Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2 (5 page)

‘Let us hope her affection remains undimmed,’ Einnes said, purple eyes still as the surface of a stone. ‘Watch yourself, Slayer of Gods. Die today and I will lose the chance to kill you.’

‘We wouldn’t want that,’ he agreed, watching as she slipped back to her tent, then stalking off to the front of the camp.

The great western gate of Oscan, where once long trails of caravans had entered on their way to the market, where pilgrims and travellers had received their first view of the great border city, had long months earlier been closed, garrisoned by men with short bows and curved blades. It was the most obvious point of attack and therefore the most heavily fortified; there would be nothing clever in today’s battle, no stratagems or tricks, only muscle against muscle and steel against steel. The hoplitai getting ready to force it had traded in their customary long pikes, were making do with the short stabbing swords that were their secondary weapon. A picked contingent of the largest and strongest had been assigned to shoulder the turtle, a giant aegis of beaten steel and hardened leather, proof, hopefully, against the arrows and stones and heated oil of the Salucians. Chalked up and down its sides were clever blasphemies in Aelerian and vile profanity in gutter Salucian, and at the end was an iron-beaked ram. Driven with sufficient force this might be enough to cause a breach in the gate through which the rest of the force, and the army behind them, might enter. Such, at least, was the hope.

There was no horn to sound their charge, the Aelerians still holding out some distant hope of surprise, only a sudden bellow from Theophilus, deeper and more forceful than Bas would have credited him. And then the turtle – well, it did not surge forward, being large and ungainly and vastly heavy, but it went forward at least, half-giant Aelerian hoplitai churning the mud, the rest of the thema following close behind, drawn swords and half-shields. A howl from the walls in answer, a howl and a rain of arrows; Bas could not see them but he could hear the chorus of bowstrings and then the screams of his countrymen, a steady and odious depletion, but it did not slow the charge.

In the still-black morning and past the mass of hoplitai Bas could not see the gate breaking, but he could hear it, the clatter of the turtle’s head, the squeal of metal sounding strangely like the screams of men. And then the screams of men as well, not so loud bur protracted, as the hoplitai and the Salucian garrison met at last, sharp things drawing blood in the dark.

The dawn came slow, and Bas could not will it on faster. Battle was joined but the outcome yet uncertain. A crowd had gathered, neighbouring hoplitai and pentarchs waiting expectantly, cheering occasionally – though at what Bas could not be sure; it was still too dark to have any idea who was winning. Some ways back, a head taller than the rest of the crowd, Bas could make out Einnes, purple eyes taking in the carnage.

War is a sluggard, war is a lumbering, shambling, slow-footed behemoth, war is a thousand men making a thousand small decisions slowly and generally unwisely. Nothing ever begins on time, no one is ever where they are supposed to be when they are supposed to be there. War is an overloaded wagon with a creaking axle, mud-stuck, pulled forward by a beat-up mule. Except every so often when it is not – when it is transformed into a charging stallion, or a downward-streaking hawk. Bas sometimes supposed, amidst the endless drudgery of his day-to-day tasks, turning boys into killers and killers into corpses, that he continued on as the Caracal simply because there was no other alternative; and then one of these single sterling seconds would arrive, and Bas would again recall his purpose.

Up and past the Aelerian defences so swiftly that none had thought to stop him, past an arrow-shot hoplitai, the first of the day’s casualties but not the last, and thoughtless he reached down and grabbed the dying man’s shield, bellowing as he went, a bronzed battle horn loud enough to be heard above the tumult. His blade whistled from its sheath, Roost-forged steel red as the last moment before sunset, lighter than a switch of willow and stronger than a hand’s breadth of cast iron – the stories called it the Caracal’s Claw, or sometimes Red Wind, though Bas had never been known to call it anything, or at least not that anyone had ever heard. He pushed past the loose back rank of soldiers, a sudden shower of arrows doing nothing to slow his passage, though one struck the man next to him just above his hauberk, a death swift and sure, and another would have struck Bas’s shoulder had he not batted it aside with a movement of his shield, reflexively, without noticing, something that would have been impossible except for one man in a thousand, and for that man would be the most extraordinary deed he might perform in a long lifetime of war. As a pebble dropped in still water or a rumour whispered in a schoolroom Bas’s arrival spread its way through the hoplitai, who surged forward in answer to the Caracal’s example.

