Acolyte's Underworld

by Levi Jacobs

  Uhallen chuckled. “Shamanic work can be exhausting. And ironically, often emphasizes our physical needs. Go and practice what you’ve learned here, and return tomorrow at twelfth bell.”

  Marea went, spending more of her precious moons on the first food vendor she found, a pickled squid cart on Uhallen’s sidestreet just short of Puahi Square. She wanted to check on Nawhin and Rena, but what would she do? Tell them she could grab ghosts, so they didn’t have to worry any more?

  The thought made her remember Uhallen’s instructions, once she was well into her second ricewrap of lemon-cured squid. Marea straightened on her three-legged stool, unfocusing her eyes into shamanic sight.

  It wasn’t unfocusing exactly—more like gazing at something so far off that everything closer in lost detail. An elderly woman was passing on the far side of the street, and something long and silvery resolved at the base of her skull, like a banner of pearly silk waving in its own breeze. A farmer passed in the other direction, his cart full of the elastic hygen root fishermen used for their nets. Coiled around his neck like an ethereal snake was his revenant, red with pulses of something darker flowing through it. As Marea gazed deeper revenants came into focus all along the street, most attached to the people passing through, some drifting in various stages of dissolution. There were far more than she’d ever seen before, but that made sense—Worldsmouth held more people in a smaller place than anywhere she’d been since learning the sight.

  Marea turned to the squid vendor, his stooped figure indistinct in the distant focus of her gaze. His revenant appeared in sharp detail, a bulbous attachment at the top of his spine that fanned out in pale tentacles. Squidlike, Marea thought with a grin.

  Now to grasp it. She summoned her arm, imagining it in all its detail, and imagining the revenant as solid and rough-hided.

  The thing squirmed away, tentacles writhing. Marea’s brows rose—none of the earlier revenants had been that active. Then again, this thing was actively feeding on the man’s uai. It was probably the first healthy revenant she’d ever tried to grab.

  She tried again, frowning as she willed the thing to stay still, to stick to her shamanic grasp. The vendor glanced at her, though his features were hard to see—she realized her hands were raised like they could grab revenants, and blushed deeply but kept on. She’d bought his food, and she was essentially doing him a favor if she could pull this revenant off.

  She caught solid hold of it on the third try. “Okay,” Marea muttered, surprised to feel the thing squirming under her grip as though it were her real hand on the back of a wild hare, “now to get you off.”

  She pulled and it resisted. The vendor’s head shot up but Marea ignored him, willing more strength into her arm, imagining exactly what it would feel like as the revenant came free. She’d pulled her cousin’s tooth when they were younger, and she would never forget the sensation of roots tearing free deep in his gums, or the hot well of blood over her fingers as she twisted it free.

  That was how the revenant came free, writhing under her hands, as though it had sunk roots deep into the man’s spine. He gasped. “What did you do?”

  Marea startled, losing her focus at the man’s words. Her vision snapped back to his face, eyes large, skin spotted and balding before his time. “I, ah, I didn’t do anything,” she said. It was basically true, to someone who didn’t know about revenants.

  He gave her an untrusting look, one hand rubbing his neck where the thing had been attached. “Well you were looking scatting funny just now.”

  Marea shrugged. “I’m just trying to eat my wrap. Sorry.” She took a bite as if to emphasize the fact that she was a paying customer, his only one at the moment, and the man turned back to his pot of rice. Marea unfocused her gaze again, eager to see what had become of the squid-revenant. It floated free along the rooftops above, detached end raw and vulnerable, like a leechfish mouth.

  Interesting. Marea finished her wrap and headed for the docks, joining the stream of people as she got to Puahi’s Square and doing her best to keep her feet as she held shamanic sight. It was like discovering a secret circus happening all around—streamers and ribbons and fantastical creatures of all colors, some massive and dark and brooding, some barely there, and all impervious to the laws of physics, flowing through solid objects and defying gravity like the best wafter could only dream of doing.

