Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1

by Daniel Polansky

  This had remained, roughly speaking, the ratio by which his wages were spent. A third for revelry, a third for dress, a third for home. Wasn’t long before he had acquired a costume that anyone who’d ever had the money to develop taste would recognise as unbelievably garish, and his sisters had put on enough weight so as to obscure the outline of their ribs.

  In exchange for his three drachms, Thistle was required to keep himself on hand at Isle’s from mid-afternoon to late evening, and to carry things that Rhythm wanted carried, and run the occasional message, and now and again to spend the day keeping an eye on someone Rhythm wanted an eye kept on. Watching the army of porters wind their way upslope every morning, Thistle found it very difficult to call what he did work. Not that he felt guilty – the way he saw it, any of those unfortunate beasts of burden could have had his position, if they’d been possessed of a little more by way of balls. A man had to go out and seize his fortune in this world, not just wait around hoping that it would pluck him from obscurity. Thistle had come to a lot of these insights recently, along with his weekly three drachms.

  His friends were in no hurry to call him on it, however, because if he was more generous with his newfound wisdom than he was his hard coin, still enough of the latter got passed around to satisfy Rat and Felspar and the rest. That was what they did most of that winter, drank their way through Thistle’s money. That was what they were doing that afternoon, when things all went to hell.

  They were at the pumphouse, waiting for him to get out of work with his coin, and they made quite the show when he did. Treble was up quick from his seat, passed over a bottle of potato liquor that Thistle obligingly nipped from. Rat slapped him on the back and Felspar complimented him on his new coat and even the younger Calc brother, who had never liked Thistle and never made much secret of that fact, all the same admitted the cut to be very fine. The two girls in attendance did their best to remind Thistle of their presence, though Caraway had been Felspar’s lover since before the first snow, and Timbre was just about the most aggravating resident of the Fifth Rung, and hefty to boot.

  ‘You speak to him about me yet?’ Felspar asked, before Thistle had even taken off his new coat.

  ‘No,’ Thistle said, slipping the cigarette Rat had just finished rolling and putting it to his lips. Though they had never actually set it down and made it official, the rule since Thistle had started bringing in coin was that he paid for tobacco but didn’t roll anything himself. Part of the shifting dynamic that had taken place in the last three months, along with Rat wearing Thistle’s cast-offs and Felspar desperately trying to get Thistle to put a word in with Rhythm for him.

  ‘Why not?’ Felspar asked, and he leaned one hand on his hip in a theatrical demonstration of challenge. ‘You don’t think I can hack it?’

  Thistle smoked his cigarette and didn’t say anything. In fact, Thistle figured Felspar probably could handle his current slate of labours, simple as they were. Mainly what Thistle did that he knew Felspar couldn’t do was to hang around Rhythm all afternoon without driving the man to violence. Rhythm was an all right sort but he didn’t like big talk, didn’t make it himself and didn’t see why he had to hear it from underlings, and when you looked at it from that perspective he had a pretty good point. With the mouth Felspar had on him, he wouldn’t last an afternoon before Rhythm bopped his head against a wall.

  Besides, Thistle knew that what he was doing right now wasn’t what he would be doing for ever. Already there had been talk of sending him out on collections, and that could include more than just picking up a bag. In the evening, in the small backyard of Isle’s, with the door locked, Spindle would put a long knife in Thistle’s hands and run him through his paces. Not a pig-iron shiv like the one he’d been so proud of, but a real weapon, double-edged, the length of Thistle’s arm from elbow to wrist. And though he insisted Rhythm was better with one, Spindle seemed good by Thistle’s standards, damn good, demonstrating each motion in the moonlight, how to hold it and how to parry with it and how to thrust it into some poor bastard’s resisting flesh. Thistle watched him carefully and mimicked each move as best he could, practised the same every morning with a stick on his roof beside his dormant coop. And he thought about the day when Rhythm would give him something real to do, something that might earn him the star that would be burned into his shoulder, that would mark him for ever as a member of the Brotherhood, that would set his future in stone.

