Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2 by Daniel Polansky Read Free Book Online

had moved beyond such petty concerns when he had taken his new name – that the best soldiers came from within the sound of the slurp. Fighting since they were old enough to walk, kids from half a cable to the east or the west, kids that looked the same and spoke the same and thought the same as they did. Years spent sharpening themselves against poverty and misery and violence, all that was needed was to give them something worth fighting for, and Edom had done that. ‘Hammer will do fine,’ Pyre said again.
    He was doing a keen enough job so far, one more stumble-drunk knocking down the wide Third Rung thoroughfare, a bit grimier than they generally got up here but not worth noticing twice. Coming towards the hour of the Woodcock, late afternoon giving way towards evening, and in preparation a pair of locals were kindling the street lanterns, handsome hardwood poles set at even distances along the main drag. Where Pyre had grown up there had been no such similar custom, moonlight falling unassisted between the pipes and the tenement spires onto upturned mud and cracked brick. The Third Rung was not the Second, and neither of them the First, but still it seemed a very far way from the Barrow and the docks.
    Hammer wobbled onward, past an unlovely if intimidating edifice of white brick, distinct from the small brownstone houses that surrounded it, noteworthy by virtue of its size and its ugly appearance and by the two Cuckoos standing outside of it, cudgels swinging lazily at their waist. ‘Go,’ Pyre said, and Agate sprinted down the alley, circling round to find Grim and his men at their second position. With no chance of stopping it, now that he was irrevocably committed, Pyre felt as he always felt before action, clean and hard and certain. He was smiling when the youth slipped out from a caddy-corner alleyway, actually near Pyre’s age though he looked younger. He shouted the sort of things that a young man might yell at a Cuckoo here in the waning days of the Roost, here within sight of the coming dawn, and when they turned to look he threw a stone. It went wide, chance or error, Pyre wasn’t sure, but they noticed it regardless, self-defence a function of which even the Cuckoos were basically capable, or at least supposed themselves to be. The boy laughed and made a familiar if offensive gesture and the Cuckoos tore away from their posts and sprinted after him.
    On the Fifth Rung or even the Fourth, after a solid year of enemy action, of retaliatory assassinations, of bodies bobbing face-up in the canals, the Cuckoos knew better than to run off into the alleyways, knew better than to go anywhere except in the company of six or eight of their fellows. But up on the Third Pyre his organisation were closer to urban myth than brutal reality, and the Cuckoos still imagined themselves supreme, some stutter-step beneath the demons they aped. These two men would learn the opposite, regrettably to Pyre’s mind, but there was no other way for it. Two misguided men with slit throats, two families weeping. Even Cuckoos have families, Pyre had come to learn.
    Though he didn’t concern himself with them just then. As soon as the Cuckoos were out of sight Hammer swung into action, pulled the bottle out from its hiding spot and held the rough band of fabric tied round its neck against one of the street lanterns. It flared to life and he sprinted towards the building the Cuckoos had just run from, shoving it through a barred window. There was no explosion, or at least not one that Pyre could hear, but there were screams, and then smoke, and then the front door flew open and half a dozen men came sprinting out, coughing, spluttering, terrified even before they saw Hammer standing in front of them, short sword drawn and gleaming. They were clerks and pushers of paper, cogs in the vast apparatus by which the demons kept their human slaves in bondage, no less sophisticated than the slurp itself, though perhaps less wondrous. They