Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1 (27 page)

‘That sound,’ Calla hissed, ‘that awful, incessant, sucking sound. I can’t possibly be the only one who hears it.’

‘Of course I hear it,’ Sandalwood said. If anything, Sandalwood seemed to be enjoying this trip even less than Calla. ‘Like a falling turd.’

‘Oh,’ the captain said, and he wrinkled up his nose in something that seemed like contempt, though whether it was for the setting or their ignorance of it, Calla wasn’t sure. ‘That’s the slurp.’

‘The what?’ Sandalwood asked.

‘The pumps,’ the custodian explained. ‘Where did you think your water comes from? You stop noticing them, eventually.’ He shrugged. ‘Or at least you try to.’

Calla had never been below the Third Rung before – she did not think she knew anyone who had ever been below the Third Rung before, for that matter. The general consensus was there was nothing to see near ground level, except perhaps for the docks themselves, which were reputed to beg too dangerous and nasty an area to warrant a day trip. It did not take five minutes’ proximity for Calla to recognise that, if anything, the common wisdom was too kind. It was not simply that she had not seen such poverty, misery and filth – in truth she had never even imagined it, could not entirely fathom how any creature could allow themselves or their homes to be reduced to such a state of decay. Everything that could be broken was broken; windows and road signs and wooden walls and stone walls as well. There was nothing that did not seem to be in an advanced state of dilapidation, nothing that was not dirty or chipped, nothing that seemed fully functioning. The houses were grim and tiny and either sagged noticeably sideways or hung down over the street itself, like a pigeon pecking at garbage. Long stretches of pipe wove through and around the tenements, and omnipresent was a damp and unpleasant scent, as if turning over a wet rock. The roads were – as the Shrike had noticed – small rivers of mud, though it had only been raining a short while.

Atop all of it was the
slurp-slurp-slurp
of the pumps, the sound growing louder as they descended. As with every other human in the Roost, the exact functioning of the great machine that took up most of the mountain below was a mystery to Calla. Water came up, water went down – this was as much as she knew of it. Above the Fifth Rung the apparatus that controlled the flow was contained entirely within the mountain itself, and the only traces of its existence were the public fountains and the canals and the little lakes and ponds that dotted the city, artificial but formed so long ago that entire ecosystems had sprung up inside them.

Of course, the environs had nothing on the inhabitants. They shifted about in the alleyways, aimless in the late afternoon, staring sideways at you when your attention was elsewhere, looking away if you focused on them. There were children everywhere, thin and dirty and seemingly identical. Two old women sat in the dust of the road, heavy woollen cloaks patched like mottled skin, staring up slack-jawed as they passed, eyes seemingly unconnected to any internal process. A crooked man leaned out from the shadow of a crooked doorway, spat a line of tobacco into the dirt, muttering to himself in a fashion that did not smack strongly of sanity.

And though Calla would wish to feel empathy, in fact mostly what she felt was disgust. How could one allow oneself to live like this, she wondered? Poverty did not revert one to such a state of barbarism. Did it? It was not pity that these vague semblances of humanity inspired, it was revulsion, and after revulsion, bitterness. How could you think yourself a decent person, when there was such misery in the world waiting to be alleviated? Waiting and waiting and waiting in vain. Their misfortune made a mockery of her pretensions of decency, and she resented them for it.

‘I can never understand,’ the Shrike said, ‘what it is you imagine that you see in them.’

‘Best not strain yourself,’ the Aubade responded.

A pair of young children standing on the steps of a tenement watched the procession wide-eyed, barely old enough to stand upright but old enough to know fear. A woman appeared suddenly from the doorway, raced over and pulled them both inside.

‘Pitiful creatures,’ the Shrike said. ‘See how they turn their eyes from us as they would the naked sun.’

‘One basks in the sun, sibling,’ the Aubade said quietly. ‘One does not hide from it.’

‘Who can be sure of how these things think? Or if they do? As soon see into the mind of a fish, or a stag beetle.’

‘Our sibling has always had a fascination with the lesser creatures,’ the Prime said. ‘As a hatchling he was famous for the affection that he lavished on his charges. When we came back from the last war and he discovered his prized eagle had died, he was inconsolable for more than a year.’