  But until that day came there was consolation in dressing the way he dressed and walking the way he walked, watching Felspar fall all over himself begging favours and girls blush when he walked in the room.

  Thistle took a seat on one of the broken pipes, and Rat sat on one side of him and Timbre sidled up on the other. With a few swallows of liquor in him Timbre seemed even tolerable – she had a voice stolen from a barnyard animal, but she laughed often and had a pleasant smell to her, and from Thistle’s position he could stake out a pretty good view of her cleavage, and to judge by her smile, she didn’t seem to mind him looking.

  Still, you couldn’t spend all evening staring at Timbre’s tits, and they were nearly out of whiskey, and it was clear that an expedition needed to be agreed on. In the old days it would have been an easy thing – drink until you found that happy line between energetic and uncoordinated, walk a few blocks in one direction or the other and take your alcohol-fuelled aggression out on some group of unlucky bastards.

  But the one downside of working for Rhythm was that it meant Thistle had to absent himself from the internecine feuding, the quick slashing raids back and forth that had all but defined his adolescence. It had been one of the points that Rhythm had made absolutely clear to him, after that first week when Thistle had picked up his pay. ‘There’s a man upslope that I answer to, once every couple of weeks. There’s a man upslope from him that he answers to also. And up and up and up. Way of the world. I’m the man you answer to, and so long as that’s the case the only violence you do is on my word.’

  So far Thistle had managed to keep out of trouble, though it made for some boring evenings, and occasionally Felspar would lead Treble and the rest on a sortie that he couldn’t take part in, had to listen to their war stories afterwards with a sense of shame that made him want to retch. Mostly it was made up for on days like this, when he stood head and shoulders above his old friends, and everyone strained close to hear what he had to say. Thistle was the most important person in the Barrow, and every joke he made was just shy of genius, and he was as handsome as a Four-Finger, and all it cost him was a drachm a week in drink money.

  The weather was too miserable for a stroll to the docks anyway, cold and wet like winter always was. Easier to walk to Talc Street and get tight. Rat led the way, playing the jester and playing it well, the whole group having to stop every few minutes to laugh uproariously. After a few blocks Thistle curled one arm out round Timbre and she nestled against him and he could feel his breath start to go shallow. Mind occupied on matters other than the road, Thistle was the last one to notice things had gone quiet. But Timbre was apparently less taken with him than he was with her, because she saw them and stopped moving.

  There are many things to be said about love, but one of them would not be that it is marked by its constancy. For immutability, for abiding and continued passion, one must turn to love’s less cherished sibling, hatred. Thistle had brooded, meditated, obsessed over the Four-Fingers for the entirety of his life, since he was old enough to arrange a thought. He could remember spending hours as a child trying to form some mental picture of these creatures that lived above him and somehow ordered his life. Did they have feathers? Could they fly? Mother insisted they could not, but then Mother had never seen one. In time Thistle had settled on a vague set of abstractions, of size and wealth, of power like the rush of the water through the pumps. Perhaps it was the fact that the group of Eternal standing on Talc Road that afternoon did not correspond accurately to this image that made Thistle take so long to realise what
he was staring at. But it clicked into his mind finally, the answer to this question that had plagued him even in his earliest memories.

  And his first reaction – though he would never have said this out loud, though even thinking of it made him furious to the point of self-harm – was awe. Awe, and that was the only word for it. They were just enough like him to make him feel shame – two arms and two legs and two eyes – but each superior to his own. As if Thistle and the rest of the group had been a poorly crafted first draft, the Birds’ the revised copy. One of them was female, and looking at her and then looking at Timbre he felt a great and terrible sense of shame. The other three were male, and Thistle knew he suffered no less by comparison.

  It was not right, Thistle thought, for the gods to come down and walk with men. To give knowledge of beauty unattainable.

