by Levi Jacobs
Tai kicked a withered beet out of the way. “I know. But a fortune won’t help me get my kids out. I need an army for that.”
She shook her head. Was he really that selfless? Or was this a front, because he wanted something? “You must really love them.”
“I do.” He muttered something then—likely talking to his voice.
“Are they… your kids?” He seemed too young to have more than a couple of kids, but then life on the streets was different. She’d learned that in Worldsmouth.
Surprisingly, he blushed. “No! Mine? Ah—no. I should say, my gang. Kids I found on the street, who needed help.”
A rebel street tough who cared for little kids and blushed at the mention of fatherhood. Interesting. “So did you… use any of that yura you had?”
“You mean overdosing, like you did?” Her stomach flopped, remembering what was at stake. If the wrong people found out about yuraloading… “Yeah, we did.”
Ella’s heart sank. Well that was it. It was out. It was actually relieving, somehow, to know she wasn’t the only one who knew now. And it sounded like his group wasn’t controlled by the Houses. She hoped. “So how did it go?”
Tai kept his gaze ahead. “Two of us overcame our voices. One us didn’t have anything happen. And one died.”
“One died?” Prophet’s teeth. “What happened?”
“We don’t know. He just started talking in crazy voices, shouting and stuff. I was going to ask if you knew.”
“No. I argued with my—ancestor, but I never felt in danger from it.”
Tai turned them down another path, further away from the city and the nearest mine compound. “This wasn’t ancestors. It was more like people arguing through him. And he totally lost control of his powers. He—I’ve never seen anything like it.”
There was more he wasn’t saying. “Did anything like that happen to you, when you overcame?” Overcome was the word he’d used for it, but she liked it. It fit somehow.
He shrugged. “Like I said, I don’t remember much of it.”
That was frustrating. She needed to know more, needed to understand the process. “Do you know anyone else who’s overcome?”
A hare flashed across their path, darting from one row of wintermelon to the next. “Only a few of us have tried the…”
“Yuraloading, I’ve been calling it.”
“Yuraloading. And beyond that, well, there is one person. A Minchu who fights with us.”
“There’s a Minchu in your group?” Ella had seen maybe three in her lifetime, and never talked to one. They were notoriously reclusive.
“Yeah. He seems to know a lot about the resonances, and ancestors, though he calls them demons.” He glanced over at her. “You two should probably talk.”
“I would love that. That reminds me,” she dug in her sleeve pocket. “I owe you. Two hundred marks, is that enough? I seem to remember something along those lines on the street.”
“It’s—more than enough,” Tai said, but he took the money. She’d had to borrow it from Sablo, but at the rate he paid her, she was getting close to working her debt off anyway. “Thank you.”
“Thank you. I don’t know many people who would give twelve balls to a stranger. I wouldn’t have gotten out of there without you.”
He looked uncomfortable at this. “You’re welcome. I don’t suppose there’s any way you could get my kids out of the prison camp?”
Ella huffed a laugh. “No. Though, I am working with the High Arbiter now. Maybe he can do something.”
Tai cocked his head. “High Arbiter?”
“The highest authority in Ayugen. He oversees the courts, the military, the Houses, everything.”
“Wow. Seems like a step up from Odril’s basement.” He paused, and she heard calculation in his voice when he spoke again. “How do you feel about the Councilate?”
Ella frowned. “That’s a hard question. I mean, I’m from the Councilate, for better or worse. I’m a citizen. But if you asked me whether to take it or leave it—I’d say leave it. In a heartbeat.”
“Why?”
She pursed her lips. There was so much to say, it was hard to boil down. “Because they’re destroying the only viable lifeways our continent has. The Yersh one hundred years ago, then the Seinjial, the Yati—and now you. Now the Achuri. Pretty soon we’ll all be spokes in their wagon wheel, part of one big stupid machine that’s just trying to maximize profit, not happiness. That’s why I’m here, actually, is to learn from you. To record some of this lifeway before it’s gone, then use it to try to change how the Councilate works.”
