Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1 (20 page)

‘Are you sure you want to do that?’ Leon asked.

‘I don’t know what bothers me more – that you’d think I would make an error, or that you’d be so slow to take advantage of it.’

‘All right, all right,’ Leon said, snatching at the piece.

Eudokia advanced her wren another step. Leon pursed his lips in thought.

It was not revenge, or at least it was not primarily revenge. The men charged with overseeing the Commonwealth had proven themselves incompetent to do so, Scarlet Fields had demonstrated that amply enough. Even sweet Phocas, for all that she had loved him, had been unfit for the task. Eudokia Aurelia did not take her responsibilities lightly, had not sought them out of vanity. There were none better able to guarantee Aeleria’s well-being. It was more than destiny which had thrust her towards power – it was common sense.

Slow going at first, but then she had time. It was ten years before Konstantinos could be put into play, and she had spent the time consolidating her rule, accruing wealth and saving favours, putting her friends into positions where they could repay her kindnesses, ensuring that her enemies found themselves broken or corrupted. By the time her stepson had been old enough to accept his first commission, as a tourmarches in Dycia, she had quietly become the lynchpin of the second largest faction in the Senate. The years since had only seen her grow stronger, Konstantinos replacing his father in the people’s affections, her own stratagems continuing with silent certainty. She could look everywhere upon her successes, and anticipate greater victories in the future.

Still, in her unguarded moments she found herself thinking of Phocas, of the life they might have led, of children and grandchildren. Five times since in her life she had found her menses interrupted, five times she had gone to the white-robed priestesses of Eloha, drunk their vile concoction, taken to bed for a week and risen again empty. She would have Phocas’s seed quickening in her belly or she would have none, and so none it had been. Besides, was she not now the Revered Mother, matriarch of all Aeleria, her provenance every man and woman in the Commonwealth – the Commonwealth and what might one day become so?

Eudokia’s steward broke her out of her reverie with the sort of natural-seeming cough that seemed the inheritance of those bred to serve. ‘Phrattes is in the study, Revered Mother.’

She pursed her lips and stood. Leon did not bother to look up from the board. ‘If you decide to capture with that hawk,’ Eudokia said, ‘you can assume my next move will be to retake with the falcon and proceed accordingly. Otherwise, you’ll have to await my return.’

‘Don’t hurry yourself,’ Leon said.

Eudokia had nothing against the Salucians particularly, except in so far as they were people, and thus dishonest, venal and weak-willed. Also they dressed strangely and tended to smell of cardamom. Most Aelerians held Salucians in contempt for being callow and licentious, though Eudokia thought that of all the vices that could infest a population, an exaggerated regard for pleasure was hardly the most objectionable.

Phrattes was a sterling specimen of his race. The chief broker in one of the innumerable counting houses and banking firms that gave the Salucians their wealth as well as their national reputation for being obsequious, double-dealing and slothful. Of no very distinguished birth, still he had managed to attain some rank in his home country, the Salucians being practical people, inclined to see public honours as goods to be bartered like any other. With wealth and rank had come something that nearly resembled power, and it was understood that he was a man who could get things done within the Salucian capital, a power broker of sorts, sharp-witted and calculating.

In fact he was not many of these things, or perhaps it would be better to say that he was many of these things only in a spectral fashion.

‘Your Worship,’ he said, and all but collapsed to his ankles in executing the bow.

‘Revered Mother will do fine,’ Eudokia said, taking a seat in her chair. Phrattes she allowed to remain standing. ‘We Aelerians are a humble people,’ she lied baldly, ‘and have no need for the grand forms of address that bejewel the nobility of other lands.’

‘Why be jealous of title, when your own quality is so manifestly evident to all the clear-seeing and right-thinking?’

Eudokia couldn’t help but be impressed with the flattery – she rarely heard praise executed so well. ‘Sit, please.’

Phrattes made sure to lift his robes before doing so. ‘The great man has been approached,’ he said simply.

It was another mark in Phrattes’ favour that he knew to wrap up his pleasantries swiftly. ‘And?’

‘The great man is interested in peace, as are all right-thinking people.’

