Acolyte's Underworld: An Epic Fantasy Saga (Empire of Resonance Book 4)

by L. W. Jacobs

  A clap echoed from the exploding roof above. Ella cursed in a voice timeshifted comically high. She reappeared holding the end of the spear-rope. “He travelled,” she said. “Ready?”

  Before Marea could answer a herd of elk trampled her and they were standing on open water, Teynsley a few paces away, sun low in a sky full of clouds.

  Marea shrieked.

  “You’re safe, dear,” Teynsley said. “We are slipped so deeply most surfaces are hard as rock. Now stop this nonsense and join me.”

  “So I can go kill my friends?” Marea said, keeping a firm grip on the rope. “Never.”

  “They are not your friends,” Teynsley said, stepping slightly to one side as his feet sank.

  “Why didn’t you kill us when you had the chance?” Ella cut in, panting at the far end of the spear-rope.

  “Because it is what you would expect an archrevenant to do,” Teynsley said. “And because I never waste a pawn without reason. You, Ella, I knew were a longshot to go after Tai, whom I assumed had already thralled the spear like any reasonable human. But you, Marea.” He turned to her. “You have true potential. And you know you cannot defeat me in open battle.”

  “Probably not,” Marea said. “Good thing I don’t have to do it alone.”

  They ran for him again, shoes slapping strangely on the almost-hard water. An immense pair of axes appeared in Ella’s hands and Marea frowned. That was good, but it was still thinking in terms of regular limits. And this power had no limits.

  Marea imagined an eight-pace-long sword reaching from her free hand to just below the apple in Teynsley’s neck. She dropped the spear just as momentum rammed the sword in.

  Teynsley laughed, blood bubbling from his mouth. The sword shattered. The wound healed.

  “You see the futility of this, right?” Teynsley asked, brushing aside Ella’s attack. Marea grabbed the free end of the spear-rope. “We can kill each other for days with this kind of power. Trust me, I’ve done it.”

  Another thunderclap and he was gone.

  Marea stared, dismay welling up.

  “Marea!” Ella called. “You ready?”

  “I’m—not sure we can do this,” she said, hating how weak her voice sounded. “He’s a god, Ella.”

  Ella snorted. “We’re gods. Goddesses, I mean. Did you see what we just did? We’re as divine as he is—Teynsley’s still just a man under all his power. And he wouldn’t be running from us if he wasn’t afraid of something.”

  Marea frowned, even as the sudden travel punched her in the face and they appeared in a rocky valley between two mountain tops, frigid wind howling around them. Ella was right, Teynsley was just a man. A strange, lonely man who spent his days smoking cigars and dreaming of power.

  But why would a god want more power?

  “Remember our talk of letting go, Marea?” Teynsley called over the wind, kurta pressed to his lean body. “Now is the time—this woman is holding you back. Like your friends always have.”

  Ella glanced at her, loose braids writhing around her head, raising an eyebrow. Marea didn’t need words or thoughts to understand—she was not asking are you going to betray me? She was saying ready to do this?

  Currents, it felt good to trust someone again.

  They ran, Marea wafting one of the valley’s massive boulders to her as Ella’s dress turned into blades. Teynsley tensed, glancing between them.

  Right—he needed to see which one dropped the spear, to know who he could attack. Marea believed herself running from behind the archrevenant and in a kick of air she was. And why was she running this boulder in? Uai raging in her, Marea believed the giant stone into the space where Teynsley stood. See the man survive that.

  Nothing happened, save the boulder crashing to the ground a few paces away. With a scream audible over the roaring wind Ella leapt in, dress a forest of blades.

  Teynsley thunder clapped to a few paces from Marea in a rush of air. “Clever,” he said, “but it is almost impossible to believe something violating the human body, even with your power.”

  Ella fell to the ground, blades clattering on the stone.

  “Then I’ll have to kill you the old-fashioned way,” Marea said, believing a blade into her hands.

  It shattered. “What you have to do is let go,” he said, uneven eyes drilling into her. “And I believe you can. But I will not wait forever.”