The west gate was broken, the bottom of the portcullis shattered, the top hanging impotent, but behind that the Salucians were staging an admirable last stand behind a line of barricades, though not for long, no, by the gods, not if Bas had anything to say on the matter. He found himself suddenly among the packed front ranks of hoplitai and then past them, to the very lip of the fortifications. A spearhead caught itself in Bas’s shield and he roared and pulled his arm backward and ripped the lance out of the hands of its wielder, cast both to the ground, and then he was atop the wall and down it, and his men were coming furiously behind him.

The Salucians preferred their swords single-edged and slightly curved, and carried half-moon shields, and generally were not any good with either of them. But the soldier in front of Bas then proved an exception to the rule, and he didn’t seem frightened of Bas either, and this was rather a surprising thing because everyone was afraid of Bas, not just the enemy either, anyone with a set of eyes and two grains of sense and even a fair number of men who could not claim even these meagre distinctions. But this Salucian was not – beneath his conical cap of boiled leather his eyes were dark and grim and unflinching. The Salucian was brave and the Salucian was fast, and the Salucian knew enough of combat to realise he needed to move swiftly against Bas, to swell in tight and negate Bas’s superior reach. What the Salucian did not know was that Bas, for all his more than forty-five years, was still as strong as any man alive, and when they locked their blades against each other Bas planted his legs and tensed with his shoulders and he sent the Salucian hurtling back towards the men swarming to reinforce him, sending three of them tumbling and then falling upon them, once on the attack Bas never relented, not for a single instant. It is a fact that no man is invincible or even particularly difficult to kill, that four men or at the very most five, armed with a long length of wood and a bit of sharpened metal at the end of it, are a match for the fiercest warrior who ever lived. It is also a fact that it is not so very difficult to make five men forget this truth, think of nothing but their own flesh and their own future.

Bas’s blade arched above his head, the full rays of dawn blinding bright, then dashed in among packed flesh, heedless of wood or chain or steel. One wide sweep of Roost-forged steel tore the arm and shoulder off a pockmarked pikeman and a return stroke severed the top of his comrade’s skull from its bottom, leaving blood and brain to spray off onto the tight ranks of men. Two stray bladesmen, experienced enough to work in concert, attempted to do so, the first closing in tight with him, the second hoping to edge off to his side, and both dead in no more time than it would take a chick to peck seed, two swift motions leaving meat on the ground below.

Bas’s soldiers, seized with his savagery, surrounded by the force of his presence, swarmed past him as well. It was too close for spears, it was nearly too close for swords, it was flesh against flesh, and the tide of the Aelerians overwhelming, continuing onward because they could do nothing else, the Salucians recognising this and scattering.

Bas roared as he killed, and so he roared a great deal.

The battle won, his men sprinted past him to take care of the few remaining defenders and to take their terrible reward among the beleaguered populace, the traditional seventy-two hours of plunder, rapine, savagery. Riches stolen and churches befouled and women dragged screaming from their homes. It was not the first battle that had been tipped by the appearance of Bas Alyates, the Caracal, the Killer of Gods, the mailed fist of the Empire. Had not he been the first to feel Dycian soil beneath his feet, climbing the siege ladders with two arrows sticking out of his hauberk and his left shoulder puckering from hot grease? Had he not carried the city of Eiben, in those series of grim half-wars against the border countries standing between Aeleria and Salucia, his sword work not yet masterful but his strength and speed without human comparison? Was he not, alone among mankind, the equal of an Eternal, no, not the equal, the proven better? Leaping back atop the barricade, the world, Bas roared at his soldiers and they echoed it back, near to fifty and still tougher than any man living; what he’d lost in speed he made up for in technique, and he had not lost a step in savagery, no he had not, and was she watching? Was she watching? By the gods, was she watching?

H
ammer had the bottle hidden below the wide sweep of his travelling coat, prepared a few moments beforehand. Pure alcohol or near to it, vile stuff – although Pyre had drunk worse when he had been Thistle. Years since a drop of alcohol had passed his lips, and he did not lament the interim, indeed the stink of the bottle from half a block away was near enough to make him gag. It was strange, how many of Thistle’s old pleasures seemed to Pyre not only foolish but lamentable, links in the chains that had bound him.

