Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2 (34 page)

Calla managed to stay silent through it all only through a fierce act of will that could be read across her scowling face, and as soon as they were outside she snapped back. ‘You cannot know your nephew’s feelings, and less so my own.’

‘For the sake of the gods, girl,’ Eudokia said, pushing onward through the bazaar, ‘am I really expected to believe that you’ve exposed half your breasts to sunlight in hopes of a tan?’

The captain had, in a demonstration of wisdom, chosen to walk far enough away from their conversation as to at least feign ignorance of its subject, the rest of his men doing the same. Jahan laboured along behind Eudokia, though as usual he gave no indication that the ongoing conversation was of any interest to him, nor indeed for that matter, anything else that was going on around them. That portion of the Perennial Exchange which focused on garments gave way to one selling jewellery and metalwork, precious stones, objects of art and foreign relics. At one of these, looking to Calla or the custodians no different from a dozen others along the same stretch, Eudokia pronounced herself interested and made to enter, the captain swift to open the door, displaying his characteristic gallantry.

There was much to be said about the grace and merit of the Eternal, but as regards their capacity for dissimulation they were rank amateurs, Eudokia thought, and their human agents little better. The labyrinthine subtleties of the Salucian court, the endless buried plotting that was the chief preoccupation of the Aelerian Senate, these were utterly alien to Those Above. Perhaps this was to be expected – they were, after all, a species with no conception of dishonesty, or perhaps whose conception of dishonesty was so subtle and so all-consuming that they had long ago ceased even to realise they were practising it. Adding to this difficulty was the general sense that nothing a human could do was seriously worthy of consideration, a belief that, perversely, had spread to their five-fingered subjects as well. To the best that Eudokia was able to determine, they had no intelligence service as such, and their attempts to constrain her own operations consisted of little more than posting custodians outside of Eudokia’s house, and ensuring that they followed her wherever she went. The basic tricks of spycraft – dead drops and false fronts and the like – seemed quite utterly beyond their ken. With the exception of the brief period after the death of the Shrike, there had never been a period during Eudokia’s stay in the Roost when she had not been more or less entirely capable of running her network of spies and agents without meaningful hindrance of any kind.

Indeed, as was so often the case, it was not the wiles of her enemies that Eudokia needed most to fear, but rather the incompetence of her allies. She would never learn why Steadfast was in the stall that day – perhaps he was confused on the timing, perhaps there was some problem with his agent that demanded his presence. Whatever it was, as Eudokia and her entourage were entering he was just about to make egress, and there was a discomfiting moment when they nearly bumped into one another. Of course, Eudokia gave no inkling of recognition, no hint or suggestion, just smiling the wax smile she gave to everyone, stepping aside to allow him passage. Steadfast, equally true to his nature, went pale, mumbled some distracted greeting, looked as conspicuous as a bruise on a stepson.

The shop sold jewellery and curious bits of steamwork, minor creations of Those Above, little more than toys but worth more than a bolt of silk or a flawless diamond. Calla followed in after Eudokia but turned back to stare at Steadfast, eyes narrowing. Near the entrance a knee-height vase of fine porcelain held a number of fresh-cut roses, or at least did in the moment before the tip of Eudokia’s cane overturned the inoffensive flowerpot, shattering it loudly. Calla turned towards the noise, and Steadfast, in a rare and happy moment of competence, took the opportunity to make his retreat. By the time Calla thought to turn back he was gone.

Eudokia’s display of lamentation regarding the destruction of the vase was, even to her own ears, rather exaggerated, but the proprietor matched her in melodrama.

‘It was quite the ugliest piece I ever owned,’ he assured Eudokia without evident irony. ‘I was planning on breaking it myself, after the end of the business day, so really you’ve done nothing but save me the trouble.’

Calla’s attention, Eudokia was displeased to discover, was back on the door, or perhaps the individual she had just seen leaving it. Had Steadfast so botched her play as to give the girls some warning of her plan? Surely not. There was no way, after all, that Eudokia could have known who Steadfast was, apart from an awkward and ill-behaved stranger. And indeed, as Eudokia made her way further into the shop, Calla attended her without any further evidence of concern. Eudokia spent some time modelling a large golden brooch, though in the end she dismissed it as being too heavy a burden, both of weight and ostentation. She was more pleased with a silver and sapphire torc from far-flung Chazar, held it up to the light, inspected the craftsmanship.

