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

by L. W. Jacobs

  “Abandoning us?” Marea snapped. “He was cut down by rebels trying to get mom and I to safety. You know, fighting against savages? While you and yours were up here reading broadsheets and sipping dreamtea?”

  Brannel recoiled. It wasn’t the right thing to say, but he deserved it. Her dad had done the best he could for their House and she would never let anyone say different.

  “We were working hard up here too,” Brannel said, setting his glass down on the wooden sideboard. “And have been doubly since the loss of that contract near shut down our mills. Now. What do you want?”

  Marea started. “I—want my rooms back. And money. I need money. But I’m willing to work for it.”

  “Oh, willing are you?” Brannel took another drink of iced dreamtea. “Things have changed since your father was alive, girl. What work we have we’re more than adequate to do ourselves. Eat up and brush up on your etiquette, if you want to do something for the House. Your marriage will be worth a lot more to us than anything else you can do. Balance out what your father lost us, maybe.”

  Marea bit back an angry remark and swallowed the revulsion at his talk of marriage. Marry was the last thing she wanted to do after her experience with Avery. But she needed this man’s help if she was going to hire Rena a healworker anytime soon.

  She schooled her voice to steadiness. “My father trained me in strategy and calculism and the major schools of economic theory. I can recite the primary through tertiary sources of income of the twelve Houses as well as all our competitors in forestry and milling. I can do more for us than get married.”

  “Strategy I can handle,” Brannel said, holding up a hand. “What I need from you is a pretty lighthaired face to get us some new forests. All the strategy in the world isn’t going to make enough pulp appear to keep our mills running.”

  “What of the Avensley tracts? Father purchased several forests on the south Ein specifically to shield us from instability around the yura trade.”

  “Mortgaged,” Brannel sighed, ticking a ringed finger against his glass. “Mortgaged to save us from the worst of the fallout, and no way Mattoy’s ever giving them back without twice what they’re owed.”

  House Mattoy. Marea thought quickly—competitors in timber and quill fowl in the southern reaches, but also heavily involved in fur trapping and mineral speculation.

  “Have you thought of ceding them fur and mineral rights for a reduced payoff?”

  “Yes I’ve tried negotiating,” Brannel sneered. “Gren Mattoy will never do it. He’s hated me ever since academy days. He’d hold on to those forests even if they were stripped to the saplings and burnt bare. He’ll keep em just to see us squirm.”

  “Let me try then,” Marea said, seizing on the opportunity. Not only did she hate being seen as only good for marriage, but if that was all her uncle took her for, she’d never be able help the Metteks. “You two have a personal relationship, but I can keep it to business. Give me numbers to work with and I will get us those forests. Trust me.”

  “I said I tried girl.” Brannel ticked his finger angrily against his glass. “If Gren won’t do it for me, he sure isn’t going to do it for my niece.”

  For a girl is what he didn’t say. A young, inexperienced, foolhardy girl. Marea could feel the opportunity slipping away—but she had more than wits on her side.

  She struck resonance, not sure if it would work on something this subtle, summoning a vision of success into her mind even as she started talking. “Then we have nothing to lose. And I don’t have to work with Gren—plenty of contracts are negotiated by junior House members, or at the very least details are worked out for ratification by the heads. If I fail it’s nothing on you. And if I succeed, we can get our mills back and running before some other House steals our sales contracts with cheaper product.”

  Brannel’s jaw worked. She forced the image sharper in her mind—the way he’d relax his chin, the drop to his shoulders, the timbre of his voice as he said, “Why not? You think you can win him over? Be my guest.”

  What he actually said was a little less pleasant. “Fine. And if you don’t convince him that way, I think the old bastard’s widowed again. Maybe we can marry you into the deal.” But his shoulders did drop and his jaw did soften. Most importantly, he’d let her foot in the door.

  She would do the rest.

  But first, Nawhin and Rena. House deals like this took weeks and months to finalize, and longer yet to actually see money coming in. She needed something faster than that.

  Marea took a breath. “Thank you. I won’t let us down.”

