Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2 (19 page)

‘You need not remind me,’ he said, ignoring her entirely as being beneath notice and staring firmly at the Shrike instead, ‘and whatever joys it might bring the Lord of the Ebony Towers, he will not have opportunity to practise his sadism at the expense of my honour. This Dayspan is beneath the protection of the Conclave, your predilections towards cruelty notwithstanding.’

‘Thank you, my Lord, oh by the gods thank you. They hate us so, my Lord, they are mad with hatred, I know nothing of politics, my Lords, by all the gods and all their creatures—’

‘Indeed – though the Lord of the Ebony Towers is well known for his obsessive contempt for the Dayspans, never did I suppose the Prime would fall victim to such error. Have you gone so mad with fear, sibling, that you see danger hiding behind every tree and branch, huddled beneath the cobblestones, slithering out of the pipes?’

‘The Lord of the Ebony Towers does not speak for me,’ the Prime said swiftly. ‘Never have we sat in counsel together, and as regards the humans of the Roost, indeed we have ever been in fierce and open dispute, as any honest witness will admit. My recommendations carry no hint of cruelty, a luxury the Lord of the Red Keep has never allowed himself, but only of self-defence, the primary duty of all things living. Aeleria is a threat to the future of the Roost, I believe it and I have long believed it, and if we do not answer rapidly and with force then we may well lose the opportunity to do so effectively. The balance of power within the continent must be maintained, and for that the Aelerian army must be shattered. If left unchecked they will grow one day to devour us. This woman is the architect of this danger; it is her hand wielding the blade, her threat that we must answer today, here and now, at this very moment.’

But looking down from thrones of aureate and ivory, who would believe it? An old woman, enfeebled by the standards of a race that was so weak anyway as to be of no account, who died in the blink of an eye and who were replaced by some identical mass of flesh. Her voice quivered and she leaned hard on her cane, barely able to speak against the inevitable majesty of the Eternal; two species similar as the sun is to the moon, alike in rough shape but essentially and ultimately without comparison. Who would believe her a threat? Who could think such a thing possible?

I
n a province of no particular importance, lying roughly equidistant between Oscan, Hyrcania and the Roost, there was a valley. Nearby that valley there was a town called Actria, and afterward the battle would be named for it, but that was not actually the name of the valley. The valley did not have a name, not even to the people of Actria, who referred to it by compass bearing on those rare occasions when it needed to be mentioned. In the valley that did not have a name on that day in the early spring there were magnolia trees just starting to bloom, thin sprays of white and pink stretching out from the boughs. There were tanager and warbler returned from their winter quarters, beginning the laborious task of nesting, if they were female, or simply singing their joy to the sun, were they otherwise. There were evergreens still looking rich from winter, there were strands of catmint and lavender poking up from the dirt. There were voles in the grass, there were sparrows in the sky, there were ninety thousand men carrying sharpened steel, though by nightfall there would be a good number fewer.

It had not come as a surprise to Bas to find that the arrival of the three western themas, swelling as they had the ranks of what had already been the largest military force in Aelerian history, had not been sent back homeward. A month since they had left the ruined city of Oscan, scuttling east like a snail abandoning its shell, leaving in their wake the usual trail of burned townships and ravaged farms and weeping smallfolk. Unable to make peace, having failed to convince the Others to intervene, Salucia had scraped together the largest force it could field and sent it south to meet the invaders, and by divine providence or cruel fate or the random alignment of events, the two armies found themselves occupying opposite ends of a valley that had never before been important enough to receive a proper name, but which would afterward echo in the annals of human history, however brief a span that might be.

No, the coming battle was not a surprise to Bas – but it was an odd feeling indeed not to be in the middle of it. Outside a not over-modest command tent, positioned at the lip of the valley, Bas had a fine view of everything that would develop below, though no capacity to influence it. True, it was rare for a Legatus to be put in charge of a single thema, but there was nothing about this situation that could be considered normal. Konstantinos insisted he required Bas as a personal consultant, dealing with the strategic considerations of the campaign, though Bas was not exceptional in this regard and anyway his opinion had rarely been solicited. The sight of the men down below, his men, and their standard, his standard, the three-legged wolf snarling on a crimson background, had set the bottom half of Bas’s jaw scratching against the top, and his hand curling round the hilt of his sword in unconscious sympathy for his comrades.

