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

by L. W. Jacobs

  The Broken. She had summoned wafters, once his harmony was out of range, and sent them after another boulder. Lifted it up the outside while he chatted with Ella. Shouts sounded below, Broken brawlers rushing back in. Of course they would. To keep the Achuri penned in until the Tower fell.

  The building groaned, debris raining down, and the whole walkway slanted underfoot. Semeca opened a polished teak door. “You love them so much, Tai? Die with them.” The window shattered at the far end, and she flew out.

  73

  Tai hesitated just a moment. He did love them so much. But the best thing he could do for them was kill Semeca, or disrupt her communications at least, so they had a chance at escape. There was no way he was beating all those brawlers alone.

  Which meant there was also no way he was making sure Ella or Aelya or any of his other friends got out, but that was how it had to be. He knew the costs. Tai shot out into the night after her.

  A swarm of wafters attacked him, but he had his harmony ready. His uai was weakening, but still a hundred times what he normally had, enough to keep them paces back from him as he searched for Semeca.

  She wasn’t hard to find, floating near the top of the Tower, which he saw with a sickening lurch was falling inward even now, like a sandcastle eroding from the inside.

  You chose wisely, she said. A survivor. Like me.

  “No,” he said, arrowing straight for her. “A leader. Nothing like you.” And again he summoned the images from her past, the lovers and children she had lost.

  That doesn’t work, she said, dodging just out of reach. I was letting you win before.

  His mindsight told a different story, uai just strong enough to feel the ancient despair rising up in her. The fear that, above all, it had all been for nothing. She had no one left.

  “You wish you would have died with them. That you had stayed in your Tower.”

  No, she spat, lashing out at him with air, all weapons gone. No, I couldn’t have.

  He lashed back, anticipating the moves, seeking deeper in her mind, following the trail of her denial upriver. Denial meant there was something to deny. Some moment she had chosen power over love.

  There. A cold morning in a high mountain pass, waking up alone. A city burned to ash by the ninespears miles below, her lover among them. Teyena. He pushed the memory back at her. “Yes, you did,” he growled. “I would rather die than live with something like this.”

  Walls of air slammed into him, shears and knives and swords. He read it all, dodged it all, worked his way closer in even as he forced her to relive the memory, the day spent wandering through the cooling ashes, white snow falling in stark contrast to the blackened buildings, searching for the right house, the right room. Finding her Teyena’s bones.

  “No!” she screamed, clutching at her head, pain so bright it finally pushed Tai out of her mind. All her attacks dropped, her defenses stilled, his last impression one of deep despair.

  Tai struck. And this time he made sure to finish the job.

  74

  Ella ran for the window. There was a time for fighting, and a time for knowing you’d done all you could. She’d seen Tai shoot out into the night, and the Tower was literally collapsing above them, a roar of shattering glass and tumbling stone. She scrambled out the broken window. Prophet send the Achuri below made it out in time.

  The night outside was madness. The heat was intense, Newgen burned to embers but still throwing off tons of heat. She turned and began running down the long spiral edge of the Tower, remembering a night not so long ago she’d had to do this for a different reason, escaping Councilate lawkeepers. Then, too, her fear of heights had struck her, but this time the fear of dying was stronger.

  The good news was it was not as hot as they’d feared, and Ella saw some water still in the troughs between houses, not boiled off like they’d thought. The bad news was that the Tower, slowly imploding, had become a glass volcano, exhaling broken glass and debris from its central hole as all the air inside was forced out. This rained around her, stabbed into her feet, but there was nothing for it. Better cut up than dead.

  Broken smashed like human-sized hail into the glowing ruins, each one an eruption of cinders, sometimes rising again, sometimes dead. Others still spun in the darkness overhead, screaming, but like those cinders they were dispersing, burning out. Below her the last of the survivors streamed from the Tower front, perhaps realizing it wasn’t as hot as they’d thought, or at least better than getting crushed. The building lurched underfoot, roaring collapse drowning out all other sounds. Ella sprinted. She wasn’t going to make it. She—

  Strong arms caught her waist and pulled her up and away from it all. Tai.

  “Looked like you could use some help,” he said.

  Her heart lurched from fear to relief. “You could say that. Semeca. Is she—”

  He nodded, stubble rough against her cheek where she pressed against him. “Dead. For good this time.”

