by L. W. Jacobs
BEGGAR’S REBELLION
©2018-2021 LEVI JACOBS
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Contents
ALSO IN SERIES
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
ALSO IN SERIES
From the Author
Acknowledgments
ALSO IN SERIES
BEGGAR’S REBELLION
PAUPER’S EMPIRE
APOSTATE’S PILGRAMAGE
ACOLYTE’S UNDERWORLD
To Bri,
for supporting me without question in this strange quest.
1
The key to the New Yersh Councilate, clearly, was the waterways. With the invention of draft boats, and cheap labor from the indentured, we could now move goods easily up and down the Ein. Long a harbor for commerce with the Brineriders, Worldsmouth became the hub for a trade system expanding upstream. It was only a matter of time before they thought to conquer their partners.
—Telen Fostler, Empire Reconsidered
Ellumia Aygla leaned against the ship’s wood rail, fingers of wind in her hair. It was a warm afternoon, even for the chilly south, and the sun’s light played off the river water, glinting like gems in a jeweler’s market. Scents of roast fish and lamb rolled from the top deck over the clatter and rattle of men taking second tea. The Swallowtail Mistress was one of the finest riverboats to ply the Ein, offering its passengers song and drink and game on the three-month journey from the capital through the provinces. Most were bound for the last stop, Ayugen, center of the swelling trade in power-inducing yura moss, along with more traditional deforestation and slave collection.
She could smell the slaves, the sour odor of the galley ahead pulling them up the current, indentured men and women made to row six years for their crimes. It was disgusting, but so much about the Councilate was disgusting: its worship of money, its flagrant excess, its destruction of cultures and people for the sake of material gain.
It was disgusting, and it was home.
Or, it had been—the Swallowtail was home now, a floating escape from her past. For two years, she’d been traveling the river, balancing the books of rich passengers to pay her berthage and save toward crossing the sea. It was glorious, in allowing her to make money without attachment to House or husband. Glorious too in the access it gave her to all the ports and peoples of the continent.
Glorious and maddening. From the Ein river you could reach all six of the colonies, either directly on the banks or up a tributary. The Swallowtail stopped at all of them, and for a few hours every few weeks, she could mingle with the people of the docks, hear their tongues and try their foods and admire the strangeness of their crafts. For a few precious hours, she could add sight and smell and touch and taste to the travelogues she’d been reading since youth. Then it was back on the ship, back to the bureaucrats and dull ledgers and long afternoons of watching the world roll by.
She was, as far as she knew, the only tax calculor working the river. It made sense for the bureaucrats, who tended to leave the capital with personal and business ledgers in need of calculating. They could arrive in port with books ready for audit, and meeting about financial strategy gave them something to do in the long months of transit. It made sense for her too—she was able to travel, to save money toward studying at the Thousand Spires, and the lack of competition meant she didn’t have to worry about other calculors lowering rates.
That, and they’d know she was a fake.
Not that she was a fake, exactly—she kept up with the tax codes, knew the loopholes to maximize her clients’ savings, and produced clean-enough books that clients regularly offered to hire her. She just didn’t have a license. She’d taught herself calculism, working under her brother’s guidance. And when he died, spending five years getting licensure training in the city had been impossible. Besides, it was fun to spit in the eye of Councilate law.
Currents knew they’d spit in hers.
Ella turned back to the rail. They were passing through southern Yatiland now, the hilltribe’s iconic circular settlements topping the scattered hills of the river valley. The Councilate had conquered them twenty-odd years before, and already their port looked like Worldsmouth, their people spoke passable Yersh, and their children traveled to the capital for jobs and training. Who or what the city had been before was gone. Out here, though, days from any port or Councilate stronghold, the hilltribes held to the old ways. Squinting against the light on the water, she could make out red-haired men and women at work in the dog kennels and terraces ringing their wooden hilltop settlements, grasses green and lush in midsummer.
“Wild beasts they are, wild beasts,” she spoke, quoting one of her favorite travelogues. “The Yati war and kill and procreate with all the abandon of a pack of curs.” She had only been in their major port, but the Yati she met never struck her as bestial.