‘It was a falcon,’ the Aubade said, ‘and I still regret its loss.’

‘Why compare a raptor to a human?’ the Shrike asked. ‘You might as much compare steamwork to a lump of mud. We’d have been better had the ancestors stepped on them outright.’

‘You think yourself wiser than the Founders, sibling?’ the Aubade asked, and even Calla knew enough to recognise the danger in this question. Those Above had no gods and offered no prayers, but they did have one commandment – the Roost was perfect, and those who had created it, the first generation, were sacrosanct.

‘You take offence too easily,’ the Shrike insisted, ‘seizing on a fragment of speech in hopes of showing me a fool.’

‘You prove yourself one without any help of mine. Who do you imagine farms your food, mines your ore, cooks your dinner and cleans your toilet?’

‘Bees make honey,’ the Shrike said. ‘It hardly proves them sentient.’

‘Another thing about bees,’ the Aubade answered, ‘is they sting. There’s a reason, sibling, that we do not build apiaries in the bedroom.’

They had come to a fork in the main road, interrupted a procession of young adults. Calla had heard their laughter twinkle its way upslope from the docks, but it ended as soon as they saw the Eternal, replaced with wonder or horror or some combination of the two.

‘Then it is there that the comparison breaks down,’ the Shrike said. ‘The humans might be better equated to grasshoppers – though somewhat less numerous, they share the same pointless love of procreation, the same lack of purpose.’

‘They have the same purpose as everything else that flies, walks, digs or swims,’ the Aubade said. ‘They survive. That there are so many of them is proof of their success.’

‘They survive because we let them,’ the Shrike said. ‘And I do not count
our
forbearance among
their
virtues.’

‘Your father thought similarly – I wonder if he changed his mind, when the Aelerians pulled him from his horse and speared him through the throat.’

‘I doubt the circumstances allowed much time for reflection,’ the Shrike said, leaping gracefully and without pause over a puddle. ‘Had they, I would presume his thinking would have come to align neatly with mine. Order amongst the Dayspans is best kept with closed fist, and stained lash.’

‘Order? You’ve no more notion of order than a dog gone mad in the high summer heat. The blood alone is what interests you, savagery your only end.’

‘Your affection for the Locusts leads you to discourtesy against your own kind. I am the Lord of the Ebony Towers, and unused to being spoken to in such a fashion.’

‘I am well aware of your seat, sibling, and of the shame you bring to it. Your father and I were cohort-mates. I sang the song of loss at his death, I laid the wreaths, kept silent for six turnings of the moon. Would to the Founders I could have warned him to cancel you before your quickening, rather than watch you bring dishonour to his line.’

Calla looked down at her feet, tried to keep her breath steady and even. Though the Aubade and the Shrike were a hair’s breadth from mortal conflict, there was no physical sign of it, at least not one perceptible to the human eye. Each insult was exchanged in the flat, emotionless monotone that Those Above always spoke in; both parties stood ramrod straight and stared at each other unblinking, though again this was the standard pose of their species. An observer ignorant of the Eternal tongue would have no idea how thickly death hung in the air.

But Calla was well aware of the humiliation the Shrike was enduring, the tremendous sense of shame that would be heightened a thousandfold were he to gain any inkling that the humans in their midst were a party to it. Calla took a quick look at Sandalwood, could see he was not unaware of the danger.

After what seemed a very long time, the Shrike lowered his eyes from the Aubade, who allowed his shoulders to slump almost imperceptibly downwards, and the moment of tension had passed.

One of the boys across the street broke the silence with an awkward cough.

The Shrike moved so suddenly that Calla barely had time to turn her neck before he had reached the group. For a curious fractured second the Shrike was standing in front of the boy who had coughed, and then the Shrike’s hand was through his skull, and all that Calla could think of was a ripe melon dropped from a great height, flesh rupturing and bone shattering into a sheen so fine it might as well have been liquid.

It took a few seconds for the youths to start screaming. Even the other Eternal seemed shocked, struggled to decide how to react. The mass of civil guards dashed across the street, interspersed themselves in the group, though to Calla’s eyes the children seemed more horrified than infuriated, more likely to weep than fight. At least they made no effort to defend themselves, and soon the three boys still living were face down against the mud, and the girls were shuffled off to the side, one shrieking all but uncontrollably, the other catatonic with fear or rage or despair.

