Beggar's Rebellion: An Epic Fantasy Saga (Empire of Resonance Book 1)

by L. W. Jacobs

  She nodded. “We all do.”

  Ella glanced at the door, still open. She tensed. “Is it—”

  “Open? Yes. You can try it if you want to.” Tunla shrugged. “You won’t get any farther than the front door. Odril keeps a brawler there day and night.”

  Ella narrowed her eyes. “To keep us in.”

  The Achuri woman nodded. “And to keep the rest out. Not everyone Odril does business with is a nice person.”

  “But you can leave. You were at Odril’s.”

  “Aye. He knows I’m not going to try to escape.”

  “Why not?”

  “I used to have a husband, run my own business in Riverbottom. But since the war…” Tunla shrugged. “Harl’s gone, work is scarce, and anybody not working’s getting put in the camp. I count myself lucky just to have a place to sleep and some money to support my girl.”

  “You have a daughter?”

  “Aye. After the lawkeepers started rounding people up, I thought it would be safer to send her upriver. Borrowed some money to do it from some men I probably shouldn’t have, and Odril bought my debt. Still, I manage to send her something every moon.”

  “In exchange for a contract that says you can never leave.”

  “I could leave, if I paid off what I owe him, plus interest. But that’s never happening, at these wages.” She laughed as if it were funny.

  Ella shook her head. “How can you stay locked up like this?”

  “I’m not really locked up. Yes, there’s a guard at the door, but I leave almost every day for something—to do the cooking and cleaning at Odril’s place, or buy things in town, sometimes just to catch up with friends. He knows I’m not going to run.”

  Ella huffed a laugh. “Well, I am.”

  Tunla nodded. “I heard you had an episode this morning. Over the locked door?”

  Ella shuddered. “Yes.”

  “Is it really that bad?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “I—” Ella took a deep breath. “My parents had money when I was young. And when you have money in Worldsmouth, that means you marry your children for business, not love. But when I was ten, I ran away with one of the cleaning boys—”

  “When you were ten!” Tunla laughed. “Had you even bled?”

  “No, but I thought we were in love. My parents were furious when they found out. And they—” She stopped, waited for her voice to steady. “So, they locked me up in the highest part of our house and said they wouldn’t let me out until I was ready to marry someone they chose.”

  “Ancestors. But you didn’t do it?”

  She gave a grim smile. “I ruined every marriage contract they made for five years. But it meant living in a cell with only my voice and my brother’s visits to keep my company.” Her heart clenched again, thinking of Telen, but it felt good to talk about this, to actually say the words out loud.

  “Prophets, girl. I can see why you hate locked doors.”

  “I can’t stand them.”

  Tunla took a breath. “Well, I think we can leave this one unlocked. There’s still a guard at the end of the hall, and he still won’t let you leave, but if it makes you feel better, I think Prula will be okay with it. As long as you don’t try to escape.”

  “No, this is—this is good for now. Thank you.” Just having that door open made her feel so much better.

  Tunla nodded, and there was a pause. “You need to start working tomorrow,” she said.

  “Or what, they’ll starve me to death?”

  “Or they’ll turn you in to the lawkeepers for failing your debts. Send you to the camps. And believe me,” Tunla said, her eyes intense, “this is better than the camps.”

  “But he wouldn’t—” She was about to say Odril wouldn’t send her, a lighthair, to the camps, then bit her tongue. This was a good job to Tunla, the best a darkhaired woman could hope to find, and here she was treating it like torture.

  Tunla mistook her silence. “Yes, he would. He’s not a good man, Ella.”

  Ella half-laughed. “I gathered that much.”

  “But this is not a bad place. There are lots worse.”

  Ella nodded. She would still escape, still needed to find her thief, but— “I guess I will start working, then.” She’d probably have a better chance of escape if she spent a few days understanding the place, anyway.

