and only discover afterward that it was the case, from the pain that comes with its absence. I grow windsome with age,’ he said finally, abruptly, shut his mouth and turned his head away from her entire.

  Einnes did not say anything for a long time, sitting quietly atop her steed, contemplating Bas’s words. Bas was not sure if this thoughtfulness was peculiar to her or common to the others, but either way he wished it was more in appearance among his own species. ‘I think you’re right,’ she said finally.

  Bas dismounted and tethered his horse. After a moment Einnes did the same, with more grace, and once grounded she whispered a few words in her indecipherable tongue to her stallion, which whinnied and went still. Bas reached into his saddlebag and removed a cloth blanket and a small hamper. He spread the blanket out on the ground, overlooking the plateau, then sat down atop it.

  She joined him after a moment, crossing the distance swiftly. Her scent was inhuman but not unpleasant, subtle and evocative. like a memory grown faint with age.

  ‘Will you march on Hyrcania?’ she asked, the question arriving, as usual, without preamble or warning.

  Bas shrugged. It was the only question that anyone had been asking for the better part of a month, and he had no answer for it. With the victory at Actria, the heartland of Salucia was laid open before them; Thalia, which was the centre of the great banking houses, the silver mines of the Linnel Valley, the uncountable wealth of the capital itself. The whole vast treasurehouse of the northlands, and none to defend it – save the demons themselves.

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Yes,’ Einnes agreed. And then, switching course without preamble, ‘My condolences on the death of
the boy.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘He seemed … I did not mind him.’

  ‘I didn’t mind him either,’ Bas admitted. He thought of saying something else then, but did not. There was no need to say anything with Einnes. She understood, or at least she did not mind him keeping silent. From the hamper Bas began to pull out their packed meal. It was simple fare, cold chicken and some bread, a flagon of whatever wine Isaac had been able to get his hands on. Bas unwrapped it on the ground in front of them.

  Einnes stared at it for a long moment, as if it was a species with which she was unfamiliar, searching to recognise it in her memory. ‘The food of Dayspans is forbidden us,’ she said. ‘It is taboo.’

  Bas shrugged, indifferent or seeming so. ‘As suits you,’ he said, taking a long pull from the wineskin. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll die without lunch.’

  Far below, the river continued on its lazy, circulatory, recurring journey to the sea. A pair of swallows chased each other just above it, skimming the surface or nearly, their duet twittering happily into the late afternoon. The redbud trees were in rich bloom, and the silverbell, their fruit bitter and inedible but fragrant and pleasing to view.

  ‘But then … I suppose there is no one here to see it,’ Einnes said.

  ‘Only us,’ Bas agreed. There was something in his throat but he managed to repeat it. ‘Only us.’

  After a moment Einnes reached out with her four-fingered hand to the corpse of the chicken, pulled off a bit of flesh, brought it to her mouth. She chewed it over for a moment, carefully, with great and sincere deliberation. ‘It’s not bad,’ she said, running her tongue across her teeth.

  Neither spoke again for a long time. The swallows had disappeared, song silenced, returned to their nest – or at least this was what Bas hoped. The sun passed slowly towards its home beyond the horizon, casting long shadows over the blossoming trees, and the river below, and over their horses, and over the two of them. And for a moment they might have been any pair of living things, a rose bush attended to by a summer bee, a trail of ivy choking an oak.

  24

  Amber’s beard was white and his hair was white and his shoulders were broad and his hands were gnarled as the trees beneath which he had spent most of his life. The raptor perched on his arm was golden-brown and crownless, with flat, unsentimental eyes. The Prime was down on one knee, stretching the bird’s wings with graceful consideration, so carefully as to draw no rebuke from her beak.

  ‘You will see the spot just beside her alula, my Lord,’ Amber said regretfully. ‘I think it can only be the rot, but I thought it best to check before destroying her.’

  The Prime allowed her wing to retract, then nuzzled the raptor for a long moment, grooming her feathers with his long second finger. ‘Well that you did. It’s not the rot. Feed her hibiscus root, and keep her out of the sun for a few days. She’ll be healed before our next hunt.’

  Amber nodded briskly, by all appearances neither surprised nor insulted to find his conclusion, one born of a human lifetime of experience, to be false. What, after all, was a human lifetime against the knowledge the Prime had acquired in his span? ‘Forgive me, my Lord – the colour of the mottle, in particular—’

  ‘You’ve given fine service, Amber, have no concern. There is no way you could be expected to have known. It is a peculiarity of her heritage, in fact, though I thought I’d bred it out of the line. Her grandsire twenty-three – twenty-four times removed suffered the same affliction. It mimics the effects of rot close enough for your mistake to be forgivable.’

  The Lord’s eyrie was in the far corner of the Red Keep, past the flower gardens and the fruit orchards, past the first terrestrial bestiary and the second terrestrial bestiary and the aquatic enclosure. In contrast to the rest of the estate, which was as carefully cultivated as a rose bush, the area around the eyrie had been allowed to grow unrestrained, resembling the virgin forests to be found in the distant human kingdoms beyond. Or such was Calla’s understanding; of course she had never been outside the Roost, never seen the forests after which it was patterned. Certainly it seemed wild enough, towering groves of oak and cyprus, the boughs thick enough to blot out the sun. The eyrie itself was three storeys of dark wood built directly into the roots of the trees, the trunks weaving their way through the main room, the staircase wrapped round an elm. On the top two floors the Lord’s collection of raptors enjoyed an existence that would be the envy of much of the Roost. On the bottom Amber and his two sons lived quietly, rustically even, taking their meals alone, rarely venturing into the rest of the Red Keep, let alone into the city beyond; rough-edged and lacking in etiquette, but they knew their craft as well as any other human living, if less so than an Eternal. Amber had been caretaker since Calla’s father’s day, and though the Aubade spoke occasionally of shifting some of his burdens onto the shoulders of one of his two sons, thus far the transition had not been necessary. It would be a sad day indeed when age forced him to vacate his post, his chief source of purpose and joy.

