Pauper's Empire

by Levi Jacobs

  “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 drowing 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 all, 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 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 w
ho 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.”

  Thanks for reading! The story continues with Apostate’s Pilgrimage, coming May 10th in ebook and paperback! Keep reading for a sneak peek.

  If you liked this book, leave me a review or some stars on Amazon. Indie authors live and die by their reviews these days, and I’d love to hear what you thought.

  And if the preview isn’t enough, I give a free Resonant Saga novella to everyone on my Brawlers and Beggars Mailing List, set a year before Beggar’s Rebellion—here’s the description:

  When Aelya woke up this morning, she thought she was going to pick up the score of yura her gang needed to escape the streets. Instead she finds her dealer dead, herself arrested, and her freedom dependent on finding the real killer—and convincing the lighthair holding her chains he can trust her enough to do it...

  Urchin’s Gambit – A Resonant Saga Novella

  A sneak preview of…

  Apostate’s Pilgrimage

  The Resonant Saga, Volume Three

  Coming May 2019!

  1

  Tai and Ella's boots crunched in the fresh snow, fat flakes falling from a winter-grey sky. Hightown was a wilderness of burned-out buildings around them, scorched bricks and toppled walls reaching to the sky like bare branches, crowned in pale white snow. Winter was heavy on the air, a feeling Tai associated with long months huddled around smoky fires in one hideout or another, chilled to the bone and living on thin broth. This would be his first cold season as something more than an orphan or a street tough. Something much more—he was the leader of the city now, with his own bed in a well-heated bluffhouse and people who looked up to him.

  Some days it was hard to believe.

  Ella shivered next to him, her olive face framed in a wolf's-fur cloak. "You seriously do this every year?"

  "Which part, the freezing? Or the walking around with beautiful Councilate ladies?" That part was even harder to believe. It had been a month since Semeca's attack, since they finally acknowledged what was between them, and Ella was still intoxicating. He hardly felt the cold.

  "The freezing, you oaf."

  He smiled. "You get used to it." Even so he tugged her hand closer into his pocket, glad for the warmth of their fingers twined together.

  “You know you don’t have to do this,” she said as they passed through the frozen remains of Mummer’s Square. They were heading out to gather wintergrass, part of their strategy to feed the city. “You’re a leader now. You have people to do this for you.”

  He shook his head. “That’s the kind of leader Semeca was, or Sablo. Not me. Besides,” he exhaled fog, “it’s nice to get out and get some fresh air.”

  “You’re insane,” she said, snuggling in closer. “And wonderful, of course.”

  “Insanely wonderful?” They stepped out onto the surface of the Sanga, river frozen solid at this time of year. Ahead the open field of bittermelon vines was lumpy under a fresh coat of snow, and Ella’s face went still.

  “Hey,” he said. “We don’t have to go this way, if you don’t want.” This was where she and a hundred others had fought their way from the mines to Newgen under heavy attack. They’d done their best to move the bodies before the snow came, but the ground was still churned and discolored under the snow.

  “No,” she said, “it’s okay. We won, and they died fighting for what is right. It just—” She took a breath. “That was a hard time.”

  He nodded. Most of the survivors felt this way, and the relief they all felt in the days after Semeca’s attack was colored by grief. Even with people returning who had fled in the final weeks, they were maybe four hundred now, where a month ago they had been twice that. He had taken charge of a city in mourning, and traditional services were held every day for the ancestors, wishing them safe passage and inviting them to come into the youth still in need of spirit guides.

  It was hard to know what to think of Achuri beliefs, now that he’d learned that spirit guides were more like leeches feeding off their host’s uai. So much had changed so quickly, but there was still value in the old ways. To complicate things further, the Cult of the Blood was still going strong, claiming his latest battle as another victory for “Lord Tai,” and still waited on his words as though he knew the secrets to the universe. It was another reason he liked to get out every day, despite the cold.

  “Hey,” Ella broke the silence, “Sorry, I didn’t meant to be so dour. I know that time was hard for you too.”

  “It’s okay,” he said, not wanting to remember his days in the woods while his friends fought and died. While a revenant lead him around on a broken leg pretending to be Fisher. “Dour? What does that mean?”

  She smiled. “It’s another fancy Yersh word. It means heavy and unhappy. What would you say in Achuri?”

  He thought for a minute and came up with a word, and talked about the differences between the two languages as they crossed the long field and got deep enough into the trees to find fresh wintergrass.

  They worked mostly in silence, clipping the purplish grass above the snowline to give the roots a chance to regrow. Wintergrass smelled like it tasted, sour and bitter, but it was better than starving, and the meager grain reserves they’d started the winter with were gone. With the fields burned and passage into Gendrys snowed over, they had no other options for food. It would be a long winter.

  Soft footsteps crunched behind him. “You can’t sneak up on me that easy,” he said without turning. “And if you think I want another faceful of snow—”

  Pain hit him, like an axe strike to the spine. Tai gasped, losing his grip on his shears and falling into the snow. What—

  “You’re too predictable,” a man said, stepping out from behind a leatherleaf in the corner of his vision. Ella screamed to his right, and Tai’s head snapped up. Ella was in danger. He struck resonance.

  Nothing happened.

  The man waved a hand. “Don’t bother. You won’t be able to use that against me.” He looked familiar—pale and fleshy, a slight stoop to his shoulders.

  “Odril?” Ella gasped behind him.

  “The very same,” the man said, offering a thin-lipped smile. “How nice of you to remember me.”

&nbs
p; Odril—the arms fence from Hightown? What was he doing here? It didn’t matter. Tai had to stop him. Had to keep Ella from getting hurt. Tai pushed himself up, reaching for the long dagger he kept at his side.

  “I wouldn’t try that,” Odril said quickly. “I am your master now, and I can hurt you in ways—”

  Tai lunged, sprinting the short gap between them. He stumbled halfway there, like the snow had turned to mud, and kept running. The ground grew stickier the closer he got, until his sprint slowed to a walk, then to a stall as he struggled to even lift them from the snow. “What—resonance is this?”

  Odril smiled. “This is no resonance, thrall. This is far beyond resonances.”

  It clicked then—Sablo’s strange attack outside Gendrys. That had stolen his uai too. But making his feet stick to the earth?

  On the far side of Odril Ella got to her feet. He turned to her, as if Tai was no longer a threat. Tai, who’d killed an immortal being just last month. Defeated an entire army the month before that. Tai tugged at his foot—stuck solid. How was Odril doing this?

  “Ella,” Odril said. “How nice to see you again. You’re looking… aged, I have to say.”

  “Stuff boarcock up your shatterhole,” Ella spat, pulling a knife from her belt and flinging it at him.

  Odril blanched, but the knife went wide. Still—he hadn’t stopped it, with whatever powers he was using. That meant there was a chance.

  “Is that any way to speak to your new master? Or old master I guess I should say, in our case?”