  Brannel slugged dreamtea. “Not much farther down we can go.”

  “There is one other thing,” Marea said. “A family I met on the road, widowed in the violence. The mother is sharp-witted, but the daughter has bluefoot. Since the north wing is empty—”

  “Absolutely not,” Brannel said, dropping into his cushioned chair again. “We’re barely keeping food on the table as it is. Do you know how much taxes are on Widow’s Hill estates? How much we’re paying our mill workers to stand idle, just to keep them from defecting to Mattoy or Erewhin? This is a house, not a charity. Send them to the Eschatolists if they’re so desperate. Or pay them from your own pockets, once you seal this deal with Mattoy.”

  “Fine,” Marea agreed, taking what she could get before even that was gone. “I’ll take two percent on agreed payoff price as negotiation fee.”

  Brannel snorted. “Take ten, for all the good it’ll do you.”

  “Ten percentage points, then,” Marea agreed. “Lineila, you’ll draw up the agreement?”

  Lineila scurried off to write the contract, and Brannel gave her a surprised look. “Bottoms, girl, you know how to work an angle don’t you?”

  “I know a lot of things,” Marea said, trying not to sound smug. “But thank you, for giving me the chance. I’ll want your final figures and documents related to the mortgages by the end of the day.”

  She walked out before he could respond. Contract negotiation had never been her dream, but then neither was trying to cure an impossible disease or making amends for a murder. Maybe life wasn’t about dreams. She’d settle for second chances.

  Map

  9

  Of course they built it on a delta of shifting sand. What else could explain the quagmire Worldsmouth has become?

  —LeTwi, Morning Tea

  Ella stood at the prow of a six-oar river taxi, eyes closed, breathing in. Worldsmouth had a scent, no matter which channel you took through the city, day or night, rainy season or dry. It was sweat and swamp water and the stench of an entire city’s waste dumped into a sluggish delta of bottom-feeding fish who ate the waste and then were caught and eaten and shat out again in an endless cycle. That and the indefinable reek of a culture at the height of its pride. That was Worldsmouth.

  And much as she had always hated it, always denied it, it smelled like home.

  In her left hand she clutched a sheaf of papers, part of a long talk she’d had with Tai the morning she left. A talk about his vision and what they were fighting for, but mostly about how to fight. She’d told him there was a way to fight they hadn’t been using, one perfect for the capital. Words. She’d started writing as soon as she booked passage south, and had three broadsheets ready to go, with more outlined.

  In her right hand she held Semeca’s spear. The spear of second sight, Falena had called it. An ancient magical device with the power to level the entire city of Worldsmouth if she wanted to. A tool for the other kind of fighting. The irony that she needed its power to save the world from those who would abuse that same power was not lost on her. How did you stop a war without fighting it?

  One answer was to convince the aggressors it wasn’t worth it—that’s what her broadsheets were for. Another was calling down the justice of higher powers, if such a thing existed.

  That’s what she was here for.

  The taxi lurched at the passing of a larger scow, helmsmen cursing, and her feet
rolled as naturally as if she’d never left. It was a hot day, the middle of the dry season, which only meant that the rains stopped and the city was safe from storms for a while. It certainly didn’t mean it was dry—the delta’s humid air hung on her like a heavy blanket, pressing the clothes to her skin, squeezing sweat out without offering any relief from the heat.

  The last time she’d taken a river taxi was to book her first passage on a rivership, a third-class passenger scow headed for Seingard, every half-moon she’d saved from a year working the Brokewater flophouses tucked into her clothes, eyes darting for thieves or family members or the lawkeepers who’d had a warrant for her arrest and execution since the day she’d escaped her House.

  It seemed a lifetime ago, or a different life entirely, and yet this heat and reek and the slur-mouthed curses of the oarsmen in the clogged Einswater channel felt comfortable in a way nowhere she’d been since had—not Ayugen with its sweeping forests, not the fortified hills of Yatiland or the moldering grandeur of the Yershire’s shrines and cities. Something about Worldsmouth had stayed in her blood, like a bad case of Rider’s Pox.

