Acolyte's Underworld

by Levi Jacobs

  She scanned the crowd, looking for an aberration, keeping the vision crystal clear in her mind. She looked five minutes. Ten. The Ylensmarsh Sand Tower struck eleventh hour, and still nothing.

  Sweat beaded on her brow. She had never used her resonance this long, but she would burn it out if it meant a chance to make up for killing Eyadin. Hundreds of people passed in front of her. Thousands since she had started. Surely one of them would feel the pull. Surely someone here knew what she needed.

  An ache crept up her back, sign her uai was running out. A thousand lighthaired people streamed past, crowd speckled with fyelocke and darkhaired people, occasionally even a red-haired Yati. But no shamans. Or at least, none pulled in by her resonance.

  Marea stamped her foot as the ache in her spine spiked and her resonance faltered. It hadn’t worked. Her ‘rarest and most powerful of resonances’ had let her down.

  A cough sounded behind her. A very deliberate cough.

  Marea spun. A lighthaired woman gazed at her from the base of the statue, dressed in indigo silks, an amused smile on her face.

  “That’s one way to get attention,” she said.

  Marea sucked in a breath. It worked. “Thank you. Are you—”

  “I am the kind of person you are looking for, yes,” she said.

  Of course—she’d read her mind. Real shamans could use any resonance like it was their own. “Well. Then you know the deal I seek,” she said. “If you are willing to—”

  The woman cleared her throat. “Walk with me? The square is so noisy.”

  Meaning it was so full of ears. Obviously. Marea’s cheeks burned. She climbed down from the statue steps and waded with the shaman into the current of people. She remembered her manners around the time they exited the square. “Marea Fetterwel,” she said, offering a hand. “Of House Fetterwel.” This, at least, was safe to say out loud.

  “You can forget that name, child,” the woman said, her hips swaying beneath the shifting silk. “It is better if we don’t use them, even if your thoughts are open. Let us call you… Puahi?”

  The statue from the square—Goddess of Tide and Fortune. “Sure,” Marea said, crowd thinning around them as they entered the ancient warren of stone buildings on the south end of Ylensmarsh. “So you’re willing to teach me, if I find you some revenants?”

  “We will teach you, certainly,” the woman said, staying a few steps ahead so Marea had to hurry to keep up. “But revenants are not so hard to find as all that. I had other ideas, actually.”

  Marea slowed. Avery had had other ideas. “Meaning what?”

  “You are friends with the savior of Ayugen, yes?” the woman asked, slowing and looking back.

  “If you’ve read my thoughts you know we’re not friends.”

  “Acquaintances, then. That’s all we require. A way in.”

  Marea stopped. “If you’re asking me to help you kill him, the answer is no.”

  The woman turned, a smile playing across thin lips. “I’m not asking, actually, though I’d hoped you might agree of your own will. Well. There are other ways.”

  Stains. She hadn’t thought anyone would see her as a way to Tai—she barely knew the man. There was a busier street ahead, and Marea quickly sketched a vision in her mind, seeing and hearing herself walking unharmed past the woman and back into public safety.

  The woman laughed throatily. “You do have things to learn, don’t you? We’ll turn you to our cause yet. But for the moment—”

  Marea struck resonance, just as the woman flicked a hand. A dark shadow leapt from it, and Marea’s world exploded in pain.

  11

  When she clawed her way back to sanity, Marea did not find herself locked in a cage or manacled to a curvaceous women in a silk dress. Instead, she found her cheek pressed against cool cobblestones, eyes staring at the moss-covered foundations of a lutemaker’s shop and a foot draped in indigo silk.

  Marea pushed up. Indigo silk. The woman—the attack—

  “You are safe,” came a calm voice behind her.

  She spun to find a darkhaired man gazing down at her, handsome save for eyes that were slightly uneven. A formal kurta trailed down his long frame, flowing black hair bound in a silver clasp.

  He extended a hand. “Here. Shamanic attacks can be difficult to recover from, if you are unused to it.”

  The woman lay prone behind her. “Is she—”

  “Alive, as of yet,” the man said. “Dealing with my own attack.”

