Pauper's Empire: An Epic Fantasy Saga (Empire of Resonance Book 2)

by L. W. Jacobs

  Derision. This stream was simpler to follow. Centuries of being smarter, faster, more powerful than only a handful of others in the world, and them in a nebulous sort of truce. Leading to never meeting an equal, not expecting one, not believing they even could exist. This was useful. He took it.

  And fear. This vein ran deepest, this river widest, even high in the peaks of her mind. Around a bend he found the ninespears, not Nauro and Sablo but a faceless, deathless enemy as old as she was, older, dedicated to bringing her down, to bringing them all down, powerful in their knowledge, dangerous in their ignorance, unstoppable in their secretive, decentralized society. The reason she could never rest. The reason this rebellion, these Broken, this unexplained trip east filled her with such fear, because she was exposing herself. The highest heads must be ready for axes.

  The thought resonated somewhere, reminded him of something, but uai drove him ahead, a juggernaut.

  The fear went deeper. Deeper than the scar on her neck or the other failed ninespear attempts. He saw a shallow bowl between hills, green grass and waving wildflowers, a circle of nine people not just resonating, or harmonizing, but singing with their uai, and the bones of the earth shaking beneath their feet. This knowledge was dangerous. This knowledge should be dead, needed to be dead. It was worth exposing herself for.

  And still more fear behind this, rushing through crevices and secret caverns in the wintry heights of her mind. Of a second sun descending from the sky, of a people who were not people, who knew too much, who could end them all at a moment’s notice. Had ended them, once.

  There. The deepest fear of all. But of what? He pushed farther, and finally his curiosity could not override the winds howling against him, freezing him, forcing him back. Aymila.

  I will kill you for this.

  “What are you?” he whispered, dimly aware of her body now halfway in the room. Of Ella mid-air, sword spinning from her hand, hurtling toward the far wall from the force of Semeca’s entrance. Her extended timeslip had dropped, but time still felt like a pearl necklace, each moment to be examined and savored at will.

  Fear pushed through, fear and anxiety. Not the fears of Semeca, worried about secret societies and second suns descending from the sky. A much smaller and more familiar fear, something closer to home. His own fear. Him. Tai. A tiny mind lost in a river of perception, a flood of uai. Tumbling. Drowning.

  His question sparked thoughts she would never speak, uai letting him hear them anyway: she was an archrevenant. Master of all revenants that operated on the mindseye resonance, recipient of their uai. Immortal. Powerful beyond imagination.

  Well, almost. He could sense her frustration that he was reading her thoughts despite her resistance.

  Your little spurt of power will end, her voice came again in his mind. Mine never dies.

  “Unless you do,” he said, holding tight to his own fear, to the familiarity of self in the sea of other thoughts.

  She laughed, her body still suspended halfway in the room, a pearly bead of time. And you’ll be the one to do it? Mindsight takes years of practice. You can barely distinguish yourself from the minds around you. By the time you do, you will be dead.

  And yet still he read that fear in her, followed it backwards, knowing this was the knowledge he needed. Why was she afraid?

  Because he had as much uai as she did. Because he could use it to waft as she could, to read her mind as she read his, anticipate her every move.

  Yes. As soon as he did, he saw the strike coming—not for him, but for Ella. Aymila knew how important the woman was to him, knew her death would break him.

  As he knew how to stop it. The air was alive at his fingertips, time still more concept than reality. He struck his second resonance—his third already raging—and shot the sword flying from Ella’s fingers at Semeca’s heart.

  She dodged, but the move took her away from Ella, and Tai was up, bones healed, body healed, strong.

  Ella hit the wall, Semeca spun to face him, and the dance was joined. She pushed air at him, he countered with a wedge, grabbing weapons, spinning off walls, floor and ceiling, uai a deadly roar around them. Each one just a second ahead of the other, each one a second from death.

  Still this battle was only a secondary thing, a reflection of the string of pearls they passed back and forth, him reading her reading him reading her, an infinite nest of reactions. He needed some edge.

