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

by L. W. Jacobs

  He certainly wasn’t. They pushed on, Ella finding herself agitated she couldn’t slow and enjoy the city. Of all the places in Yershire, this was one of the few she had wanted to visit, and the glimpses she caught around the crowds and soldiers didn’t disappoint: curling vines drooping from rooftop gardens, ancient houses built one atop another in the traditional Yersh style, ornate shrines and grottos worked into every street, and every intersection with a statue or fountain and a name, a history. There were entire books devoted to Aran, like Melthesan’s A Walking History of Aran. She’d read it during a particularly dark period, when her brother stopped visiting her and her parents had reduced her to one meal a day, demanding that she accept a suitor.

  It had seemed a paradise then, and it was, and it was frustrating that they were always in a hurry, always in danger, always running to or from something. Ella found herself clenching her fists as she walked, muttering about how annoying it was, how frustrating the whole situation was. As the crowds thickened the pilgrims seemed to grow more fervent around them, gazing in holy wonder or grinning like children or shouting at each other in fights that often devolved into fists, soldiers looking the other way. Then at the intersection of a long narrow alley and two wide streets a woman stood perfectly balanced atop an ancient statue of a walrus, arms over her head, her skin literally glowing.

  “What in stains,” Ella cursed, glaring at the dope-eyed zealots who packed the square. It was like the whole city was determined to get in her way.

  “Prophet’s mercy,” Marea whispered, looking as awed as the zealots.

  Feynrick whistled, but his gaze said he wasn’t interested in the woman for her glowing skin. Not the parts that were showing, at least.

  Avery cleared his throat. “The uai. I’m sure you’re all feeling it by now. The stone’s power is reaching this far into the city. She must believe she is blessed in some way, and the uai is making her imagination real.”

  Feynrick gave a lecherous grin. “Blessed is one way to put it.”

  “Fight that,” Avery said. “Feynrick, that pull towards sex. Marea, that awe and wonder you’re feeling. Tai, that overwhelming despondency. And Ella, whatever it is that has you clenching your fists.”

  She started, relaxing her hands, realizing how strange her reaction was. They were in danger and she was frustrated about not being able to sightsee?

  Feynrick and Marea did likewise around her, and she realized Tai had been staring at the cobbles for the last half hour.

  “Gods,” she said. “The stone is having that much effect already?”

  “Yes,” Avery said. “We are close now, maybe halfway to the old city, and beginning to feel the waystone’s power. It’s only going to get stronger. Watch yourselves. Your internal feelings, your reactions. Uai in these amounts can be like dreamleaf or Seinjial lager, and what we need are clear minds. So stay vigilant.”

  Ella shook herself. “Right,” she said. “Sorry.” Her frustration melted away, replaced by a heightened awareness, like the rush that came at the beginning of battle.

  Or when she struck resonance, she realized. The heightened awareness of uai.

  It took hold of the others too, as they came out of whatever state they had fallen into. Tai cleared his throat, giving the barest nod toward the roofs. “Best to keep moving. I don’t think the whitecoats like this lady much either.”

  “Least we know we’re in the right city,” Feynrick muttered, looking around like waking from a dream.

  Ella glanced up to find archers lining the rooftops around the plaza, some of them with arrows nocked. Prophets, what would all this uai be doing to them, who were unused to its effects? No wonder everyone in the city seemed out of sorts. They were all dreamy on uai.

  The scholarly side of her wanted to stop everyone and start running tests. Take people out of the city and see what their natural tendencies were, then pull them back into the uai and see what it was doing. Why had she gotten frustrated? Why would Tai get despondent, and Marea religious of all things?

  They started walking, and she realized that her curiosity was the uai too, distracting her down a different mental pathway, amping up whatever small tendencies her mind had. Gods. Focus, Ella. Focus because few people in this city are, and no doubt those who can keep their concentration are the ones who make it to the old city. No doubt the shamans there know how to handle all this power.

