Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2 (38 page)

‘You aren’t a citizen of the Roost,’ Bas said, the two of them leaning over the edge of the balcony and none else within earshot, ‘nor it is likely you’ll live to see the morrow.’

‘It doesn’t look promising, does it?’

Bas spat over the side in answer. The night was clear, the views of the constellations unobscured by cloud, the cluster of lights reflecting from the city below, which seemed the mirror and the obverse of the sky’s naked glory.

‘Have you ever seen anything like it?’ Hamilcar asked quietly.

‘No,’ Bas admitted.

And still hours passed, and still nothing happened, still the Eternal failed to respond in force, still the city guard dithered. The Owl’s hour chimed out across the cityscape, towering chronological edifices echoing across the Rung. Hearing them and wondering at their construction, Bas could understand why rumour and myth had turned the Birds into something that resembled gods, had credited them with the ability to fly or spit fire. Because here was the product of a race so utterly alien as to defy measure with the works of man, as one would not think to compare a rat’s nest to the Senate Hall.

They arrived finally, deep into the evening, though Bas could make them out clearly in the bright light of the torches and the basked fires that lit the Rung. It was not a concerted effort, so far as he could tell, only the independent reaction of the immediate neighbours, a half-dozen Eternal assuming themselves sufficient to put to flight whatever quantity of men had taken up residence uninvited within their homes. Five were clad in full plate, intricate as a costume mask, leering heads for pauldrons, space in the comb through which their tendril-like stalks of hair escaped. The sixth wore a set of loose silk robes, and had a sword the length of a spear in a scabbard on his back.

‘Finally,’ Hamilcar said, though you might almost have thought he’d have been willing to wait longer. His archers were arraigned in three tiers along the balcony, and he gave the order to make ready, though there was not a member of that grim company who had failed to note the presence of the demons, nor questioned how best to receive their arrival.

The Eternal stood in a line and conversed for a short few moments in their mad foreign tongue. The unarmoured one faded back into the crowd of Cuckoos and then the evening-clad city, leaving his five fellows alone to spearhead a frontal assault.

‘Where is he going?’ Hamilcar asked.

‘That’s a good question.’

‘There is no back passage?’

‘Did you see one?’

‘No, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one.’

‘There isn’t one.’

‘Does he mean to scale the tower?’

‘Smooth as sea glass, you said it yourself. And I saw no climbing gear. Did you?’

‘No. Then what’s he doing?’

There proved to be no further time for discussion. They had given no war cry at the battle of Scarlet Fields and they gave no war cry now either, but the themas offered one in counter, a bellow and a curse, the battle finally joined. Full plate but they were fast as a sprinting man and footsure despite the dark, darting through and around and above the caltrops and traps that had been prepared for them, and the bodies of the dead and dying Cuckoos. The wave of arrows broke uselessly against the bright chrome of their armour, save one lucky shot that fell through the thin visor of a great-helm, the demon beneath collapsing like a puppet with its wires snipped. But the rest made it to the barricades without revealing any serious injury. The first, a behemoth in blue and argent, leaped clean over the barricade, landing in heavy-shod boots amidst the mass of hoplitai – though it paid for its temerity, for its boldness, soldiers collapsing round him, dying and screaming but fighting furiously all the same.

That left only three, and three was not enough, not even for them; they were mad with pride, they were arrogant as strutting roosters but still they could not have imagined that five of them alone would be sufficient to cause a breach in the defences.

What, then, did they think?

Bas turned his back from the battle and gave a shout of warning, sprinting towards the far corner of the porch, his blade coming out of its sheath but too late, too late. Between the ground and the balcony were three storeys, an easy sixty links, but there was a
thud
and a hand on the ledge and then the thing atop entire, looking larger than even it really was, and it was terribly large – it towered over the Dycian archers as a man above a child, robes billowing, torchlight reflecting back eyes of bright sterling, the falling cascade of its hair like the mane of a lion. Before even loosing its blade it had killed a man, tossed him from the battlements one-handed, the loud scream audible though not the sound of impact, and then its sword was free and upright, stretching forever into the evening, the curled end mirroring the sliver of the new moon high above, then sweeping down into the flesh below, blood and bone and flesh scattered like grass cuttings.

