Rebel of Riddle and Woe, page 1
Rebel of Riddle and Woe
Tidecaller Chronicles, Book Three
By Levi Jacobs
Copyright © 2022 by Levi W. Jacobs
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. You can, however, lend the book to a friend.
Cover Art and Design by Damonza
First Edition, Jan 2023
ISBN 978-1-952298-17-2
For inquiries:
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387 15th St W. #142
Dickinson, ND 58601
For more on Levi Jacobs, including a free Tidecaller novella and audiobook, visit www.levijacobs.com
To the Aletheias of the world—may you find your story.
1
Seven Days from Dahran
“Well, slop,” Anan says, staring at the broken wheel.
It pretty well sums up how I feel, too. Three of the eight spokes are shattered, our formerly handsome iron-rimmed wheel now an egg-shaped lump on the polished rail of the ironway. We’re a week out of Dahran, traveling by wagon to escape notice—far enough out that traffic is light and the exchange yards few. The midday heat is oppressive, and striped flies buzz in the air around us, looking for a chance to bite.
“I knew there was a reason we got a deal on this cart,” Anan mutters, pawing his vest for a clove twist. “So, what do we do now?”
I sigh. “I guess we start walking.”
He glances at me. “If you don’t want to walk, I’m sure we can get Ekifte to do it. Or Isang. He’s got the longest legs.”
“It’s not that,” I say. “It’s—”
“What is going on?” Teiwo asks, leaning his tanned head and shoulders from the wagon’s canvas-covered bed. His eyes are bleary from sleep—he took second watch last night.
“Cart’s beggared,” Anan says, striking a match to light his twist.
“It’s not beggared,” I say. “The spokes just broke.”
“Ah,” Teiwo says, climbing from the cart to take a look. “I—do not know much of cart wheels. But I am sure it will be okay. Another caravan will come along the rails soon. We can buy a new wheel from them.”
It’s a nice thought, but I’m not going to sit here all day hoping someone comes. “The thing is—”
“Buy one?” Anan snorts. “Any Daraa with half a brain is going to rob you blind this far from an exchange, with your caravan broke down. But if you all can distract them—”
“We’re not stealing spokes, Anan,” I cut in. Gaxna got me used to stealing for survival, back in Serei, and we couldn’t have escaped Dahran without Anan’s skills, but stealing from innocent people still roils my waters.
“What? They rob us, or we rob them. It’s the Dahranese way.” The skinny thief shrugs. “Besides, you didn’t seem too excited about walking.”
I sigh. “I’m not. The next yard could be hours away on foot, and then we have to buy the things, and get back, and fix it. But it still sounds better than waiting around, hoping a caravan will come by with the parts we need.”
Teiwo frowns. “What is the hurry, Aletheia?”
I slap at a fly. I have to remind myself that this is different for them. That as much as they’re on board with helping me stop the floods and save Gaxna and kill my enemies, it isn’t urgent for them the way it is for me. They didn’t see the world end in a holy vision. They haven’t felt only silence from their lover, where everyone else in my bloodsight is a constant stream of emotion.
“A day feels like a long time,” I say at last, when I’ve iced the churn inside enough not to snap at him. “We don’t know when the floods are coming. Or our enemies, for that matter.”
He puts a hand on my shoulder. “We have a day, at least. And no other options. All will be well.”
I appreciate the gesture, even if I don’t share his faith.
Anan nods up the rails. “Looks like Ekifte knows something we don’t. Maybe he can help.”
I start at the sight of the massive Bamani man running back to us between the parallel iron rails, naked blade in hand. A hundred immediate worries blot out my longer-term ones—was this sabotage? Did he see bandits up ahead? Or another pack of overseers sent from Serei to kill me?
I have my own staff out, unconsciously taking Floodwaters Rise, when he pounds up.
“What is it?” I call out. “Bandits? Overseers?”
“I saw you were in trouble,” he puffs out, pounding to a halt, eyes scanning the patchy jungle. “Are we under attack? From which side?”
Anan blows a lazy lungful of smoke. “Attack of a broken wheel.”