  They saw more strange sights as they wove through the city, statues that blinked and shrines that floated and withered old men dancing like children. In one plaza thirty people knelt with their heads submerged in the fountain’s water, not breathing but apparently alive.

  They saw more whitecoats too, increasingly edgy and heavily armed and watching the uai-drunk pilgrims with suspicious eyes. There was no rebellion here, not in the new city at least, but there was like to be a battle from the looks of it. And Ella did not want to see what these power-mad believers were capable of, if the whitecoats interrupted their reveries.

  Avery, bless the man, continued to wake them out of theirs, when they would fall into it. Thrice Ella lapsed back into scholarly curiosity, beginning to drift away from the group as some question or other caught her fancy and she started to examine it. She could see now why so many leaving the city had looked starved—they had likely stayed in one uai-obsessed state or another until their bodies gave out. Indeed, there were bodies in the alley she could not be sure were live or dead.

  She did her best to nudge Tai when he would begin to look despondent, or angry, and Marea when her eyes grew fearful or awestruck. Feynrick seemed able to keep himself sober, as it were, but maybe that was no surprise given the amounts of dreamleaf the man could handle.

  Tai had to nudge her awake out of the thoughts that followed, when her scholarly brain began comparing the effects of free-flowing uai with other known intoxicants, and how dependence might alter its expression.

  “Stains,” she said, trying not look at the hard-eyed men in whitecoats clumped on one side of a tree-filled plaza they crossed, doe-eyed pilgrims dancing intricate patterns on the other. This city was ready to explode.

  “Not far now,” Avery said. “Keep your head. There’s enough uai here that anyone could be a threat.”

  “No shamans so far,” Tai said, walking clear-eyed with his head up. The challenge of staying focused seemed to have drawn him out of the mood he’d been in since they found Eyadin’s body. “Unless they’ve fallen spell to the stone too.”

  “Could have,” Avery said. “Journeymen, maybe. I doubt any full shamans would be so easily distracted. No, I’m guessing they’re closer in. In the old city.”

  “Battling for the stone?” Ella asked.

  “Or waiting,” he said. “Ready to strike at whoever manages to open it first.”

  A jolt of fear ran through her, and it was all she could do not to follow it down a tunnel into panic and despair. Had the shamans tried all the things she planned? Would she open the stone only to have some all-powerful shaman steal the spear from under them?

  They wound through another crowded street, and a plaza of women singing Eschatolist dirges in complex harmonies. Their voices carried power, something like power of the resonance harmonies. Were they singing with uai?

  The street beyond was blocked with a solid crush of people, the sound of their shouts and cries echoing from the overhanging buildings into a dull roar. Ella craned her neck, trying to see over the shoulders of the pilgrims ahead.

  “Whitecoats,” Tai said, tall enough he could see over most of the crowd. “It’s solid whitecoats up there.”

  “The old city,” Ella said. “The soldier at the gate said they had it blocked off.”

  “That’s where the stone is, right?” Feynrick asked, striking resonance. “Nothing a little grin-and-shove won’t get us through.”

  “Have a care,” Tai said, laying a hand on the man’s shoulder. “I’m not sure the whitecoats will take to shoving as kindly as these pilgrims.”

  �
�They look entirely too eager to use their swords as it is,” Avery said, pulling Marea close.

  Feynrick grinned. “I was one a’them sword-eager lads once upon a time. You leave them to me.”

  With that he began clearing a path, and as before they followed in his wake, Tai and Avery holding the crowd aside for her and Marea. It helped that many of the people they pressed through looked half-delirious, murmuring excitedly and pointing at the sky.

  No—not the sky. The waystone. Through a brief gap in the crowd Ella saw the stone, rising like a giant shrine amidst the steep roofs and tiered towers of the old city. Only where the Eschatolist shrines were carved wood and gilt paint, the waystone was unbroken stone, rising twice as high as any of the buildings and appearing almost to glitter in the sun.

  Then her view was gone, and Ella was almost glad. The Yati waystone had had a special presence to it, but this—it was like the stone called to her. Pulled her. No wonder people were pressed cheek to jowl. How long could the whitecoats keep them back?