  She smiled, using air to throw the sword at Ella as her hand reached for Tindwal’s throat, to tear it out. You have no edge here. You are alone and weakening.

  He struck the blade aside in air and scored a blow on Semeca as she flew toward Tindwal, then glass shattered behind them.

  His stomach dropped—the Broken.

  He read her strategy just as it came clear in his own mind. She and he were equally matched, at least for the moment, but she had been busy while he fought Naveinya, breaking holes in the Tower’s net of harmony. Holes the Broken could push through.

  Maybe he could defeat her. But not an army of Broken too.

  68

  Ella awoke to a roar of wind and uai. Tai and Semeca shot around the room almost too fast to follow, Tindwal’s sword and Arela’s knife and the shattered remains of a bedside table shooting for different throats like confused, murderous birds.

  Tai had overcome his voice. Relief mixed with the panic and worry raging in her gut. His body was whole and his eyes were sharp, and at least for the time being he seemed a match for Semeca, neither of them finding an edge.

  Ella smiled. She could be that edge. She struck resonance.

  Nothing happened. She struck again, but it was like striking a bell wrapped in cloth. She was out of uai. Out of her reserves too, having eaten them all in the mad push to give Tai time to overcome.

  Tindwal’s sword flew for her throat, then shot another direction with a howl of air. She needed to get out of here.

  No. She needed to help Tai, however she could. Her resonance was gone, but she still had her mind. She could be smarter.

  The window smashed out toward the back, Broken wafters pouring in. Prophets. Tai blasted them back out with a shout, but the split second diversion gave Semeca time to kill Tindwal, like a patient master of ninekings removing secondary pieces, until the Elder King stood alone.

  Ella would be next. But she was no secondary piece. She didn’t need her resonance, she just needed to think.

  The wafters smashed in again. Tai smashed them out again, shouting to her, and Semeca nearly got Arela, who was crouching wide-eyed behind the bed. It didn’t take a master player to see where this pattern would lead, no matter how hard Tai tried. He had a third resonance—mindseye, to judge from how he anticipated Semeca’s moves—but they needed something more.

  Semeca shot at Ella and she ducked, shouting, Tai yelling at her to get out. Broken smashed in again, free to attack now that the harmony was gone.

  That was it. The harmony. But Tindwal was dead, and she had no uai left to strike hers. Think.

  Tai had uai. He had mountains of it.

  And he had two resonances.

  “Tai!” she shouted. “Your harmony!”

  He looked at her, confused, and for an awful moment she thought Semeca or one of the wafters would kill him, but he blasted them both back with air.

  “Your own harmony!” she yelled. “Strike it!”

  69

  He had no idea what Ella was yelling about, but fortunately he didn’t need his own ideas anymore. The uai still raging through him went straight into her thoughts, read her plans.

  Brilliant. If he could do it.

  Tai ducked a Broken arrow shot—there were far too many weapons flying around this little room—slammed the shooter back into wafters flying in behind, and searched inside for the harmony. He already had all three resonances going—basic wafting, wafting other objects, and now mindsight—but were they in harmony? Could he get them there?

  “Your mindseye!” Ella yelled, words echoing in mindsigh
t. “It should move easiest!”

  He dodged a spinning axe and launched a mangled chair at Semeca. Too bad his mindsight was also newest. He had never even tried to control it, had only just started to keep himself separate from the flood of thoughts and emotions still coming in from outside, but—

  It was this or die. So, in the spaces between attacks, in the brief empty gaps between each pearl of time, he flexed his new resonance. Up, flooding more thoughts and feelings in, the wailing grief of Arela, the wave of panic from below as Broken brawlers smashed through the front doors.

  There. What did that do? Nothing, or maybe not nothing, but not a harmony.

  Down, mercifully tightening the reach of his sight, Tai looping around a wedge of wafters flying in, then shoving air behind them to smash them head-first into the far wall. There. Maybe there?

