Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2 (16 page)

He did not matter a fig, he was irrelevant and extraneous to the moment at hand. One could see it even by the way Ink lounged in his chair – defiance that verged on petulance, like an upslope child. By contrast, the man sitting beside him was stiff and straight and almost regal. Probably past forty, though it was hard to tell, with his hair painted in two vibrant if unnatural colours, and with the heavy make-up that obscured most of his face, white powder extending mask-like down to the high cowl of his robes, black silk with threads of silver interwoven. The skin around his eyes had been painted amber, and the lids as well. He did not bother to introduce himself.

There were two open seats. Pyre took one and Hammer took the other. Then they all sat a moment in silence.

‘Congratulations.’ The chancellor’s voice was high-pitched, unbecoming, like an untuned lute. ‘You have succeeded in making yourself a nuisance.’

The bearded man who had escorted them inside smirked, rolled round the table to stand behind his masters. Pyre could sense Hammer quiver in the chair beside him. For his part, Pyre neither moved nor spoke.

‘It is an accomplishment,’ the chancellor acknowledged. ‘It is a thing of which to be proud.’

The sounds of a zither came in from the adjoining comfort rooms, muffled but recognisable, and the sounds that accompanied those sounds, soft moaning and occasional grunts, pleasure real and feigned. Pyre had the sensation – one he was long familiar with, as every child of the Fifth was familiar – of something small and foul running across his skin, lice or fleas or bedbugs.

‘You’ve no response?’ the chancellor asked.

‘You’ve yet to ask a question.’

The chancellor’s smile was as false as all the rest of him, as false as his coloured hair or his rouged cheeks. ‘Fair enough. You are not the voice of your organisation, only the muscle. All to the good – a fool might pay his attentions to the puppet, but a wiser man directs his thoughts to the mummer.’

‘You exaggerate my importance. I am merely a servant of the word.’

‘Oh, I think otherwise – it is not to Edom that the Five-Fingers have replaced the Brotherhood as the chief source of order, all along the docks and even up as high as the Fourth Rung. Not to Edom that bullyboys leave slaughtered birds in the main intersections, not to Edom that there are few enough Cuckoos willing even to go out on patrol. We have been aware of the Five-Fingers since Edom first returned to the city. We allowed him to continue his activities, because you downslopers need something to occupy your minds – to the degree that you may be said to have any – and because we found it convenient to have the fulcrum of dissent so clearly in hand. Five years, I’ve been aware of him, but only in the last year and a half – since you’ve joined them, Pyre, the First of His Line – have they risen to their current level of importance.’

‘Which would be?’

‘A nuisance, as I said. An irritant. A headache, a minor misfortune, a blemish of the skin.’

‘Hard to notice with all that make-up,’ Hammer said.

‘You watch your fucking tongue, boy, or I’ll carve it out and toss it to a whore.’ Ink sounded like Pyre had known he would sound, blunt-tongued and bitter. He was happy for the chance to say something, however petty or vicious, simply to remind himself that he was still in the room. This last explained, to Pyre’s mind at least, the greater balance of human speech.

Without looking behind him, eyes still on the painted man, Pyre gestured Hammer into silence.

‘As a rule, I think very little about the Fifth Rung,’ the chancellor began, no more interested in his subordinate’s outburst than was Pyre. ‘And so long as you were willing to entertain yourself downslope, this dispute between Ink’s organisation and your own was of no meaningful interest to me or mine. But this … expansion into the Third Rung, this attack on the bank last month; you overreach yourself, and you court disaster.’

‘And I’ve been summoned tonight to hear a warning?’

‘And in hopes of coming to some sort of mutually beneficial agreement. There are three ways that this situation might be dealt with. The first, and the easiest, is to tell me what you want, and for me to give it to you.’

‘A simple enough thing, Chancellor, and one of which we’ve made no secret. I wish for this yoke which has laid across our backs for millennia uncounted to be lifted, and I wish for those who have held us enslaved to be brought to justice.’

The chancellor made a face as if Pyre had emitted some unexpected odour. ‘And the sun to shine at the hour of the Owl, and the current in the bay to run backward? Perhaps I shall wave my hands and make you live for ever, or bring your dead grandmother back to life? Enough nonsense, boy, there’s no point in holding up your facade any longer. I can offer you riches and wealth beyond anything you’ve yet dreamed – and power as well,’ he added, ‘real power, power over life and death in the borough where you reside, a king in your little kinglet. If, needless to say, one who still pays homage to an emperor above him.’