  Marea straightened, ignoring his hand. “So you’re—”

  “Uhallen of Thensgal,” he said. “And yes, I am also a shaman, though it’s best not to talk of such things in public. Walk with me?”

  Marea stayed where she was. “Why did you help me?”

  “Because I am one of those rare fools who believe in justice, I suppose. But justice is not what we’ll receive if the lawkeepers find us here with an unconscious woman. So walk with me?”

  Marea walked, more because he was right about getting found than because she trusted him. “Are you after Tai too?”

  Uhallen sucked in a breath, striding back into the busier avenue. “Searing deeps. You were in Ayugen when it all happened.”

  She needed to get better at controlling her thoughts around mindseyes—in the past Avery had always been able to block them off. Well, the scales were in the pot now. No hiding her association with Tai or the rebels, or what she’d done in Aran.

  “I was. But I won’t sell out my friends, if that’s what you’re after.”

  “I am not. My goals are more… local. But I am interested in taking your deal, if it is still available.”

  Marea glanced back as the woman disappeared from view. “It is. Though I’m not joining any cells and I’m not attacking any innocent people.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to,” Uhallen said, and turned down a quieter street.

  After a moment’s hesitation, she followed. “What do you want then?”

  “That,” he said, pressing to one wall for an ice-monger to pass, “we will need to speak of in private.”

  Marea joined him, a wave of cold rolling from the cart’s sweating block of ice. They were in the oldest part of Ylensmarsh, streets narrow and unplanned, the stone buildings patinaed in moss and worn with centuries of delta rains.

  “Let me save us some time,” Marea said once the cart was past. “Is what I want even possible?”

  “Curing bluefoot? Oh yes.” He glanced around—the street was quiet, with just a few well-dressed people passing in either direction. “You were right to think through it as you did—with enough uai most any condition can be reversed. Even death, occasionally.” He gave her a tight-lipped smile. “Ah, here we are.”

  He stopped in front of an ornate iron gate, ivy trailing from above. Marea glanced up to see it was one of the colonnaded towers that dotted the old city. He inserted a key into a thick metal lock.

  “This is where you live?”

  “When I am in the north, yes,” Uhallen said. “My family has an estate in Thensgal that I much prefer. But where money flows, thence must we go.”

  Marea swallowed. Renting something like this, in this part of Ylensmarsh, was likely three or four times what her uncle paid for their estate on Widow’s Hill. “You—have done well for yourself, then.”

  “It is not hard to do well, when you’ve lived as long as I have.” He gestured her inside.

  Marea hesitated, well aware that she was leaving the relative safety of the street. But she would never get anywhere without taking risks, and the man had saved her from that woman’s attack. If he’d wanted to force her into something, he could have done it back there. And if he was looking to trick her somehow, Marea was ready for that. No attachments and no commitments. Get your power and get out.

  Marea stepped in.

  He entered behind her and they climbed the outer staircase, view of the city expanding as they followed the tower’s curve around and up. First came the white-washed stone tower
s and squares of Ylensmarsh, then the glinting glass mansions of Widow’s Hill across the Einsarm, and finally the long view south of the broad Ein winding toward the Yershire and points beyond.

  He ushered her into an austere sitting room at the next landing, stone lattice windows letting in slivers of light. It smelled of tynsfol incense and some other muskier scent.

  “This whole tower is yours?” Marea tried not to sound impressed and failed.

  “Just the top two floors. Privacy is hard to find in a city this crowded. Ninespear cells in other places tend to meet in crypts or basements, but in a sandy delta—” He shrugged. “You have to go up.”

  “Are you part of a cell then?”

  Uhallen opened a lacquered wood chest set into the wall. “Head of one actually, if only by default. I am a cell of one, which is part of the reason I decided to answer your call. I could use some allies.” He pulled a thick cigar and a sliver of kindling from inside the chest.

  “Allies,” she said, mistrust rising in her at memories of Avery. “You’ve probably read in my mind that alliances with shamans haven’t gone well for me in the past.”

