Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1

by Daniel Polansky

  That was the last thing that Jon the Sanguine had taught Bas, taught him early one morning beneath a cattle-hide yurt amidst the endless and unchanging plains that only now, after he felt certain he would never see them again, Bas realised he thought of as home. A scream cutting through the air, and Bas sprinting into the man’s tent ahead of even Jon’s subaltern, and the boot on the ground and a reed-snake with Jon’s knife in it, a spectacular throw though it would do no good. Jon looking up at him with eyes full of fear, because he knew as sure as Bas did that there was no cure for what had just bitten him. Waiting for the leg to swell up, Jon becoming less and less coherent and more and more bitter until he couldn’t do anything but curse at the men he had spent his life beside, and the sun and the sky and the grass that he was soon to leave. And then even that being taken away from him, till he could do nothing but scream in agony, and then moan piteously. And then nothing, a ditch dug in a trackless flatland and a stone monument that would wear away before the winter.

  Jon the Sanguine was a genius, and a legend, and perhaps even a hero, if you had Aelerian blood in your veins and you weren’t too careful about how you used the word. But most of all, Jon the Sanguine was dead. Dead in a strange land, dead without anyone to mourn him. A corpse, as Bas would find himself in the not so very distant future.

  Well – it was the way of flesh, and in the meantime, Bas had work to do. He grabbed a passing subaltern. ‘Get Isaac and the rest of the commanders,’ he said. ‘Tell them to assemble in my tent in fifteen minutes. We have a war to plan.’

  Einnes was to accompany them, was she? At the very least, Bas would make certain she got a show.

  37

  The morning was overcast and grey, as was appropriate to the mood and purpose of the gathering. Virtually the entirety of the Eternal population of the Roost had come out to watch the proceedings, a greater number than Calla had ever seen concentrated in one place. The atmosphere was one of subdued anticipation; if not quite festival-like, then too close to festival-like given what was to come. The Wright was there, and the Glutton. The Lord Bristle and the Lady of the Azure Seat and the Lord of the Verdant Gardens. The Lord of the Ivory Towers and the Lady of the East Estates sat near the front, twinned together since the night of their union. The Shrike had shown up early, not long after Calla had arrived, anxious to assure himself of the best possible seat. Not for the first time Calla realised how much she hated him, the taste sour on her tongue.

  Calla stood on the side of the course, watching the Aubade make his final preparations. He had risen at dawn, as on any other day, eaten a light repast and left quickly for the armoury, a spacious hall located in the east wing. Though he had a reputation as one of the fiercest of all the High, the Aubade almost never visited his collection and had not added to it in Calla’s memory. Then again he hardly needed to; there was row after row of elaborate suits of heavy plate and display cases filled with different sorts of weaponry. The armourer was a grizzled man with copper skin and ugly eyes who clearly took the maintenance of the collection seriously. To Calla there seemed to be little difference between one suit and the next, but this she soon realised was sheer ignorance, as the Aubade and his smith quickly became engaged in a running discussion about the relative merits of each, how one would do better against the head of a mace but less so against a sword, and did the Lord know whether the Prime would be using a single-headed lance or one with several points, and she was widely famed for her skill with a flail, and perhaps a wider shield would be better. He had settled finally on one of the less elaborate pieces in his collection, interlocking plates of Roost-forged steel, a bright blue base with golden trim. Attached to the back was a framework of filigreed silver fitted with freshly plucked peacock feathers. His helmet was an unadorned basinet, with a small opening in the back through which his hair would be braided. Still unable to make a decision regarding his arms, he ordered the armourer to assemble a selection of different weapons and to cart them all to the courses.

  Then it was on to his stable, to repeat the process with the chief groomswoman and her charges. Though here, at least, the choice was simpler. The Aubade had no particular favourite among his many instruments of death, but he had one horse that he prized above all others, a huge mare the colour of silver. The horses of the Roost were larger than any other breed, larger and far more fierce – the Red Keep had lost three equerries in the past five years to the seemingly random savagery of the creatures, and Calla made sure to stand as far from them as etiquette would allow.