‘A blessing to be reckoned above all others,’ Eudokia agreed. ‘And what would the great man want in return?’

‘He has let it be known that he would accept forty thousand in exchange for his support.’

Forty thousand meant that Phrattes had been asked for thirty and thought to pocket the rest. She noticed the gold sheen of his belt buckle and revised her estimate. Phrattes had been asked for twenty-five. ‘And what has he promised, to expect such honey?’

‘The great promise little to the small, as Her Worshipfulness well knows. And the small know to insist on nothing, when invited to the tables of the great.’

‘It is wise to keep one’s sense of scale,’ Eudokia agreed. ‘But we are in Aeleria, which sees distinction only in merit. And in Aeleria, we consider it unwise to purchase a thing without seeing it.’

‘With the coin in his account, I think the great man would be willing to put something in writing.’

Eudokia thought this over as she finished her tea. ‘Thirty-five,’ she said, setting aside her cup and standing. If Phrattes was clever he would know to accept his honorarium with the same grace that he had exhibited throughout the rest of the conversation.

As indeed he did. Phrattes put his cup on the side table and rose with a grace and speed admirable in such a heavy man. ‘It will require the most delicate negotiations,’ he said, bowing neatly, ‘but I shall see that they are performed.’

Eudokia gave him a kiss in farewell, tried not to wrinkle her nose at the cardamom.

Back at the table, Leon had decided to take back with the hawk, and had made her next move as instructed. ‘Have I told you yet,’ he asked, hesitating between two pieces, ‘how little that ribbon suits you?’

Eudokia wore a stretch of bright crimson over her forearm, an accessory that had gained favour across wide swathes of the city’s population in the last month. ‘Red is not my colour,’ she admitted. ‘But when national honour is at issue, vanity needs go by the wayside.’

‘I hadn’t realised that you felt such passion on the subject of Oscan.’

Oscan had been Aeleria’s outpost in the north-east, the boundary between the Commonwealth and Salucia. As part of the indemnity that had been forced on Aeleria after the Others had intervened between the two nations, it had been made a free city, no longer part of the Commonwealth proper. Meant to punish Aeleria for its belligerence, it had ended up as a perpetual source of conflict between the two countries and a wellspring of discontent to the Aelerian populace.

‘The plight of our beloved countrymen, split from the bosom of the Commonwealth by an unjust peace, is always in my mind. I spent three weeks in Oscan, as a girl, during my first tour of the Aelerian lands. A beautiful city, white stone and green gardens.’ Of course Eudokia had never come within five hundred cables of Oscan, but she wished her nephew luck in proving it.

‘Senator Gratian said something very similar, not two days past.’

Appropriately enough, as she all but wrote the man’s speeches. Still, it was a good reminder to be less free with her talk in the future. It would hardly do to make people think that she was cribbing her best lines from that halfwit. ‘A man of great wisdom, the senator.’

‘You should try not to smile when you say that,’ Leon said, moving an eagle.

Eudokia stole one of his wrens. ‘Duly noted.’

He hadn’t seen that coming, which disappointed her, but what disappointed her more was that he let her see it on his face, and allowed it to affect his next words. ‘All the pith and genius of the senator notwithstanding, I fear that his side will be disappointed. Scouring the Baleferic Isles of pirates is one thing – it costs little, people enjoy easy victories and public festivals. But the people haven’t quite forgotten what happened the last time we feuded with Salucia, and the heavy, four-fingered hands of their protectors.’

‘They haven’t forgotten at all,’ Eudokia said. ‘Which is why you’re wrong.’

‘War with Salucia will hardly sit well with the merchants.’

‘Salucia won’t be going anywhere. For a season the trading fleets will be sent south rather than north. When next they return, the markets will be rich with silk and spices, and the native traders desperate for our steel and slaves – the only difference is they won’t need to pay a tariff to sell them.’

‘You expect the moneychangers to see beyond their interests?’

