Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1

by Daniel Polansky

  ‘How like a human, to desecrate their own nest,’ the Shrike said.

  ‘Your contention then, Marshal, if I understand it correctly, is that a group of troublemakers decided to commit blasphemy of the sort which they must have known would result in a death most terrible, and they did this because, being troublemakers, they like to make trouble? Does this seem credible to you?’ The Aubade asked.

  The marshal took a very long time to answer. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you not suppose it more likely that this is the work of some faction within the Fifth Rung? One that works against the harmony and order for which we strive, who saw the trouble on the Anamnesis as a way of spreading their cause?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know anything about that,’ the marshal said, too terrified to be lying. ‘I wouldn’t know anything about that,’ he repeated, assuring them or perhaps only himself.

  The Wright was staring at a small yellow jacket withering out the last of its life in a nearby dustbin. The Shrike was inspecting his nails, which were long and sharp and painted black. The Prime was looking at the Aubade in her vague but benevolent fashion. Only the Aubade himself seemed to be paying any attention to the proceedings. ‘What I’m trying to understand,’ he continued, ‘whoever was responsible, is what grievance would drive your people to this act of rebellion? What have we done to earn their enmity?’

  If the Aubade had made the calculated decision to reduce the marshal to a mewling ball of fear, he could not have been more effective. It must have seemed a cruel attempt at humour to the poor man, a set-up, because who would be foolish enough to tell the High themselves of their failure? In any case, he could not find it within himself to answer, though he opened his mouth once or twice as if he might make the attempt.

  ‘We will get nothing more from this man,’ the Aubade said in his native tongue, then stood and left the building.

  ‘Finally,’ the Wright said, following him out. The Prime and the Shrike joined them, and then it was Calla’s turn, and the turn of the other humans in attendance. The marshal did his best to compose himself and give some sort of an appropriate farewell, but between the breakdown he seemed on the verge of having and his ignorance of protocol, this ambition remained unrealised.

  Outside it was cold and wet and the sky was grey, though you could see very little of that last, the horizon being broken almost immediately by the endless line of tenements. A dozen custodians stood at what they likely imagined to be attention, having been pulled together frantically after the Eldest had already arrived. The custodians on the upper Rungs served little more purpose than to guide the flow of pedestrian traffic, but so far downslope Calla surmised that they probably played a more active role. In truth they seemed not so very different from criminals themselves, their uniforms patched and faded, with scruffy hair and unpleasant eyes.

  Those Above did not seem to mind the rain, or even much notice it, though they loved parasols for their beauty. They continued their conversation as if beside a roaring fire, or a sunlit field.

  ‘That was quite substantially pointless,’ the Prime said. ‘I hardly think that Dayspan could have been less helpful if he’d been trying.’

  ‘Perhaps he was,’ the Shrike said quickly. ‘Perhaps his ignorance was a cover for nefariousness.’

  ‘Perhaps the mud conspires to ruin your shoes,’ the Aubade said. ‘Perhaps the clouds collude to hide the sun. That man is innocent of everything but cowardice and stupidity. Though it hardly says much for the quality of our administration if someone so incapable is put in charge of an eighth of a Rung.’

  ‘It goes along well enough,’ the Wright said, leading the way towards the canal and the ships waiting there for them. The return trip would be longer than the journey down, the oarsmen forced to beat their way upcurrent, the long wait at the locks that would allow them to ascend from Rung to Rung. But at least they would be out of the rain, beneath the comfortable awning of the ship. There was a little brazier in the back, and they would warm themselves beside it while a pot of mulled wine did the same.

  Except that the Aubade remained standing, rather than follow the remainder of the party, and of course Calla did the same. After a few paces the Prime realised that the Aubade was not following, and turned back to look at him. ‘Are you not returning?’

  ‘I’m going for a stroll,’ the Aubade said.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘You three are welcome to return, of course. I’m going to take a walk downslope, perhaps take a look at where the crime occurred.’

  ‘The marshal said it had been cleaned up weeks ago,’ the Shrike said. ‘What do you seek to accomplish, apart from dirtying your robes?’