“Aye, and beasts they ar
e, Miss Ella.” She turned to find Captain Ralhens, pipe clenched in a broad smile. “Never let ’em on the Swallowtail, not once.”
She quirked her eyebrow at him. “Perhaps we are the ones who seem uncivilized to them, Captain, rowing ourselves up and down this river in search of coin, when they have all they need in the space of one hilltop.”
He shook his head. “That’s fine, if all you want is sheep and sour beer. Sounds to me like you’ve been reading too many of those books.”
“What else is a lady to do with her time at water?”
The captain hitched his leg on the lower rail. “You might find yourself a man on one of these voyages. Plenty of fine men headed south in this economy.”
Ella snorted. “All they see in me is free calculism and a set of hips.”
Ralhens reddened—the Yersh were notoriously prudish. “I think some of them would be a great improvement to the House Aygla.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt that.” Aygla was the false name she’d taken, a bastard mix of major Houses Alsthen and Galya, a family working for the Houses without direct lineage. By marrying a real Alsthen or Galya, or even closer bastards like Alson or Gaya, a calculor could improve her standing—and that of her children. It was the reason many women studied in the first place, to turn wealthy clients into husbands.
She’d rather die. Ella smiled at the captain. “Soon enough.”
Ralhens frowned around his unlit pipe. “You’ve what, twenty-five summers now?”
“Twenty-two.”
“Descending Gods, but you’re young still!”
She stood a bit straighter. “I’ve lived a full life.”
“I don’t doubt it, ma’am.” Ralhens cleared his throat, no doubt remembering the condition in which she first came to him. “There’s a soiree tonight, last of the voyage. You might think of going—I believe Lieutenant Warmsmith is recently widowed.”
“What do you think all this is for?” Ella gestured at her dress, one of the Brinerider gowns she kept for special occasions.
“Oh, ah, yes.” He cleared his throat, reddening now for a different reason. She had that effect on men. “Well.” He tipped his hat to her.
Ella smiled, watching him go. They had some version of this talk on every voyage, and she believed he was genuinely concerned for her. Naive, and no idea who she was even after two years, but a good man nonetheless. He was the closest thing she had to a friend here.
I’m almost offended, her voice said.
Her smile turned wry. “You’re hardly a friend, LeTwi. More like a virulent and inescapable pest.”
At least I’m not trying to marry you off. His tone was educated and world-weary, as if speaking was barely worth the effort.
“Ralhens means well. He just can’t see past the ideas of his parents.”
Ah. And you can?
“I can see the whole thing is fishscat, if that’s what you mean. You did too!” Before dying and becoming her voice, LeTwi had been a highly respected scholar, one of the advisors to the Council, though he hadn’t much involved himself in politics. She’d read everything he wrote.
My approach was slightly different. I said everything is fishscat, to use your terms. The challenge is to be brave enough to live with that knowledge.
“I—” Ella cut off, a man coming from top deck and passing by. Councilate culture held that voices were childish fancies, something to be suppressed by adulthood. Though she knew other cultures viewed them differently, it was still embarrassing to be caught talking to herself. “And you think I don’t have that courage?”
I think your search for meaning in primitive cultures is a clever way of running from the facts. But no, if you must know.
“And if I find something out there that is truly different than Councilate fishscat?”
LeTwi sighed—he was good at sighing. There is a certain inertia to history, dear. Even if you do find something, it will take a long time to change minds.
“Not if I become an advisor.” The Council had just gotten its first female Councilor, Salea Deyenal. It wasn’t so far off to imagine she could become an advisor.
Ah yes. The old irony of hating the Councilate but intending to work for it.
“To make it better. What else can I do? The whole world will be under its control before long.”
There is nothing else, my dear. Though I did find solace in dreamtea. Speaking of which, aren’t there husbands you’re meant to be wooing? The band had struck up a song on the top deck.
“Clients, LeTwi.” She stood from the rail—there were still a few men on board who hadn’t come to her for bookkeeping. “One last job would bring us to a nice even total for the voyage.”
And you say you’re above Councilate money-grubbing.
Ella opened her mouth, then turned for the top deck. LeTwi had an annoying way of getting the last word.
