Apostate's Pilgrimage: An Epic Fantasy Saga (Empire of Resonance Book 3)

by L. W. Jacobs

  Tai glanced at Ella, who was looking at him. What Nauro was saying could be true. But now that Tai had more or less caught him in a lie about how many revenants he had, this again sounded like a convenient way to put off training Ella. Still, he was too much of a street child to mention it right away. Better to watch and wait. Like it or not, they did need to learn defenses against shamans, and Nauro still seemed like the best way to do it.

  Even if the man wouldn’t teach Ella.

  “So how do we start?” he asked. At least at the moment, if he didn’t have the secondary resonance, whatever Nauro had him do the rest could too.

  “Very simply,” Nauro said. “Close your eyes.”

  Tai glanced at the path ahead of them. It was fairly smooth, but walking with snownets still took a lot of balance. “What?”

  “Close your eyes,” Nauro said again. “Just for a few moments.”

  “Okay,” Tai said, glancing at Ella then doing it. Hers were already closed—she must have realized this training didn’t take a revenant too. He closed his eyes. “Now what?”

  “Now focus on your stomach.”

  “My what?” Ella said beside him. Tai was thinking the same thing.

  Nauro sighed. “Your stomach. The sensations there. Are you full, hungry? Is it upset, calm, tense, what? Tell me.”

  “Normal,” Tai said. “Well, maybe a little tense.”

  “Okay. Ella?”

  “Tense. Sick of wintergrass. A little empty, if truth be told.”

  “Good,” Nauro said, voice sounding much too young for his hundred and forty years. “Now continue paying attention.”

  Tai fluttered his eyelids a moment to make sure he wasn’t going to walk into something. “To what?”

  “To this.”

  Nauro’s voice sounded a touch strained, but nothing else happened.

  “To…what?” Ella asked.

  “Open them again,” Nauro said.

  The world looked unchanged.

  “Few people notice anything their first time,” Nauro said, though he looked disappointed. “Let’s do it again.”

  “Notice what?” Ella asked.

  “Again,” Nauro said. “Close your eyes.”

  Tai dutifully did, making sure the path was clear ahead.

  “Now feel your stomach, everything about it. In three…two… one.”

  Ella sucked air, and Tai frowned. He had almost felt—what? Hunger?

  “Open them,” Nauro said. “Anything?”

  “I felt a—coldness,” Ella said. “Like a chill?”

  Nauro twitched his lips. “Tai?”

  “Nothing. Or, maybe a hunger? But nothing, I think.”

  “Fine. Again.”

  “What are we doing?” Ella asked.

  “Again.”

  They did a few more rounds of this, Nauro offering no explanation, until finally Tai couldn’t stand it either. “What does walking blind and feeling our stomachs have to do with anything?”

  “He’s just keeping me and the girl entertained,” Feynrick said in a stage whisper, from where he and Marea led the animals. “You look mad.”

  “You are learning to sense revenants,” Nauro said.

  “In their stomachs?” Marea asked.

  “The stomach is a good place to start. We are too used to our eyes, our ears, our nose, our regular senses. Used to filtering out any information that doesn’t make sense, or doesn’t fit into our worldview. Like the way we tend to believe a voice in our heads, because they sound so real, even though we know they are not. Same with our senses.”

  “But not the stomach?” Ella asked.

  “Well. We have our familiar categories of understanding for the stomach too, but it so happens that most people will feel something there, when they touch a revenant.”

  “Touch a revenant?” Tai asked. “I thought they were, y’know—” He didn’t know this word in Yersh.

  “Incorporeal,” Ella supplied.

  “Yeah. That.”

  “They mostly are,” Nauro answered. “Just as we are mostly flesh, but have nonphysical components, such as the uai our bodies create, vibrating on use but otherwise incorporeal. You can sense revenants in a number of ways, even without shamanic sight. How they do varies some on the individual revenant, and on the sensitivity of the person touching them.”

  “So you just… walked revenants through us?” Tai asked.

  “More like you walked through them, but yes.”