  They emerged from the long street into open air, and the dull roar she had heard swelled into song. The melody tugged at her memory—the aeschatol! An Eschatolist hymn sung at birthings and funerals if she remembered right, the Yersh so ancient scholars argued about the meaning. She had heard it as a girl, walking past the birthing center near her family’s mansion, and at the funerals of state her father had dragged her to.

  But never like this: what had been a pretty song then became something beautiful here, haunting, roaring from the throats of ten thousand believers pressed against the pikes and spears of the Councilate army. Because their weapons were out—she saw that now as they approached the front, rank on rank of armored Councilate men holding out weapons like a sideways forest of blades.

  And yet the believers pressed on, impelled by the crush of people behind, by the magnetism of the stone glittering above the old city. It was impossible to see what was happening at the front, impossible to hear anything but the loudest shouts over the roar of song, but she read Tai’s gesture well enough, pointing to the cobblestones beneath their feet.

  She looked and almost lost her stomach. They were red, as were her boots, as were the hems of skirts and pants around her. Red with blood.

  Were the whitecoats killing anyone who came too near? But she heard no screams, only song, and the crowd pressed forward around them.

  A woman stumbled back from the front then, dress stuck to her chest with fresh blood, mouth open in song, life’s blood pumping from a wound to her heart. But even as Ella stared the wound began to close, like someone in the first rush of overcoming a revenant.

  Feynrick pushed closer and they saw a man with a mending gash in his neck, then a girl holding her own arm, and believers too wounded to walk crawling back from the front, all singing, all healing, eyes fervent. Ella stared, caught in the wonder of it despite the urgency of the situation. Belief and uai. That was all these people needed.

  Then her foot caught on something soft, and her wonder soured. Belief had not been enough for the man sprawled on the flagstones. Ella stepped over him, but as the crowd crushed in and such bodies became more common there was nowhere else to step without losing her feet, so Ella stepped on them, hating the soft feeling beneath her feet, chest tightening.

  She tried to shout to Tai, to Avery, to anyone about what was going on, but the hymn was too loud, the crowd’s roar shaking even the slick flagstones beneath her feet. Or was that uai?

  Then the man ahead of them fell to a spear thrust in his chest, and Feynrick’s push forward became a push back, nothing ahead but a line of Councilate spears.

  Ella struck resonance without thinking, needing a moment to breathe, to process. To plan.

  The world froze around her—Feynrick’s mouth open in a bellow, the speared man halfway to the ground, the crowd’s roar shifted to unending thunder around her. Ahead, a youthful whitecoat grimaced at the far end of the spear, his face and uniform splattered red, his expression more animal than man. The soldiers next to him looked same, holding a tight rank with the line of men behind them, all jabbing spears toward the crowd.

  Leaning into the killing space Ella saw that formation repeating all the way down the square, saw whitecoats frozen in the act of jabbing spears, saw peaceful pilgrims with mouths open in song, accepting the blades into their bodies. Did they know they would be healed? Was someone coordinating this, or was it the very words of the song, words denying birth and death in the power of the bi-God’s grace?

  She didn’t know. Couldn’t stay here in slip trying to figure it out, her life hours draining away. They needed a plan. Feynrick had said he could deal with the whitecoats, because he used to be one, but looking at the bloodthirsty expressions on the soldiers’ faces she doubted it. They were caught in the waystone’s uai as surely as the pilgrims, only their experience was colored by fear and military training instead of reverence and belief.

  And as soon as she dropped slip, that uai-driven fear was going to be directed at Tai and Feynrick. They could fight a few soldiers, but an army?

  Feynrick’s bellow had changed as she stood, the grizzled Yatiman’s hand drifting for his axe. That plan would not work. Think, Ella, think.

  The problem was even if she made a plan there would be no time to communicate it, to act on it. Feynrick was seconds from attacking back, and then there would truly be no time.

  If only there was a way to speak to their minds, like Avery had done. Or slow them all down, so they could discuss here together.