  ‘I won’t know it until I see it,’ the Aubade said. ‘And I certainly won’t find it without looking for it.’

  It was clear that the Shrike saw little purpose in the errand, and for once Calla found herself in agreement with the Lord of the Ebony Towers. The expedition had thus far been unpleasant and rather useless, and she saw absolutely no need to extend it out any further. Unlike the Shrike, Calla of course had no choice in the matter. She steeled her shoes for ruin and her soul for hideousness, and followed her master downslope.

  Their too-thick escort hurried after them, beefy, frightened-looking men carrying cudgels with noisemakers attached to the handle. It was clear that this was not an activity with which they had much familiarity, because they seemed confused at how to go about executing it. Were they to walk in front of the Wellborn, and clear the way? Or would that be a sign of disrespect, to stand forward of Those Above? They seemed finally to decide the latter to be true, and took to trailing behind with Calla and the rest of the humans.

  ‘What in the name of the Founders is that?’ Calla asked the leader of the guards, a portly fellow whose main concern seemed to be standing very quietly and not drawing attention to himself.

  They were the first words she had spoken and they seemed to take the poor fellow distinctly by surprise, as if he had thought her mute or tongueless. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘That sound,’ Calla hissed, ‘that awful, incessant, sucking sound. I can’t possibly be the only one who hears it.’

  ‘Of course I hear it,’ Sandalwood said. If anything, Sandalwood seemed to be enjoying this trip even less than Calla. ‘Like a falling turd.’

  ‘Oh,’ the captain said, and he wrinkled up his nose in something that seemed like contempt, though whether it was for the setting or their ignorance of it, Calla wasn’t sure. ‘That’s the slurp.’

  ‘The what?’ Sandalwood asked.

  ‘The pumps,’ the custodian explained. ‘Where did you think your water comes from? You stop noticing them, eventually.’ He shrugged. ‘Or at least you try to.’

  Calla had never been below the Third Rung before – she did not think she knew anyone who had ever been below the Third Rung before, for that matter. The general consensus was there was nothing to see near ground level, except perhaps for the docks themselves, which were reputed to beg too dangerous and nasty an area to warrant a day trip. It did not take five minutes’ proximity for Calla to recognise that, if anything, the common wisdom was too kind. It was not simply that she had not seen such poverty, misery and filth – in truth she had never even imagined it, could not entirely fathom how any creature could allow themselves or their homes to be reduced to such a state of decay. Everything that could be broken was broken; windows and road signs and wooden walls and stone walls as well. There was nothing that did not seem to be in an advanced state of dilapidation, nothing that was not dirty or chipped, nothing that seemed fully functioning. The houses were grim and tiny and either sagged noticeably sideways or hung down over the street itself, like a pigeon pecking at garbage. Long stretches of pipe wove through and around the tenements, and omnipresent was a damp and unpleasant scent, as if turning over a wet rock. The roads were – as the Shrike had noticed – small rivers of mud, though it had only been raining a short while.

  Atop all of it was
the slurp-slurp-slurp of the pumps, the sound growing louder as they descended. As with every other human in the Roost, the exact functioning of the great machine that took up most of the mountain below was a mystery to Calla. Water came up, water went down – this was as much as she knew of it. Above the Fifth Rung the apparatus that controlled the flow was contained entirely within the mountain itself, and the only traces of its existence were the public fountains and the canals and the little lakes and ponds that dotted the city, artificial but formed so long ago that entire ecosystems had sprung up inside them.

  Of course, the environs had nothing on the inhabitants. They shifted about in the alleyways, aimless in the late afternoon, staring sideways at you when your attention was elsewhere, looking away if you focused on them. There were children everywhere, thin and dirty and seemingly identical. Two old women sat in the dust of the road, heavy woollen cloaks patched like mottled skin, staring up slack-jawed as they passed, eyes seemingly unconnected to any internal process. A crooked man leaned out from the shadow of a crooked doorway, spat a line of tobacco into the dirt, muttering to himself in a fashion that did not smack strongly of sanity.