  A distant part of his mind registered what he’d seen. Brawlers breaking in below? They would make short work of the defenders.

  The resonance clicked. Something clicked, something felt right, more right than it had. Good enough. A Broken a few feet from him screamed and slammed itself into the ceiling. Confused by his harmony, according to Ella’s thoughts. Good. But not good enough. He shot for Semeca.

  She had, of course, read the whole thing in his thoughts, knew what he was doing, and moved to evade him, but there was only so much space in the bedchamber, and if his uai was as strong as he thought, he wouldn’t need to get very close.

  And when he did, they wouldn’t need all the resonators cutting the Broken off from Semeca’s commands. Because he would be severing them at the source.

  One corner of his consciousness burst with joy and satisfaction. Ella. This was her idea. Thank the ancestors she was here. He hit.

  The Broken screamed as one, those in the room like fish dropped back into a pond, shooting every direction, returned to their insanity, no less powerful but entirely less focused. Semeca shouted too, in frustration, and Ella in victory.

  Suddenly the things Tai had to monitor on each pearl of time got simpler. He attacked.

  Semeca struck back, of course, but without the Broken to distract him, without as much worry for Ella and Arela, he countered faster, planned better, spinning around the table she launched at him to swing a bloody axe at her. She dodged, but he saw the dodge coming and kept on her. What had been a choreography of many bodies became just a dance of two. She shot for the doorway, Tai reading her plans to get outside his field of harmony, so the Broken would respond again.

  He kept on her, shooting out into the cavernous central space, battle below turned into a rout as militiamen cut down Broken brawlers suddenly gone insane.

  You cannot kill me, Semeca-Aymila’s voice came in his mind. Even if you defeat all my Broken, I have the speed of a slip, the strength of a brawler, and a mind seasoned with a thousand years.

  I will, he thought back, not sure if he was speaking aloud anymore, because I have everything to lose, and you have nothing.

  She spun backward at him, hurling a spear. That’s ridiculous. I am queen of an empire you could never imagine.

  No, he said, pressing in, using hammers of air to smash railings at her. You are a queen of dust only. Holding on to a past that’s gone. Keeping tight on her, pushing back through what he’d seen in her mind, he went on. Jacoli, Dagrid, Bentral, Saylia, he named them, conjuring images from her own memories. Your children are gone, your descendants so distant they’ve forgotten you.

  You could never understand. Her tone was withering, but uai pushed him upstream to see the despair, the deep spring of apathy this stream was flowing from.

  It was enough to make him feel sorry for her. But she had made her choices clear-eyed. You fight for power because it is all you have left. There is no one you love in this world. I have seen it.

  She hesitated, emotions raw, and in that moment he struck, shattering railings in a circle around them to impale her five times over. Four of them blasted away at the last moment, but the fifth one hit, driving straight through her stomach.

  Semeca gasped, and went pale, and fell.

  70

  Aelya cursed, smashing her iron fist into another mad brawler who happened to turn their way. Whatever Tai had done up there, the brawlers were insane now, but that didn’t mean they were safe. Not by a long shot.

  She held a ragged line with what was left of the able-bodied fighters, mecking few of them after the brawlers broke through and started slaughtering, but she couldn’t look at the bodies, couldn’t think about her friends gone. Not only because she was constantly about to lose her lunch with all the blood around. Because she needed to stay angry, and there was a well deep inside that was only sad, only filled with grief for the lost.

  So she clung to the anger. Tai was doing it. They were doing it. He’d confused the Broken somehow, and all they had to do now was hold them off while they murdered each other. Or themselves, in the case of the red-haired woman hacking at her own stomach with a mad intensity. And every time they accidentally attacked her little band of survivors, well, that was a chance to smash another one of them in the meckstaining face for what they’d done.

  Shouts of “Tai!” and “The Blood!” rose up, and she looked up to see him battling the lady in white in the air above them, weapons and shattered debris a whirlwind around them. “Come on, you meckstain,” she growled, balling her good fist. “You can do this.”

