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

  Which meant a sick stomach every time Tai went into danger. Which, with him, was most of the time. She hitched the bag of wintergrass higher on her back. Damn the man.

  Ella pushed out of the trees, shivering in the bitter wind. At least she had plenty to do to distract herself. With the key role resonance harmonies had played in defending against the Broken, and the relative lack of other things to do, her fledgling school was suddenly flooded with students.

  And they were making progress—leaps and bounds compared to before. She could never think of Semeca’s attack as a good thing, not with all the people they’d lost, many of them her students and friends. Still, it had been the push she needed to break through the mystery of why only some students were overcoming: sympathetic resonance and harmony. Everything in the month since then had been refining that, testing it, and putting it into practice.

  She took the long way around the bittermelon field, world silent save for the crisp sound of her steps. They’d gotten a lot of practice. Not least because many of the students who overcame their first revenant came back as soon as their second revenant made itself known. Revenants seemed to choose an identity from the person’s past with the highest emotional attachment, and in this city that meant they were mostly people dead only a few weeks. Students were coming to the school just to escape the pain of talking to them, especially as the realization spread that, cherished as the Achuri notion of spirit guides was, revenants weren’t who they said.

  Ella nodded in greeting to the man shivering at the entrance to the school. Her school still met in the caves, despite everything that had happened there, for the simple reason that the bluffhouses were full of beds and people, and no other buildings remained that were big enough. But in a nod to what had happened, they kept a guard outside the front entrance, rotated every half hand in the cold.

  Not that the Broken would stand much chance now, against her school.

  The familiar feel of damp air greeted her as she descended the rough-hewn stairs, along with the scents of woodsmoke and aletegang, the main dish the Achuri made from wintergrass. It tasted like cat vomit, but it kept them alive. At least the Achuri agreed it was disgusting.

  Marea sat at the bottom of the stairs, wrapped in a thick fur coat even in the relative warmth of the caves, making notes in a ledger. With the influx of students, Tunla had needed help making the rounds, and Marea was the perfect option—well-trained in math and literature, fluent in Achuri and Yersh, and already done with both her revenants. She had turned out to be a blank, one of those rare few whose resonance had no effect, but she still understood overcoming.

  Maybe more importantly, she was a lighthaired orphan in a darkhaired world, daughter of wealthy Councilate parents killed in the rebellion, stuck amongst the people who killed them. She needed someplace to belong until she could get back to Worldsmouth, someone to be friends with, and Ella was the only one in the city with a similar background. So Marea had started helping out, quickly becoming indispensable.

  Not that it made her any easier to deal with.

  “There you are,” the young girl said, marking her place in the book. “Done making out with your boyfriend?”

  Ella raised an eyebrow. “Jealous?”

  “Of him? Never.” Marea pushed back a few silvery locks that had escaped her tight bun. “Still don’t know what you see in him.”

  This was an old discussion. Tai was part of the original rebellion, so for Marea he was the worst thing imaginable, and yet Ella was in love with him. “Maybe you’ll figure it out sometime. And no, we weren’t making out. We were attacked, actually.”

  Marea’s face brightened, her features that strange fifteen-year-old mix of cherubic childhood and mature woman. “The army? Have they come back?”

  The girl had a recurring fantasy that the Councilate army would come back and save her, though all reports from Gendrys said the Councilate had more or less pulled out for the winter. “No. A ninespear.”

  Marea’s eyebrows rose. In the course of their time together, Ella had told her about Odril and Sablo. “Did you kick them in the shatterhole?”

  Ella grinned. “Close enough. We killed him.” Was it okay to grin at a man’s death? Especially in front of an impressionable girl? She didn’t care. He’d threatened Tai.

  “Pearly. Where’s your lover then?”

  “He—had to go see someone for a while.” She tried to ignore the pit that opened in her stomach at the thought of it. She should be there, but he insisted on going alone. “How are the students today?”

