Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1

by Daniel Polansky

  Bas wiped a drip of sweat from his forehead. ‘I’m not sure that I could do you justice.’

  ‘I won’t be able to tell either way.’

  This time Bas did laugh, but then he gave the matter a few seconds of thought. ‘Einnes?’ he ventured.

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ Bas said. ‘It’s just a name.’

  The Sentinel of the Southern Reach, or the Lady of the Ivory Estate, or Einnes, could not possibly have known that this was a lie.

  She repeated it several times, slowly, as if tasting each syllable. ‘Einnes I am, then. At least among the humans of Aeleria.’ She took a look up at the sun, which fell swiftly so early in the year. ‘It grows late,’ she said, ‘and I had hoped to get a hunt in before supper.’ Bas found himself escorting her back to her great black mount – which, he now realised, had remained standing where she had left it for the better part of an hour, without fetter, rope or chain. Isaac and Hamilcar and some of the other officers sat silently nearby.

  Einnes swung herself up onto the beast with the same ease that she had displayed upon dismounting. ‘Farewell, Bas.’

  ‘Farewell, Einnes,’ Bas said, and found himself choking back a smile.

  Hamilcar waited until her horse had carried her out of earshot before commenting. ‘She is a beautiful creature, is she not?’

  Isaac spat on the ground, turned his broken teeth to a sneer. ‘I’d sooner set my cock in the mouth of a rabid dog.’

  If Bas heard any of this, he gave no sign. He was watching Einnes gallop away on her magnificent, strange, wondrous steed, and as he did so he made sure to keep his face as blank and unreadable as a bluff overlooking the sea.

  24

  Thistle and Spindle and Chalk and two other men were playing Rag-a-Jack at a back table at Isle’s. Chalk was the worst Rag-a-Jack player Thistle had ever met, threw away his high cards without giving it any thought, acted proud as a seed-pecker when he was bluffing, shrunk in his shoulders on those occasions when he had a decent hand. The rest of the table weren’t anything much to speak of, and for that matter, Thistle couldn’t claim any great mastery – but Chalk was on another level of incompetence altogether.

  ‘I’ll up you a tertarum,’ Thistle said.

  Chalk stacked and restacked the few coins he was still holding on to, spent a few seconds trying to read Thistle’s mind. ‘Do you have it, or are you just trying to make me think you have it?’ When Thistle didn’t answer Chalk threw the rest of his coin into the pot. ‘Because I’ve got four blues,’ he said, flipping over his hand to prove it. ‘Which means I’ll be drinking off you tonight.’

  ‘Six reds,’ Thistle said, turning the cards over one by one, slowly, deliberately, rather nastily.

  Chalk didn’t say anything.

  ‘Six is more than four,’ Thistle explained. ‘Feel free to count off your fingers if that’ll help.’

  Five months working with Chalk had rubbed off most of the fear he’d once had of the man, leaving a patina of contempt. Chalk was ugly and Chalk was mean, and Chalk could hit a target with a thrown knife nine times out of ten, but apart from that there seemed to be very little that Chalk was capable of accomplishing. Even Spindle, with his slow way of speaking and empty eyes, was smarter, smarter and more reliable, which Thistle supposed was the reason he’d been made a full initiate, a star branded onto his shoulder, while Chalk remained hired help. ‘I guess I wasn’t bluffing, was I?’

  Thistle thought maybe there was something wrong with Chalk, something more than the obvious, that is, because when things got tense he had this unbecoming habit of blinking repeatedly, almost uncontrollably. ‘You got a big fucking mouth, for a little bitch ain’t yet stuck a man,’ Chalk said. The two players at the table that weren’t Spindle, loose affiliates of the Brotherhood but nothing more, looked very deliberately towards the wall.

  ‘I’ve been sticking you all night, Chalk,’ Thistle said. ‘Or hadn’t you noticed?’

  Chalk’s left hand began to shake vigorously. Chalk’s right hand eased its way into Chalk’s jacket, towards one of the many pieces of sharpened metal that Chalk strapped on to himself before he walked outside in the morning. And now Thistle started to wonder if maybe Chalk was crazier than he had previously credited the man, crazy enough to try and murder him in a crowded bar, blood on the floor and damn the consequences.

