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

  10

  One moment Ella couldn’t breathe, stars dancing behind her eyes as her lungs collapsed, ribs unable to push against the crushing weight. The next it was gone. Her lungs sucked frigid air, and her racing mind took in the scene in an instant.

  Marea, sprawled in the remnants of the guyo. Nauro, standing tall and straight, deep in concentration. Tai, vanishing under a ball of furs, the attacker screaming at him.

  He was going to kill Tai. Nauro was too slow, Feynrick too slow, they were all too slow.

  Not Ella. She struck resonance hard, the wind stilling around her, furs freezing in air. She stood, every bone and muscle aching in her body. She would not lose Tai. Now or ever.

  She ran, straight over the coals, heat barely touching her feet, skin insensitive to the cold, pulling the axe from Feynrick’s stilled fingers. Ran straight for the attacker and swung.

  And missed. He was wafting too high. She couldn’t even hit his feet.

  Shattercocks. Find something to stand on?

  She looked around wildly, furs drifting in air, knowing time was limited, even with the amount of uai-filled wintergrass she’d eaten. The guyo was scattered, elk off in the trees, firewood burnt. Nothing.

  “Shatsickles,” she cursed, looking up again. Her knives—if she could find them she could throw them, but their packs were scattered too, indistinct from furs and everything else in the dim moonlight.

  No time. “Here goes nothing,” she muttered, wishing she’d taken Feynrick up on those axe lessons.

  She swung the axe back and hurled.

  It wobbled up in the air, bouncing harmlessly off the attacker.

  “Cockstains,” she cursed, crunching through the snow to retrieve it. Tried again, failed again. A few furs drifted toward her.

  How much longer? Her back was starting to ache, and she hated seeing Tai buried in furs up there, even if this was all less than a single breath’s time for him. Threw again. Missed again.

  “Stains!” she screamed, world dead and cold around her. “No! Shatter this! This isn’t happening!”

  She threw again, and this time managed a deep cut on the man’s forehead, her slip so deep she had the axe back in her hand before it started to bleed. It was a start, but her spine was truly aching now—time for maybe one more throw. She hauled back and hurled the thing skyward, hopes not high at this point.

  It turned, and tumbled, and stuck handle-first into his eye.

  11

  Tai stared at the axe, sticking blade-out from the dying man, blood still pounding in his ears.

  “What in bloody boarscock?” Feynrick asked beside him, looking from the dead man to Ella. “You’re lying. Don’t know why ye are and don’t mean offense, miss, but that throw’s impossible.”

  Ella looked baffled. “I guess I just got lucky?”

  She also looked freezing, standing there in her shift. Tai summoned the uai still in him and began sweeping the scattered furs together, looking for any large enough to cover her.

  “Thank ancestors you did,” Tai said. “The rest of us were too busy dying.”

  There. He found a large scrap where three pelts were still stitched together, and draped it over her bare shoulders. Distractingly bare, even in the freezing cold. Something about almost dying always made him want her more.

  “Speaking of which,” Marea said, trying to stand and keep her pile of furs on her, “what are we going to do? It’s freezing and we don’t have a fire and it’s the middle of the night.”

  “Got to gather the furs,” Feynrick said. “Won’t last another night without them, and take too long to hunt down this many animals. Stitch ‘em back together once it warms up.”

  “And until then?”

  “Until then we walk,” Tai said. “You don’t stay warm standing still, and a fire will do us little good without the guyo, even after we gathered wood and lit it.” Prophets knew he and Aelya had spent enough winter nights walking the streets to keep warm, when they had no place to sleep or no fuel to heat it.

  They got to work, Feynrick going after furs in the woods and Marea going to check on the elk, tied up a few hundredpace away.

  Nauro stood in the same place he had since the beginning, furs fallen in a pile around him, face a mask of concentration. Gathering up the revenants the other shaman had thralled?

  “What was that, Nauro?” Tai asked, picking through the snow for their belongings, scattered in the fight.