  Sudden resonance filled the air, and the kindling burst into flame. He held it to the cigar and drew deeply, the sage within crackling. “Harides,” he said on exhale. “I knew of him, in days past. I am sorry you ran afoul of such a creature, but his kind is unfortunately common among shamans.”

  “Apparently,” Marea said. Currents send they weren’t all like that. Nauro hadn’t been, at least. Maybe Uhallen was the same. “Well I need your help, and I am willing to do what I can to get it, as long as it doesn’t involve killing innocent people or betraying my friends.”

  “Far from it,” Uhallen said, settling onto a plush gray sofa with a sigh. “My dangers are more immediate. Semeca’s death disrupted our community, with so much power suddenly available. Not all the shamans reacted… honorably.”

  “Like the one we just left in the street?”

  “Yes. Like her. The sudden surge in power caused a divide in a lot of cells, including my own. Some wanted to go to Aran and battle each other for the spear, and others like myself felt it would only further the archrevenant’s cause. That instead of killing each other we should be uniting against them.” He took another deep draw on his cigar. “You see where that lead.”

  His exhaled smoke drifted in the breeze through the latticework, sweet and musky. “So you didn’t go?”

  “I stayed,” Uhallen confirmed. “But the head of my cell went, and made it clear I was not welcome anymore. Cutting used to be outlawed between cells—anyone killing another shaman to take their thralls was a thing that would unite us all, in hunting them down. Semeca’s death changed all that.” He cracked his neck, leaning it sharply to either side. “Anyway that’s more than you likely care to know. You are here to see if I can help you get the power you need to cure Rena’s illness. I can.”

  Marea stamped down on the hope that surged inside. Saving her on the street or not, she doubted Uhallen was helping her out of sympathy. “And in return I find you revenants to thrall using fatewalking?”

  “It’s not a bad idea,” he said, “but no. The city has been stripped bare of those over the years, and even in less hunted places such a process would take years. No,” he drew on his cigar, “what I want is for you to be my hand in this city. My face is too known to do much of what needs to be done.”

  Marea frowned. The only other way to get those revenants would be taking ones already thralled. Meaning killing other shamans. She narrowed her eyes. “You want revenge on your old cell?”

  “I want justice,” Uhallen said, voice suddenly hard. “A return to the Ninespear code. In my view everyone who attacked a fellow shaman during the last few months betrayed our brotherhood. They should be held to the oaths they swore. And by those same oaths their revenants are forfeit to those willing to hold them accountable.”

  Killing shamans as punishment for killing other shamans? It seemed a thin line to walk.

  “It is,” Uhallen said, startling her again with mindsight. “Another reason you will make a good ally—I am bound by those oaths. You are not.”

  Marea took a deep breath. “So you are asking me to hunt down and kill other shamans?”

  “After training you to the point you are capable of it, yes,” Uhallen said. “This is the only path I know that will get either of us enough uai to cure something as virulent as bluefoot, and it happens to align with our goals otherwise. I clean up the vermin of the city, and you gain power without committing to a cell. Because you do want power, don’t you?”

  She did. It was the only thing she knew for certain, amid the churn of uncertainty in her stomach: she needed to make Eyadin’s murder right. And that meant getting enough power to cure Rena.

  “And you can guarantee the men you send me after are guilty? I would have no hesitation killing someone like Harides, but I’ve already killed one innocent man. I’m not interested in doing it again.”

  “I can,” he said. “And after the first hit, I can teach you the mindsight you’ll need to confirm their pasts yourself.” He stood. “That is my offer to you, Marea of House Fetterwel. The training and power you’ll need to cure your friend’s disease, in exchange for bringing justice to men guilty of murder. Will you accept it?” He held out a wrist in the Seinjialese fashion.

  Marea hesitated. She hardly knew this man, and what he was proposing sounded as dangerous as hunting down thugs in alleys for their coin. More so.

  But it also sounded a lot more likely to accomplish her goals, and make the world safer in the process. Fewer shamans couldn’t be a bad thing.

  “I will,” she said, clasping his wrist.

  “Good,” Uhallen said, setting down his cigar. “Then let’s begin.”