  The answer to that question should have worried Thistle, but for some reason it didn’t, he was too full up with rage to feel anything else. Rage at Chalk for being so fucking stupid and at Spindle for being friends with Chalk and at himself for spending another night sitting at a table with halfwits, especially when it looked like one of those halfwits might kill him.

  ‘Thistle,’ Rhythm said, the door to the back opening and his square, bald head appearing from it. ‘Back room. The rest of y’all, cut out.’

  Thistle pulled his sneer up into a snarl, then pointed at the money lying on the table. ‘This better be here when I get back.’

  ‘No cause for that kind of talk, Thistle,’ said Spindle, and he shook his head sadly, and Thistle knew he had pushed things too far. Still, there was nothing left but to keep his glower stitched onto his face as he walked into the big man’s office.

  ‘Take a seat,’ Rhythm said, circling around to the back of his small desk and dropping into his own.

  Thistle followed his suggestion, or his order, depending on how you looked at it.

  ‘You think it’s wise, making an enemy out of Chalk?’

  ‘I can handle myself.’

  ‘You wouldn’t last thirty seconds in a room with Chalk. That man was a killer straight from the womb.’

  ‘And what am I?’

  ‘You?’ Rhythm leaned back into his seat. ‘You’re just angry. Anger ain’t shit.’

  ‘Fuck him,’ Thistle said. ‘He can’t afford to lose, he shouldn’t play.’

  ‘You talk nonsense like this, I hear my knife sing,’ Rhythm said. ‘Makes me want to pull it out and hear the tune proper, hum along while you bleed out. It’d piss Chalk off, not getting to do you himself, but I think it might be worth it all the same.’

  Thistle knew that if a man was going to put a hole in you, he wasn’t going to warn you about it beforehand. But he couldn’t pretend he didn’t leak a little sweat sitting there, the most dangerous man on the Rung threatening to end him, in his steady equanimous rasp.

  ‘Two months you’ve been like this,’ Rhythm said, apparently deciding to let Thistle live a few sentences longer. ‘Going around looking for walls to kick, ever since that Four-Finger did for your boy. Yeah, I heard about that. I hear about everything.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Exactly – so? So what? You think he’s the first of us ever been offed by a Bird? You think his mummy’s the only one ever cried? You think you’re the only person ever been done wrong?’

  Thistle didn’t say anything to that, just simmered quietly.

  Rhythm undid the clasp on his cuff, rolled the white silk sleeve up to reveal his biceps. Even in the dim light Thistle could make out a row of puckered scars, each about the length of his middle finger. ‘You see these?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘One for each year below. One for each year I never saw sunlight, never smelled grass, never drank water didn’t taste like metal. How many I got on me?’

  ‘Three,’ Thistle said.

  ‘Three,’ Rhythm confirmed. ‘Three fucking years. I went to the pits at seventeen. Was walking out of a bar when a pack of Cuckoos mistook me for someone else, and I was young and full of liquor and I decided to act the big man, ended up touching one of them. Of course he’d put hands on me first, but the magistrate didn’t think that part of the story relevant. Didn’t even let me tell it, just listened to that lying fuck talk about how I was drunk and violent, and then he shook his head and said, three years. And when they say it, it happens right then, not like you get to go around saying goodbyes. That morning I gave my mother a k
iss on the cheek and went out to work, and that was the last I ever saw of her. She was dead by the time I came out. You think you got more right to be angry than me, Thistle? You think you got more right to your hate?’

  Thistle didn’t say anything.

