Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2 (26 page)

‘Chazar, do you suppose? Or is it Parthan?’

‘As I said, mistress, I rarely descend below the Second.’

‘Certainly not Salucian.’

‘If you are certain.’

Leon returned then with the fruits of his expedition, two bags of brown paper reeking of cooked fat. ‘One for me, and one for you, Captain – an insufficient reward for your service, but take it with my compliments all the same.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ the captain began, ‘but we’re not supposed to eat when on duty.’

Leon shrugged and threw away the now unneeded second bag. A porter, bent-backed, carrying a load of wool upslope, stepped in it, cursed, looked around at the Cuckoos and hurried on. By all outward evidence oblivious to the misfortune he had caused, Leon tossed a bit of fried liver into a fool’s grin. ‘Whatever you say, Captain. Now, back to my afternoon dip …’

They continued on to the disharmonious beat of Leon’s rambling idiocy, staccato bursts of pointless questions and inane observations that left the captain exasperated and Eudokia holding back laughter. The great stone quay was interrupted by a finger of land jutting out into the bay, thickly crowded with administrative offices, merchant houses, branches of the great banks upslope. They were passing one of these buildings – handsome, well-built, indistinguishable from any of its neighbours – when Eudokia cleared her throat loudly. A few steps further and Leon went finally silent, halting mid-sentence, his pose of easy arrogance replaced by one of fervent concern. ‘That – that little bastard! He stole my purse!’ And indeed the purse was no longer there, his belt looking naked without it.

Eudokia had known it was coming, it or something like it, but even still she found herself half-believing the act, so frantic seemed her nephew in that moment, as if contained in his leather pouch were not a few bits of gold and silver, but the antidote to a poison he had recently ingested, or the secret names of the gods themselves.

‘Calm down, sir,’ the captain said,

‘Calm down,’ Leon said, face growing furious, piglike despite his high cheekbones and slender nose, ‘calm down! Fifteen tertarum I had in there, and one of those bastard Dycians stole it!’

‘Sir, I assure you—’

But Leon was gone, swearing furiously and tearing back off towards the quay, in desperate and, somehow Eudokia could not help but suspect, fruitless search of his lost purse. The Custodians looked at the captain, the captain looked at Leon’s fleeing back.

Eudokia snapped her fingers loudly. ‘Well? Go after him.’

‘Forgive me, mistress, but my orders were to ensure your safety while you visited the Fifth Rung. Ensure your safety at every step of the way. They were very clear on that point.’

‘Jahan is more than sufficient guardian, I assure you, no one will think to try and murder me in the public square. My … imbecile nephew, however, might well find himself in trouble while chasing after his purse, or, gods help us, if he actually manages to find the man who stole it.’

Which, upon brief consideration, the captain had to admit seemed true, though on the other hand, on the other hand …

‘He may not have the wit of a beaten mule, Captain, but he is the only child of my only sister, and should anything happen to him she will make my life a misery, and should that happen, believe me, I will not endure such misfortune alone.’

The expanse of their robes hindered their movement rather less than Eudokia had been expecting. She waited until they were lost in the crowd before heading into the small stone building, above which a sign read,
COBBLE AND CO., FACTORS
.

There was a front room and a dowdy, unfriendly looking woman making sure that no one passed beyond it, but there was time for neither delay nor subtlety and before she could voice objection Eudokia made a gesture to Jahan, who made a different gesture at the woman, which convinced her to adopt a course of silence. The inner office was well appointed, a great walnut desk taking up most of the room, a back window open to allow the sea breeze to enter. Luxurious, but then Steadfast could be relied upon to line his pockets. So far as Eudokia was concerned, that was all about which he could be trusted. He was scrolling through a ledger when the door opened, and then he was staring up in wide-eyed consternation. He could not, of course, have been expecting Eudokia’s arrival, but all the same she thought the depth of his shock was no very strong evidence of the stability of his nerves.

‘Thank the gods,’ Eudokia said, setting herself down neatly into the chair opposite Steadfast.

‘What – what …’ It would be a long few moments of hysteria, Eudokia knew, if she did not plough forward.

