Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2 (43 page)

When Bas came awake the sun was bright against his eyes, and the Eternal was dead, and both horses were dead, and there was blood matting his long hair down against his face. Standing, his vision dipped and pitched for an instant before settling into equilibrium, and his ankle was not moving as it generally did, and Bas barely noticed either, pulled his sword from off the corpse of his mount. With nowhere to ride, with the vast weight of the Aelerians closing round them, unhorsed and unused to defence, the final flower of the Eternal made a desperate last stand beneath the gonfalon of their leader, and Bas sprinted towards it as a bee to flower, or a moth to flame.

An Eternal blocked his path, its suit of armour pale blue and bright argent, and overlaying its face was the Roost-forged steel of some hideous chimera. In one hand it carried an ungainly looking single-edged broadsword and in the other it carried its twin; one would be the feint and one would deliver the killing blow, and Bas knew that he had no hope of defending against both and did not attempt it. A toss of the dice, a gambler’s luck, the left was the feint and the right the true attack, and Bas deflecting it and the counterstroke ate away at a gap in the Eternal’s armour and at the gold skin and pale bone beneath it. It did not scream, they never screamed, but it gave a step and then it gave another, and when it thought to give a third it slipped or nearly slipped on a corpse, human or Eternal Bas could not say for certain, there being little enough difference between dead flesh. But Bas was not slow to take advantage of the error, the first strike ringing off the demon’s guard but the second catching it just above the breastbone and the next severing its throat, blood spattering briskly onto Bas’s blade and onto his chain hauberk and against his face, blood rich on his jaw and his tongue.

Beneath the Prime’s standard he could see a fluttering pennant of white, and he sprinted towards it, and he roared greeting though it was lost amidst the tumult, amidst the screams and the steel that rang against steel. The battle had devolved into the final mad melee, which would go on for long hours, no longer any attempt at strategy, just groups of hoplitai surrounding and savaging and then slaughtering their betters, like hounds bringing down a wolf. Amidst it he ran to her as he had promised he would, hoping she saw him, hoping she was doing the same.

Another blocked his way then, small by the standards of the Eternal, just slightly taller than Bas. Squaring up against it Bas saw or thought he saw that old familiar glint in its eye, that glint that Bas had thought no Other could possess, that fear that Bas had seen in a hundred men across a dozen different lands. He – or perhaps she, Bas could not see through the helmet – could only see the eyes through the visor, oblong slots of yellow, and through them at the terror beneath – moved backwards, playing for time, time that Bas would never allow, coming forward swiftly, swiftly, swiftly. And if they could feel fear, might they feel love also, might that not be possible? And still pondering this question in the dim recesses of his mind Bas feinted low and then reared back and thrust the narrow point of his sword through the visor and those eyes that had felt fear and perhaps love and now, as a certainty, nothing at all.

Bas stumbled suddenly, faltering first and only then feeling the sensation of pain, howling and going down on one knee. Above him stood an Eternal carrying a crescented hand axe slick with Bas’s blood, and he turned then to deal with another hoplitai, thinking surely and not unreasonably that he must have killed Bas, that no human could have survived so savage a blow, paying for this miscalculation with his life, Bas’s ruptured side straining in agony but he was upright almost as soon as he had gone down, and he planted his sword into the demon’s back and shoved halfway to the hilt. Spine severed, puking blood, still it tried to grab Bas with a backward hand, flailing aimlessly and as if of its own volition, Bas managing to hold the thing off until it gasped finally, dead as all things die, and slid down the length of Bas’s sword and into the mud, and Bas continued onward without a pause though his wounds no longer allowed him to run.

She was close now, he could see her on her great horse, strangely bent blade turning swift and terrible, and how beautiful she was, like a bolt of lightning on the Marches, like a newborn shrieking, like something ephemeral and transitory, like something that was not long for life! The first blow fell against her back and her shoulder, bit deep but did nothing to slow her. She turned and disposed of the cavalryman who had attacked her, a movement of her blade severing his neck from his shoulders, the skull itself tumbling and spraying blood on Einnes and Einnes’s horse and the ground below, and Bas realised he was cheering.

