Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1 (6 page)

In the three years since she had assumed the position of seneschal, Calla had never once required a wake-up call. It was a small source of pride to her, the discipline and self-control she maintained over her mind even while lost in the realm of slumber. Still, better certain than sorry, and it wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that one morning the aid of a human alarm would be needed. Knowing Tourmaline as she did, Calla felt that would be the one day the poor, stupid little thing would muck it up, falling asleep herself, or tripping down a staircase and breaking both legs.

‘You’re not here delivering dinner?’

Two blinks of blue eyes not far from idiocy. ‘No, mistress. It’s barely morning.’

Calla gave no outward sign of annoyance. ‘Not everyone has your advantages,’ her father used to tell her, after she had left one of the other children of the Keep in tears. ‘And you ought not be so proud over something you had no hand in creating. You owe your mind to an accident of birth. As soon praise yourself for growing tall.’ A wise man, her father, a good deal wiser than Calla knew herself to be.

Though she tried to follow the example he had left her. ‘Thank you for your service, Tourmaline – you may return to your quarters now.’

‘Thank you, mistress,’ Tourmaline said, bowing and bowing and then bowing again, as if Calla had saved her from the gibbet rather than sent her off to bed.

With the girl gone, Calla turned her full attention to her mirror. She had never taken any great pride in her beauty, though she couldn’t help but recognise it. She had long legs and a flat stomach and a nose that mostly didn’t even bother her any more. Strawberry-blonde locks curled down below her shoulders, shoulders that led into a round bosom. Starting at her wrist and ending just below her neck was her brand, a cast of hawks shadowing the noonday sun. All human residents of the Roost, apart from those unfortunates living on the lowest Rung, were marked at adolescence, though it was only here at the summit that tattooing had been elevated to an art. The markings of the lower Rungs were crude things, proof that the bearer was allowed to remain within a certain proximity to Those Above, each Rung and section of a Rung having different symbols – three variously sized stars, twisted lines on an oval. By contrast Calla’s own brand was a minor masterpiece, the red sun a composite of garnet-based ink, the hawks outlined in gold leaf. At a glance, anyone living on the First Rung could tell by the colour scheme that she owed obedience to the Aubade, and from its intricacy that she was a servant of the highest rank. She hid it beneath blue robes that accentuated her features without drawing overmuch attention to them. Checking herself in the mirror one final time, Calla decided that she liked what she saw, or at least accepted it, and slipped on her house shoes as if to leave.

But before doing so she walked over to one of the bookcases and lifted a volume off the shelves. She took a long look around the room before she did so, knowing it was foolishness, that there were no peepholes hidden in the walls, that her sanctuary was inviolate. And even if someone had walked in on her, what would they have seen? Most of the rest of the servants were illiterate, or nearly so, and of course the Lord and his kind had no books, did not entirely understand their purpose even. Still, it paid to be careful – what she held in her hands might get her killed, and not swiftly. A quick flip through to make sure the words hadn’t run away since the night before, then she buried the book back in with its siblings. For years she had kept it hidden beneath a loose stone in the floor, before realising it was far more conspicuous to constantly be moving two clove of stone than for one more tome to join her collection.

Satisfied, Calla opened the door and started briskly on her way.

She had ground to cover – there were towns in the hinterlands between Salucia and Aeleria that were smaller than the Red Keep, and cities far less impressive. Calla had never left the Roost, but her lack of experience, in this case at least, did not make her wrong. There was nowhere in the world to compete with the paradise Those Above had built, and one did not need to have visited every backwater burg to know that for a truth. One needed only to open one’s eyes.

From Calla’s room it was a twenty-minute walk to the kitchens, though of course if you were unfamiliar with the terrain it would have taken far longer. With most of the staff still asleep she felt the dignity of her office could survive a light jog, her footfalls muffled by finely woven carpets, down long corridors of red brick, windows overlooking the gardens or the bay itself. Once morning came, assuming it did not look like rain, the house servants would open the thousands and thousands of glass apertures, and the sun would flood over the intricate stonework, and the wind would carry in the fragrance of fresh flowers and salt water. But in the evenings and when the weather was foul the Lord preferred his own, carefully crafted scents, and in the predawn hours incense simmered in small bronze bowls hanging from the ceiling.

