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

power. While humans in animal furs huddled round peat fires, fearing the night, the Eternal wandered the length of the coast and far beyond, as free as anything that had ever lived, bound only by sentience. And then the crime, the sin that could never be expunged, and the terrible punishment that followed – a culling without number, and those humans that survived scattering to the distant corners of the land, centuries before they would begin to eke out some semblance of civilisation, or marched to the coast to spend generations carving out the mountain and building the foundations of the Roost.
    Or perhaps none of these things had ever happened. There were no Eternal alive who could remember it, and they had no books, no written records or documents. What was the difference between history and myth, Calla wondered? Both purported to explain the circumstances of the moment, but only the latter did so to any useful degree. Sentiment, theme, these are in the end more important than fact, because fact cannot be changed, fact can be only weathered. The punishment was reality, the punishment was fact, and thus the crime must have been true as well. A man will accept anything, if he is convinced he deserves it.
    The Anamnesis was, regardless, the celebration of this punishment, the yoke that had fallen and now would forever lie on the humans of the continent. In the docks far below, the true balance of the slave nations’ tribute had already been delivered – vast weight of ore, caravels filled with cotton and silk and silver, unfathomable quantities of foodstuffs, the raw materials with which the Roost operated. Across the First and the Second the Anamnesis was considered an occasion for great merriment, any concern about the origin of the holiday forgotten in frivolity. In the past it had been the same on the lower Rungs as well, though with the mood downslope so grim these days, Calla did not suppose there would be many bold enough to drink a toast to their continued subjugation.
    Here in the Conclave the Source spilled sweet water high and bright into the open air. Waiting to be called in by the master of protocol were the representatives of the surrounding nations, ambassadors leading five pairs of slaves, males and females, the annual tithe of flesh to be paid as it had been paid for millennia. It was a motley if elegant assortment. Salucians in bright silk, high-collared, smooth-tongued and obsequious even by the standards of the slave states, though they could hardly afford to be otherwise with the Aelerians occupying half their kingdom. Their national enemies stood somewhat further back in line, the senator who had so nakedly stared at Calla’s backside during the party at the Red Keep, and a number of curious-looking slaves who did not resemble him in physiognomy or dress. The Dycian contingent were all nearly as tall as the Well-born and dark as charred firewood, and they stared wide-eyed at the Source with undisguised wonder. Behind them stood the grandees of Vryngia and Gardariki, minor kingdoms far to the north, where rimefrost gripped the earth for nine months of the year, whale blubber was their chief source of sustenance and the Eternal were barely even myth. At the moment, pride of place belonged to the ambassador from the Baleferic Isles. A short man but well-formed, skin the colour of summer honey, and offering his pronouncement in the human speech of the Roost with an accent that was just scarcely detectable. He held a pomegranate branch, three fat fruits dangling from the end, and behind him were five paired couples, slaves hand-picked for their beauty and grace.
    Across the First the Eternal prepared for the evening festivities, which were, even by the standards of the Roost, quite elaborate, and to receive this great parade of tribute there were only the Prime and the Lord of the Sidereal Citadel, seated a short distance above the dais, engaged in a not particularly quiet conversation, unrelated entirely