Acolyte's Underworld: An Epic Fantasy Saga (Empire of Resonance Book 4)

by L. W. Jacobs

  Marrem clucked, stepping into the room with her usual air of common sense. Her hair was mussed, though, and her sensible brown dress looked hastily buttoned. Ella lost the last of her anger in barely suppressed mirth. She and Feynrick had disappeared awfully quickly. Not that she blamed them.

  Marrem noticed her gaze and began tugging at her clothes furiously. “Anyone hurt? Your nose, girl. Come here.”

  With a start, Ella realized her nose was still broken and throbbing. She willed herself healed, and a shocking moment of ice later was whole. Marrem gasped. “We have a shortcut these days,” Ella grinned. “I think we’re all fine, Marrem.”

  “He en’t fine,” Feynrick said, jerking his head at the body slumped against the far wall. “Who d’ye suppose he was?”

  “Someone who could change appearances like Harides did,” Ella said, at the same time Tai said, “A shaman. He knew exactly how to use the spear, and he was one step ahead of me the whole time.”

  “A late-comer from Aran?” Feynrick asked, picking at the shattered remains of the couch with a mournful look. “Looking to take one last shot at the spear?”

  “Maybe,” Tai said, “but I doubt many of the shamans there had much power left after we took the spear, and changing your appearance takes a lot of uai.”

  Ella frowned. “How do you know that?”

  Tai looked over, startled. “I—guess Nauro told me, sometime.”

  That was strange, but Nauro had sometimes insisted on private lessons during the long walk from Ayugen. “So where was his power coming from?” she asked, returning to the threads of logic. “He might have overcome enough revenants to waft and brawl and timeslip, but there’s no resonance that lets you change your appearance.”

  They were quiet a moment, evening light cutting beams through the dusty air. Tai looked up. “Eyadin. Remember how Eyadin could spot shamans even though he wasn’t one? And hadn’t even overcome his own revenants? What if this guy was something like that?”

  Ella bit her finger. “Eyadin could only do that because he was sent by someone else. Someone high up in the ninespears. At least, that’s what Avery said.”

  She met eyes with Tai and Feynrick. “For what that’s worth,” the burly Yatiman said.

  She frowned, poking at a broken washboard with her foot. “I remember Marea looking strange when he said it. Like there was something she wasn’t saying.”

  “Well where is she?” Marrem asked. “Get the girl and let’s find out.”

  Ella laughed without humor. “She—a lot happened at the end. Marea ended up having something she needed to do badly. She left before Tai did even, to go back to Worldsmouth.” Currents, but she hoped the girl was okay. She’d left with nothing, to walk through a countryside rife with hungry pilgrims and tense soldiers.

  “If it wasn’t a shaman,” Tai said, “it had to be an archrevenant. They’re the only ones who would have power to spare, and who’d know how to use the spear.”

  Ella had been avoiding the thought for a while now. “And the only one we know of,” she said reluctantly, “is that woman who appeared to us the other night. Who said she wanted to help us.”

  Tai’s eyes narrowed. “Eyadin talked about whoever sent him as a ‘she.’ Though apparently such things can be faked.”

  “So the archrevenant sent him?” Ella asked, then shook her head. Something wasn’t fitting. “But why would she be so roundabout, when she could have just taken it? She could have killed both of us before we even knew she was there that night.”

  Tai paused in helping Feynrick try to flip the couch. “I’ve thought about that a lot,” he said. “Nauro spoke of a pact between the gods, back when I first visited him in his tent outside Ayugen. And the archrevenant said they would all attack if we made a full harmony again, which if it wasn’t a lie confirms they’re in some kind of alliance.”

  The men redoubled their effort, and the couch crashed back to its feet. “Alliance against what?” Feynrick asked. “They’re gods.”

  “I don’t know,” Ella said. “I just find it hard to believe that she doesn’t want the power. Archrevenants all used to be ninespears, as far as we know. People who dedicated their lives to getting power.”