‘It had been so long since I’d seen or heard from you, Steadfast, that I assumed the worst had happened. Our various avenues of communication blocked, your messengers failing to arrive as they should, and I left supposing some terrible and bloody misfortune had befallen you. Oh, what joy it brings my heart, to see you upright and healthy! And how deep does it grieve me, to think how perilous a situation you find yourself in, just how uncertain your well-being truly remains!’

Somehow, in that moment, Jahan seemed rather more present, though he did nothing in particular.

‘The death of the demon has changed everything,’ Steadfast said weakly. ‘The Cuckoos press against us at every point. We were forced to pull our agents back downslope, for fear of losing them altogether.’

‘We?’

‘The Five-Fingered, of course.’

‘Whoever was speaking of the Five-Fingered? I was speaking to you, Steadfast, and felt curious as to why our personal means of communication has been suspended. Surely you haven’t forgotten our arrangement?’

‘No,’ Steadfast said, his head hung like a dog. ‘Forgive me, Revered Mother.’

‘Much better. Now, quickly and to the point—what happened to the demon?’

‘Pyre killed it,’ Steadfast muttered.

‘Did he?’

‘Killed it and left its head in the middle of the street. Not far from here, in fact.’

‘He has a flair for the dramatic, that one. Where is he now?’

‘Gone to ground, no one knows where, not even Edom. Only his own people.’

‘The boy grows to wisdom,’ Eudokia said to Jahan, who snickered but made no further answer. ‘Tell Pyre to send men to investigate the Perpetual Spire, and in particular its roots on the lower Rungs. Do you understand?’

‘Yes.’

‘The Perpetual Spire,’ Eudokia repeated, ‘and the depth of its foundations.’

‘I heard you,’ Steadfast snapped, though after a long stare from Eudokia he dropped his eyes to the desk.

‘I simply could not bear it, Steadfast, were our communication to once again be hindered. It would throw me into the sort of emotional dismay the results of which are unlikely to be beneficial to anyone.’

‘Whatever we can do, Revered Mother,’ Steadfast answered, the colour returning gradually to his face.

‘Here’s what you may do. Every evening at half past the Nightjar’s hour, you will send a boy wearing a red cap to visit the Full Purse bar, on the Second Rung. Not the same boy every night – a different boy, with the same red cap.’

‘This is not my first venture into the clandestine.’

‘How happy I am to hear it. Should there be a plant there, he need do nothing. Should that plant ever be absent, he will know that I require a meeting with you and your master, to be arranged immediately.’

‘Edom is not mine to command. I cannot snap my fingers and compel his attendance.’

‘But I command you, Steadfast. Should I command it, you would get down on all fours and bark like a dog, you would pull something sharp down-side against your wrist, you would walk smilingly into a bonfire. And in that vein, you will bring Edom where I tell you to bring him, if that means binding him and carrying him upslope on your own two shoulders. When I give an order, Steadfast, it is not for you to determine reasons why it cannot be followed, but only to obey.’

‘Yes, Revered Mother,’ he said finally.

‘I fear, Steadfast, that our long absence from one another, this time you’ve spent here in the Roost, has given you an inaccurate conception of your own position, may even have caused you some confusion as to the ultimate object of your loyalties.’

‘No, Revered Mother,’ a line of slaver over thin lips, ‘no, nothing of the sort, I assure you.’

‘What were you, before you met me, Steadfast?’

‘No one, Revered Mother,’ Steadfast said ‘I was no one.’

‘And who knows but that you might again return to such a station? You are mine, mine entirely. I own your right earlobe, and I own your left. I own your hair, your bone, your skin, your organs and viscera and genitals and toenails, every piece of flesh and every drop of blood. I own them entirely, free and unencumbered. This facade of obedience which you provide to Edom is that and that alone, and it would be excessively unwise if ever you were to forget it. Wouldn’t it?’

He answered in the affirmative, though too quietly for Eudokia’s tastes.’

‘Wouldn’t it?’ she repeated.

This time when he spoke, it was loud enough to be heard from outside the open window.

