Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1 (36 page)

Sandalwood smiled. ‘I am not sure that the Lord’s expedition will carry us quite so high.’

‘Perhaps the next time. It is an extraordinary thing you have created.’

‘I think, as I had so little to do with its construction, it might not be too immodest of me to suggest that you do not truly understand the truth of those words. The Wright is …’ Sandalwood fell silent. ‘It is a privilege.’

‘A vice can be made of modesty, as of anything,’ Calla said brightly, slipping one arm beneath his. ‘And today’s victory is nearly as much yours as your master’s.’

He blushed and began to answer, but the Wright called out to him then, needing his input on some or other aspect of the craft, and he smiled and dipped his head. She watched as together they inspected the array of machinery, talking quietly and making small adjustments. If it was the Wright’s child, then at least Sandalwood had proven instrumental in its delivery. He looked handsome, sharp and focused, and happy the way someone is happy when they are performing a difficult task with skill. Once he looked over to see if she was watching him, and he smiled to see that she was, and she smiled to see that she had made him smile. Afterward, with the Aubade’s permission, she might take the evening off, invite Sandalwood out for a celebratory libation and perhaps even take him home after. Bulan wouldn’t like it, but then Bulan would never know, and anyway Calla felt more than confident that she was not the only woman privileged to grace the Chazar’s bed.

Lost in thought, Calla had not noticed the Aubade drift away to speak with the Prime. The two of them conversed quietly at the outermost reach of the precipice, their beauty a palimpsest against the endless blue of the afternoon sky. Their liaison continued with all the haste of a fleeing tortoise, a pace that might well see Calla’s children dead before flowering. He had sent an etching two weeks earlier that might have been of her face, or of the sky before a winter storm, and she had responded with a special blend of joss that still lingered happily in the corridors of the Red Keep.

Alas, it seemed this was not the time for love. ‘The reports from the Sentinel of the Southern Reach are that the Aelerians continue their preparations,’ the Aubade said. ‘And that the war party is ascendant.’

The Prime was staring out at the Wright’s masterpiece, and seemed less than thrilled to have to turn her attention away from it. ‘With all there is to see today, can’t we speak of something else?’

‘I take no joy in politics, nor of turning our talk towards them. But the Aelerians are a threat that needs to be taken seriously.’

‘Those Below are never happy except when they’re killing each other,’ the Prime said. ‘I have stood beneath the sun for two hundred turnings, and there have not been ten when the Dayspans were not at war.’

‘You do not need to tell me of the Five-Fingered,’ the Aubade said. ‘I’ve spent as much time observing them as any of us.’

‘Experience does not necessarily lead to understanding,’ the Prime said. ‘There are many in the Conclave who would say that your time as a Sentinel has tainted your judgement – that the destruction of Elsium by the Sea rendered you antagonistic towards the Aelerians, and over-willing to intervene in human affairs.’

It was to the Aubade’s credit that he could consider this suggestion without rancour. He deliberated for a time before speaking. ‘In truth, I think of my years outside the Roost but rarely. My memories of Elsium by the Sea are faint and ill-preserved. Though there are times when I can recall the sound of the water lapping against the sands, and am filled with the most terrible sense of despair, as if there were nothing in the world for me but to hear that sound again.’ He fell silent, and despite his words seemed very much lost in memory, blinked twice to shake himself free of it. ‘But that is not to the point – my past history is used as a comfortable excuse to ignore me, to continue blind to the truth.’

‘Which is?’

‘That the humans are a threat to us. That we have thought too long of them as chattel, and must readjust our understanding.’

The Prime turned her gaze away from the airship and onto the servants who were running over the top of it. ‘They seem quite threatening.’

‘You look at your house servants and the people of the First Rung, and you imagine them to be representative of the species. But you are wrong, as wrong as you would be to call a wolf a dog. They are clever, and they learn quickly, and they are cruel, terribly cruel. You imagine their short span is a weakness? I am far from sure of that – their nearness to death makes them mad to leave something of themselves behind. They do more in a day than we do in a month, and with lives so brief can barely give a thought towards the future.’

‘One wonders why they have not sacked the city and killed all of us.’

