by L. W. Jacobs
ACOLYTE’S UNDERWORLD
©2018-2021 LEVI JACOBS
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Contents
ALSO IN SERIES
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Map
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Afterword
Acknowledgments
ALSO IN SERIES
From the Author
ALSO IN SERIES
BEGGAR’S REBELLION
PAUPER’S EMPIRE
APOSTATE’S PILGRAMAGE
ACOLYTE’S UNDERWORLD
To Juliette,
Who came with a warrior’s cry in the middle of this book. May you continue your line of powerful women.
1
Yes, I created this thing. Encouraged the hubris of a kingdom sure it could not fall. Inspired the merchants not bright enough to see their own power. Sparked the atrocities that would goad them to war. But now that it is all done? I find myself tiring of this empire. Let us tear it down and begin again, like a child building castles of sand.
—Archenault Teynsley, private letters
Ella woke feeling ancient. The aging cottage was dim in the orange rays of dawn, air crisp and smelling of puceleaf smoke. A few embers glowed in the hearth and she rolled out of bed to stoke them, sucking air at the pain in her joints. Tai had taken the spear just three days ago, gone to check on Ayugen, and already the curse of her resonance was back, age creeping into her bones. Mornings felt especially bad.
She padded across the cold wood floor, Feynrick’s snores masking the creak of old planks. Three days. He’d only been gone three days, and already she felt like a military bride in one of the cheap romances her mother used to read, full of overdone longing and worry for a newly married husband gone off to war. They weren’t even married yet, and Tai would be back any day, but still the longing and worry remained. Much as she loved what they’d accomplished in the handful of months they’d been together, she was ready for some quiet time.
Not that the world was likely to give it. Not with the power of a god in their hands.
Ella laid fresh kindling atop the embers and blew, rubbing her hands over the smoking wood. And not with another archrevenant already watching them. The woman had insisted she wasn’t interested in the spear, but Ella had felt the rush of power from the ancient artifact. The sense that one could do anything at any time. Who wouldn’t want more of that?
Flames caught and she set the blackened kettle on its tripod, shaving ginseng and dried yuzu peel into the water for morning tea. The archrevenant had called herself a peer, and also an enemy. What did that mean? Ella shivered, leaning closer into the crackling fire. She wasn’t sure she wanted a god as an enemy or peer, but having the spear changed everything. They were gods now, even if neither understood what that really meant.
Voices sounded from outside the cottage and Ella sighed, wrapping the kettle’s handle with a thick cloth and pouring a steaming cup of tea. One thing it meant was worshippers, apparently. There had been a steady stream of people leaving the city since the day they took the spear, most of them haggard pilgrims looking suddenly woke from a strange dream, hurrying home to jobs and families. After them had come the true believers, many of them people who’d been in the battle around the old city. They’d all seen Tai appear in the sky, heard him speak thunderous words, felt his power freeze them in place while he searched for a solution to their conflict.
In the aftermath they had split into two parties: those who believed they’d seen the Ascending God, come to reclaim its power, and those who saw Tai as some new sort of prophet or god. There were a hundred different interpretations running wild between the departing faithful, melding and merging and birthing radical preachers who stood on overturned wagons proclaiming their insights to any who would listen.
And some few of that massive stream of people still pouring from Aran had happened to wander off the road and find an overgrown cottage and seen the raven-haired man with a spear staying there. And of course word had spread, even as Tai left for Ayugen and the faithful found only an aging lighthaired woman and a foul-mouthed Yatiman.
Worship songs started outside the door and Feynrick snorted in his sleep. Ella took a long draught of tea, relishing the aromatic citrus and the fire of ginseng in her throat. She had a little more time yet. Soon enough the pilgrims would start to get restless, needing someone to answer their questions, asking about Tai. But for a few minutes more she could be alone with her tea.
Feynrick groaned. “Whose turn is it to water the hounds?”