Brave men, the Dycians, veterans of combat across the breadth of the continent. They ran screaming, ran screaming or died swiftly, all thoughts of defence lost entire to fear, none willing to contend with the monster, as if to stand against a flood or a wildfire. Bas shoved his way through the stream until he was in front of it, taller and thicker and more terrible than Einnes, blade about to dispatch another archer to whatever grim fate awaited him. Bas caught the strike with his own sword and he flung his shoulder against the giant and he came back again as if from a stone wall, dazed as much from the blow as from the discovery that here for perhaps the first time in his long life he had finally met something stronger than himself. The demon advanced fearlessly and without pause, the implied contempt nearly proving justified in the next instant, Bas deflecting the great sweep of the thing’s sword but only barely and then giving ground, rapid and incautious, turning his foot against something and struggling to keep upright. He’d have been a corpse had not two hoplitai found the courage to assault the demon, from the back of course, for who was brave or mad enough to think to best one of them in honest combat? An admirable effort, though futile; the demon heard or sensed or intuited their presence and turned from Bas just long enough to deliver two swift blows, the whistling of its blade clear to Bas despite the sounds of battle that echoed through the evening, the screams of men and the clatter of steel but mainly the screams of men.

Their deaths bought Bas the half-moment he needed to reassert himself, and when the demon turned back round to deliver the killing stroke it was Bas who took the offensive, Bas whose Roost-forged blade gleamed bright against the moon and the torchlight, the demon parrying and twisting out of range. Stronger and faster, but its sword was prettier than it was useful, too long to wield effectively in defence, fashion at the expense of utility, and it had to keep giving ground until they were back near the parapets, out of view of the battle that was raging at the front gate. Not that Bas had any attention to spare regardless, every bit of focus and energy reserved exclusively towards the demon’s end, an end that was coming soon now, the thing too sure of itself, the thing not having known that Bas was just as swift and terrible as ever. The Caracal surged forward in the next exchange and the other came off the worst, pushed back further, to the edge of the balcony, and Bas roaring and the point of his blade searching for the demon’s flesh, pirouetting out of the way neatly, the opening a feint, Bas moving forward recklessly and soon to pay for it. Bas not the only one who knew something of combat, and how many decades had the demon practised that last move, how many centuries? It wasn’t really fair, but fair or not Bas would be dead in a moment, pivoting to try to face the thing but not fast enough, he would die in the moonlight, and not so terrible a thing – it came to everyone, and not all of them in the moonlight either.

Hamilcar’s arrow – Bas did not see him shoot it but he knew it was Hamilcar’s, could have been no one else’s – jutted out from the demon’s breast, fletching tight against flesh. And still it came forward, Bas barely managing to deflect the next blow. The demon dodged the second arrow somehow, a whistling but no
thump
to accompany it, an impossible feat accomplished neatly, though still it required the thing to contort itself and Bas responded, took the offered opening, a wide scattering of blood against the clear walls of the Spire. With torso half-severed it now showed signs of injury, shifting backwards on unsteady legs, and their insides were at least the same, the pink of intestine in the torchlight, the pure white of bone. Still it caught Bas’s next blow with the edge of its sword, and the one it offered in return was no half-hearted attempt at violence, would have taken the top off Bas’s head if Bas had not been as swift as Bas always was. Hamilcar’s next arrow settled the matter; a spot of dark against the dark and then the point past teeth and tongue and through its throat and breaking against the demon’s spine, death swallowed whole as it collapsed down on one knee. And still the demon’s eyes were fluttering, and still with some dim sentience it struggled forward, until Bas’s next stroke removed its head from its shoulders.

