Acolyte's Underworld Read online

  She drew her arms tighter around him. “Well at least they’re not attacking for now. We’ll think of something. We have the power of a god, right?”

  He sighed, body relaxing. “Yeah. And good thing too—looks like it doesn’t take long for your youth to wear off.”

  She almost cracked a joke about him wanting a hot young thing, then felt her mother’s old fear behind it, the fear that he would leave her if she looked old. She bit her tongue. She was done thinking that way. “It doesn’t. Probably day two I was starting to feel it. On the bright side, the aches and pains of old age are going to be no surprise to me. How are you? How is your hand?”

  He’d claimed it didn’t hurt, following the traitor Harides cutting it off with a black blade made of uai. “It’s fine,” he said, holding up his arm to reveal a smooth stump, skin grown over the wound as though it were years old.

  Ella looked away. She hated it, and she hated Harides even more for taking it from him. It wasn’t fair, but then she was probably the fool for wanting life to be fair. It didn’t stop her hating it. “Have you tried healing it? With the spear?”

  “Many times,” he said. “I guess there’s limits even to what a god can do.”

  “Or limits to what we know about what we can do,” she said. “I keep waiting for Nauro to show up in someone else’s body and tell us what to do. Prophet knows we could use him, with that sow archrevenant looking over our shoulders.”

  Tai chuckled. “You really don’t like her, do you?”

  “It’s not about what I like or don’t like,” Ella said. She had nothing against the woman personally. She was just a sow. Objectively. “She knew exactly what we did at the stone and was able to appear out of nowhere right afterwards, and basically came to smile and say hello and threaten to wipe us off the face of Muyu if we ever made a full harmony again.”

  Tai shrugged, his muscles moving in interesting ways under her hand. “She also called us peers and said she didn’t want the power of the spear. Said she had enough of her own.”

  Ella snorted. “You don’t become an archrevenant without wanting power badly. All the ninespears do, and they’re the ones that become archrevenants. You think because she’s got one resonance she’s satisfied? Whatever the reason she didn’t attack last time, we need to be on guard in case she changes her mind.”

  He held up his handless arm in supplication. “I’m not saying we don’t prepare for it. I’m just saying the world is more complicated than friend and enemy. I think Nauro proved that to us. And Avery for that matter, or whatever his name was. Yes, we should be ready, but we should also keep an open mind, so that we don’t lose a potential ally. Ancestors know we could use more.”

  He was being idealistic and slightly naive and was probably right as usual, but there was no need to say all that. “I love you,” she said instead, nuzzling her head into his chest. “Let’s not be away from each other for weeks at a time, okay? It sounds dumb, but I missed you as soon as you left.”

  Tai quirked an eyebrow. “You missed me, or the spear?”

  She quirked one back. “Depends on which spear you’re talking about.”

  Then they were done with talking for a time.

  When Ella got up to use the outhouse, she had to search for her clothes. She pulled them on, then took the time to make them look right. The privy was outside, usually with a line these days, and much as the thought of shocking all the prudishly faithful with disheveled hair and a misbuttoned dress tickled her, she’d rather just be quick and private about it.

  Ella passed the time in line explaining the concept of uai and revenants for the third time to a kindly old woman she was fairly sure she had seen balancing naked atop a fountain in Aran during their journey toward the stone.

  Business done, she made her way back to the house, assuring everyone Tai would be out soon. “When I’m done with him,” she added under breath, and pushed the door open.

  To see a slender lighthaired woman leaning over the hearth.

  Ella stopped, momentarily confused. Was she looking in a mirror? But the woman at the hearth wore different clothes—the split green leana she’d worn yesterday.

  No—this was no mirror. It was an intruder. At the hearth.

  Where they’d hidden the spear.

  “Tai!” she yelled, even as she struck resonance. “Intruder!”

  Ella ran, feeling the air thicken against her as time slowed, watching the woman’s arm reach behind the weathered armoire. Toward the spear that would make her a god.

