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

But Thistle didn’t hesitate, not for even a second, and it was this that made Seed capable of doing the same, though Quail and Dray blanched white as chalk and were a long slow time following them down.

Seed descended hand over hand, and after a few rungs the darkness had grown all-consuming. He could not make out Thistle beneath him, nor the leather of his boots, nor the ladder in front of him nor the hands that held it.

‘Don’t fear, brothers.’ Thistle’s voice, ringing clearly from the black. ‘Our people have laboured beneath the mountain in days beyond memory, and she has not forgotten us. The demons live atop her and think they know her secrets – as if the owner knows more of a house than its tenant!’

Thistle had a lantern lit and hung before Seed made it all the way down, but its dim light failed to reach to the high far corners of the chamber. At either end were heavy floodgates, drop-walls of thickly forged iron. At different points in the day, according to no particular rhythm that anyone on the Fifth ever managed to figure, those gates would close, and the chamber would be flooded. This was not Seed’s foremost concern at the moment, however. In the dim light he could see the waters rushing down towards the bay, and the stone walls covered with moss, and also that Thistle was carrying a knife long enough to reasonably be called a sword. It must have been hidden beneath the travelling cloak that hung now next to the lantern, and Seed stared at it so nakedly and for so long that he thought Thistle must now be certain of his purpose, if he hadn’t already deduced it.

‘I welcome you then to the abode of the Five-Fingers. Perhaps it does not look like much, but it is ours, brothers, yours and mine, and a shack freely owned is better than a mansion entailed.’

There were three of them against Thistle’s one, was what Seed was thinking, and all three of them were carrying blades. But they were small things, shivs really, bits of sharpened metal they had found or stolen. The way Thistle rested his hand on his own weapon made Seed think that neither their knives nor their numbers would do them much good.

But it was too late to back out now – probably Thistle wouldn’t let him leave, anyway, and there were still those men waiting outside, likely with the same kind of weapon as Thistle was carrying, likely no less skilled. And then the thought of seeing the sun again, of the light shining on Seed and on the shame as yet unanswered, proved enough to spur him onward.

‘I guess you don’t remember me.’ He had said it a thousand times in his mind, a thousand times a thousand, and it had never sounded so foolish or so hollow.

‘Of course I remember – did you think that I would lead three strangers into our headquarters, what with half of our besotted species still doing the work of the demons?’ Thistle slipped his blade from its sheath so cleanly and so swiftly that Quail and Dray jumped clear back, and there was an instant when Seed felt sure that he would die in the sewers beneath the Rung, that his body would be food for the rats or float listlessly out to sea, his body and the bodies of his friends.

So when Thistle flipped it to him, hilt first, Seed was so startled that he nearly dropped it into the sewer water; and what a shame that would have been, something so beautiful and so deadly lost amidst the dark. He managed to catch it by the very tip of the pommel, found it was heavier than he had imagined, found that he now had no idea what to do with it.

‘You wish revenge,’ Thistle said. It was a statement but Seed heard it as a question. ‘I cannot blame you. It is all we are taught to do, violence, all we believe ourselves capable of. The demons prefer it that way, prefer us weak and broken and foolish, know that if we ever stopped feuding among ourselves we would recall our strength, as in days of old, and be capable of greatness.’

‘Stop talking like that,’ Seed said.

‘Like what?’

‘Like you’re on stage, like you’re giving a speech, like you’re so damn special.’

‘You’d rather I dip into that downslope chatter, ’ey boy? Rather I grab a few bullyboys so we can get a good scrap going? You’d rather I turned my sword on you, as I would have when I was Thistle, turned it against you and had half a dozen men waiting down here to do the same? I’m afraid I cannot do so. I have been reborn, consecrated in the service of something a thousand times larger than myself, something so vast and so beautiful that before it my life is as a scrap of paper near a flame.’

‘This is birdshit,’ Seed said, and when he said it his voice cracked, and when his voice cracked he swung the blade upright. ‘You might have the rest of the city conned, but I know you, I know you down to your bones. You’re a brute, same as me, same as any of us. Two years ago you was part of Rhythm’s crew, going to get the Brotherhood’s scar on your shoulder, a pimp and a thug.’