‘Well,’ Eudokia began, standing without the aid of her cane. ‘This was, as is every interaction with you, Steadfast, a source of almost ineffable joy. I will sup off its memories through boring afternoons and dismal evenings to come. One last question, before I leave you,’ she continued, turning back from the open door, ‘How exactly do you suppose the demons knew where the boy would be?’

Steadfast swallowed hard but did not answer.

When the captain came back a few minutes later, Leon in his train cursing with a fluent vulgarity that she had not supposed her nephew to possess, Eudokia sat on the low stone wall overlooking the bay. Jahan helped her to her feet, and she dashed forward with a speed surprising in a woman of her age and infirmities, cane rapping loudly against cobblestone.

‘Oh, by the gods! Oh, by the gods, by every one of them!’ Her high voice wavered between anger and tenderness, deciding finally on the latter, pulling her nephew down against her breast. Blue eyes peered over him at the captain, blue eyes heavy with gratitude. ‘I can’t thank you enough, Captain. I don’t know what I’d ever do without him.’

B
as was an indifferent rider for all his time in the saddle, but even if he had sat a mount like a March lord he would have been no match for her, as his horse was no match for the writhing stallion that raced neatly below the fruiting orange trees, which seemed with all its essence to wish for nothing more than to gallop onward to the horizon and beyond, which was only restrained by her will and her hand. She pulled up short at the crest of the hill, the mount stilled by her silent command. When Bas joined her a moment later she had not moved, her focus occupied entirely with the view. The vista was of the flatlands of eastern Salucia, green and rich in this high summer, and the great river below, flat and blue and sweet-looking, curling its way towards the sea.

‘A thing worth seeing,’ Einnes admitted after a long time.

Her hair was bound tight, reaching upward and then cascading past her shoulders, like the sprouting top of some strange bush. She wore dark blue robes of some fabric Bas had never seen before, thin as gossamer.

‘Yes,’ Bas agreed.

‘How did you know of this place?’

‘I scouted it last time I was here.’

Which had been a quarter-century past, two weeks before Scarlet Fields had seen slaughtered the cream of the Aelerian army, and six weeks before a lucky shot with a war-hammer at Ebs Wood had made Bas the most celebrated combatant in the Commonwealth and well beyond, the people happy for some hook upon which to hang their pride, some sliver of hope to take from the comprehensive defeat that was the outcome of the last war against the Others. Twenty years or twenty and one; Bas’s exact age was a matter of mystery to him, the bastard son of a hoplitai whose name he had never learned and a Marcher half-breed whose name he pretended to have forgotten, both dead while he was still young. A childhood – to the degree that he could be said to have had one – spent in the company of men of the Thirteenth, viciousness with a veneer of sentimentality; they would come back from some savage punitive measure against a Marcher village, the smell of ash and blood still thick on them, and tussle his hair, sit him on their laps. When he was old enough to hold a pike they had shoved one in his hand and made him swear the oaths, to the Empty Throne, and the Senate, and most importantly to the Thirteenth itself, to the three-legged wolf that was their standard, ravaged and wounded but never beaten. Five years garrisoning the Marches, savage skirmishes that would never earn a line in a history book, warring against an entire nation of men for whom battle was the highest and finest and indeed only purpose of existence; and thank the Self-Created that they never learned how to forge steel, and that the only thing they loathed more than the Commonwealth was each other, every clan and every village against every other. And then the news that they would be heading east to make war against Salucia, and against their Eternal masters who Bas and most of the rest of the Thirteenth had largely supposed fictitious. Bas’s first time amidst the great civilisations of the coast, cities one quarter of which held more people than resided across the entire vast length of the Marches, more wealth and more people and more despair than he had known in twenty years being raised with the legion, wonder and reek nestled so close atop one another that they often proved indistinguishable. He was not a ruminative man, little given to nostalgia, but still he remembered this distant period with fondness; before he had become the Caracal, when he was just a pentarche, no different or not much different from any of a thousand others, unappreciative of the anonymity that was soon to be lost.

‘I had forgotten,’ Einnes said, ‘this is not the first time you’ve invaded Salucia.’

‘It’s something of a national pastime.’

‘Is it all like this?’

‘I’ve never been past Hyrcania,’ Bas admitted, ‘and even then only to burn it. But I believe most of the north is swampland.’