  Ella had ten paces to run at timeslip pace, versus the woman’s two handswidth in slowed time.

  She wasn’t going to make it.

  Ella gut clenched as the woman’s arm flexed. Leaped the low table though her ancient bones protested, knowing she would be too late—

  A sudden gale pressed on Ella, slamming woman and spear into the wall in slowed motion. Tai! She glanced back to see him pushing up from the couch, eyes open. Thank the Prophets. Ahead, the impact knocked the spear out of the woman’s grasp, sending it bouncing back toward the beds.

  Ella relaxed a touch, leaning into the slowed breeze and turning for the spear. There was no way the woman could beat her to the spear now. Her timeslipping gave her too much advantage.

  A curse sounded behind her, in a voice that should have been pitch-shifted low by the speed of Ella’s timeslip. It wasn’t.

  Currents. The woman was a timeslip too.

  Ella darted for the spear, tumbling in air ahead of her—

  A hand clamped on her shoulder. A far meatier hand than any woman had a right to.

  It spun her around, and she glimpsed a familiar face—the man from this morning, asking after Tai. She knew something was off about him. His fist smashed into her face.

  His smashed into her face. Ella slammed into the floor, pain flaring in her nose and fear welling in her gut. The stranger reached for the spear with a look of ecstasy on his face.

  2

  Tai woke to an alarmed cry from Ella that slurred from normal speech up to something unintelligibly high and fast. It didn’t matter—there was only one that could go wrong. The spear. Someone was trying to take the spear.

  He struck resonance on instinct, sending a blast of air toward where they’d tossed it in the height of passion—stupid, but there hadn’t been much room for thinking—hoping to throw anyone off who was trying to take it.

  And someone did cry out, but it was the birdsong cry of a sped-up voice. Before he could react, even sort out which blur was Ella and which their intruder, the spear tumbled past him as if shot from a sling, wood whirring against the air.

  So he sent a second blast that direction, not sideways but up, tapping his resonance deep like he meant to press every table and chair in the room against the ceiling.

  As he did Ella appeared suddenly, sliding backward on the floor in regular time, yelling something, nose fountaining blood. He followed her pointing hand as all the furniture in the room did slam against the ceiling. A stocky Yershman appeared with it, the spear wedged against a blackened ceiling beam five paces from him.

  “Good,” Tai growled, rolling to his feet, keeping up the windborn press against the ceiling though he could feel his uai draining rapidly. “Get out of that one, timeslip.” He wanted to run to Ella, but the spear had to take priority. He focused on splitting the winds around the spear, letting it drop from the ceiling.

  As he did he felt the resonance in the room shift, a second wafter’s rattle joining the high-pitched timeslip whine. And impossibly, the Yershman began pushing down from the ceiling, fighting Tai’s upward wind.

  A timeslip and wafter? Stains.

  It didn’t change what Tai needed to do. He stilled all resonance and leapt for the spear as it fell, hoping the man’s downward thrust would slam him to the floor in the absence of resistance.

  Tai caught the spear, power rushing into him.

  So did the Yershman, his momentum nearly wrenching the slender wood from Tai�
��s hand. Brawler, Tai thought, imagining himself super-strong, willing the uai to keep his good hand locked around the spear. It instantly was, even as the roaring power of the spear dropped to half, the Yershman diverting its other half.

  “Let go,” the man growled, close enough Tai could see the pockmarks on his skin. At the same time something slammed into Tai, a wall of air, but his hand held as firm as his imagination to the spear, and he sent a focused blast at the man, like a spear of air.

  The Yershman grunted, a wound opening on his neck and closing just as quickly.

  That was the trouble with the spear—it gave power to whoever held it equally, and wounds meant nothing when you could heal as quick as thought. Tai had already fought this battle once, locked inside the stone of Aran with the shaman Aeyenor, and he knew he would need something more.

  Like an ancient puceleaf table, heavy enough Feynrick couldn’t lift it alone. As more hardened air projectiles slammed into him, Tai willed the table into the air behind the attacker and thrust it forward, intent on breaking the man’s back.

