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

beside the dying man, put one knee on the body, grunted and pulled the blade loose, being careful to dodge the spray of blood that escaped its release. ‘Though in truth, I’d be ashamed to miss him at such a range.’
    ‘Did you know him, Caracal?’ Isaac asked.
    ‘No.’
    ‘War drives men mad,’ Theophilus said.
    Though thinking on it, then and later that evening, restless on the soft bed in his stolen quarters, Bas found he could not dispute any of the charges his would-be assassin had levelled.

10
    O n a cold, sunny day in winter they set Apple into the bay.
    There were no graveyards in the Roost. The demons disposed of their dead by excarnation, leaving their bodies exposed on the cliffs at the top of the city to be picked dry by the birds. Those humans living upslope burned their corpses with little fanfare. In imitation of their masters they denied the existence of any divinity, supposed religion to be one of the many sorts of prejudices that they, alone among the species, were wise enough to be free of.
    Of course it was an open secret that the inhabitants of the lower Rungs still clung to a slim belief in the pantheons of the surrounding lands, some choosing to offer their prayers and small sacrifices to Enkedri and his siblings, others to Mephet, Bull-headed god of Salucia, but most to a syncretic combination of the two. So it was not a general lack of piety that prescribed all but the barest rites for the corpses of the Fifth Rung; it was that there was nowhere to bury them, not with so many living cheek to jowl, and having abided in such a fashion for thousands and thousands of years. Most did not have six square feet to occupy when they had been alive, there was no possibility of finding such space for them after death. And anyway, below the ground were the pumps, and the sewers – a few shovel-fills and you started hitting pipe.
    But still there was the sea. The canals were the exclusive province of the demons, but of the ocean itself even Those Above were not so mad as to think themselves owner. So it was that Mama and the three girls and Pyre and a handful of neighbours had taken Apple’s body from their house, cleaned and wrapped in white cloth, and carried it downslope to the small quay set aside for this purpose, which had seen who knew how many of Pyre’s ancestors sent out into the waves, an endless succession of flesh swallowed by the boundless sea. The craft they had purchased was waiting there for them, like a rowboat but smaller. They settled the body atop a bed of scrap wood and dry kindling, then set it adrift, Pyre himself throwing the torch. The smell of sea foam mixed with woodsmoke, and then with another smell, sweet and unpleasant, and then that was lost as well.
    Mama did not weep. Of course she had been weeping all the previous evening, and the day before, when Apple had breathed his last, and the week before, when it had become clear how little time her youngest son had left. She had wept for a long time prior to that as well, a torrent falling fruitlessly to the earth, salt water with which to poison the ground. The girls cried to make up for it, though Pyre thought that only Thyme and Shrub, the two eldest, really understood what was going on.
    Pyre did not cry either, though there was a moment, just before they put his little brother into the waters, his body so shrivelled and pale, when he very much wanted to. And this surprised him, because Pyre had rarely thought much of young Apple, now that it was too late to remedy the situation he could admit honestly that he had never been any sort of brother, not when he had been a boy, too caught up in misadventure and foolishness, and not now that he was a man. These last two years there had been barely a moment to dedicate to his family, and perhaps he had known also that there was nothing to be done, that Pyre had no more say in whom the gods chose to take than had Thistle.
    He held his mother’s hand on the short walk back to