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

ledgers unbalanced.
    Pyre shoved it back down. Hatred, anger, these were the feelings of a boy named Thistle, and not the man he had become. ‘Make me repeat the question, and I’ll make you scream the answer.’
    ‘Down the hall to the right,’ the man answered swiftly, ‘down the hall to the right.’
    ‘After you,’ and Hammer gave him a good hard shove in the direction he had indicated. Pyre tried to figure how long had elapsed since they’d set the fire, but time was a tricky thing in moments like these. They came to a locked door and this time the manager did not need to be threatened, reached into his pocket and pulled out a long key.
    It was a large room. It needed to be, containing records for half the transactions on the Fifth Rung, debts owed by storekeepers and shop-owners, bartenders and porters, managers of small restaurants, mothers pawning their beds and their clothes and their bodies and the bodies of their offspring and anything else that might find value upslope. Ignorant, unlettered, capable of counting to twenty if they took off their shoes and if they hadn’t suffered an accident, setting their mark down on a piece of paper that promised they’d spend their lives trying to repay some modest sum.
    Hammer smiled wide, knew what needed to be done without Pyre saying so. He had two more bottles hooked against his belt and he hooted loudly and tossed one over to Agate, who caught it one-handed and tore off the cap, opened one of the larger drawers and started to dump it over the parchment inside.
    ‘What are you doing?’ the manager asked, though he must have known by then.
    ‘I am filing the bars of a cage,’ Pyre said. ‘It is the primary occupation of the Five-Fingered.’
    ‘But … but … these are the records for the entire Fifth Rung! Every loan and financial transaction, tens of thousands of debts!’
    ‘Do you think we came here by coincidence?’ Agate asked, laughing, upending one of the drawers against another, the crescendo of wood against the stone floor, paper scattering across the room. ‘The Five-Fingered will free their brethren of the yoke of credit, and shove a nice finger into the eye of all of you upslope trash.’
    ‘These are legitimate transactions!’ the manager protested, and Pyre was surprised as he always was at the willingness of the bound to fight in service of their own subordination. It was a peculiar kind of courage, preferring to risk injury or death rather than face bluntly the facts of their own slavery. A potent thing, the truth, and there were men who would rather die than hear it. ‘You have no right to do this!’
    ‘You gave an eagle to a man fifty years ago, and you have his children’s children still paying interest.’ Hammer had finished preparing the inferno, faced up against the manager, breathing heavy and with one hand on his blade. ‘We ought to clip him right now, let everyone know he’s a traitor to the species.’
    ‘He’s ignorant,’ Pyre said, making a swift motion with his hand to forestall any violence. ‘As you were, as I was. Perhaps this will be the moment when the truth reaches him. If not,’ Pyre turned suddenly on the man, ‘we will meet him again on the morning of the new age.’
    ‘We doing this?’ Agate asked. Most of the bureaus were knocked on the ground, their financial secrets spilled across the floor and wetted down with alcohol.
    ‘Hammer, do the honours,’ Pyre said.
    Hammer turned his snarl from the manager, grabbed a lantern off the walls and dashed it against the far corner of the room. The fire started swiftly and burned fast, dry parchment as good an accelerant as coal oil. They left immediately after, and already the smoke was black and billowy. Back towards the front entrance and the second blaze was hot and high, intended as a distraction though it had gained its own momentum, as fires and causes often do. They would feel this, men on the Second and their demonic masters on the First; it was