“Wow.” They walked in silence for a beat, Tai plucking a few blades of grass. “What if you could do better than that? What if you could save the people as well as their ideas?”
She stopped. “Are you asking me to join the rebellion?”
He met her eyes, “Yes. We need someone on the inside. Someone who knows what the Councilate is doing. Your job with the Arbiter is perfect.”
Ella’s throat tightened—the idea was wild. She’d never thought about doing any more than trying to influence policies from within the Councilate. To actually fight it? It seemed hopeless—but exciting too, in a way she hadn’t felt in a long time. Since she broke out of her parent’s house, probably. “And your friends really are committed to pushing the Councilate out? They’re not just taking contracts from the Houses?”
“No. If they were I wouldn’t be there. They’re trying to end this.”
The hope for that, the hope that the Achuri people could actually be saved, that they could make a real refuge from the Councilate here—it was almost too much to believe in.
Her inner skeptic said it was. “And you? Are you trying to end this?”
He rolled his shoulders. “I wasn’t. All I wanted to do was get my kids somewhere safe. But I’m starting to doubt there’s anywhere that’s safe, if the Councilate’s there. It’s just volunteering to be a spoke in the wheel, like you said.”
She thought of what had happened to Yatiland, Seinjial, the martial law there. “Sounds accurate.”
“So will you do it? I’m not asking you to fight, or even to put yourself in danger. Just to pass information. The things you can hear in the Tower could help us a lot on the ground.”
She chewed it over while they walked, afternoon light casting leaf-shaped shadows across the path. “It’s not like you’ll stop yuraloading if I say no.”
He glanced at her apologetically. “No. That dye is spilled. But I was thinking, with your interest in yura and all that, maybe you could help with the research side of it. Keep track of what we’re doing, help us make it better.”
The academic prospects of it almost stopped her in her tracks. Researching on human subjects was illegal under Councilate law, yes, but the rebellion wasn’t exactly inside Councilate law, and besides, Tai had said they would do it any way. She could justify her involvement as mitigation, as an attempt to reduce harm.
Though that would mean increasing harm for the Councilate. Hm. This was going to be tricky.
But she knew her answer even before Tai asked again. “Yes, then. I’ll do it.”
She grinned, and he grinned back at her, like two kids sharing a secret. It felt good to belong to something here, even if this street-tough-turned-rebel was likely the only rebel she would ever know.
It felt even better to be doing something real to stop the system she hated. What would LeTwi think if he saw her now?
21
One would think the sun had gone out, for the endless days of blue light in At’li winter. Only an orange glow on the horizon would shine, and yet the star and moon would wheel overhead marking the regular progression of days. I admit to some relief when, with the spring melt, the sun began to rise higher and higher above the ice sheet.
--Markels, Travels among the Achuri and At’li
Tai crouched in the bow of the rowboat, holding a damp cloth to Theron’s face. Behind them a Coldferth burned and sank stern-
first into the Genga, slave galley beached with men escaping.
The strike had gone well, better than expected, but someone always got hurt. Karhail, Weiland, Eddels and three other brawlers crowded in the back of the boat, while Eyna sat with feet braced against the prow. She had yuraloaded, successfully, and her resonance thrummed as she pushed them upstream.
There was little likelihood of retaliation—the ship had no way to send a message upstream to Ayugen, and there had been no ships behind it in the river—but still the tension of battle hung over them. It had been a close thing for a while, Tai and Eyna feeding flames on one side of the ship while the brawlers worked to battle the scant crew and axe a hole on the far side, but they’d done it, sinking a valuable ship and all its cargo into the river. Better yet, they’d chosen one of the shallower areas of the Genga—meaning the ship was likely to block river traffic until someone could get it moved.
And as soon as they did, the rebellion would sink another.
“Look a’this!” one of the new brawlers, Eddels, called, digging in the bundles of weapons they’d taken. “Found it while I was looting the hold!”
