Apostate's Pilgrimage: An Epic Fantasy Saga (Empire of Resonance Book 3)

by L. W. Jacobs

  “You’re amazing, you know that?” she whispered in his ear.

  He grunted, half asleep.

  He was amazing, for so many reasons. Prophet send she lived to see them all.

  52

  Kill him? I doubt I could kill the boy if an archrevenant failed—but there are other ways to defeat a man. Or a woman. And the best of them is love.

  —Meyn Harides, personal journals

  Tai woke to Feynrick cursing. Not the loud, exaggerated cursing the Yatiman usually did, but low, serious cursing.

  He rolled out of bed. The sun was barely up, amber light shining through the hazy farmhouse windows. Ella blinked at him. “What—”

  Tai pulled a shirt on and rushed outside. If Feynrick was serious, that meant trouble. Danger. Shamans had found them, maybe, or whitecoats. Tai struck resonance.

  Feynrick was standing alone in an unassuming patch of grassy farmyard, staring down. Cursing.

  “Feynrick, man,” Tai said low, not wanting to wake the others. “What is it?”

  Feynrick turned to him with a mournful expression. “See for yourself.”

  Tai looked. Eyadin lay face down in the grass, as though he’d passed out in the night.

  Passed out with a knife in his throat.

  Tai’s stomach clenched. “What—” It couldn’t be. “Who—”

  “Found him like this when I came out to piss,” Feynrick said.

  “Who would attack him and not the rest of us?” It didn’t make any sense. Tai rolled his shoulders, suddenly tight. All that work, the compromise they’d made last night, Eyadin’s family in Worldsmouth—

  Gone. Because you still think you’re entitled to the spear.

  Tai shook his head. Ydilwen was the last thing he needed right now.

  “Look at the knife,” Feynrick said, face still mournful. “It’s same as the other stock in the kitchen.”

  Same as the other stock in the kitchen. Tai thought through the words, struggling like they were in some foreign tongue.

  “It was one of us,” Fenyrick said. “Avery, Marea, or Ella. Don’t see how it coulda been otherwise.”

  Meckstains. One of them did it? “But who—”

  “It wasn’t me,” Feynrick said quickly. “You know I had no dogs with the man. Was willing to let him come so long as you thought it was right.”

  “Then who—”

  “Tai?” Ella leaned out the open door, still in her thin nightdress. “What’s going on?”

  He hated the new light he saw her in, hated the suspicion, but Feynrick was right. It had been one of them. “Eyadin’s dead,” Tai said, putting it bluntly, watching her reaction. Evaluating the sincerity of her shock, the look in her eyes, the strength of her grip as she held him and looked at the body.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “You had finally convinced him.”

  “And now his spirit is another revenant,” Tai said. And now I repeat again the pattern I was trying to break.

  What that his thought or Ydilwen’s?

  “Think of it this way,” Feynrick said. “Least this way we can be sure he ain’t bringing that message to Aran.”

  Which was what Ella had wanted initially, whatever she’d said last night. Tai struck resonance, hating himself for it even as he had to know. He looked her in the eyes. “Did you do this?”

  “No, Tai,” she said, disgust and more than a little hurt registering in her voice.

  Her thoughts mirrored that exactly and he relaxed. “Okay. I’m sorry. I just—”

  “You think one of us did it?” she asked, turning back to the body.

  Feynrick told her about the knife.

  “Gods,” she said, looking toward the open door. “So, it had to be Marea or Avery?”

  “Or it was the shaman that sent him,” Avery said, stepping out into the yard. “Taking her revenge and trying to sow discord among us at the same time.”

  Tai didn’t wait to peer into the man’s thoughts, little good though it would likely do. “How did you know about this?” Tai asked.

  Avery shrugged. “I heard you talking inside. Pretty hard to ignore half the room getting up and leaving at the crack of dawn.”

  Avery’s current of thoughts showed the same thing, with plenty of other streams traveling back to his care for Marea, his worry about the coming day, even a trickle that was sorrow for a man killed unnecessarily.

