Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2

by Daniel Polansky

  ‘Pyre is not the head of the Five-Fingered,’ Edom snapped. ‘He is my servant, whatever confusion there sometimes seems to be on the matter. The Roostborn rise to freedom, and they do so under the guidance of Edom, the First of His Line.’

  ‘Freedom which will be bought with Aelerian gold, fought with Aelerian steel, and most of all, won with an Aelerian army, one which will be at the foot of the Roost in a short period of time and, with the gods’ assistance, inside it only a little while after. By the end of the season, my hoplitai will march upslope along the canals, or the Birds will have made corpses of us all.’

  ‘And how will they know where to attack? And who will distract the demons while you launch it? I am not the same man you met in Aeleria, all those long years ago, Revered Mother. Edom has grown to his full strength, and is not one to be casually dismissed. You need me as much as I need you.’

  Inside her head Eudokia did the bloody tally. Jahan would be across the table before she had finished giving the command. Of course he could not carry his sword within the Roost but his hands were more than sufficient for the task; a twist and Edom’s neck would be snapped like dry wood, though Steadfast might have a moment to scream before he reached the same end. Two that she knew about for certain, the one who had been waiting in the main room and Grim who had gone to join him, probably more, probably not enough to cause a problem for Jahan but then what? Try to blame it on the demons, but for that to be convincing she’d need make a slaughter of everyone in the bar, sanguinary even by Eudokia’s standards and probably impossible – some might already have left. Eudokia’s pride was a bonfire, though it dulled beside her sense of purpose, and Edom was right – she needed him.

  For the moment. ‘Perhaps I spoke too harshly,’ she said. ‘You must forgive an old woman for an excess of passion in defence of her family.’

  ‘More than forgive,’ Edom declared, ‘applaud. It is the same principle which is at the heart of the Five-Fingered, extended onto the species entire. Are we not all one vast family in opposition against the demons?’

  ‘We are that exactly,’ Eudokia confirmed. ‘United for a single end.’

  Mirrored smiles from opposite each other, wide and bright. Unnoticed beside them, Steadfast shivered.

  30

  Far above, the hour of the Nightjar chimed from the public clocks, and bright street lamps held back the dark, but down on the Fifth there was only the sound of the suck and the heavy dark of a moonless evening. Four men travelled upslope, moving swiftly but off the main roads, up narrow passages, through warrens of alleyways, along the shadowed banks of unused canals. The gate was one of dozens interrupting the great barriers that obstructed passage to the Fourth, unique only in that the Cuckoo stationed there had woken up one morning an odd year earlier to discover a slaughtered avian on his doorstep, and decided henceforth that while Those Above might be terrible they were terrible a very long way upslope, while whatever the Dead Pigeons might have lacked in sheer horror they made up for with unhappy proximity. He made it very clear that he did not notice any of them when they passed, staring at the basalt walls as if trying to decipher some hidden secret.

  Pyre had been thinking about how to kill the Roost for a very long time, for longer even than perhaps he realised, since before joining the Five-Fingered, since he was a boy on the top of his tenement, spending the summers in a cleaned-out bird hutch, surrounded by the pipes with their odious slurp, gazing upslope with hatred proportional to his ignorance. Its size and its wealth and its unfathomable age gave an impression of invincibility, but this was false, this was mummers’ paint and sawdust. Its size made it too large to defend, its wealth had enfeebled the demons and their human slaves, its age left it moribund and incapable of reaction. It was like some great beast rotting from the inside, wounded and maddened by its wounds, reaching out for death blindly and unknowing.