  They were accompanied by a half-dozen human servants, notable for the exquisite make of their outfits, for having all their teeth and for their general cleanliness – though this last had been little improved by the jaunt they’d taken through the Fifth. Escorting them were a dozen Cuckoos, but Thistle had seen plenty of Cuckoos before, and didn’t bother to pay them any attention.

  There was a strange rustling sound that Thistle took a moment to recognise as the Birds’ speech. It was utterly alien in pitch and tone, more like the babbling of a stream or the movement of the breeze through a garden. And they spoke without facial tic or hand gesture, seemingly without giving vent to emotion at all. Perhaps they didn’t have them, or had them only in a distant and incomprehensible fashion.

  Felspar shot Thistle a questioning look, but the exact degree to which Thistle was in over his head had been hammered home concretely. There wasn’t anything to do but stare until they went away. And certainly they would go away soon enough – how long could anyone stand on Talc Street getting rained on? Hell, if it was up to Thistle he’d have split the hell out of here long since. They would leave and there would be nothing left but the memory, this horrible, tantalising, hateful memory, this memory that would keep him awake and furious that night and long nights to come.

  He was right about that, though not quite in the way he supposed.

  Thistle was staring at one of the humans when it happened – a pretty girl, well built, dressed exquisitely – and so all he saw was a sudden flash of movement and one of the Eldest was not where he had been a moment earlier, and then neither was Rat’s skull.

  In that fraction of a second between the Bird moving and Rat being dead, Thistle felt a fear so intense that it seemed to rob him of all conscious thought – the fear of a squirrel for a hawk, a mouse for a snake, a gnat for a hummingbird. Later that night Thistle would realise he had pissed himself, crumple up his trousers and throw them in the canal.

  It happened too quickly for Rat to make a sound, but Felspar and the two girls made up for it with formless exhales of breath, like putting your hand on a stove. Treble was too shocked to yell at first, slow in this like everything else, though after a moment he started to mutter, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ again and again, unceasing until long after the thing was over.

  Thistle didn’t scream, though he very much wanted to, especially when he realised all of a sudden that what he was tasting was Rat’s brain and blood. A bubble of anger broke through the fear just then, and perhaps the Bird sensed some flicker of motion on Thistle’s part, or perhaps it was coincidence, but at that moment he turned his eyes from Rat’s corpse. He gazed down at Thistle from what seemed like an immense height, and again Thistle was conscious of nothing more than the terror that was like a weight on his chest, and of the perfect eternity contained within the Bird’s eyes.

  And then one of the Cuckoos sapped him from behind, and Thistle was on the ground with a pain in his head that promised a happy few moments of insentience. Thistle couldn’t even exactly blame them, they were as shocked as he, and being shocked they were just doing what came naturally to them. Thistle went loose and let it happen, for once in his life didn’t bother to struggle. On some level he was happy that the Cuckoos had intervened – at least this way he had an excuse for not doing anything to avenge Rat.

  There was one image that stuck with Thistle through the beating he took then, through the pain that wrapped his skull in wool, through the rest of that horrible night and the days to come. From what little he had seen of them Thistle had supposed the Birds were emotionless, or at least that they displayed no emotion. But Thistle now knew this to be a lie, because in the brief moment after killing Thistle’s best friend – his only real friend, he saw now – and before returning to his own group, the Eternal had looked straight at Thistle, into Thistle, and he had smiled, white teeth stained with Rat’s red blood.

  19

  Looking at him leaning back on the windowsill, the winter sun playing on his flat chest and dark black hair and still-turgid member, Eudokia could almost imagine that she cared for Heraclius. His smile might have been winning instead of spoilt, his eyes innocent rather than stupid. It was a rare thing indeed, especially at her age and in this stage of their relationship, for Eudokia to find herself being fucked in the late afternoon. But the Revered Mother had a policy about vice, which was to indulge it quickly and without reservation, then move swiftly on to more important matters. And so after a fruitless half-hour of going through her correspondence, during which she realised her budding lust would allow for no work, she had sent swiftly for Heraclius, who had been out at one of the clubs doing whatever it was he did when they weren’t coupling.

