Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1

by Daniel Polansky

  So Calla could appreciate that Bulan might be feeling some flutter of agitation before his meeting with the Aubade. He was dressed in an elaborate suit of robes that he had bought for this occasion, or at least that she could not remember seeing before. They were made from the skin of a spotted animal native to Bulan’s homeland, and they were quite beautiful – though they had been more so before Bulan had sweated through them. ‘In Chazar,’ he said, turning towards her, ‘it is the custom of a man who makes an appointment to show up for that appointment at the time he has made it.’

  ‘In the Roost – which, perhaps it has escaped you, is where you currently reside – it is the custom of the Eternal to do whatever they wish, at whatever moment they wish to. Happily, the Lord of the Red Keep was never one to hold too strongly to tradition, and is generally known to be punctual.’ She slipped her arm underneath his, allowed him to pull her tight. ‘Worry not, Bulan, son of Busir.’

  ‘Worry?’ he said, as if the word was unfamiliar and he hoped to commit it to memory. ‘I am not a man who has ever been troubled by that particular emotion. I am a man, however, who has other things to do today besides squire around your lord.’

  ‘Then a happy day this is for you,’ Calla said, disentangling herself from him and smiling cruelly, ‘because he swiftly approaches.’

  Calla could hear the Aubade before she could see him. A spindly youth came sprinting down the banks of the canal, or at least as close to a sprint as he could manage in such close environs, yelling, ‘A High! A High!’ Pedestrians stopped to watch; even the mad press of business seemed to ease for a moment, the brokers and merchants taking a scant few seconds away from making money to gape in awe at the craft and the thing that rode atop it.

  The ship arrived, finally, the Aubade himself at the prow. Looking at him standing there, his hair-stalks dyed rainbow and cascading down nearly to his ankles, thin robes of silk and samite and silver, three heads taller than the tallest man on the Rung, Calla could hardly condemn the crowd for their rapt attention.

  He alighted from the craft almost before it landed, his leap so smoothly executed that a rumbled gasp made its way through the horde. The Aubade seemed not to notice. ‘Greetings of the sun to you, Calla,’ he said, then turned to her companion. ‘I am correct in believing you to be Bulan?’

  Bulan had been anticipating this moment for a week, and still his courage almost failed him. But he smiled through his awe and dropped smoothly into the Wellborn greeting, performing it with an excellence that spoke of long practice. ‘Good day to you, my Lord of the Red Keep,’ he said. ‘I hope the light finds you well.’

  The Aubade took a long look around at his environs – not a casual glance, but a slow, penetrating gaze, a sincere attempt to grapple with what was in front of him. ‘This is the Perennial Exchange,’ he said, self-evidently.

  ‘It is indeed, my Lord,’ Bulan said. ‘The beating heart of the Rung. Every moment we are speaking a fortune is made or lost, a man thrust upwards to the spiral of his ambitions, or brought crashing down towards disaster and despair. Bulan bids you welcome to his home.’

  ‘The Roost is not your home,’ the Aubade said.

  ‘But the Exchange is not quite the Roost, as you shall see,’ Bulan said, smiling. ‘And anywhere there is money to be made, that place is Bulan’s home, as surely as once was the belly of his mother.’

  The Aubade made no comment, except to motion to Calla, and Calla turned and nodded at Bulan, and Bulan bowed again and walked deeper into the thick of the market. He was an excellent guide, it soon become clear, offering a running commentary on the stalls that they passed – what they sold and to whom they sold it, the origin of their goods and their likely final destination. To hear him speak there was no trader, merchant, exporter or vendor who Bulan did not feel to be running his business with at least partial incompetence. Everything was an opportunity to Bulan, every sale made was one that he could have handled more skilfully, were he not already busy with his other labours.

  ‘Tell me, Bulan,’ the Aubade began while looking through the stock of a bead merchant, twirling his hands through the long strings of multicoloured shell and glass that hung down from the awning. The owner was a Dycian woman, or at least she looked Dycian, dark and heavy; and unlike more or less everyone else that they had seen on the Third Rung, she did not seem particularly impressed by the presence of the Aubade in her establishment. ‘You are a man well travelled, yes? You have seen something of the diversity of your species?’

