Pauper's Empire: An Epic Fantasy Saga (Empire of Resonance Book 2)

by L. W. Jacobs

  She turned to see Feynrick, grinning and holding his hands in the air. “Found me? Punched me, more like, and for no good reason.”

  “For trying to pinch me is why,” Marrem scowled, though she was clearly enjoying it too.

  “As I said,” Feynrick continued, “no good reason.”

  She was a little too tired to find the humor in it. Seeing their interaction reminded her of Tai, and the few times they hadn’t been so caught up in one dire situation or another that they’d been able to joke like that. Gods send Feynrick brought news of him. “What brings you to the caves?”

  “Steady supply of food, so I heard,” the Yatiman winked. “Half the city wants to get down here on account of your two square meals a day.”

  They’d been given two of the wagons that came from Gendrys, but it made sense. Nothing else mattered if they didn’t make a breakthrough here. “I imagine we can spare a plate. Anything more?”

  His grin lessened a touch. “’Fraid not. Second wave of woodsmen came back without word of the milkweed. Seems your boy just disappeared, at least within the first twenty thousandpace of the city.”

  Ella nodded. She’d been trying to prepare herself for this since Feynrick had first said they needed to plan on defending the city without Tai, but still it hurt. He was Ayugen to her, somehow. The reason she was here and the reason she wanted to stay. She had other friends here, certainly, and loved the work, but living here without him would be hard.

  Good thing she had research to keep her mind off it. “I had a chance to read the book I mentioned, the one from Sablo’s rooms that might give us clues as to what Nauro was doing.”

  Feynrick tried another pinch, and received a slap. “And?”

  “And most of it was too scorched to make out, but I gathered the ninespears have a way of controlling voices. Of moving them from person to person, or infecting people with them. I think it’s what Sablo did to us before we reached Gendrys.”

  “Ooch. Though I don’t think Gleesfen would ever let me go.”

  “The text might have been saying it was easier to do on those who’d already overcome their voices, or who were too young to have fully formed ones yet.”

  Marrem’s eyes sharpened. “Tai had already overcome his voice.”

  “Both of them.” Shatters. “Whatever Sablo did didn’t last, but I’m guessing Nauro is better at his craft than the arbiter was.”

  “So he mighta infected the milkweed with a voice, you’re saying?” Feynrick asked. “He’s already overcome two, what’s one more?”

  Ella shook her head. “If it was easy, he’d be back to us by now. Maybe they gave him an extra difficult voice, or they have a way of forcing it to stay there, so you can’t escape, I—there’s just so much we don’t know.”

  “One thing we do know,” Feynrick said, clearing his throat. “The caves are a good spot—there’s a reason Coldferth only needed twenty of us to guard a hundredsome workers. One entrance, one exit means good defense. But we can’t fit the city down here, nor could we feed and water them. We need to pull back to Newgen.”

  “To—what?” She must be tired. “Move the school?”

  “Move the city, lass. Like as not more Broken are on the way, and we can’t defend against them split up as we are. Get us all inside Newgen’s walls and close the gates, the brawlers at least will have a hard time reaching us, and the slips. Make the defense easier.”

  “Okay.” There was no reason not to move the school, she’d just gotten used to being down here. And it sounded like so much work. She was tired. “When are we doing this?”

  “Now. Today. Soon as ye can. No sense in waiting and getting caught off guard. We’re moving what remains of the food there now, and herding people in.”

  Something in his tone confirmed the fear she’d been holding since Karhail’s attack. They really didn’t have time to waste. The Councilate would send more, and they needed a plan. Newgen was good. A method for overcoming on command would be even better.

  “Have there been any more attacks?”

  Feynrick chewed his lip a moment. “No attacks. But people are seeing things in the sky. Off in the forest. It’s coming, lass. Better to be ready.”

  “Right. Give us an hour. Marrem, spread word to the teachers. We’ll reform in the Tower amphitheater, try pairing them off there.”

  And hopefully discover what she’d been missing, because even Newgen’s walls wouldn’t hold the Broken for long.