Ekifte stares at him a moment, still tensed for battle, then his shoulders drop. “Ah. Well. I am sure we will overcome this, too.”
I can’t help feeling disappointed. Even if he was only running to warn us of bandits, I could have used an honest fight. Something I’m good at, instead of managing broken wagon wheels in the hinterlands.
“Did you see any caravans up there?” I ask. Ekifte has been ranging ahead, scouting for bandits or trouble. He seems to like the role, and he’s good at it—a symptom of living under the constant threat of raids in Bamani, no doubt.
“None,” he says, “nor bandits.” He eyes the cart, then me. “What do we do?”
I roll my shoulders. This is something new for me: in the arena, I set myself up as the battle leader, and it was a role I felt comfortable with. I had the most training of anyone, and I wanted to be the one taking the most risk. Out here, I don’t really have any special skills or training—definitely less than people like Anan and Isang, who’ve actually traveled by wagon before. Still, in the last week, everyone’s started looking to me for answers. I guess because I’m the one with the most to lose.
“We walk, I guess,” I say. “Though it probably means a full day wasted.”
Ekifte frowns. “With such a party as ours? No. We can carry this thing. You, me, Teiwo, Isang, we have strength enough. It will make a great tale.”
Anan clears his throat. “You forgot someone.”
The massive tattooed man bellows out a laugh, clean and wholehearted. It’s one of my favorite things about him. “No, tiny man, I did not! Someone must still drive the cart, yes?”
I eye the next hill, then the sturdy wagon, heavy with forty-thousand of the Bull’s ravas stuffed into a panel beneath the floor. “I’m—not sure we can make it that far.”
Ekifte looks almost hurt. “Did we not defeat the Bull of Dahran in open combat? One gonad-shaped wheel cannot stand in our way. Ah, there! Isang! Come, and let us carry this measly wagon to the next exchange.”
I turn to find the tall man climbing down from the back, a sheaf of papers still in his hand. He’s been helping me read the Immersion Chronicles, partially because the motion of the wagon makes me sick, but mostly because I am afraid I’ll miss something. My father’s notes are dense, and I’ve never been much of a scholar.
“We could do that,” he says slowly. “Or we could just pull the boxing, distribute the spokes, and rework the felloes.”
I’m glad I’m not the only one staring at him.
“I hate it when he does this,” Anan mutters. “Say it again, without the smug?”
“Spread out the spokes,” Isang says. “Five of them are still in good shape. If we pull the broken ones and space out the solid ones evenly, we should be able to make it to the next exchange at least.”
“And you can do this?” Ekifte asks, looking at the egg-shaped wheel like it’s a strange carcass washed up on the beach.
Isang shrugs. “Why not?”
Anan looks amused, Ekifte disappointed, and Teiwo unsurprised. I just feel relieved: one less day wasted. One less day for Gaxna to die or the floods to come or my enemies to get ahead while we trundle across the continent. Every day I question whether it wouldn’t have been better to just take a ship, even though Nerimes will be expecting that, and probably has overseers in every port, waiting for me.
“Thank you,” I say, and hold out a hand for the chronicles. One of us is reading them at any point in the day, and we’ve still only made it through the full text once in a week. My father was thorough. “Find anything?”
Isang scrunches his chin. “Not really. More mentions of the floods, some cryptic passages about uniting different ways, but nothing we can use.”
I take them, the sheafs of vellum soft in my hand. There has to be something here. Some key to stopping the floods. My father was sure of it. Though a voice inside whispers what’s the point, if we don’t save Gaxna first. If she still can be saved. I poke again at her seed in my chest, dead for weeks now. But she’s not dead. I know it.
Other fears swim there too, like manta rays lurking on the bottom of my consciousness. The fear that whatever my dad found in the chronicles, Nerimes already knows about it. Or that he’s found some way around it, with the strange magic he and Hiana share. Or that Gaxna is still alive, but after what I put her through, she wants nothing to do with me. She always said it wasn’t worth it. And now here we are.
My fingers tap out a rhythm against my thigh. They’ve been doing that lately, when I get stressed. Which feels like a lot of the time.
“Hey,” a voice comes, and I startle out of it. Anan’s looking at me. “The wheel’s broken, not the canvas.”