  ‘If I would be too polite to claim such, I am not so humble as to refuse it if offered.’

  ‘What do you think of the Salucians?’

  ‘Rich,’ Bulan said. ‘Rich from their plantations and their ore. And cunning – everything they say has two meanings and both are likely to be lies. But they lack courage – or perhaps they simply have faith in their friends.’

  ‘The Dycians?’

  ‘Clever,’ Bulan said. ‘Sharp traders and good pirates. Arrogant as well, unbelievably arrogant, given that they live with the Aelerians’ boot on their neck. Though if you meet one, you’d best avoid mentioning that fact unless you are very quick with a knife.’

  ‘And the Aelerians?’

  ‘They are loud, and boastful, and often speak nonsense, and soon you come very close to discounting them altogether – but then they do something so clever that you begin to wonder if their earlier foolishness was not a feint. They cannot haggle, but they have more of everything than everyone else, and can sell it cheaper, so it doesn’t matter. The wharves of their capital are flooded with the furs and amber of the March lords, and now the fruits and spices of the Baleferic Isles. Behind all of their demands is a naked pike, and the hard men who carry them. And they are proud – by Enkedri, how they are proud. They accept no insult, brood upon every injury until they can repay it tenfold.’

  ‘And Those Above?’ Calla asked.

  Bulan smiled but did not answer, and they walked onward.

  There seemed neither rhyme nor reason in what caught the Lord’s fancy, or least none that Calla could detect. He would pass rows of stalls selling the most exquisite silks or jewellery, only to spend half an hour inspecting a butcher shop. Twice he instructed Calla to purchase the entirety of a store’s stock, glorious, shining days for the owners, the sort of windfall that one might dream of but would be a fool to expect.

  After they had bought out the contents of a small glassware dealership, the Aubade halted abruptly in front of a squat, wooden building with a sign displaying a fat man holding a bag of coin and a flagon. ‘This is what you would call a bar?’

  ‘Or a tavern, or a public house.’

  ‘Are these part of the Exchange?’ he asked.

  Bulan laughed. ‘They are the very heart of it! These hand-to-hand transactions, these petty vendors –’ He made a dismissive gesture. ‘The real money is made wholesale, not a half-dozen necklaces sold to passers-by, but the raw silver ore to make them. And what better place to discuss the specifics of a deal than a tavern? If you come away victorious, you are only a few steps from a celebratory libation; but should success fail to crown your efforts, you are no further distance from succour.’

  The Aubade listened to Bulan finish his speech, and then without saying anything to indicate his intentions walked quickly inside. Bulan and Calla followed swiftly.

  The restaurants and drinking establishments that Calla usually visited were on the First and Second Rungs – quiet, well stocked, beautiful little places, where a few glasses of wine could be consumed quietly by soft candlelight. The Fat Man, or the Happy Sot, or the Banker’s Draft, or whatever this bar was named, was of an entirely different sort. It was large enough to hold a hundred people comfortably and had no doubt often held far more than that, alcoholics and lechers and happy-seeming whores. At this time however, just after the hour of the Kite, it was mostly empty, a few hardened alcoholics waiting in the wings, the single employee a smiling man behind the counter who nearly went into fits w
hen the Aubade made his appearance.

  Calla whisked the Lord away to one of the far tables and Bulan ordered a flagon of red wine and a few skewers of grilled meat. It was impossible for the Aubade to consume anything that had also been prepared for the consumption of humans, even had the quality of the fare approached his standards – which of course it did not. But he seemed to be enjoying himself all the same, inspecting the environs and watching Calla and Bulan consume their order. At the very least he did not seem bored, which was rare for an Eternal.

  ‘Tell me, Bulan,’ he said, ‘of your homeland.’

  Bulan smiled, poured himself some more wine. ‘She misses me,’ he said. ‘From across the eastern sea, I can still hear her call for my return.’

  ‘And you? Do you not miss it as well?’

