Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1 (34 page)

‘And you?’ Bas asked. ‘Why are you here?’

She had a way of speaking as if everything she said were as obvious and unquestionable as dirt. ‘Since the Founding, the Wellborn have posted Seven Sentinels across the lands, to ensure the human nations operate in harmony with one another.’

Except that the Founding of the Roost, so far as Bas understood it, had taken place closer to three thousand years ago than two, when the greater part of the continent would have been no more than old-growth forests and untamed plains. What had the job been like, back in those distant days, he wondered? There were still towers scattered across the continent that were said to have been the product of the ancient Sentinels, strange and wondrous things, crumbling but still beautiful.

‘And why are you one of those seven?’

‘Is it not a thing to be proud of, to uphold one’s duty to one’s kind and country?’

‘It depends on the kind,’ Bas said, ‘and the country.’

‘No,’ she said after giving it a moment’s thought. ‘I do not think it does. And I do not think that you think that, Strategos.’

Bas realised he was smiling. ‘Call me Bas.’

‘Bas,’ she repeated, or acknowledged.

‘And what am I to call you?’

‘Here I am called the Sentinel of the Southern Reach.’

‘That’s a title,’ Bas said. ‘Not a name.’

‘Is a thing not named for its purpose?’

‘If that were the case,’ Bas said, ‘very few of us would be named anything.’

‘The name I am known by among my people is private. In any case, you would not be able to understand it, nor to pronounce it. No human can.’

‘And the humans in your charge? They must call you something.’

‘Of course. They call me Lady,’ she said, as if this were the most obvious thing in the world.

Bas did not want to insult her by laughing. ‘And what if you and another of your kind were standing together, and a servant needed to draw your attention?’

‘My humans are far too well trained to interrupt a conversation between two of the Eternal,’ she said. ‘I suppose if there were some sort of emergency, they would refer to me by my full title.’

‘Which is?’

‘I am the Lady of the Ivory Estate.’

‘I’ve never been to the Ivory Estate,’ Bas said.

Another stuttered pause while she tried to understand why this was relevant. ‘It’s no longer Ivory,’ she acknowledged. ‘But it was in my grandmother’s day, when it was first built.’

‘I see.’

‘Now it’s mostly blue.’

‘The Lady of the Ivory Estate,’ Bas repeated. ‘It does not trip lightly off the tongue.’

‘I suppose …’ She fell silent for a moment, then another one, as if working through some complex problem in her head. ‘I suppose you might give me a name.’

Bas wiped a drip of sweat from his forehead. ‘I’m not sure that I could do you justice.’

‘I won’t be able to tell either way.’

This time Bas did laugh, but then he gave the matter a few seconds of thought. ‘Einnes?’ he ventured.

‘What does it mean?’

‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ Bas said. ‘It’s just a name.’

The Sentinel of the Southern Reach, or the Lady of the Ivory Estate, or Einnes, could not possibly have known that this was a lie.

She repeated it several times, slowly, as if tasting each syllable. ‘Einnes I am, then. At least among the humans of Aeleria.’ She took a look up at the sun, which fell swiftly so early in the year. ‘It grows late,’ she said, ‘and I had hoped to get a hunt in before supper.’ Bas found himself escorting her back to her great black mount – which, he now realised, had remained standing where she had left it for the better part of an hour, without fetter, rope or chain. Isaac and Hamilcar and some of the other officers sat silently nearby.

Einnes swung herself up onto the beast with the same ease that she had displayed upon dismounting. ‘Farewell, Bas.’

‘Farewell, Einnes,’ Bas said, and found himself choking back a smile.

Hamilcar waited until her horse had carried her out of earshot before commenting. ‘She is a beautiful creature, is she not?’

Isaac spat on the ground, turned his broken teeth to a sneer. ‘I’d sooner set my cock in the mouth of a rabid dog.’

If Bas heard any of this, he gave no sign. He was watching Einnes gallop away on her magnificent, strange, wondrous steed, and as he did so he made sure to keep his face as blank and unreadable as a bluff overlooking the sea.

T
histle and Spindle and Chalk and two other men were playing Rag-a-Jack at a back table at Isle’s. Chalk was the worst Rag-a-Jack player Thistle had ever met, threw away his high cards without giving it any thought, acted proud as a seed-pecker when he was bluffing, shrunk in his shoulders on those occasions when he had a decent hand. The rest of the table weren’t anything much to speak of, and for that matter, Thistle couldn’t claim any great mastery – but Chalk was on another level of incompetence altogether.