First, Calla paid a quick visit to the kitchens, making sure that everything was in readiness for the Lord’s feast. He took a light breakfast by the standards of his kind: three courses of small plates, a round eighteen dishes in all, plus sherbet to cleanse the palate, tea and several different juices, depending upon what had been available at market the evening prior. Besides the head cook herself there was a specialist for the pastries, one for the meat, one to see to the beverages and a handful of other culinary adepts of whom the Lord made infrequent use, not to mention any number of half-chefs and assistants and attendants.

The head cook was an elderly, waspish woman, easily offended. In Calla’s father’s day the head cook had been a middle-aged waspish woman, though at least at the time she’d also been a thoroughly competent one. But the last year had seen a swift uptick in the woman’s sense of bitterness, accompanied by a slightly less dramatic decrease in her skill. A month earlier she had left the custard tarts in too long, burned them an unsightly brown. The Lord was, of course, the noblest of spirits, his reputation for generosity and temperance literally a byword among the Roostborn – but all the same it didn’t bear thinking about, what might have happened to the unfortunate woman, had Calla not caught the mistake in time to salvage the situation, rearranging the menu so that a replacement could be offered without causing the Lord offence. Of course, for her efforts Calla had earned nothing but an increase in the vitriol of which the cook seemed to possess an ever-increasing supply, and entering the kitchens Calla girded herself for battle.

Today, at least, all was in readiness; the fires were stoked, the pastries and sweetmeats soon to be set over them. The cook was busy berating one of the twenty-odd souls under her direct command, crowding him into a corner and banging her hand against a hanging pot to make her point. Unfortunate for the boy, but at least it gave Calla the opportunity to make a quick survey of the situation. By the time Calla was finished with her inspection the target of the cook’s abuse had been reduced to tears and the cook herself, having momentarily exhausted her spleen, even managed a friendly wave to speed Calla on her way.

Calla left by a side corridor at a fast walk, checking one of the water clocks that were evenly spaced around the estate. Still some time before the hour of the Lark – Calla was on schedule, but the schedule was as tight as it was every other day. She double-timed it down hallways and through antechambers, every step of the maze long ingrained from memory into routine. One of the banisters running along the fourth stairwell in the far quarters had been inexpertly cleaned, not for the first time, and she made a mental note to chastise the maid responsible for that portion of the Keep. She wouldn’t have an opportunity to do so until late in the afternoon, but Calla’s mind was neat as a well-kept slate, and she wouldn’t forget.

Calla exited the walls of the manor and walked swiftly to the east aviary, a walled area of wilderness that looked as if someone had snatched a square cable of old-growth forest, sawed it free from the earth, carried it with some giant hand and replanted it at the top of the Roost. Here, amidst the towering maples and redwood trees like turrets, the Lord’s vast stable of raptors was situated, hawks and eagles and merlins and falcons and one huge, ugly, cruel-seeming condor. In the centre of the arboretum the caretaker and his two sons resided, and Calla spent some time ensuring that all was in readiness should the Lord, as he often did, wish to watch his killers in action. Next she checked on the smaller west aviary, where the other birds in the Lord’s collection – the cassowaries and button-quails, the coots and turacos, were kept. Calla much preferred the west to the east, with its menagerie of tiny bright things singing sweet songs, and strutting false-winged avians staring about with good-natured confusion.

From there Calla visited the other menageries that it pleased the Lord to keep – the tanks of fish and waterfowl and aquatic mammals that held residence in the north garden, schools of creatures that had been found and hooked and transported halfway round the world to add colour and life to the Lord’s estates. Much of the bottom floor of the manor was taken up with the Lord’s workshop, a forge for making the steamwork mechanisms that were all the rage on the First Rung of the Roost. In truth the Lord was at best a competent craftsman, a fact of which he was well aware but which did not at all seem to affect his passion for the activity. The fortunes he had pissed away in that workshop, and for so little result!