  The Broken stuttered back to stillness for a second—they had done that a few times, when whatever Tai was doing stopped working for a moment. Then they snapped back to chaos just as shouts of victory rose up around her. She glanced up to see the biawelo finally falling, a giant spear of railing through her guts, then back to the mob of brawlers. They weren’t out of this yet.

  No more attacked, and though they kept moving erratically, the woman hacking at herself stopped, and they were generally moving toward the doors.

  Thank the ancestors. Thank the saints. Thank the mecking Councilate full of lighthairs. She was dead, and the Broken were leaving.

  But should they have gone crazy, instead of filing out so neat and orderly?

  “Sigwil,” she said, laying her good hand on his arm, eyes not leaving the retreating mob. “Something’s not right about this.”

  His face was ecstatic. “What do you mean not right? We won! He did it!” He turned and took up the shout in Achuri. “The Blood! The Blood! We did it!”

  Aelya’d lived on the streets too long to not smell a fish. She turned and looked up at the impaled woman, just now about to hit. And she did hit—but just a touch too softly.

  She was still alive.

  “TAI!” she yelled, heedless of the others, using her won’t-be-able-to-talk-tomorrow voice. “TAI, SHE’S NOT DEAD!”

  It wasn’t very secretive, but shatter secrecy. She just hoped Tai heard it. Probably up there kissing his mecking girlfriend. Aelya scavenged another spear off the dead while everyone around her celebrated. This wasn’t over.

  71

  Ella stumbled from the room just in time to see Semeca fall. It had worked. Her idea had worked.

  She’d been smarter, even if it took her until the last minute to figure everything out.

  Tai drifted down, breathing heavy, amid another shower of white plaster from the roof. They would need to get out of here, soon.

  But first she wanted another chance at life.

  So once again she waved her arms and yelled like a crazy lighthaired lady, and he noticed with a smile and came over, landing with a wince on the bloodstained carpet. His body looked fully healed in the overcoming. His tall, muscular body…

  She remembered with a start what she’d done a few minutes ago, before he overcame, and blushed. “Ah. Tai. Did you—”

  He held up a hand. “I saw it. But I was a little distracted at the time. Give me another chance?”

  She did, and this kiss was leagues better than the first one, her leaning into him, their bodies finding their own kind of harmony.


  She was just getting her hands on those wide shoulders when he stiffened. She pulled back. “What?”

  His face was suddenly all business. “I don’t know. But I need to check. Stay here, okay?” He gave her one last kiss, breaking into a grin like a little boy. “We’re not done.”

  Then he turned and leapt from the railing.

  72

  Tai fell. Aelya wouldn’t yell like that if she didn’t have a strong suspicion, and if there was anyone’s gut he trusted more than his own, it was hers. She’d been on the streets years longer than him.

  The debris-piled courtyard rushed up, Semeca’s prone form standing out in white and red atop one pile. She looked pretty dead to him.

  Ah, a voice came in his mind, and her eyes opened. But the mind’s eye tells a different story.

  His stomach fell out. Tai struck resonance, not as strong as it was now, breaking his fall. Meck. He should have made sure. Should have carried a weapon. Should have—

  She shot up toward him, and the shoulds vanished in the familiar play of strike and counterstrike. But how had she done it?

  I told you I have all six resonances, young one, and the uai of every mindseye in the world to power them. Including a brawler’s second ability.

  The ability to heal yourself. It took a while with brawlers—but apparently not if you had unlimited uai. She flew off the railing impaling her without a drop of blood.

  He shot at her, seeking his harmony again, and she laughed. It’s too late, Tai. You gave me time to make another plan.

  “It’s never too late—”

  His words were cut off by a massive crash above. Semeca shot to the side and he followed, looking up to see another boulder hurtling down, debris a halo around it. Support pillars toppled to all sides, and the boulder landed with a boom that shook the Tower.