Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2
disapprovingly, at those who had spoken and those who had remained quiet. ‘Those are not your names. Those are the names they have given you, lies that you have supped upon since birth, falsehoods swallowed down with mother’s milk. Untruths that have blinded you to your patronym, to your history, to your very future. In a time that has been forgotten, in an age the memory of which was obliterated, we roamed wild and proud across the land, with our own leaders and our own priests, blessed by the gods, free as man was meant to be free. Until the demons came,’ – voice dipping an octave into horror and hatred. ‘Without law or justice, thinking themselves divine, jealous of our innocence. They slaughtered your ancestors as cattle, and those they did not kill they enslaved, forced to labour for an unknowable eternity beneath the ground, out of sight of the sun, out of sight, they supposed, of the gods themselves. They broke us, and they thought we would remain forever broken. For generations beyond counting, you have laboured beneath that yoke, knowing nothing different, thinking, in your delusion, in your ignorance, that it was justified, that your bounds were ornaments, that your slavery freedom, that you were what they said you were.’
    The crowd was not quite silent – there was still the rustle of clothing and heavy drawing of breath, here and there a cough or a mutter – but when Edom clapped his hands together it echoed loud and clear through the vast hallway.
    ‘It is time to wake now from this nightmare, my brothers and sisters. It is time now, finally, finally and long past time, that you free yourself from your delusions, from your bounds. Free yourself from the whoremongers and the child-poisoners, the gamblers with their loaded dice and false tongues, the knife-boys who come to your businesses and your homes and tell you that what little you have scrimped and saved and salvaged is not yours at all, that it is theirs. And above them, faceless and unknowable, three or five or seven cables upslope, the Cuckoos and their masters, Five-Fingered as you and I but made blind by their own self-hatred, by the depths of their loathing, by their desperate and foolish and impossible adoration of the demons. The world was promised you,’ Edom said, his voice rising until it filled every nook and cranny of the warehouse, until it extended into the furthest back corners, until it seeped into the mind and the heart and the soul of everyone blessed to hear it. ‘And it is to you to redeem that promise. It will be your strength that frees your children of their servitude, that will begin a new chapter in the history of your race. I am Edom, the First of His Line, and if a free heart beats in your chest, if you yearn for a future beyond that which they have promised, then you are already one of us, and must but speak the words.’
    When it was finished, every man and woman and child packed into the warehouse, five hundred souls easily, matched the motion of the man on stage, reflected it, hands uplifted, fingers splayed, Calla making it along with them and not sure in her own mind if it was pretence.
    Afterwards she left the gathering swiftly, well-graced with fear.

4
    T he Salucians could not fight for shit.
    This had been Bas’s feeling twenty-five years earlier, and thus far he had seen nothing to force him to reconsider the opinion. The three themas he had brought from Aeleria were newly raised and largely unblooded, and he would not have given all of them for half of his beloved Thirteenth, still serving on the Marches far to the east. But they were chariot-bearers of the war god himself compared to the Salucians. Their infantry were all peasants, badly equipped and worse led. The nobles served in the cavalry, and they looked very impressive – their saddles were trimmed with silver and samite, and the pommels of their weapons elaborately crafted – and Bas supposed that it was their wealth as much as their lives
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