‘I rarely expect anyone to see past what’s immediately in front of them. Which is why it’s really best that those rare few blessed with vision make a point of exercising it. We call that leadership,’ Eudokia said, pushing her wren forward innocuously. ‘In truth, you overcomplicate everything. The people dislike Salucia because they have always disliked Salucia, because their parents did and their parents before them. Oscan is a poisoned pill; if anyone in that misbegotten swamp had a lick of sense they’d never have accepted it. It would not require coal oil to start a conflagration.’

‘And the Others? Do you rank them so low, as well?’

Eudokia smiled but didn’t answer. In the long silence, Leon turned back to inspecting the board, seeking some way out of his predicament. He was a tenacious sort, her nephew, and it rankled him to be beaten so soundly.

But even the most bull-headed of men will face the inevitable, given enough time. ‘The game is lost,’ Leon said.

‘For the last three moves.’

‘Perhaps even sooner.’

‘When you sat down.’

Leon smiled. ‘I should have taken that wren, shouldn’t I?’

‘It is not enough to be intelligent,’ Eudokia said, setting up the pieces for a second game. ‘One must also be vicious.’

T
he Source was the most singular engineering feat that had ever been attempted. To create it had required the labour of a dozen generations of humans, two dozen, perhaps more, perhaps many more, slaving away in the dark, hollowing out the mountain and crafting the vast system of pipework that pumped water from the Bay of Eirann to the summit of the Roost. The Conclave, as the structure surrounding the Source was called, was a budding flower of white marble and pure gold, with its face half open to the sky. There were humans throughout the world who would have drowned their children to get a look at the facade, and cheerfully made the rest of the family into corpses at the thought of taking a peek inside. Here the official policy of the Eldest was hammered out. Here, today, at this very moment, the destiny of a dozen human lands was being written. It was no exaggeration to suggest that Calla was standing at the very navel of existence.

All this being true, Calla strained with every fibre of her not inconsiderable will to stifle the yawn that had been working its way up through her diaphragm over the course of the last five minutes. Her legs ached and her mouth was dry and she had a desire to urinate that was rapidly moving from irritant to a source of major concern. Most of the rest of the Eternal seemed to regard the affair with a similar lack of interest, at least in so far as they had chosen not to attend this month’s gathering. The great amphitheatre was half empty, vacant benches outnumbering the full. In Calla’s memory, admittedly very brief by the standards of the High, she could not recall it ever being otherwise.

For their part, the servants in attendance also seemed uninterested, though at least they had incomprehension as an excuse. It was an open question, the degree to which her fellow seneschals understood the High Tongue. Certainly, even the least accomplished among them could claim a basic understanding of the language, the greetings and honorifics, simple articles. Sandalwood and some of the cleverer ones no doubt understood more than that, though being clever they were loath to show it.

But no human could claim anything close to her own degree of competence, Calla knew this as a fact, as she knew that her fluency owed nothing to her own ability, or at least not much, and everything to the book. In the distant memories of her childhood she could see it clearly, her father at his desk, studying it with one eye always on the door. Twelve generations it had been handed down, from her many-times grandfather Felum, who had been seneschal to the Aubade’s father, impossible as that seemed. Hundreds of years of effort into understanding the language of Those Above, effort that would have been repaid with the severest cruelty had it ever been discovered. ‘Read it every day,’ her father had told her when finally giving in to her demands to study it, ‘but only add when you are certain. And for the sake of everything, never,
never
speak of it.’ Calla had kept to these commandments even as a child, and doubly so since the death of her father had made the book her own exclusive charge.

‘Then we’re agreed,’ the Prime said, jolting Calla back into the present, ‘the tithe from Salucia to be set at seventy slate of iron, forty slate of silver, and three hundred of grain?’

There was no official response to her query, but then the rules of procedure in the Conclave were curiously informal. There were no votes taken, and any High was allowed to speak for as long as they wished, whenever they wished. Decisions were reached as part of a broad consensus, after every participant felt that they had expressed themselves as fully as they desired. Among humans it would have been a recipe for anarchy. That it had endured since the Founding was evidence of how different the Four-Fingered were from the Five.

‘That settles external business,’ the Prime said. ‘Now to move on to the Roost itself—’