  ‘I miss her every day, my Lord,’ Bulan said, no longer smiling. ‘I miss the blossoms in the springtime, and the prayer calls that go out from the temple of the One God. I miss the food, for there is much to say of this city but honesty bids me add that there is not a single soul living here who is capable of correctly cooking lamb. I miss hearing the words of my own tongue spoken, and I miss my sisters and my mother, who weeps for me every evening, and prays for me at daybreak.’

  ‘Then what is it that has brought you so far from Chazar?’ the Aubade asked, with what seemed to Calla to be true interest. ‘What has brought all of you, this vast assortment of the human species, from the joys of hearth and home?’

  ‘Yes, Bulan,’ Calla said, having drunk enough at this point to be feeling cheeky. ‘What could possibly tempt you to remain so far from the pleasures of your country?’

  Bulan was as quick-witted a man as ever she had come across, cleverer even in speech than in thought, and he was not at all a dullard. But he waited for a time before answering. ‘The fifth ship.’

  The Aubade thought this over for a moment. ‘A curious answer.’

  ‘I am here in the Roost to set up a factor as a clearing-house for my own goods, so that I don’t have to pay one of the larger interests a gods-damned third, which is what they charge.’ He looked bitter for a moment, then shrugged. ‘What I will charge also, once I am up and running. And when it is in place I will be able to send my small fleet of trading vessels further afield than ever before, and have a place to store my stock until it has reached its peak price.’

  ‘But still I have not heard tell of this fifth ship,’ the Aubade said.

  Bulan smiled. ‘Next year I will have five ships making the western run – down to Aeleria, then out to old Dycia, then back to the Roost, then the long voyage home to Chazar.’ He held up five fingers, each ringed and manicured and slightly plump. ‘A pair of these will never return –’ he bent two digits down into his palm ‘– lost on the shoals or taken by pirates. I have a full bond on all of them, ships and cargo, though of the two I will lose, only one will ultimately pay out. Of the remaining three ships, one will meet with foul weather off the coast of Calabar, have to spend the winter in port, won’t return until the summer after next. And I’ll have to pay the crew extra for their time, and some of the stock will have rotted, and I’ll be lucky to make a profit of two against five.’

  ‘Are you sure you would not do better as a porter?’ Calla asked. ‘I could arrange something for you, if you’d like.’

  ‘That was three,’ the Aubade said, uninterested in Calla’s attempt at humour, if he was aware of it.

  ‘Then one sunny afternoon in mid-autumn, when I am growing very worried that perhaps this year the One God has forgotten my piety, and the sacrifices I have made to him, and will not even allow me my two ships safe – on that afternoon a boy will appear at the front door of my office, excited near to death, and I will give him a silver without even letting him speak, and bet him another that I’ll be the first to reach the docks.’ He closed his hand and slammed it against the table. ‘And though my feet touch wharf stone ahead of his, I’ll pay up all the same. And with that one ship, Fortune’s Smile, perhaps, or the Lover’s Breath, with the goods in her belly – fistfuls of black pepper from Dycia, furs from the Marches, metalwork from Aeleria – with these I will have enough to recoup my losses in their entirety. To pay off my men, to refurbish my ships and replenish my stocks.’

  ‘And the fifth ship?’ Calla asked.

  Bulan leaned towards Calla, took her hand with the one he had been using to count imaginary caravels. ‘With what I make on the fifth ship, dearest, I will buy a sixth ship. And next spring, when the great harbour at Atil is filled with our vast merchant fleet, and the high priest of the One God comes to bless our fortunes, and the scions of the great merchant families – the Slate Bank and Blackrose and Ieseph’s Sons, and the Chazarian branches of the Dycian counting houses – when they tour along the wharves they will see what I have built, from one rickety dhow that my father nearly sold for drink. And they will nod to me, and comment on the weather, and I will return their pleasantries in kind, and pretend I have forgotten all the insults they did me when I was too small and weak to return them. And they will pretend that they have forgotten offering them as well, and vie with each other to compliment my business acumen, though my fleet of six will yet be nothing compared to their vast resources, and my income barely a trickle against their river. And do you know why?’

  ‘No,’ the Aubade said.