  “Are you masking your thoughts?” Tai asked, hating that he had no other way to find out, hoping the blunt approach would make something happen in the man’s thoughts at least.

  There was nothing. “No reason to mask them if I don’t have anything to hide.”

  Marea came out then, and saw the body, and screamed, eyes going wide. And all he read in her thoughts was shock and horror. “Who would do this?” she asked, staring at the corpse.

  “One of us, apparently,” Tai said. “The knife came from inside the house.”

  She blanched at this, looking from face to face, but her thoughts showed no sign of guilt. Could Avery be right? Would a powerful shaman be able to do this? He hated that he didn’t know.

  “This wasn’t you?” Tai asked, knowing it was poor timing and rude, but needing to at least try every angle. Watch her thoughts for anything strange.

  He got nothing but the indignation that mirrored her reply. “Of course it wasn’t me. I agreed with you for once, that we couldn’t kill him, even with his message. Why would I kill him? How could I even? He’s twice my size.”

  Eyadin hadn’t been twice her size, but the girl had a point. She could also be lying and Avery could be using his masking technique to make her thoughts appear normal. Or he could be doing that for himself. Or Avery could be right, that the shaman that sent Eyadin had killed him somehow. With their knife. Maybe planted it deliberately. There was no way to know.

  And no time to figure it out. The longer they waited, the better chance someone else had of beating them to the spear, and then it would all be for nothing. Including Eyadin’s death.

  Tai clenched his fists. “I made a promise to this man. And if we survive, I intend to keep it. Feynrick. Avery. Help me find something to dig with. We bury him before we go.”

  Ella and Marea came too, unearthing a pair of shovels and some worn hoes leaning in a far corner, and together they hacked a rectangular hole in the grassy farmyard. Tai flung shovelful after shovelful, wavering between disbelief and anger. One of them had done it? Just as he’d convinced the man not to deliver his message without having to threaten him? It was like the universe was plotting against him, to keep him from ever escaping the violence that brought them here.

  Or you are unwilling to accept what escaping that violence will mean. Walk away, Tai. The costs are too high on this one, and if you take the spear you’ll only continue the cycle.

  When it was deep enough to keep the animals out Tai called a halt, and they laid Eyadin’s body down. Words needed to be said, something to honor the passing of the man, but Tai’s mind was a blank, his anger settling into a dull emptiness. Another one gone. How many revenants had they made on this trip? How many more would they make today?

  “We didn’t know him well,” Ella said, “and it was only the purest of chances that brought us together, but Eyadin was a true traveling companion, and a man who cared deeply for his family, and for the people of Aran. May his spirit find rest.”

  His revenant, more like. What would the religions have to say about death, if they knew the reality of it?

  “Saints take ye up, son,” Feynrick said, and Marea and Avery added something for themselves. Tai wanted to say something, to feel something beyond the melancholy of a funeral attended by strangers, but he had nothing.

  “Atumbarye,” he said at last, the traditional Achuri word of farewell, and they filled in the hole. Left a pile of stones on top, to tell the next person who came here there was a body underneath. Tai unfocused his eyes to shamanic sight, wondering if he’d be able to see Eyadin’s revenant somewhere. If he could take
it on like he’d taken on Ydilwen’s. That would feel right, somehow, to give them some version of life from his own uai, since he was the one who’d taken theirs.

  There was nothing to see, however, and daylight was burning. “Pack up,” Tai said. “We still have a stone to open.”

  “Once we figure out how to open it,” Ella said.

  “And get past whatever shamans are there,” Avery said.

  “And the Councilate soldiers,” Marea said, looking frail in the morning light.

  “And generally crack some skulls,” Feynrick grinned, hands on his axes.

  They struck out overland, Tai reasoning the road was so crowded they’d make better time just cutting through fields. He knew he should be thinking through what was coming ahead, but his mind kept circling back to Eyadin’s body, to the knife stuck in his throat. Could it really be some shaman far away? Why would they bother to make it look like one of their party? And if they were that worried about Tai’s chances of opening the stone, why not attack directly?