  46

  The next wave of uai hit while she was still talking to the newly-overcome mindseye. It felt deeper this time, a brawler’s buzz. Ella smiled, something in her relaxing. It had finally worked for a brawler.

  Then she heard the screams.

  Ella stood. “Meliona, excuse me, I—”

  “Broken,” the woman said, eyes unfocusing. Reading minds. “In the main hall.”

  Shatters. Ella ran, exhaustion forgotten in her panic. A Broken here? Inside the caves? It would ruin everything.

  People ran the other way, one of them bleeding from a gash on her forehead. Panic gripped her harder. She’d been using her uai all day, trying to help people, to demonstrate harmonizing. Prophets send she had enough to kill whatever this thing was.

  The main chamber was a stampede. Shouts and screams and uai echoed off the stone walls, blood everywhere and people running. It was all she could do to keep her feet. “Your resonances!” she yelled. “Harmonize! It confuses them!”

  Her voice was lost in shouts and screams. The arched stone cavern was thick with uai—her bones rattled like they had that day in the fort—but it was too chaotic to make out any harmony. Someone slammed into her back and Ella nearly lost her feet.

  She struck resonance, not wanting to waste her uai but needing a moment to breathe. To see what was going on. The panicked mill slowed, shouting reduced to a basso rumble, her bones quivering with uai.

  “There,” she said, breathing out. There would be no pushing through the bodies frozen all around her, so she grabbed a set of meaty shoulders instead. “Sorry about this,” she muttered, and scrabbled herself up onto his shoulders.

  The room was a ring of people pressed back against the walls, with a wide circle in the middle clear save for two figures. One was a Broken with an axe buried in its neck.

  The other was Feynrick, a spear struck through his chest.

  Ella gasped and lost resonance in her shock. The world swung to life, the man beneath her toppling, the crowd’s roar coming back, and it was all she could do to keep from getting trampled as she sought her resonance again.

  She struck and climbed to see both men fallen, the Broken in a wash of blood, Feynrick with an uncharacteristic look of surprise on his face, one hand grasping the spear, as if to pull it out.

  “Feynrick!” she called, uselessly, scrabbling across the heads and shoulders of the frozen crowd, spine aching already.

  She got to him, resonance holding, and shoved down the part of her that wanted to run to him, to clutch the jovial man, to heal him somehow. First things first. The Broken’s belt bristled with knives and swords and she drew one of these, then another and another, plunging them into the thing’s heart until it looked like a seamstress’s pincushion.

  Then she ran back to Feynrick, bracing herself against his back to keep him from falling, and dropped slip.

  Once again the cave slurred into chaos and panic, but the sudden jerks of the Broken, the absence of its uai as it toppled over dead, did something to ease that. As soon as the noise died down Ella shouted, “Healworker! I need a healworker here!”

  Feynrick gasped, collapsing against her, and she bore him to the floor, turning sideways so the spear wouldn’t push further on his chest. Blood pumped out both sides.

  “Feynrick,” she said, cradling his head. “What were you doing?”

  “Impressing,” he wheezed, “the ladies.”

  Before she could answer Marrem appeared, kneeling by his side, hands delicately probing the wound.
/>   The woman hissed.

  “What,” Ella snapped. “What do we need?”

  She shook her head. “Bandages, and dreamleaf if you have it, but—his lungs are punctured. We can only make him comfortable.”

  Ella stared, heart constricting. Make him comfortable? “There’s nothing you can do?”

  The woman shook her head again.

  “Well, go and get someone who can! He can’t—”

  Her words were lost in a tortured scream and a rattle of uai. Another Broken.

  Ella looked up, unable to move, as if she were the one speared through the chest. A bloodied thing flew down the chiseled tunnel of the cave entrance, cutting down men, blasts of air coming from it like a human tornado.

  This was it then. They would be killed. They couldn’t fight Broken after Broken in these tight caves. Feynrick was already dead, or dying, and somehow her mind couldn’t move fast enough. Find some solution. They were dead, was all. It was almost a relief.

