by Levi Jacobs
It wasn’t all bad—she could ferret information out of cigar-suitors as well as she could from the shop’s employee. Half of them, of course, were only asking questions to lead her into some topic they personally were knowledgeable about, so they could then explain it at length to her. The trouble was the other half, the ones who knew how to listen, were so attentive it was difficult to make her questions about a darkhaired smoker sound casual.
It felt like The Swallowtail Mistress all over again, or the wealthy suitors her parents had sent to her in her early years of confinement. Fortunately, those times gave her plenty of experience directing conversations where she wanted while coming off simple-minded and innocent.
Unfortunately, none of them knew of or had seen a darkhaired cigar smoker frequenting The Gentleman Sage. After exhausting the last of the able-to-listen cigar suitors and seeing another wave of the want-to-hear-myself-talk ones coming, Ella made a quick exit.
She sucked a delicious breath of clean air. Even the city’s sewer-delta stench smelled fresh after the green-gray haze of that place.
The sun was nearly down in the sky, conversation humming through the light foot traffic on West Cove’s broad thoroughfares. She had at least gleaned the names of the other respected cigar shops in the city—Eddard’s Pipe and Sage and The Philosopher’s Leaf. The second of those was a short river taxi away, in the old money district of Reed Heath. She spent the trip watching the fires of The Stilts and the white globes of Ylensmarsh’s lanterns slide by, wondering how old her body was, and whether it would be worse to walk the Brokewater by night as an old woman or a young one.
Still, she had her resonance, and every extra day it took her to find Teynsley was another day the archrevenant could send assassins after Tai. Better to push it. She could handle some Brokewater thugs. But Tai’s attacker had wafted, timeslipped, used the spear, and changed his appearance even without the spear’s power. She’d been avoiding the thought, not wanting to admit what Tai was up against, but since the attacker wasn’t an archrevenant himself, he must have been a shaman. Which meant Teynsley somehow had shamans working for him, though the two should be bitter enemies.
Currents send there were no more attacks before she got back.
Currents send Tai had gone to Ayugen. He’d be harder to track down there.
The Philosopher’s Leaf was stone and leather and dark wood inside, the air pleasantly clear, with a clever system of vents and flues along the ceiling.
The Leaf’s clientele, however, proved little different than The Gentleman Sage, and Ella kept a pleasant smile plastered to her face as she weeded out the talkers from the listeners, then carefully plied them for information about a darkhaired cigar smoker. More than once she nearly passed out from nausea as she did so—ventilation or not, the musky stench of sage seemed to stick in her nostrils, and she had to resist a primal urge to just get out, mission or not.
Fortunately, the shop was not as well attended as the last, and she worked through her possible informants in half an hour. She pitched her smoldering cigar in the fountain outside—given to her by a particularly insistent bald-headed man bragging about his position in Jeltenets—and headed for the docks. She’d learned nothing and she was exhausted, but the shop in Ylensmarsh was on her way back to Brokewater anyway. She could do one more.
Ella almost changed her mind at the wave of smoke that rolled out from Eddard’s Pipe and Sage, the interior as cramped and ancient as one might expect from Ylensmarsh. Then her eyes lighted on a selection of recent broadsheets on a side table. Her article should be out by now, possibly even republished elsewhere if it’d proven popular. She could handle one more pack of smoking suitors.
The shop’s inside was packed with men still dressed in House colors, each clutching a pipe or cigar, the room as noisy as any low-class teahouse. For once, the men didn’t turn as one to size her up. Either her resonance had finally aged her past male attention, or the place was too crowded to notice. Either way Ella squared her shoulders, breathing firmly through her mouth, and made her way to the table with the broadsheets.
And there it was, squarely at the top of Stiltspeak and Delta’s Oath, two of the main broadsheets aimed at the lower class. Ella scanned them quickly and was pleased to see they’d reprinted her without too many cuts or revisions. She didn’t trust the literary taste of men like the crier’s boss, and she hoped the higher-class broadsheets would pick her story up.
