Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2

Book 2: The Empty Throne

by Daniel Polansky

Genres: Fantasy; Science Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

For centuries beyond counting, humanity has served the Others, god-like Eternals who rule from their cloud-capped mountain-city, building a civilization of unimagined beauty and unchecked viciousness. But all that is about to change. Bas Alyates, grizzled general of a thousand battles, has assembled a vast army with which to contend with the might of Those Above. Eudokia, Machiavellian matriarch and the power behind the Empty Throne, travels to the Roost, nominally to play peacemaker - but in fact to inspire the human population toward revolt. Deep in the dark byways of the mountain's lower tiers, the urchin Pyre leads a band of fanatical revolutionaries in acts of terrorism against their inhuman oppressors. Against them, Calla, handmaiden of the Eternals' king, fights desperately to stave off the rising tide of violence which threatens to destroy her beloved city. The story begun in Those Above comes to a stunning conclusion in this unforgettable battle for the hearts and minds of the human race, making The Empty Throne the most exciting epic fantasies of recent times.

Release date: March 10, 2016

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 368

Sample

Two men came walking past first, porters or one-time porters, thick legs and bent backs and mean eyes. They spent a long moment silently scrutinising Seed and Dray and Quail. They didn’t make any threats, except in so far as their presence was a threat; their very existence was a threat.

Seed made sure to look straight back at them, without blinking or bowing his head. They were looking for moles, agents of the Those Above, and Seed was most certainly not that – just your average Fifth Rung slum kid, about at that age when it was time to get marked as a porter, or to get work on the plantations outside of the city. No different from ten thousand others on the lowest levels of the Roost, strutting about in worn pants during the late afternoon, faces dirty, looking to get forget-yourself drunk. He was big and he was tough, but there were plenty boys bigger and plenty men tougher; the Fifth Rung was the sort of place that bred rowdies and brutes and straight-up killers in great profusion. The only thing that made him noteworthy – and this might have been stretching the point – was his busted eye, the lid drooping, the iris lazy and unresponsive. He had never been a handsome man but there was a difference between being homely and being deformed, a difference he had had a long time to ponder in the two and a half years since a Barrow boy had beaten the scars into his face.

Dray and Quail couldn’t even claim that distinction, if being made ugly enough that you couldn’t get a woman to look at you without a couple of tertarum in your hand was a distinction. Seed did not think it was; in fact he thought it was quite the opposite. Seed thought what had been done to his face was the sort of thing worth holding a grudge about, and he thought also that there was no point in holding on to a grudge when you could even it up. This was the reason that he was standing against the wall of a run-down building a few minutes’ walk from the docks, getting eyeballed by a pair of Dead Pigeons.

One of the soldiers nodded, and then they both headed back upslope, and a moment later Thistle came strutting past, and whatever doubts Seed had about his errand were forgotten at the first sight of that arrogant smile, those eyes that were heavy and cold as a stone unearthed from the bottom of a riverbed. ‘Hello, brothers,’ he said. Seed couldn’t remember if he had ever heard him talk before; Seed didn’t think so. Seed didn’t like the fact that he liked his voice, which was deep and slow and seemed to emanate from somewhere far within his chest. ‘Walk with me.’

Thistle turned and headed east, headed east without looking back, and Seed hated him all over again, hated him as much for his arrogance as for what he had done to Seed’s eye.

Of course they’d been hearing rumours about the Five-Fingers for years – you could always find men foolish or mad enough to dream and even speak of retribution and rebellion and revolution, as you could find men foolish or mad enough to speak of climbing up the sky and casting the sun down to earth. The Fifth Rung had no shortage of inebriates and lunatics. But then, you couldn’t exactly call them madmen, not this last year, not with half the docks attending their secret rallies, not with all the whispers you heard of bulging coffers and gangs of well-trained hard boys. Rumours are like smoke of course, but still, you smell enough of it and you’d be wise to start looking for fire. And amidst the many other stories that spread swift across the lower Rungs, there was one of Pyre, the First of His Line, leader of the militant wing of the Five-Fingered.

Dead Pigeons they were called, after their preferred form of intimidation, birds left bleeding on the doorsteps of their opponents. To murder an avian was a capital offence in the Roost, as far as the authorities were concerned one more serious than theft or assault, worse than rape, worse even than carrying a weapon. A man mad enough to do that publicly was a man mad enough to do anything, and moreover a man who knew where you lived.