It was an oiled leather satchel, finely tooled and well-sealed. Karhail took it from him, breaking the sealed knots. “Correspondence, no doubt.” He leafed through the pages inside, stony face impassive. “Some of this could be useful.”
Eddels snorted. “If you like reading love letters to lighthairs.” He was a farmer’s son, thick black hair shot with red, grown up somewhere along the lowlands between Seinjail and Yatiland.
“Quiet,” Eyna barked from the front. “Might be something ahead.”
They all stilled. Tai squinted, making out a group of people walking along the shoreline.
“Lawkeepers?” someone asked.
Tai shook his head, squinting. “No. Looks like—“
“Darkhairs,” Karhail said. “Achuri, most like. They look pretty beat up.”
“Them and me both,” Theron groaned. His skin was hot red and blistered, with much of the hair singed from that side of his head. Apparently someone had hit him with a burning board.
“Slow, Eyna,” Tai said, looking closer as they came into view. “They might need our help.”
“We need our help,” Beal said. “Or did you forget we’re full of contraband and Theron’s losing his face?”
Eyna slowed, and Karhail didn’t question it—a sign of the respect the rebels had been giving Tai of late. The boat strike had been his idea, and much of the previous days’ raids had worked because his resonance was so much more powerful than the Councilate’s wafters.
“Ho!” Tai called in Achuri as they approached. “Prophet’s guidance on you, brothers.” Some of the group—about nine in all, a few limping or nursing wounds—shied away, but three of them, two women and a man, came down to the shore to meet them. “What happens here?”
“We come from the camp,” one of the women said, a hollow look in her eyes.
“Escaped,” the man said, face ashen and hand clamped to a dark spot in his side.
“Gods,” Tai said, then at a commotion from the rebels, only one of whom spoke Achuri, “do you speak Yersh? My friends would hear your tale.”
“Who are you?” the wounded man asked, switching to Councilate standard.
“We’re the Ghost Rebellion,” Karhail answered. “And you?”
“Escapees from the prison camp,” Tai said, then turned to them, hope flickering despite their sorry state. “But how did you get out? Is the place not heavily guarded?”
“Dumb luck,” the hollow-eyed woman said. “The gates were open for a restocking, and there was some argument between the guards, and—” She choked off, eyes going distant. Tai knew that look—she’d lost someone.
The other woman, older and unhurt, laid a hand on her shoulder. “And we ran,” she finished. “Maybe a hundred of us in all. We’re all that made it out, as far as I know.”
“Any children escape with you?” Tai asked. “A young girl, about ten winters, with fyelock hair, or a curly-headed Achuri boy, or a teen girl who can juggle…”
The older woman shook her head. “It was impossible to tell, in the moment. There were too many running, and it happened so fast.”
“Are the conditions so bad then?” Eyna asked, face drawn from the bends. “Inside the camp?”
“See for yourselves.” The woman gestured behind her, the rest of their band looking hollow-cheeked and distant, skin dirty and hair stringy. “They feed us little, tell us less, and let any kind of trouble go on inside the walls. Most of us are in there for no reason at all. And it’s become so crowded…” She shook her head.
“’Twas worth it,” the wounded man said. “To get out. I’d have gone mad if I stayed. Might die now, but at least I’ll die out here, in the open.”
“Hoping to find a village,” the older woman said. “The city’s not safe anymore. They’ll find us. Do ye know one?”
“There are plenty of hamlets on the far side of the river,” Eyna said. “They might give you rest.”
“And you’ll find supplies aplenty just downstream,” Eddels put in. “There, where the smoke is. We sunk a Coldferth barge, full of fish and cheeses and who knows what all.”
Tai frowned, unable to ease the knot in his stomach. It sounded so stupid, to tell these people that they had sunk a ship, maybe cost a lighthaired House a few thousand marks. What did it matter to them? To the people in the camp? “You can come with us,” Tai said, stepping off the boat. “We can fit more on the boat, and we have a hideout on the far side of the city, in the forest.”