  Tai shrugged, dusting debris from the couch’s mangled cushions. “Maybe it changed them. I saw into Semeca’s mind, when I fought her at the tower. Saw what it had been like for her to outlive her lovers, and her children, and her children’s children. She didn’t want power anymore. Maybe they’re all like that.”

  “Well somebody wants it,” Feynrick said, spitting in the direction of the corpse. “Somebody with power to burn.”

  Marrem had been examining the body. She turned now, pulling down the tatters of its shirt. “Does this symbol mean anything to you all?”

  Ella’s heart leaped—if it was a circle pierced by nine spears, at least then they would know something. It wasn’t—instead she saw the figure of a man, sprouting swords from his back like wings. “No,” she said, after studying it another moment. “That doesn’t say ninespears or anything about archrevenants to me.”

  Tai frowned down at it, looking as worried and disappointed as she felt. They needed to figure this out, or they might not survive the next attack.

  “So where does that leave us?” he asked. “The tattoo points to him not working alone. So some ninespear cell?”

  “Could be the brand of an archrevenant too,” Feynrick said. “Who knows?”

  Ella bit her lip. “There’s one person who knows.”

  Tai frowned at her. “Nauro’s dead. And even he didn’t really know what was going on with the archrevenants.”

  Feynrick’s head shot up. “Ye don’t mean—genitor’s teeth girl, if ye escape a pack of wolves once, ye don’t go back to hunt in their woods.”

  “Even if there’s no food?” she asked. It was a bad idea. She knew that. But it was their only idea.

  “The archrevenant?” Tai barked, putting it together. “No. She might be the one that sent him!”

  “But why would she bother?” Ella asked, caught in the grip of idea. “She didn’t take it when she had the chance. So it stands to reason she won’t if we call her back.”

  Feynrick frowned. “How would you call her?”

  “The harmony,” Tai sighed. He knew her well enough to know she was feeling set on this. Good. A man should know when to let a woman have her way. “It’s what drew her to us in the first place. Apparently she can tell when someone strikes a full chord.” He looked at her. “And she told us never to do it again, or she’d kill us all.”

  “We barely survived this today,” Ella said. “Barely. And what’s the alternative? To just stay on guard all the time? It won’t help if the next attack is stronger, or I don’t come back from the privy in time, or any number of other things go wrong. We’re definitely dead if we go that route, versus only possibly dead if we call her.”

  Tai rolled his shoulders. “She specifically said she would kill us if we did it again. You remember that, right?”

  Of course she did. And Ella didn’t trust the woman to begin with, but better to know where they stood than to live in fear of her and whoever sent this man. Because nothing pointed to the woman having done it.

  “So we do it in a way that shows we’re not trying to harm her or open a stone or whatever it is she’s worried about,” Ella said. “We do it just for a second. Just long enough to send a message out, like the horns they blow on Sealou Point to keep the ships from running aground.”

  “No,” Tai said. “Absolutely not. There are other ways to find out what we want. People we can talk to. Books we can read. I’m not risking the goodwill of a mecking archrevenant just so I can find out who this guy was.”

  Ella nodded. “You’re probably right.”

  But the idea stuck with her as they cleaned up the rest of the house, as Tai once again addressed the people and they all did their best to explain what happened, without really knowing themselves. Ella hated the feeling of u
ncertainty. Hated knowing they were in danger and not knowing how to prepare for it. If their enemy could change their appearance, they could be anyone. Or another one of these thousand pilgrims, for that matter—more had come over the course of the day. Word was spreading.

  They did the best they could with the cottage, using the spear’s power to shore up the walls and ceiling, the pilgrims insisting they take blankets and bedrolls to pad the bare floor. Tai fell asleep within moments of laying down. She waited until his breathing deepened, then slipped out of bed.

  “Sorry love,” she whispered, easing the door closed. “But I have to do this.”

  Ella strode out into the night, spear in hand. She had a god to call.

  5

  And so I tell you our true enemies are not from different Houses, or different nations, or possessed of different hair. They walk among us, hiding impossible powers, depending on our greed and ignorance to keep them in power.

  —graffiti on walls of Councileum

  Marea left the grave walking in a straight line. She knew where Califf was, knew where Worldsmouth was beyond that, knew what she had to do if she was ever going to feel okay about herself again.