  And though Calla would wish to feel empathy, in fact mostly what she felt was disgust. How could one allow oneself to live like this, she wondered? Poverty did not revert one to such a state of barbarism. Did it? It was not pity that these vague semblances of humanity inspired, it was revulsion, and after revulsion, bitterness. How could you think yourself a decent person, when there was such misery in the world waiting to be alleviated? Waiting and waiting and waiting in vain. Their misfortune made a mockery of her pretensions of decency, and she resented them for it.

  ‘I can never understand,’ the Shrike said, ‘what it is you imagine that you see in them.’

  ‘Best not strain yourself,’ the Aubade responded.

  A pair of young children standing on the steps of a tenement watched the procession wide-eyed, barely old enough to stand upright but old enough to know fear. A woman appeared suddenly from the doorway, raced over and pulled them both inside.

  ‘Pitiful creatures,’ the Shrike said. ‘See how they turn their eyes from us as they would the naked sun.’

  ‘One basks in the sun, sibling,’ the Aubade said quietly. ‘One does not hide from it.’

  ‘Who can be sure of how these things think? Or if they do? As soon see into the mind of a fish, or a stag beetle.’

  ‘Our sibling has always had a fascination with the lesser creatures,’ the Prime said. ‘As a hatchling he was famous for the affection that he lavished on his charges. When we came back from the last war and he discovered his prized eagle had died, he was inconsolable for more than a year.’

  ‘It was a falcon,’ the Aubade said, ‘and I still regret its loss.’

  ‘Why compare a raptor to a human?’ the Shrike asked. ‘You might as much compare steamwork to a lump of mud. We’d have been better had the ancestors stepped on them outright.’

  ‘You think yourself wiser than the Founders, sibling?’ the Aubade asked, and even Calla knew enough to recognise the danger in this question. Those Above had no gods and offered no prayers, but they did have one commandment – the Roost was perfect, and those who had created it, the first generation, were sacrosanct.

  ‘You take offence too easily,’ the Shrike insisted, ‘seizing on a fragment of speech in hopes of showing me a fool.’

  ‘You prove yourself one without any help of mine. Who do you imagine farms your food, mines your ore, cooks your dinner and cleans your toilet?’

  ‘Bees make honey,’ the Shrike said. ‘It hardly proves them sentient.’

  ‘Another thing about bees,’ the Aubade answered, ‘is they sting. There’s a reason, sibling, that we do not build apiaries in the bedroom.’

  They had come to a fork in the main road, interrupted a procession of young adults. Calla had heard their laughter twinkle its way upslope from the docks, but it ended as soon as they saw the Eternal, replaced with wonder or horror or some combination of the two.

  ‘Then it is there that the comparison breaks down,’ the Shrike said. ‘The humans might be better equated to grasshoppers – though somewhat less numerous, they share the same pointless love of procreation, the same lack of purpose.’

  ‘They have the same purpose as everything else that flies, walks, digs or swims,’ the Aubade said. ‘They survive. That there are so many of them is proof of their success.’

  ‘They survive because we let them,’ the Shrike said. ‘And I do not count our forbearance among their virtues.’

  ‘Your father thought similarly – I wonder if he changed his mind, when the Aelerians pulled him from his horse and speared him through the throat.’

  ‘I doubt the circumstances allowed much time for reflection,’ the Shrike said, leaping gracefully and without pause over a puddle. ‘Had they, I would presume his thinking would have come to align neatly with mine. Order amongst the Dayspans is best kept with closed fist, and stained lash.’

  ‘Order? You’ve no more notion of order than a dog gone mad in the high summer heat. The blood alone is what interests you, savagery your only end.’

  ‘Your affection for the Locusts leads you to discourtesy against your own kind. I am the Lord of the Ebony Towers, and unused to being spoken to in such a fashion.’

  ‘I am well aware of your seat, sibling, and of the shame you bring to it. Your father and I were cohort-mates. I sang the song of loss at his death, I laid the wreaths, kept silent for six turnings of the moon. Would to the Founders I could have warned him to cancel you before your quickening, rather than watch you bring dishonour to his line.’

