Acolyte's Underworld

by Levi Jacobs

  “Ah. Rena.” Uhallen nodded gravely. “Well, I may have a way to help you with more uai too. But first, a simple technique for today, to give you an edge in your future encounters.”

  He went on to show her how to thrall revenants to each other, creating a long chain of them connected head to behind, skewered through the middle with a shamanic arm.

  Marea eyed the thing she’d created doubtfully, once she’d managed to thrall a few to each other. “What does this do? I mean, if the head one’s thralled to someone, they’re just going to eat its uai before it gets to you. And if not…”

  “Then the lead revenant is five times as hungry,” Uhallen said. “So?”

  “Oh. So if you stick this on someone, it’s going to have a lot bigger effect than just attacking with one.”

  The shaman smiled. “Exactly. Now try it out.”

  The spars that followed were taxing and painful, but mercifully short.

  “It’s not exactly fair, I suppose, to pit you against me,” Uhallen said, while Marea picked herself up from the floor. Her bones were still throbbing from the last attack, her uai eaten. “You’ll do better against someone of your own level. But this should give you an edge.”

  “Thank you,” Marea said, though she was far from feeling gratitude. Just once she’d like to get the better of the shaman—to land one of these revenant trains on his neck and see how he did.

  “Good,” the shaman grinned around a cloud of smoke. “There is always a natural tension between master and student, as the student progresses. That drive will serve you well in your next mission.”

  Marea perked up. “You have something for me?”

  “Yes,” he said, “though it’s more of an optional thing. Not as clean-cut as Josell.”

  Marea brushed off her knees, aching pain beginning to recede. “What do you mean?”

  “The soiree I mentioned to your friend, on Ascension Day? Commonly held opinion is there will be violence of some sort between House Fenril and Erewhin, as Erewhin makes a play for a Council seat. These things are often just duels, but occasionally assassinations are involved. Semeca’s death did not only hurt them financially—she left Fenril with just two heirs of an age to lead the House.”

  Losing bloodlines could be disastrous for a House—it was why her uncle had always hounded her father about having more kids. He’d been too committed to her mother, who’d nearly died having her, to want to attempt it again. “How does that help us?”

  “The Neverblades have always been an aggressive cell. Even before they rejected the Ninespear pact on killing fellow shamans, they were hiring out as assassins to earn money or favors for the cell.”

  Marea swallowed. There were a few guilds of assassins in the city—the Order of Willows and Order of Oaks chief among them—but so far as she knew they kept to more traditional means of killing their marks. She could imagine shamanic powers doing a much better job.

  “And more discreetly,” Uhallen said. “For the right price, you can often find out who was hired to do which job. But when a shaman makes the kill, neither Order has any idea who did it, and interested parties can’t find the right person to bribe.”

  Marea swallowed, absorbing it all. “And you think there’s going to be an assassination like that at the soiree?” Challenges and duels were an accepted part of such events—the perfect cover for a shamanic killing.

  “I am saying the conditions are right, with House Fenril weakened following the events at Gendrys and the loss of yura trade. And if a Neverblade shaman is hired to do it, he won’t see you coming.”

  Marea swallowed. “I—I appreciate the offer. And I do need power. But Josell I could do, because of his past. If we don’t know who’s showing up at the soiree—”

  Uhallen took up his cigar, summoning an impossible flame to relight it. “You are a moral person, Marea, and that’s good. Don’t lose that. But the moment you see them assassinate or aid in an assassination, is that not motive enough? Such things are illegal, even if the Council tends to turn a blind eye. There is nothing wrong in killing a killer.”

  Marea bit her lip. Murderers did deserve to die, and assassinations were murders… but it was a fine line. Still, above all else, she needed uai soon or Rena was going to die. And if she did see them kill someone first, well, that would have to be enough.

  “I’ll do it,” she said, standing.

  Uhallen grinned, accentuating the unevenness of his eyes. “Good. Then there are a few things you should know.”

