Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1 (23 page)

‘He dresses very well,’ Hamilcar said.

‘You’d know better than I.’

‘They say he smashed the Baleferic pirate fleet all but single-handed, a masterpiece of strategy and manoeuvre.’

‘That’s what they say.’

‘There were no pirates on the Baleferic coast, back when Dycia still had a fleet.’

‘You didn’t appreciate the competition?’

‘It’s not a game for amateurs, and the pirates were just that. You’d see them plying the straits in these rickety dhows, a hundred of them stuffed into a space unfit for half that, not ten decent swords between them. Never sure whether you should sink them or give them food.’ He finished off what was left of his drink. ‘We’d sink them, of course. But we didn’t feel the need to make such a display of it afterwards.’

The pack of people surrounding Konstantinos laughed uproariously, their bright garments and untanned flesh momentarily shielding the hero from view.

‘The greatest victory against the Marchers since the death of Jon the Sanguine, the whole of the west open up to their pillage, and the capital creams itself over a boy with his hair all a-bowed. We’ll see what that pretty hair does against the Salucians.’

‘Or the Others.’

Hamilcar nodded, poured himself another glass of wine from a flagon resting on a nearby table, then topped up Bas. ‘Or the Others,’ he agreed, and the two drank. ‘Does it gall you – a lifetime in their service, killing their enemies, making them rich and free of fear, and still you will never be anything more to them than a tool?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘You really mean that, don’t you?’

Bas shrugged.

‘Is there nothing that you want, Caracal?’

‘I’d like this evening to be over,’ Bas said.

Hamilcar laughed and drank the rest of his wine in one fierce gulp. ‘If you’ll excuse me, then. I imagine I’m going to take the Third Consul up on his offer.’

Bas watched Hamilcar slip back into the party. In the far corner Isaac was rapidly turning the corner from drunk to stupefied. He’d need to be taken away soon; it wouldn’t do to have his second in command vomiting on the silverware. It would be a good excuse to leave, one that Bas had been looking for all evening. Off to his right he could see a group of gallants gathering up the courage to approach him, and with the same instinct for self-preservation that had seen him survive a lifetime on the Marches, he slipped quickly and silently out of a side door and into the gardens beyond.

The evening was colder than he had thought, too cold to be standing for long in what he was wearing, though in the first moments it was a desperate relief. Belatedly he realised he had drunk too much of the sugary swill that they’d been passing to him since he’d got there; his stomach was a hard knot of misery. Bas leaned against the wrought-iron railing and looked down at the gardens below, rose bushes and coloured ivy, and thought about the pleasure to be had in vomiting on them, the sour stink of his insides bringing honest taint to something beautiful.

‘If you would excuse my interrupting,’ said a voice from behind him, atonal and sharply staccato.

Bas tensed unconsciously when he heard it, reached down for a weapon that wasn’t there, remembered where he was. Then he pulled himself up to his full height and turned round to face the devil.

He hadn’t expected it to be a woman. Not a woman, he reminded himself, a female. There were few enough differences between the sexes – at least they both killed as well, riding into battle perched on their massive horses, pronged lances shining.

‘I am the Lady of the Ivory Nest, the Sentinel of the Southern Reach. The Roost’s liaison here in Aeleria. You are the one they call the Caracal? You will tell me if you are not. I have little skill in distinguishing between Dayspans.’

Bas had known that the Roost kept an Other in each of the capital cities of the continent, half as evidence of their superiority, half to act as spy. But that had been a distant sort of knowledge, something that he had never imagined would play any active role in his life. ‘Some people call me that, I suppose.’

She cocked her head, flickered her eyes over him, swirling pools of silver. ‘I had thought you would be larger.’

‘Sorry to disappoint you.’

‘It is not disappointment I am expressing,’ she said. ‘It is interest.’

Bas almost smiled at that. There was no shortage of humans in the capital, and weren’t none of them so very different. It occurred to Bas that this was the first time he’d got a look at an Other who wasn’t dressed in plate and trying to kill him. There had been plenty of time for inspecting corpses, of course, but a corpse wasn’t the same as a living body. In this at least, the two species resembled each other.