It died silently, it died in magnificent and glorious futility, like all of them. The battle for the front gate was over by then, Bas knew without looking, its only purpose having been to offer a distraction for this attack. The Spire would hold, Bas knew that as well, Those Above would not respond with sufficient swiftness, not before the full mass of the Aelerian army arrived at the walls the next morning. Whatever their strength, they could not bring it to bear, too old and stagnant to react to events as they were unfolding. And the city that spread out below them, a city exquisite and wondrous beyond imagination, a city the sort of which Bas had not thought existed, which had been not even a dream to him before he had seen it, that city would burn, that city would sunder, that city would drown in the blood of its inhabitants. That city would die just as surely as the demon had died, just as bravely and with no more purpose.

‘Damn you, Caracal,’ Hamilcar said, coming to stand above the corpse he had made. ‘Damn you to hell.’

W
hen Eudokia awoke the next morning she stared out of her open window, looking for evidence of her machinations in the skyline, some hint of the bloodshed that was, one way or the other, sure to come. As yet she saw no evidence of its arrival, but she did not suppose that would long remain the case. There was a steam shower attached to her bedroom, part of the slate of luxuries that were ubiquitous upslope but which had no corollary anywhere else in the world of men, and she spent a long time luxuriating in it. If things went according to plan, it would be a long time before she’d have the opportunity for another. If things went badly, it would be her last altogether. Then she dressed and went down to breakfast, finding Jahan outside her door as always.

Leon was waiting for her in the small garden in the centre of the complex, sitting at the wooden table where she took her breakfast most mornings. Whatever was going on in the rest of the city, if her grim strategems had blossomed or failed entirely, it had not affected the good service of her house-slaves, and a tray of bread and fruit and clear water awaited her.

He seemed to have slept little. His face was pale and drawn, but he rose and offered a swift bow as she sat. ‘Revered Mother.’

‘Nephew,’ she said. ‘Have you eaten?’

‘I’m not hungry.’

Eudokia curled a tab of butter onto a chunk of bread, drizzled it with honey and handed it over.

‘I’ve no appetite,’ he said again.

‘Surely you can manage a few bites?’

And indeed after a moment of staring at her he consumed it swiftly, and washed it down with most of the flagon of water that had been left her. ‘I have spent the morning wondering what I was to hope for from today’s events.’

‘Did you reach any conclusions?’

‘The one hand holds the death of tens of thousands of my countrymen, perhaps the destruction of the nation. The other would see the end of a species entire, the world they have built, and the death of countless innocents under their sway. They seem neither rosy options.’

‘You’ve pieced it together, then?’

‘The essential points. You supplied a revolutionary group within the walls of the Roost, you pointed them towards acts of violence meant to provoke a similar response. You baited them and led them to the slaughter, provocation provoking provocation, till all hope of reconciliation became impossible.’

‘It was Steadfast you turned?’

‘Tricked, more like. He was a fool.’

‘We make use of the pawns available to us.’

‘Was that all this was? A game? Something to occupy your own genius? Surely you do not expect me to believe that all this is revenge for your poor Phocas, a man dead a quarter-century of whom I’ve never heard you speak?’

‘Don’t suppose you know every secret that lies in the heart of the Revered Mother,’ Eudokia said, eyes clouding over. ‘Not a day has passed that I have not mourned for my husband, and of what we might have done together. But it’s true, what comes today has little of revenge, nor can I claim honest hatred of Those Above. In fact, apart from some ultimately superficial dissimilarities, they seem virtually identical to our own species. One would think that their longer span might make them wiser, or at least more prudent, given that they have to deal with the ramifications of their own foolishness, rather than passing the injury on to the unborn. But in fact the opposite seems true. They float along on the surface of the moment like children, with no more reason or purpose.’

‘Then it was simply mad ambition? You saw so immense a prize within reach, and could not but try and grasp it? So much death in service of your own grandeur! So much death!’

Eudokia looked at him for a long time, longer than the normal give-and-take of a conversation ought to allow, long enough that Leon, even having steeled himself for conflict, grew uncomfortable. Then she brought the back of her hand up to his face, laid it against his cheek. Leon, more surprised than had she struck him, flinched at the unexpected moment of kindness. ‘I find myself saying this very rarely – but you overrate me.’