  And after all that bustle, they had journeyed by boat to the courses, the equipment and the beast to follow. The Aubade had spent a few minutes investigating the grounds, but then he had retired to a small pavilion at one end of the field. He had shut himself inside alone, and what he was doing there Calla couldn’t say. That had been the hour of the Starling, and little had happened since, giving Calla plenty of time for reflection – or at least enough time to exacerbate all of her worries and concerns, though unfortunately not enough to come to a resolution with any of them.

  The previous night Calla had seen what she was confident would be the last of Bulan, son of Busir. Tourmaline had knocked on her door well after dinner, when Calla had been released to her quarters. Calla had the book in front of her but wasn’t able to work. For once she was happy for Tourmaline’s interruption.

  ‘Your sir is at the entrance, mistress,’ she explained breathlessly. ‘The gatekeeper won’t mind keeping it a secret, miss, but you’d best hurry, as he gets off soon and the night man is a drunkard and a gossip.’

  Calla wrapped a shawl round her shoulders and went out to discover what it was that had brought Bulan to her home so unexpectedly. ‘You forget yourself, sir,’ she said playfully when she saw him, standing in the shadow of a side entrance. ‘You’ll give me quite the reputation, showing up so late in the evening.’

  But for once Bulan seemed in no mood to banter. ‘Leave here with me,’ he said.

  ‘That’s very little of a joke, and I am renowned for my sense of humour.’

  ‘Do not pretend you think me such a fool as to have bribed the guards to enter the First Rung after nightfall, then sneaked here like a common footpad out of some misplaced sense of coquetry. I know you find this intrusive. I’m hoping you’ll forgive the violation. Indeed, I am hoping you will make a more serious one.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Leave here with me, tonight. Pack no bag and tell no one. Take my hand as if we were to go for a stroll. I have a palanquin waiting to take us to the docks. One of my galleys lies in port at this moment. In three hours we can be at sea, bound for my homeland,’ he said, ‘our ship piloted by a captain who would die before revealing my secrets, and a crew too ignorant to have any idea who you are. I would rather not speak of the life we might have there – you have known me long enough not to be ignorant of my qualities, good or bad. But if you require guarantees of some sort, know that I would make them without hesitation.’

  ‘What has possessed you to speak such foolishness? I am the Seneschal of the Lord of the Red Keep himself, my home is the stuff of dreams. What could you possibly offer me that could match the splendour that is mine by birth?’

  ‘Survival,’ Bulan hissed. ‘It is very bright here, and very beautiful. But do not let it blind you to the future, which comes more swiftly than we realise, and which is often more terrible than we imagine.’

  ‘I take it you have heard the results of Conclave,’ Calla said. ‘And it is true, the Prime is known to be a deft hand with a lance. But there are none to match the Aubade with blade or axe, and I would be a poor servant indeed if I removed myself from his service in the hour of his greatest need.’

  ‘This duel is a pinprick compared to the river of blood that this city will see in the coming months.’

  It took Calla a struggling moment to pick her way through this. ‘You mean this war that Aeleria has declared?’ She shrugged her shoulders. In truth she had all but forgotten the cause
of the fight, so absorbed was she in the fact of it. ‘What of it?’

  ‘The Aelerians will march into Salucia, and the Eternal will be drawn in against them.’

  ‘Yes, yes, as they did twenty years ago.’

  ‘This time will not be like the last. The Aelerians will shatter Those Above, and then they will take the Roost and everything in it.’

  Calla spent a moment reflecting on two unpleasant possibilities. The first was that Bulan was quite irreparably mad, and somehow she had missed the signs during the half-year of their acquaintanceship, despite the long hours spent gossiping over wine and the longer hours spent cocooned in bed. A horrifying circumstance, because of what it said about Bulan and because of what it said about her. The second possibility, of course, was far more disturbing; that Bulan was as clever as she had always taken him to be, and that his predictions contained more than a grain of truth.