  27

  It is remarkable that our ‘civilizing missions’ have always been to lands ripe for economic plunder, whether in natural resources or labor or arable land. It leads me to question how our leaders define ‘civility.’

  —Malia Galferth, A Citizen’s Tale of Aran’s Last Days, Con’t printed in The Councilate Quill

  Ella heard the soiree before she saw it—raucous conversation and clinking glasses and string instruments muddling into an inebriated roar that echoed up the hillside to where she stood, paying one hundred moons to gain entrance to the Downs’ upper deck.

  She stepped through, and the sight of it took her breath away. The Downs was built on the highest hill in the city, a cascading series of terraces that stuck further and further from the hillside, roofed with manicured gardens and built of imported teakwood. Unlike the exclusive clubs and ballrooms of Reed Heath or West Cove, The Downs were famously open to anyone—so long as you could afford it. Each terrace down became more lavish, its architecture more daring, its spread of food and drink more exotic, culminating in a fifth terrace so expensive that entrance alone cost as much as many Houses grossed in a month. The flowering vines draped over each terrace were just enough to ensure privacy—and to allow those above to see who was wealthy enough to socialize further down.

  “The best place to see the city,” Ella murmured, resting her arms on the gleaming teakwood railing and gazing down, “and the best place in the city to be seen.” It was a line oft-repeated in the broadsheets when the Downs had first opened.

  “Even for us commoners stuck up here, eh?” a man said beside her. Ella turned to find a portly man with just a fringe of silver hair above his layers of frilled collar.

  She started at his casual address, then remembered who she looked like. After having been seen in front of The Councilate Quill yesterday—the broadsheet had been quick to print a story on it—she’d needed an effective disguise, something better than different clothes or dyed hair. So she’d forgone the spear’s healing uai last night and let her resonance’s cost do what no amount of makeup or dye could: convincingly age her past any possibility she was Ellumia Merewil.

  She smiled politely back. “Indeed. Ironic that the highest tiers should be for those of us financially lower.”

  “Ah but that is their distinct privilege, to pay more that we might look down and adore, no?” He smiled and took her hand in what was likely meant to be a debonair expression. Ella inclined her head as he brushed lips to her lined knuckles, secretly hoping she was beyond such gestures when she actually reached this age.

  “Have you been here long?” she asked. “My husband tasked me with watching for Praet Sablos.”

  The man’s face fell at the mention of a husband. He had likely inferred her station from the quality of her gown and was angling for some advantageous marriage or partnership. Rarely was love in the upper class actually about love, save the love of money. Her gown, and the clink of moons in her handbag, said she was bound for richer tiers than this one.

  “Not long,” he said, withdrawing his hand. “But I believe I did see a Sablos retinue pass on their way down some time back.”

  “Then I thank you,” she said, nodding again. “Enjoy the view.”

  Was it bad that she felt good casually handing the stairkeeper two hundred moons in full view of the man, who likely could not afford it? She’d hated the city’s economic caste system from the moment she understood it, but he had been inappropriately forward, and sh
e had a role to play here. Her mother would have approved.

  Ella started, halfway down the stairs to the next garden, where an upper class crowd mixed around a snaking fountain, miniature statues of the twelve Council House sigils burbling in the dyed water. She’d run over the conversation with her mother endless times last night and this morning, and while she had a new understanding and sympathy for her mother—it made sense that she would try to control her daughter’s marriage, after her own had ended so disastrously—the glacier of anger was still there.

  It also hurt to think that her parent’s marriage, that her family, had been a disaster. Had her mother always thought that?

  Ella accepted a bubbling glass of ginseng tonic from one of the waitstaff dressed in immaculate blacks. Ironic that she was here pretending to be her mother after their conversation, but she knew the woman’s mannerisms intimately, and Elyssa had confirmed none of them were coming. It was the perfect cover.

  Ella sipped, bringing her mind back to the present. She wasn’t here for her House, no matter her disguise.