  “Thank the Prophets. What was she?”

  “An archrevenant,” he said, as if that explained anything. “I—saw a lot, before she died. We can talk it all through, later. For now, I think we got interrupted back there.”

  “Yes,” she breathed, romance warring with lurching fear inside her. They were so far off the ground. “But could you—put us down first? Maybe somewhere private?”

  “Heights!” he cried. “I forgot. Yes.”

  He set them down in the woods west of the city, sun just beginning to glow red on the horizon. “Now. Where were we?”

  Epilogue

  The waystone I found here was strangest of all: thrust from the ice in a crevasse of its own making, surrounded by shattered glaciers as though the ice that ground down mountains could not touch it, was another of the runic stones, said by the At’li to be the finger of a god.

  Markels, Travels in the South: At’li and Achuri

  Mecksicking meckstained barley buckets. Aelya hefted another from the Councilate wagon, every inch of her body hurting despite the plug of dreamleaf in her teeth. It’d been two days since they all almost died and already Tai was making them work. In the snow, no less.

  She spat green. “Piss of a day, eh, Sigwil?”

  The fyelocke handed her down another bucket, but he was talking to one of Marrem’s daughters, chest puffed out like a strutting rooster. Poor guy. Every time she saw him he was talking up a different ear, trying to get down its shirt. Somebody needed to teach him about women.

  She hefted the buckets, twisting her iron fist so it held the strap. Weiland, now, there was a man you could admire: knew when to talk, and when a grunt was enough. She’d found him after the Tower fell down and pushed him into the least-burning building she could find, to see if he knew any other sounds.

  Turns out he did.

  She trudged down the stairs to Marrem’s bluffhouse, other survivors doing the same up and down the road. A fresh coat of white hid everything, first snow of the year. Maybe it’d finally put the city out. The Broken had burned it from Hightown all the way to Riverbottom. These were the only houses left, because they were too buried to burn.

  Marrem sat inside, fussing over a bowl full of herbs. “There you are,” she snapped. “What do you do when dreamleaf doesn’t work?”

  “Excuse me?” Marrem was supposed to know everything about herbs.

  “I’ve seen the way you chew it. Your teeth are stained a permanent green. So, what do you do when your tolerance is too high, and it won’t put you to sleep?”

  Aelya shrugged, which was hard with the buckets. “Have fun. That’s when it feels the best.”

  “That’s the problem. I’ve given that man nearly all the leaf I’ve got left and he’s still awake.”

  “Promised me a kiss!” Feynrick shouted from the other room. “More’n that!”

  Apparently ‘that man’ was Feynrick. Aelya smirked. “Sounds like he’s just fine to me.”

  “Well, he’s not. It’s a miracle he survived that fall at al
l, and with the amount of broken bones and torn tendons he’s got the man needs to sleep for a week.”

  “Sounds like maybe you owe him something first.” Aelya winked and Marrem scowled and she walked through to the back, pouring the buckets in the granary closet.

  Tai was there when she got outside, not hauling barley but at least making sure it was done right. He’d make a good leader. Now that he’d pulled his head out of his meckhole. “Where’s your girlfriend?”

  He blushed and she grinned. Everybody knew he and Ella were together—it’d been pretty obvious when they showed up the morning after the fight, clothes all misbuttoned. But he was so shattercocking shy about it that she couldn’t help but needle him.

  “Interviewing newcomers,” he said.

  “They still coming in?” People had started trickling in the day after the fight, ones who’d only left a few days ago, and some who’d run earlier on.

  “Yeah. Ella thinks it’s a good idea to keep track of them, make sure we know who’s who.” He met eyes with her. “Some of them are lighthairs.”

  “Good,” she said, not blinking. She would tell him about Curly sometime, but she needed to own her mistakes too. “We need all the help we can get. Long as they don’t mind eating wintergrass.”

  Tai grimaced. They’d both eaten plenty of wintergrass on the streets. It grew great in the snow, and would technically keep you alive. It just tasted like sickup, was all. “Yeah.”

  She knew that look. Aelya slugged him on the arm. “Hey. We won and you got the girl. So, what are you still worried about?”