If this lesson went unheeded, they had other ways of making their point. A Cuckoo on the Fourth Rung renowned for a particularly severe brand of sadism was found butchered one morning in the whorehouse that he had frequented. A notoriously corrupt bureaucrat, famed even by the standards of his kind for avarice, cupidity and licentiousness, went missing on his way upslope one evening. He showed up two days later absent the small fingers on both of his hands and talking of nothing but redemption, of his own evils and what he would do to make up for them, talking of it loudly and frequently in the main thoroughfare running along the docks, having traded wealth and iniquity for the life of a penniless preacher. There were others – men disappeared into the sewers and men made silent from fear of such, and soon the Cuckoos, the Roost’s human guard, had come to speak quietly rather than with their characteristic belligerence, and would not go out in the evening except in the company of their fellows, eyes roaming and hands tight about their ferules.

It was to Pyre that this change was attributed, and the first bounty had gone out on his head a year past: five golden eagles, the Eternal currency, used only by those directly in their employ, the seneschals and high servants. Five golden eagles was more money than a man on the Fifth Rung would earn in a grim lifetime of labour, and though it doubled and then doubled and then doubled again, still it was not enough to bring word of Pyre’s location to the men who sought him harm. The Fifth did not give up its secrets so casually.

Seed did not care about any of that. The Five-Fingers could hold hands with the Four and jump in the bay so far as he was concerned. Seed had never given a thought to politics, never even given a thought that someone might. Life at the docks was personal, it started with your best friend and it ended with your worst enemy, and the distance between them was a few minutes’ walk.

Thistle led them towards one of the pumphouses, part of the vast engine that leeched water out of the bay and sent it, some several cables, some practical infinity, upslope. The pumps were what gave the Fifth its character, if by character you meant an unpleasant smell of wet and an ever-present slurping sound, like a drunken fart. Two men were half-lounging around outside it; not the sort of thing a passing Cuckoo would have flagged but Seed could tell them for what they were: more security for the boy-king of the Fifth Rung. One of them was large and dark and held Seed’s eyes unflinchingly, then opened the door swiftly and allowed them entrance.

Inside was a small stone chamber covered with a thick layer of junk and debris, for in years past the pumphouse had been the gathering place of the neighbourhood children, to get drunk and to boast and to try to while away the impoverished hours of their pointless lives. There was a thick pallet in the centre of the room that Thistle was even then removing, revealing a hole leading down into the earth.

‘The sewers?’ Dray asked, voice wavering, and even Seed, for a moment, looked less than firm. Because despite living surrounded by this great web of piping the men and women of the Fifth had no real idea of how the thing worked, except that sometimes it was filled with water and sometimes it was not, and when it was full then anything inside it would most assuredly be dead. There was a pumphouse near where Seed lived; it was a rite of passage to descend beneath it and swim across the subterranean river below, a journey of no more than five minutes, tip to tail, but even so everyone made sure to do it just after the last heavy flow had subsided, when the risk of flood was minimal. Seed figured that most of the rest of the boys on the Fifth must have a similar sort of ritual, and most of them displayed the same sort of prudence. There were a lot of ways to die, as Seed reckoned, and none of them seemed very good, but there weren’t many that seemed worse than being caught below ground once the slurps started going heavy, the rats screaming and trying to escape, you screaming and doing the same and both of you failing.

But Thistle didn’t hesitate, not for even a second, and it was this that made Seed capable of doing the same, though Quail and Dray blanched white as chalk and were a long slow time following them down.

Seed descended hand over hand, and after a few rungs the darkness had grown all-consuming. He could not make out Thistle beneath him, nor the leather of his boots, nor the ladder in front of him nor the hands that held it.

‘Don’t fear, brothers.’ Thistle’s voice, ringing clearly from the black. ‘Our people have laboured beneath the mountain in days beyond memory, and she has not forgotten us. The demons live atop her and think they know her secrets – as if the owner knows more of a house than its tenant!’

