Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2 (31 page)

And then there was just the one who had injured Leon and perhaps killed him, backing away, the red on his knife slick in the moonlight, and his eyes brighter still. ‘The blood of the martyrs will fuel the fire to come,’ he said, and his smile was, to Calla’s eyes at least, an honest one.

The Prime did not expect it either, Calla did not think, or he would have tried to stop the boy. He committed to death neatly and without wavering, the blade outstretched and then through his throat and jutting out of the back of his neck, Calla turning away too late.

Leon had stopped screaming. His face was very pale, and his eyes were unfocused.

The Aubade, at least, had no moment of confusion, but moved swiftly and with purpose as ever. ‘Are you safe?’ he asked, and then louder and a second time, ‘Are you safe?’

‘Yes,’ she managed finally.

‘I’ll send help,’ the Aubade said. ‘In the meantime, it would be a misfortune were the boy to die within the Roost.’

And before she could answer he had lifted Leon’s weight as easily and carefully as a mother would a newborn, turned and sprinted upslope, disappearing into the darkness, leaving Calla behind with the bodies of the men who had tried to kill her, growing raw in the moonlight, blossoms falling softly on carrion.

T
he door swung open, hardwood slapping against the wall, hinges squeaking in futile protest. The man behind it was wide and dark and scowling, and no one paid him attention, entranced as they were by the elderly woman walking swiftly in his train, blue-eyed and well-dressed and furious as a sudden storm. Her cane rapped loud against the floorboards, an arrhythmic gait, her thick-shouldered bodyguard struggling to keep up with his own awkward crablike sidle.

The bar was on a distant corner of the Third, where the riches and luxury of the upper Rungs gave way to the dilapidation and despair of the lower. Under normal circumstances the arrival of some upslope wench in these rough and rude environs would have been enough to elicit commentary of the insulting or lewd variety. But the countertop wits and the half-soused porters took one look at Jahan and found themselves looking in other directions. The bartender was a man ill-suited to his profession, taciturn and unpleasant. His father had owned the tavern, and his father before him, and on and on down into the distant roots of the past, and if he had ever had any option other than becoming a bartender he had not been aware of it. He disliked casual conversation and found the smell of ale nauseating, and between the two he had lost enough money to require taking on a five-eagle loan, which without collateral was little different from taking on a partner. ‘Can I help you, Lady?’ the publican asked.

‘And what sort of help do you suppose I need?’ Eudokia snapped. ‘What would possibly compel a person such as myself out of her bed and into a palanquin and to descend into the depths of this absurd, endless, monstrosity of a city, and then into a random and unhandsome establishment, and then up to a fat man with what appears to be chicken grease on his lapel? Do I want some of the beer you’ve watered? A turn with whatever hand-me-down whore works the evening shift? I’m here to see the man in the back, you waste of blood and bone.’

‘He’s waiting,’ said a man at the other end of the counter, quietly but loud enough to be heard. He was big, dressed unassuming, and if you had looked carefully you might have seen that the tankard in front of him was full to the brim, as if he had ordered it with no intention of drinking.

Eudokia snapped her attention over to this speaker. ‘How subtle. I’d never have given you such credit, after this recent rash of foolishness.’

The man muttered something unintelligible, made a head-feint towards a back door. Eudokia paid him no more attention, save to follow the direction he had indicated. But Jahan stopped a moment in front of the man, weighing him silently. He lifted the tankard from off the counter and brought it to slug-like lips, thick neck straining, brown eyes steady, without blink or shudder. Then he put it back down empty and scurried to catch up with his mistress.

Through the small back corridor in a small room at a small table, Edom and Steadfast and a man Eudokia did not know sat silently, with an air of unpleasant anticipation. Eudokia took the single empty seat, allowing Jahan to remain standing. Had Eudokia never seen Edom before, she might have supposed him calm, so skilled was he at dissimulation, but past experience allowed her to note the occasional flutter of his blue eyes, the small signs of tension and concern. By contrast, Steadfast was half-frantic, swallowing hard when she entered and looking down at the wood of the table. Only the third man, as yet unnamed, seemed without fear, though objectively one would have to admit this was more a sign of foolishness than of bravery.