  Marea glanced to where Ella was getting to her feet, spear-rope in hand. The woman started running, knives appearing in her hands.

  “You won’t have to,” Marea said, and pushed herself deeper into timeslip to focus her vision: Ella leaping at Teynsley, raging wind smashing her into him, knives sinking into his eyes. Body frozen, lungs locked in the stony stillness of time, Marea saw Teynsley’s look of surprise, felt the hot blood on the cold wind, heard her friend’s cry of victory.

  Then she unslipped time and called on the greatest weapon she had: luck.

  A weapon made incredibly deadly with the spear’s power.

  Ella leapt. Marea struck. And all the possible outcomes of that moment simplified to just one: Ella’s knives sinking deeply into Teynsley’s skull, an ear and an eye socket.

  Marea saw his shock, felt the hot blood, heard Ella’s tiger scream.

  Teynsley fell.

  “That was it!” Ella cried, landing on her feet. “Your fatewalking and my slip—”

  She wasn’t holding the rope. “Ella!” Marea cried over the wind. “Pick up the—”

  Ella jerked back, Teynsley appearing behind her in a boom of thunder, wounds closing. “You cannot defeat a god!” he boomed, rising into the air. “Now choose Marea, or I choose for you! The spear or your friend’s life!”

  It was an awful choice, but not what stuck in Marea’s mind. You cannot fight a god, he’d said. But a god who wanted more power—what sort of god was that? Teynsley is just a man under all that power, Ella had said. And he wouldn’t be running from us if he wasn’t afraid of something.

  “Do you remember what you told me?” Marea called over the wind, as Ella thrashed helplessly in Teynsley’s grip. “About watching the actions and not the faces, as they always spoke of the true person?”

  “And you have seen I will hold to my word.” A curved blade appeared in his free hand, another on the ground in front of her. “Join me. Kill her.”

  “So I can be afraid too?”

  “Afraid?” Teynsley frowned, hair and kurta blowing in the wind. “What could I possibly fear?”

  “The one thing you never gave up!” Marea called, everything coming clear in her mind. “The reason you joined the ninespears in the first place, despite having a wife and child you loved! The belief in your own weakness.”

  Teynsley laughed, but without the easy assurance she’d always heard from him. “I am a god, child. Who could possibly call me weak?” As if to demonstrate he shook Ella one-armed like a rag doll.

  “No one needs to! Your actions say it for you—only someone who believes themselves weak would run from two untrained women with a spear. Or spend their life seeking more power.”

  “Then we are fish of the same scale!” he called. “You seek it too—what did you say? To finally take control of your life.”

  Control. That was what she’d wanted at bottom. She’d spent so much of her life powerless—to her parents, to her situation in Ayugen, to the powers of the people she traveled with. But now that she had some power? Had the power of a god, even?

  “I was wrong. I thought more power would give me control, but that’s what I have to let go of. Control is just a substitute for trust, forcing someone to your will because you can’t rely on them. Because you haven’t earned their trust. That’s not a life I want to live. And I have people I can trust now. One, at least.”

  Teynsley’s smile was as uneven as his eyes. “Then I will let go of her for you.”

  He drew the knife back, and Marea closed her eyes. Uai and belief. All power came down to uai and belief, including Teynsley’s, a
nd she knew now what her opponent believed, no matter what he said. This was no god. This was a powerful man afraid of his weakness.

  But she was a goddess. One who believed in her own strength. She didn’t need to control people to prove it. She already knew it.

  And for the rest, she’d just have to trust.

  Marea opened her eyes and met Ella’s, cool despite the knife at her throat. The woman nodded. She knew what to do.

  There was no need to summon the vision—she could already see it, smell it, touch it, hear it. She wanted her friend back.

  Marea struck resonance, the earth-shaking resonance of a goddess. Struck and channeled it into her desire, not bothering to picture the exact way it would play out. That was Ella’s job.

  Uai roared out of her and Marea looked up to see Ella wrest the knife from Teynsley’s grip—the grip of a man, not a god—and plunge it upwards, into the soft tissue beneath his jaw.