He took a moment to look at this one. She was as tall as Bas, which would have made her something like a giant had she been a human, though for an Other it seemed to be more or less the norm. Her proportions were slightly off, her arms a tic longer than her frame ought to have allowed. Her hair seemed less that than a cluster of thick stalks, like the roots of some massive oak, though there was an absence in the centre of the tussock where one of the strands had been removed. What breasts she had were hidden beneath the folds of her robe, which was loose and dark and made of some material Bas had never seen before.

‘It is true that you were the victor in single combat against one of my kind?’

‘True as anything.’

‘How it was done?’

‘He wasn’t your father or something, was he?’

She cocked her head at him again – in a human this would have expressed surprise, or confusion, but Bas was quickly coming to realise that their mannerisms did not align with those of his own species, and was unsure what to make of it. ‘We had no direct relation as you understand it.’

‘Then why do you care?’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘Care?’

‘Why does it matter to you? Are you interested in evening up the score?’

She took a long time before speaking, as if thinking carefully through each sentence – though whether that was because of her difficulty with the Aelerian tongue, or because she did not have an easy answer, he couldn’t say. ‘I believe you would say that I am curious? It was not a thing thought possible, that a Dayspan could defeat one of my kind. Some still do not think it really happened.’

Many, many people asked Bas about the battle that had given him his name. Very few had ever got an answer. ‘A hammer,’ he said. ‘A war hammer, flat at one end with a spike on the other. It’s good against armour, splinters bone right through metal. I don’t think your people use them. At least, I never saw one of you carrying one.’

She seemed to think that over for a moment. The wine had well and truly caught up with Bas now, overtaken him on the road and thumped him into submission. His head hurt – and his knee of course, but only the head could be blamed on drink.

‘What is the meaning of your sobriquet?’

‘A Caracal is an animal that lives on the Marches – a large cat, like the leopards of Dycia. It hunts birds.’ It also rhymed with ‘devil’s fall’, which, if Bas had to guess, was the main reason that some nameless minstrel had decided to brand him with it in the days after the battle at Ebbs Field had turned him from anonymous ranker to the most celebrated warrior in the Commonwealth.

She gave no indication that she had understood, or even heard, but after a moment she began to speak again. ‘The colour of your hair indicates you are old, yes? And the lines in your face.’

Bas laughed, an ugly bark. ‘I’m not young.’

‘Despite that, I think you would be a difficult man to kill.’

Things seemed less funny, all of a sudden. ‘No one is that hard to kill,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘That is a very good point.’ She took a moment to consider it, and then said, ‘I hope very much that I get the chance to murder you on the field of battle.’

If she had been human it would have been a threat, but she wasn’t human, and it wasn’t. In fact, Bas got the sense that she had meant it as something of a compliment. ‘It isn’t called murder if you do it in war,’ Bas said, though he’d never been sure why.

W
hen Thistle saw Rhythm double-timing it down Talc Street at four in the afternoon, he knew something was going to go down. Because Rhythm generally didn’t leave his hole till after dark, and he never ever hurried. Rhythm was the Brotherhood’s representative in the neighbourhood, not just an affiliate but a full member, with the burn scars to prove it. And that made Rhythm the man in the Barrow, and the man don’t need to hurry.

And yet there he was, undeniably on Talc Street, undeniably in the daytime, and undeniably bustling. Sweat puddled on his thick bald head, dripped down over the scar tissue of a nose that had been broken more than once, was licked off swelled lips by a pink tongue. Rhythm was a big man, dark-skinned, fierce-looking and sharp-eyed. He was dressed in Salucian robes; they didn’t look good on him, but that was because he was ugly, and not the fault of the clothes themselves, which were tasteful if not elegant.

Thistle was sitting alone on his steps, the rest of the crew having absented themselves for the afternoon. Rat and Treble were down at the docks watching the ships unload, Felspar was at the Straits, continuing his ceaseless quest for upslope pussy. Thistle had seen almost as many cargo ships as he had apathetic girls, wasn’t interested in making the walk to catch a glimpse of either. The sun was warm on his skin and the red brick he sat on warm against his arse. He was debating whether or not to roll a smoke. He only had enough tobacco left for one good cigarette or two weak ones, wanted to save something for after dinner. Would one half-cigarette be enough, Thistle wondered? His future self was an avaricious motherfucker, like his predecessor.