“Mine,” Ella said firmly, setting down her cup. Feynrick had gone out yesterday morning, and his versi
on of ‘watering the hounds’ had involved two fistfights and a string of expletives so creative she’d wanted to take notes. Which would be fine, except they might need these people. Tai’s Cult of the Blood in Ayugen had ended up staunch allies during Semeca’s attack, and Ella didn’t need to be religious to understood the power of belief. Or its uses, as LeTwi would have said.
So she lifted her aging bones out the chair, ginseng beginning to do its work, and spent a few minutes making herself presentable. It raised interesting questions—who did they want to see? What did a god’s wife look like? And did she want to show them that, or the opposite?
In the end her travel pack didn’t hold that many options, and she chose the nicest of the worn dresses she’d been wearing since Ayugen, a split green leana. She tied her hair into a simple series of knots that might be Yersh or Worldsmouthian.
Then opened the door to a sea of faithful.
Ella sucked in a breath. The pilgrims had taken up much of the farmyard yesterday afternoon, their motley quilt of their tents and lean-tos spreading from her front doorstep as far as the scarlet puceleafs that marked the bottom of the far hill. Today the quilt climbed that slope in all directions, and the sun’s horizontal rays caught smoke from a hundred cookfires, each circled with bright-eyed pilgrims stamping feet and rubbing hands, singing a hymnal in Yersh so antiquated she couldn’t make out the words.
“Sow’s teats,” Feynrick grunted behind her, as the singing fell off and hundreds of faces turned toward her. “We don’t say the right things, this could get ugly quick.”
“That’s why you’re letting me talk this time,” Ella said under her breath, then raised it. “Pilgrims and faithful of Aran! Blessings on this Ascension Day morning. Sekaetai has not returned from his sojourn to the south, but we still expect him at any time. We do not have food to offer and this place is not truly ours, but you are welcome to stay so long as you maintain his peace.”
The Prophet’s Peace was what most of them were calling the thing Tai had worked after their battle for the spear, using Semeca’s power to strike down anyone who committed violence within the city of walls. It did not work out here, but the faithful took it just as seriously. A fact in which Ella took much comfort as she and Feynrick began their rounds of the tents, exchanging greetings and accepting cups of tea or other small gifts, answering questions where they could.
Most of them were about Tai, of course, which was frustrating because Ella wished she knew more herself. Others were about theological matters on which she resisted the urge to comment flippantly—how soon the Descending God would return, whether Tai was the Prophet reborn, whether the stone’s sudden loss of power in Aran meant the gods had forsaken them.
And then there were questions about things she did know the answer to—how Tai had flown in the sky, why some pilgrims had been able to survive deadly wounds during the standoff outside the Old City, explanations for many of the impossible feats they’d seen around the holy city’s fountains and squares during their trek inward. It was information the Ninespears had kept secret for centuries, knowledge she’d spent years trying to dig out of ethnographies and oral histories, and likely truths the archrevenants would rather stay buried, if their reaction to unlocking the stone was any gauge.
Ella gave it freely. Let the Councilate learn more secrets of resonance. Let the shamans and the archrevenants quake at their holy secrets becoming common knowledge. In her view knowing more, understanding more, could never be a bad thing, even if the waves it caused rocked all boats. How different would the world be if shamans had spread their techniques instead of hoarding them? How much better off mankind if they’d known how to overcome their inner voices centuries ago?
“The holy resonance,” a woman nodded as Ella explained about the spear, seated cross-legged on a blanket with a child at her breast. “Yes. So the Lord Tai created the yura too?”
Ella stifled a sigh. The archrevenants were probably safe—try as she might, most of the pilgrims only understood her explanations as religious metaphor. Well, it was a start.
“Got room for one more?” A man peeked from behind the ragged roof of the family’s once-red canvas shelter, now sun-bleached and rain-washed to a dull pink.
“By all means,” Ella said, shifting to make room on the only seat around the pilgrim family’s fire circle, an overturned log.
“Please,” the man said, raising his hands. “I couldn’t take it from the wife of the prophet.”