  Calla chose to believe the former. ‘You speak nonsense.’

  ‘How many Eldest are there in the whole city?’ Bulan asked. ‘Six thousand? Eight? How many are born each year? There are more men in one thema than there are Four-Fingers above ground. They have not yet reached out and crushed you because they are slow to realise their strength, like a boy just grown to manhood.’ He took her by the shoulders and forced her gaze upwards, to his. ‘But they will not remain so ignorant for long. The Aelerians will be at the gates of the Roost within two years, mark every word I speak. And they will be inside them soon after.’

  She put her hand up against his chest, pushed him away softly. ‘No doubt the Aelerians thought the same the last time. But they were wrong then, as now. You have seen them,’ Calla continued, as if trying to explain something obvious to a child. ‘They are better than us, stronger and more perfect. Who is there to match the Lord in might, in speed, in fierce purpose?’

  ‘No three men alive,’ Bulan said confidently. ‘No five men. But ten? Twelve? Twenty? War is not a series of duels, is not fought on groomed land as tomorrow’s contest will be. There are more Aelerians under arms than there are wasps in a hive, and no wasp has anything on them for savagery.’

  And perhaps what he was saying seemed plausible enough to make Calla angry. ‘You speak nonsense. No human army has ever defeated Those Above, not in all the time that ever was, not before the Founding or since.’

  ‘Everything is impossible, until it happens.’

  ‘The Roost is more than Those Above. There are hundreds of thousands of humans in this city, countless numbers – do you imagine they will stand idly by while their homes are destroyed?’

  ‘The Roost is the most perfect thing in existence,’ Bulan admitted. ‘There is nothing that has ever been built to rival it, and I doubt greatly that there ever will be. Built with five-fingered hands, built with their toil, maintained by their labour, their sweat, their blood. Well and good,’ he went on swiftly, cutting off Calla before she could object, ‘it is the way of the world. My galleys are crewed by debtors and foreign slaves, captives taken in war. But I do not suppose them my friends, or the evil I do to them a kindness. They would have my head if they were able to take it, and I could hardly complain of ill-treatment.’

  ‘Do you think me a slave?’ Calla asked, almost startled at the concept. She turned her hand towards the east gardens, the warm spring breeze carrying with it the smell of holly and rose petal. In the distance Calla could hear the soft strains of a psaltery, sweet and faint and desperately beautiful. ‘This is paradise, Bulan. This is what you foreign-born would call heaven.’

  ‘And you cannot leave it.’

  ‘I do not want to,’ Calla insisted, though she knew this was not quite the same thing.

  ‘Do you think every human in the Roost is the Seneschal of the Red Keep? When the Aelerians come anyone not living on the First Rung will rise up with them, and the fine things you have will mark you as their enemy. The Roost will drown in blood, and you with it.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ Calla said. ‘The Roost is eternal.’

  ‘Nothing is eternal,’ Bulan hissed. ‘All that is green will one day grow black. I have heard stories of what the Aelerians did to Dycia, Calla. I would not have you suffer the same.’

  And now they were well past the point where Calla could pretend that her lover was a madman, or a fool. What he said made more sense than Calla wished – perhaps even echoed currents of her own thoughts, currents she had ignored or suppressed. She thought for a moment of the boy the Shrike had killed, and then she thought about how long it had been since she had thought of him. Was the whole city like that? A den of animals, made brutal through mistreatment, held at bay only through the naked threat of force?

  It couldn’t be. She did not believe it. She would not. ‘This has been the home of my family since before the Aelerians came from the south. Before the first cornerstone was laid in Dycia, before the Salucians yet knew the working of metal.’ Calla leaned in, allowed Bulan to take her in his arms, kissed him smoothly and with all the passion she could summon. He seemed to sense that this would be their last embrace, responded in kind. When it was over she took a small step backwards, stared up into his deep, brown eyes. ‘The Roost will never fall,’ she said. ‘But if it does, I will be buried in the rubble.’

