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

were men unused to violence; this far up the mountain it was all but unknown, petty criminality rare and swiftly punished, the big thieves taking care to hang the little ones.
    ‘On your knees,’ Hammer shouted, louder than necessary but this was his first action, and Pyre could forgive him his excitement. ‘On your knees!’ he said a second time, and this time the men were not slow to obey, long robes trailing in the dust.
    Grim and three of his men came walking swiftly eastward. One of them was Agate, and one of them was the boy who had thrown the stone, and the last had his blade free, and it was slick with the blood of a stranger.
    ‘Any problems?’ Pyre asked.
    Grim shook his head vigorously, broad-smiling, turned his attention to the lackeys arraigned before him. ‘Which one of you is bossman?’ Grim asked. Grim was born closer to here than the Fifth, but he liked to affect the downslope slang, and since apart from that he was tough and fearless and utterly reliable, it was the sort of foolishness that could be overlooked.
    None answered, knees bent against cobblestone, eyes firmly on the ground.
    ‘Obey and this will go swiftly and without bloodshed,’ Pyre said quietly. ‘Hinder our objectives in any way and I will set your mothers to weeping. These are the words of Pyre, the First of His Line, and by the Self-Created I will stay true to them.’
    It was as much Pyre’s name as Pyre’s threats that got them to react. Even here, a seeming world away from the Fifth, they knew of the Dead Pigeons and of the savage young man who ruled them. ‘I’m the manager,’ one of them said, looking much like the rest, a little older perhaps, a little fatter, one of the faceless multitude of the fettered, thinking themselves free because they did not notice their chains.
    Hammer pulled him upright and sent him tumbling back into the building. Agate followed along, though Pyre waited a moment before joining them.
    ‘We’ll be done before reinforcements arrive,’ Pyre said to Grim, who had taken up position by the door.
    Grim smiled. ‘Take as long as you want. There aren’t enough Cuckoos in the city to bring us down.’
    A lie – what was true, however, what Pyre knew to be true without consideration or rumination, was that if the Cuckoos managed to amass a sufficient force to break through they would do so over the corpses of Grim and his men. There was not anyone in the Dead Pigeons who he could not count on to perform likewise.
    The interior was ugly, banal, no different from a thousand other such offices on the Rung, places that built nothing, forged nothing, created nothing, nodes of finance, leeches draining life from the body politic. The fire was still smouldering, but it didn’t seem to be spreading very fast. If the clerks had been braver they might well have been able to put it out themselves, but then again they’d have no reason to suppose themselves the target of an attack. That had been part of the brilliance of it, to strike in a spot where the demons and their servants imagined themselves protected.
    Part of the brilliance, but not all of it. Hammer and Agate had corralled the manager between them, and were staring at him in a fashion that would have alarmed his wife or mother. As if to forestall any abuse, he pointed towards a door and said, ‘The vaults are that way. But all the silver is in bars – you won’t be able to carry it anywhere.’
    ‘We aren’t going to the vaults,’ Pyre said quietly. ‘Your records – where are the records kept?’
    He went white-faced then, and for the first time Pyre felt like hurting him, that fierce, oily rage boiling itself up from somewhere around his cock, because there wasn’t anything to these upslopers but greed, that was all that mattered to them, not even silver or gold but rows of ciphers on paper, scratches of ink more important than the lives of their fellows and more important than their own even, they’d lose a limb before seeing their