  “Alla,” she barked, Stiltspeak coming back to her like she’d never spoken differently. The oarsmen broke for the nearest pier. Two or three other bedraggled Mouthians stepped out after her, throwing half-moons into the bargemaster’s worn leather bowl, gap already widening as the oarsmen—indentured servants all—pushed off for the next stop.

  Ella walked the worn planks like she was traveling backward in time, backward into the mold-slick footbridges and back-alley cookshops of the Brokewater, home to Worldsmouth’s poorest and most desperate. She’d fit both those bills after escaping her parent’s house, even if her clothes had marked her as someone from a very different part of the city. Those she’d sold first, the last traces of her heritage, lacking the money to leave the city and knowing the Brokewater was the last place her parents would look. That most lawkeepers and self-respecting private lawbinders wouldn’t even enter the half-water, half-mud warren, fearing for their lives as much as their purses.

  She walked it now with the head-bent gait she’d learned just a few days in, pulling the moth-eaten wrap she’d bought in Cretshoal close around her. Zaza would happily trade her the rest of what she needed. Zaza, who’d known from the start she wasn’t who she said she was, and been happy to keep the secrets of a girl who knew how to keep her mouth shut and work. Zaza, whom she hadn’t seen in years. Currents send the woman was still alive.

  The Brokewater was narrow here, a low peninsula of huts connecting the lower marshes and the old city to the docks. She crossed it in a quarter of an hour, storefronts and desperate faces changed after just five years. Changed and yet the same—the cobbled construction and despair felt as familiar as she imagined her family’s estate would, with its washed white walls and gleaming picture glass windows.

  Were her parents still alive there? What had become of House Merewil?

  A monger stood at the intersection of two alleys, where a series of stepping stones crossed one of the Brokewater’s thousand stagnant streams. Ella stopped to listen to the stories he was calling, unsurprised to hear wild rumors about Aran among them. Mongers were what passed for news in the poorer districts—with so few able to read, mongers would buy recent broadsheets and stand on street corners reading headlines until someone gave a half-moon or twist of dreamleaf to hear the news.

  This one scowled at her where she paused. “Teha, sister, you wanting news or just me?”

  The scrawny man puffed out his chest, red eyes marking dreamleaf addiction. Men in the Brokewater were either scurrying broken things or full of false machismo. This one was apparently the latter.

  “News,” she said. “Got mine to share, teha? Who’s your runner?”

  The monger laughed. “News you got to share, tauera?”

  The word was stiltspeak for cleaning woman, literally meaning something like dirty water. Ella spat. “Nothing for you, hora. Come from Aran with fresher word.”

  The monger laughed. “Aran? You come from that alley, tauera. I seen it.”

  She’d expected this, knew she would have to do something a touch flashy to get her foot in the door. “Carrying these?” she asked, flashing her clutch of inked sheets at him. The title on the first would be clearly visible: A Citizen’s Tale of Aran’s Last Days, written in elegant letters with lines of her neat hand beneath.

  He made a shee sound through his teeth. “You write those?”

  “Nah. But I got them to sell, teha? Need some moons.”

  The crier’s eyebrows lowered, and he reconsidered her. Good. Her story had gone from something a tauera could never do, to something she could—he thought she’d stolen the papers. She didn’t care what he thought as long as they got published.

  “That case,” he said, “best you give them to me, I see what I can get you.”

  “Nah,” she said again, rolling them up. “Want your bossman or I try another hora and you don’t make nothing.” She made as if to leave.

  “Peace, sister. Step back here tomorrow sunrise time and I get you bossman. And you get me moons, teha?”

  “Wei,” she said, acknowledging a deal made. “Sunrise, teha?”

  “And moons,” the monger said, already turning back to his wrinkled broadsheet.

  Ella took the stones across the stream, remembering how the third one wobbled, and hid a growing smile. That crier would be reading her words in a few days. And if they resonated at all with the poorest and most desperate of the city, getting into the richer broadsheets would be easy.

  Ella stopped at a toolsmith’s, trading a quartermoon mark for a fistful of reed bristles and some twine. She began tying them to the end of the spear, still flush with her victory. One mission accomplished.