  More than once she lost her feet, or flinched away from something no one else could see, but holding the sight felt important. Shamans saw revenants all the time, as far as she could tell, and if she was going to face them she at least needed to be proficient at it. Still, it was a relief to get out over the water and have the relative quiet of just her taxi’s other revenants and the few drifting along the waters to distract her.

  She took it around the southern tip of Ylensmarsh, searching the scattering of ornate towers there for Uhallen’s, then up the Einsarm past Widow’s Hill and Brokewater to The Racks. He hadn’t tried to coerce her into anything today, and he seemed to be teaching her real skills. Maybe he wasn’t out to use her. She’d keep her guard up anyway.

  She debarked at the same tar-covered stone pier, steps purposeful along the wide boulevard. She didn’t have much money to offer them, and no uai to cure Rena’s fever, but she had her resonance. It was a long shot, but she needed something to ease the guilt weighing on her.

  If it didn’t work she could still give them the rest of her money—they’d looked badly off. No wonder, with Eyadin gone and no blood connection to a major House. It would be on Nawhin to support the family now.

  Which was all Marea’s fault, of course. Hers or Harides’s, depending on how you looked at it. But hers to clean up, either way.

  Marea drew herself up and pulled the chimes. Dread pressed on her like a blanket of stones, but with any luck this would make it lighter.

  With any luck, they’d never find out the real reason she wanted so badly to help them.

  No one answered. Marea pulled the chimes again, forcing herself to focus. Could they have gone out? But Nawhin wouldn’t take Rena out in her state.

  Had something happened? Current’s wake if Rena died Marea would never forgive herself.

  A shuffle at the door—the lock being pulled back, then it swung open a crack. A pallid, crusted face hovered there in a sweat-soaked nightshift.

  “Rena?” Marea asked.

  The girl’s face fell. She’d been hoping for someone else, apparently.

  Marea’s stomach tightened. Probably her dad.

  The girl swayed against the door and Marea rushed forward, just catching her as she fell.

  “So—thirsty,” Rena managed. Her body weighed nothing, though she looked to be Marea’s height.

  “Right,” Marea said, half-carrying the girl in and closing the door. “Let’s get you some water.” This at least was something she could do. She sat the girl in one of the sitting chairs and ladled cool water from a cistern in the corner.

  She held it to the girl’s mouth—Marea could see the fever’s namesake blueish tint in Rena’s lips—and waited as she choked down water, coughing much of it down the front of her shirt.

  Marea’s heart sank. She was no healworker, but she didn’t need to be. Rena didn’t have long to live.

  “Thank you,” Rena managed, slumping back in the chair. “You’re—Marea?”

  “Yes. I’m—sorry to intrude. I thought maybe your mother would be here.”

  “At—market,” Rena worked out, her voice raspy. “Working.”

  So she had gone to seek work. Leaving her dying daughter alone. Because Marea had killed her husband.

  Currents, she needed to fix this.

  No time like the present. Marea summoned a vision of a healthy, vibrant Rena into her mind. It wasn’t easy, given the girl’s wretched state, but still she envisioned glowing skin, smelled clean air instead of decay, imagined the girl laughing from her belly. Marea struck resonance.

  Rena just gazed at her, cheekbones sticking fro
m what should have been a beautiful face, unchanged.

  A thought suddenly came to her. Uai fixed fevers. Marea had none to give, not yet, but Rena would have some.

  “Do you want to get better?” Marea asked her.

  Rena paused a moment, her breathing so shallow Marea thought maybe the girl had gone to sleep. “Fish want to swim?” she said at last.

  It was so unexpected, so out of place, that Marea barked a laugh despite herself. “Good. Ok. Well, I—” How did she explain the power of uai and belief? “Just, you can, okay? Just believe that you can.”

  As she said it she gazed into shamanic sight and found Rena’s revenant, a slender ribbon of green hanging down her back. It probably wasn’t getting much uai from its host, not with how far the fever had progressed, but Rena needed every bit of that energy for her recovery. Marea seized the thing and yanked.