  “Journeyman,” the fyelocke answered, eyes focused in the distance.

  “The lowest in your order?” Ella asked, finding her clothes and dropping furs to pull them on.

  “Middling,” Nauro said, like he was dream talking, “but this one had a healthy uai stream. Likely been out here a while.”

  “He was insane,” Tai said, remembering the quick sight he had into the man’s mind. “I—read his thoughts, before he died. Thought he was a god or something.”

  And that was reason to kill him? Ydilwen said inside. The man was abused all his life. You saw that.

  Ella wrapped a beaver pelt around her head. “Makes sense, with him telling us to kneel.”

  Tai opened his mouth and closed it again. They’d had to kill him, right?

  Sure. Like you had to kill me.

  “Not uncommon, unfortunately,” Nauro said, turning from his distant stare. “An increased uai stream without preparation can make one feel… more than human.”

  “How’re you feeling, then?” Ella asked, Tai recognizing the too-casual tone of her voice. She saw the danger: whatever Nauro had been before, if he’d just taken all the attacker’s revenants, he would be at least that powerful now. Enough to kill them all, in other words. “You just thralled his revenants, didn’t you?”

  “I added them to my stream, yes,” Nauro said. “But this is not a new experience for me, and I was prepared for it as a journeyman, before I ever increased my uai. This man, I doubt he had risen that high in the training.”

  “He was a bureaucrat,” Tai said. “Mid-level in Galya. Came here from Seingard, seeking souls.”

  Is Nauro any different? Why do you not kill him too? Or anyone seeking power? Because these are your friends?

  Yes, Tai thought back. Because they are not trying to kill me.

  Yet. Give Nauro time—once you stop being useful to him, you will be a threat.

  Nauro nodded. “Smart then, at least. Plenty of revenants out here to take. He was likely gathering them in the wild, then traveling to the cities to attach them to new hosts.”

  Ella pulled a rucksack from the snow, voice still casual. “So you can do all the things he was doing? Control objects, float?”

  “I could already do all that,” the fyelocke said, bland as if he was talking about a second helping of soup. “But yes, now I can do it better.”

  “Then why did it take you so long to stop him?” Tai asked, unable to keep the anger in his voice. They had almost died. Ella had almost died, while Nauro was doing what? Increasing his own personal power? Was that all he was after?

  He’s a ninespears. That’s what they are.

  “A battle between shamans is not primarily a battle of uai,” the man said, sounding again like a teacher. “It is a battle for control of revenants. He either didn’t know this, or thought he could overwhelm me too quickly for it to matter.”

  “Looked to me like he was just better than you,” Feynrick said, coming in from the trees with a pile of furs. “If Ella and the milkweed hadn’t fought him the way they did, we’d probably all be eating dirt about now.”

  Nauro paused a full breath. Deciding what to say? Choosing a lie?

  “Yes,” he said at last. “The man was stronger than me. Not more knowledgeable, or more skilled, but while I have been waiting in the woods for Tai to make his decision, others have been actively gathering Semeca’s power, and have done in the space of a month what it took decades to do previously.”

  “And we’re to believe,” Ella said, sounding as hot as Tai felt, “t
hat you weren’t also spending a lot of that month in the wild like this man and Ydilwen, gathering up unclaimed revenants?”

  “I was,” Nauro said. “But unclaimed revenants do little until they are attached to a host and begin harvesting uai. And there was no one in the southern forest to attach a revenant to, and precious little time in Ayugen to find hosts.”

  “So you risked it all,” Ella said, voice softening. “You knew others would be outstripping you, journeymen like this one, and still you risked it on Tai agreeing to tutelage.”

  “Yes,” Nauro said. “I am not one of your Cult of the Blood, but I have faith in Tai. There have been many who have become powerful in the last few centuries. Many who have made their tries at the gods. Only one who has succeeded.”

  “Then you will remember the terms of our deal,” Tai said, dropping another stack of furs and standing up straight. “Any power that we gain, we share. That means this man’s power too.”