  ‘Ain’t much to think about down below. No way of marking time except by when they feed you, and they weren’t so regular about that. You dig and you think, and you dig and you think. Some guys thought about their women, though you’d have to be an awful fool to imagine she’d wait it out for you, especially since not one in five comes out alive at the end.’ He tapped loudly on the table, as if to make sure that Thistle was listening. ‘Not one in five. Some guys – a lot of guys – all they think about is the wrongness of it, the unfairness. When they get out they’re so full of bile they spew it at everyone they find, end up back below sooner rather than later. That’s what their anger gets them.’ Rhythm stood up from his chair and opened a window. The winter chill came in with it, but Rhythm didn’t seem to notice, or didn’t seem to mind. He leaned his head out and took a deep breath of evening, then sat back down behind his desk. ‘Three years I was down there, Thistle – three long years. And you know what I thought about?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Never going back in. Spending every morning afterwards greeting the light, and maybe doing it in a decent house next to a decent whore. A man like me, he doesn’t get to be angry, he doesn’t have that luxury. A man like me needs to survive. When I picked you out, I thought maybe you were a man like I was, like I am now. Was I wrong in thinking that?’

  Thistle didn’t answer.

  ‘Get out of here,’ Rhythm said. ‘And don’t show up for a few days. Make sure you want to work for me. Make sure that you aren’t just sprinting into the darkness yourself. I don’t pay you to carry a chip around on your shoulder. You can’t brush it off, you’d best find yourself a new line.’

  The money was waiting on the table. Outside the weather had turned from cold and dry to cold and wet, tendrils of sleet curling down from a dark sky. Thistle watched them fall from the shelter of the doorway, tried to figure out somewhere to go.

  Home he dismissed without consideration. The boys would be down at the pumphouse, drinking themselves friendly. But Thistle wasn’t in a friendly mood, didn’t feel like having to dodge Felspar’s constant begging or Treble’s stone-eyed stupidity. Thistle never seemed to want to see the boys these days, spent most of his nights drinking at Isle’s or sitting by the canals. Rat had been the centrepiece of the whole thing, though Thistle had only realised it belatedly. Thistle had made the decisions but the only reason there was anyone to listen to him was because they all liked to be around Rat.

  So Thistle wandered aimlessly upslope, which was a good way to get your head broken, as he well knew. He was dressed pretty enough to draw the attention of any sharp-eyed hard-boys he might pass, twins to Thistle in all but birthplace. Maybe Thistle was even hoping to attract a few, give himself the opportunity to skin a knuckle, lose himself in the rush of speed and violence.

  Lucky for someone, what with the weather the usual packs of scavengers had scattered, and there was no one around to take Thistle’s open challenge. Flakes of snow collected on his dense locks, melted and dripped down onto his jacket. The mud pulled at his boots, seeped into his stockings, left his toes numb. In time he found himself on a part of the Rung he’d never been to before, right up close to the boundary with the Fourth. The blocks of tenements were larger and slightly better kept, though you’d need to be something of an expert in slum architecture to see the difference. The pipes were less oppressive upslope, their sucking sound more restrained.

  Thistle noticed the three men because they were trying so hard not to be noticed, keeping the loudest silence Thistle had ever seen. They gave all evidence of being engaged in some sort of organised mischief, though Thistle struggled to determine the particular species. Closer to middle age than youth, too old to be amidst some errand of casual tomfoolery, but dressed too poorly to be affiliated with the Brotherhood. Porters, probably, not even foremen, though what they would be doing out so late on a night like this, and with such conspicuous secrecy, Thistle had no idea.

  He followed them because he had nothing else to do and because it was fun practice, feeling a professional among amateurs, a wolf among sheep. Spindle had given him some lessons in shadowing, and though Thistle lacked Spindle’s experience he had the advantage of not being noticeably larger than average. For all their pretence of wariness Thistle had no trouble following along behind them, even with the streets all but empty in the dark and cold.

  After one final spasm of pointless caution, they turned quickly down a side street and disappeared into one of the endless crush of warehouses that stacked this portion of the Fifth. Thistle found a spot in the shadows and spent a while looking at the building they had walked into. Two men stood outsidef it in big black cloaks that obscured most of their other details. They didn’t seem unfriendly enough to be engaged in a crime, nor did Thistle notice they were carrying weapons.

  Thistle found himself approaching them, couldn’t exactly have said why. ‘Good evening, brother,’ one said. ‘How can we help you?’

  Thistle nodded inside. ‘I’m here to see the show.’

  The first guard smiled at the second guard, who moved aside to allow Thistle to pass.