  The sounds of the suck faded soon after they reached the Fourth, but the dark remained, just as well given their mission. Glory and Vigour were both from Grim’s old cell, had been his top soldiers before Pyre had promoted Grim to his second-in-command. They were big men, bigger than Pyre and bigger even than Grim, broad-shouldered and handsome. They kept a few paces ahead of him and Grim kept a few paces behind, for Pyre was more than Pyre now, more even than the leader of the Dead Pigeons; he was a symbol, he was an idea. The demon’s blood had sanctified him, had redeemed him, as it soon would redeem the species entire. Glory signalled a halt once they had come within sight of the walls of the Third, a swift downward hand gesture and Pyre and Grim took shelter against the dark of the alley, the other two hurrying on to the nearest gate. On the upper reaches of the Fourth the Cuckoos were less inclined towards amiability, and with Pyre’s description handed out across the Roost, subterfuge was too dangerous to attempt. A few moments of silence and then Glory returned to lead them onward to the next Rung, looking unwinded, looking not at all the worse for wear, the only evidence of a scuffle being the two blue-robed bodies lying still in the moonlight.

  The revolution would start in the late afternoon, half past the hour of the Kite. There were two main headquarters for the Cuckoos on the Fifth Rung and two on the Fourth, and as the guard returned at the end of their shifts a picked squad of Dead Pigeons would descend for the slaughter. Two months of oppression had done little or nothing to affect the fighting capability of Pyre’s men; the Cuckoos and their demon masters raged about but they did so blindly, their sweeps rarely succeeding in catching anyone of value, their indiscriminate slaughter serving only to further enrage the populace. When the day came Pyre would be able to count on nearly four hundred oath-sworn brothers, a small army but an army nonetheless and moreover an army who had heard the word, who knew themselves to be at the great vanguard of the age to come. Before the last rays of daylight the Cuckoos would have learned, as they had learned many times over the last years, that one free man dying for his species was worth five still enchained, and the bottom third of the Roost would be, to all intents and purposes, the possession of the Five-Fingered.

  Grim took the lead once they got to the Third, the only one among them who could claim personal familiarity with the terrain, bastard son of some banker on the Second, his mother a servant to whom he’d taken a passing fantasy, seduced or raped and bought off with a back chamber in a downslope apartment. Pyre and the other two followed blindly, faithfully, for every man of the Dead Pigeons trusted every other man as the right hand trusted the left; that was one of Edom’s sayings but it was true all the same. Nor did Pyre’s faith prove mistaken, for after twenty-five minutes of swift movement they had come to one of the Third’s few pumphouses, an entrance to the sewers within the mountain. A short way inside they found a great oak door bound in brass. Glory pulled a half-maul off his back, and after a few swings of his corded shoulders it burst like a ripe pimple. Inside was a long-disused staircase, narrow and circular, leading further up into the mountain. Glory and Vigour hesitated a moment, staring into the unfathomable darkness above, but Pyre plunged past them without any further word.

  The news of the rebellion would ascend like an unwanted burden, each sub-commander and bureaucrat faltering before passing it higher, fearful that the loss of the city would somehow be attributed to them personally. The last months Those Above had taken, on occasion, to accompanying squads of custodians downslope, as on that fateful night with Rhythm, but they did so informally, without order, as if setting off on a hunting expedition. Creatures of pleasure and sin, they would spend the evening whoring and feasting in their castles far above; it was unlikely any would be about to make trouble. And if there happened to be one or two attending to the bottom half of the Roost, well then, they would discover that they had chosen to pursue a more dangerous prey than they had supposed. The Eternal were falsely named – had not Pyre, of all men, proved that?

  Upward and upward and after a few minutes Pyre told the other three to extinguish their torches. They had replacements of course but still, caution is
always better than its opposite, and so it was only Pyre’s dim flicker that illuminated their ascent, twisting and turning, surrounded by the unfathomable vastness of the mountain.

  The utility of a wall, of course, is determined by who is standing atop it. After the slaughter of the Cuckoos, Pyre’s men would spread out to the major entrance points on the Fourth and the Fifth, tearing up cobblestones for barricades, blockading the gates between the Rungs, shutting down entirely the normal progress of the city. Pyre’s men and not Pyre’s men alone; they would be assisted in their struggle by the great ravenous mob who anticipated unknowingly the age to come, who would rise with the first hint of rebellion. Porters and clerks, thugs and inebriates and wild-eyed youths, they would see the Five-Fingered banners flying from the walls and they would stream into the streets with brickbat or hammer or their own bare hands, an army numerous beyond counting and vengeful beyond measure.