Thistle had a lantern lit and hung before Seed made it all the way down, but its dim light failed to reach to the high far corners of the chamber. At either end were heavy floodgates, drop-walls of thickly forged iron. At different points in the day, according to no particular rhythm that anyone on the Fifth ever managed to figure, those gates would close, and the chamber would be flooded. This was not Seed’s foremost concern at the moment, however. In the dim light he could see the waters rushing down towards the bay, and the stone walls covered with moss, and also that Thistle was carrying a knife long enough to reasonably be called a sword. It must have been hidden beneath the travelling cloak that hung now next to the lantern, and Seed stared at it so nakedly and for so long that he thought Thistle must now be certain of his purpose, if he hadn’t already deduced it.

‘I welcome you then to the abode of the Five-Fingers. Perhaps it does not look like much, but it is ours, brothers, yours and mine, and a shack freely owned is better than a mansion entailed.’

There were three of them against Thistle’s one, was what Seed was thinking, and all three of them were carrying blades. But they were small things, shivs really, bits of sharpened metal they had found or stolen. The way Thistle rested his hand on his own weapon made Seed think that neither their knives nor their numbers would do them much good.

But it was too late to back out now – probably Thistle wouldn’t let him leave, anyway, and there were still those men waiting outside, likely with the same kind of weapon as Thistle was carrying, likely no less skilled. And then the thought of seeing the sun again, of the light shining on Seed and on the shame as yet unanswered, proved enough to spur him onward.

‘I guess you don’t remember me.’ He had said it a thousand times in his mind, a thousand times a thousand, and it had never sounded so foolish or so hollow.

‘Of course I remember – did you think that I would lead three strangers into our headquarters, what with half of our besotted species still doing the work of the demons?’ Thistle slipped his blade from its sheath so cleanly and so swiftly that Quail and Dray jumped clear back, and there was an instant when Seed felt sure that he would die in the sewers beneath the Rung, that his body would be food for the rats or float listlessly out to sea, his body and the bodies of his friends.

So when Thistle flipped it to him, hilt first, Seed was so startled that he nearly dropped it into the sewer water; and what a shame that would have been, something so beautiful and so deadly lost amidst the dark. He managed to catch it by the very tip of the pommel, found it was heavier than he had imagined, found that he now had no idea what to do with it.

‘You wish revenge,’ Thistle said. It was a statement but Seed heard it as a question. ‘I cannot blame you. It is all we are taught to do, violence, all we believe ourselves capable of. The demons prefer it that way, prefer us weak and broken and foolish, know that if we ever stopped feuding among ourselves we would recall our strength, as in days of old, and be capable of greatness.’

‘Stop talking like that,’ Seed said.

‘Like what?’

‘Like you’re on stage, like you’re giving a speech, like you’re so damn special.’

‘You’d rather I dip into that downslope chatter, ’ey boy? Rather I grab a few bullyboys so we can get a good scrap going? You’d rather I turned my sword on you, as I would have when I was Thistle, turned it against you and had half a dozen men waiting down here to do the same? I’m afraid I cannot do so. I have been reborn, consecrated in the service of something a thousand times larger than myself, something so vast and so beautiful that before it my life is as a scrap of paper near a flame.’

‘This is birdshit,’ Seed said, and when he said it his voice cracked, and when his voice cracked he swung the blade upright. ‘You might have the rest of the city conned, but I know you, I know you down to your bones. You’re a brute, same as me, same as any of us. Two years ago you was part of Rhythm’s crew, going to get the Brotherhood’s scar on your shoulder, a pimp and a thug.’

‘It is true, my ignorance was vast. For a time, before I heard the truth, before my light was kindled, I was everything that you say. I carried a blade in the service of a man, I leeched from my people, I was a thief and a thug. But no longer, brothers, no longer. Now I carry a blade in service of men, to restore their freedom, to lead them, bleary-eyed and blinking, into the dawn to come.’

‘You won’t be around to see it,’ Seed said, the tip of the sword pointing at the tender flesh of Thistle’s breast.

‘Perhaps. But it will arrive just the same.’