  It didn’t make sense, which meant that someone in their party murdering Eyadin did. But Ella was the only one who’d wanted him dead, and he trusted her when she said she hadn’t done it. Avery could be masking his or Marea’s thoughts, but neither of them had wanted the messenger to die. Avery especially had wanted the man to live. So had it been some far off shaman?

  And on and on. The farms they passed were increasingly abandoned, fields stripped bare, frequently with pilgrims camping in the yards or even living in the houses. He knew the pilgrims because they all shared a look: sunken cheeks and bright eyes.

  Was the stone really that powerful? If what Nauro had said was right, it was radiating the uai of all the people with a mindseye revenant back out into the world. The power of an archrevenant. The power of a god, in ninespear terms.

  The power he’d failed to grasp, the first time he could have.

  This time he would be ready, no matter what came. They would be ready—Ella was siccing revenants now in addition to her timeslip, Avery came off as a more powerful shaman every time they were attacked, and Marea’s powers were like a secret weapon. She was the only reason they’d won the battle yesterday, and the one at Yatiport.

  He glanced at her, trudging through a cut field of barley stalks with her hand in Avery’s. Did she still hate him? Something Ella had said came back to him then: if you can win her over, you can probably win over anyone in the Councilate. She didn’t seem as hostile as she had been, but had he won her over? Could he count on her to turn the fates in their favor, instead of against them, in the coming battles?

  Probably as far as he could count on Avery to hold to their side, because the girl was besotted. For his part, the man seemed committed to opening the stone. A fourth of a half of Semeca’s power, the terms of their agreement, surely seemed a vast wealth compared to the few revenants most shamans managed to thrall. A fifth of a half of the world’s mindseyes—how many would that be? Fifty thousand? One hundred thousand?

  Enough, apparently, to keep him loyally at their side despite the dangers they’d faced, and Marea’s attempts to get him to quit.

  Five people, against the smartest and strongest shamans on the continent. In the world, maybe. Ancestors send it was enough.

  53

  By the time the steeples of Aran appeared, hazy in the distance, even the fields were beginning to fill with people. Ella had never seen so many people, not on the docks of Worldsmouth or the people crowding the Councileum on a festival day. They clustered around meager fires, walked thin-limbed toward Califf, or sat gazing back toward Aran, eyes burning with religious fervor. The ones she talked to echoed that, speaking of the Ascending God’s radiance and getting healed from old wounds and all sorts of miracles that seemed impossible.

  But Avery had said shamanic powers were all about uai and belief. With the uai the stone was giving off and the belief of the pilgrims, who was to say what was possible?

  A good lesson. She was no Eschatolist, but if she could summon enough belief, the stone’s uai might be the edge she needed in whatever was coming.

  To opening the stone, even? But surely someone had tried that by now.

  As the crowds thickened so did the whitecoats. They began to pass regular camps, orderly rows of tents surrounded by orderly rows of stakes, smelling of toasted millet and roast meat, drawing hungry eyes. Bands of whitecoats five and ten strong pushed through the milling crowd, one of them inevitably reading off the proclamation about the punishment for treason and the city of Aran being under martial law.

  They were less threatening, outnumbered as they were one hundred to one by fever-eyed pilgrims. Of course, they were well-fed and armed too, where most of the people leaving the city seemed to have been stripped of all wealth as well as flesh from their bones, and those heading toward the city were road-weary as well as eager.

  What would have happened, had Eyadin’s message gone through? Would the whitecoats really have cut all these people down? Or would the people have overwhelmed them, and Aran become the second city this year to fight its way free of Councilate rule?

  Better they did not find out. Ella harbored no love for the Councilate, but living through the Ghost Rebellion in Ayugen had taught her war was a social disease with no victors. Better that they all live under an imperfect system than the bulk of them die trying to make something better.