  Calla looked down at her feet, tried to keep her breath steady and even. Though the Aubade and the Shrike were a hair’s breadth from mortal conflict, there was no physical sign of it, at least not one perceptible to the human eye. Each insult was exchanged in the flat, emotionless monotone that Those Above always spoke in; both parties stood ramrod straight and stared at each other unblinking, though again this was the standard pose of their species. An observer ignorant of the Eternal tongue would have no idea how thickly death hung in the air.

  But Calla was well aware of the humiliation the Shrike was enduring, the tremendous sense of shame that would be heightened a thousandfold were he to gain any inkling that the humans in their midst were a party to it. Calla took a quick look at Sandalwood, could see he was not unaware of the danger.

  After what seemed a very long time, the Shrike lowered his eyes from the Aubade, who allowed his shoulders to slump almost imperceptibly downwards, and the moment of tension had passed.

  One of the boys across the street broke the silence with an awkward cough.

  The Shrike moved so suddenly that Calla barely had time to turn her neck before he had reached the group. For a curious fractured second the Shrike was standing in front of the boy who had coughed, and then the Shrike’s hand was through his skull, and all that Calla could think of was a ripe melon dropped from a great height, flesh rupturing and bone shattering into a sheen so fine it might as well have been liquid.

  It took a few seconds for the youths to start screaming. Even the other Eternal seemed shocked, struggled to decide how to react. The mass of civil guards dashed across the street, interspersed themselves in the group, though to Calla’s eyes the children seemed more horrified than infuriated, more likely to weep than fight. At least they made no effort to defend themselves, and soon the three boys still living were face down against the mud, and the girls were shuffled off to the side, one shrieking all but uncontrollably, the other catatonic with fear or rage or despair.

  The Shrike turned his back on the chaos, sauntered over to his party, stood in front of the Aubade for a long moment before speaking. ‘I beg pardon, elder sibling,’ the Shrike said, and it was not the red stain dripping down to his wrists that made Calla struggle to choke back vomit, it was the little bits of pink, pink like well-chopped meat, that covered his chest and his sho
ulders and his face, a trail of sinew or brain that had stuck to his cheek and that he made no effort to remove. ‘I beg pardon, for one who has forgotten themselves, and their line, and who requires more instruction than he had realised, and who is grateful for your offering it. I beg pardon, elder sibling, and hope that in the future you take pity on my foolishness, and continue to offer your wisdom so openly.’ The Shrike stretched himself in the pattern of atonement, left hand over his heart, right hand extended, dripping fresh blood onto the ground. The Prime positioned herself nearer the two of them, as if hoping to ward off a confrontation.

  Though Calla knew that none would be forthcoming. Killing a human was not a crime, not an unattached human like the boy whose brain and skull were now decorating the Shrike’s chest. It was not even not a crime – it was not anything, it was not mentioned in the codes of law at all, any more than the annals would need to explicitly state that there was no injunction against swatting a fly, or crushing an ant.

  Finally, impotently, the Aubade turned his back on the Shrike, and on the screaming children, and on the whole Fifth Rung, and began to walk back towards his launch. Calla followed after him, silent as well. It took three blocks before the screaming of the boy’s people was drowned out by the slurp, though it echoed in Calla’s mind far longer.

  18

  The first week Thistle worked for Rhythm he was given three Salucian drachms, a month’s salary for a bonded porter. Thistle had spent some of it that night getting Rat and Felspar drunk on corn mash at one of the bars on Bristle Street they’d never had the balls to go to before, and spent most of the rest the next morning on a brimless hat that the tailor told him was all the rage upslope. What was left over he’d given to his mother, told her he’d been doing odd jobs around the neighbourhood. She’d looked at him long enough to let him know she knew he was lying but not long enough to make an issue out of it, then patted him on the head and secreted the coins away. That night they’d had a hock of ham in their stew, and Apple had sat at the table and laughed some.