Feynrick snorted. “Wife? They’re barely more’n kids in the hay. Though there’s been plenty o’that, if ye take my meaning.”
The mother looked scandalized, but the man just shrugged. He eased his way onto his knees in the manner of the salt marshes, though he wore loose leggings and had glass beads tied in his beard like the Yersh. “The Lord Tai, he’s returning soon?”
It was the question she got most often, despite announcing every morning that she basically had no idea when he was coming back. Ella put on a polite smile, like the one her mother wore at long and unnecessary House meetings. “Yes. He had things to see to, among his people in the south.”
Not many of the pilgrims had made the connection between Sekaetai, Ascendant God of Aran, and Tai Kulga, Achuri Menace. And while she wasn’t going to lie about it, she wasn’t eager to point it out either.
She wasn’t sure even religion was strong enough to overcome the north’s prejudice for darkhairs.
“The south,” the man echoed, giving her a sudden penetrating gaze. “I have heard he carries a spear of power?”
“Yes. It’s how he was able to do what he did in Aran.”
“And he’s coming back here?” he pressed. “To this house?”
“Yes,” she said, looking at the man again. This might not be a regular pilgrim—she needed to remind Tai of the danger they were in once he got back. Not all the shamans vying for the spear had died or given up. They needed to take precautions.
“Will you be with him?”
Ella drew herself up, feeling for her resonance inside. Something was not right here. “I will. Why do you ask?”
The man gave an easy smile, glass beads sparkling in his beard. “Oh it’s just—the needs of the faithful are many. You are doing such a good job of ministering to us here, I was afraid he would send you elsewhere once he arrived.”
Or he wanted to catch Tai alone. Ella put on a sweet smile. “Even a god couldn’t keep me from my man.”
“Right. Well then,” the man said, standing and dusting off his leggings. “I’ll leave you to your tea.”
Ella caught Feynrick’s glance as he walked off. It was a strange interaction, but then a lot of these pilgrims were strange. No wonder, given the strangeness of the city while the stone had still been radiating uai. Still, it didn’t hurt to be on their guard. Especially when they were outnumbered hundreds to one.
It wasn’t hard to tell when Tai came back. Shouts rose up all around—Ella was seated in the shade of a simple canvas awning, talking with a woman who’d lost her husband in the fighting inside Aran. She looked up and saw a solitary figure descending from the sky—no two figures, the second a matronly figure with dark hair tied in a sensible bun.
“Marrey!” Feynrick cried, springing up from his game of dice and running down the hillside faster than Ella’d ever seen him move, even in battle.
Ella wasn’t far behind—would have been ahead, if her hips weren’t aching from so much sitting and so little blood movement. Curse her untimely aging. Still, she made it to the cottage just as Tai touched down.
So did a hundred fervent pilgrims, and it took a moment to work her way to the front. When she did, his arms felt like she’d never left them, and for a minute archrevenants and pilgrims and aging bones vanished in her lover’s arms.
He pulled back long enough to push the spear into her hands. She winced. “That bad, huh?”
“You look a little wiser than when I left,” he said. He glanced at the crowd of people behind them. “Run awa
y with me for a while?”
Her whole body relaxed as the spear’s uai rushed into it. It was like stepping into a hot bath on a winter’s night.
“You should say something first. They’ve been waiting here for days.”
Tai frowned, looking at the pilgrim camp. “Like what?”
“Anything. These people think you’re a god, some of them. Something like what you said before you ended the battle outside the old city.”
He rolled his shoulders, then turned away from her to cup hands around his mouth. “You’re safe now! You can all go home!”
Silence followed his words, and Ella grimaced. “I don’t think that’s what they were looking for.”
“Ancestors eat what they’re looking for,” he said in a lower voice, arm tightening around her. “All I want is you.”
Ella suppressed a giggle as he pulled her toward the door. “We’ll be back out later!” she called, then burst into a full fit once they were inside and he’d pulled the door shut.
“What?” he asked, and even the tight set of his shoulders wasn’t enough to totally dampen her mirth.