  The Broken spun closer, cutting through students like stalks of millet, blades a blur. Tai had done that once, in the battle for Newgen. It was so awful, and beautiful—

  And still something nagged at her, some pattern waiting to be seen. A solution to be found.

  The Broken screamed and spun out of control, slamming itself against the ceiling then the floor. Aelya appeared next to it, trying to hit it with a spear, Dayglen at her side.

  She could feel it from here—the harmony. Of course! They were using the harmony to confuse it, and in the absence of whatever control the Broken usually had, it was acting like all yuraloads gone wrong—self-destructing.

  “Yrelen,” Feynrick was muttering, shaking his head. “Should have been Yrelen.”

  Aelya landed a thrust through the Broken’s chest, and the resulting scream—just of pain this time, not insanity—brought Ella back to reality.

  “Go,” the healworker was saying. “We need to get out of here.”

  “No,” Ella said, standing. “We need to fight.”

  47

  The Broken thrashed up, ripping the spear from Aelya’s hands, but it was dead now, or would be in moments. “Back!” she shouted, raising a hand to the Blackspines at her back. “Find a mindseye! Or Tunla! Use the harmonies! And you,” Aelya said to Dayglen. “Come with me.”

  They marched up the long stairs to the surface, uai raging, Dayglen tuning his resonance to hers. Aelya didn’t understand the harmony, hadn’t managed it after what seemed like days of practicing down here, but she could feel it. Like the way her feet and breath would fall into a rhythm after she’d run for a few seconds. It felt good.

  They were halfway up when the entrance above darkened. “Who are you?” she yelled, knowing there were likely better words, not caring.

  The thing shrieked. That was answer enough. Aelya tightened her good fist on the spear.

  Dayglen pulled his sword. “Still up for this?”

  “Mecking right I am,” she said. “Been waiting for it all day.” She needed something to fight, to work out the anger eating her inside. Fights were how she worked through her feelings. It was stupid, but that’s how she’d always been. Tai would know that, if he was here. Mecking idiot.

  The Broken charged, leaping stairs, and Aelya set her feet on the stairs, teeth baring in a grin. It was on them in a flash, but something changed before it hit, the wiry man losing coordination, the look in his eyes suddenly less sure.

  Aelya struck, jabbing the spear through his middle. Momentum carried him down it, to her, and she gave him an iron backhand, bones crunching under her uai-fueled strength.

  “Good,” she said, dropping the spear and the dying Broken on it. “More. Come on.”

  They made it up without another attack, though shouts and cries echoed down the narrow passage. At one time the entrance had been a small brick building, but it was now just a foundation with a hole in it for stairs.

  Aelya poked her head out into hell.

  The ground was littered with dead and dying, mostly her Blackspines, a core group of five or six of them back to back around the mine entrance. Beyond them the sky swarmed with Broken, and brawlers ran from all sides.

  “Mecksicking shatstains,” Aelya whispered, concentration and anger lost for a second by the sheer numbers of them. This was more Broken than all the ones they’d fought so far. Twice that. Five times that.

  A hundred times that.

  Three Broken wafters swooped down, Blackspines still unaware of her as they prepared to fight and die to keep the mine safe. Her concentration snapped back. “Blackspines! Retreat to the mines! Go!”

  Three of them heard her and turned, running down the stairs on the strength of drilled orders. Two glanced back, confused by the sudden sound of her voice. One focused on the sky, loosing arrows at the oncoming brawlers.

  The Broken crashed down, coordination lost but sheer momentum driving them into the remaining defenders. Aelya seized the closest Blackspines and threw them down the stairs, Broken wafters already shooting off in random directions, confused by the harmony.

  Not so the Broken brawlers charging them. “Back down!” she shouted. “Easier to fight them on the stairs!”

  They retreated, Aelya stumbling over a man lying on the stairs. The closest Broken leapt the bodies surrounding the entrance, howling, only to lose his footing as he entered their harmony. Aelya thrust the spear at him, Dayglen slashing at another with his sword, then the other Broken pushed in and the two attacked each other.