“Anything interesting?” a voice reeking of sage asked over her shoulder. Ella forced a smile and turned back to her work.
Thirty minutes later she was ready to leave. There were plenty of men there she hadn’t talked to, but the smoke was starting to turn her stomach. She was starting to feel her age—this would be easier after a night recharging with the spear’s uai. The man currently doing his best to buy her another cigar despite the smoking monstrosity she held in her hand was more of a talker than a listener, but he also claimed to frequent the shop daily. If the archrevenant had been in here, he would know it.
He paused to inhale, halfway through describing how Ergstad’s last innovation in barge hulls was going to revolutionize the shipping industry, and Ella seized on the opening to try a last line of questions.
“That’s very interesting,” she said, holding her own cigar as far from her face as possible. “I find you cigar smokers such an interesting crowd. But it really is a lighthaired man’s pursuit, doesn’t it?”
The man—Petrin, was it?—startled, as though shaken awake from his barge-hull reverie. “It is, I suppose. The damned things really aren’t cheap, is one aspect of it. Not too many mudhairs can even afford to step in here.”
Perfect. She had refined her methods of steering cigar conversations over the course of the evening. “But you would think with Alsthen, at least,” she said innocently, “there would be a few darkhairs wealthy enough to come by.”
“Alsthen.” Possibly-Petrin puffed smoke dismissively. “They’re too Seinjialese to be caught smoking these things. Northern leaf, you know. Probably all sitting around somewhere drinking that fermented swill they call lager.”
At least he hadn’t been outright prejudiced about it, like a lot of the men had been that night, when she brought up Alsthen. “But have you seen none around?” Ella pressed, walking a fine line between getting the answers she wanted and outright negating the man’s opinion, which would likely shut him down. “I’ve heard there’s at least one Alsthen higher-up that enjoys fine sage.”
Maybe-Petrin pulled on his cigar, cherry blazing red as he gathered his thoughts. “There is one,” he said on exhale. Ella’s heart surged. Finally. “Don’t see him too much, but when he comes in seems like he’s shopping for his entire House.”
“How interesting,” Ella said. “I’d like to talk with the man. As part of my studies on sage culture, you understand.” This had been her cover story from the start, one the men seemed only too happy to believe in. Of course someone would want to study them. Everyone thought their own lives were fascinating. “You don’t happen to know his name, do you?”
“Uhallen,” He said, tapping ash into a wide ceramic bowl. “The man’s name is Uhallen.”
18
Marea took her time climbing the tower stairs. She’d woken still exhausted, eyes red and puffy, to firm knocks on her door. She’d been sure it was lawkeepers come to arrest her for Josell’s murder.
It had been Lineila instead, summoning her to a breakfast in which her uncle eyed the copious amounts of food she put away and muttered about layabout nieces. She hadn’t had the words to tell him about her meeting at Mattoy—the whole thing felt so petty compared to what she’d gotten involved in—and time had been short. Whatever else happened, she was not missing her meeting with Uhallen. The shaman had promised her power, enough to ‘ease your friend’s pain.’ Yesterday had been a scatstorm, but if it dried out to her helping Rena, it would all be worth it.
Marea circled higher and the redstone roofs of West Cove appe
ared beyond Ylensmarsh, hazy in the sweltering noonday air. She found her footsteps slowing. Felt a sudden urge to turn and go back down the stairs, to stop before she got in too deep with shamans and murders. To go and apologize to Nawhin and Rena and pray that she made enough from the Mattoy deal to keep them comfortable while Rena died.
To accept that she wasn’t strong enough to do this.
“No,” Marea whispered, forcing her feet into motion again. She’d wanted control of her life for years: while living under her parents’ wings in Newgen, then constrained as an orphan in a rebel city, and the weakest person on the long and dangerous journey north. All the while she’d felt capable of more, and just needed the chance to prove it. Avery revealing her fatewalking to her had been that chance—but she’d blown it by believing the rest of his lies.