‘You think me a hypocrite, then? To be bought off with coin or cheap favour?’

‘Hypocrisy is a word that the weak use to bind the strong – to contain and corral them, to confuse and diminish them. It rarely works, of course, but then the weak have few enough weapons on which to rely. My time is not infinite, and I find the company insalubrious. You have thus far shown yourself to be a competent tactician—’

‘Enough to make your dog run scared,’ Hammer interrupted.

The eponymous dog snarled, cracked his fingers, then pointed one at Hammer. ‘You just keep on thinking that, zealot,’ Ink said. ‘You just keep right on thinking that.’

The chancellor rolled his eyes, continued on as if the interruption had never taken place. ‘—and a man of some intellect. Surely you are not dense enough to believe the … pabulum you spread to the masses?’

‘I have no need for gold,’ Pyre said simply. ‘If you had hoped to bribe me, you’ve wasted both of our time.’

‘Drop the fucking act, boy,’ Ink snarled. ‘You done enough to get yourself a spot at the table, now claim your winnings and get back to your hole.’

The chancellor raised two fingers, the nails of which had been painted opposing colours, and Ink fell silent. ‘You say you have no personal interest in the matter? You say you wish for the well-being of your people? Fine, I will take you at your word. If you were to fall in line, we could discuss … changes in the organisation of the lower Rungs. Those Above allow me wide leeway in that regard.’

‘A better-fed slave is still a slave,’ Pyre said simply. ‘My people wish for freedom, and will accept no substitute.’

In the flickering candlelight the chancellor’s lips were bright, and they left a stain of red on his teeth. ‘Is that really what they wish? Do you honestly suppose that there would be any gain for anyone if the rabble that occupy the lower Rungs were suddenly to find themselves without our guiding hand? Think hard here, think honestly, do not simply mouth the platitudes that have been taught you. Given the opportunity, would they spontaneously assemble themselves in council? Would they draft laws, would they distribute offices and responsibilities? The Fifth would be an abattoir before the sun’s rise tomorrow, the blood would rise about your knees.’

‘At first, perhaps,’ Pyre agreed. ‘But the tide runs back out, doesn’t it? And when it did we would be able to rebuild, as free men rather than slaves.’

‘How many of the men on your Rung can read? How many can sum? How many can speak or act coherently, how many have thoughts beyond the end of the day’s work, beyond the next drink, the next whore?’

‘And whose fault is that?’ Pyre asked quietly. ‘They kill our leaders and any who might become so. They deprive us of every hope of growth and of advancement, they lock us in a cage as proof we cannot grow.’

‘Perhaps you truly do think that,’ the chancellor said. ‘Perhaps you are so foolish.’ He waved his hand across the table, palm down, as if scattering seed. ‘No matter – the freedom you herald would destroy the Roost entirely, your people as much as mine. Happy for all of us that it will never come.’

‘No?’

‘No,’ the chancellor echoed. ‘I am trying to be forgiving. It is understandable, even appropriate for a man born in your circumstances. Likely you’ve never been in the presence of an Eternal. Likely you’ve never even seen one.’

False, though Pyre made no effort to correct him. The guard behind Ink, the bearded one, sucked at his crooked teeth.

‘You see the custodians and you think, in your ignorance, in your vast and infinite stupidity, that it is they against whom you contend. You think, perhaps, that having had such success against their servants every victory will be so easy to attain. I tell you, Pyre, and if you have yet believed nothing I have said then believe this – you are fabulously wrong. You are wholeheartedly and, in every particular, mistaken. You have won nothing, you have not even begun the contest. You could slaughter every custodian in the Roost, build a fire with the bodies and toss the entirety of the Brotherhood Below atop it, and you would have come no closer to ensuring this victory of which you dream. I have dealt with Those Above my entire life, and tell you in simple language so there is no confusion – they are everything they imagine themselves to be. The names they have given themselves, the names we have given them, they are apt, they are entirely accurate. The Eternal are superior in every fashion that one creature might be to another. Every man and boy you could arm and train would be insufficient to defeat a handful in open combat. The mote of grime you scrub from your eye in the morning is of more concern to you than you and all your people are to them.’