‘He’s awful new to be taking point,’ said Agate quietly. This was self-evident and verbalising it pointless, but Agate had the tendency to grow nervous in the moments before a job, edgy and irritable. In the moment itself he was very cool, he was a good man to have standing beside you, blade drawn and scowling, but then anticipation is often the worst part of a thing.

‘He’ll handle it,’ Pyre said with some confidence. ‘And so will you.’

Agate nodded and smiled and tightened his grip round the hilt of his long knife.

Not that Agate’s concerns were altogether misguided. Only a month and a half now since a boy named Seed had become a man named Hammer, barely enough time to hear the truth, let alone become a member of the Dead Pigeons. But it was Pyre’s belief – and he did not think this was parochialism, he had moved beyond such petty concerns when he had taken his new name – that the best soldiers came from within the sound of the slurp. Fighting since they were old enough to walk, kids from half a cable to the east or the west, kids that looked the same and spoke the same and thought the same as they did. Years spent sharpening themselves against poverty and misery and violence, all that was needed was to give them something worth fighting for, and Edom had done that. ‘Hammer will do fine,’ Pyre said again.

He was doing a keen enough job so far, one more stumble-drunk knocking down the wide Third Rung thoroughfare, a bit grimier than they generally got up here but not worth noticing twice. Coming towards the hour of the Woodcock, late afternoon giving way towards evening, and in preparation a pair of locals were kindling the street lanterns, handsome hardwood poles set at even distances along the main drag. Where Pyre had grown up there had been no such similar custom, moonlight falling unassisted between the pipes and the tenement spires onto upturned mud and cracked brick. The Third Rung was not the Second, and neither of them the First, but still it seemed a very far way from the Barrow and the docks.

Hammer wobbled onward, past an unlovely if intimidating edifice of white brick, distinct from the small brownstone houses that surrounded it, noteworthy by virtue of its size and its ugly appearance and by the two Cuckoos standing outside of it, cudgels swinging lazily at their waist. ‘Go,’ Pyre said, and Agate sprinted down the alley, circling round to find Grim and his men at their second position. With no chance of stopping it, now that he was irrevocably committed, Pyre felt as he always felt before action, clean and hard and certain. He was smiling when the youth slipped out from a caddy-corner alleyway, actually near Pyre’s age though he looked younger. He shouted the sort of things that a young man might yell at a Cuckoo here in the waning days of the Roost, here within sight of the coming dawn, and when they turned to look he threw a stone. It went wide, chance or error, Pyre wasn’t sure, but they noticed it regardless, self-defence a function of which even the Cuckoos were basically capable, or at least supposed themselves to be. The boy laughed and made a familiar if offensive gesture and the Cuckoos tore away from their posts and sprinted after him.

On the Fifth Rung or even the Fourth, after a solid year of enemy action, of retaliatory assassinations, of bodies bobbing face-up in the canals, the Cuckoos knew better than to run off into the alleyways, knew better than to go anywhere except in the company of six or eight of their fellows. But up on the Third Pyre his organisation were closer to urban myth than brutal reality, and the Cuckoos still imagined themselves supreme, some stutter-step beneath the demons they aped. These two men would learn the opposite, regrettably to Pyre’s mind, but there was no other way for it. Two misguided men with slit throats, two families weeping. Even Cuckoos have families, Pyre had come to learn.

Though he didn’t concern himself with them just then. As soon as the Cuckoos were out of sight Hammer swung into action, pulled the bottle out from its hiding spot and held the rough band of fabric tied round its neck against one of the street lanterns. It flared to life and he sprinted towards the building the Cuckoos had just run from, shoving it through a barred window. There was no explosion, or at least not one that Pyre could hear, but there were screams, and then smoke, and then the front door flew open and half a dozen men came sprinting out, coughing, spluttering, terrified even before they saw Hammer standing in front of them, short sword drawn and gleaming. They were clerks and pushers of paper, cogs in the vast apparatus by which the demons kept their human slaves in bondage, no less sophisticated than the slurp itself, though perhaps less wondrous. They were men unused to violence; this far up the mountain it was all but unknown, petty criminality rare and swiftly punished, the big thieves taking care to hang the little ones.