Protostrator Konstantinos watched the coming conflict like a man holding a pair of weighted dice. Battle orders had been signed out long hours earlier; there had been plenty of time to arrange the thema below to his satisfaction. Signalmen stood nearby, preparing their array of flags to transmit his orders, though Bas suspected it would require nothing more complicated than the simple black banner indicating forward movement. A clear day, cloudless, the sun descending on Konsantinos’s broad smile as if by personal invitation. He wore a chain baldric and a sword that had never been bloodied. He had a sterling silver torc that was the just due of his rank, and he carried a short rod, ivory and gold-capped. He had not said anything for several minutes, though Bas could see that this happy interlude was about to come to an end.

‘Hail, Caracal. May the gods look upon our work today with favour.’

Of this Bas had little doubt. It had been his experience over the course of near forty years of death and blood and slaughter that the gods preferred large numbers to small, and the Aelerians had that. Seven to five, had been the predictions of the spies and scouts and traitors, though looking at the army Salucia had assembled below Bas suspected it was closer to five to three. Not that it would matter, because that five or that three, however many there were exactly, were mostly not soldiers but only men holding weapons. At the other end of the valley men were praying loudly to their bull-god Mephet, and remembering the faces of their lovers or their sons or their mothers, soft contours they would never see again. The cream of the Salucian military – to the degree that such a thing could be spoken of in a race as silk-soft as the Salucians – had died at Bod’s Wake and on the walls of Oscan. What was left were raw recruits, fresh levees impressed and forced to carry a spear, the unlucky sons of tenant farmers and the urban poor, fit only for dying.

‘The contest would be more certain if I was in the vanguard,’ Bas observed, though he didn’t entirely believe it.

‘No doubt,’ Konstantinos said, smiling and gesturing with his rod to the men below. Not at anything in particular, more so that he could wave the thing around. ‘But the Caracal’s is too valuable a life to risk on so trivial an exercise. There will yet be time to show your claws.’

Which was true as far as it went, but which Bas secretly suspected was not the reason he had been withheld from the fray. Bas’s heroics at Oscan had not gone unnoticed – nothing that Bas did went unnoticed, not since that day twenty-five years ago when he had battered the brains of an Eternal against the flat end of his warhammer and the mossy grass, his every cough and bowel movement fodder for some or other second-rate minstrel. Bas had heard the songs they’d written this last winter – that he had taken Oscan single-handed, that he had battered down the walls with his sword or with his voice or with his cock. That they were foolish beyond measure or meaning, that only a child and an idiot child at that would believe them, had done nothing to diminish their popularity. Perhaps it had grown wearisome to Konstantinos, that the larger share of legend due from the Salucian campaign had so far gathered about Bas’s broad shoulders.

Bas excused himself and went to find Isaac. His adjutant stood a short walk downslope, staring at the armies below as a carpenter would an uneven table. ‘They don’t have enough men in their reserve line.’

‘They don’t have enough men, period.’

Isaac nodded, the ruined flesh of his cropped ears stuttering up and down. ‘I’d have anchored the east end against that copse of trees,’ he said. ‘Rather than leave the seam open. If the Protostrator is any sort of clever, that’ll be where he’ll throw the cavalry.’

‘He’s clever enough,’ Bas said grudgingly. ‘Anyway, the boy’s in charge of the horse. Theophilus will know to do it, even if he isn’t told.’

The command had come after Oscan, just recognition for Theophilus’s skill in handling the attack. An impressive ascent for a youth of his age, and for once a well-deserved one. His bloodline was enough to satisfy Konstantinos and the other aristocrats, and the years he had spent in tutelage to Bas and Isaac had left him competent and more than competent at the business of war.

‘They never did have horse worth a damn,’ Isaac said after a moment.

‘They had the Marchers as auxiliaries, in the last go-round.’

Isaac grunted. He and Bas, as much as any two men alive, were the reason that the Salucians could no longer call upon the services of the March lords, having spent the better part of the last twenty years winnowing away at their territory and slaughtering any group of them that ever swelled large enough to dispute this loss.