Karhail said something, but Tai rolled over him. “There you’ll find rest, and enough time to heal your wounds. And if you want, you might join our cause.”
“There ain’t enough room in the boat,” Eddels said, gesturing around. “We’re packed as it is.”
“Then I’ll walk.”
“Ye can’t walk, we need you to push when Eyna tires out.”
“Then you’ll walk,” Tai snapped, “or we all walk, I don’t care. I’m not leaving these people.”
Eyna met his eye—she had become a friend over the last few days. “They have valuable information,” she said to the rest. “They’ve been inside the camp, they know the weak spots. They can help us plan for our attack.”
Karhail worked at his knuckles, eying the ragtag bunch of escapees. “Eddels, Jemma, Welo, Eyna,” he said at last. “Out. Tai, you take these people and the loot and meet us back at hideout.”
Tai breathed a sigh of relief as the rebels disembarked and he helped the older woman explain the situation to the rest of the escapees, two of whom looked near-death. They loaded them in, boat dangerously low in the water, and Karhail shoved them off, bending close to his ear. “They had better have valuable information,” he muttered as he shoved them out. “This is a rebellion, not a charity.”
“If we care about the people we’re saving, it’s both,” Tai growled, and shoved them out into the current.
They reached the hideout near dark, pace painfully slow with the wounded hanging on their friend’s shoulders, and the rest helping to pull a sling with the looted weapons and papers. Tai considered sending some of them to Marrem, but he had already endangered her enough with Lumo—and the hideout had its own healworker now.
“This is it, then?” one of the escapees asked.
“Aye.” They straggled through a break in the trees, forest opening up to a natural bowl around a small stream-fed pond. The woods had been cut back about fifty paces on each side, and a few rough longhouses dotted the area. “A medic, dry beds and likely some hot food if we’re quick.”
They all brightened at that, and Tai lead them down through the hamlet, nodding to men turning wood and women tending goats, a few children even playing amongst the houses. It could have been any rural Achuri village—save that many heads sprouted fine or salted hair, the buildings were all new, and shouts rang out from the clearing above the bowl, where new recruits wou
ld be training in resonances and combat.
Tai saw the escapees to the longhouses, the aged healworker Leyra hobbling out to meet them, then retired to his own bunk, a simple straw mat in one of the longhouses. Exhausted as he was, though, sleep would not come. Instead he thought over the stories the escapees had told of the camp—of violence between the people held there, of guards executing people at will, of the hierarchy the Councilate were building between some Achuri and others, trying to divide them, and the manual labor they were forced to do, digging trenches and felling trees for the expansion.
Where were Fisher and Curly and Ping in all that? Were they still alive? Were they being forced to work with the rest? Had Tulric lied, and the kids were already dead somewhere? Or half-starved, like the escapees?
He had to know. And with the runaways’ confirmation of just how heavily guarded the prison camp was, that meant only one thing.
“Absolutely not,” Karhail said, at the planning meeting next morning, under one of the tall needleleaves. “To attack now would be suicide.”
“We have soldiers now,” Tai said, gesturing to the others gathered there, and the recruits training in the clearing behind. “Yuraloaded wafters and brawlers that are stronger than anything the Councilate can muster. We can take them.”
A few nodded at this—Eyna, Theron, Weiland. The core of what he’d begun to think of as his group, when disagreements came.
“A tactical strike might serve where a full-on assault wouldn’t,” Theron put in, speaking quietly for the bandages over most of his face. “Rip a hole in their defenses, let the people do the rest.”
“And if we fail?” Karhail shook his head. “A serious loss now would set us back months, and expose us to real retaliation.”
Something in Tai knew the man was right. Just like something else knew he couldn’t leave his kids in that camp any longer. “You promised me an attack. Have I not done enough for the rebellion? Taught you to yuraload? Fought in every battle? Helped in planning many of them?”