  Tunla smiled. “Good. This will be fine, trust me.” She reached over and squeezed Ella’s shoulder, then stood. “Now get some rest. Lots of books on for tomorrow.”

  “Great. Thank you, Tunla.”

  The Achuri woman considered her a moment. “You are welcome. If you do manage to get out, don’t forget this.”

  Ella was relieved to find the door still unlocked the next morning. The hall outside led past a series of identical doors to a larger common area with rows of desks. Tunla sat there with five other women working numbers, ledgers spread before them. The old woman Prula stood. “Going to pull your weight today, then?”

  Ella nodded, eying the room. It was another basement room, light filtering through glass windows too narrow to crawl out of. At the front, the brawler stood in front of what must have been the door out, locked with a heavy chain. He smirked at her, and Ella looked away before she could feel either angry or trapped. “Aye. I guess I am.”

  The next few hours felt almost like working books on the boat, lost in a stream of numbers and ledgers and ink cups and tax tables. They stopped at lunch for a spicy red soup with what Tunla said was elk meat in it, along with chunks of bitter vegetable that could only be winterfoods.

  If you had any yura, maybe that would matter.

  The guard would be an easy match for her if she could timeslip, and the keys on his belt had to be for the lock behind him. Ella spent the afternoon hatching different schemes for escape as she processed the books, but they all returned to yura—yura she didn’t have.

  The books themselves were almost identical to what she’d done on the boat, save that most of them were for House Alsthen, which was curious because any major House would have its own team of calculors to handle its books. As time went on, she noticed another oddity: an overwhelming amount of expenses and receipts were written to private entities for vague things like contractual obligations or services rendered. Some of them were for quite large amounts.

  She asked Tunla about this when they broke for supper. The woman grimaced, glancing around. “Better not to ask about those.”

  Ella frowned. “You can’t just say that and not explain.”

  Tunla glanced around—the other women had gone off for the evening, a few of them leaving via the front door. “They’re for proxies.”

  “Proxies?”

  “Proxy forces. Mercenaries.”

  Ella drew her head back. “Mercenaries? What does Alsthen need mercenaries for? They’ve got lawkeepers and House soldiers for protection.”

  “Not for protection. For attacks, against other Houses.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Alsthen is attacking other Houses?”

  “They all do it. You didn’t know that?”

  “No, I didn’t know that. But why?”

  The Achuri woman shrugged. “Steal yura, disrupt supplies, cut into profits. It’s hard to tell from the books. But the way I understand it, yura is too new for any House to have a corner on the market—but they all want it. They all want to shut each other out, and they’re not getting it done economically. So, they do it militarily.”

  Ella shook her head. “But that’s illegal. That’s part of the basic compact that started the Councilate a hundred years ago—that the major Houses would cooperate militarily to increase profits and protect the minor Houses and workers of the Councilate.”

  “Exactly—that’s why they need to hire proxies to do it. That’s why we’re here at all,” Tunla said, gesturing to the empty tables and chairs. “By the time it’s processed through our books, all those funds look like legal House transact
ions. And then the Houses can take our ledgers and process them again, and the larger Councilate never finds out.”

  “But they have to know—how do they explain all these attacks?”

  “Rebels,” Tunla said simply. “Pockets of Achuri resistance fighters, hilltribes, whatever. All the Houses here turn a blind eye to it, because they’re all doing it. But as far as Worldsmouth knows, no laws are being broken. And it’s a good excuse to throw anyone you don’t like into the camps,” she added, looking darker at this last part.

  “Ascending gods,” Ella cursed. “This is exactly why I wanted to escape the Councilate in the first place.”

  The Achuri woman shook her head sadly. “Well, you won’t escape them here. It’s been a long time since there was any real Achuri resistance to what’s going on.”

  She didn’t need LeTwi’s snide remark to notice how Tunla was proving his point about history’s inevitability.

  “I don’t think it’s armies that we need. It’s new ideas, different ideas that don’t have us attacking each other in secret, trying to squeeze more moons out of whatever business we’re running.”