  The warehouse smelled of fruit. A crowd of twenty or twenty-five men of distinctly the cheaper sort half filled three ranks of overturned crates. The men he’d been following were sitting up at the front, and didn’t turn round to check on the newcomer. Thistle took a seat on a box at the back – strawberry, to go by its scent – and waited to see what he was waiting for.

  ‘First time, brother?’ the man next to him asked, white-haired and lean, his clothing worn but well repaired.

  Thistle grunted non-committally.

  The man took this as a yes. ‘You’ll remember tonight for ever, brother,’ he said. ‘You’ll remember tonight for the rest of your life.’

  Thistle thought he was going to say more – old men who start talking are generally loath to stop – but instead he turned to face the stage and left Thistle to his thoughts.

  After a few minutes the two guards from outside came in and closed the front door, took up a position beside it. The atmosphere was excited but not at all unpleasant. Still, the sound of that door closing got Thistle to worrying, this whole escapade being ill-considered, pointless at best and possibly more dangerous than he had anticipated. He was kicking himself for his recklessness when the man who had saved his life six months earlier walked in through the back door.

  It was a small stage but he took up all of it. The great sweep of his white hair looked every bit the crown. He wore the same costume Thistle had seen him in the first time, a strangely formal version of the uniform forced on men working below. His eyes were bright blue and he had big, gnarled hands, like a smith or a brawler.

  ‘Everything that you know is a lie,’ he said simply.

  ‘Your name is not your name. Your history is false, your myths doubly so. Your words are the words of another. Your labour feeds the belly of a stranger. You sire children to be chattel. Your breath itself exists in the service of beings to whom you are of less interest and import than an insect. Truly, in all the world, there are none who can claim such abject misery, such utter lack of purpose, such profound and absolute misery, as yourselves. Everything that a man can lose, you have lost.’

  Thistle realised he had been nodding along in rhythm, and that his heart was beating very quickly in his chest.

  ‘Who has done this to you?’ the man asked, still speaking in his steady baritone. ‘Who is at fault?’

  ‘The Four-Fingers!’ yelled a man behind Thistle, a man who’d had something to drink before the meeting, if his slurred words were any indication.

  ‘False!’ the speaker roared suddenly, a clap of sound that echoed through the small enclosure. ‘False!’ he roared again, and the
man who had spoken shrank his head down into his shoulders and looked less than proud.

  But when the orator continued it was in the same easy tone as before. ‘The Birds are no more responsible for your decline than the grapevine is the drunkard’s. It is you and you alone who must be held responsible – you and you alone whose complicity in this injustice demands reproach. You have allowed your memories to be forgotten, you have bent knee to demons. You have accepted your subjugation without complaint, without reproach, without rebellion. Do not look to the Four-Fingers. Do not look to those upslope. You and you alone are responsible for this calamity, and you and you alone have the capacity to remedy it.’

  Thistle could hear the man clearly but found himself leaning forward all the same.

  ‘The Four-Fingers put us beneath the ground – we forgot the light. The Four-Fingers gave us names – we were fool enough to accept them. The Four-Fingers called themselves gods – we chose to worship them. You sit with your hands unfettered, with strength in your arms, with the ancient blood of the west in your veins, and you complain of oppression. Freedom is in your grasp, if only you would take it.’

  One of the men in the side corner, thickly muscled and poorly dressed, had begun to weep, deep-chested sobs of a kind Thistle had never heard a man make before. With one thick fist he beat at his breast in time with the words, not lightly either, an ecstatic act of masochism. His fanaticism fell like seed on fallow earth, and soon half the audience was engaged in similar displays, pulling at the roots of their hair, shaking back and forth.

  ‘No Four-Finger can claim your inheritance. And no Four-Finger can redeem you from bondage. You and you alone must make that choice, must make it again and again, every morning, every evening, every waking moment of the day. I am Edom, First of His Line, chaplain of the Five Fingers,’ he said, holding one hand aloft, each digit splayed wide. ‘If you are unwilling to remain amidst the squalor of your birth; if you demand a right to the wrongs that have been done to you before your grandfather’s grandfather was pulled forth from the womb; if you would rather die than see another generation of our kind be robbed of the future the gods have decreed for them; then you are already one of us, and must but say the words.’