‘It is true, my ignorance was vast. For a time, before I heard the truth, before my light was kindled, I was everything that you say. I carried a blade in the service of a man, I leeched from my people, I was a thief and a thug. But no longer, brothers, no longer. Now I carry a blade in service of men, to restore their freedom, to lead them, bleary-eyed and blinking, into the dawn to come.’

‘You won’t be around to see it,’ Seed said, the tip of the sword pointing at the tender flesh of Thistle’s breast.

‘Perhaps. But it will arrive just the same.’

Seed found that his fingers were curled so tight round Pyre’s sword, Thistle’s sword he meant, this little Barrow cunt could call himself whatever he wanted but it wouldn’t put Seed’s eye back into place, would it? Wouldn’t make him pretty like he’d used to be, wouldn’t make the girls in the street stop turning away when he brushed down the boulevard. And fine, it wasn’t as if Seed hadn’t done things similar; there was that one dust-up with one of the crews to the east where he’d ended up breaking a bottle over some kid’s head, and Seed had never seen him again but had heard he didn’t talk so well any more – but so what? This wasn’t a question of fairness, this wasn’t a question of justice, this was a question of revenge, this was a question of clearing a slate, that was the only justice a boy from the Fifth knew anything about, could ever know.

The sword clattered loudly against stone.

‘What is your name?’

‘Seed.’

‘Seed is the name they gave you,’ Pyre said, smiling and shaking his head. ‘Boy they called Seed – there is someone you should meet.’

E
udokia had last seen Protostrator Konstantinos Aurelia, her stepson and the leader of the Aelerian armies in Salucia, eighteen months earlier, marching at the head of his themas down the great trunk road that led north out of the capital, the entirety of the city thronging the streets, shrieking their love of him until it seemed almost a physical thing, a brisk wind, a strong current. He had accepted the adoration with dignity, if not quite enthusiasm, as if this was one more trial to be overcome, and he would prefer to save his strength for those ahead. He had looked marvellous, absolutely marvellous, dressed as a typical hoplitai with chain armour and a standard short sword, but so broad-shouldered and gorgeous that women were said to faint as he passed by, to faint and be crushed beneath the uncaring hooves of the crowd. It had been the crowning achievement of his life to that point, the moment he had been fitted for nearly since birth; if it had been the end of his labours he could have retired knowing that no man had ever performed so skilfully.

Alas then, that there was still the war to be fought.

Six months they had been forced to wait at the borders of the Commonwealth while the Roost gave its consent for two slave nations to wage war – fine, he could not be blamed for that, nor for the long winter that had after been wasted. And the first part of this year’s campaign had gone well enough. They had finally met the enemy at Bod’s Wake, and if the result was not the signal victory that Eudokia’s propaganda machine had proclaimed it, still it had been the Salucians who had found themselves in rapid retreat northward, towards the heartland and the nation’s capital.

But that had been nearly four months previous, and the time since had been spent camped in front of Oscan, the themas diminishing daily and a second winter growing close. As the trees had budded and then blossomed and were now shortly to die away again, so had the gallant youth she had waved farewell to diminished. There was grey at his temples, a shade she found difficult to square with the immaturity he had somehow managed to retain from the first moment he had been presented to her, a tow-headed child of fifteen. He had on the same chain armour that he had worn while marching out of the capital, but it looked better used, no longer an affectation but as natural as the sallow skin it covered. His eyes were cramped, and uncertain.

He sat at his desk, as if so engrossed in his work he had failed to notice her arrival. A pretence, and not a particularly good one either, meant to show how hard he was working, how seriously he took his task though his efforts had not yet been crowned with success. By the gods, how she yearned for a man, a true man, and not simply a long-limbed boy!

‘Revered Mother,’ he said, rising swiftly. At least he had not forgotten that much. He leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. ‘How was the journey from the capital?’

‘Tedious. As will be the next leg. How fares the child of my beloved Phocas, upon whom the hopes and prayers of Aeleria reside?’

