Those Below: The Empty Throne Book 2 by Daniel Polansky

one thing to kill a Cuckoo in some distant corner of the Roost, to throw graffiti on walls, to hold rallies and demonstrations. To strike at the purse, though, was to take aim at the very essence of the city.
    ‘Any trouble?’ Pyre asked Grim once they were all back outside, breathing deep of the early evening air, free finally from the smoke.
    ‘No, but you can hear it coming.’
    And indeed you could, rattling downslope, the loud droning of ratchets. The Cuckoos had been alerted and were coming in force, the shock troops of Those Above, ill-trained and worse-armed but there would be plenty of them, there would be enough. Pyre turned swiftly to the functionaries and petty bureaucrats kneeling in the dust, the smoke from their business growing thicker even from the outside. They refused to look back at him, eyes bent and neck bowed, a position with which they had long familiarity.
    Though Pyre preferred to see them free of it. ‘You are blind, each and every one of you. You suppose yourself free by virtue of the small luxuries afforded you, but this is a lie, and now is the moment of your deliverance. The demons parcel out your birthright, and you are so pathetic as to feel grateful. But a reckoning is coming, brothers, for the demons and for you as well. What was stolen will be returned, what was taken will be replaced. The scales will be righted.’
    ‘By the will of the Self-Created,’ Grim said.
    ‘Until the dawn of the new age,’ Hammer echoed.
    ‘Leave, or stay, as is your want,’ Pyre said, though between the fire and the smoke and the coming certainty of violence they were not slow to make their escape, on their feet and hurrying off as fast as they were able.
    ‘You’d best do the same,’ Pyre said to Grim.
    ‘I will see you downslope, or at the foot of Enkedri’s throne,’ Grim said, smiling.
    ‘You’ll see me downslope,’ Pyre corrected. ‘I haven’t given you permission to die.’
    Grim slapped his hand against his chest and extended it with each finger unfolded. Then he and Agate and the rest of his men went roaring off west, to follow the Sterling Canal towards the Fifth. Pyre and Hammer headed in the opposite direction, eastward for a few long moments and then downslope towards freedom and home.
    The hum of the ratchets followed them through the dimming evening light, but this was an old game to Pyre, fleeing from the Cuckoos, this was an activity at which Pyre was well-practised, and Hammer too. There was a moment when Pyre looked at Hammer and Hammer looked at Pyre and they nearly burst out laughing, the noisemakers echoing louder and still nothing more than a spur to merriment.
    They turned out of an alleyway and onto a main thoroughfare and suddenly there were four of them. Pyre never learned if they had been called from upslope or if this was part of their usual beat and it didn’t matter anyway. He did not hesitate; that was perhaps the one quality he still shared with a boy named Thistle, there was no interlude for him between shock and violence, and in that brief instant before the Cuckoos accepted the sudden reality of the situation Pyre’s blade had cut a hole in a blue robe and a gash in pale flesh. The wounded man screamed and fell back and Pyre continued onward, knowing distantly that speed alone might prove their salvation, that any halt would mean death. His attack was so rapid and so savage that it embroiled two of the Cuckoos in trying to defend against it, backing away fearfully, but that still left the one, and that one was pulling his truncheon back to shatter Pyre’s skull when Hammer intervened, catching the blow near the hilt of his short blade, good Aelerian steel biting deep into the hardwood, and still moving he caught Pyre’s assailant by the shoulder and yet moving still he hurled the Cuckoo against the alley wall, bone against indifferent brick, and then the blade upright and entering through the ribcage. Ignorant of his reprieve, Pyre continued forcefully