‘I ask myself that often,’ the Aubade said. ‘Once they were too fractious to turn their attentions towards us. Now I imagine they simply overrate our strength.’

‘There is as much danger in fearmongering as in complacency. I rode beside you the last time we met the Aelerians, and well remember your blade among them. If the Locusts are so desperate to meet their death, then it will be no very great struggle to bring it to them.’

‘I suppose it is a factor of our span, that makes it so difficult to adjust to time’s passage, to imagine that there might yet be things that we have not seen, that tomorrow might not arrive identical to yesterday.’

‘Does life bore you so, that you need make monsters out of shadows and demand that we all follow you in pursuit of them? Or is it sheer bloodthirst that would have us descend upon the Aelerians with fire and sword? I had not thought that you and the Lord of the Ebony Towers would have so much in common.’

For a moment the Aubade seemed bright and terrible as the noonday sun, the mention of the Shrike leading him towards fury. ‘I would think you know me better than that.’

After a moment the Prime dipped her head. ‘Yes,’ she said, which was no very great apology but it seemed it was all he would get.

Calla thought they both looked happy to see the Wright waving over to them, bringing their conversation to an abrupt end. The expected moment had finally arrived. The Wright bowed to the Prime and then to the Aubade, pulled his robes tight about him and in one easy leap cleared the gangway to land upright. He gave a signal to two of the house servants still standing on the tower, who swiftly released the ties that anchored the ship.

The assembled crowd held its breath in wonder and terror. The strange, hulking, absurd contraption, freed from its bounds, rose slowly up into the air. Sandalwood called the beat of the rowers,
one-two one-two
, and the ship lurched forward, making its way out into the naked air. The Wright stood on the bow, enjoying this moment that his long months of labour had created. You could not quite call it graceful – the craft bobbed violently, could be no very comfortable berth for those ensconced inside. But, awkward or not, the thing flew! It did not float or glide – it flew as a bird, wings humming in even but rapid time, the balloons a bright burst of colour against the azure sky. Calla laughed and clapped her hands in sheer wonder, and she was far from the only one.

Who, looking at the craft, would have doubted the truth of the Prime’s words? Calla had heard that the humans on the lower portions of the Roost, and those benighted souls beyond it, credited the High with all sorts of supernatural abilities, said that they could read minds and call down lightning with a word – nonsense, of course, though she could understand how such stories had begun. For were they not worthy of myth, these creatures among which she lived? Were they not legends, though they stood and walked as men?

Calla was looking at Sandalwood, who was standing beside the Wright with a smile to match his lord’s, and so she didn’t see whatever it was that exploded actually explode, only heard the sound and felt a sudden wave of heat and force that knocked her to the ground, head turning tortuously, a drone in her ears that was more like a pain than a noise.

It took Calla a long time to stand; her arms wouldn’t do what she told them to and her legs proved similarly rebellious. When she finally managed it she discovered the front of the craft was thick with smoke, and the chittering left wing that had so amused her a moment before was gone completely, bits of falling debris the only evidence that it had ever existed. One of the rear sacks had burst and the ship listed vertically, the humans manning it tumbling towards the prow.

The buzz in her ears died enough for her to hear the chorus of five-fingered screams. The explosion had knocked the Wright to the deck of the ship, but he was back up swiftly. He grabbed the nearest human, one of the rowers, a man bull-necked and stout, and threw him over his shoulder as if he were a sack of wheat. Then he sprinted across the deck and made a smooth leap onto the dock.

Calla was so focused on the Wright’s escape that she did not realise the Aubade was making the reverse journey. Without preamble and seemingly without consideration he tore across the deck, building up speed for the jump. Calla’s heart was in her chest and then her lord was in the air. The ship hung some far way out from the precipice, and the Aubade barely made it, catching the tip of the bow with one hand. Calla screamed then, adding her voice to the crowd, but the Aubade continued on unflappable, swinging himself up and darting straight into the hull.

The fire had spread so rapidly that this was now obscured entirely by black smoke, and what happened next Calla couldn’t make out clearly. The rest of the assemblage, human and High, had been reduced to chaos, the Wright’s servants shrieking and running back and forth along the quay. One of the unfortunate crew members came sprinting out from inside the hull, engulfed in flame and shrieking so loudly and so terribly as to drown out, for a moment, the rest of the cries. Then he was over the edge and falling and his voice soon lost. Another eruption of sound and the side air sack was gone as well, and the weight of the ship began to pull unceasingly downward.