  Ella sucked in a breath—there was a way to do that. Nauro had done it to her, back at the Yati waystone, when he first told her of the costs of her resonance. He’d frozen them both in slip using his uai. You could do it too, he’d said. It’s your higher resonance.

  It would no doubt age her even more rapidly, but what choice did she have? She wasn’t going to let them all die here. Ella reached inside and struck resonance again, not sure how it worked, remembering the time she’d saved Tai inside the Councilate prison, the day he’d driven the whitecoats from Ayugen.

  Something resonated, something higher—an octave higher, Marea had said—and she tried to focus on the group around her, not sure how to limit who she included in slip.

  “—out!” Feynrick bellowed, ripping his axe free and spinning to sink it into the spear-holder in front of him, who was still frozen in time.

  Her friends slipped into regular motion, stumbling against the frozen crowd. Marea looked around in wonder, and Tai turned to her in confusion.

  “No time,” Ella said. “You’re all in slip, but this could be killing me so let’s make a plan quick. There’s no way we’re fighting through these soldiers.”

  “And doubtful we’d survive the fight the way the pilgrims are,” Avery said, alone of the group looking unsurprised at her ability.

  Feynrick pulled his axe out with a confused expression, the wound just barely beginning to seep blood. “Don’t seem fair to fight a man who can’t fight back.”

  “And these are not our enemies,” Tai said. “This is not our fight. We just need to get through them.”

  Marea looked to Ella. “Can you keep this up long enough for us to just walk through them? Or on them?”

  “No,” Ella panted. “My back already hurts, and this costs more than uai.”

  “Right,” Tai said. “We waft, and whoever chases us chases us. Avery, you get Feynrick.” He wrapped one arm around her and another around Marea.

  It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was better than nothing. Ella dropped slip.

  54

  Tai shot them up, resonance roaring, as the spearman Feynrick had hit crumpled and the roaring hymn of the crowd crashed back in around them. Ella clutched onto his right side, eyes squeezed shut. Avery rose to his left, Feynrick clinging to his shoulders.

  The crowd spread out below them, rivers of multicolored pilgrims flowing from every street into the cleared square around the old city. They were a sea crashing into a wa
ll of spears and white-coated men, the soldiers hard against a moat surrounding ancient stone walls. The crowd was pushing them back, then—the soldiers would not have started with nowhere to retreat.

  Tai shoved forward. Even as he did soldiers rose from the ranks of the whitecoats. No, not just soldiers—Titans, the Councilate’s elite warriors trained in resonances. They wore gleaming metal suits and bore long spiked halberds.

  Tai swerved around the first of these, but Titans kept rising, and rising fast. A pair shot forward to block him off from the old city, faster than he’d ever seen Councilate wafters fly. But no wonder—the stone’s uai would be strengthening them as it did him, and they weren’t carrying a person in each arm.

  Cursing, Tai pushed higher, trying to evade them, but they mirrored his movements, faster. He circled back to find a pair closing on them from behind, halberds raised. With no time to think, Tai struck his higher resonance and pushed a wedge of air between them, shooting through the gap.

  To his right Avery was similarly pushed back, Titans circling him. Could the man not use some shamanic power on them? Below the crowd still sang, but fingers that had been pointing toward the stone were pointing towards them now.

  Little help that was against supercharged Titans.

  “Marea!” Tai called over the wind, sweeping high then swooping low in an attempt to get around a fresh Titan attack. “A little luck?”

  “Working on it!” she yelled back, slim body rigid in his left arm.

  Titans shot up to block him again, and Tai circled back again, catching sight of Avery wafting south along the line between pilgrims and whitecoats, Titans rising to meet him in a wave along the way.

  Tai tried again, failed again, no amount of height enough to lose them, no amount of speed fast enough to get past them, whatever luck Marea was summoning not enough to make a gap he could get through.

  Tai circled back above the pilgrims, uai inside feeling endless but at the same time not enough. He needed to be faster, stronger, some other edge. Mindsight? But what good would that do in this kind of fight?