Seed found that his fingers were curled so tight round Pyre’s sword, Thistle’s sword he meant, this little Barrow cunt could call himself whatever he wanted but it wouldn’t put Seed’s eye back into place, would it? Wouldn’t make him pretty like he’d used to be, wouldn’t make the girls in the street stop turning away when he brushed down the boulevard. And fine, it wasn’t as if Seed hadn’t done things similar; there was that one dust-up with one of the crews to the east where he’d ended up breaking a bottle over some kid’s head, and Seed had never seen him again but had heard he didn’t talk so well any more – but so what? This wasn’t a question of fairness, this wasn’t a question of justice, this was a question of revenge, this was a question of clearing a slate, that was the only justice a boy from the Fifth knew anything about, could ever know.

The sword clattered loudly against stone.

‘What is your name?’

‘Seed.’

‘Seed is the name they gave you,’ Pyre said, smiling and shaking his head. ‘Boy they called Seed – there is someone you should meet.’

Eudokia had last seen Protostrator Konstantinos Aurelia, her stepson and the leader of the Aelerian armies in Salucia, eighteen months earlier, marching at the head of his themas down the great trunk road that led north out of the capital, the entirety of the city thronging the streets, shrieking their love of him until it seemed almost a physical thing, a brisk wind, a strong current. He had accepted the adoration with dignity, if not quite enthusiasm, as if this was one more trial to be overcome, and he would prefer to save his strength for those ahead. He had looked marvellous, absolutely marvellous, dressed as a typical hoplitai with chain armour and a standard short sword, but so broad-shouldered and gorgeous that women were said to faint as he passed by, to faint and be crushed beneath the uncaring hooves of the crowd. It had been the crowning achievement of his life to that point, the moment he had been fitted for nearly since birth; if it had been the end of his labours he could have retired knowing that no man had ever performed so skilfully.

Alas then, that there was still the war to be fought.

Six months they had been forced to wait at the borders of the Commonwealth while the Roost gave its consent for two slave nations to wage war – fine, he could not be blamed for that, nor for the long winter that had after been wasted. And the first part of this year’s campaign had gone well enough. They had finally met the enemy at Bod’s Wake, and if the result was not the signal victory that Eudokia’s propaganda machine had proclaimed it, still it had been the Salucians who had found themselves in rapid retreat northward, towards the heartland and the nation’s capital.

But that had been nearly four months previous, and the time since had been spent camped in front of Oscan, the themas diminishing daily and a second winter growing close. As the trees had budded and then blossomed and were now shortly to die away again, so had the gallant youth she had waved farewell to diminished. There was grey at his temples, a shade she found difficult to square with the immaturity he had somehow managed to retain from the first moment he had been presented to her, a tow-headed child of fifteen. He had on the same chain armour that he had worn while marching out of the capital, but it looked better used, no longer an affectation but as natural as the sallow skin it covered. His eyes were cramped, and uncertain.

He sat at his desk, as if so engrossed in his work he had failed to notice her arrival. A pretence, and not a particularly good one either, meant to show how hard he was working, how seriously he took his task though his efforts had not yet been crowned with success. By the gods, how she yearned for a man, a true man, and not simply a long-limbed boy!

‘Revered Mother,’ he said, rising swiftly. At least he had not forgotten that much. He leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. ‘How was the journey from the capital?’

‘Tedious. As will be the next leg. How fares the child of my beloved Phocas, upon whom the hopes and prayers of Aeleria reside?’

Konstantinos made an attempt at stoicism, but he wasn’t very good at it and also he didn’t try for very long. ‘It is no easy thing, being the leader of men.’

‘Do tell.’

‘The Salucians have bottled themselves up inside the city, and they have provisions to last out the winter. Every day we lose ten men from disease, and it won’t be long until we start losing more from the cold. If they’d only come out and give fair battle, we’d roll right through them, but …’

It was almost as if they would prefer not to die, Eudokia thought. A clever people, the Salucians, but then again wit wasn’t everything. A well-timed jibe would not get you so much as a swift blow to the jaw, and whatever the poets might say, one doesn’t ride to battle holding a pen. ‘Heavy are the burdens required of great men. Broad must be their shoulders.’

‘It’s not like with the sea lords. The truth is they weren’t nearly so hard to kill as everyone made out. A ragtag bunch, and they had no walls to hide behind.’

Not for the first time Eudokia wondered if it had been wise to arrange the short series of naval battles that had cleared the southern coast of pirates and established within the minds of the more credulous citizenry – a group that apparently included Konstantinos himself – her stepson’s reputation for invincibility. The Gentleman Lion, they had taken to calling him, and it seemed clear he had heard the name.