  It broke—and healed in a flash. A chair slammed into Tai, and he healed in a flash of ice even as he gripped all the furniture he could see and sent it hurtling toward his opponent. Surely at some point the man would get too wounded to heal himself.

  If Tai didn’t first—a similar barrage hit him, consciousness threatening to slip away even as he clung tenaciously to the spear, to the belief he was whole and unwounded, bones knitting and reknitting in his body with every impact. The cottage shook under a maelstrom of broken furniture, the very floorboards pulling up.

  Something more. Tai slammed the twisted remains of the heavy four-poster bed against his snarling, blood-smeared opponent and racked his mind for something more. Some edge in what was otherwise sheer willpower, their uai perfectly balanced, bodies becoming inchoate, the force of wind and smashing furniture throwing them wildly around the room.

  Then a block of stone lodged in his throat and he choked. Of course—suffocation. You couldn’t heal suffocation. It was how he’d finally beaten Aeyenor. And now his opponent was doing it to him. Tai imagined the block gone but his throat filled with dust, a second stone replacing the first before he could suck air. Gagging, he willed a choking block into his opponent’s throat, but the man just smiled. He had been ready for it, had taken a deep lungful knowing what would happen. Tai’s chest heaved, stone appearing and dissolving in his throat, lungs drowning in dust.

  He fought back as hard as he could, doubling the hurricane of wood and metal and stone smashing into his opponent, but his vision was already graying. He had lost.

  3

  By the time Ella got to her feet, the air in the cabin was a deadly storm of debris, smashed pottery and bent knives and broken furniture flying through the air. At the center of the hurricane two men gripped a spear that roared with resonance.

  Half a splintered chair struck her and she fell, a line of fire opening on her back to match the pounding ache in her face. Blood streamed from her nose, and she had to fight against the animal urge to just run, to get as far away from this sea of danger and death as she could. No. Her lover was in there. Her fiancé.

  And if she let him die, that Yershman would suddenly become a god.

  So she forced herself to hands and knees and struck resonance, grateful to feel a deep well of uai still in her system. The maelstrom slowed, storm of death slowing to a drifting cloud of broken objects.

  “This I can handle,” she muttered, pushing up between a shattered table leg and the flapping remains of a shaman’s journal. There was no timeslipping away the force of the uai-fueled winds, Tai and the intruder’s forces battling each other in an invisible riptide, but it all pulled her inward toward them.

  Ella kept her eyes off the bloody mess of her lover at the center. He had the spear in his hand. He could heal. They would both heal when this was done. For now she needed to get there, to be the pebble that swung the balance in his favor.

  It was something like swimming in a whirlpool made of honey. Violent honey, with shards of broken pottery and kitchen implements suspended in it. A knife floated by—the same knife they had found in Eyadin’s back, she thought. A detached part of her mind thought of Marea, duped into killing a good man for another who was only using her. Poor girl. The rest of her thought only of how useful that thick vegetable-chopping blade could be at the moment.

  “Kill the right man this time,” she muttered, pulling it from the debris-thick air. She pushed her way deeper.

  Tai’s back arched and the Yershman’s face grew an ugly grin under his layer of blood and ever-closing cuts. Ella cursed and pushed harder, winds pushing her in all directions. She needed to get there now. The spinning remains of the cottage’s thick table drifted past and she leaped atop it, steeling her nerve for the collision. Currents send she was right about how uai healing worked. She would only get one chance as this.

  As the tabletop crashed into Tai she leaped off and made two quick, desperation-fueled chops at the spear. Eight lengths of fingers separated from the attacker’s fists and she swept them into the wind—then added her tiny, human-strength pull to Tai’s mighty one.

  Power flooded into her. Blood fountained in slow motion. And like she’d hoped, even as hundreds of new cuts opened and closed beneath the tatters of the Yershman’s clothes, his fingertips did not regrow, nor did his old ones fly back and re-knit.