Having seen to the Lord’s needs, she then moved on to doing the same for the large staff of humans. Making sure that all was in readiness in the human kitchens, and the staff would have something to eat when the majority of them awoke within the next hour. Ensuring order amidst the various cadres of servants, pouring oil on the turbulent waters ever-present in any large group of people. Later in the day, if she could carve out some time, she’d take a look at yesterday’s accounts, make sure all was in order, that the dozen-odd people deputised to visit the Perennial Exchange on the Third Rung and make purchases on the Lord’s accounts had done so honestly and competently. Then she would check that the stockrooms were full, that they hadn’t been crept into while an inattentive or corrupt quartermaster looked elsewhere. A year earlier she had discovered that the woman in charge of the staff’s bedding had been selling off some of the reserve linens. How that foolish old bag had wept when she had been dismissed, losing her job and her home at one stroke, forced to move to one of the lower Rungs and scrape by doing whatever she could find, her brand scarred off with a heated iron. Imagine, throwing away generations of honest service to the Lord for a few coins! Sometimes, Calla had to admit, her own species was as much a source of mystery as the Eternal.

It was a busy morning, though not quite frantic. With the hour of the Lark drawing near, Calla arrived at the foot of the steam-powered elevator which would take her to the top of the Keep. She had just enough time to swallow one of the raisin buns she had snatched from the human kitchens before climbing inside and beginning her ascent.

There were many things that made the Red Keep magnificent – its size, its ingenious construction, the infinity of tiny but striking details present on the facades and the porticoes, on the stairwells and the ceilings and the floors. Most of these could be attributed to the brilliance of the Lord, or the Lord’s ancestors, who had laboured diligently in its creation and upkeep. But for its placement at the absolute easternmost point of the Roost, jutting out over the water below, one could not rightly credit the Lord, nor his line – for that one needed to herald Providence, or the sheer wonders of nature itself. In the spring and summer the Red Keep was the beneficiary of a strong wind that blew in the early mornings. As dawn rose over the endless blue abyss the breeze pulled the vast abundance of fluttering strands towards the bay, the ribbons and banners and particoloured kites – as if at any moment the Keep itself might detach from the city and float off into the ether, an island of its own, drifting east towards unknown lands.

Turning her back on the Bay of Eirann, Calla stared westward at the neighbouring manors – the Aurelian Abode, with its gilded towers higher even than the Red Keep, and beyond that to the House of the Blind Swallow, flowering vines bright over indigo walls. Rising gradually in the distance was the Source, the surging fountain at the apex of the city, the Roost’s heart and centre. Further to the north and south and west the mountain began to slope downward away from the water, slowly and barely perceptibly. Indeed, a casual pedestrian might not have noticed the gradient until they had come to the barrier with the Second Rung, heavy stone walls running the length of the divide. The Second Rung, with its civil servants and wealthy merchants and the occasional artisan, was twice the size of the First Rung, and the Third Rung twice the size of the Second, expanding outward and downward until one came to the base of the mountain, to the Fifth Rung and the vast human population that lived there. Such was Calla’s understanding, at least, though in point of fact she had never descended lower than the Third Rung, and she had been there rarely. Her knowledge of the First Rung was all but comprehensive – she could tell the Alabaster Haunt from the Calignous Citadel by the appearance of their minarets in the late evening, knew the name of every demesne by which the east estuary flowed – but dropped in the heart of the Fourth Rung she would have been as lost as a seagull in the desert.

For all that luxury reigned throughout the rest of the estate, the Lord’s personal preserve was noteworthy for its simplicity, albeit a simplicity married to the highest taste. The silk hammock on which he slept was the sole piece of furniture in the cell that served as his bedchamber, a single room composed entirely of glass, naked to sunshine and moonbeam. Surrounding it was a surreal desert landscape, a kaleidoscope of hued sands that were combed and re-patterned daily. Dotting it were two half-boulders of ebony and crystal, eyes staring up into the sky. The sun was still struggling to break night’s final grip, but in a few moments the entire tier would be flooded with light and colour. Calla found the trail the Lord had left in the prismatic sand, followed his footsteps towards the precipice.