‘I’ll up you a tertarum,’ Thistle said.

Chalk stacked and restacked the few coins he was still holding on to, spent a few seconds trying to read Thistle’s mind. ‘Do you have it, or are you just trying to make me think you have it?’ When Thistle didn’t answer Chalk threw the rest of his coin into the pot. ‘Because I’ve got four blues,’ he said, flipping over his hand to prove it. ‘Which means I’ll be drinking off you tonight.’

‘Six reds,’ Thistle said, turning the cards over one by one, slowly, deliberately, rather nastily.

Chalk didn’t say anything.

‘Six is more than four,’ Thistle explained. ‘Feel free to count off your fingers if that’ll help.’

Five months working with Chalk had rubbed off most of the fear he’d once had of the man, leaving a patina of contempt. Chalk was ugly and Chalk was mean, and Chalk could hit a target with a thrown knife nine times out of ten, but apart from that there seemed to be very little that Chalk was capable of accomplishing. Even Spindle, with his slow way of speaking and empty eyes, was smarter, smarter and more reliable, which Thistle supposed was the reason he’d been made a full initiate, a star branded onto his shoulder, while Chalk remained hired help. ‘I guess I wasn’t bluffing, was I?’

Thistle thought maybe there was something wrong with Chalk, something more than the obvious, that is, because when things got tense he had this unbecoming habit of blinking repeatedly, almost uncontrollably. ‘You got a big fucking mouth, for a little bitch ain’t yet stuck a man,’ Chalk said. The two players at the table that weren’t Spindle, loose affiliates of the Brotherhood but nothing more, looked very deliberately towards the wall.

‘I’ve been sticking you all night, Chalk,’ Thistle said. ‘Or hadn’t you noticed?’

Chalk’s left hand began to shake vigorously. Chalk’s right hand eased its way into Chalk’s jacket, towards one of the many pieces of sharpened metal that Chalk strapped on to himself before he walked outside in the morning. And now Thistle started to wonder if maybe Chalk was crazier than he had previously credited the man, crazy enough to try and murder him in a crowded bar, blood on the floor and damn the consequences.

The answer to that question should have worried Thistle, but for some reason it didn’t, he was too full up with rage to feel anything else. Rage at Chalk for being so fucking stupid and at Spindle for being friends with Chalk and at himself for spending another night sitting at a table with halfwits, especially when it looked like one of those halfwits might kill him.

‘Thistle,’ Rhythm said, the door to the back opening and his square, bald head appearing from it. ‘Back room. The rest of y’all, cut out.’

Thistle pulled his sneer up into a snarl, then pointed at the money lying on the table. ‘This better be here when I get back.’

‘No cause for that kind of talk, Thistle,’ said Spindle, and he shook his head sadly, and Thistle knew he had pushed things too far. Still, there was nothing left but to keep his glower stitched onto his face as he walked into the big man’s office.

‘Take a seat,’ Rhythm said, circling around to the back of his small desk and dropping into his own.

Thistle followed his suggestion, or his order, depending on how you looked at it.

‘You think it’s wise, making an enemy out of Chalk?’

‘I can handle myself.’

‘You wouldn’t last thirty seconds in a room with Chalk. That man was a killer straight from the womb.’

‘And what am I?’

‘You?’ Rhythm leaned back into his seat. ‘You’re just angry. Anger ain’t shit.’

‘Fuck him,’ Thistle said. ‘He can’t afford to lose, he shouldn’t play.’

‘You talk nonsense like this, I hear my knife sing,’ Rhythm said. ‘Makes me want to pull it out and hear the tune proper, hum along while you bleed out. It’d piss Chalk off, not getting to do you himself, but I think it might be worth it all the same.’

Thistle knew that if a man was going to put a hole in you, he wasn’t going to warn you about it beforehand. But he couldn’t pretend he didn’t leak a little sweat sitting there, the most dangerous man on the Rung threatening to end him, in his steady equanimous rasp.

‘Two months you’ve been like this,’ Rhythm said, apparently deciding to let Thistle live a few sentences longer. ‘Going around looking for walls to kick, ever since that Four-Finger did for your boy. Yeah, I heard about that. I hear about everything.’

‘So?’