  Tunla nodded. “We had something like that once. Before your people came.”

  “They’re not my people.”

  Tunla raised an eyebrow.

  “Well, maybe they are my people—they’re where I came from—but I don’t agree with what they’re doing. That’s the whole reason I came up here in the first place.”

  “You can’t escape your past.”

  “Not to escape. To learn. To find some different idea about life and politics that could change the way the Councilate works. And then come back and do something about it.” It sounded grandiose when she said it like that, especially compared to where she actually was. “That was the idea, anyway.”

  Tunla shook her head. “Don’t judge the bird from the egg. You can still do those things.”

  “Not from here, I can’t.” There was a silence then, as Tunla ate and Ella’s mind spun through escape plans and yura and struggled still with the panic of being locked in.

  “Tunla,” she said after a moment. “Can you get me yura? One of these times when you go into town?”

  The Achuri woman hesitated. “I could. They don’t monitor where I go, and I know some places to get it cheap. But—” She shook her head. “If Odril found out I was the one that gave it to you, he would punish us for weeks.”

  Ella frowned. “Punish you?”

  “Like he is doing to you. Keep us locked in, deny us food, give us more work than we can do in a day. Now and then, he will make us go without water, though it’s been some time now.”

  “And you put up with that?”

  “What else can we do?”

  “Fight it! What if you—I don’t know, what if you escaped and started your own calculism practice? You have the skills—everyone here does. That’s what I was doing, before all this.”

  Tunla shook her head. “He would find out. And he has the contract.”

  “So we take the contracts! Burn them! You can’t just stay here!”

  Her face hardened. “I have my daughter to think about. And Ayugen is my home. Where would I go?”

  Ella sighed in frustration. How could she not want to escape? “What if I can get us out? Guarantee that we get out, that we can get to Odril’s house and get the contracts, too?”

  “How could you do that?”

  Ella leaned in. “I’m a timeslip. Get me yura and the brawler at the door’s like a sleeping baby. So would be breaking into Odril’s house.”

  Tunla bit her lip, then shook her head. “I’m sorry. If anything went wrong—if the contracts aren’t there, or he has copies, or anything—it might mean that I stop sending money to my girl. And I can’t risk that. She deserves better than what I’ve got.”

  “Then we kill him.” Tunla looked shocked, but Ella pressed on. “He’s a bad man, Tunla. You know that. He’s got us all imprisoned in here like slaves, he’s making money off hiding House wars that are probably getting lots of people killed—and it’s all feeding into more of your people being put in the camps. If there was any justice in the world, he would be put to death for all that. But since there isn’t, maybe we have to make it.”

  Tunla shook her head. “It isn’t that simple. He hasn’t told you yet, but there’s a transfer of debt. If Odril dies, other men have bought the rights to his holdings—including us.”

  “So what—they would take over this shop?”

  She nodded. “All of it. And if the next one dies—I think it’s Michaels—it would pass from there to Eddenal, who is as likely to sell our bodies as make us do books. And it gets worse from there. No, killing him is not a solution.”

  “But we have to do something.” Ella balled her fists, looking around the empty office. “Wait—what about the proxy funding? This whole money-laundering thing he’s making us do? It’s illegal. If I could just get out, get him in court, maybe I could get it shut down, get the contracts annulled. Then you’d be free of his inheritors.”

  “And then what? We go back to the land?”

  “Yes. Or you and Prula and whoever wants to start your own accounting firm, a legal one, and the money you’re currently making for Odril you get to keep. And you’re free.” She banged a fist down at this last word. “Not living under Odril the rest of your life.”

  Tunla looked uncomfortable. “If that worked…it would be great. But if anything went wrong…” She shook her head. “I don’t know what Odril would do. Especially to me, as he would know I’m the one who helped you.”