  “Do it again,” Ella said at once.

  They did it again, Tai paying extra close attention to his stomach as they walked blind. Yes—there was a sensation. Almost like hunger, or hunger if it was also angry. Tai said as much.

  “Good,” Nauro said. “Yes. I could see that with this one. Now I will switch the revenants I have been using. See if you notice the difference.”

  They closed their eyes and felt. Ella gasped the same moment Tai’s eyes popped open. “That wasn’t hunger at all, it was like a chill, or a cold needle—”

  “And mine did feel hungry!” Ella cried. “This is amazing!”

  “Okay, okay,” Marea said, pushing up from where she’d been walking with Feynrick. “I want in too. Put a ghost on me.”

  Nauro’s face went flat. “No.”

  Marea’s face went angry. She’d been showing more emotion the last few days. “Yes. I’m hearing it all anyway. Not like I couldn’t repeat what you’re doing with someone else.”

  “You couldn’t, actually, because you’re not a shaman. And it would be dangerous to try and repeat this without having a much firmer grasp on the forces in play.”

  “Excuses.” She glanced at Tai, but like usual wouldn’t actually meet his eyes. “Ella? Tell him I have to learn too.”

  Ella raised her eyebrows. “That’s—not really my call to make. Although for my part, yes, of course you should learn. And as soon as I can do what he’s doing I will teach you.”

  “The girl can learn,” Tai said, turning to Nauro.

  “Think about what you’re saying,” Nauro said, voice calm as ever but mouth starting to twitch. “This is not one of your people. She’s with us for the express purpose of leaving us as soon as she can. Foolish enough that you let her come, knowing what she knows of your insights into harmonic resonances, but to send her back to your enemies knowing something of shamanism too?”

  Tai rolled his shoulders, glancing at Marea, who was glaring at Nauro, still refusing to meet his gaze. Did she hate him so much? He knew Nauro was right, that it was already a mistake to let her go knowing what she knew, but he also wasn’t going to keep an innocent girl prisoner. What would a few days stumbling into ghosts change anything? And maybe if he did this, she would let go of whatever she was holding against him.

  “She can learn. That’s final.”

  Nauro worked his jaw for a moment. “Fine. Then we resume.”

  Marea’s face lit up. “Thank you.”

  Tai smiled. “You’re welcome.”

  “I was talking to Ella,” Marea said, not looking at him.

  Ella opened her mouth but Tai waved her off. It was disappointing, but maybe it was justice too. That he meet at least one of the widows and orphans he’d made during the rebellion. That he deal with never being forgiven the way he would never forgive whoever had taken Fisher and Curly from him.

  They continued trying to sense revenants as the sun set and the star’s light cast everything blue, Nauro switching out revenants and making them guess which they had run into. Ella showed particular aptitude, and Marea wasn’t far behind, though Tai held his own.

  It was fascinating and exhausting. During a break near starset Marea cleared her throat. “I never got a chance to ask this but… where are we going?”

  Tai glanced at Nauro, who’d taken him aside to advise telling the girl as little as possible. “To the closest waystone.”

  They walked in silence a few moments. “And that’s where, exactly?” Marea asked. “North, at least? The direction of
Worldsmouth?”

  “It is a few days more,” Nauro said.

  “A few days more would be the Yati hinterlands,” she said. “And across a low mountain range, if I remember my topography right?”

  So much for that secret. Tai opened his mouth to answer, and Nauro cleared his throat, and Tai closed it again.

  “Oh, Prophet’s piece,” Ella said, “you two really think we can travel together for weeks on end and just keep her in the dark? What if she gets lost? What if we do and she remembers her maps better? The girl is Worldsmouth educated. She’ll know where we are when we get there anyway.”

  “I just want to go home,” Marea said, keeping her face forward. “Or to a port that’s not frozen. I can make my way from there.”

  Tai answered her over Nauro’s frown. “We’re headed to the closest waystone, which is somewhere in the Yati valley beyond the divide. Nauro doesn’t know exactly which one was tied to Semeca, so we need to check them all, and this one is closest. After that we’ll take a boat downstream to Yatiport, and you can book for Worldsmouth from there.”