  As they passed beyond the canopy of the trees bright strands of summer sunshine fell against them. In a few weeks or a month the heat would be oppressive, but just at that moment it was more caress than slap. In suffering weather, and perhaps that alone, are all sentient things equal – the rain falls on the rich and the poor alike, the sun offers its blessings to Four-Fingered and Five without consideration. For the first time in a long time, the Aubade seemed free from the duties of his office, free to concern himself with the joys on offer. Calla followed him back towards the Keep, along neatly pruned paths, the flowers rich and high beside them.

  ‘Shall we attend to the summer gardens?’ she asked.

  ‘I had thought first to inspect the new creatures in the aquatic pavilion.’

  ‘As you wish, my Lord,’ Calla said, following him onward.

  He was dressed very simply, long robes trailing behind him, his hair for once uncoloured, rough stalks of off-white tied tight and tumbling down near his ankles. ‘How did you dispose of your free evening?’

  ‘At a concert on the Second Rung, My Lord. With Leon of Aeleria. You had asked me to escort him to the Lord of the Sidereal Citadel’s launch, you will recall.’

  ‘With perfect clarity,’ the Aubade confirmed. ‘Though I made no similar claims on any future segment of your time.’

  ‘True enough – that at least, was my own design. Does it meet with my Lord’s disfavour?’

  They did not lie or dissemble, the Eternal, not in love nor policy nor casual conversation. ‘It does.’

  Of course the raptors were the Lord’s favourite, followed closely by the summer gardens in the far corner of the grounds, where resided the rest of the avians, singing sweetly or gambolling about on unsteady legs, looking kind and beautiful and pointless. But a near third was the aquatic pavilion, great tanks filled with bright-coloured carp and darting sequinned arowana, pits filled with greyish water in which slunk strangely shaped serpents, flat-headed and unfriendly. The Aubade spent a long moment inspecting his newest acquisition, a trio of hairy, friendly, big-eyed creatures enclosed in a small pavilion that was half sand and half water.

  ‘You worry me, Calla,’ the Lord said, reaching over the fence and stretching out his four-fingered hand.

  ‘Yes, my Lord?’

  ‘Thirty-one years. Not so young for one of your kind.’

  ‘Not so old either, my Lord.’

  ‘Old enough to have put aside the pleasures of childhood. Old enough to consider the responsibilities of the future. What will happen to you and Leon?’

  ‘I was thinking of taking him to the Blossom Festival, my Lord. It’s in a few weeks’ time.’

  ‘Was that a jest, Calla?’

  ‘It was, my Lord.’

  In the enclosure below the rodents were gathering up the courage to inspect this new arrival, coming towards the Prime’s outstretched hand and then scattering back again with cautious joy. ‘I did not enjoy it.’

  �
��Forgive me, my Lord.’

  ‘Seven generations your line has given me faithful service, Calla. It would grieve me were you to be the last.’

  ‘… thank you, my Lord.’

  ‘It is time, and past time, that you concern yourself with producing an heir.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘It is the ultimate obligation of every living thing, Calla,’ the Lord said, ‘to continue itself. No doubt the boy has some valuable qualities, or you would not allow him to pursue you. But surely you understand he can be no good match? He cannot provide your children with a father?’

  ‘I admit your … concerns have rather outstripped my own, Lord. A date is not a proposal for binding, nor has there been any discussion of rearing his child.’

  They were like animated rugs, Calla thought, nothing but thick golden fur and happy brown eyes, and it had not taken long for them to overcome their fear. They chittered happily against the glass walls of the enclosure, tumbling over one another as if in competition for the Prime’s attention, which they had lost momentarily, the Lord of the Red Keep turning his eyes upon another one of his subjects. ‘Do you understand, Calla, that there will be war between his nation and the Roost?’

  ‘I know this to be a possibility.’

  ‘Rather more of a certainty. Had the Conclave listened to reason, we would have struck already, the full force of the High-born, every Eternal who can wield a lance descending from the Source. Alas, my siblings are yet blind to the threat we face, but they will not always so remain. When next we meet, without that … woman, to distract them, and with this latest victory to report, I will be able to force an ultimatum against the Commonwealth to disperse their forces. They will do so, no doubt, rather than risk our direct ire – but their greed will not remain long in abeyance. In three years, in five at the very most, after Aeleria has had time to digest their new territories, they will again grow hungry, they will make eyes against Salucia or perhaps think to impact the Roost more directly. Eventually, my siblings will be forced to recognise that there can be no peace with Aeleria as it exists. And when that day arrives, Calla, there will be such slaughter of humanfolk as has not been seen since we removed their king from his throne, perhaps even since the Founding itself,’ his eyes on hers, golden and opaque.