  Ella popped her neck. Tunla was thinking of her daughter, not herself. And she couldn’t blame her for that. But it was so frustrating. “Okay. I don’t want to put you at risk if your daughter’s depending on you. But I will think of something.”

  Tunla smiled sadly. “I almost hope you do.”

  12

  There are powers here even our books do not speak of. We need to meet again. –O

  —note found on Arbiter’s desk, Ayugen, Yiel 111

  The next morning, a strange sight greeted farmers working the fields north of Ayugen: a ragged young man in a fine-cut House Coldferth tunic and bare feet descending the footpaths from the bluffs. His stomach bulged in the middle, as though he’d grown his wisdom belly early, and those who passed close caught the earthen odor of yura wafting behind him.

  Tai had fallen asleep on the far bluffs, waking to sunlight and the double hunger of a body without food or uai. He found a simple farmstead along the path and traded the woman there a ball of yura for porridge and a cup of sour mavenstym tea. It felt odd to be alone—no kids, no lawkeepers, no rebels around, just the laughing children of the matron and a wood stool and the blue sky.

  And me.

  And you. Tai sighed, drinking the last of the tea. Ancestors forbid I escape you, too.

  He stood, thanking the matron again for the breakfast in Achuri, the woman waving and children stopping to stare as he set off along a footpath across the valley. Ayugen rose in the distance, climbing the bluffs from the river, Newgen a squat stone toad on the west side. Farmers worked in the early morning light, pulling red weeds from waving rows of barley, gathering wintermelon flowers for the spicy summer soup agetegang.

  Speaking of escape, seems like House Coldferth is going to be after us now. That Yati mercenary recognized you.

  Tai adjusted the sack around his waist. “So?” He could tell when Hake was building up to something.

  So, the lawkeepers are too. And, y’know, the Titans at the prison camp, and everybody who works in the mines.

  “So?”

  So, go alone.

  “Hake, no.”

  It makes a lot more sense now, Tai. Not only is there no safe place for us in the city or the mines, but you’ve got an elkload of yura tied to your waist. Think about what that’s worth in the capital.

  Tai nodded at an elderly man pulling beets. “I’ve thought about it. It’s worth a ton here, too
. I could probably hire my army just with what we took last night.”

  Hake sighed. But somehow, I know you’re not going to.

  “I could. But Karhail and the rest are already raising an army—and I wouldn’t know how to do it on my own. How to train them, how to equip them? Those guys are soldiers, Hake. Plus, they might end up doing Ayugen some good for once, besides getting the kids out.”

  Have you thought about where you’re going to go with the kids once they’re out? We’ll still be stuck here, with no money and even more people angry at us than before. I mean, if you thought the lawkeepers were bad…

  They were approaching a string of boats along the shoreline, ferries waiting to take farmers and produce to the city.

  That’s where the rebellion comes in, Tai thought back. We’ll stay with them, get our feet under us at least, and figure it out from there.

  That didn’t end well last time.

  Tai negotiated passage across, giving the wizened old man a ball of yura and getting a few half-moons in change.

  It’ll give us a place to land at least, Tai thought back. And if it doesn’t look like it’s going well for them, I won’t stick around like we did last time.

  Let’s review our options, shall we? Tai could almost see Hake, arms crossed and head cocked like he did when he was sure he was right. You can repeatedly risk your life fighting soldiers like the ones that killed me in the hopes the rebellion will pan out and you’ll get Fisher and the rest back. Or you could spend a couple months getting filthy rich in Worldsmouth, come back and break your kids free, then have a place waiting for them in the capital. Seems like an obvious choice to me.

  Tai held the edge of the narrow boat, the old man casually dodging flotillas of logs floating downstream.

  That would be great, he thought back. If we had a few months.

  You think the rebels will get it done before then?

  Tai glanced at the burnt hulks of the rebel’s last attack, now dragged onto shore and being dismantled for salvage. I’ve got a big bag of yura says they will, he thought. And I don’t think they’re in the caves for fun.