  She tilted her head. “How will you know if it’s the right waystone or not?”

  “There will be an energy to the place,” Nauro said. “I don’t know exactly what, but it will be obvious.”

  “An energy,” Ella said. The two made a vicious combo. “So this is what all your great knowledge comes down to, is that you’ll just kinda feel the energy when you get there?”

  “I have been there before,” Nauro said coldly. “I’ve been to all the waystones on this continent, including the one buried in the ice sheet. I know how they feel. If forty thousand souls are suddenly feeding one of them uai, we will be able to tell.”

  Ella raised an eyebrow. “And then we what, tap it and ask it nicely to break open so you can take its power?”

  “And then we start experimenting,” Nauro said. “The book is unclear about how they can be opened, but there are only so many possibilities.”

  Marea raised an eyebrow. “You don’t know how to open it? Aren’t you, like, three hundred years old?”

  “One hundred,” Nauro said. “And thirty-eight. Don’t believe all the rumors you heard in Ayugen. And if you know what’s good for you, don’t go repeating them once you get back to Worldsmouth.”

  “Because you don’t want your precious secrets getting out?” Ella asked.

  “No,” he said, eyeing the forest around them. “Because there are plenty of people in Worldsmouth who don’t want those secrets to get out. Who have spent their lives protecting them. Don’t assume the death of a minor House daughter would mean much to them.”

  Marea’s face paled. “Are you threatening me?”

  “I’m preparing you,” he said. “I warned you, knowledge has its costs. You wanted to know more, and now you need to be prepared to protect yourself. Speaking of which, if you don’t mind I need to watch the air. We could be attacked at any time out here.”

  She paled further, and Tai rolled his shoulders against a knot there. They couldn’t have left the girl in the forest, and she obviously wanted to come. But was she really ready for where they were going?

  They set up camp in a hollow between two large boulders, the land growing rockier and trees thinning as they climbed toward the pass that separated the Genga river valley from Yatiland. Feynrick and Nauro busied themselves with the fur-and-poles guyo while Marea saw to the elk, a task she seemed to enjoy. Tai raised his eyebrows at Ella. “Help me gather wood?”

  Feynrick chuckled without looking up. “Is that what you Achuri call it?”

  Tai blushed and pulled Ella out, unable to think of a response.

  “Interesting lessons today,” Ella said when they were back in the trees. “Who would have thought you could sense revenants without being a shaman?”

  “I didn’t know you could sense them at all until a few weeks ago,” Tai said, “but I’m starting to feel like the more I learn, the less I realize I actually know.”

  Ella laughed. “Try reading old Yersh scholarship. If you don’t start with the ancients you’ll have no idea what’s going on, and even then,” she shrugged. “I guess there was a reason I always preferred ethnography.”

  Tai bent and shook off a fallen tree limb. “Did you find anything strange about Nauro only having one revenant that’s fit to put on us?”

  “Strange, no. Infuriating? Yes. Another excuse to only train you, even if he’s tolerating Marea and I. He was only really paying attention to your answers.”

  Tai nodded. “He does seem pretty single-minded. But think about it: he was waiting outside Ayugen for me to come to start training, so surely in that time he had gotten a revenant ready for it, and would have taken it with him when we went to the city, and then on this trip.”

  Ella nodded. “Yeah. So?”

  “So Ydilwen was a shaman too, and Nauro took his revenant on our way back to Ayugen. He said not all revenants would ‘serve,’ but you’d think the newly-dead revenant of someone who’d been a shaman would work.”

  “Stains,” Ella said. “Well it just means he really doesn’t want anyone but you to learn shamanism. No surprises there.”

  Tai shrugged, using the limb to poke at a fallen cragbark. “And that he’s comfortable lying. Makes me wonder how much we can believe what he’s teaching us, other than what we can actually test.”