  Only to stop when they fought their way outside the resonance. There they recoordinated and turned to attack again. So the harmony worked for about five paces out. Good. Let them come. She still had issues to work out, and the corpses of her Blackspines only made her more angry.

  The next few minutes or hours were lost in the pattern of attack and disperse, Broken charging in or swooping down only to lose their coordination in the last few paces, when Aelya or the Blackspines would try to hit them without getting hurt in the process. Uncontrolled or not, the confused Broken were still insanely strong and armed to the teeth.

  They gradually retreated five paces or so down the mine entrance. Fighting from below wasn’t ideal, but the tunnel forced the Broken to come one at a time, and most of the time the harmony kept them from even getting in.

  What they would do about the mass of them beyond the entrance, she had no idea.

  Aelya cut down the ones that made it in with a vengeance, or sent them wounded to those lining the stairs below. She slashed and jabbed, imagining each one responsible for Tai’s death, or the attack on the city, or the traitors that burned their grain.

  After a nasty tangle with a scar-faced brawler Aelya realized the fire she felt wasn’t only from her anger, lessening now that she’d been able to work it out. It was burning up her backbone too. “Reinforcements,” she gasped, surprised suddenly at how tired she was. “Need more—uai.”

  “Already here,” a voice slurred—her voice, the lighthaired woman—then the harmony around them swelled.

  “—been trying to get her to take a break for a while,” Dayglen was saying, stepping down in the lull between Broken. Sigwil and an elderly woman stepped up, resonances harmonized, followed by two fresh fighters.

  “I had things I needed to do,” Aelya muttered, handing her bloodied sword to one of the fighters.

  “And we have strategy to plan,” the lighthair said, but somehow in the aftermath of all that killing Aelya couldn’t even really summon anger at Ella. She was in it as much as the rest of them. More, if you consider how many times she’d stepped up to fight Broken.

  Still, “Sure,” was the best Aelya could manage. She was so mecking tired. “Maybe just a quick lie-down first.”

  Brawler’s breaks woke her up, pain searing through her muscles like she’d spent the last week running nonstop. Aelya grit her teeth, having to lean on the wall to keep from falling.

  The caves were back to order below, if you could call it that—everyone clus
tered in worried groups in the main chamber, bodies cleared away. Tunla stood in the middle next to Feynrick, who was pale as a sheet but still breathing.

  “I’ve got the next eight pairs organized,” the Achuri woman said to Ella. “If the brawlers can hold out five minutes each, and we rotate them through, that should give us a hand or so.”

  “Good,” Ella said. “Find any winterfood?”

  “Very little. None, basically. The uai we’ve got in our bellies is what we’ve got.”

  Aelya sat down with a wince, trying to absorb that. “There’s no winterfood down here?”

  “We kept it outside with the cookfires,” Ella answered, glaring at her as though in challenge. “Didn’t want all that smoke down here.”

  “Which I assume there’s no rescuing at this point?” Tunla asked.

  Aelya would have laughed if it didn’t hurt so much. “No. Nothing but blood up there.” She was coated in it herself, her skin starting to itch. “So, we’re dead in a hand, you’re saying?”

  “Unless we come up with something better,” Ella said, again staring at her. “That’s why I said we need to make plans.”

  Aelya shrugged, wanting nothing more than to lay down and nap. “I got nothing. I just did what I could, and there’s still a mecking army of Broken outside the door.”

  “The backdoor,” Tunla said, perking up. “The Ghost Rebellion had a backdoor into Coldferth. There has to be a way to get to it from here.”

  They met each other’s eyes. “I think we killed the last people who knew that yesterday,” Aelya said.

  “Still, Marea, can you ask around?” Ella asked a young lighthaired girl. “But we can’t plan on that. Other ideas?”

  Aelya had to admire the woman for not giving up. The way she felt right now, she was almost ready to just lay down and hope the Broken killed her in her sleep. “We can hold them off for a while in the corridor, even after our uai runs out. They can’t fit more than one or two down at a time.”

  “And that’d buy us what, half a hand?” Ella snapped. “And then we all die to insane Broken?”