  They fell, and Marea realized there was one more thing she needed to do. Something Teynsley had taught her, no less. An attack no one could recover from, whether god or man.

  She summoned a shamanic arm and slammed it into the man’s forehead, even as they fell. Pushed through the eerie resistance and found the beating core just as the pair crashed into the rocky soil. It was warm as all the other souls she had touched, but brittle too. Ancient.

  Ready to go. Marea set her feet and yanked.

  53

  Ella crashed into the ground, pain exploding up her left side. She ground her teeth and struggled onto all fours. Teynsley had recovered the last time she’d stabbed him in the head. She couldn’t let him do it again.

  Arm on fire, Ella grabbed for the knife. Something hot and excruciating ripped through her elbow and she fell, but her other hand found the hilt. Pulled it out to a fresh gout of blood. Ella drew it back for another stab, growling deep in her throat. Her arm felt like jelly, her whole body—

  The world grayed, and again she fought through the pain. Teynsley would heal himself. He would end her. And with her this tiny little arc of light in her belly.

  Sorry, little one, she thought in a wash of agony. I did my best. Her hand slipped from the knife.

  Teynsley didn’t move. The raging wind tore at his hair and flapped his loose kurta, but the man himself lay still. Could he actually be—

  “Dead,” a voice said behind her. “Now let’s make sure you don’t end up the same.”

  Ice shot through her, colder than the frozen stone under her cheek. Ice and uai.

  Ella jerked upright, gasping for air, eyes wide open. Marea stood before her, clothes torn and blood-spattered, grinning a fool’s grin. She spread her arms and Ella fell in, power of the spear rushing into her at the same time.

  “You’re sure?” Ella asked, still unable to believe. A god. Had they just killed a god?

  “See for yourself,” Marea said, gesturing at the body. “No glow in that one.”

  Ella gazed into shamanic sight. It was true—nothing but a corpse. She glanced at her own belly—the arc was still there, tiny and bright. Some deep part of her she hadn’t known was tense relaxed. “Praise the currents. So did you—are you a god now?”

  Marea grinned wider. “Goddess, remember?”

  54

  Too many times has tribalism or nationalism been invoked to explain military action. In Seingard, in Yatiland, in Ayugen, the message is the same: the darkhairs are too backward to accept change; we must do this for their own good. Let us name this for what it truly is: prejudice. Or better yet, fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of losing what we have. And it is fine to be afraid, but we must act from a deeper nobility.

  —Ellumia Merewil, An Outcast’s View of Empire, reprinted in Widow’s Hill Daily

  On a quiet side street in Worldsmouth’s richest district, a sudden wind blew around a pair of women who had not been there a moment before.

  Ella breathed deep. “You know, I never thought I’d miss this smell. But it isn’t all bad, is it?”

  “That’s funny,” Marea said, frowning at the spear. It shrunk to a wooden hairpin, and she handed it to Ella. “I was just thinking you might be right about how bad it smells.”

  They left the alley and took the winding cobbled street up a gentle slope, the day’s heat setting in as the fog burned off. By mutual agreement they were travelling by spear, even though they were more than equipped to handle any trouble with lawkeepers.

  “So you actually lived there?” Marea asked, sounding for all the world like a sixteen-rains girl and not a blood-spattered god-killer. They’d just come from Brokewater, and you would think Marea had never seen anything scarier.

  “I owe Zaza my life,” Ella said. Explaining what had happened to the matronly woman hadn’t been easy—stone walls didn’t appear out of nowhere—but she had taken it in stride, and even given Ella a packet of herbs to help with the morning sickness. “If it wasn’t for her—well, you saw what life is in Brokewater. And I had nowhere else to go.”

  “I wish I could say the same for my uncle. I felt like I had nowhere to go when I went to him, but—well it’s not the same without your parents, even if it’s still your House.” She steered them down a lane Ella assumed lead to House Fetterwel.

  “Sometimes it’s not the same even with your parents.” In some ways it would have felt easier if her parents had died. That was a grim thought. Ella put on a smile. “Well, it can’t be as awkward as Nawhin and Rena, right?”