  Ella and Feynrick stopped gathering furs, the clearing suddenly getting very quiet.

  “You are not ready,” Nauro said. “I can’t share these with you if you don’t know how to take them.”

  “Then teach me.”

  “The—thralling revenants is not something taught until the journeyman stage at least. You are barely an initiate.”

  “And as we agreed, this is not a normal training. You don’t teach it to initiates because it’s impossible, or because it’s customary?”

  As he asked, he struck mindsight and pushed hard at Nauro’s mind. The man was normally impenetrable, the current of his thoughts flowing deep underground, but just in case. He needed to know how much he could trust this man. If he could trust him.

  He caught a bare glimpse—not of frustration, or calculation. Of fear.

  What was Nauro afraid of?

  “More of custom,” Nauro said at last. “We can try. But I can’t promise it will work, or work out the way you think.”

  “Story of my life,” Tai said, relaxing some. Fear was better than calculation—it pointed to an honest motive. And the man had agreed, at least for now. Good enough.

  And so, you will take on power too, as I did, as the dead man did. How long will you deny what you are?

  Tai opened his mouth to respond and found he had no answer. He bent back to the furs.

  12

  The Yati are the only people accounted little faith in the Prophet. I wonder, did he skip their rocky valley in his pilgrimage from the ice sheet to Aran? Or did his tales, preserved everywhere in their own cultural inflections, get absorbed somehow into the Yati mythos of the genitors? Markels speaks of one genitor unlike the others, not renowned for violence, fertility, or bawdy wisdom, theorizing this was the Prophet. Markels, however, was no ethnologist, and his account is likely apocryphal.

  —Eylan Ailes, Treatise on World Religions

  The weather warmed some as they descended the slopes from Ninefingers Pass toward the Yanu river, trees thickening and bare patches of ground beginning to appear. For Ella it was like walking into Markels’ classic Among the Yati, the descriptions she had pored over in her youth coming to life in tidy Yati terrace gardens and hilltop villages. These were still sparse and often so hidden behind forest Feynrick had to point them out to her, but it was exciting nonetheless. After the Achuri, the Yati were the most recently-colonized people, and this far upriver their lifestyles would still be similar to what they’d been before Councilate influence. Unspoiled.

  She took a deep breath, catching the scent of burning dung and roasting meat on the air as they passed near another village. “I have always wanted to come here.”

  Feynrick barked a laugh. “To the hinterlands? These people are savages.”

  “Aren’t you… one of them?” Marea asked. The girl was starting to open up, slowly.

  “Sure,” Feynrick said, “if one of your saltmarsh peasants is the same as a city-dwelling House daughter. I grew up in the warring counties, just upriver from Yatiport. People up here? They’re still breeding with dogs and building with mud bricks. Barely call ‘em Yati, if you ask me.”

  Ella shrugged at Marea. She doubted very much that the people here bred with dogs, but it was good to remember that what looked like one culture and people from the outside always had divisions within it, not least between rural and urban.

  “How far from here to the waystone?” Tai asked.

  “Piss if I know,” Feynrick said. “A day, maybe two?”

  It turned out to be more, but the going was easier once the land flattened out, and though they kept watch at night they saw no sign of other shamans wandering like the one they had fought. The land was stippled with steep hills, the highest of these cleared of trees and planted in stepped terraces fed by an intricate system of waterways.

  “How could savages build something like that?” Ella asked, gesturing at another terraced and fortified Yati settlement. Feynrick insisted they not make contact, for their own safety.

  The burly red-haired man snorted. “That’s nothing. Wait till you see the warring counties.”

  Tai’s lessons continued on apace. Nauro had either relented or given up fighting Tai on letting her and Marea listen in, which was both frustrating and gratifying. Frustrating because she couldn’t see what Tai was seeing, could only feel the occasional revenant that passed too close. It was like learning to play fox-and-rat with a blindfold on. Only this fox and rat was much more than a game.