‘Any chance they can hold out till evening?’ Isaac asked, sounding strangely hopeful. ‘Organise some sort of retreat?’

‘I suppose there’s always a chance,’ Bas said after a moment.

‘I suppose.’

‘You’d think they’d be wise enough to know when they’re beaten.’

‘They know,’ Bas said. ‘What can they do about it? Three embassies we had come to Oscan, and all turned away. That last was a prince of the blood, nephew of the Queen herself.’

‘The one with the hat?’

‘Aye.’

Isaac grunted. He removed a canteen from one of his pockets, unscrewed the cap with his worn, knotted hands, brought it to his lips. And why not? Neither would be doing anything but watching today, and a drunk witness would be no worse than a sober one. Isaac tilted the flask in Bas’s direction but he pretended that he didn’t see it, and after a moment Isaac put it away. ‘What do we want with Salucia, exactly?’

‘What did we want with the Marches?’ Bas asked. ‘Everything. Everyone wants everything.’

‘I don’t,’ Isaac said after a moment.

‘I don’t either,’ Bas admitted, then left Isaac to his drink.

Had Einnes been human, had she been possessed of that range of emotions that were common to Bas’s kind, she would have been offended by the looks she received as she strutted towards the command tent – or perhaps insulted, wavering as they did between contemptuous and lewd. She was not human, of course, and the thoughts or feelings of the five-fingered beings among whom she resided were of no more interest to her than the cries of the kites overhead, or the chittering of squirrels. Bas was less sanguine about the matter, and when he noticed a tetrarch sneering – one of Konstantinos’s, a well-formed youth who had risen to his office without unsheathing a sword – Bas returned the look with sort of blistering intensity that had sent killers off weeping, and the boy swallowed hard and disappeared.

Ignorant of his courtesy, Einnes took up a position on the cliff, glancing down at the fracas below. ‘There aren’t very many of them,’ was the first thing she said.

‘There aren’t enough,’ Bas agreed.

‘They don’t look very happy to be fighting, either,’ Einnes said, squinting her eyes. ‘Their leader is fat, and his eyes know fear. Also, I think those are wine stains on his jerkin.’

Could she really see such a distance? Bas wondered, but knew for a certainty that the answer was yes. As extraordinary as she was physically – her strength and speed, her hearing and her vision, a sense of smell to outdo a bloodhound – more exceptional in Bas’s mind was the fact that she never lied, indeed seemed only distantly even to understand the concept. If Einnes said that the leader of the Salucian forces was working hard to drink away his fear, then she was right.

‘And there will be no repetition of your performance at Oscan?’ Einnes asked after a moment. ‘No extraordinary heroics to tip the scale?’

‘The scale seems well tipped.’

‘It does that,’ Einnes agreed. ‘Still, a pity. I had quite enjoyed your last performance. I can’t help but think that this little fracas will be rather less exciting altogether.’

‘Exciting enough for the men fighting it,’ Bas said.

Konstantinos broke away from his small band of advisers and approached at a saunter. ‘Hail, Sentinel of the Southern Reach,’ Konstantinos began, as polite as ever, decorousness second nature. ‘You have come to bear witness to our victory?’

‘Such are the demands of my position,’ Einnes said flatly. Whatever sympathy she enjoyed with Bas had not spread to the rest of the species, least of all to Konstantinos. ‘To watch, and to remember.’

‘You will have much to report to your superiors, come the evening.’

‘The death of locusts is not a matter of broad interest to we Eternal, irrespective of quantity,’ Einnes said, turning full to face him. ‘And this morning’s slaughter will have no bearing upon your situation, so far as I can tell. The Conclave did not follow my suggestion in demanding that your army disband, nor in meeting this force with an army of their own – you may thank the gods you claim to worship for this development. But do not think my threat empty when I assure you that whatever happens today your army will never set foot into Hyrcania, will go no further into the heartland of Salucia. Have you not yet received sufficient plunder to satisfy your greed? Always I had understood that your species is riven with divisions as arbitrary as they are trivial, that you hold these minor distinctions in colour and language to be worthy of savage violence, but I admit to finding your sheer willingness to commit slaughter … wasteful.’