  She was here to find a god.

  The ginseng burned and the drink’s citrine vapors opened her nostrils, bringing clarity with it. She focused on Falena’s mindfilter and the new Ella she wanted a mindseye to find there. The story she had decided to present to the archrevenant was very close to the truth. It was at once safe, because it involved few lies, and most dangerous, as her real story and intentions were only a few lies away. Still, what had Nauro said? The best lies are those closest to the truth.

  Ella did not bother socializing on the second terrace. She strode straight through the crowd, letting her mother’s brittle pride stand in for the snootiness that would come naturally to the city’s wealthiest, and handed five solium moons to the attendant standing at the top of the next stair.

  It was a stupid amount of money, but Tai had brought yura back from Ayugen, and with the abrupt cutoff in supply, prices in the city were ridiculous. She’d sold ten balls for seven hundred moons each.

  The crowd was thinner on the third tier, the kurtas and gowns more elaborate. Ella slowed, searching for her quarry among the crowd. One effect of the nobility’s attempts to outdo each other in expensive dress was that House colors either became exaggerated to an extreme—like the long-nosed woman from House Mettelken whose gown and trailing scarves screamed orange and gray—or made so subtle as to be almost unreadable, like the Erewhin man’s single pinstripe of green and gold. She would have known all these peoples’s names at one point—standard homework for any House daughter—but thankfully that part of her mind had been overwritten with more useful information.

  Ella snorted. Any information at all would fit that bill, though she had looked up the Sablos family tree in preparation for her meeting. Praet was third son to the House, the first dead to a Seinjialese sword and the second in acting command of the House as their father declined into senility. Arten Sablos, former High Arbiter of Ayugen, was sixth in line. Or had been—she had no idea what had become of the man after disappearing in the woods outside Gendrys. But she found it fascinating that he’d been a shaman, while his older brother had at some point been replaced by an archrevenant. How did that work? Did he know?

  She accepted another glass of bubbling liquid—this one a deep amber with muddled herbs and delicate mavenstym blossoms—and made her way around the wide terrace, searching for her prey while trying to appear circumspect. The third terrace was surrounded on three sides by sheets of water cascading from an ingenious aqueduct system fed by the fountains above, muting the conversations and sending delicious wafts of cool air across the intimate space.

  “Miss Merewil,” a feminine voice said at her side. “Unless I am mistaken?”

  Ella’s heart clutched. She turned to find a stately woman in a white gown with embossed violet flowers—Fenril, then, though Ella had no idea of her name. Her mother would.

  She smiled politely. “I’m afraid I don’t get away from House affairs as often as I used to. Of which branch are you?”

  “Heana Fenril, dear. Grelon’s widow, but don’t worry about it.” The Fenril woman leaned in close. “How are you reacting to the news of your daughter? Is there any truth to it?”

  Ella summoned a troubled expression, even as she relaxed inwardly. The woman had bought her disguise, despite the name flub. “My daughter was given justice nearly three years ago by a certified lawbinder,” she said carefully. “You can check the lawkeeping records.”

  “Certainly,” Heana said, soothing. “But how do you explain the rumors?”

  This was another part of the Councilate Ella did not miss—for being the largest city in the known world, people gossiped like it was a village of two hundred. “House Erewhin, I don’t doubt. Or another competitor wishing to cast silt on our name.”

  “Mm, but the silt runs so deep. Have you read the latest article?”

  Ella had given a third article to The Quill last night, addressing some of what had happened in Gendrys and Ayugen. She suppressed a smile—clearly it had already made the rounds.

  “It was cogently written, and the arguments are compelling. I don’t doubt whoever penned it was indeed present for the events they describe. It just wasn’t my daughter.”

  Heala brushed her hand over the shoulder of a man passing in Fenril’s white-and-violet. “Such a perfect series for the broadsheets—an already-newsworthy daughter returning from the South with highly political information, presented as well as any of our best broadsheeteurs could manage. And published primarily in papers your House has an interest in. Lucky for you.”