In between them two human soldiers were fighting an Eternal and he shouldered them aside unthinking, bearing down on the demon they had been facing like a force of nature rather than a living thing, like a rain-swelled river overspilling its banks. The demon was short and squat by the standards of its race, which was to say that it was as tall as one Bas and as wide as two, the sun reflecting so bright off its plate that Bas could not make out the colour, and wielding in two hands a great mace that must have weighed the same as an anvil, richly flanged and flecked with bits of bone and brain. There was no time for subtlety nor strategy, Bas would be gone in a moment and she would not last much longer either, and Bas hurled himself, feinting low and then twisting the great blade of his sword. But the Eternal anticipated it, shifted out of the way of Bas’s assault and returned it with a speed that no human could match, not even Bas, and it was only by the barest thread that he managed to deflect it, the flanged head of the mace striking against Bas’s blade, the Roost-forged steel that he had thought unbreakable cracking at the midpoint. Brought down on one knee from the force of the blow, holding a hilt and an arm’s length of blade beyond it, bleeding and dying but not dead, no, not dead yet; only one was deserving of that signal honour, and as the Other raised its mace to deliver the final killing blow Bas roared one final time and came upright, moving as if the lifeblood that was dribbling and pouring out from his wound had served only to slow him, and free of it now he could move faster, and that half of his sword that Bas still held disappeared again and again into the chest of the Other, three times, five, and then Bas was stumbling over the corpse and rushing forward to meet her, shouldering aside hoplitai like jackals closing in on the kill, bellowing like a wounded bull, ignorant of the blood that was filling his boots, uncognisant of the torn muscle and of the jagged length of bone, his bone, sticking through flesh, his flesh.

Bas did not see what brought her horse down, that magnificent and terrible creature, streaks of red along its flanks and then one last horrific scream and then it stumbled. And she so swift and so graceful, so perfect, that she managed somehow to disentangle herself from it and land standing, her weapon still in her hand, turning it on the mass of men surging around her, the blade rising and descending and rising and descending and then she was lost in the press.

Bas screamed and surged forward but there were too many, of his kind and of hers, and both serving to separate them. Something struck him in the side, he lashed out at whoever had delivered it, not knowing whether it was man or Other, not caring, flesh being flesh being flesh. So close, just inside the next ring, and if he could only make it to her, if he could only die at her hand, or she at his, or they together.

But he never made it. On his knees again, the light dimming around him, and it didn’t hurt so much any more and he knew he was breathing his last. ‘Einnes,’ he said, the name of his mother, and the half of the sword he still held, and the only thing that he had ever loved. ‘Einnes,’ he said again, the blood coming swiftly now, swiftly and unstaunched. ‘Einnes.’

I
t was whim, it was folly, it was a mad and uncharacteristic ambition that took Eudokia Aurelia from the sanctuary the Five-Fingers had offered her and into the chaos of the First Rung that final day. For once there was no purpose in her movement; for once, for the first time in years and decades, she gave free rein to a moment’s passion, rather than meticulously executing a task that she had previously planned. The men Pyre had left to guard her protested her decision, though unsuccessfully and not for very long – it was a rare circumstance indeed in which Eudokia did not ultimately attain what she wanted; the day itself was firm and finest evidence of this.

Ascending upslope, Eudokia’s robes and jewellery and age caught the attention of a group of men coming out of a ransacked building, holding bits of metal and brickbats, eyes locking on to her and seeing prey, mouths opening, though before insult could be offered Jahan’s blade was out and the lead man – boy, really – was handless and screaming, his confederates staring at his stump and considering revenge, though not seriously and not for very long. After that Jahan did not bother to return his talwar to its sheath, blood leaking down to the hilt and onto his hands and onto the cobblestones, and they had no further trouble.

