Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2 (41 page)

‘You’re lying,’ he said, though it might have been a question.

‘A pointless affectation, dishonesty. For the weak and less than clever, a vice we sowers of discord have little reason to indulge. Quite the opposite, in fact. Do you wish to see the towers torn asunder, to see blood run in the streets? Give every man true knowledge of his neighbour. The world would become an abattoir within the hour.’

A band of hooligans, downslope thugs making their first excursion above their home Rung in search of plunder and rapine, came out from one of the alleyways, saw Eudokia in her finery and laughed nastily. One of them carried a rug over one shoulder, woven of silk and threaded gold, one of them carried a large urn that seemed made of pure silver, one of them held a stout length of wood and the two others bits of sharpened metal. Flush with the day’s violence and the coming certainty of more, they did not seem to notice Pyre standing beside her.

‘What have we here?’ asked the one holding the club, a few years younger than Pyre, taller but thinner. A recent discovery of the simple efficacy of violence had made him very bold, but his eyes went wide at Pyre’s snarl, and the following blow sent him halfway to his knees, and before he had reached them Pyre’s blade was out from its sheath and its point perilously close to the downed child.

‘I am Pyre, the First of His Line, and this woman is under my protection, and by Enkedri the next thing out of your mouth will be an apology or what follows will be your life’s blood.’

Damp red appeared on his lips, fear in the corners of his eyes. He swallowed hard, and held his hands up before him, the club forgotten in the mud of the thoroughfare. ‘Forgive me, mistress,’ he said, standing and backing down the way he’d come, his friends quick to follow him.

‘You grow to it already,’ Eudokia said, smiling.

T
he battle that Bas had missed while storming the Roost would go down in history as the Salvation. In fact history is the wrong word – it skipped swiftly past history and moved directly into legend, bards’ songs and mummers’ tales and the games of children. For generations and centuries to come boys would relive it with sticks as swords and broom handles as spears, argue over who would play the demons, who would play Konstantinos, the Gentleman Lion, who would play the Caracal, his red-handed subordinate. It could be compared to no other human conflict—for a corollary one needed to reach towards religion, to the great conflict that Enkedri and his siblings had fought before the beginning of time, against the chthonic forces that had hoped to dethrone him. This battle that had already, in the hours since it had been fought, attained an almost mythical status, that had firmly established Konstantinos – so far as popular opinion was concerned, and is there anything else that matters? – as the foremost captain of the age, that would once again confirm Bas as the Empire’s greatest champion, even though he had not actually fought in it, that a thousand thousand braggarts and liars and fools from across the continent would claim to have participated in, this epic triumph, this signal victory, had lost the Aelerians five soldiers for every Other that was killed, the blood of fifteen thousand men watering the summer fields.

And among this innumerable dead – perhaps not innumerable; you could count them, if for some reason such a task appealed to you, and you had a few dozen hours to spend looking over the corpses – was Isaac, Bas’s oldest friend.

Bas could get no clear information about what had happened to him. A pentarche said that he had seen him ridden down in the first charge of the demons, another insisted that this was not possible, that the adjutant had rallied them after the third, when things looked all but lost, had led them surging forward into the heart of the Other front. Mostly the men of the Thireenth just shrugged and shook their heads sadly. How could anyone be expected to keep track of a single corpse, among such a vast assemblage? You might as well ask follow the passage of a drop of water through a river, through a bay, through the ocean.

Konstantinos had evacuated his tent, every spread of canvas being needed to tend to the wounded, and still there was not enough and not nearly enough, long rows of the injured waiting to be treated, limbs stacked upon each other like firewood, left unveiled against the sun, which was, kindly and according to its fashion, dimming beneath the horizon. Bas found the Protostrator standing beneath a peach tree, a short way out from what had been his sleeping quarters and was now a silk-lined cenotaph. The greatest victory in the history of Aeleria seemed to have done the man very little good. He looked exhausted – he looked more than exhausted, he looked close to collapse. He did not bother to rise when he saw Bas, made do with a vague wave of his hand.

