Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1

by Daniel Polansky

  ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Felspar said grandly, situating his hands midway between Button’s ample buttocks and small breasts. ‘We owe them for what they did to Rat.’

  Rat stopped drinking long enough to buck up at the sound of his name. A month or so after the last big brawl he’d been caught by his lonesome somewhat too close to the water, got a pretty decent beating for his lack of caution. ‘They owed,’ Rat agreed.

  Which was true as far as you figured it, but then, the Barrow boys had been owed for when Thistle had dropped a stone on one of the dockers from the third floor of an abandoned tenement. Been aiming for the boy’s head but hadn’t hit it – hit his leg, however. Which had been fun and all, but which you had to admit offered the crew downslope a legitimate grievance.

  ‘It’s a question of honour,’ Felspar finished, reaching over and taking a pull from Rat’s whiskey. They’d bought the liquor they were drinking using money Felspar had stolen from his mother’s purse while she was visiting the outhouse, though if anyone noticed the contradiction they kept silent on it.

  It was an old game, but a good one. Petal might pretend otherwise, but she was as hot for blood as Thistle or Felspar or Treble, more maybe, cause at the end of the day it wasn’t her skin in the game. Petal was too much of everybody’s girl to ever be altogether Thistle’s, but she’d been seeing more of him this last month or two than she had anybody else. So far they hadn’t more than necked, endless hours pressed tight against each other, hours that had long gone from exciting to routine to flat dull, his tongue tired from overwork and his cock sore as a broken thumb. But that wouldn’t last much longer. She was ready, Thistle could feel it, the instinct of the species making up for his own personal ignorance. She’d preened herself before coming down to the pumphouse, and she’d manouevred Thistle’s back into the hollow of her breasts. If he returned with a docker’s blood slick on his fists she’d let him take her up to the roof and slide her dress up her legs and Thistle would finally get a shot at what he’d been dreaming of ever since he’d woken up one morning a few years back with sticky thighs. Come back from the docks a conqueror, and later that night he might even end up a man.

  ‘The dockers ain’t like us,’ Felspar was saying, more because he liked to hear himself talk than because he thought what he was saying made sense. ‘They’re not real Roostborn.’

  ‘The docks aren’t part of the Roost?’ Rat asked.

  ‘Of course the docks are part of the Roost. But the kids who live there, they’re all the bastard sons of whores and sailors, their blood is as foreign as a Dycian orange.’

  ‘What kind of sense do you think that makes?’ Rat asked. ‘Don’t none of us come from here, you go far back enough.’

  ‘Birdshit!’ Felspar pulled his hand off Button’s arse and slapped it against his chest. ‘My people go back since the Founding, since the Time Below.’

  ‘So you’ve been a slave the longest?’ Thistle growled. ‘Congratulations.’

  Thistle found the pretence that they had a real reason for walking down to the docks and breaking down anybody they found there, that they needed a real reason, nonsense. Thistle didn’t have any true hate for the dockers, not hate like he had for the folk upslope, not hate like he had for the Cuckoos or the Four-Fingers. They weren’t any different to him, when it came right down to it; if any of the dockers had been born half a cable upslope they’d have been his brother, as much as Treble or Rat. But a man needs something to die and kill over, that’s what makes him a man – and if half a cable was all you had, then half a cable would have to do.

  Been enough fucking talk, was what Thistle thought then, and he stood up from the step, grabbed the mostly empty bottle from out of Rat’s hand, made it all the way empty and dashed it against the wall. ‘Let’s go.’

  A spark dropped on dry grass. Treble was up first, Rat a close second. Felspar gave Button a quick kiss on the neck, then scooted her up off his lap. The Calc brothers both tried for the same, but either Amber hadn’t made her mind up about which of the two she had it for, or she didn’t have it for either, cause she danced off, laughing merrily.