‘The Salucians send peace offerings weekly,’ he informed her, as if she had not already known, as if there had ever been anything, down to the contents of his meal and the specificity of his toilet, that Eudokia did not understand better than did her stepson.

‘Yes?’

‘They have promised to make Oscan a free city, one without official ties to either of our nations. But I think if pressed, they would agree to allow for incorporation within the Commonwealth, provided we give sufficient guarantees that our expansion will cease thereafter.’

‘Honeyed words hide false promises. Weakened and tottering on the precipice, they offer something that is ours by right and soon in fact. In a few years, when they have rebuilt their walls and replenished their stocks, when they have hired mercenary armies from the east, we will see how firm their commitment to amity. We have not come to wound the Salucians, we have come to cripple them. To ensure that never again will the children of Aeleria fear the machinations of the bitch-Queen of Hyrcania.’

‘Every peace is temporary,’ Konstantinos said, and for a long moment he would not look at her. ‘And I sometimes wonder if the children of Aeleria would not be better served if their lives were frittered away less casually. At Bod’s Wake there were so many corpses that you could walk from one end of the field to the next without ever taking your boot off flesh. At night I dream of them, and I dream of Enkedri beyond them, and he asks me what was my purpose in leading so many to death, why my gain needed to be bought with their blood, and I have no answer for him, Mother, I have no answer—’

The sharp slap echoed loudly within the tent. ‘Revered Mother,’ Eudokia hissed, ‘and by the gods you seem suddenly so fond of, do not again forget it.’

It had been a calculated provocation, as was virtually everything that Eudokia did. And, like virtually everything Eudokia did, it had the intended effect. Konstantinos blinked twice, and the colour began to return to his face. He looked angry and ashamed, but at least he no longer looked like he was going to vomit on his trousers, or turn his knife against himself.

‘Men die,’ Eudokia said simply, ‘such is the purpose of men – or did you suppose mortality some recent invention of your own? The themas are blessed to expire in service of their beloved Aeleria, in service of her national destiny. To die is their burden. To lead them into battle is yours, as it was your father’s, and it shames me to watch you quiver beneath it. The world is filled with men, the world shakes them off, daily, hourly, every moment, unmourned and unconsidered, as a mutt does fleas. Would you be more than just a man? Would you be great? This is the price asked of you, the price demanded. It is no small thing. It is too much for most.’ Eudokia laid her hand along the high cheekbones of her nephew, let it rest there a moment, for one does not rule by the lash alone. ‘Be at peace, my beloved child. A great task has Aeleria asked of you, and she will offer the tools to complete it. The Senate, in recognition of the importance of your duty, has voted you three more themas.’ And what arm-bending had that taken; two of them had come from the Marches and she had been forced to pay a call on every senator with an estate in the hinterlands, offering assurances that the Marchers had been well and truly obliterated. Which of course had been her purpose in provoking them into revolt some years earlier, making certain of her western flank before moving east.

The news of his reinforcements spread across Konstantinos’s face like a shot of fine liquor, steadied his eyes and brought fresh bloom to his face. ‘Three themas?’

‘March-hardened veterans to a man,’ she said soothingly. ‘We’ll show these Salucians what it is to quibble with the might of the Commonwealth. Aelerian boots will echo on the cobblestone streets of Oscan, and you will be first among the throng. Your name will be sung centuries after your death, future generations of children will play beneath the shadow of the great statues they erect in your honour.’ Eudokia stretched her arm out, as if pointing to this vision in the distance. ‘All that a man would wish to possess, wealth and fame and fortune nation, all of it, yes, all of it, will be yours.’ Excepting power, of course – power would remain in the hands of that person most capable of wielding it, and Eudokia did not suppose there to be any question as to where that lay. ‘The strain upon you has been a terrible thing, and you have borne it manfully. But what great task was ever accomplished without sacrifice? One must wager to win, and the stakes in this game are not gold nor silver but blood and sinew and the spirit that animates them. The gods have set this task in front of you, and will not fail so long as you answer it.’