  He held up a piece of paper. “This. One of the newcomers brought it with them.”

  “Who’s it from, the Councilate?”

  “It’s from Nauro.” He said that like it was worse.

  “Fox guy? We didn’t kill him?” She took the paper and read.

  Congratulations. You have done what we’ve tried and failed for centuries to do. Though without our training, you've missed reaping the rewards. We can’t let that happen again.

  Semeca is the first archrevenant to die in three hundred years. This makes you a target, not just of the Councilate, which we suspect has other archrevenants among its upper circle. Of all her surviving peers.

  She shook her head. “What’s an archrevenant?”

  “That’s what Semeca was. I’m not totally sure, but they feed off the resonances somehow. Like everyone who has a resonance sends her a little of their uai. Hers was mindseyes, though she had all the abilities. She was a thousand years old, Aels.”

  “So you getting targeted by the other ones is not so good then?”

  “Right.” He gestured at the paper. “There’s more.”

  It also makes you a target of the ninespears, both those who want your power and those who want you dead.

  You did the impossible, Tai of Ayugen, in both defeating Semeca AND saving your people. You were right to spurn my offer. But you need me more than ever now, because what you have managed with one you will not pull off with the other eight, nor are you ready for the ways in which the ninespears will attack you. Naveinya was a comparatively mild taste of that.

  “What’s the ninespears?”

  He shook his head. “I still don’t really know. Ella found some of their books, but they were mostly burned. Some kind of secret society. Nauro’s part of them, and Sablo and Odril were too. They—it seems like they can move revenants around. Voices, I mean. What we used to call ancestors. Attack you with them. Take away your resonance. That’s how Nauro got me. With one called Naveinya.”

  She spit green. “Doesn’t sound good.”

  My offer still stands. Join us, learn from us, help us take down the other eight. There is great opportunity for glory and power, power to change the world as we see fit. I know you will see the value in that.

  I await your answer in the southern forests. You will know the clearing.

  She read it again, then handed it back. “So, you going to do it?”

  “I think I have to,” he said. “There’s too much we don’t know. And as powerful as Semeca was—” He shook his head. “It’s either that or I leave right now, so I don’t drag the rest of you into it.”

  “You leave again Tai, and I will mecking break you.”

  He grinned. “Yeah. I don’t want to go either. Which means we have to figure out what we’re up against. Nauro knows all that.”

  “So you’re going to join their secret society? And then fight these archrevenant things?”

  “I am,” he said, a mischievous light in his eye. “Just not how they think.”

  ALSO IN SERIES

  BEGGAR’S REBELLION

  PAUPER’S EMPIRE

  APOSTATE’S PILGRAMAGE

  ACOLYTE’S UNDERWORLD

  From the Author

  Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, consider leaving me a review or some stars on Amazon. Authors live or die by their reviews these days, and every one means a lot to me. For previews, deleted scenes, and a free novella not available anywhere else, click here for Beggars and Brawlers: the Resonant Saga Newsletter. Or if you prefer audio, check out the Beggars and Brawlers podcast!

  Acknowledgments

  This book wouldn’t be what it is without so many people—I worked on it for so long, through so many revisions, it’s hard to even remember all the people who read it, so apologies if I miss you—but to my BSFWW oldies Laura and Neal, thank for your edits. To Kyle for being my fellow traveler on this indie journey, epic emails and all. To Rawley for gently telling me the book sucked the first time around. To Katheryn in particular for convincing me Ella shouldn’t be a sex worker. To Alex for last-minute proofreading, and Amy, Debbie, and Heidi for post-last-minute proofreads. To the SPFBO community, and Fantasy Book Critic in particular, for lending me some much-needed credibility and visibility. And to CJ Aaron and everyone at Aethon Books, for taking that visibility to the next level.

  To the fruit lovers of North Dakota and eastern Montana—bet you can’t guess which fruit town Ayugen is based on?

  To Bri and Mac, neither of whom want me to leave in the morning to go write, and are always waiting with smiles when I get back. Thank you. Hopefully, someday, this will be the only leaving I have to do.

  And finally, to you. That you got this far means you probably liked the book, and that means the world to me. As long as you keep reading, I’ll keep writing.

  Deal?

  Levi Jacobs

  Denver Colorado

  January 2020