  ‘Because I hunger. Because their appetites were sated before ever they were born, by their father or grandfather before them, while I sprang from the womb ravenous, a cannibal, with no thought for anything but my own fortune. And in the year after that I will send out eight ships, and the year after that twelve, and then fifteen. And soon I’ll have enough capital to give bond on the voyages of others, and to trade in hard currency. To build a mansion in the western hills, and to marry my daughters off to foreign princelings.’ For a moment Bulan was lost in dreams of wealth uncounted, of thick golden ingots and eagle-headed coins. He shook that away and turned back towards the Aubade. ‘But first,’ he said, ‘comes the fifth ship.’

  ‘And will that be enough?’ the Aubade asked. ‘When you have your fifth ship, and your sixth ship after that, and your trading house, and your mansion in the western hills, will that be enough for you?’

  ‘Nothing will ever be enough for Bulan, son of Busir,’ Bulan said, and whether it was the drink or the conversation, he seemed to be enjoying himself a great deal. ‘I will heap stone atop stone until the end, I will build until I can draw breath no longer. And if the One God is good, I will pass it on to my sons, who will be fierce and bright as Bulan, though as beautiful as their mother.’ He shot a sidelong glance at Calla that made her heart skip, but then continued. ‘And they will go forth full of fire to make a mockery of my efforts, that they may say to themselves, as all men wish, that their father was no better man than they. And the house of Bulan will grow and grow and grow, until it is a byword, in every port in every country in the world, for wealth and for style and for excellence.’ Then he smiled, shrugged, finished off what was in his goblet. ‘Or perhaps they will squander my fortune on women and strong liquor. I will be dead by then, and not likely to care much either way.’

  The Aubade did not say anything for a long time. The Aubade did not say anything for such a long time, in fact, that had he not been the Aubade one might have interrupted his thoughts, or at least fidgeted in one’s seat. Calla kept absolutely still, of course.

  ‘I would give you something, Bulan, son of Busir,’ the Aubade said finally. ‘For your story.’ From inside one of the pockets of his robe he pulled out a brooch. The outside was pure gold, which would have made it valuable enough on its own, but the crux of the thing was the elaborate clockwork centrepiece, which showed a ship sailing across the waves. The background changed gradually, noon to night-time, and the waters went from turbulent to calm, but still the ship moved forward. It was clearly Eternal craftsmanship; no human could have hoped to create such a masterpiece.

  Calla had seen enough of their like not to
gasp at its beauty, but she did not blame Bulan for his lack of similar composure. ‘I assure you, my Lord, that neither thanks nor reward is necessary. It was an honour to have shown you more of your domain.’

  ‘That was not a request,’ the Aubade said.

  Bulan needed no further persuasion. He ducked his head low, took the brooch from the Lord’s hand. ‘Thank you, my Lord,’ he said, staring at the clockwork ship as it struggled its way through the waves. ‘I will treasure it always.’

  ‘It is no less than your services merit,’ the Aubade said. But despite the gift, the Lord’s good humour seemed to have evaporated, and it was not long afterwards that he stood abruptly and walked out of the bar.

  Calla still had half a glass of wine to finish, but of course she stood up also and went to follow after the Lord. ‘Speak soon,’ she said to Bulan.

  Bulan had not yet bothered to affix the brooch, which he stared at for a moment before answering. ‘Until then, Calla of the Red Keep.’

  Despite having been run in rings for the last few hours in a territory he had never before seen, the Aubade knew exactly where his ship lay. They did not speak, not until they were both seated beneath the back awning, their rowers marking time ceaselessly upstream. ‘Was the afternoon a success, my Lord?’ Calla asked.

  ‘It taught me much about your species,’ the Aubade said. He turned back to watch the Exchange for a moment. The coming of evening had slowed the place only very slightly; no one was yet bothering to break down their stands, and the press of the crowds seemed almost as mad as ever. Young boys carried trays of tea and sweet pastries, moving through the mob deftly and with speed. Men yelled and thrust their chests forward into each other until violence seemed certain, and then one would shrug and they would shake hands in agreement. Everything seeking to eat or be eaten, ever moving, ever changing, at once unsure of itself and certain of its future.