Running away from Eyadin’s murder would be accepting she didn’t have control, that she couldn’t fix her own mistakes. The first step was saving Rena’s life. And if that meant she got a little bloody on the way, so be it. This didn’t tie her to Uhallen, or anyone else. No commitments and no attachments, she reminded herself. Get your power and get out.
She cleared the top floor, northern winds carrying a bit of cool from the ocean, to find Uhallen was not alone. Three people sat on chairs near the far edge of the circular space—a young man and two older women. No, they didn’t sit—they were tied there, heads lolling.
She glanced from them to Uhallen, who leaned against a column smoking his ever-present cigar. At her gaze, he exhaled. “They’re not dead,” he said. “Just unconscious. We’ll need them for today’s session.”
Marea steeled herself. “Am I going to have to kill them?”
Uhallen barked a laugh. “No! Not at all. Was the mission so bad, then?”
It was awful, Marea wanted to say. I cried half the night afterwards.
“It wasn’t great,” she said out loud. “Josell figured me out, and the revenant attack didn’t work. Or, it did eventually, but things got messy.”
“Mm,” the shaman said. “But you learned something too.”
“I learned a few things,” she said, trying to sound confident. “That you can have more than one shamanic arm, for one thing. And that you have to pull a revenant off for an attack to work. But most of all, that I can’t keep murdering people in broad daylight in this city.”
“It wasn’t murder,” Uhallen said, voice hardening for a moment. “It was justice. I told you Josell’s past, and you surely got a sense for the man while you were fighting. He deserved to die.”
That made her feel better, if marginally. Uhallen could be lying, but Josell had seemed like a meckstain. “I didn’t see any revenants to thrall though,” Marea said. “I’m not sure he had any.”
“He had three,” Uhallen said, examining the lit end of his cigar. “I took them.”
She started. “You were there?”
“Close enough,” the shaman said. “I had to make sure you survived.”
“Then you know I almost didn’t,” Marea said, unable to keep a touch of anger out of her voice. “You could have stepped in.”
“I had to make sure you were resourceful as I hoped,” the shaman said, “and you were. You did well.”
Marea blushed, realizing the man had likely watched her scrub herself in the courtyard, and panic, and lose herself to tears.
“Thank you,” she said, trying to get control of herself. “So the three revenants you got—”
Uhallen nodded. “You are owed one and a half, as per our agreement. Though I think I will give you two, as one is not so strong as the others, and you need uai more than I.”
A weight lifted from her shoulders she didn’t know she’d been carrying. “Great,” she said. She was going to get power. Uhallen hadn’t been lying or using her, or if he was he at least intended to honor this part of their bargain. She could help Rena. “So how do we do it? Do you just stick them on me?”
The shaman pulled on his cigar. “No. Sticking them, like you practiced yesterday, will cause a revenant to start feeding, once it seats. What we want is to get fed. You have to do it backwards.”
“Backwards,” Marea said, trying to imagine what that meant.
A revenant rose from the floor, pinkish-gray, pointed toward her. “Think of the revenants as shadows of their human bodies. Not only does their size and shape and color reflect the quality of that human’s experience, their morphology also approximates their creator’s.”
Marea frowned at the bulbous thing. “Meaning?”
“Meaning they have a mouth and an anus,” Uhallen said, breeze catching his smoke and drawing it out over the bay beyond. “A place to consume uai and a place to get rid of what they haven’t used. So far we have been working with the mouths—that is what you’ve been thinking of as the front.”
Marea thought back to the revenants she’d pulled from people. Many of them had vaguely raw circular spots where they’d attached, like sucker fish.
“Exactly. Their exit holes are harder to find, but that matters little for our purposes. Now. If our intention is to thrall rather than stick a revenant on someone, how would you expect to do it?”
“Thralling means to get the uai they’re… not using,” Marea said, trying to ignore the anus metaphor. “So we need to attach their—backs to ourselves, rather than their fronts.”