‘Hail, God-Killer,’ he said, and he dropped his arm back down, as if even this much had been too much effort. ‘I’m afraid that sobriquet is no longer so rare as it once was.’

‘Congratulations,’ Bas said, not really meaning it.

‘Yes,’ Konstantinos said, not really meaning it either. ‘I take it the fact that we faced four thousand Birds instead of six was your doing?’

‘It was,’ Bas said. ‘The Roost is in open rebellion. There are none on the lower Rungs who dare show for the Eternal. Our allies there have performed as promised.’

‘And the tower?’

‘Will hold,’ Bas said confidently. If there had been any chance otherwise Bas would not have left, for in the end there was nothing to him but duty, or perhaps that had been his defining feature for so long that he could not imagine himself doing anything else. Regardless, he had only descended from the Spire after the first wave of reinforcements had arrived from below, when it bristled with victorious hoplitai and the fractured remnants of the Eternal had returned to their homes at the top of the Roost for what was certain to be the last time. ‘The force I led into the city has now been supplemented by two more contingents of soldiers, as per the plan. There are a thousand hoplitai on the First Rung, and there will be two thousand before morning. Soon there will be enough to make a raid on the surrounding castles. Not that I suppose it’ll matter by then.’

‘No,’ Konstantinos agreed. ‘It’ll end tomorrow. Who’s in charge?’

‘Hamilcar, the Dycian.’

‘And why are you not with them?’

Bas shrugged. ‘Someone needed to report. And I suppose I wished to be there at the end.’

Neither said anything for a while; they stood quietly, listening to the screaming coming from the tents, the sawbones with their hacksaws heating in the fire, the stray dogs collecting outside, lapping up the blood, carrying away loose cuts of man meat.

‘How many survived, do you suppose?’ Bas asked.

Konstantinos shrugged. ‘A thousand, perhaps more. When it was clear the day was lost, the Prime managed to cut his way out and flee back to the Roost.’

Was one of those Einnes, Bas wondered? Was she at the peak of the city just now, engaged in whatever desperate debate occupied the remnants of Those Above, searching for some dim means of escape, or accepting their bloody fate? Or was her corpse even now rotting amidst the vast ocean of dead, a crow pecking at her eyes?

‘I’d have thought they’d have died on the battlefield,’ Konstantinos said. ‘Rather than flee. Is there any chance they will try and make terms? Or take up position in the city, fortify the approach and make us starve them out?’

‘They won’t make terms, even if they thought we might accept them, which we wouldn’t. They’ll die tomorrow, outside the walls,’ Bas said, somehow confident. ‘They’re just figuring out how to do it.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’d like to take charge of the Thirteenth.’

‘Only fitting,’ Konstantinos said after a moment. ‘Tell Nikephoros I gave the order.’

Bas nodded. Another long pause.

‘What was it like inside?’ Konstantinos asked.

‘Beautiful,’ Bas said finally.

‘I thought it would be,’ Konstantinos said, gazing distantly at the Roost. ‘I thought it would have to be. I’m sorry about your adjutant,’ he added, as an afterthought.

‘Yes.’

‘He had lots of company.’

‘No. We all go alone, at the end.’

T
hat night the Roost ran red.

Blood gathered in little pools on cobblestone streets and leached into the rich black soil of the public gardens. Blood ran in trickles down alleyways and in torrents down the main thoroughfares. Blood soaked through silk bedsheets and plush carpets, blood dripped off the faces of screaming men and weeping women, blood clotted and dried and grew cold beside a thousand thousand bodies, dockers, tradesmen, porters, merchants, custodians, milliners, carpenters, cooks and maids and servants, brute thugs and crime lords, wealthy merchants and civic leaders. Rich crimson blood, and blood a shade darker, though blood all the same.