And then the Aubade came out of the smoke, a human slung over each shoulder. There was an instant when he stood unmoving on the trembling deck of the ship, marshalling his energies for the task in front of him. Calla was screaming at him to stop, that he could never make it, that he had barely made it the first time. Later she would realise how mad this was, since of course staying on the ship was suicide, but in the moment somehow she did not realise it.

Perhaps the ship had drifted closer to the tower, or perhaps the Aubade’s first leap had been below his normal standards, because this time he cleared the distance easily, landing, by coincidence or design, just in front of Calla herself. Midway through his leap the final air sack popped desultorily and the craft plunged like a stone, dropping so rapidly that Calla barely had time to mark its descent before she heard – no, felt – the impact below, a caterwaul of crushed steel and wood and flesh that seemed to shake the very foundations of the city.

The Aubade set the two humans he had saved down in front of her, then allowed himself to be led away by the Prime. One of the humans was breathing shallowly, but the other was quite terribly burned, flesh blackened and blistered, and Calla knew that he was dead, or would be dead very soon. The smell was appalling, made Calla want to weep even if she hadn’t wanted to weep anyway. A swarm of servants were quick to reach them, offering what aid could still be offered, and Calla happily vacated her spot near the carnage.

The Prime was inspecting the wounds that the Aubade had received, steam burns along his arm and a cut that wept crimson just above his forehead. It was a task made more difficult by the fact that the Aubade seemed as jubilant and energetic as a child. ‘What a splendid show!’ he insisted, struggling to rise. ‘Did you see that leap?’

‘I saw, I saw,’ the Prime said, putting her hand on his shoulder and settling him back onto the ground. ‘You were magnificent – now please stop moving.’

The Wright had been quite ill-treated by the fire, though not to such a degree as some of his humans. His robes were tattered and torn, his skin was bruised where it was not covered with soot and the flesh of his shoulder was a charred and unappetising red. He seemed to notice all of this very little, however, overlooking the sight of the crash and speaking animatedly to himself. ‘The third gear, it must have been the third gear. It caught loose shifting and tore out enough of the air sack for the gas to leak out, and then—’ He rose quickly from where he was sitting and switched to human speech. ‘Sandalwood? Sandalwood?’ He turned his neck back and forth sharply, surveying for his lost man. ‘Where is Sandalwood?’

‘I’m afraid he’s dead, my Lord,’ one of the workers chimed in, a thickset young woman who had been standing near the edge when the craft had gone down. Her face was streaked with ash and a section of her long hair had been burned away.

The Wright leaned his head back over the precipice and stared at the wreckage below. Then he turned back to the woman who had spoken. ‘Evergreen, you are now Chief Seneschal. Congratulations.’

‘Thank you, my Lord,’ the woman said after a stuttering moment, though she seemed less than thrilled at the promotion.

The craft lay far below, a peculiar and ungainly cenotaph for a man who had been her friend and lover, as well as for many people who had no doubt served the same function for others. It had fallen, Calla could see now, in the midst of a crowded thoroughfare on the Second Rung. Humans swarmed around it, and it was not hard to imagine their shock and horror at this catastrophe that had, quite literally, tumbled down upon them from the skies.

‘The first thing to do, of course, is inspect the wreckage,’ the Wright explained to his new seneschal. ‘Some of the bladders are likely still good, and perhaps one of the rudders. Remember – there is no such thing as a failure. This is but a setback, and one which will make our eventual triumph all the more thrilling.’

E
udokia followed Andronikos out of the main chapel, down a long, narrow set of stairs and into the small room that had been set aside for the refreshment of the Archpriest and Priestess of the Cult of Enkedri. In contrast to the gilded grandeur of the cathedral, the antechamber was small and dark and unprepossessing. It was quiet though, at least, and after half a day of ringing gongs and endless chants that wasn’t something to dismiss casually. Laid on a table were an amphora of table wine and a few vittles, and Eudokia poured two glasses and brought one over to the senator, who had collapsed into a chair almost as soon as he’d entered the room.