The Shrike turned his back on the chaos, sauntered over to his party, stood in front of the Aubade for a long moment before speaking. ‘I beg pardon, elder sibling,’ the Shrike said, and it was not the red stain dripping down to his wrists that made Calla struggle to choke back vomit, it was the little bits of pink, pink like well-chopped meat, that covered his chest and his shoulders and his face, a trail of sinew or brain that had stuck to his cheek and that he made no effort to remove. ‘I beg pardon, for one who has forgotten themselves, and their line, and who requires more instruction than he had realised, and who is grateful for your offering it. I beg pardon, elder sibling, and hope that in the future you take pity on my foolishness, and continue to offer your wisdom so openly.’ The Shrike stretched himself in the pattern of atonement, left hand over his heart, right hand extended, dripping fresh blood onto the ground. The Prime positioned herself nearer the two of them, as if hoping to ward off a confrontation.

Though Calla knew that none would be forthcoming. Killing a human was not a crime, not an unattached human like the boy whose brain and skull were now decorating the Shrike’s chest. It was not even not a crime – it was not anything, it was not mentioned in the codes of law at all, any more than the annals would need to explicitly state that there was no injunction against swatting a fly, or crushing an ant.

Finally, impotently, the Aubade turned his back on the Shrike, and on the screaming children, and on the whole Fifth Rung, and began to walk back towards his launch. Calla followed after him, silent as well. It took three blocks before the screaming of the boy’s people was drowned out by the slurp, though it echoed in Calla’s mind far longer.

T
he first week Thistle worked for Rhythm he was given three Salucian drachms, a month’s salary for a bonded porter. Thistle had spent some of it that night getting Rat and Felspar drunk on corn mash at one of the bars on Bristle Street they’d never had the balls to go to before, and spent most of the rest the next morning on a brimless hat that the tailor told him was all the rage upslope. What was left over he’d given to his mother, told her he’d been doing odd jobs around the neighbourhood. She’d looked at him long enough to let him know she knew he was lying but not long enough to make an issue out of it, then patted him on the head and secreted the coins away. That night they’d had a hock of ham in their stew, and Apple had sat at the table and laughed some.

This had remained, roughly speaking, the ratio by which his wages were spent. A third for revelry, a third for dress, a third for home. Wasn’t long before he had acquired a costume that anyone who’d ever had the money to develop taste would recognise as unbelievably garish, and his sisters had put on enough weight so as to obscure the outline of their ribs.

In exchange for his three drachms, Thistle was required to keep himself on hand at Isle’s from mid-afternoon to late evening, and to carry things that Rhythm wanted carried, and run the occasional message, and now and again to spend the day keeping an eye on someone Rhythm wanted an eye kept on. Watching the army of porters wind their way upslope every morning, Thistle found it very difficult to call what he did work. Not that he felt guilty – the way he saw it, any of those unfortunate beasts of burden could have had his position, if they’d been possessed of a little more by way of balls. A man had to go out and seize his fortune in this world, not just wait around hoping that it would pluck him from obscurity. Thistle had come to a lot of these insights recently, along with his weekly three drachms.

His friends were in no hurry to call him on it, however, because if he was more generous with his newfound wisdom than he was his hard coin, still enough of the latter got passed around to satisfy Rat and Felspar and the rest. That was what they did most of that winter, drank their way through Thistle’s money. That was what they were doing that afternoon, when things all went to hell.

They were at the pumphouse, waiting for him to get out of work with his coin, and they made quite the show when he did. Treble was up quick from his seat, passed over a bottle of potato liquor that Thistle obligingly nipped from. Rat slapped him on the back and Felspar complimented him on his new coat and even the younger Calc brother, who had never liked Thistle and never made much secret of that fact, all the same admitted the cut to be very fine. The two girls in attendance did their best to remind Thistle of their presence, though Caraway had been Felspar’s lover since before the first snow, and Timbre was just about the most aggravating resident of the Fifth Rung, and hefty to boot.