  In time the suck of the slurp grew quieter, and then they came finally to another door, barred once again by brass and cobweb. She had said it was empty, she had said it was long forgotten, but who was she, really, and why could she be trusted? Perhaps there was an entire family of demons waiting for them, a family of demons and an army of servants beyond. A reasonable concern, but not one that checked them for long. Pyre had grown to learn – Pyre had known since becoming Pyre, but he had known for certain since slaying the demon – that his life and future were in the hands of the gods, of bloody-handed Terjunta, of Enkedri whose throne sat above all things, and that there was no more purpose in struggling against fate than in raging at the sun for coming east in the morning. In the narrow staircase Glory struggled to make good use of his maul, and it was a long few moments before the thing was burst on its hinges, every blow echoing loudly, and no sooner was it broken than Pyre had rushed inside.

  Those Above would gather a force to respond eventually, Cuckoos leavened with a firm core of demons, and they would descend from the top of the Roost in retaliation at the audacity of the Five-Fingered in supposing themselves free men. The Dead Pigeons would hold out on the walls as long as they could, tumbling rocks and hot oil and anything else that they could find, but they would not hold out for ever, nor try to. They would leave a token force on the walls to distract attention, volunteers happy to die if dying brought forward the age to come, and then they would scatter back into the city, burning what could be burned, killing anything that needed to be killed. The demons would need to go house by house and street by street, and every cable and every link bought thick with the crimson blood of humans and the darker ichor of their tormentors.

  Pyre’s boots fell on soft carpet, and his eyes on luxury beyond imagining, things of gold and silver, things of silk and rich soft fur, riches that had been left to decay for decades, perhaps for centuries. The hidden entrance came up into a narrow hallway, moth-eaten tapestries on the walls, the images they had once depicted rendered hallucinatory and fragmented. Glory and Vigour were left to hold their avenue of escape, and together Grim and Pyre scuttled onward through the castle, a vast menagerie of rotting wonders, beautiful and silent as a cenotaph.

  ‘How long has this lain empty?’ Grim asked.

  Pyre ran a finger along a heavy ebony side table, breaking a smooth blanket of dust. ‘Generations.’

  ‘You could fit a dozen families in here,’ Grim said, with more wonder than fury. ‘You could fit a hundred.’

  Pyre hocked and spat loudly, phlegm falling against a crushed velvet carpet. ‘The demons are profligate beyond measure.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Grim said, reminding himself of his hate and following Pyre further into the darkness.

  By the evening the docks and the Barrow and the Straits, and a hundred other similar neighbourhoods on the Fifth Rung, and a hundred other neighbourhoods on the Fourth, would be scenes of frantic battle, the demons and their deluded followers struggling to hold back the new age. A grand and bloody sideshow, the feint that would obscure the killing blow.

  Through a final door and out into the summer evening, scented sweetly by aster and lilac and dianthus. While they had been below ground the moon had shed her veil of clouds and now streamed bright and full on the city below. They stood on a balcony that hung, girdle-like, a few floors over the street, and above them the tower seemed to climb up for ever, seemed to rise as far into the sky as it had descended into the mountain, the peak lost from view. It was a quiet spot on the First Rung, all but empty so late in the evening, and the only sounds to be heard were the chirrup of grasshoppers and the rustle of the canals and the slightly more distant sounds of a stringed instrument that Pyre had never before heard.

  Grim’s jaw was slack. His eyes were wide.

  ‘We can fortify it during the evenings,’ Pyre said, pacing over to the edge of the balcony. ‘Most of the material can be scavenged from the keep itself, and anything else we can bring up from the staircase. The gods know we have enough porters.’ A series of concentric walls formed of the same material as the tower itself radiated out from the spire, more for aesthetic purposes than for defence, though they would serve well enough for that last. ‘Funnel them down through the main entrance. Numbers don’t mean anything if they can’t bring them to bear.’