  “Two overcome just this morning,” Marea said, tapping the page. “Gylen and Waglea. Finally realized Gylen needed an augmented triad if he was going to get anything done.”

  That was the other great thing about Marea—she’d trained in classical music, and knew all the vocabulary for things Ella, who’d never had much of an ear, struggled to hear. “Augmented… that’s the one that sounds kinda dreamy?”

  Marea raised an eyebrow. “It sounds augmented. Your parents seriously never brought in tutors?”

  “I told you, I scared off every tutor that taught anything even remotely making me a more suitable candidate for marriage.”

  “And now you’re hooked up with a darkhair, not even a citizen. Bet they’d love that,” Marea smirked.

  Ella… didn’t know how they’d feel. Or how she’d feel about how they felt. It’d been a long time.

  “I did some math, while you were gone,” Marea said, glancing back at her notes.

  “What did you come up with?” For all that she hated showing it, Marea had a brilliant mind. And she needed approval, much as that was the last thing she would ever admit. Had Ella ever been like that?

  No. She’d been trying to make sure no one approved of her.

  “The city,” Marea said, flipping her ledger to a different page. “I went through our latest census, and marked off who’s overcome, and whether they’ve done one or both, then calculated how quickly we’ve been getting them to overcome, and extrapolated that out with a little bit of acceleration assuming we continue getting better at this, and—”

  Ella glanced at the numbers, her calculor’s mind juggling them. The math looked solid. “And?”

  “And I think we can be revenant-free by winter’s end.”

  “What?” Ella lost the numbers she was juggling, gaping at Marea’s beaming face. “You—we could get everyone in the city overcome?”

  “Not just overcome. Both revenants. Completely free.”

  “Marea, that’s amazing!” She’d thought they were working through them quickly, but all of Ayugen?

  Marea beamed. “Just in time for me to go back and teach it to my house.”

  Ella’s smile faltered. They hadn’t directly discussed this, but she doubted Tai or the rest of his council would like the idea of Marea teaching the Councilate how to overcome without yura. And yet the academic in her, the researcher that bubbled at the thought of everyone, not just Ayugen, getting free of their revenants, was all for it. Thankfully the snows kept them from having to decide that one for a while. “Right. I’ll be sad to see you go.”

  Marea cocked her head. “You don’t want to go back?”

  “Ayugen’s my home. I never fit in the Mouth, and now?” She shrugged. “There’s nothing for me there.”

  “What about your parents?”

  Ella shook her head. “They—were never really parents to me. Just managers. Like I was some kind of House asset that needed special assistance.”

  Marea shrugged, looking back at her notes. “Maybe that’s just because you were young. My second voice was my mother, and even though it was a fishscat revenant and not her, she still helped me realize a lot about how I was to them, before they died.” She shook her head, closing her ledger. “I had no idea how much they cared about me.”

  “My parents kept me locked in a bedroom for five years. They fed me through a door. I hardly knew them.”

  “Okay, okay,” Marea held up her
hands. “They were scatholes. Don’t need to get all defensive on me.”

  Ella cleared her throat. “How’s everyone else doing?”

  Marea flipped open the ledger and they spent some time going through the list of students, over seventy of them at the moment. The process had come down to making sure the student was willing to overcome, gauging what their relationship with their revenant was, then trying different triads of resonance on them, interspersed with reflection time. “How about this one, Eacham?”

  Marea grimaced. “Says he wants to overcome, but every time I try to help him he starts lecturing me. Think he doesn’t like it that I’m young, and a girl. Or that my hair’s the wrong color.”

  Ella nodded. Some of the Achuri still held a grudge against lighthairs. “As I recall Tai said he was a curmudgeon. Had his grain stores raided in one of the first attacks.”

  Marea glanced up. “Speak of the devil.”

  Ella’s heart leapt. She spun and saw Tai coming down the long stairs.

  Nauro the ninespear walked at his side.

  4

  “Tai!” Ella cried, barely resisting the urge to run and fling her arms around him. He was safe.