  She had to tell a wife and daughter they were now widow and orphan. Had to apologize for being the one who made them that way. And then make it up to them somehow.

  Starting with curing the daughter’s incurable disease.

  It sounded impossible. But until a few weeks ago, she would have thought a lot of things were impossible—ancient stones that turned soft as butter, light-drinking blades that burned people to ash, a resonance that bent fate to her will. All impossible, except she’d seen them. The last one she’d done herself, coming hard on the heels of learning she was not a blank, that she was in fact the rarest and most powerful of the resonant abilities, a fatewalker.

  Little good it did her now. Avery—no, Harides, the shaman pretending to be the man she thought she’d loved—had been the worst luck of her life, worse even than her parents getting killed in the Ayugen rebellion. She understood why that had happened now, knew how you could enter a mindstate where killing strangers felt justified to protect the ones you loved. It was what she’d thought she was doing when she killed Eyadin.

  Turned out she was ruining a family instead.

  Never again. She’d been naive and plunged backwards in love, and while she wasn’t stupid enough to think she was done being stupid, her eyes were open now. And for all the good it did her, she had the power to change fate at her will.

  Too bad it couldn’t change the past too.

  She’d needed her resonance in the first few days leaving Aran. Returning pilgrims were beginning to flood from the city, looking sunken-eyed and disillusioned as she felt, and a well-dressed girl traveling alone made an easy target for those not so committed to Eschatolism’s moral code. Fatewalking took care of them, and she carried one of their thick-bladed daggers now, strapped to her thigh. Something in her bearing must have changed too, because no one had bothered her since booking passage at Fenschurch.

  Marea gazed over the barge’s railing at the towers and white-washed stone of Worldsmouth in the distance, inhaled the delta’s humid air. It felt unreal to be here. Like she had spent so many years in Ayugen dreaming of them that the reality no longer fit. She booked a private skiff along the east channel of the delta, watching a city so familiar to her appear so strange. The sage-smoking bare-chested men of the docks, the stilt-houses built out over the water—these had been her world when she’d left the city years ago. Did they even know of revenants, and the power of a resonance outside the limited version yura offered? Did they have any idea there was a secret war between shamans and gods for the uai their bodies offered up? Did they see anything beyond the moons they scraped into their wallets each day?

  No. Nor had she, before she left, but she’d been a child then—she saw that now. Was no doubt still a child. But a child who had seen much.

  “Effinsquay, please,” she said to the rower, a fyelocked man in his later years, sinewy arms nutbrown from the sun. She tipped him heavily as she stepped onto the jetty, stone piers scrubbed of river filth and planks freshly tarred. This was The Racks—she had spent her youth here, before her family had made enough on sweetleaf fiber to buy an estate on the lower slopes of Widow’s Hill. Built once the delta’s islands ran out of room, The Racks had wide stone streets and houses of red Mazeridge stone, cheaper now that the quartzite mines were mostly bare. It was midday, the sun deliciously warm after so many cold nights, and the breeze smelled of brine and cook fires rather than the reek of the city.

  She passed Coridge Lane and glanced down it to see the sandy dunes rising at the end. She’d spent so much of her childhood playing on the beach beyond. Marea itched to go, but she itched more to find Nawhin and Rena Mettek and finally start righting the wrong she’d done. A word at the lawkeeping station sent her another thousandpace deeper, the houses growing larger and bridges less common as the land rose toward the Yershire plain.

  The Mettek’s house was nondescript red stone, a two-story structure with potted gardens and an outside stairway leading to an apartment upstairs. Marea didn’t know what she was expecting—a slump-roofed hovel like the Brokewater, or a door nailed shut with Quarantine written across it? But bluefoot fever victims didn’t get cut off—most people here got it in their youth and recovered in a day or two. It was those who came from outside the delta, or only caught it later, that risked long illness and death.

  Eyadin had said his daughter was dying of bluefoot, but even if Marea hadn’t gotten bluefoot as a child, the disease wouldn’t stop her. Not with this weight on her chest. She took a breath and pulled the cord, chimes rattling inside.

