Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1

by Daniel Polansky

  ‘He on the payroll, now, is he?’ Chalk asked.

  ‘Who’s the mutt?’ Spindle asked, cheerier.

  ‘Granite’s little brother,’ Rhythm answered.

  ‘Granite?’ Spindle asked. ‘Shit, I used to work the dock with Granite, back in the day. I heard he packed off to the plantations. How’s he doing?’

  But Rhythm interrupted before Thistle could answer. ‘Granite ain’t the point right now, and neither is his brother,’ Rhythm said, and he put enough on it to bring both subordinates to attention. ‘I told you the situation, so I can’t for the life of me figure out why the hell y’all are still sitting.’

  ‘Shit, Rhythm,’ Spindle said, rising to his feet. ‘No need getting sharp about it.’

  Chalk didn’t say anything, just finished off what was left in his glass and stood. He didn’t seem happy to be moving, but then Chalk didn’t seem like a happy person generally. As the group passed towards the exit, Thistle tried his best impression of casual. ‘Where we headed, boss-man?’

  Rhythm smirked but didn’t look at him. ‘Hadn’t thought I’d need your services any more.’

  But that was less than a dismissal, and it would take an outright command to shake Thistle off the only interesting thing that had happened to him since – well, a long damn time. And once they got outside Rhythm pulled a cigarette from one of his pockets, lit it against the wind, puffed twice and turned to stare at Thistle. ‘You know Sweet Opal’s place, off Craw Street, beneath the sign of the blue lantern?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Same deal as last time. Keep your eyes up and shout if you see a Cuckoo. You get there, knock twice, tell Opal we’re a minute behind you and make sure there’s no one waiting there for us who shouldn’t be.’

  Thistle nodded and pulled ahead of the party, had to remind himself not to sprint. Instead he stuck his hands in his pockets, bulled his shoulders forward and wedged a sneer onto his face. It was his usual pose when he walked, but he put more into it this time. Appearances to keep up, after all. He wasn’t just thugging for his own benefit – he was on special commission, deserved a wide berth.

  Sweet Opal ran the best whorehouse in the Barrow, the top two floors of a three-storey tenement not so far up from the docks, catering to a couple of the neighbourhood big shots and any sailors that managed to make it that far upslope. If Thistle had saved up all the money he’d begged, borrowed and stolen for a year, he might have been able to rent a bed there for an hour. Even in the midst of pretending to be hard, he was excited to get a solid look at the place.

  He was to be disappointed. Thistle knocked twice on the door below the sign of the blue lantern. It opened almost immediately, and a woman who could only be Sweet Opal looked out of it. Maybe she’d been pretty once, or maybe Thistle didn’t have an accurate idea of what men considered beauty. She seemed more like a sketch of a woman than a woman, breasts large as fresh hams and an arse to match. Her face was painted in a garish imitation of an upsloper, itself a garish imitation of a seed-pecker, pancake blush and bright blue pigment on unsmiling lips.

  ‘Get the hell out of here, kid,’ she said. ‘You’re too young to come inside, and even if you wasn’t you’d be too broke, and even if you wasn’t we ain’t open right now.’

  Thistle put his foot in the door before she could close it. ‘Rhythm’s behind me.’

  A wave of relief dripped through the paint and Opal put one fat hand on Thistle’s shoulder, pulled him into the corridor quickly. ‘Hell, why didn’t you say so?’

  Thistle found himself wedged face first into Sweet Opal’s tits. She had liquor on her breath, and something below that – a hot, humid smell, strangely familiar.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Thistle.’

  ‘You working for Rhythm, now?’

  ‘Yes,’ Thistle said, the lie sweet in his mouth.

  A knock on the door interrupted the dialogue, Opal pulling it open and gesturing Rhythm and his boys inside. ‘Tin’s upstairs,’ she whispered. ‘Second room on the right.’ Her eyes were different colours, Thistle noticed all of a sudden, one green and one bright blue. Both had been crying.

  ‘Anyone else in here?’

  She shook her head. ‘We had two other guests, but I hustled them out. They didn’t say anything but that don’t mean they didn’t hear something – there was some screaming.’

  Rhythm nodded, brought a hand up to the old whore’s face. ‘You done fine, Opal. You done good. Go back to your room, stay there until you hear otherwise.’