  12

  If Aran was indeed a rebellion against the Councilate, where were the rebels? What I saw in the streets were pilgrims only, and all obeying the Eschatolist code against arms. The only weapons were in the hands of the soldiers we sent. And if you knew what they had done in our name, friends, you might consider revolt yourselves.

  —Malia Galferth, A Citizen’s Tale of Aran’s Last Days, printed in Stiltspeak

  Ella woke to the undertaker crying for bodies in the street. It was dark, and her shift clung to her skin with sweat and humidity. The reek of brackish water and human waste drifted in through gaps in the plank walls, and over it rose the warm scent of rice steaming downstairs. She inhaled deeply, the smells and sounds taking her back to her days here. Back then she had slept in the maid’s dorms, not much more than a narrow set of bunks hard against the sloping roof of the flophouse. Now she had the head maid’s closet to herself—stuffy and narrow, but private in a district where almost nothing was.

  Thank the currents, because she had barely sat up in her cot than she was reaching for the nightpail to empty her stomach. Likely the curry she’d had last night, or the notorious Brokewater Kiss most visitors got within a day or two of entering the slum. She’d been away too long.

  That or the cost of her resonance catching up with her. She’d slept with the spear, but hadn’t bothered to strip its disguise, figuring she wouldn’t need its age-reversing effects just yet. Ella put the pail down. She was worse off than she thought.

  She’d given the spear a lot of thought on the journey here—it was too great a liability to carry, and too valuable to leave behind. In the end, she’d opted to leave it at Zaza’s. She trusted the woman inherently, and few were likely to break into a maid’s closet in her house expecting anything of value. If they did, they would find a few clothes and a broom—she’d pulled the tip off, tied bristles to the end and given it a thick coat of paint. Even Brokewater thieves wouldn’t bother with a broom, and the coat of paint kept a casual touch from feeling the spear’s power.

  Ella rolled to her feet and pulled on her tattered dress, tucking finer clothes into a moth-eaten satchel for later in the day. It felt strange to leave the spear ungu
arded, the thing they had fought so long and hard for, but an archrevenant was trying to kill her fiancé, she was the only one who could gather evidence against him, and she needed the spear to survive long enough to do that. The safest place to leave it was the place no one would come looking.

  Which meant Brokewater, even more than the Stilts. Only locals knew how to navigate the muddy warren, and even well-paid lawbinders refused to enter the place. It was why she’d run here so many years ago.

  As expected, Zaza bustled about the kitchen below, the kerchief around her thick brow already damp with sweat. “Off to it, tauera?”

  From her, the word was a term of endearment. Praise, almost—Ella had gone from beggar to tauera under Zaza’s care.

  “Sa. I’ll see you darktime or sooner mama. Keep steady, wei?”

  “Wei,” the big woman said, then turned to snap off orders at a slip of a girl cleaning the day’s load of rice.

  Ella left via the kitchen door, grateful to the woman. When she’d left five years ago she’d hoped never to return, but ironically the place felt like home. Much moreso than her family’s West Cove estate would.

  Ella retraced her steps through the winding muddy lanes of Brokewater, children crying and sallow men relieving themselves in nameless streams as the warren woke to another day. She found the place she’d talked to the newsmonger the day before and smirked to see him just arriving.

  “Dream too much last night, hora? You said sunrise.”

  “Sunrise now, tauera,” the man mumbled, dropping his stool and stowing a cloth-wrapped bundle beneath. “Boss man say you give sheets, I bring back moons.”

  “Ha,” Ella laughed, summoning the high pitched surprised-but-not-amused laugh of the Brokewater. “Faregood monger.” She made as if to leave.

  “Okay, okay,” the monger said, holding up his hands. “Bossman coming soon.”

  The fog had mostly burned off by the time the bossman came. He was dressed in the flamboyant style of anyone who thought they’d made it somewhere in Brokewater, copper trinkets and glass beads tied to his belt, a faded purple doublet buttoned over an ill-fitting dress shirt. Studded boots rounded out the attire, but his face was deadly serious.