  Silence, then the scrape of a lock pulled back. A pinched face appeared in the doorway, black eyes looking her up and down once, pausing on the fur coat she carried under one arm. “Yes?”

  Marea took a deep breath. “Are you Nawhin Mettek?”

  “I am. What of it?”

  “My name is Marea Fetterwel, and I come bearing news.” She’d rehearsed this a thousand times on the journey here, but rarely got past the first line.

  “Well? What is it?”

  Marea paused, heart beating. She hadn’t imagined doing this on the doorstep. Didn’t want to. “Can I come in?”

  Nawhin’s face paled. “It’s about Eyadin, isn’t it? Did he get himself into some kind of trouble? Did they finally come for him?”

  “Your husband is dead,” Marea said. There was no way to soften the blow. He’s dead and I killed him, she wanted to say. But she couldn’t tell this woman that.

  The widow’s face barely changed, just a slow sucking-in of her cheeks, like she’d expected this. “Dead. Of course he is.” She seemed to remember herself. “Come in. You’ve had bluefoot? My daughter’s got it.”

  “I have,” Marea said, stomach clenching with guilt. She couldn’t tell Nawhin the whole truth because there was no way she would let Marea help if she knew. And as much as she needed to get the truth off her chest, she needed to mitigate what she’d done even more.

  The inside was dim, shades drawn on small glassed windows. A stout table with benches, two cushioned rocking chairs, the scent of steamed rice and tink of cooling charcoal rising from an open door in the back. Nawhin motioned her to a bench. “How did it happen?”

  “I—we met him at Califf. He was on his way to Aran.”

  Nawhin sat down, eyes boring into her. “And?”

  “And we traveled together for a while. It was safer that way. And then one night we were staying at a cottage, and—” She took a deep breath. “He was stabbed. Going out to the privy.”

  “By who?”

  “We didn’t see her.”

  “Her?”

  “Him,” Marea corrected. “I don’t know. Someone. But he told me to come help you.”

  Sweat beaded on her forehead. Currents, when had she become such a bad liar?

  “And you came. Why?�
��

  The woman’s eyes were like black pools drinking in light. Marea’s stomach twisted. Nawhin knew. She’d figured it out somehow. Currents. “It’s—the least I could do. I was coming back to the city anyway.”

  “Are you one of them?” Nawhin snapped. “The ones he was working for? Because if you are I want no part of it. That’s done now.”

  The ones that ordered Aran put to the sword, she meant. Stains. What had this family been through?

  “I just met him on the road. I swear it,” Marea said, putting all the conviction she could in her voice.

  The black pools stayed on her a long minute, then looked down to where Nawhin’s hands worked at her knuckles. “Well there’s not much you can do unless you’re fabulously wealthy as well as unlucky. My daughter’s dying of bluefoot and the only healworker they say can cure it costs a fortune.”

  “My House is not badly off,” Marea said, jumping at the change in topic. Yes. This is what she wanted to talk about. About helping Nawhin.

  Not about how she’d killed her husband.

  “And you would spend your money asking nothing in return?”

  “Your husband was a good man. He didn’t deserve what happened to him.” Saying the words was like twisting a knife in her own stomach. Eyadin hadn’t deserved it.

  “I told him not to go,” Nawhin said, not looking up from her hands. “You know the message he was carrying?”

  “Yes. But he was doing it for you. To save you, he said.”

  The thin woman huffed. “Look how well that worked out.”

  “Well it isn’t over yet,” Marea said. Because if it is I’m just a pile of fishscat. “And if the healworker doesn’t cure her, I may have other means.”

  “Like what?”

  “You know about yura?”

  “The cave moss?” Nawhin frowned. “I know it makes men float a few inches in the air, but that won’t heal my Rena.”

  “There are other uses, and deeper powers. Things I learned about in the south. I think they might help your daughter.” Fatewalking was worth a try—if there was a possibility Rena was going to get better, maybe Marea’s resonance could make that possibility actual. And if not, she had seen uai heal impossible things in Aran. She had no way to get more uai, but that was a problem for another day.