Blood leaked out the nose and mouth and punctured stomach of a tradesman on the Fifth Rung— no supporter of the Birds, either open or covert, at least any more than virtually everyone had been in the day before the world was upended. But he had been wealthier, and was not that wealth evidence of complicity with the demons? Certainly the men laughing and standing atop his shattered corpse seemed to think so, though they were unlettered porters who had heard no word of the truth. On the Fourth Rung a custodian barricaded himself inside his house, he and his wife and his three children and the suckling that still nursed at her breast, propping every item of furniture he owned against the door frame, holding his ferule should anyone manage to break through. In the end it did no good though, the mob outside firing the house, the custodian and his wife and his three children and the suckling that still nursed at her breast. In the Perennial Exchange on the Third a woman sat amidst the ruins of the shop she had spent a lifetime building, dresses and shawls trampled in the dust, the mob that had passed through not bothering even to steal them, destruction itself a joy, and thinking on it for some time she went to search for a pair of scissors, deciding she had no taste for what was to come. On the Second Rung were such seeds of depravity, of rapine and cruelty and foulness as to make the Self-Created blush, as to make him turn away, as to make him wonder in what moment of foolishness he had seen fit to decree that base matter ought ever to organise itself into thinking creatures, irrespective of the number of their digits.

And on the First? On the First?

In between dropping Eudokia off at her safe house and finding himself at the Third, the afternoon had turned to early evening had turned firmly and fully to night. How had Pyre spent those hours? He could not say, not then nor at any point after. They were stripped from his memory in their entirety, never to return, a spot of history obliterated, only faint impressions of crimson, and of children crying, and of corpses left to rot in the moonlight. Downslope the battle raged onward, Pyre’s minions continuing on despite the absence of their leader, the victory clear within sight. They had succeeded, they had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, had tapped deep into that simmering vein of rage of which Pyre himself had always been the truest and most vivid example. There were not a thousand official members of the Five-Fingered, and only four hundred of them able to wield a blade – four hundred two days earlier, of course; who could say what remnant of that now remained? A tiny drop of passion in a vast sea of indifference, or seeming indifference. And yet at a word, at the slightest suggestion, at the first glimmer of resistance, the city had risen up against the demons, giving vent to long-simmering hatred. Surely this could only be taken as evidence of the justice of the cause, that the truth was written, faded but legible, on the heart of all men – that freedom was theirs by right, that they need only be strong enough to take it.

Or was it otherwise? Was it simply that most men are constrained by routine more than by any sense of morality, and that should these basic covenants ever break down, should it occur to them that they might not go to work in the morning, that they might not pay homage to their superiors and to the civil authority set over them, should this revelation ever strike, then blood and massacre and death are certain to follow?

Pyre could not say, Pyre did not know. Pyre stalked through the city as if through the body of some ancient dying god, its viscera and intestines and sweetmeats on display, the raw rich red flesh rendered skinless and visible. He had one hand on his short sword and his eyes were wounded pinpricks of open hate, and the thugs and petty bandits gave him a wide berth.

Pyre had been in front of Edom’s safe house for a long time before he realised that was where he was standing. A building on the Third, nothing important about it except what it held, part of the elaborate shell game that Pyre had been playing for the better part of two years, since being made responsible for the security of the Five-Fingered, since being made responsible for the security of Edom, the First of His Line.

Two hard knocks, two soft knocks, one final blow with his full fist, the door shuddering in response. It opened swiftly to reveal an expectant Redemption, who smiled when he saw Pyre, smiled and offered the salute, though Pyre did not return it.

‘Brother Pyre,’ he said, ‘We’ve had no news – how is the war downslope? Have you heard anything of our brothers outside the walls? Or on the First?’

Pyre brushed inside. Only meant to be used for a few days during the rebellion, the house was mostly unfurnished, and the large parlour that Pyre had entered was empty except for a rough wooden table, occupied by three members of the Dead Pigeons, brothers to Pyre in all but name, trusted implicitly and implicitly trusting. ‘Victorious on all fronts,’ he said in a curiously neutral monotone, and before this announcement gave way to general jubilation he asked, ‘Where is Edom?’

‘On the top floor, with Steadfast,’ Redemption answered. ‘He is unable to sleep.’

‘Grim is gathering men,’ Pyre said quietly. ‘Gather your weapons and join him at his headquarters on the Fourth.’

‘Where on the fourth?’

‘At the Hallowed Gate, near the Sweetwater canal. Do you know it?’