‘Would it go with his eyes, do you suppose?’ Eudokia asked.

Calla spent some time considering, and behind her Jahan shook loose a line of paper from somewhere within the folds of his robes, set it beneath the base of a heavy statue on a table nearby. The statue was an eagle, wings cast wide, eyes cruel. The parchment detailed the expected movements of the Aelerian forces then marching on the city, and the pass signs by which they would know their Roostborn liaisons, and a number of other details of the plot to come.

‘I think it would,’ Calla said, handing it back to Eudokia.

Eudokia smiled widely, at the affirmation or perhaps at something else, and in purchasing the necklace she did not haggle quite so vigorously as might have been expected.

Back outside the hour of the Kite was turning towards the hour of the Woodcock, though the market showed no lessening of its freneticism. ‘You were honest, Captain, when you spoke so exultantly of the wonders of the Exchange,’ Eudokia said.

‘It pleased me to hear that you think so, Revered Mother,’ he said, almost blushing. ‘Is there somewhere else we might escort you?’

‘Perhaps only back home,’ Eudokia said, revealing a tired smile. ‘I’m afraid all the excitement is almost too much for me.’

The captain sketched a bow and led them back in the direction they had come.

‘Such expressions of enthusiasm,’ Calla said, ‘for a place you would as soon see in cinders.’

‘Not at all,’ Eudokia said, smiling toothily, ‘I’d prefer to see it mine.’

‘Aeleria’s, you mean.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘And what sort of city would it be, beneath Aeleria’s possession? Beneath your laws and tithes?’

‘Better for some. Worse for others. There is no wind which blows only ill, and no good fortune which is not diluted with misery.’

‘Miserable, for instance, for Calla of the Red Keep? Or the proprietress of the clothing store you so enjoyed? I am told that in Aeleria, despite your sterling example, women are allowed no public role. Cannot conduct business, or hold political office, or even formally own property.’

‘A slight simplification,’ Eudokia observed, ‘though broadly true.’

‘One struggles to understand why you would allow such a situation to continue, given your role within the Commonwealth.’

‘Why encourage the competition?’

‘Your wit is sharp as ever, though it does nothing to change the fact that were you ever to reign in the Roost, as impossible and absurd a suggestion as that is, that woman would never again be allowed to operate her shop, nor Calla to oversee the Red Keep.’

‘You claim kinship from our shared aperture? Ought I to feel the same sentimentality for anyone else with the same arrangement, any halfwit or whore, because she might give milk or bear seed? Do you suppose men think the same, call each other brother for the nubbin of flesh between their legs? You’ll forgive me when I admit the similarities do not seem so distinct as you make them out to be. When the gods created Eudokia, child, they broke the mould.’

They had come again to the outskirts of the market, and the captain hurried off to find their palanquin, quartered with a number of others in a lot nearby. In the square across from them two children tottered uncertainly towards a nearby flight of pigeons, laughing, scattering the birds at peck.

‘You have a peculiar notion of your self-worth,’ Calla said.

‘Quite the opposite in fact – it is one I hold in common with every other human being who yet resides above the ground, present company not at all excluded. Whatever lies you may tell yourself, your actions belie the truth. You love yourself and those few close to you, and you feel indifference to that vast multitude failing to enjoy so privileged a position. Such a perspective is an essential necessity for any sentient being. The death of a thousand strangers in a land you will never visit is of less consequence than a cut to your finger too small to require a bandage.’

‘I have sometimes noticed this tendency, in those lacking in basic scruple, to universalise their immorality, as if hoping to ameliorate guilt by spreading it more broadly.’

‘Tell me then, Calla of the Red Keep – you weep for the benighted and oppressed females of Aeleria, labouring in backward ignorance? Do you reserve any of that torrent of sympathy for the multitude of women held daily in despair as a consequence of your own country?’

‘In the lower Rungs as well, there is no legal distinction between the sexes. A woman on the Fifth Rung is free as a woman on the First.’