  “Hey.” He smiled, but she didn’t miss the lines of worry around his eyes. “You remember Nauro.”

  Her excitement cooled. “I do.”

  “Ellumia,” the thin mixed-hair man said, voice cultured and smooth. “A pleasure.”

  “Hardly. You going to try to pump me for information again, then run when I refuse?”

  “My apologies,” the man said, face still cool. “Time was short, and I was worried for Tai’s wellbeing. I needed information.”

  Tai’s wellbeing. Not, you know, hers too, or the people of Ayugen. “And now?”

  “The situation is no less dire, but he at least understands the dangers.”

  “And you’re not planning to sic some evil revenant on him again?”

  “Not without his wishes, no.” Nauro quirked a smile, directed at Tai, and anger welled up in her. This was the man who’d tried to kill Tai, to take him from her, and now he was trying to smile at him? It was all she could do not to strike resonance then and there.

  Aside from the fact he could probably stop her as easily as Ydilwen had.

  Tai was looking back and forth between them, eyebrows up. Ella realized with a start how defensive she probably sounded. “He’s going to teach me,” Tai said. “On my terms. Show us what Ydilwen did, and how to defend against it, for starters.”

  “Do we have any reason to believe there will be more?” Ella asked, searching for some hole in the man’s logic.

  “Yes.”

  “And they are?”

  Nauro sighed. “These are not things we normally discuss with the uninitiated, but I see we are in a unique situation here. To put it in the simplest terms, Semeca was queen of a large amount of revenants.”

  “An archrevenant,” Ella said.

  “Yes,” Nauro said. “Normally those spirits pass some small portion of the uai they take from their hosts on to the archrevenant above them, giving Semeca the powers you witnessed in her attack—control of the Broken, using any and all resonances at a high level, moving giant structures—”

  “The power to control Broken,” Ella cut in, half wanting to catch him in a lie and half because she hadn’t been able to figure it out. “That was a form of mindseye?”

  “No,” Nauro said, appearing annoyed at the interruption. “That was no resonance at all. When you are being fed uai directly, as shamans and archrevenants are, you are not limited by those shapes. If your belief is strong enough, you can make that uai do anything.”

  “My feet,” Tai said, meeting her eyes. “Ydilwen stuck them to the ground somehow, when I tried to attack him.”

  “Good,” Nauro said. “Yes. He had likely been out hunting loose revenants, and thralled enough to have some simple abilities like that.”

  “Then why haven’t we seen this kind of thing before?” Ella asked, far from convinced. This man was a snake.

  “As I said,” Nauro said, clearing his throat, “everything changed with Tai’s defeat of Semeca. Normally, when someone defeats an archrevenant, they thrall their revenant, and through it take all the revenants thralled to it. Tai did not. This means that all the revenants she held in thrall—say, thirty or forty thousand—suddenly had nowhere to send their uai. And the targets for shamans like Ydilwen and I went from a few souls that never conformed to a resonance to those loose forty thousand.”

  “So Ydilwen was hunting… revenants?” Ella asked. Tai had seen something like that in mindsight.

  “I imagine so, yes. Thralling their uai stream to his own to harvest their power, now that Semeca isn’t taking it. I don’t doubt that most shamans have realized what happened, and even as we speak they are gathering up loose revenants, replacing Semeca with a host of power-drunk shamans. The war between them could last centuries, if we don’t do something about it.”

  “Why would you?” Marea cut in. “We’ll all be long dead before it matters.”

  Nauro glanced at her, mouth twitching. “Because Tai is involved in that war. He started it. And they all know, no matter how much power they gather, that he defeated someone who had all of it.”

  “Semeca,” Marea said.

  “Yes. So he has the power to defeat them too.”

  “Unless they kill him first,” Ella breathed, fear spreading in her belly.

  “Kill or thrall him, if they are foolish or powerful enough to try thralling,” Nauro said. “That, I gather, was Ydilwen’s quest.”