‘I have come directly from the Red Keep,’ Eudokia announced, settling her hands firmly on her lap, as if it was only her preternatural self-control that was keeping them from violence. ‘From the bedside of my now one-handed nephew, administrated tenderly to by the seneschal of the Prime himself, who, along with her master, is extremely alive. Alive in every particular, uninjured, not wounded at all. He is sleeping at the moment, my nephew, deep in soporific slumber, but I am told his injuries were the result of defending himself from a group of assassins, members of the Five-Fingers, fanatics, zealots, madmen attempting to break the peace of the Roost. Which I admit to finding immensely curious, as I am of course the chief patron of those same fanatics, zealots and madmen, a fact I had imagined would be sufficient to keep them from injuring my own flesh and blood.’

No one seemed in any very great hurry to answer her. Steadfast found something on the far wall that required the seeming entirety of his attention. There was a brief moment when Edom was not even smiling. ‘Revered Mother,’ he began slowly, and then his teeth were once again on offer, friendly and reassuring. ‘Word has just a few moments ago reached me of this … tragic misfortune, one which we regret entirely, it goes without saying. But are you sure our meeting like this is wise? You yourself said the demons and their servants are watching you closely.’

‘The day Eduokia cannot outwit a handful of custodians is the day she draws a warm bath and presses steel against her wrist. The three men who were posted to follow me are following three sets of palanquins, which have dispersed to different points around the city. But you’re right, this is unwise. What is happening right now, Edom, the First of His Line, is not an example of the proverbial cleverness of the Revered Mother. Instead, you are about to bear witness to one of her rarely seen though no less storied qualities – an astonishingly savage capacity for vengeance. Not quite yet, but soon, very soon indeed if I do not start to receive answers, rather than prevarications.’

Throughout the course of Eudokia’s monologue the boy’s face had gotten redder and redder, and at the end it burst like a boil. ‘Perhaps your ire might better be directed at your nephew, spending his time with the demons and the whore-slaves who serve them.’

Eudokia responded in a tone of voice sweet enough to draw a swarm of hornets. ‘To whom am I speaking?’

‘Grim, the First of His Line.’

‘Have you any hopes of there being a second, you will vacate your seat and the room as well. This conversation will be conducted in your absence or over your corpse.’

‘You are very bold with your threats, Revered Mother,’ Grim responded after a moment.

‘I don’t make threats,’ Eudokia said. ‘Threats are for savages, for thugs, backroom criminals. I am a woman of stature, of class and refinement. I prognosticate – I predict, I augur and foretell. I read the future in the bloody entrails of the world, and I am very, very rarely wrong. And so when I tell you that you sit right now on the very knife’s edge, a breath of wind, a shudder, a false word or blink or thought from oblivion, you would do well not to take that as the empty words of a woman wronged, but as a firm certainty, as the sun rising tomorrow, as the very oath of Enkedri himself.’

Jahan’s eyes, as he stood beside her, were their usual flat imperturbable brown, the colour of mud or of shit dried in the sun, but his swollen lips were bared up over unwhite teeth and those teeth were drawn into a smile. Apart from that he had made no movement to prepare himself for the conflict threatening to arrive, except in so far as he was always, in every waking moment as well as casual slumber, so ready.

‘It’s fine, Brother Grim,’ Edom said. ‘The Revered Mother is concerned about her nephew, as she has every right to be. And of course we are old friends, Eudokia and I, friends and more than friends.’

‘Yes, Father,’ Grim said, rising after a long moment, though he stared hard at Eudokia and even harder at Jahan after. It was not lost on Eudokia that it was not her warnings that drove the boy from the room, but Edom’s command. In fact it gave her a little burst of confidence for the thing to come. Five hundred of such fanatics, all chasing after death as frantically as a pack of mutts might a bitch in heat.

‘There was a misunderstanding,’ Edom said finally.

‘A misunderstanding?’ Eudokia repeated, as if the concept was alien but pleasant-sounding. ‘Yes, a misunderstanding – that was exactly what this was. Do continue.’