  Petal stood up also, and in the moment Thistle didn’t notice her bad skin or the way her eye sort of drooped. He grabbed her by the back of the neck, pulled her into a firm kiss, pressed his mouth against hers, hard, too hard, heard her moan, pushed her away and started walking downslope, certain that he wouldn’t be walking alone.

  Lock your doors and hide your ladyfolk, the Barrow boys were on the march.

  Treble took the lead as usual, but Thistle was right behind him. Felspar had picked up a little wicker switch, was hooting and swinging it back and forth. Rat stopped every fifteen seconds to howl at the moon, low in the sky but getting higher. The Calc brothers were holding up the rear and helping fill in Rat’s chorus, hollering back and forth to each other.

  The burnt-out house on the intersection of Garden Street and Fallow was widely considered the demarcation line between the two territories, and as they passed it Felspar scampered up a sidewall onto the little bit of the second floor that remained extant. He clutched a support beam with one hand and leaned himself out over the ether, screaming his challenge into the night.

  Thistle was thinking maybe they’d have to march further downslope, smash a window or two, make enough trouble to draw the dockers into battle. But the weather down by the bay was as torrid as it was at the Bowery, and the mood was the same. Felspar hadn’t been giving out their war-call for more than a minute or two when Thistle heard it being answered from out of the gloom, their rival pack spitting strands of doggerel as they came to offer combat.

  They’d come with an extra soldier, but that was fine as far as Thistle was concerned – a man from the Bowery was worth a man and a half from anywhere else, and Treble you had to figure was worth at least two. Though they’d been born less than a cable from each other, Thistle had never met one of them outside of a street fight. Thistle supposed that had a stranger been unfortunate enough to walk through the docks that night, they wouldn’t have seen much difference between the two packs of rowdy, badly dressed youths. Had that theoretical stranger been foolish enough to say anything to that effect, however, he’d have found his words had a conciliatory effect on the two parties, encouraging them to redirect their violence towards his person.

  ‘What you trash coming round for?’ one asked. Thistle had used to think of him as the cocksucker with the patchy beard, but after Thistle had dropped a stone on the boy, he had mentally switched nomenclature to that motherfucker who is lucky to just have a limp. Whatever his real name was, he seemed to be the head of his crew in the same rough sense that Thistle was the head of his. ‘Didn’t you get enough of us last summer?’

  ‘No!’ Treble stuttered, and not for the first time Thistle wished his friend was mute, or at least smart enough to pretend.

  Felspar had slipped down from off his heights and taken up a spot near Thistle. ‘Don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. The Barrow runs right down to Cooper Street. The question is, what the fuck are you doing out of your territory?’

  ‘Fallow Street is the border,’ the leader said. ‘Always was.’

  ‘How about we sprint for it?’ Thistle asked quietly, and with an ugly smirk.

  The boy who couldn’t walk right any more shot Thistle a look of pure and violent hatred, something beyond the passions they were all about to exercise. He maybe had reason to, Thistle had to admit. Taking someone in a straight fight was one thing, even jumping an unlucky sucker with your boys – but what Thistle had done was out of bounds, out of bounds even by the loose and anarchic standards of the Fifth.

  Ahh, fuck him. Fuck all of them, and fuck this parley nonsense altogether. There wasn’t anything at stake in this conflict except blood and honour, and neither of those could be satisfied with talk. The only question was whether they were going to make the jump from fists to weapons, whether the losers would end up bruised or buried. So far the running fe
ud between the two sides had stayed short of making corpses, but there was a first time for everything, wasn’t there? Thistle had his blade stuffed into his waistband, and he knew Treble had one hidden somewhere as well. The younger Calc brother was still carrying one of the bottles, and that could be turned deadly without much effort. Thistle would be surprised to discover that the dockers hadn’t come to the party with a similar set of favours. All he needed to do to set it off was reach down into his trousers and whip out the blade, and there would be corpses in the evening and weeping mothers come the morrow.

  For some reason he didn’t, though one of these nights he figured he probably would.