  When the going became slow through sheer numbers of people, Feynrick bulled his way to the front and began clearing a path. He grinned and kidded and joked with the people he was shoving aside, of course, but there was no sugar-coating the kind of force needed to actually move forward as they approached the city’s outer walls, and Ella felt the low buzz of his resonance as he worked.

  Histories said Aran was thousands of years old, predating the Prophet by at least a millennium, and in times past had been a center of military as well as cultural might. In the centuries since the new Yersh king conquered it, however, and his kingdom was in turn conquered by the Councilate, its once-mighty walls had traded any real protection for lush ivy and the convenience of wide gates. Still, a phalanx of white-coated soldiers blocked the entrance to the first gates they approached, letting a stream out and only a few in. The sun rose a hand in the sky before they finally got in through a combination of Ella’s words and Marea’s resonance.

  “Stay alert,” Tai said as they passed through the heavy walls, air cool and damp. The people were not nearly so thick on the inside, the whitecoats letting more out than in, but the street was still full of pilgrims in flowing kaftans, glass beads clacking in their hair. The air smelled of bodies and musty wood, houses hanging over the street three and even four stories high. There were no whitecoats in the immediate vicinity, but the street opened onto a small plaza with a dry fountain ahead, and the place looked to be full of soldiers.

  Ella took a deep breath and raised her head, marching at their front. They had passed through an official gate—these men should have no reason to question them.

  And they didn’t, though they watched the people passing around the crumbling fountain with hands on weapons. They looked tense, even sorrowful. It would be a hard life, trying to keep control of a city flooded with pilgrims, and likely facing danger from the shamans in the old city. Would there be whitecoats in there too? The soldier had said the old city was closed off. Because the Councilate had occupied it, or because the shamans were keeping everyone out?

  They passed through the square unmolested and Ella chose a street angling deeper into the city on the far side. Such cities were strange to her, though she had stopped in many ports along the Ein, and spent her time in Ayugen. In Worldsmouth most streets were waterways, and by necessity the city felt more open, even if the water was often stagnant and the sky overcast.

  “Any idea where we’re going?” Ella asked, once they were out of Councilate earshot.

  “The waystone is at the center of the old city,” Avery said. “That should be east of here.”
<
br />   “Follow the crowds,” Tai said. “Seems like everyone here is a pilgrim, and they’re all trying to get to the same place.”

  She did, though the streets were crooked and windy enough that they had to backtrack more than once. She started following the crowds—the closer they got, the thicker the people were, leaning from windows or sitting against buildings or milling in the statue-filled plazas at every intersection.

  The number of whitecoats increased too, with soldiers fingering bows and sharpening swords at most of the intersections, archers occasionally looking down from rooftops. Many of them held the same expressions of sorrow or fear she’d seen on the soldier at the gate, and they all had weapons close to hand.

  “Something isn’t right here,” Tai said, after passing over a bridge lined on both sides with Councilate soldiers in full battle gear. “Whitecoats in Ayugen didn’t walk around this armed even at the height of the rebellion.”

  “Councilate’s not taking any chances,” Feynrick said.

  “Or they’re preparing for something,” Ella said, giving voice to the concern that had been growing like a weight in her belly.

  “You think they know about Eyadin’s orders?” Tai asked. “Were expecting them?”

  “Maybe,” Ella said. “Maybe there were other messengers before him, getting them ready, preparing them for the possibility.”

  “They sure don’t look excited about it, whatever it is,” Feynrick said amicably, spitting green onto the worn stone pavement. He was chewing dreamleaf like he had during the final battle against Semeca two months ago. Not a good sign.

  “Would you be excited to try and control a city full of religious zealots?” Marea asked. “Especially with whatever’s probably happening with the—in the old city?”

  Ella understood her hesitance to say shamans. Even with Avery’s soundproofing, it felt insane to say it here. Who knew who was watching? And what powers they had?

  “Me? Yapping right,” Feynrick said. “But I get yer meaning. I’m not everybody.”