  Bulan looked at her for a moment, breathed in deeply as if to continue the argument. But then he exhaled, his shoulders sinking downward, and they stared at each other for a long, silent moment. ‘Farewell, Calla of the Red Keep,’ he said at last, then turned abruptly and headed back the way he had come.

  ‘May the sun shine on you, Bulan, son of Busir!’ Calla said to his back. But he did not turn to look at her, or make any sign that he had heard.

  It had been a long night, afterwards. There were many reasons she should be unable to sleep and she counted all of them, staring up at her ceiling until the first flickering rays of light shone in through her window.

  Calla brought her mind back to the present, fought through the clinging scraps of memory. It was undignified, a woman of her age being upended by the disappearance of a lover. Who was Bulan, to have affected her so? How many men had she brought to her bedchamber over the years, handsomer and of finer quality? At the end of the evening, there was only so much one could expect from a foreigner.

  The Lord had left his tent to inspect the weapons that had been brought from the Red Keep. He seemed to settle on one, said something to the armourer and then moved to approach her. Even clad in his elaborate suit of armour he walked in almost unbroken silence, and Calla was so caught up in her thoughts that she didn’t notice him until they were nearly face to face.

  ‘The Lord of the Sidereal Citadel has agreed to take on the contents of the eyrie, animal and human, should it become necessary. The aquatic creatures as well, though he will need to add another wing to his property. I doubt there will be any interest in the apiary. It is not truly first-rate, I suppose, for all that I have worked to make it so. I am no kind of apiarist, if truth is to be valued more than kindness.’

  ‘You have many other qualities to boast of, my Lord.’

  ‘The Prime has of course agreed to take you into her service, should the circumstances necessitate it. I’ve spoken accurately of your quality, and am sure she will find you a suitable position. She would be a fine mistress.’

  Calla would draw a razor across her wrist rather than spend the rest of her life as a toady in the house of the Eldest that had killed her master, though it would be a far easier lot than most of the rest of the Lord’s household would enjoy. Without a High to serve they would be banished from the First Rung, forced to seek what shelter they could find downslope. Some of the more skilled might find work on the middle Rungs, but the larger portion, the domestics and the labourers, would find themselves dragged down to the very roots of the city, forced to make ends meet any miserable way they could. The Red Keep would be stripped of what treasures the other Eldest decided to take and then left to rot, another once great estate lost to time. The gardens would be
overrun with weeds, the flowerbeds would lie fallow, the animals unsecured. No banners would flutter from the Lord’s battlements, no songs grace his halls. The crows and pigeons would make their homes where gods had once resided.

  The thought of this, and of the combat soon to come, seemed not to have caused the Aubade any discomfort. His eyes were unclouded; he betrayed no hint of worry or concern. He motioned to the servants who assisted him with his war gear: big men, brawny and dark-skinned. They led the Lord’s horse out from its stall, walking it at the very end of a long chain, careful not to get within reach of its hooves or its cruel-looking teeth.

  The Aubade vaulted atop it without assistance, though it was even taller at the shoulder than he was. ‘Try and find a mate,’ he said, leaning down from his horse. ‘It would please me to think that your line will continue.’

  It wasn’t until the Aubade had reached his mark that Calla realised this last comment, uttered quietly enough that only she could have heard it, had been delivered in the High Tongue.

  The Wright had been agreed upon as an appropriate arbiter, and he stood on a dais in the centre of the field, to be removed once he had finished speaking. He was dressed plainly, or at least as plainly as Those Above seemed capable, his robes the colour of rain clouds. ‘Siblings,’ he cried, and his voice was tremendously loud, loud enough to be heard in the back rows and to injure Calla’s ears from where she was near the front. ‘A challenge has been offered. A challenge has been accepted. Can the challenge be retracted?’ He turned towards the Prime.

  ‘It cannot.’

  ‘Can the challenge be rejected?’