  ‘You dockers reek more than a Parthan outhouse,’ Felspar continued.

  ‘You kiss your mother with that mouth?’

  Felspar grabbed himself with his off hand. ‘I fuck your mother with this dick.’

  And then the two lines rushed together in a mad scrum, kicking and clawing and screaming and biting, and the whole thing devolved into a formless melee.

  Thistle squared off against a pie-faced little cunt that he’d seen around but whose name he didn’t know, not that he’d ever lower himself to know the name of a docker. The pie-faced cunt had a few links on Thistle but was filling those links with fat rather than muscle, and Thistle felt pretty confident he’d put the boy down but good. There was no technique to any of it, Thistle just bulled into the boy with his shoulder, tried to get him on the ground and finish him as soon as possible. Thistle worked best up close, where he could get his finger into an eye or latched against the inner pocket of a cheek, where he could claw and scratch and bite.

  But the boy was faster than Thistle had expected and than his frame would suggest, shifted beneath the blow and gave one of his own, a short right that popped against Thistle’s jaw. Gave another while Thistle was stunned, straight out against his nose, Thistle could feel it split and he stumbled backwards a step. The sight of Thistle’s blood got the boy overeager, and he came strong at Thistle, hoping to end the whole thing quick. If he’d have known Thistle any better he’d have been more careful, because Thistle was never more dangerous than when he was on his back legs, and while the boy wound up for a finishing shot Thistle leaned in and tapped him on the chin hard enough to set him up on his arse.

  Thistle was planning on making sure the boy didn’t get up again, not for a while, but next to him Rat was coming off worse in a contest with a tan-skinned giant, some Aelerian-looking motherfucker who might have given Treble a run for his groat, and loyalty took precedence over sadism. Thistle dived into the back of the boy’s legs and they collapsed into a heap, a heap Rat was quick to throw himself atop. Even outnumbered and on the ground the boy proved almost more than they could handle, clipping Thistle in the chin with his elbow. But Thistle gave him a return blow that stunned the boy long enough for Rat to get a decent grip on him, pinning his arms together. Thistle had got back up to his feet and was just about ready to give the tan-skinned boy a reasonable hammering when a blow to the side of his head rocked him hard enough that his vision went blurry. Thistle rolled sideways with the force of the punch, trying to get out of range of any follow-up.

  The fat boy had recovered more quickly than Thistle would have suspected, and if the bottom half of his face was starting to swell he was smiling through the purple, the shot he’d just offered to the back of Thistle’s skull sufficient analgesic. And all of a sudden Rat and the Aelerian giant were forgotten. The rest of the combatants were forgotten, the evening and the sound of the pumps and the universal dock smell of salt water and sewage were forgotten. In all the world there was nothing but Thistle and this thing that had done him wrong.

  Thistle screamed and charged.

  And then he was pulled upward, arms pressed tight against his chest, and he was kicking back against whoever was doing it, trying to get free. Someone was saying something to him but they had to repeat it three or four times before he could make it out – ‘Cool down, boy, cool down,’ and even a few more times to realise that it was Rat speaking.

  Thistle didn’t listen, still trying to break free from the grip he was in and get back at the tattered thing that was lying on the ground before him. But whoever had him was too strong to break free of, and after a few more seconds of failure Thistle realised that it must be Treble, what with Rat being the one speaking, and he remembered distantly that Treble was his friend, or at least his ally, and he went slack.

  When Treble finally dropped him, Thistle had largely threaded himself back into consciousness, though it took him a while longer to realise that the fighting had stopped, most of the dockers bailing once it was clear things had gone bad. Those who remained stood intermingled with Thistle’s people, the rest of the conflict abnegated by this change of circumstance, and they were all staring at Thistle with the same look on their faces, something between fear and disgust.

  The fat boy Thistle had been fighting was on the ground, and he had not moved in what seemed like a very long time. His face looked relatively little like a face.