‘It was, of course, never our intention to injure your nephew,’ Edom said. His smile remained unchecked. A run of sweat had accumulated over his brow. ‘Our spies on the Second Rung informed us that the Prime was making a rare visit to the Second. It was thought … we had thought … it was determined that this was an opportunity which could not be missed.’

‘An opportunity to what, exactly? Have your men slaughtered? What is the life of one or other Eternal, in the balance?’

‘Not just one Eternal, the King.’

‘Gods.’ Eudokia shook her head vigorously. ‘An entire life lived at their feet, and you do not understand them in the slightest. The Prime no more commands Those Above than he does the evening tide.’

‘After our recent losses, it was thought wise to remind the demons and our yet-enslaved brethren that we have not been broken, that the flame of rebellion burns bright as ever, that our species, so long held in bondage, has not yet—’

Eudokia cut him off. ‘I am not one of your followers, Edom, and I find your passion for pomposity more windsome than enthralling. They’ve been killing your people and so you want to kill some of theirs, yes? Fine, an understandable reaction. Although it seems rather trivial, given the slaughter to come. In the meantime, not only have you injured my nephew, but you will have rendered our communication immeasurably more difficult. What do you suppose the response from the Eternal will be, at your assassination attempt? Foolish to attempt it, and foolish twice over to fail! This demonstrates very little of the caution which I have come to expect from you. Indeed, it seems much more the thinking of your sometime subordinate, slayer of demons, who I take it is too busy to attend in person?’

‘Pyre is not the head of the Five-Fingered,’ Edom snapped. ‘He is my servant, whatever confusion there sometimes seems to be on the matter. The Roostborn rise to freedom, and they do so under the guidance of Edom, the First of His Line.’

‘Freedom which will be bought with Aelerian gold, fought with Aelerian steel, and most of all, won with an Aelerian army, one which will be at the foot of the Roost in a short period of time and, with the gods’ assistance, inside it only a little while after. By the end of the season, my hoplitai will march upslope along the canals, or the Birds will have made corpses of us all.’

‘And how will they know where to attack? And who will distract the demons while you launch it? I am not the same man you met in Aeleria, all those long years ago, Revered Mother. Edom has grown to his full strength, and is not one to be casually dismissed. You need me as much as I need you.’

Inside her head Eudokia did the bloody tally. Jahan would be across the table before she had finished giving the command. Of course he could not carry his sword within the Roost but his hands were more than sufficient for the task; a twist and Edom’s neck would be snapped like dry wood, though Steadfast might have a moment to scream before he reached the same end. Two that she knew about for certain, the one who had been waiting in the main room and Grim who had gone to join him, probably more, probably not enough to cause a problem for Jahan but then what? Try to blame it on the demons, but for that to be convincing she’d need make a slaughter of everyone in the bar, sanguinary even by Eudokia’s standards and probably impossible – some might already have left. Eudokia’s pride was a bonfire, though it dulled beside her sense of purpose, and Edom was right – she needed him.

For the moment. ‘Perhaps I spoke too harshly,’ she said. ‘You must forgive an old woman for an excess of passion in defence of her family.’

‘More than forgive,’ Edom declared, ‘applaud. It is the same principle which is at the heart of the Five-Fingered, extended onto the species entire. Are we not all one vast family in opposition against the demons?’

‘We are that exactly,’ Eudokia confirmed. ‘United for a single end.’

Mirrored smiles from opposite each other, wide and bright. Unnoticed beside them, Steadfast shivered.

F
ar above, the hour of the Nightjar chimed from the public clocks, and bright street lamps held back the dark, but down on the Fifth there was only the sound of the suck and the heavy dark of a moonless evening. Four men travelled upslope, moving swiftly but off the main roads, up narrow passages, through warrens of alleyways, along the shadowed banks of unused canals. The gate was one of dozens interrupting the great barriers that obstructed passage to the Fourth, unique only in that the Cuckoo stationed there had woken up one morning an odd year earlier to discover a slaughtered avian on his doorstep, and decided henceforth that while Those Above might be terrible they were terrible a very long way upslope, while whatever the Dead Pigeons might have lacked in sheer horror they made up for with unhappy proximity. He made it very clear that he did not notice any of them when they passed, staring at the basalt walls as if trying to decipher some hidden secret.