  Opal nodded, opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again and said, ‘Currant was a good girl.’

  ‘I know she was.’

  ‘Three years she’s been here, never once made any trouble.’

  ‘She was a good girl,’ Rhythm reminded her.

  ‘Fucking upslopers.’

  ‘Enough now,’ Rhythm said. ‘Into the back with you.’

  Opal nodded and did as she was told. Even one short, the corridor was cramped and hot as hell, not a place for parley. Rhythm was quick to leave it, heading up the stairs behind Spindle and Chalk, stopping at the second door. Spindle banged on it, his fist bigger than Thistle’s head. He didn’t seem to put any particular effort into it, but the door bent all the same.

  ‘Who is it?’ a voice said from inside, one close to breaking.

  ‘If it was the Cuckoos, you wouldn’t get a knock,’ Rhythm said.

  The door opened quickly. The man standing there – Tin, Thistle assumed, though he wasn’t greeted by name – was fat and mottled and largely naked, the last throwing the first pair into sharp relief. He wasn’t from the neighbourhood, Thistle knew that right off, and not only because Thistle knew everyone in the neighbourhood. No man in the Barrow could afford to grow man-tits, and no man in the Barrow could keep his skin that pale. He bore a brand that Thistle had never seen before, two shadowed triangles stretched nearly illegible by the dimpled excess of his flesh.

  He looked to Thistle like someone about to fall from a great height. ‘Come inside, quickly,’ he said, his voice all vibrato.

  ‘Get the fuck out of the doorway, then,’ Chalk said.

  Tin flinched and disappeared back into the room, Chalk and Spindle after him. Thistle had the vague hope that he might slip in as well, but this time Rhythm didn’t forget him, turned quickly and made a cutting movement with his hand. ‘Wait downstairs,’ he said. ‘And hoot if you see anything.’

  Thistle knew well enough not to argue, especially since he wasn’t planning on obeying. He nodded and headed down the steps, waiting to hear the door close before sneaking back to Tin’s room and putting his eye to the aperture between the hinges and the wall.

  Tin was speaking. ‘Enkedri’s bloody hand, I’m glad to see you.’

  ‘Given the situation,’ Rhythm said, ‘I’d be careful about drawing the Law Giver’s attention.’

  ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘She got her head bashed in by accident?’ Rhythm said. ‘That’s some bad luck – for the two of you.’

  Spindle was bent over in the corner, and he lifted what Thistle took to be the bed sheet off what Thistle was certain was the woman. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ Spindle said.

  Rhythm came over, obscuring Thistle’s field of vision. ‘What did you hit her with?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Tin quavered.

  ‘The candlestick,’ Chalk said, voice like lamp oil.

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ Spindle repeated, tossing the sheet back where it had been.

  ‘It was an accident,’ Tin said.

  ‘You mentioned.’ Rhythm uprighted a stool that had been knocked over in the tussle, put it in front of where Tin sat on the bed, dropped down onto it.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Tin asked.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About what? About the girl!’

  ‘Currant, you mean?’ Rhythm said.

  Tin didn’t say anything.

  ‘We wouldn’t have to do anything about Currant, if
you hadn’t beaten her face in.’

  ‘I woke up and she was picking through my purse! When I tried to take it away from her she fought me. Far as I’m concerned this whole thing is your damn fault. Opal’s your creature, yeah? This is your house. If you were keeping the girls in line like you should, none of this would never have happened.’

  Rhythm didn’t say anything. Spindle didn’t say anything either. Chalk snickered.

  Maybe if Tin had been wearing his upslope clothes and sitting in the top seat at one of the warehouses by the wharf, he’d have looked like someone important, but naked as an animal, cock bent below his fat belly – well, Thistle wouldn’t have chosen this the moment to start playing the heavy. ‘It was her fault, damn it.’

  ‘I guess she’s paid for it, ain’t she?’ Rhythm asked.

  Tin didn’t answer.

  ‘When you woke up she was rifling through your shit. You told her to stop. She didn’t stop, so you grabbed the candlestick up from off the table and you decided you’d make her stop.’ Rhythm let a moment elapse, as the nonsense spread into the firmament. ‘How long you been coming here, Tin?’

  ‘A month or two, on and off. When I needed a hitch on my lunch break.’