  It came free and Rena’s eyes fluttered open. “What—”

  “Nothing,” Marea said. “Just—believe in yourself, okay? Plenty of people get bluefoot, and they get better.”

  A rueful smile passed the girl’s blueish lips. “Sure. Plenty—people get rich too.”

  At least she still had a sense of humor. “I should go,” Marea said, making to stand. “Do you need anything else? More water?”

  “No,” Rena said, laying a flaking hand on Marea’s arm. “Stay. Talk.”

  Marea paused, halfway to her feet. “I—about what?”

  “My dad,” Rena rasped. “Tell me about—the end.”

  The girl’s look was a knife in Marea’s heart, but she deserved to know it. Deserved to know all of it, including how stupid Marea had been to kill him, but there was no way she could say that. So, guilt pressing on her twice as heavily as before, she related what she could of the final days before Aran.

  did,Rena perked up some as she did, asking a few questions. She didn’t draw into herself or start weeping like Marea had feared—instead the story seemed to give her strength, and she asked Marea to tell her several times about how her father had warned them of the final attack.

  When she was done she again made to leave, not wanting to wear the girl out, and Rena again caught her sleeve. “Stay. Tell me more.”

  Marea stopped, guilt pressing her at once to be gone and to do what she could to ease the girl’s pain. “About what?”

  “Anything. Your life. Just nice—to talk.”

  Her life. What was there to say about that? Still, she’d talk for hours if it did a scrap of good for this girl. “Well, I’m Marea Fetterwel, if you didn’t catch that before. I used to live in The Racks, actually. Coridge Lane. My family moved to Widow’s Hill a few years back.”

  “The Hill,” Rena said, and Marea thought she saw an eyebrow raise. “Posh.”

  “More like pretentious,” Marea said, feeling oddly comfortable with this dying girl. How long had it been since she talked to someone her own age? “My uncle moved too soon, and now that my dad’s gone I think he’s struggling to pay the rent.”

  Rena’s brow furrowed. “Your dad gone?”

  “Yeah,” Marea said, and told the story of how her parents died, which lead into what Ayugen was like and how she’d gotten by without them in a rebel city.

  “You miss him?” Rena asked, sun’s rays reddening out the oilpaper window.

  “Every day,” Marea said, surprising herself at the longing that welled up. She’d gotten so used to being alone, to fending for herself. But she remembered how long that had taken, working in the caves with Ella just to take her mind off it. “But it gets easier.”

  “Hope so,” Rena managed, then started coughing.

  Marea got her a ladle of water, stomach turning at the deep, phlegmy sound of Rena’s cough. If she didn’t do something this girl would die, and soon.

  Marea helped her into bed. “You should sleep,” she said, pressing covers around her. “Thank you, for listening to me talk for so long.”

  Rena lay on her side, eyes closed, breathing labored. It was hard to leave, but the girl needed sleep, and Marea dreaded Nawhin coming back. Like the woman would have figured out the truth, and break this fragile friendship they’d started to build. Because that’s what it felt like, despite the guilt and fear. A friendship.

  “Come back,” Rena’s voice came as she was leaving.

  “What?”

  “Tomorrow,” Rena croaked. “Nice to—talk. Come back.”

  After all the sob stories she’d told Rena, those simple words were the ones that made Marea tear up. “I will,” she said. “Tell your mom I left some money, okay?” She laid what she had left on the table.

  Marea left with a lighter heart despite the fear and guilt. A lighter heart and a new fire inside to learn as fast as she could, to get the uai she needed to save Rena before it was too late.

  14

  Beyond the logistical conveniences, I find it amusing to pose as a shaman. What better disguise than as my own sworn enemy?

