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

often used herself, polite but unyielding. She brought the folds of her robes up from her wrist, displayed the ink that had been applied earlier that morning. It was good work, Calla knew, but not too good, nothing like the elaborate tattoo that ran up her other arm and to the nape of her neck, which she had powdered over with heavy make-up and which was now obscured by a length of scarf.
    ‘This would make you a worker on the cerulean section of the Second Rung, yes?’
    Head halfway to a nod, another flicker of warning or terror and she turned it into a head-shake. ‘The third, my lord,’ she said, looking down as if frightened, no very difficult emotion to fake. ‘I am a maid for a family there.’
    He did not smile, but there was some indefinable sense of easing. ‘I am no lord,’ he said. ‘Rank, title, these are lies created by the demons, meant to separate and weaken us. You are human, and thus my sibling, and there need be no question of hierarchy between us. I congratulate you on your courage in coming so far from your home,’ he continued, nodding to the guards and waving her inside, ‘and I welcome you to your first meeting of the Five-Fingers. Your future starts tonight.’
    A stage had been erected at the back of the warehouse, though Calla could only make it out through the mad press of bodies, windows shuttering open and closed through the great wall of flesh. Elbowing her way to a clear view took the better part of ten minutes, and was an unseemly and unpleasant task. The crowd were porters and shop-owners and petty craftsmen and outright vagrants, they were small-time thugs and washerwomen, they were cooks and servants, they were human as she was human and as unrecognisable to her as the back of the moon. She ended up standing beside a family of five, a thick-shouldered husband and a homely wife, three young children standing seriously below them. After a while a man appeared on the stage, middle-aged, handsome, shifty-looking. Calla stared hard at his face, willing herself to remember, folding his image into the recesses of her mind.
    ‘Five years ago,’ he began, ‘I heard the truth, and was reborn Steadfast, the First of His Line.’
    A cheer from the crowd.
    ‘Are you ready to hear the same, brothers and sisters? Are you ready to be reborn?’
    A louder cheer, and longer, though when Steadfast brought his hands up it quieted with surprising speed, this mob of downslope ruffians, five hundred souls at least, every one staring silently forward with keen intensity, nothing to be heard but the occasional cough. And then Steadfast removed himself, and the man they had all come to see arrived from off stage. At first glance he did not seem like much, this man who had set the lower half of the Roost on fire with his words, who had drawn this crowd like bees to honey or wild dogs to raw meat. Near fifty, if Calla was to take a guess, though you would only say so by his bright white mane. His shoulders were broad and he stood straight and unbowed, and his eyes were clear blue even from a distance. But he was not handsome particularly, and apart from the hair there was nothing noteworthy about him.
    But when he spoke – at his first words, which were sonorous and bright, and which she could hear clearly though she was halfway back in the crowd – Calla understood.
    ‘What is your name?’
    He allowed the silence to extend out again.
    ‘What is your name?’ he repeated.
    This time there were scattered shouts of response from the crowd, Mouse and Hinge and Burr, downslope names without beauty or even much sense. On the First Rung and the Second, children were named after flowers and spices, after sweet-smelling plants, after precious minerals and things beautiful or thought to be so. Down here on the Fifth they seemed to title their spawn after anything that caught their fancy, with less thought than Calla might have given to her supper.
    He did not ask the question a third time, only looked on