Konstantinos was smiling now, not broadly but the hint of it at least, eyes filled with visions of a future in which the world knew him to be everything he had always supposed himself to be.

Such a narrow thing, between arrogance and dejection! Best to bring him back down a notch. ‘And finally, you ought not let your guilt trouble you so, for the simple reason that you are not really in charge, and never were. If anyone will have to answer to the gods for this tally, it will be Eudokia.’ She smoothed out the folds of her robes. ‘Now if there’s nothing else, it’s been a very long day, and I could quite use a bath.’

Konstantinos was up swiftly, off to speak to an attendant and see to the Revered Mother’s demands.

Coming through the basalt walls and into the Fifth Rung, Calla’s mouth had gone dry and her knees had started shaking like a drunkard’s hands. She had imagined that this was as frightened as she was capable of, that she had reached the very apex of her terror; indeed it was this ignorance that had allowed her to continue downslope, certain that she had reached her moment of truth, and that so long as she continued through it, pushed beyond it, she would find strength on the other side.

For a time this was even true. Her steps eased, she enjoyed a growing sense of confidence. The men who gave her passing looks did so out of lust and not because they saw through her disguise, which was identical to that worn downslope, homespun robes and boots that were more comfortable than lovely. She would betray herself when she spoke, she knew, but then there was some fair portion of the Fifth who had once been servants or workers on the higher Rungs and had lost those positions from misfortune or misbehaviour. And anyway she wouldn’t need to do much talking, only to listen and to remember.

But when Calla first heard the call of the pipes – like a fat man’s belch, mud leaking into boots, other, less pleasant things – and when they came into sight, splitting out from the depths of the sloping mountain on which the Roost was built, weaving through the crumbling tenements and one-room shacks and worn storefronts like the bleached bones of some long-dead giant, the full and unhindered force of her folly descended upon her. Alone, alone entirely, for the first time in her life beyond the reach of the Lord’s four-fingered hands, outside of the protection she enjoyed by virtue of who she was and where she lived, by virtue of being born in a portion of the Roost where the Eternal held a strict monopoly on the use of force.

She pulled herself off the main thoroughfare, set her back against an alleyway, watched the shadows gather, wondering at the time. There were no road signs below the Third Rung, at least none that Calla could identify. The landmarks with which she used to navigate upslope, the Perpetual Spire on the easternmost edge of the Rung, the Source rising above that even, the centrepiece and the highest point of the city, were long since lost from view. On the First and the Second the great clocks rang out at regular intervals, but downslope there seemed to be no public timepieces of any kind, and Calla felt as lost temporally as she was geographically, unmoored entirely from her life’s ambit.

When he had summoned her late the evening prior, Calla had known that there was something momentous afoot. For thirty-one years she had served the Aubade, Lord of the Red Keep, now the Prime, first among equals if not the outright leader of Those Above, and nearly ten of them had been as his chief seneschal. During none of them had he ever felt it necessary to call her after the end of her working day. At the very top of his vast citadel, illuminated by the fat autumn moon and its attendant stars, he had run through the situation, explaining the matter slowly, persuading rather than commanding.

‘I know what I’m asking of you,’ he had said, standing still against the evening, his four long fingers bent round themselves, shoulders straight, tendrils of hair like strong hemp twisting down to his ankles. ‘And would have you understand the same. It could be – it will be dangerous. But there are currents at work in the Roost that must be investigated, and they stir in corners of the city where no Eternal could be seen. I have put my trust in your line for half a dozen generations – will you give me the same honour?’

Calla would have said yes to anything at that moment, would have said yes out of sheer pride, even if she did not sense as well as the Aubade that her city was angled atop a precipice, even if she did not have, whatever he might think or know, as deep and profound a love for her home as did any Four-Finger.

Calla thought of that passion then, tried to recall some flicker of it, to kindle that flame into a light strong enough to illuminate a path forward. Late afternoon and the porters were making their last run of the day, bent-backed men carrying goods and foodstuffs upslope without complaint – or, anyway, with no complaint they thought worth voicing. The children of the evening were just beginning to shake themselves out from whatever holes they scuttled into during the day, the men dressed better than the porters and standing conscientiously and stiffly upright. Two women who could only be, even to Calla’s unpractised eyes, whores, lounged on the steps of a tenement; blank faces and