  —Archenault Teynsley, private letters

  House Alsthen was a mountain of grey in the sea of white-washed walls that was West Cove. Ella walked Founders Boulevard from the pier, streams of House employees in colored garb thick here: Mettelken bankers in somber navy, Galya bureaucrats with its seven-armed squid emblazoned on every shoulder. But most of all, on this street, the blue and gray of House Alsthen, lantern-and-hammer insignia gaudy on the uniforms of the lower ranks, subtle on those higher up. Their workers were lighthaired for the most part, though Alsthen was a Seinjialese House, the first of its kind successful enough to make Council status. She remembered when they had undercut and ousted House Yenox, the first House to control their entire supply chain, from mining to smithing to marketing. Conservatives had spoken of a darkhaired house like it would be the end of the Councilate. Liberals had proclaimed it as the success of the colonial model, that a House could come from a former protectorate. Ella saw it as the next phase of imperial erasure, as Seinjialese people with their own robust history traded their lifeways to compete on the Councilate’s economic terms.

  Still, Alsthen had retained some of their Seinjialese roots. Where most Council Houses strove to outdo each other with ostentatious wealth and daring designs, Alsthen’s compound was built of plain gray granite, shipped all the way from Seingard in a very different sort of wealth display. Its architecture hailed back to Seingard’s feudal history as well, with thick outer walls and towers designed more for defense than for architectural innovation.

  It managed to intimidate for those very reasons—in a city that hadn’t seen invasion since well before the founding of the Councilate, Alsthen’s compound was a fortress among mansions.

  Was there an archrevenant behind its design, planning for an uncertain future? Falena had said Teynsley was the driving force behind the creation of the Councilate—could Alsthen’s sudden rise to power and bleak military appearance be his attempt to regain control of his creation?

  A chill ran down her spine despite the heat. She was hunting a being as much a force of history as a god or man. But the archrevenant was not her target today: today she was looking for a youngish woman in the clerical department with a few strands of dark in her light hair.

  The House’s clerical department had a bustling sitting area, scribes and calculors passing through with sheafs of documents in their hands. Ella eyed each one—thank the Prophet fyelockism usually expressed as an even mix of dark and light—a lighthaired woman with just a few sprigs of black would stand out. Unless the woman had dyed her hair since—such things were not unheard of, though inevitably the result was something other than natural-looking hair.

  “May I help you?” one of the receptionists asked. Ella drew out a conversation about seeking employment, eying the workers passing through all the while.

  Fortunately, Alsthen required an application and essay from potential employees. Ella settled back and began penning a work of pure fiction, her mind only half on her words as she watched for a black-stranded lighthair. She needed to f
ind the woman to figure out who Teynsley was hiding as, but she might also need the application—once she found him out, she would need some excuse to stay close to him. Calculism might do nicely.

  She saw few fyelockes—true darkhairs occasionally passed through, looking to be in positions of power, but even after the House’s bell had struck fourteen, she had yet to see a woman matching Nawhin’s description. She’d been here three hours, and the receptionist was beginning to eye her—House-to-House espionage was not unheard of, and most Houses trained their employees in counter measures.

  The last thing she wanted to do was draw attention, especially if Teynsley was in power here. It didn’t look likely she’d run into the woman by happenstance—Alsthen’s clerical staff was huge—but a placard on the wall listed start and stop times for each shift. And because the entire compound had only one main way in and out—part of its defensibility—if she watched outside the gates around shift change time, she’d have a good chance of spotting this woman. Especially now that the clerical uniform—two narrow stripes of orange down a bland cobalt suitcoat, for both men and women—had been burned into her mind.

  Ella turned in her application, not wanting to arouse suspicion, then left with promises to check back in a few days.

  Ella passed out of the thick stone gates and back into the humid, sun-bleached cityscape of West Cove. There were a few hours till shift change and it was the worst time of the day to be out in Worldsmouth, the manicured rows of cypress doing little to break up the sun’s heat. She found her feet carrying her deeper into the district. Ironically, she knew Brokewater better than she did West Cove, though she’d lived here the first fifteen years of her life. She’d been too young to wander much in the early years, and spent her teen years locked in a cell.

  She smiled suddenly—she’d had a view out the narrow window of her cell, and there had been an ice bar she’d always been curious about. A place her mother would go sometimes, on particularly stressful days. She’d always wanted to go, had dreamed of being free enough to walk even a few streets from home. Then she’d run away and literally never come back.