‘Exactly – so? So what? You think he’s the first of us ever been offed by a Bird? You think his mummy’s the only one ever cried? You think you’re the only person ever been done wrong?’

Thistle didn’t say anything to that, just simmered quietly.

Rhythm undid the clasp on his cuff, rolled the white silk sleeve up to reveal his biceps. Even in the dim light Thistle could make out a row of puckered scars, each about the length of his middle finger. ‘You see these?’

‘Yeah.’

‘One for each year below. One for each year I never saw sunlight, never smelled grass, never drank water didn’t taste like metal. How many I got on me?’

‘Three,’ Thistle said.

‘Three,’ Rhythm confirmed. ‘Three fucking years. I went to the pits at seventeen. Was walking out of a bar when a pack of Cuckoos mistook me for someone else, and I was young and full of liquor and I decided to act the big man, ended up touching one of them. Of course he’d put hands on me first, but the magistrate didn’t think that part of the story relevant. Didn’t even let me tell it, just listened to that lying fuck talk about how I was drunk and violent, and then he shook his head and said, three years. And when they say it, it happens right then, not like you get to go around saying goodbyes. That morning I gave my mother a kiss on the cheek and went out to work, and that was the last I ever saw of her. She was dead by the time I came out. You think you got more right to be angry than me, Thistle? You think you got more right to your hate?’

Thistle didn’t say anything.

‘Ain’t much to think about down below. No way of marking time except by when they feed you, and they weren’t so regular about that. You dig and you think, and you dig and you think. Some guys thought about their women, though you’d have to be an awful fool to imagine she’d wait it out for you, especially since not one in five comes out alive at the end.’ He tapped loudly on the table, as if to make sure that Thistle was listening. ‘Not one in five. Some guys – a lot of guys – all they think about is the wrongness of it, the unfairness. When they get out they’re so full of bile they spew it at everyone they find, end up back below sooner rather than later. That’s what their anger gets them.’ Rhythm stood up from his chair and opened a window. The winter chill came in with it, but Rhythm didn’t seem to notice, or didn’t seem to mind. He leaned his head out and took a deep breath of evening, then sat back down behind his desk. ‘Three years I was down there, Thistle – three long years. And you know what I thought about?’

‘No.’

‘Never going back in. Spending every morning afterwards greeting the light, and maybe doing it in a decent house next to a decent whore. A man like me, he doesn’t get to be angry, he doesn’t have that luxury. A man like me needs to survive. When I picked you out, I thought maybe you were a man like I was, like I am now. Was I wrong in thinking that?’

Thistle didn’t answer.

‘Get out of here,’ Rhythm said. ‘And don’t show up for a few days. Make sure you want to work for me. Make sure that you aren’t just sprinting into the darkness yourself. I don’t pay you to carry a chip around on your shoulder. You can’t brush it off, you’d best find yourself a new line.’

The money was waiting on the table. Outside the weather had turned from cold and dry to cold and wet, tendrils of sleet curling down from a dark sky. Thistle watched them fall from the shelter of the doorway, tried to figure out somewhere to go.

Home he dismissed without consideration. The boys would be down at the pumphouse, drinking themselves friendly. But Thistle wasn’t in a friendly mood, didn’t feel like having to dodge Felspar’s constant begging or Treble’s stone-eyed stupidity. Thistle never seemed to want to see the boys these days, spent most of his nights drinking at Isle’s or sitting by the canals. Rat had been the centrepiece of the whole thing, though Thistle had only realised it belatedly. Thistle had made the decisions but the only reason there was anyone to listen to him was because they all liked to be around Rat.

So Thistle wandered aimlessly upslope, which was a good way to get your head broken, as he well knew. He was dressed pretty enough to draw the attention of any sharp-eyed hard-boys he might pass, twins to Thistle in all but birthplace. Maybe Thistle was even hoping to attract a few, give himself the opportunity to skin a knuckle, lose himself in the rush of speed and violence.

Lucky for someone, what with the weather the usual packs of scavengers had scattered, and there was no one around to take Thistle’s open challenge. Flakes of snow collected on his dense locks, melted and dripped down onto his jacket. The mud pulled at his boots, seeped into his stockings, left his toes numb. In time he found himself on a part of the Rung he’d never been to before, right up close to the boundary with the Fourth. The blocks of tenements were larger and slightly better kept, though you’d need to be something of an expert in slum architecture to see the difference. The pipes were less oppressive upslope, their sucking sound more restrained.