  Now to track down a god.

  10

  The next morning, dressed in the A-line skirt and loose kurta of a businesswoman, Marea presented herself at the gates of the Mattoy compound, heart thumping from a cup of ginseng tea.

  Two hours later she was finally summoned into Gren Mattoy’s chambers, tea wearing off and confidence eroding.

  Two minutes later she was escorted out, proposal unspoken, Gren’s echoing laugh chasing her down the stone hallway.

  “Stains,” Marea cursed as the heavy gates closed behind her. Of course the head of the Mattoy House threw out his rival’s niece without hearing her out. Of course the negotiations were more about politics and personality than money. This was the Councilate. She’d been stupid to think otherwise.

  But where did that leave her?

  Marea hailed a private skiff to the old city, hands gripping the polished wood in frustration. Obtaining the forests back from Mattoy had been her only realistic option for getting money. Trying to fatewalk thugs in dark alleys was out, and she couldn’t see using her resonance to steal from regular people, even if it would be easy. Brannel had given her a few hundred moons as personal spending money, but most of that had gone into her stupid business clothes.

  Marea stepped onto the worn stone pier only half-seeing the stream of similarly clad people heading into the old city for the day’s business. Even if she found money, she was less and less certain any healworkers would be able to actually cure Rena. She’d spent the last few days reading everything she could about the fever. According to what she’d read, rumors of someone actually healing bluefoot were just that—rumors. The best healworkers could still only make victims comfortable. So even if she found money, Rena was still going to die. Leaving Nawhin with nothing.

  Marea pushed out of the crowd’s current to take an open spot on one of the ancient stone benches that lined Puahi Square. That left her with two options. The first was healing Rena with fatewalking, but according to how Avery had described it, fatewalking only worked on what was possible. The less possible something was, the more uai it took to make actual.

  Curing bluefoot sounded impossible.

  She leaned back with a sigh, gazing at the weat
her-worn statue of the ancient sea goddess in the middle of the square. It was a holdover from a time before Worldsmouth had been Worldsmouth, before the traders and merchants here had conquered the Yersh Kingdom and been in turn conquered by Yersh culture and morals. Puahi, keeper of tides and fortune. She could use some good fortune about now.

  If fatewalking didn’t work she was left with using uai directly. It meant spending more time with shamans, a thought she hated after her time with Avery-Harides. But she had seen him heal Tai after a shamanic attack left his body broken. Watched the free-flowing uai of the waystone in Aran cure wounded pilgrims almost instantly. Uai healed what healworkers could not, like bluefoot. But there was only one way to get uai outside of stealing Tai’s spear.

  She had to become a shaman.

  Which meant finding a ninespear cell in Worldsmouth and infiltrating it. They existed—Nauro and Harides had both mentioned them, and if she remembered right the strongest shaman at the waystone had been from a Worldsmouth cell.

  Marea sighed, watching the crowd stream past. Another impossible option. What was she going to do, stand up and shout about shamans and wait for someone to react? Start asking around for secret underground cells that survived only by staying hidden?

  Sounded like a good way to get herself killed. If she was lucky enough to even ask the right people.

  Marea sucked in a breath. Luck. Curing bluefoot was impossible, but if there were shamans in this city, that meant that finding them was still possible, if highly unlikely.

  Those were odds she could work with.

  Marea stood and started pushing through the crowd. It might take a while, but fatewalking would find one. Would take that slim chance of a meeting and tug on it until it happened. And any shaman worth talking to would recognize what she was doing, see that she had no revenants, and be interested.

  She got to the base of the statue and started climbing stairs. Last time she’d gotten involved with a shaman she’d ended up killing an innocent man and almost leading her friends to their death. She would be smarter about it this time, and use what she’d learned. Shamans were dangerous, but they were ultimately just after power—it was why Harides had tricked her, because he’d figured Tai would take the spear and needed a reason to join their group. This time no shaman would see her as a path to a god—Tai owed her nothing and certainly didn’t think of her as a friend.