  ‘Currant was your regular?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So you been coming here for two months, good and steady, and this is the first time she ever tried anything like this. I tell you, Spindle, all the time I’ve spent in a whorehouse, I never had anything like that ever happen to me.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Spindle agreed.

  ‘What was it, Tin? She tell you your rod wasn’t quite what you’d thought? Maybe you couldn’t get it up, and she started to snicker? You don’t pay a whore to snicker, maybe you said. And then the candlestick was in your hand?’

  ‘She was just a whore.’

  ‘And you’re just a fat bastard from upslope, likes to beat on women. And Chalk’s just a savage likes to carve up strangers. And I’m just the man settling it between the two of you. So maybe you oughta tell me something that’ll make me more likely to judge things in a way won’t get you leaked.’

  ‘I bring three ships in a week for you people, three ships on a slow week, three ships a week for fifteen years. You have any idea how much coin that is? How much money I put in your pocket?’

  ‘In my pocket?’ Rhythm asked.

  ‘Shade’s pocket is your pocket.’ Shade was supposed to be the man Rhythm reported to, though he’d never been seen downslope.

  ‘Shit,’ Spindle said. ‘I wish that were true.’

  ‘I done good for you,’ Tin said. ‘I done good for all of you, you know that. No point in letting something like this spoil a good working relationship.’

  Rhythm was nodding at that, not like he agreed, just like he was marking time. When he didn’t say anything Tin got nervous and started talking again.

  ‘So what are we going to do?’

  ‘Right now I’m thinking about calling the Cuckoos,’ Rhythm said. ‘Let them know what happened, pass you over as a goodwill. I figure they won’t give you more than … what, thirty, forty years in the pit? Or, hell, maybe do you ourselves, have Chalk put something sharp just below your ear. Cause it’s a funny thing about the Cuckoos – they don’t like finding one body, but they don’t have no problem if you give them two.’

  ‘Shade wouldn’t like that.’

  ‘Shade trusts my judgement,’ Rhythm said. ‘I tell him you in the pipes, he won’t be shedding any tears over it.’

  ‘Shade sounds awful quick to be giving up a hundred eagles a year in contraband.’

  ‘You think you’re the only official working the docks we keep in our pocket?’ Rhythm asked. ‘You are not. Just the only one who gets his jollies killing my girls.’

  ‘It was an accident!’ Desperate this time, desperate or getting there. ‘I was just trying to scare her!’

  ‘Give him one that won’t show,’ Rhythm said.

  Flesh struck bone. From his limited vantage point, Thistle wasn’t sure whether it had been Spindle or Chalk that had hit him. Probably Chalk – he seemed to like hitting people, and Spindle being as big as he was, if it had been him Tin would be laid right out. There was a lengthy intermission in which no one said anything, though Tin wept some.

  ‘I say we bleed him,’ Chalk said. ‘Wrap him and the whore in the bedroll, pitch them both into the slurp.’

  The man began to weep louder. Rhythm didn’t say anything.

  ‘I said I say we kill him,’ Chalk said. There was a certain breathless quality to Chalk’s voice that let you know he didn’t find this set of circumstances at all unfortunate, that this was his idea of a good afternoon’s entertainment, watching a fat man break, maybe even getting to off him.

  ‘I heard you,’ Rhythm said; then, to Tin, ‘Where are your clothes?’

  ‘There was blood on them,’ Tin said, recovered enough from the hit he took to speak. ‘I had to take them off.’

  ‘That’s fascinating,’ Rhythm said, and he sounded tired. ‘Where are they now?’

  ‘They’re in the corner.’

  ‘Chalk, run back to your house and get a set of clothes for the man.’

  ‘I dont want this dogshit motherfucker wearing my silk!’

  ‘Chalk.’

  Chalk spewed a long string of curses in Salucian.

  ‘Here’s how it’s going to work,’ Rhythm said. ‘Chalk’s gonna come back with some clothes, and you’re gonna clean yourself up as best you can and put them on. Then you’re going to head back to the docks and hire a palanquin to take you home.’

  ‘And what then?’

  ‘Nothing then. This is the end of it as far as you need be concerned, a bad dream that you get to wake up from. I’d expect to discover that whatever cut you get from Shade, you’re going to start getting a hell of a lot less – but that’ll be settled between the two of you.’

  Tin didn’t say anything for a while – doubtless it was enough trouble to keep from crying again. ‘All right.’