The soiree was held under the canopy on the top deck, polished wood floorboards reflecting the warm light of lanterns as the sun sank over the port rail. Musicians played at the rear, Worldsmouth strings and tuned Seinjialese drums, while smoke rolled from lemon-basted perch and lamb over open coals. Ella’s stomach rumbled. There were perks to working on a top-class riverboat—the lower classes ate beans and rice the entire voyage.
Ella scanned the clusters of men, looking for those she hadn’t done books for. Colonel Olgsby stood near the bar with two House men she hadn’t done books for—Odril and Gettels, she thought they were. Ella approached them. “Gentlemen. I’m glad to see concerns of the coming port haven’t dampened your spirits.”
Odril grinned, showing too many teeth. “Never.”
The old Colonel inclined his head. “You’re referring to the so-called rebellion? Hardly worth losing a supper for, my lady. Would you care to join us?”
She gave them a practiced smile. “I would love to.” She had already done Olgsby’s books, but perhaps she could get one of the others to bite.
They took a table near the bow, star tinting the sunset a brilliant purple. “I don’t know why you don’t just quash them,” Odril was saying. He was a midlevel bureaucrat with a sallow complexion and beady eyes. “I thought the rebels were wiped out years ago.”
“This is a new breed,” Olgsby waved his hand as though brushing aside gnats. “Guerilla fighters. Cowards, hiding down in the yura mines. They haven’t done much more than property damage—fifty, maybe a hundred untrained fighters, maximum. If they try anything real the garrison will sort them out.”
“Well I say we bring the Titans in. Crush ’em.” Odril watched her as he said this, and Ella kept a polite smile on her mouth. Male posturing among men old enough to be one’s father was a professional hazard.
“Perhaps what they need is to be included in the political process,” she said, arranging a napkin on her lap.
“An Achuri House?” the old colonel spluttered. “Never! We only just began recognizing Seinjialese Houses last year!”
“With the costs I read of troop deployment and maintenance, it might save us money in the long run to just let them have a small say in things.” She didn’t need LeTwi’s snide remark to know how likely the idea was to fall on deaf ears, but she had to try.
Odril gave her a patronizing smile. “Oh, we hardly need to save money. With the amount we’re making in yura, the whole city could rise up and it wouldn’t dent our profits.”
Profitability was a point of pride among these men, and one of contention between the Houses. Perhaps if she could start them boasting about money, she could talk one of them into some calculism. “So Alsthen is doing well, then?”
The sallow bureaucrat puffed up. She had noticed men, when they were competing for a woman’s attention, tended to act like preening turkeys. Odril certainly fit the bill at present. “Extremely well. Ninety percent of the construction in New Ayugen is ours.”
Was that a light of jealousy in Gettels’ eyes? “Mr. Gettels, I hear your House has been turning quite a profit on dried winterfoods of late.”
He puffed his own chest out. “We have, it—”
“Passing fad,” Odril cut in. “It’ll never match yura for demand.”
“On the contrary,” the other said, back straightening, “it appears the two complement each other quite nicely.”
Ella nodded. “Recent broadsheets are theorizing the reason so many of us can’t use yura, or only weakly, is the lack of winterfoods in our diet. You can’t get uai without them, and without uai, yura has no power.”
Odril glanced between them, deflating slightly. “Well, yura will always be more important.”
Ella took a bubbling glass of ginseng and lime from a serving man. “I suppose the measure of that would be whose House is doing better.”
Gettels eyed Odril. “We’re doing remarkably well.”
Odril eyed him back. “Alsthen is doing extremely well.”
Ella struck an innocent expression. “You must have so many books to calculate.”
“Oh, piles and piles.”
She smiled. “You know I’m offering calculism aboard the ship, if you’d rather arrive with books ready for audit.”
Gettels paused, fully inflated and caught in her trap. But Odril waved a hand. “I have my own calculors.”
“How disappointing.” She turned her shoulder to him, knowing it would appear to the other men that he’d lost her favor. “And you, Mr. Gettels? Have you any need? I am free tomorrow. We could meet midmorning.”