Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1 (35 page)

Thistle noticed the three men because they were trying so hard not to be noticed, keeping the loudest silence Thistle had ever seen. They gave all evidence of being engaged in some sort of organised mischief, though Thistle struggled to determine the particular species. Closer to middle age than youth, too old to be amidst some errand of casual tomfoolery, but dressed too poorly to be affiliated with the Brotherhood. Porters, probably, not even foremen, though what they would be doing out so late on a night like this, and with such conspicuous secrecy, Thistle had no idea.

He followed them because he had nothing else to do and because it was fun practice, feeling a professional among amateurs, a wolf among sheep. Spindle had given him some lessons in shadowing, and though Thistle lacked Spindle’s experience he had the advantage of not being noticeably larger than average. For all their pretence of wariness Thistle had no trouble following along behind them, even with the streets all but empty in the dark and cold.

After one final spasm of pointless caution, they turned quickly down a side street and disappeared into one of the endless crush of warehouses that stacked this portion of the Fifth. Thistle found a spot in the shadows and spent a while looking at the building they had walked into. Two men stood outsidef it in big black cloaks that obscured most of their other details. They didn’t seem unfriendly enough to be engaged in a crime, nor did Thistle notice they were carrying weapons.

Thistle found himself approaching them, couldn’t exactly have said why. ‘Good evening, brother,’ one said. ‘How can we help you?’

Thistle nodded inside. ‘I’m here to see the show.’

The first guard smiled at the second guard, who moved aside to allow Thistle to pass.

The warehouse smelled of fruit. A crowd of twenty or twenty-five men of distinctly the cheaper sort half filled three ranks of overturned crates. The men he’d been following were sitting up at the front, and didn’t turn round to check on the newcomer. Thistle took a seat on a box at the back – strawberry, to go by its scent – and waited to see what he was waiting for.

‘First time, brother?’ the man next to him asked, white-haired and lean, his clothing worn but well repaired.

Thistle grunted non-committally.

The man took this as a yes. ‘You’ll remember tonight for ever, brother,’ he said. ‘You’ll remember tonight for the rest of your life.’

Thistle thought he was going to say more – old men who start talking are generally loath to stop – but instead he turned to face the stage and left Thistle to his thoughts.

After a few minutes the two guards from outside came in and closed the front door, took up a position beside it. The atmosphere was excited but not at all unpleasant. Still, the sound of that door closing got Thistle to worrying, this whole escapade being ill-considered, pointless at best and possibly more dangerous than he had anticipated. He was kicking himself for his recklessness when the man who had saved his life six months earlier walked in through the back door.

It was a small stage but he took up all of it. The great sweep of his white hair looked every bit the crown. He wore the same costume Thistle had seen him in the first time, a strangely formal version of the uniform forced on men working below. His eyes were bright blue and he had big, gnarled hands, like a smith or a brawler.

‘Everything that you know is a lie,’ he said simply.

‘Your name is not your name. Your history is false, your myths doubly so. Your words are the words of another. Your labour feeds the belly of a stranger. You sire children to be chattel. Your breath itself exists in the service of beings to whom you are of less interest and import than an insect. Truly, in all the world, there are none who can claim such abject misery, such utter lack of purpose, such profound and absolute misery, as yourselves. Everything that a man can lose, you have lost.’

Thistle realised he had been nodding along in rhythm, and that his heart was beating very quickly in his chest.

‘Who has done this to you?’ the man asked, still speaking in his steady baritone. ‘Who is at fault?’

‘The Four-Fingers!’ yelled a man behind Thistle, a man who’d had something to drink before the meeting, if his slurred words were any indication.

‘False!’ the speaker roared suddenly, a clap of sound that echoed through the small enclosure. ‘False!’ he roared again, and the man who had spoken shrank his head down into his shoulders and looked less than proud.