The violence, the anarchy, the immolation; none of it came as any surprise. Eudokia was a woman who had long lost any illusions about what might be expected of a person when they suppose they will never be called to account for their actions. And it was more than greed, lust, the simple basic cruelty of all living things. The mass that was ascending and would continue to build, a great river of flesh and steel and hate flowing upslope in violation of the natural law, they had legitimate grievance, their loathing was well-earned. There is an understandable if sadly specious notion that suffering breeds wisdom or at least restraint, that having felt the bite of the lash one is slower to distribute it. Alas. In Eudokia’s experience, pain only leads to pain, and a kicked dog is first to bite.

Lost somewhere amidst the rising slaughter was her nephew, absent since the morning prior when he had walked weeping out of her garden. Eudokia had ordered a number of the Dead Pigeons stationed at her old quarters in case he chose to return, though even while doing so she had known it was pointless. Indeed, with that grim-eyed certainty that had allowed her to rise to the summit not only of her own nation but of the world, that perceptive pessimism, that willingness to stare full-bore at cruel reality without blinking, Eudokia knew that she would not see Leon again. He was dead, one of the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of corpses caused by the extraordinary explosion of force that Eudokia had conspired to release. Or he was taking part in the violence himself, vicious recompense for the savagery done to his paramour, his innocence lost in the futile melee below. Eudokia did not think this last was the case but you could never tell, we are all capable of more evil than we dream possible. Regardless, he would never return to her – if he lived, he would flee the city on his own terms, he would lose himself in the vast army of exiles or he would take ship to some distant land, to mourn one woman and curse another until the end of his days. Stepping lightly beneath the cover of the budding dogwoods, Eudokia suffered a memory of the boy as he was when he first come to her, not yet ten, so blond as to be nearly translucent, trying his very best to be brave.

There were no guards on the gate to the First Rung, the custodians, or the Cuckoos; in this last moment it was clear that they deserved the pejorative, had fled, more desperate to escape the coming violence than even their fellow citizens. Apart from that, there was little immediate evidence of the end of the world. In curious contrast to the state of anarchic violence that existed throughout the rest of the Roost, the First Rung was quiet. If you had not known better, if you had not come through the slaughterhouse that had been made of paradise, if you were somehow unable to recognise the scent of fire on the wind, of burned wood and charred flesh, you might have supposed the place calm. The Eternal had descended en masse to the gates of the city, where they had already ridden or were soon to ride to their deaths, and their human servants were barricading themselves in their castles, or stuffing their most expensive belongings in the pockets of their cheapest clothes and fleeing downslope, hoping to lose themselves in the mob below. A false hope, Eudokia suspected – the reckoning to come would be thorough, and bloody, and brutal.

And it would come soon. By nightfall the first contingent of the great Aelerian army would be at the gates, and with the instincts of veteran campaigners, which was to say scavengers, thieves, rapists, they would make swiftly for the First Rung. The estates and castles of the Eternal would be picked clean as a corpse staked over an anthill, fortunes beyond imagining devolving to those hoplitai who had been fortunate or skilled enough to survive the slaughter. In ages hence, in fifty years or a hundred, there would be great fortunes sprung from this act of robbery, merchant houses and bankers and industrialists who could trace the roots of their wealth to a chunk of gold lifted off the facade of one of the Eternal’s homes, to some or other work of art broken down to its constituent ore. Eudokia would, needless to say, be first among them, had already marked out the Red Keep as her own personal preserve. In a few moments she and Jahan would stake their claim to it, and none could suggest that she had not earned her share of the spoils.

But it seemed that in the interim the larger portion of the Roost had not yet screwed up the courage to approach the seat of their fallen gods. Eudokia continued her walk through the First, a warm afternoon turning to a pleasant evening, and for long moments the only sounds to be heard were the fall of her cane on the cobblestone. Midway through her perambulation Eudokia noticed that the canals were less full than they had been, by a third or perhaps more. Had she made her way to the Conclave she felt sure that she would discover the Source had gone dry, the apparatus that had kept the water flowing for millennia beyond recorded time stuttering to a halt. Perhaps Those Above had decided to destroy it rather than see it used by their freed slaves, or perhaps it was sabotage on the part of the Five-Fingered – or perhaps it was simply that some necessary bit of upkeep had not been performed, that without the integration of the two species working in harmony or at least concert, the Source and all the wondrous workings of the Roost would swiftly decay.