Konstantinos made an attempt at stoicism, but he wasn’t very good at it and also he didn’t try for very long. ‘It is no easy thing, being the leader of men.’

‘Do tell.’

‘The Salucians have bottled themselves up inside the city, and they have provisions to last out the winter. Every day we lose ten men from disease, and it won’t be long until we start losing more from the cold. If they’d only come out and give fair battle, we’d roll right through them, but …’

It was almost as if they would prefer not to die, Eudokia thought. A clever people, the Salucians, but then again wit wasn’t everything. A well-timed jibe would not get you so much as a swift blow to the jaw, and whatever the poets might say, one doesn’t ride to battle holding a pen. ‘Heavy are the burdens required of great men. Broad must be their shoulders.’

‘It’s not like with the sea lords. The truth is they weren’t nearly so hard to kill as everyone made out. A ragtag bunch, and they had no walls to hide behind.’

Not for the first time Eudokia wondered if it had been wise to arrange the short series of naval battles that had cleared the southern coast of pirates and established within the minds of the more credulous citizenry – a group that apparently included Konstantinos himself – her stepson’s reputation for invincibility. The Gentleman Lion, they had taken to calling him, and it seemed clear he had heard the name.

‘The Salucians send peace offerings weekly,’ he informed her, as if she had not already known, as if there had ever been anything, down to the contents of his meal and the specificity of his toilet, that Eudokia did not understand better than did her stepson.

‘Yes?’

‘They have promised to make Oscan a free city, one without official ties to either of our nations. But I think if pressed, they would agree to allow for incorporation within the Commonwealth, provided we give sufficient guarantees that our expansion will cease thereafter.’

‘Honeyed words hide false promises. Weakened and tottering on the precipice, they offer something that is ours by right and soon in fact. In a few years, when they have rebuilt their walls and replenished their stocks, when they have hired mercenary armies from the east, we will see how firm their commitment to amity. We have not come to wound the Salucians, we have come to cripple them. To ensure that never again will the children of Aeleria fear the machinations of the bitch-Queen of Hyrcania.’

‘Every peace is temporary,’ Konstantinos said, and for a long moment he would not look at her. ‘And I sometimes wonder if the children of Aeleria would not be better served if their lives were frittered away less casually. At Bod’s Wake there were so many corpses that you could walk from one end of the field to the next without ever taking your boot off flesh. At night I dream of them, and I dream of Enkedri beyond them, and he asks me what was my purpose in leading so many to death, why my gain needed to be bought with their blood, and I have no answer for him, Mother, I have no answer—’

The sharp slap echoed loudly within the tent. ‘Revered Mother,’ Eudokia hissed, ‘and by the gods you seem suddenly so fond of, do not again forget it.’

It had been a calculated provocation, as was virtually everything that Eudokia did. And, like virtually everything Eudokia did, it had the intended effect. Konstantinos blinked twice, and the colour began to return to his face. He looked angry and ashamed, but at least he no longer looked like he was going to vomit on his trousers, or turn his knife against himself.

‘Men die,’ Eudokia said simply, ‘such is the purpose of men – or did you suppose mortality some recent invention of your own? The themas are blessed to expire in service of their beloved Aeleria, in service of her national destiny. To die is their burden. To lead them into battle is yours, as it was your father’s, and it shames me to watch you quiver beneath it. The world is filled with men, the world shakes them off, daily, hourly, every moment, unmourned and unconsidered, as a mutt does fleas. Would you be more than just a man? Would you be great? This is the price asked of you, the price demanded. It is no small thing. It is too much for most.’ Eudokia laid her hand along the high cheekbones of her nephew, let it rest there a moment, for one does not rule by the lash alone. ‘Be at peace, my beloved child. A great task has Aeleria asked of you, and she will offer the tools to complete it. The Senate, in recognition of the importance of your duty, has voted you three more themas.’ And what arm-bending had that taken; two of them had come from the Marches and she had been forced to pay a call on every senator with an estate in the hinterlands, offering assurances that the Marchers had been well and truly obliterated. Which of course had been her purpose in provoking them into revolt some years earlier, making certain of her western flank before moving east.