“Good,” Uhallen said, and casually ripped the revenant from one of the sedated women. Her head jerked up, then lolled back in slumber. “Because those ends are so hard to find, we do it thus.” A second shamanic arm extended from him and pushed into the mouth of the revenant, disappearing inside before appearing from the rear of the pinkish-gray blob.
“Having found the end,” he said, “we attach it to ourselves.” He circled his shamanic arm around and pointed to the spot between his brows. The revenant slid down his arm and stuck to his eyebrow crease. He pulled his arm free.
Marea stared. “Aren’t you risking an archrevenant sensing the loss of power and coming for you?”
“These are what we call unaligned revenants—they don’t vibrate at any of the six regular frequencies. And anyway,” he grinned, “the archrevenants are likely not as sharp as you think.”
“Unaligned,” she said. “So—their hosts don’t have one of the six resonances?”
“No,” he said. “Their abilities are all over the place, and often useless. They’re also exceedingly rare, which is why shamans struggle so many years to increase their uai stream. There just aren’t many targets out there. Most cells have a ranking system that counts by the individual thrall, and plenty of seekers only have two or three themselves. I don’t doubt Josell got these from the shamans he killed during Aymila’s time. When Tai took the spear and her power evaporated, these few remained.”
“So that’s—one of Josell’s revenants?”
“Yes,” Uhallen said, swiping at the thing impatiently. It spun away, leaving a gossamer trail like a silk moth. “You can see it’s pinkish-gray—an in-between color. If you see these, thrall them. They are the safest bets. Solid colors like blue and black and red stand for solid resonances, and you do stand a chance of raising a god’s ire if you thrall them. Now. Take a revenant and try it.”
Hesitantly, Marea extended her arm and pulled the revenant from the young man on the left. Like Uhallen had said, it was a mottled greenish yellow, not the simpler colors of the revenants she had seen so far. Nauro had been so adamant about not thralling unknown revenants that she still hesitated after summoning her second arm, imagining a lightning bolt suddenly striking from the sky the moment she attached it to her forehead.
But she was also starting to suspect Uhallen was as powerful as Nauro had been, or more. And he hadn’t survived this long by calling down the gods’ ire.
So she put her second hand into the thing’s mouth. It felt awful—slick and warm and tight. It also resisted her arm like a human throat might. She grunted. “This isn’t easy.”
“That’s your
imagination. Don’t think of it as a human throat. Think of it like the sleeve of a shirt, just something you’re putting on to keep you warm.”
Marea frowned, trying to change her mental image. A shirt. Maybe a loose sailcloth shirt like she’d seen on the fashionable women in West Cove, slightly scratchy and billowing in the wind.
And like that, it was. Marea gasped and her hand popped out the far side.
“Belief,” Uhallen said. “I cannot tell you enough, it all comes down to uai and belief. Now put it on. You’ve earned this.”
Stilling the last of her fears, Marea bent the hand around that was sticking from the revenant and placed it between her eyebrows. It tingled—then the revenant slid down her arm and hit.
It was like a monsoon gust shooting directly into her skull. Marea sucked in a breath, limbs flooding with strength, all the scents and sights of the world sharpening.
“Prophets,” she breathed. “This is amazing.”
Uhallen smiled. “It is pleasant, isn’t it?” He blew a puff of smoke. “You forget, after so long. Congratulations. You’ve augmented your uai stream, and you’re now further along than ninety percent of the people who call themselves ninespears.”
Gods. “I—will this help me with Rena?”
“It should do something, yes, though the effect of each individual revenant is small. Most shamans will say you need ten or more to noticeably augment your lifespan.”
“I’m not trying to live a long time,” Marea said, spinning around, feeling like she’d slammed a cup of distilled ginseng. “I just need to help my friend.”
“And this will do that,” Uhallen said, watching her with obvious amusement. “Though to actually cure her you’ll need quite a few more.”