  They’d gone to see Eyadin’s family first, to assure them they were safe for good. Nawhin had kept them at a cordial distance, insisting they’d already done enough, and Rena had just stared. It’d clearly been hard for Marea—Ella wasn’t sure the girl had any friends her own age.

  “Don’t bet on it,” Marea said, pulling the chime on an ornate ironwork gate set into Widow’s Hill’s omnipresent immaculate hedge gardens.

  A servant met them and lead them in. House Fetterwel had obviously done better than Merewil—their gardens were more spacious and manse much larger than Ella’s parents’, though it did not look as well kept. They found Marea’s uncle with an iced glass of dreamtea on the back patio, a stack of broadsheets beside him.

  He stood at the servant’s words, a tallish man with the round belly and thin legs of older men unused to physical work. “So,” he said, “the pigeon comes back to the roost. And who’s this?”

  “Ellumia Merewil,” Marea said mildly.

  Brannel spit tea, gaping at Ella. “The Runaway Knife? You brought her here?”

  “I did,” Marea said. “If you’ve read the broadsheets, you know we were together at the Downs. I’ve come to check if there’s been any word from Mattoy or Fenril.” Marea had apparently been involved in negotiations with Mattoy over some mortgaged Fetterwel land.

  “There was,” Brannel said, wiping flecks of dreamtea from his kurta. “Not from Grennig, piss on the man’s throat. From Fenril. Said you’d done them a service at the Downs. Asked what we wanted in return.”

  “And?” Marea asked, voice calm but hands flexing on the hem of her blouse.

  “And I had them buy out the mortgage,” Brannel said like he was admitting defeat. “You did well. I’ll grant you temporary license to arrange your own marriage, and I suppose I could give you some of your father’s old duties in the meantime.”

  “And my ten percent?” Marea asked, hand still clutching the hem.

  “Held in trust until you sign for it.”

  “Excellent,” Marea said, hands relaxing. “Bring the documents. I want it all to go to Nawhin Mettek of The Racks.”

  Brannel frowned. “The woman you were on about earlier? What about your own expenses? I can’t keep funding you from the House’s accounts.”

  Marea glanced at Ella. “I won’t be needing any of the House’s money. And you can keep father’s duties with whoever’s overseeing them now.”

  “And what are you going to be doing?” Brannel asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Marea said, break
ing into a smile. “But I know who I’m doing it with. No offense, but this doesn’t feel like home anymore, and I’ve got things I want to do more than crunch numbers.”

  Brannel frowned at Ella, even as he took a step back. “Is this your doing?”

  “This is her doing,” Ella said evenly. “And maybe yours, from what I hear. But don’t worry. We’ll take good care of her.”

  Marea shot her a look, and Ella cleared her throat. “I mean, she can take good care of herself.”

  It didn’t take long to sign the documents, directing Marea’s eight thousand moons to be sent to Nawhin and Rena. They left before mid-morning, Marea taking only the worn pack she’d carried all the way from Ayugen, what felt like ages ago.

  “So,” the girl said, pulling the spear-pin from her hair. “To House Merewil?”

  Ella swallowed. She’d sent the riverpost to her mother last night—currents, it felt longer than that—so the woman had likely received it by now. But she already knew what her father’s reaction would be, and didn’t look forward to making a scene with the spear once lawkeepers showed up.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “She knows how to contact me, and this pregnant mama’s not feeling up to it.” The morning sickness felt like it was going to be all-day sickness this time. “But there is one last detail I want to clean up.”

  She took the spear and a mule-kick later they were standing in front of The Councilate Quill in Ylensmarsh, in the exact same spot lawkeepers had tried to arrest her a few days ago.

  “We’ll have to be quick about it,” Ella said. “If we want to avoid a scene.”

  Marea shrugged, looking around the white-washed walls of the old city. “A scene could be fun. I mean we already blew the top off a tower a few blocks that way.”

  “And destroyed a part of the Councileum, don’t forget.”

  They pushed in, and for the second time that day watched a grown man spit tea all over himself.