  He coughed finally, and rolled himself over to the side, and there was a collective gasp of relief on the part of the assembled party. Thistle didn’t say anything, and if he was relieved to discover he wasn’t a murderer you couldn’t tell it by his manner. The boys from the docks that hadn’t run off grabbed their injured comrade by the shoulders, pulled him to his feet and started to walk him back the way they’d come. Neither group said anything to the other; the truce was unofficial and temporary.

  It was a victory, of sorts – at the very least the dockers wouldn’t be calling the Barrow boys pussies for a while, maybe not ever again. But walking back upslope afterwards there was nothing of the air of conquering heroes about them, not in Rat who seemed like he might be sick, nor in Felspar who was likewise pale as a corpse. Even Treble’s silence for once seemed to indicate more than just an inability to string together a sentence in its entirety.

  For his part, Thistle spent the walk back trying to figure out how he felt about what he had done – whether he felt anything at all, whether he might have felt more if Treble hadn’t stopped him from killing the boy whose name he didn’t know.

  8

  It had been nearly two weeks, and Bas still wasn’t rid of the smell of blood.

  The day after the battle was spent in a riotous orgy of victory, fuelled by loot stripped from the dead Marchers and, Bas felt unpleasantly certain, the hoplitai themselves. It was nothing like what had been won during the war against Salucia, or on the day of Dycia’s fall, but still, the weapons, jewellery and small money of twenty thousand men were more than enough to gorge the vast flock of scavengers that had been following the Western Army these last six months, to leave the liquor-sellers dry and the whores exhausted. The two days after that were spent burying corpses, taking their own to the communal pyres, dumping the vast heap of Marcher carrion into pits. Bas didn’t do it personally, of course, that was one of the benefits of being Legatus, but you couldn’t very well camp downwind of a charnel house four cables in diameter and think to avoid the stink. His time had been spent dealing with the remnants of the great Marcher confederacy that had been wise enough to stay and accept Bas’s terms, which were stark and non-negotiable.

  On the fourth day Bas had taken his cavalry and started off after that smaller portion of the enemy army that had attempted to escape, and over the course of the next week he had fought two full engagements and any number of smaller skirmishes, cornering and shattering the fragments of the vast horde that only a few days earlier had hoped to unravel the entire western wing of the Commonwealth. The cataphracts only made up a small portion of Bas’s forces, but the fleeing remnants of the Marcher forces were in no condition to fight, worked desperately to escape the Caracal and his men, died easy when escape proved impossible.

  Mykhailo’s confederation had ended that day on the battlefield, and Mykhailo along with it, ridden down during the final charge that had sealed the fate of his kinsmen
. But the seeds of some future horde might grow from the remains of this one, the sinewy youths riding hard to the west on broken ponies returning some twenty years hence, their children and grandchildren in tow.

  Bas was not a man to leave a job half done.

  They had been chasing a band of soldiers from the Yellow Otter clan, the last significant force of free Marchers in existence. Chasing them and chasing them hard, for three days they’d been finding the corpses of ponies left behind in the wake of the retreat. Perhaps it was the brutal pace they had kept that made the Otter clan imagine they had escaped their pursuers. More likely they had simply been too tired to care any more, though even at the limits of exhaustion they should have known not to make camp without ensuring a line of retreat.

  But they hadn’t, and when Bas’s forces had arrived around midnight they had blocked the one entrance into the canyon, eliminating any chance of escape. A scout had sneaked down just before dawn, come back with reports of women and children among the Marchers. Bas had sent a messenger out afterwards, his white flag bright in the opening light of day. ‘Surrender before noon,’ read the note he carried, ‘and I will only claim the men.’

  It was a half-hour before the allotted time, and they had yet to hear word. The cavalry was formed up, prepared to make good on the unspoken second half of the ultimatum. Bas and a few of his men were overlooking the bottleneck leading down into the gorge, watching for signs of movement.