  Gratifying too because it was still learning. She’d read about none of this, heard of none it, in years of studying the resonances and cultural understandings of them. The ninespears really had managed to keep their arts a secret, for centuries if Nauro was telling the truth.

  Which made sense, if you considered the archrevenants would kill anyone with the knowledge. According to Tai, that was why Semeca had risked attacking them directly.

  The arts themselves were fascinating too, like learning a new way of seeing. She practiced what she could of the skills Nauro taught Tai, determined to be ready for when she finally got a revenant.

  Because she would get one. One way or another. If Nauro didn’t want it, then she did.

  This morning, their third since the night attack, Nauro was pushing a revenant into the trees and challenging Tai to find it. Because Tai needed yura to see revenants with his resonance, and they hadn’t brought much with them—mainly to use in barter—they often practiced without his new resonance. Which meant Ella could do it too.

  “There,” Nauro said. “Where is it now?”

  Ella searched the trees, unfocusing her eyes like Nauro had taught, looking for any kind of smudge or disturbance. Theoretically you could see revenants without resonance, they were just much more indistinct, like details in starlight instead of day.

  “High up, about thirty paces ahead,” Tai said, before she’d seen anything. “In the yewleaf.”

  “Cockstains,” Marea cursed, following the lessons just as closely as Ella and much more competitive about it. “I almost had that one.”

  “Again,” Nauro said. “Find it and name it.”

  Weighted silence. Ella’s eyes flew over the draw they were passing through, trees clustered around a wide, shallow creek. There?

  “The rock outcropping,” Ella said. “To the right of the dead needleaf.”

  “Yes,” Nauro said, sparing as ever with his praise. “And its name?”

  “Chills,” Marea said without pause. She’d given most of the revenants their names.

  “No.”

  “What?” She sounded indignant, though it was difficult to name the revenants without feeling them.

  “Ashes,” Tai said. “Winding around the lower branches.”

  “Good,” Nauro smiled. “Now the touchings. Two and you’re out.”

  This was a separate exercise, one of Ella’s favorites. Rather than try to identify the revenant, which was still easiest for her by touch, the goal here was to be the last one touched, which meant seeing the revenant and do
dging it. Not to mention not tipping off your competitors if you did manage to see one.

  “What are the stakes?” Ella asked casually, already unfocusing her eyes to try seeing the revenants. Or unseeing them, as Marea said.

  “Stakes?” Nauro asked. “The stakes are will you get better at this or not.”

  “Oh, come on,” Ella answered. “Make it interesting. Say, I’m the last one standing twice in a row and you give me a revenant?”

  Nauro smiled. “Very well. But those are only one side of the stakes. What’s in it for me, if you don’t win?”

  Tai eyed her and she shot him a frown. She wasn’t going to gamble Nauro with that. “Guyo duty,” she said. “You’re free and clear the next two nights if I fail. I’ll gather wood and put up the tent.”

  The strange man raised his eyebrows. “High stakes indeed. Very well. You’re on.”

  “Me, too,” Marea cut in at once, and Ella smiled despite the banter that followed. Smiled because the fyelocke had basically admitted he had a revenant to give her, after denying it.

  Not so ancient and wise after all, Mr. Ninespears.

  “Begin!” Nauro snapped, and Ella ducked left on instinct. Nauro would be trying to eliminate her even more than usual. She unfocused her eyes and spun in a circle, listening for watery rustles, sniffing for dead leaves.

  There! Maybe? She dodged right, heart pounding. If she could get a revenant, she could finally put this all in practice.

  She could finally do something to protect Tai.

  Ella heard a rustle and ducked, feeling a faint chill along her back. Nauro was definitely pushing revenants at her. Of course. It was unfair, but her whole life had been unfair. She knew how to use that.

  Ella stood abruptly and ran for Tai, as fast as their clunky snownets would let her. Nauro wanted to target her? Fine. She’d use that. Behind her Marea cursed—good, one touched. Now if she could just get Tai—

  A chill washed over her. “Shat it!” she cursed. “Again!”