  Ella had done that on purpose—aside from the Brokewater papers she’d needed to start in, she’d aimed subsequent articles at The Quill and others knowing her parents would profit from it. Ella smiled. “If you’re implying that I’m writing them, dear, I’m afraid I’ve got little to say.”

  Let her believe Elyssa was writing them, if it took some of the public attention off Ella.

  Heala sipped her bubbling drink, seeming to concede the point. “Still, things must be good at home. I don’t often see you at events these days, let alone so low in the Downs.”

  “House Merewil is fine, thank you. We did think it prudent to dispel the city’s rumors at the highest levels. Ellumia is, you understand, an issue we’d rather keep in our past.”

  That was exactly the sort of thing her mother would say.

  “You have my condolences, of course,” Heala said, not sounding convinced.

  “And mine on Semeca,” Ella said, curiosity getting the better of her. “She disappeared in such unusual circumstances.”

  How did Heala and her family view the archrevenant who had overtaken their House? Did they have any idea? Did House Sablos?

  “Semeca was always a headstrong woman,” Heala said, looking out over the lower terrace and the city beyond. “Though if there was anything unusual about it, I put it at the feet of that Achuri Menace.”

  Ella sipped her drink, tongue sparkling with sour and sweet and subtle spice. “There are those who say Semeca’s rise to power in your House was itself atypical.”

  Heala’s back stiffened. “There are those in the city who will say anything, for effect.”

  Ella gave her a sympathetic smile. She did not need to burn a bridge here. “It hurts most when the stories are about a deceased one, does it not?”

  Heala’s eyes softened, understanding the reference. “I am sorry. It must be even more so with a child.”

  “I could have loved her more than I did,” Ella said, not having to fake the emotion in her voice, though it was not what Heala thought. “If you’ll excuse me.”

  The woman was enough of a gossip that Ella was sure their conversation would spread. Good. She’d glimpsed a diminutive figure in black and silver through the sheets of falling water—Praet.

  Ella took a deep breath, steadying her thoughts on the mental filter as she wished to present it. Then stepped to the fourth stairway.

&nbs
p; Time to dupe a god.

  28

  Marea let the swell and titter of conversation wash over her. She’d gotten to the second tier of the Downs with money she’d looted from two thugs on the way here, but there was no way she could afford the five hundred moons to pass down to the third terrace.

  With any luck, she wouldn’t need to. There was no reason she had to be physically close to someone to attack with revenants—she just had to be able to see them. So she leaned against the open railing and split her attention between those on the lower tiers and those on their way down, trying to spot anyone without revenants. They would be her target—and if Uhallen was right, they wouldn’t be expecting her. While they were focused on a physical fight, she would attack shamanically, and with any luck walk away with their thralls.

  Marea shifted positions on the railing, sipping from her fermented ginseng tea. She felt out of place here, which was weird because she’d felt out of place in Ayugen too, and dreamed of getting back to Worldsmouth and the friends she’d grown up with. Some of those were here at the soiree, though they apparently didn’t recognize her. She didn’t seek them out. What would she say? What stories would she answer their gossips with—murdering innocent men and killing gods? It would only make her feel more out of place. Like usual.

  Maybe it was her curse to be out of place.

  Or maybe you always felt out of place once your parents were gone. The only other time she’d been to the Downs was with her father, on a meeting with a potential House ally. She remembered being disgusted with how much money he’d spent, feeling like they were pretending to be something they weren’t. Now she understood that’s what all of these people were doing—these high-nosed, silk-adorned House elites. She could see it—they all still had revenants attached. Still heard voices of doubt and fear in the privacy of their own minds. Probably believed them, for the most part. There was nothing fundamental that set them apart from poorer people, or darkhaired people, other than that they had less struggle. No wonder no one ever overcame their revenants up here.