  Ella leaned into a dead branch to break it from the tree. “I guess it comes down to what his actual goal is. Maybe he has his reasons for only teaching you. Or maybe he wants to make sure we can’t overpower him once he turns on us to take the spear.”

  Tai nodded, scanning the sparse trees for more dead wood. “Right. I’ve been thinking about that, but I still don’t have a good answer. If I don’t get to the stone, someone will, and they’ll come for us. If we do get there, it will be before I’m Nauro’s equal in shamanic power. He’ll see to that. So I guess we have to have some kind of plan on how to keep him in check.”

  Ella broke another branch off. “A plan we can’t even make until we know what he’s capable of.”

  Tai took it from her. “A knowledge he’s in control of.”

  “Looks like he’s outmaneuvered us this time.”

  “Well he is seven times our age. Or maybe six, for you.” He bent down to work at a fallen tree.

  “Hey! I’ve got twenty-three summers, you know that!”

  He wasn’t always sure. He didn’t think she’d lie about her age, but… “You know I don’t care how old you are.”

  “I’m twenty-three,” she said flatly.

  “Okay, okay!” He held his hands up. “Anyway, I think the point is we’ll have to watch what we tell him, and really think through what he’s teaching us.”

  Ella kicked off a smaller branch on the tree. “Some of us have lived that way for a long time. Trusting people as much as you do is what seems crazy to me.”

  He paused. “Do you think I made a mistake with Marea?”

  “No. She’s young, and she’s angry, but I don’t think she actually wishes any of us harm. She just wants to go home.”

  “Probably too much to ask that she stops hating my guts.”

  Ella stacked her branches and turned back for camp. “Put it this way, if you can win her over, you can probably win over anyone in the Councilate. And if you can’t, that would just make one small part of you a normal human being.”

  Tai smirked. “Hope you’re not thinking of the part I’m thinking of.”

  She raised her eyebrows in mock surprise. “I couldn’t say. Sleeping in a fur tent with three other people hasn’t given me much chance to explore how all your parts are doing these days.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Seems like we’re pretty alone right here.”

  “Well,” she said, dropping her armload with a clatter, “maybe a little exploration is in order.”

  8

  Marea was an icemonger.

  At least, that’s what she felt like: constantly cold, constantly we
t, constantly walking without getting anywhere. Only here, instead of having a nice Worldsmouth sun shining down on her and the colorful trappings of civilization all around, she walked most of the day by frigid starlight surrounded by strangers and rebels.

  And Ella, of course. Ellumia Aygla was the one redeeming aspect of this whole trip. By the time they climbed through the rocky gap at Ninefingers Pass, three days after she found them, she felt like she knew Ella as well as her best friend. Better, even, since it’d been hard to keep a best friend the last two years, with everyone in Newgen coming and going all the time.

  “So you really kicked him in the cockwattle?” she asked one day, around the time the sun was setting, two past noon by a proper hourglass. Tai and Nauro were off somewhere being shamans, and Feynrick was back with the elk.

  “Yes, I kicked him in the wattle,” Ella said back, grinning. “My parents ran through all the good suitors pretty quick. By the time I turned fifteen, I swear, they were throwing merchant’s bastards at me just in an attempt to get rid of me. And some of them thought, well, because they kept me locked up there, maybe I was crazy. Maybe I was desperate.”

  Marea snorted. “Bet that one learned his lesson.”

  “And a few of his friends. As I recall, I didn’t have to put up with another suitor for a month and a half after that.”

  Marea whistled. “So you just didn’t want to get married?”

  “I didn’t want my parents to get me married. To do anything they wanted. It was a war of attrition: they kept me locked up, I kept their plans on hold. Someone had to give in, eventually, and it wasn’t going to be me.”

  “So they did, eventually? Let you go?”

  “No,” Ella said, looking away. “I got away on my own.”

  “You ran away? Descending godscatter Ella, that’s amazing!”

  She pursed her lips. “You might not think so, if you were there.”

  “Why?”

  “I had to hurt someone I cared about very much. And there’s no taking that back.”

  “But that’s always how it is in the stories! At least you’ve done something interesting.”