‘Free to do what, exactly? Free to squabble over bread? Free to watch her children die impoverished? What comfort do you suppose it is to the females of the Fifth that they are no more miserable than their husbands? You judge the health and prosperity of your society by your own privileged position – an understandable bit of blindness, and one which further proves my point. When you say that the people of the Roost are free and happy, in fact what you mean is “I am free. I am happy”. Indeed, this is all anyone means when they say such a thing. There is no universal – there is only the particular.’

‘Even you do not really believe what you are saying,’ Calla retorted. ‘This mad self-regard, this titanic narcissism. I was there when you attended on Leon the night he was injured, and did not suppose your consideration feigned.’

‘It was nothing of the sort. Leon is my nephew – I would sacrifice bodily for him, I would steal and maim and kill in defence of his interests. But I do not suppose that my affection for his person is common to the species, nor do I extend that sympathy to every other nephew of every other woman who ever lived. We look after our own, Calla of the Red Keep. That is the very best thing that can ever be said of us.’

The palanquin made its way down the boulevard. Eudokia offered the captain an elaborate series of thanks by the end of which even she felt winded, then passed to the entrance of her vehicle. Jahan squatted and offered his hands as platform, then raised Eudokia up into the coach. Before pulling shut the curtain she crooked a finger and gestured Calla forward.

‘For the feeling I bear him,’ Eudokia said softly, ‘and for the feeling he bears you, I will do my best to save you when the time comes. But be careful, Calla of the Red Keep – Eudokia is far from omnipotent. And what is to come will be terrible beyond all reckoning.’

L
eon was staring up at the ceiling, but when Calla came in he bolted upright and pulled his mutilated hand back below the covers. Weeks in bed had not done anything good for his complexion, which was sallow, or for his tone, which was slack. She would discover what it had done to his mind soon enough.

‘Welcome, Seneschal,’ Leon said. ‘You will forgive me if I do not rise.’

‘I can overlook it.’ Next to Leon’s bed there was a stool and a table and a small
shass
set, the game far advanced.

‘You and your aunt?’

‘Yes.’

‘White is losing,’ Calla said after a moment.

‘True.’

‘And who is white?’

‘Who do you suppose?’

‘The Prime asked me to express his deepest and most sincere apologies. If there is anything else that you desire, know that you would be treated with great attention in the Red Keep.’

‘The Prime has done more than enough for me already,’ Leon observed, ‘and if my quarters are not quite what might be expected on the First Rung, I have no complaints about my treatment.’ His smile was forced, and false, and sad. ‘The solitude has allowed me to return to my studies.’

‘Do not suppose my absence indicative of a lack of concern.’

‘What should I suppose?’

‘Things have grown … tense, within the Roost. The attempted assassination of the Prime, the movement of your armies – I was not sure it was wise for us to be seen together, wise for either of us.’

‘You might well have been right,’ Leon admitted. ‘And while I confess myself happy that you’ve broken your self-imposed exile, I can’t help but wonder what it was that changed your mind?’

Calla explained the matter neatly, simply. Sixty seconds at the most, and then the spreading silence, Leon’s eyes tightening. A final slow nod. ‘Could you get some water from the pitcher on the table? The one on the table has been diluted with a narcotic.’

Calla rose, poured a cup and brought it over to him. He took it while sitting up in bed, but it remained in his good hand unconsidered for a long time before he spoke. ‘You are certain that this man you saw at the Exchange was the same Steadfast who spoke at the meeting of the Five-Fingered?’

‘Confident enough that I came to you,’ she said. ‘Confident enough that we are having this conversation.’

Leon stared out the window for a long time without speaking. His room offered no particularly prepossessing view, just a small courtyard in which some of the servant children were playing rat-in-a-hole, and above them the gabled rooftops of the Second Rung, and above that the sky and the sun and the gods. ‘It would be entirely characteristic for my aunt to be in touch with whatever dissident forces within the Roost exist. It would be even more like her to have created them, to have sown in some distant past the seeds of your current misfortune. It would not take very much, not so very much at all. Down on the lower Rungs they have been left to rot for so long as to grow mad with hate, indeed it seems in retrospect surprising rebellion has taken so long to develop. There is more than enough discontent to tap within this paradise you have created.’