But when the orator continued it was in the same easy tone as before. ‘The Birds are no more responsible for your decline than the grapevine is the drunkard’s. It is you and you alone who must be held responsible – you and you alone whose complicity in this injustice demands reproach. You have allowed your memories to be forgotten, you have bent knee to demons. You have accepted your subjugation without complaint, without reproach, without rebellion. Do not look to the Four-Fingers. Do not look to those upslope. You and you alone are responsible for this calamity, and you and you alone have the capacity to remedy it.’

Thistle could hear the man clearly but found himself leaning forward all the same.

‘The Four-Fingers put us beneath the ground – we forgot the light. The Four-Fingers gave us names – we were fool enough to accept them. The Four-Fingers called themselves gods – we chose to worship them. You sit with your hands unfettered, with strength in your arms, with the ancient blood of the west in your veins, and you complain of oppression. Freedom is in your grasp, if only you would take it.’

One of the men in the side corner, thickly muscled and poorly dressed, had begun to weep, deep-chested sobs of a kind Thistle had never heard a man make before. With one thick fist he beat at his breast in time with the words, not lightly either, an ecstatic act of masochism. His fanaticism fell like seed on fallow earth, and soon half the audience was engaged in similar displays, pulling at the roots of their hair, shaking back and forth.

‘No Four-Finger can claim your inheritance. And no Four-Finger can redeem you from bondage. You and you alone must make that choice, must make it again and again, every morning, every evening, every waking moment of the day. I am Edom, First of His Line, chaplain of the Five Fingers,’ he said, holding one hand aloft, each digit splayed wide. ‘If you are unwilling to remain amidst the squalor of your birth; if you demand a right to the wrongs that have been done to you before your grandfather’s grandfather was pulled forth from the womb; if you would rather die than see another generation of our kind be robbed of the future the gods have decreed for them; then you are already one of us, and must but say the words.’

It was only then that Thistle made the connection between the man who had saved his life a half-year earlier and the disturbance at the Anamnesis that had so excited him, that he had thought about secretly for weeks and months afterwards. Thistle felt as if Edom were looking directly at him. Everyone who heard Edom speak thought that, but in Thistle’s case it was actually the truth.

‘A new world is coming, my brothers,’ Edom said, after a long pause. ‘Will you be a part of it?’

There couldn’t have been more than thirty men in attendance that night, but if you had heard the roar that erupted in response, you’d have thought there were far more – five hundred men, a thousand, ten, the entirety of the Rung. An explosion of passion the likes of which Thistle had never seen, sufficient to reduce the hardened porters and dockworkers and cheap thugs in attendance to a state of near mania. The man next to Thistle grabbed him suddenly and pulled him into a bear hug, and it was only after a moment that Thistle realised he was hugging the man back, and that the wetness he felt on his cheeks wasn’t perspiration, or at least not entirely so.

Thistle shoved himself free of the man and sprinted for the exit. One of the guards said something as he broke out the back but Thistle couldn’t hear him, heading swiftly into the night air. The sleet had turned to snow and now stuck heavy on the ground, thick as cobwebs and white as fresh milk. It disappeared near as soon as it touched him, thawed by the heat kindled inside his chest.

T
he citadels of the Roost were as varied and diverse as the menagerie of creatures that blessed the Lord’s gardens. The Haunt of Stars was silent and subtle and ineffably quiet, brought a sense of composure and peace and faint sadness. The Red Keep was like a ray of late-afternoon sunlight crystallised into one towering and magnificent edifice, warm and welcoming and noble. The Prime’s demesne was a vast and infinitely mysterious creation, with things strange and beautiful hidden beneath every stone and behind every redoubt, a tableau of perfection carefully delineated over the course of the epoch.

But even among this extraordinary collection, one could not help but recognise the Sidereal Citadel as being unique. The Wright, as his name would suggest, was famed among Those Above and Below for his genius in the creation of steamwork, curious mechanisms of metal and glass that walked and danced and performed many other sorts of wonders. During the course of his long life – for he was quite a bit older than the Prime even, had, in fact, stood as guardian for the Aubade himself in that impossibly distant period when the Lord of the Red Keep was still a hatchling – the Wright had rebuilt his manor according to his predilections. Everything that might be powered by water or steam rather than human muscle was done so: doors opened seemingly of their own accord, bridges between the towers dropped at the turn of a crank, awnings and balconies appeared unexpectedly from hidden indentations. Sterling orrery corresponding to no celestial pattern of which Calla was aware hung down from the ceilings, and the walls were adorned with automated tapestries depicting mounted Eternal riding into combat, or the cycle of a flower from bud to blossom.