  Instead his hands slipped, his mouth opened in shock, and suddenly there was only one wind, piling a cottage’s worth of wreckage on top of a fingerless Yershman.

  4

  They dropped to the floor and Ella cupped Tai’s face in her hands. “Are you okay?”

  His lungs hitched in answer, skin gray under a sheen of blood. He couldn’t breathe. Ella seized the spear, focusing her panic into the one thing she knew about shamanic magic: power and belief. That was all it took, and she had the power of a god in her hands. So she believed Tai’s body an open book, found the passage that spoke of a stone in his throat, of lungs filled with stone dust, and erased it.

  Tai retched and gasped air.

  “Tai!” she cried, power still roaring through her, scouring this strange book she’d created for any other thing that could be wrong with him. “Tai don’t die on me!”

  “I’m not,” he coughed. “Just—give me a second.”

  “Sure,” she said, concern for him eclipsed in a moment by another emotion—rage.

  Ella stood and turned and leveled the spear at the heap of wreckage, willing it all to go away. To reveal the man beneath who’d sought to murder her lover.

  It flashed to dust. The Yershman jerked up as though pulled by a puppet’s strings, but his head lolled and his eyes were lifeless.

  “Useless,” Ella snarled, jerking her head at the man, wanting to kill him again and again for daring to attack Tai. His body slammed into the far wall. The cottage groaned.

  A whistle sounded behind her. “Ye might want to go easy on the cottage, lass.” Feynrick stepped gingerly into the room, avoiding a section where the floorboards were missing. “Not sure they built it for this kind o’ domestic dispute.”

  Tai coughed and sat up and Ella willed her rage to cool, her face to calm. The danger was over. The attacker was dead. Tai was safe.

  Still, there was no way she was letting go of the spear until she was staining sure everything was fine.

  “Anyone else out there looking suspicious?” she asked, kneeling at Tai’s side.

  “Not unless you count five hundred pilgrims trying to decide if they should pray or take up arms,” Feynrick said, then gave a wide grin. “And Marrey. Looks like she’s been up to something.”

  Marrem clucked, stepping into the room with her usual air of common sense. Her hair was mussed, though, and her sensible brown dress looked hastily buttoned. Ella lost the last of her anger in barely suppressed mirth. She and Feynrick had disappeared awfully quickly. Not that she blamed them.

  Marrem notic
ed her gaze and began tugging at her clothes furiously. “Anyone hurt? Your nose, girl. Come here.”

  With a start, Ella realized her nose was still broken and throbbing. She willed herself healed, and a shocking moment of ice later was whole. Marrem gasped. “We have a shortcut these days,” Ella grinned. “I think we’re all fine, Marrem.”

  “He en’t fine,” Feynrick said, jerking his head at the body slumped against the far wall. “Who d’ye suppose he was?”

  “Someone who could change appearances like Harides did,” Ella said, at the same time Tai said, “A shaman. He knew exactly how to use the spear, and he was one step ahead of me the whole time.”

  “A late-comer from Aran?” Feynrick asked, picking at the shattered remains of the couch with a mournful look. “Looking to take one last shot at the spear?”

  “Maybe,” Tai said, “but I doubt many of the shamans there had much power left after we took the spear, and changing your appearance takes a lot of uai.”

  Ella frowned. “How do you know that?”

  Tai looked over, startled. “I—guess Nauro told me, sometime.”

  That was strange, but Nauro had sometimes insisted on private lessons during the long walk from Ayugen. “So where was his power coming from?” she asked, returning to the threads of logic. “He might have overcome enough revenants to waft and brawl and timeslip, but there’s no resonance that lets you change your appearance.”

  They were quiet a moment, evening light cutting beams through the dusty air. Tai looked up. “Eyadin. Remember how Eyadin could spot shamans even though he wasn’t one? And hadn’t even overcome his own revenants? What if this guy was something like that?”

  Ella bit her finger. “Eyadin could only do that because he was sent by someone else. Someone high up in the ninespears. At least, that’s what Avery said.”