‘Then why have they not reached out with their four-fingered hands and …’ Pyre made a motion with his own five digits, as if crushing something fragile.

‘Because they are busy with their dreams. Do you think the ruckus you have made on the lower Rungs is loud enough to reach their ears? They, who have laid waste to armies since before time was time, since before there was such a thing even as man?’

‘They think me important enough to treat with.’

‘They have no idea I’m here,’ he said. ‘Any more than they are aware of the existence of the Brotherhood Below, or of our association with each other. So long as the water flows upward, and the goods and gifts with which they might play, the Eternal give no more thought to what goes on downslope than you might the tunnelling of the ants in the floorboards.’

‘And you think this ignorance to be a virtue?’

‘I think it reality, and one for which you ought to feel daily grateful. Should they ever concern themselves with what goes on beneath them, should you manage to one day prove sufficient distraction to draw their attention …’ Imagining this cataclysm, he smiled, and this time it did not seem false. ‘The blood would choke the fish in the bay, and be carried up through the pipes to the Source itself, and they would hold their conclave beside the crimson fountain and they would scarcely notice the stain. They are strong, yes, Those Above, they are stronger than you can possibly imagine – but they are even crueller than they are strong.’

‘And yet, here you sit. With a child of the Fifth Rung, born within the sound of the slurp, a slum child.’

‘I am not an Eternal,’ though Pyre thought he was doing everything he could to obscure the fact, the absurd robes, the strange and unbecoming eye-paint. ‘Do you need each particularity to be spelled out for you as a child? Fine. Those Above care nothing for what goes on beneath them. That is my job, and the job of those like me. To ensure that the Eternal may continue with their happy immortality, and that we beneath them might enjoy our limited span as much as possible.’

‘And the Brotherhood Below is part of this control?’

‘Everything is part of it,’ the man said plainly. ‘The Association of the Porters, the brands and the pass necklaces, each an interlocking piece of a system which was put in place thousands of years before your birth, Pyre, the First of His Line.’ The last was said sneeringly – most of the rest as well but the last in particular.

The zither had stopped playing. Hammer sat unsmiling, fearless of death. The bearded man, still standing behind Ink and in front of one of the guards, shot Pyre a look that no one else was in a position to see.

‘First came the bribe,’ Pyre said, ‘which I ignored. Next a threat, to which I gave as little credence. What follows?’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ the chancellor asked, gesturing at the two armed guards who stood behind Pyre and Hammer. ‘If the promise of wealth does not sway you, if the certainty of retaliation from Those Above is not enough to enlighten you, then we will be forced to resort to other, more immediate options.’

‘This is my fucking bar, kid,’ Ink said, smiling for the first time now, back in his native element, a pig in loam, a maggot in rotted flesh. ‘You think you’ll ever leave it alive?’

‘Indeed,’ Pyre agreed, in response to the chancellor. ‘It was extremely obvious.’

Ink was smiling when he died; he noticed the sudden flicker of movement behind him but did not bother to look, had been expecting it, had even signalled it, having no idea of where it was directed. The bearded man, his head of security, a hardened downslope thug who knew nothing but savagery and who, it was assumed, was capable of nothing more, pulled his curved knife from his waistband, and then there was a flicker-flash as the candelight shone against his steel, and then that self-same steel was buried down to the hilt through the hair and scalp and bone and brain of the last leader of the Brotherhood Below.

Ink’s corpse collapsed face forward onto the table, flailing about like a fish removed from water, some dim biological instinct driving his fading body into a final spasm of motion. The chancellor screamed. The bearded man, whom Ink knew as Pebble but who had for two months answered in his heart only to Saviour, the First of His Line, turned his blade swiftly on the guard behind him, though Pyre had no time to watch the outcome.

The two by the door were quick but Hammer was quicker, the shiv he had bolted up his sleeve swift buried in a throat. Pyre was a step slower but fast enough, his chair spinning into a corner and then his own line of steel set loose, launching himself at the only unoccupied guard. He was tough, the guard, and he was mean, and he did well enough considering the sudden shift of circumstance. By the time it was over Pyre had a thin cut running up his shoulder, shallow but bloody, and Hammer was disposing of the guard who had managed to kill Saviour, a big man but badly wounded, a thrust beneath the armpit and then silence.