  “And he nearly did it,” Tai said, popping his neck. The lines of worry were back around his eyes. “But shamans aren’t all we have to worry about.”

  Fear spread further in her core, a snake made of ice. “What do you mean? Who else is after you?”

  “Semeca’s peers,” Nauro said. “Teynsley. Alenul. Gyelon. The eight other archrevenants. As much as Tai poses a threat to the shamans now gathering up power, he will seem like more of a threat to those in power. Semeca is the first to die in more than three hundred years, and her power was not claimed. This is a break in a pattern of millennia. They will fear for their safety.”

  “This power,” Ella said. “Whatever Semeca left. Why don’t the other archrevenants just take it for themselves?”

  “They cannot,” Nauro said. “Each can only hold one resonance. Or in the Trinity’s case, pairs of second-level resonances.”

  “So where is the rest of it going, while Semeca’s old revenants float around unclaimed?”

  “Ah,” Nauro said. “Now that is a good question. You are familiar with waystones?”

  Markels had spoken of them in his travels, strange standing stones in different parts of the continent that looked remarkably similar—one in the wilds of Yatiland, another sticking from the ice sheet among the At’li, a third in the holy city of Aran.

  “Yes,” she said. “What do they have to do with this?”

  “According to our histories,” Nauro said, “and they are admittedly spotty, these stones were created during the Prophet’s time, to seal away the power of the archrevenants he defeated.”

  Ella sucked in a breath. “You have histories going back to the time of the Prophet?”

  Nauro smiled. “We have histories going back much further. Things existing only in translation. But yes. Our organization is very old.”

  “So, it didn’t work,” Tai cut in. “Sealing away the power of the archrevenants. They are still here, still powerful.”

  “It worked for a time,” Nauro said, tone warmer toward Tai. “Centuries, if the histories tell it right. But people have always been hungry for power, and the Prophet wasn’t able to entirely suppress our knowledge.” He smiled at this. “Shamans chipped away slowly at the revenants feeding the stones, until little to no power was going to the stones at all, and new archrevenants rose up.”

  “But because I didn’t take Semeca’s power,” Tai said, “one
of the stones has started—what? Sucking up power?”

  “Redistributing it,” Nauro said. “Buried in each of these stones are the spears the original archrevenants had thralled their power to. With Semeca gone, the uai streams from all her thralls return to those weapons, and the stone sends it back into the world.”

  “How?” Ella asked. She had never heard of uai coming from anything other than digestion.

  Nauro shrugged. “How does the star send uai to the winter plants that capture it? Or how do those plants convert its light into uai instead of the sugars of summer fruits and vegetables? We don’t know. But histories tell of cities built around these waystones, places where people were able to use enormous amounts of power at any time. So we can assume it’s just there to be taken.”

  “And somewhere in the world there is a stone now radiating all of Semeca’s power?”

  He nodded. “The power of all her revenants that haven’t been gathered up yet, at least, and I would guess that is most of them, as the process is not easy.”

  “What happens when you get the spear out?” Ella asked.

  “Then all the power goes to you,” Nauro said, eying her cooly. “You are instantly a god.”

  “And I suppose the only option is to go? That this is part of Tai’s tutelage?”

  “No,” Tai said, to Ella’s relief. “We’re not trying to get into this game. We’re trying to stay out of it.”

  “But you are already in it,” Nauro said. “You started it. If you do not finish it, someone else will. And once they have Semeca’s power they will come for you. To secure their position.”

  Ella clenched her fists. Of course Tai had to go. Of course there were all these dangers. It all made sense, didn’t it? And in the end, it dried out to Nauro getting Tai alone. Like he wanted.

  “Then why haven’t they come already?” Ella snapped, thinking fast, trying to find some hole in the web he was weaving. “It’s been a month or more.”

  Nauro looked displeased. “The stones are not broken easily. In fact, it’s said they are unbreakable, that they have remained smooth and unweathered for thousands of years.”