  He had, it was only fair to say, performed admirably. Men took such absurd pride in these matters, would trade half their wealth for another third of cock, went mad if they thought they hadn’t satisfied you. The woman’s role in the exercise was quickly disregarded, as it was in most other matters.

  ‘Do you think I ought to purchase a larger palanquin?’ Heraclius asked now, without preamble.

  Eudokia sighed. Between ejaculation and aggravation was a scant five minutes. What he of course meant to ask was whether or not a carriage ought to be purchased for him, and Eudokia had no doubt where he would settle on the matter. It was not the avarice that bothered her – she had little enough right to criticise, given that from her end the relationship was entirely an issue of physical desire – it was the naked manner in which it was expressed, and the fact that if she did give him money for a carriage he would use it on the ugliest rig imaginable, garish and cumbrous and altogether awful. Like many naturally handsome people, Heraclius lacked the most basic appreciation for beauty, had never needed to cultivate a proper sense of taste or style.

  ‘If it pleases you,’ was what she said, deciding then that she would need to get rid of him, in the short term rather than the long. For some reason this thought sparked a renewed sense of lust, wanting instinctively to take advantage of this body that would not for ever belong to her. Heraclius noted her change in posture and breathing, rose from his spot and took her in his arms.

  A knock on the door interrupted their play. Eudokia recognised it immediately as Jahan’s blunt and loud and lacking any of the usual submission of a house slave.

  ‘Away, damn you,’ Heraclius half yelled, but Eudokia was already pulling away from him. She stood quickly from the bed and grabbed a bathrobe hanging on a hook by the night table. Jahan did not bother her meaninglessly, and duty trumped pleasure.

  After their time together even Heraclius had come to recognise that he stood a distant second to Eudokia’s work, though he was not altogether clear on what exactly that work entailed. Still, he put on an exaggerated frown, like a child’s, which contrasted unpleasantly with his erect penis. ‘You would leave me unattended?’

  ‘I won’t be long,’ Eudokia said, pinning her hair back neatly. ‘Surely you can keep yourself entertained, in the meantime.’

  In fact Eudokia wasn’t certain how long her business would take – but ten minutes or an hour, Heraclius could wait. It was not as if he had anything else pressing to do. Eudokia put on h
er house shoes and slipped into the antechamber adjoining her bedroom. ‘Yes?’ she asked.

  Her bathrobe displayed more of her than was appropriate, but if the show of flesh meant anything to Jahan, he made no sign of it. ‘The Salucian is here,’ he said.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The smelly one.’

  Eudokia sighed.

  ‘The merchant.’

  ‘Send him in,’ Eudokia said, taking a seat beside a small tea table.

  Phrattes seemed much the same as when last she had seen him. He bowed very low, and on his way back up he didn’t bother to look at where her flesh was peeking through her robe. Was he a practitioner of that brand of eroticism for which his country was famous, or was she no longer very much to look at? With nothing more to go on either way, Eudokia decided to believe the former.

  ‘Sit, please. May I offer you something to drink? Tea? Mulled wine, perhaps?’

  ‘A glass of mulled wine would be much appreciated, Revered Mother. There are many lovely things about your country, but I confess that I do not find winter to be one of them.’

  Eudokia nodded to Jahan. His scowl deepened a tic – he disliked leaving Eudokia alone and unprotected. A second nod sent him scuttling on his way. Eudokia appreciated the concern, but she appreciated good service more. And while Eudokia was always willing to believe the worst of anyone, even the most jaded pessimist would have a hard time seeing Phrattes as being the sort to make a suicidal attack on her person.

  ‘Soon your work here will be completed,’ Eudokia said, ‘and the wide thoroughfares and ancient markets of lovely Hyrcania blessed once again by your presence.’

  Phrattes accepted the compliment with a nod that was closer to a second bow.

  ‘Your work will soon be completed, yes? And the wide thoroughfares and ancient markets of lovely Hyrcania blessed once again by your presence?’