And then Rhythm walked by, and with him the sudden potential for excitement, like light leaking through cloud cover. And even though Thistle had never said a word to Rhythm, and even though on some distant level he was aware that he might be jumping in on more than he could handle, still as soon as he saw the man walk past he knew he would try to speak to him. Thistle was too young to be smart all the time.

‘’Ey, Rhythm,’ he said.

Rhythm stopped walking, swivelled his bull neck over at Thistle.

‘Everything all right?’ Thistle asked, almost losing his nerve beneath the man’s stare. ‘I mean, you need anything doing?’

You heard lots of rumours about Rhythm, growing up in the Barrow, and if most didn’t contain a grain of truth, that still left plenty to be worried about. They said he’d worked his way into the Brotherhood on account of being untouchable with a shiv in his hand, said he was worth two hundred eagles easy, said he’d sent more men down the pipes than turds. They said a lot of things about him, but the one fixture in this constellation of bullshit, the accepted fact of the matter, was that Rhythm had spent three years labouring in the dark, slaving away below. Anyone who came out of the pit and could still walk, talk, fight and fuck was a man to be feared, respected. A man to turn away from, when he stared at you.

Thistle didn’t, though, and finally Rhythm said, ‘Thistle?’ Half a question.

‘Yeah.’

‘You Granite’s brother.’ A statement.

‘Yeah.’

‘You the one that got into trouble up at the Points.’ Another statement.

Thistle shrugged. ‘Yeah.’

‘Come over here,’ Rhythm said.

Thistle stretched himself up from off his steps, trying to look casual and mostly failing. Rhythm looked him over silently a second time, but it was clear whatever was going down he didn’t have time to burn. ‘You know Isle’s tavern?’

Isle’s tavern was downslope about half a cable. It was more expensive than the average neighbourhood alehouse, and Thistle didn’t have enough money to drink at any of those, so he had never been inside. But he knew where it was, of course – partly because it was supposedly where Rhythm and his boys hung out, and by the prostrate standards of the neighbourhood that made it a little bit famous. But mostly just because Thistle knew where everything was in the Barrow, every gutter and rat and scratched line of graffiti.

‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘That’s where I’m going, and that’s where you’re going too,’ Rhythm said. ‘Except that you’re going to walk a hundred paces ahead of me and you’re going to sing out if you see any Cuckoos. A quick holler and then you disappear, you got it?’

‘I got it.’

Rhythm leaned in closer to Thistle, and suddenly their differences – in age and size and strength, in experience, wisdom and ability – seemed more distinct than when the boy had been seated. ‘And you ain’t going to fuck up,’ Rhythm said.

‘You want to take Cross Keys, or should we just stroll down the boulevard?’

Rhythm almost smiled. ‘Stick to the side streets.’

Thistle nodded and started off.

It took fifteen minutes to make it down to Isle’s, and if they weren’t the best fifteen minutes of Thistle’s life he couldn’t volunteer any better. Since the Cuckoos didn’t make an appearance Thistle’s duties consisted of nothing more than putting one foot after the next, and the occasional passer-by didn’t have any idea he was holding something down for the man. But Thistle knew, and it brought an added bit of weight to every step, kept his spine upright like a hook.

Thistle stopped in front of the entrance to Isle’s, took a backwards glance for the first time since he’d started off from his house. Rhythm was where he was supposed to be, and didn’t so much as glance at Thistle as he passed him, slipping out of the sun and into the cool dark of the bar.

Rhythm hadn’t told Thistle to come in – but then again, he hadn’t told him not to. And Rhythm hadn’t told Thistle to call out to him neither, and that had gone well enough. And there was no way in hell that Thistle was going to let this chance slide past him, head home, wait for Rat and the boys to show so he could brag about the little taste he’d got before slinking away.

Thistle followed Rhythm into Isle’s, and he held his head upright.

It was dark and dirty and cramped. Rhythm had crossed swiftly from the entrance towards one of the busy back tables. Five men were sitting there, but three of them got up as soon as Rhythm had made his appearance, found seats out of earshot or seemingly so. The two that remained had reputations within the neighbourhood, and not for untoward amiability.