It was to see the newest of the Wright’s creations that the Aubade, the Prime and their respective entourages were standing on the top of the highest tower in the Sidereal Citadel. Like the Red Keep far to the east, the Wright’s castle was located at the outermost edge of the First Rung – but whereas the Red Keep stood overlooking the bay and the ocean beyond, the Sidereal Citadel lay suspended above the Second Rung and far below one could watch the humans go bustling about their day.

Not that anyone was actually watching them, not with the strange splendours on offer at eye level. The Eldest loved flying things of all sorts, kites and fluttering pendants and the air-filled sacks that had become all the rage in the last few years, heated pouches with little baskets held beneath them that Those Above would use to flit undirected across the city. The Wright’s new craft, however, was in a class entirely of its own. The largest part of its bulk consisted of a half-dozen great packets, each slowly swelling with smoke from oversized silver braziers set beneath them. They were strung to the hull of a canal boat composed of interwoven willow, with a bronze beak at the front. But sliding out from the sides of the frame were two sets of wings like those of a dragonfly, purple silk stretched over metal wires. Eight stout men, two to each side, sat crammed onto narrow benches, waiting to turn their muscle towards the contraption. If they were frightened of their imminent sojourn into nothing, they didn’t show it, smiling and whispering to each other, reckless and without fear, like their lord.

Inside the hull Calla could hear the sound of metal pushing against metal, and swarming in and out of it were the Wright’s servants, humans wearing plain working clothes, checking screws and bolts and the endless minor details that would mean the difference between glorious victory and a fiery death below. The Wright was explaining the inner workings of it to the Aubade, elaborately and in great detail, though between translating it mentally from the High Tongue and the sheer complexity of the conversation, Calla understood very little.

In fairness, the Aubade seemed to be in little better shape. First in nearly every other task to which the Eternal set themselves, he had no head for steamwork, nor much understanding of its intricacies. What he did possess, however, was a keen sense of etiquette, and he had graciously spent the past half-hour listening to the Wright’s explanations of the contraption he had built.

‘In principle, of course, it’s a relatively simple variation on the classic system of air-bladders to provide lift, merged with wings to provide forward movement. Where my genius comes into play is that I’ve miniaturised the essential components, creating a vehicle capable of guided flight in a fashion never before conceived.’

‘Can you call it genius before the thing’s flown?’ the Aubade asked. ‘If it drops like a stone, wouldn’t the quality be more accurately called madness?’

‘I suppose you would have to call it both. Some of the rudder problems, in particular, I had to solve were quite taxing. Even if it fails overall, the specific advances I’ve made are definitive evidence of brilliance, speaking objectively.’

‘It won’t fail,’ the Aubade assured him, ‘and you are quite the cleverest thing the Roost has ever produced.’

‘Perhaps not ever,’ the Wright said, after giving the question some thought. ‘But certainly contemporaneously.’

The Wright pulled his sibling aside to explain some or other feature of the craft and for a moment Calla was left alone with Sandalwood. It was the first time they had spoken since their visit to the Fifth Rung months earlier. Part of that was because of Bulan, who had gradually gone from being an occasional dalliance to something more serious. But more of it was that seeing him served as an unpleasant reminder of that horrible morning and, illogical and unjust though it was, Calla found herself resenting him for it.

Though today, at least, that memory seemed attenuated, unfocused. Early spring but the weather was already warm, and all across the summit of the Roost shoots of green could be noticed, the first scent of flowers lingering in the nostrils. It seemed a day for renewal, for casting away burdens.

‘May the sun shine bright on you, Calla of the Red Keep,’ Sandalwood said with mock formality.

‘In a few minutes you should be able to make that request of him directly,’ she said.