  ‘And Tin …’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I ever hear of anything like this happening again, I’m going to let Chalk take care of you, and I won’t be particular about how he does it.’

  Thistle did not imagine this would be a problem.

  ‘Spindle, you’re on clean-up.’

  ‘Take her to the bay?’ Spindle asked.

  Rhythm scratched his chin, shook his head. ‘Best put her in the pipes.’

  ‘Not the pipes, man,’ Spindle said. ‘This is my favourite shirt. You know you can’t never get the smell out, once you go down there.’

  ‘I know,’ Rhythm said, slapping the bigger man on the shoulder. ‘I’ll cover it.’

  Thistle hustled back down the stairs, making sure to keep quiet. He kept going when he reached the bottom, couldn’t stop himself, out the door and into the afternoon. The sunlight did nothing to pierce the sense of unreality that had descended ever since he’d first met Rhythm, the feeling that what was going on wasn’t quite happening to him, was a dream or a story he was being told.

  Rhythm came walking out a few moments after, but he didn’t say anything, just blinked at the light for a while and took off round the corner. Thistle followed him, cause why not at this point? The tenement back-ended against a canal, one of the endless arteries of the Roost’s waste, draining slowly out towards the sea.

  Rhythm rolled a cigarette and lit it. Thistle did the same. After a moment of smoking and staring out at the draining water Rhythm made a sudden and unexpected motion, reached over and relieved Thistle of his shiv. ‘What’s this, then?’

  Thistle shrugged, looked down at his feet, feigned guilt he didn’t feel. In fact he was half happy that Rhythm had seen it, the blade speaking of his strength and seriousness. ‘Protection.’

  ‘You mean it’s so you can put the slant on somebody, knowing you’re carrying weight in your back pocket.’

  Thistle shrugged. ‘You never carry a knife?’
<
br />   ‘Not to sit on my porch. Not to buy a dozen eggs. Not because I like the feel of it dangling next to my cock. You know what happens if the Cuckoos find this on you? What they’ll do to you?’

  ‘Cuckoos don’t mean shit to me,’ Thistle said.

  One quick motion and Rhythm had tossed the thing into the water, and on his return stroke he gave Thistle a good backhand, hard enough to knock Thistle’s cigarette out from its perch in the corner of his mouth.

  Blood on his tongue, Thistle brought his head back round to face Rhythm, made sure he stared at him straight on.

  ‘I can’t quite make up my mind about you, boy,’ Rhythm said. ‘Are you stupid or just playing at it?’

  Thistle didn’t answer. Maybe he didn’t know. After a while Rhythm turned away, looked out over the canal. They watched the current slide past, fresh turds and slick lines of grease and endless bits of detritus.

  ‘I guess you caught an eyeful in there,’ Rhythm said. ‘Maybe two.’

  ‘I can keep my mouth shut.’

  ‘I’ve heard loud men say that.’

  ‘Then I guess Spindle will be putting two bodies into the slurp.’

  Rhythm rolled another cigarette, lit it and handed it to Thistle. It was the best smoke Thistle had ever had, and not only because Rhythm used better tobacco and had a smoother roll.

  ‘Why’d he do it?’ Thistle asked after a while.

  ‘The same reason anyone does anything,’ Rhythm said. ‘Because he knew he could get away with it.’ Rhythm reached into his purse, pulled out some metal and handed it to Thistle. Thistle held it in his palm but didn’t look at it. ‘You ever need work, stop over at Isle’s and ask for me,’ he said, before heading back towards the main road.

  When Rhythm was out of sight Thistle looked down to discover that he had two gold solidus in his hands. It was more money than he’d ever seen or expected to hold, more than his mother made in a half-year of washing, more than he’d have made in three months as a porter.

  And it wasn’t nearly enough.

  16

  To become the Archpriestess of the Cult of Enkedri had cost Eudokia dozens of favours passed and taken, hundreds of hours of political manoeuvring and ten thousand solidus in bribes. In return, she had been granted the rank of ‘Revered Mother’, an annual stipend of two hundred solidus – she only had to live another thirty-five years to break even – and the right to be present at the selection of her male counterpart. This meant as a side benefit that Eudokia, alone among the women of the Commonwealth, was allowed entrance into the Senate Hall, those hallowed corridors in which the policy of the nation was theoretically hammered out.