  One of the castles in the skyline looked to Grim more like the boughs of some infinitely large tree, twisting and turning as a willow over a canal bank. One of the towers was formed of some composite of stone that was so dark it seemed to swallow whole the night; he could only make it out by the penumbra that surrounded it. Another, by contrast, seemed composed all of silver, reflected the light so brightly that for an instant Grim found himself thinking that perhaps the moon had a hidden sister, one that shone for the demons alone.

  He turned away from the blow, not a particularly hard one, meant only to draw his attention. ‘Forgive me, Brother Pyre,’ Grim said. ‘I was distracted.’

  ‘Keep your focus,’ Pyre said, snarling. ‘We have the future to plan.’

  ‘Of course, Brother Pyre,’ Grim said, turning back to the matter at hand. ‘Of course.’

  31

  A new moon’s night in high summer, and with the fire settling dimly the stars were bright and clear. A week’s march from the Roost, at the outskirts of what was properly considered the Birds’ territory, and there was little that resembled the rich human kingdoms of the coast, no towns nor even any villages, only huge tracts of farmland, millet and rye and oat, the basic foodstuffs on which the vast population of the Roost subsisted. For days now they had been marching through fields of grain interrupted occasionally by squat, ugly barracks, where small colonies of Roostborn had been housed like worker ants, all abandoned shortly before the arrival of the Aelerians.

  They ate better than any army of which Bas had ever been a part, but for once full stomachs had not led to high morale. A war with Salucia was one thing – the Commonwealth had been engaged in those for the better part of a half-century, nibbling away at the border states, growing strong from trade dictated at the point of a pike. Sometimes they had overplayed their hand, or the Others had been bored or vicious enough to descend from their mountain fastness and give battle, but these had been the unintended consequences of imperial overreach. What they were about to attempt was a different thing altogether, was a species of madness. Never before, not since the Lamentation itself, had a human nation thought to lead an assault on the Roost. The day before Konstantinos had strung up a half-dozen hoplitai who had tried to desert, marched the entire army past them as an object lesson, their legs quivering and the strong smell of shit, not from the Thirteenth thank the gods but still …

  ‘Why didn’t they burn them, do you suppose?’ asked Nikephoros. He had become the new head of the Thirteenth in the reshuffling of positions that had occurred after Theophilus had died. A steady enough man according to what was said about him, though Bas as a rule did not believe the things that were said about anyone.

  ‘Because they expect to come back,’ Isaac said. ‘No point in destroyin
g a whole summer’s worth of crop when the Birds will ride down and devour us whole.’

  ‘And why haven’t they done that?’

  ‘Why would they bother? We’re coming to them.’

  ‘Pay no attention to Isaac,’ Hamilcar said. ‘The thought of having to spend a few days without me has made him morose.’

  This verged closely on treason, though it was a half-open secret that there was to be some sort of secret attack on the Roost, by the time Konstantinos had bothered to give the order Bas had known for half a week. And why not? There were no Eternal spies within the camp; indeed so far as he could determine from Einnes they had no intelligence service to speak of, would have thought it beneath them. Bas discovered that his wineskin was empty, called to one of the slaves for another. It was the first he had spoken since dusk.

  ‘Fear not, Isaac – I’ll bring you back a fine trophy. Roost-forged steel, like the Caracal has – a battleaxe, perhaps. Or maybe one of those great-helms to cover your ears.’ But it was a bad bluff at good humour. Hamilcar had sulked for a day and a half when he found out Isaac would not be accompanying them, nor was Bas thrilled about the matter himself. Whatever hope this mad plan had of success, it would be improved with Isaac’s assistance. But Nikephoros could not yet be trusted with the Thirteenth, not to Bas’s satisfaction, and they could not be left to the half-competency of Konstantinos and his nobles. A short argument with the Protostrator had been enough to confirm Isaac as second-in-command of the thema. Bas was no speaker, but once his word was behind a thing it was all but impossible to shift it, and in the end Konstantinos had the wit to bend gracefully. At least Nikephoros would have the benefit of Isaac’s experience when he faced the heavy cavalry of the Roost.