I start. How long have I been standing here, staring at the roof of th
“Right. I, ah, I should start reading these papers.” Isang already has the wheel halfway off, with Teiwo and Ekifte hovering nearby.
“You should relax, is what you should do. Do you know today marks a week we’ve been on the road, with no one trying to kill us or send us back to the arena? That deserves a clove twist, at least.”
Everything deserves a clove twist to Anan. Still, he’s right. I fold the papers and sit down next to him on the thick iron rails. “What I need is to meditate.”
“Why don’t you, then?” he asks, passing me a twist and leaning in so I can light it off his.
I inhale clove smoke, smooth and rich and tingly against the back of my throat. “That’s the ironic thing. The times I need it most are the times I want to do it least.”
“Sounds right,” he says. “Still, I saw you in the arena. I wouldn’t think a broken wheel could lick you like this.”
I exhale. “It’s not the wheel. In the arena, I knew what to do. There were only two options, right? You bow down to Booker and accept his slop, or you kill yourself trying to get out.”
He blows smoke in a way that feels like agreement.
“I knew what to do, even if everyone thought I was crazy,” I go on. “But out here? I don’t know, should we just go to the nearest port and deal with the overseers if they’re there? If we do, are we going to Serei to try to kill my enemies and get Gaxna out, or do we need to find the rebel temple and try to come in with an army? Before any of that, am I wasting my time trying to find out how to stop the floods in all this nonsense”—I shake the chronicles in my hands—“or does everything else need to wait on that, because nothing matters if we all drown? Or do I need one of the monastics to help me figure it out? Because I’m getting nothing so far.”
Anan nods sagely. “I was wrong. You’re going to need at least two clove twists.”
I bark a laugh despite it all, or maybe because of it all. “You’re nuts, you know that, Anan? How does all of this not get you down? The fact that we might all die tonight in a sudden flood we can’t do anything to stop?”
He pulls at his clove. When he exhales, his expression is serious, something I’ve seen happen to him more often lately. “You saw me in the arena. I was ready to die. Knew I was going to die. Was really only living so I could spit in my wife’s face, in Dahran’s face, because that was the only thing left that I could do. But all this? Getting out?” He shakes his head, gazing toward the vine-choked bluffs rising in the distance. “This is like the biggest hit I’ve ever pulled. Getting more time. A second chance at life. So even if we die tonight? That’s like seven days more than I thought I would get.”
I pull in smoke, my heart warming because I know I had some part in that, even as that kind of gratitude feels an ocean away from where I am, swimming in worry and fear.
I grind the clove out against the rail. “Well. Thank you for reminding me. I should have been dead a hundred times, too. And thank you for the smoke. I think I can face this thing again.” I pick up the papers.
He shrugs. “Always got more when you need them. We bought a whole bale, remember?”
I spend the next hour poring over my dad’s crabbed writing, while Isang miraculously takes the wheel apart and rebuilds it with Ekifte and Teiwo’s help. I find nothing in the text, other than my own impatience, but Isang’s fix works, and I’m relieved at least to get moving again. And when Anan insists that night that we all drink to celebrate our first week of freedom, I even manage to ignore my worries for a few hours, and have some laughs around the fire with my allies.
No, I think, as Anan starts in on another ridiculous story and Ekifte searches his brain for one to top it, not my allies. My friends.
Teiwo eventually steps out to take watch, and Anan and Ekifte take the half-full bottle of rice wine—our third tonight—into the back of the wagon, where they usually sleep. Isang and I go back to our tent.
I wasn’t sure, at first, what to do with the tent we bought. It didn’t feel right to sleep in it alone, especially with space so limited elsewhere, but even though we all crammed our pallets together for protection in the Gaol Tower, it feels different to lay my bed next to just one person. I’m also not stupid—much as I grew up in a temple, and have barely had a relationship with anyone outside of Gaxna, I knew how choosing one person for my tent might affect the rest of our group. But they all saw me kiss Isang that last day on the sands, and if it was going to be anyone, it was going to be him. Even if this still feels like betraying Gaxna, who’s locked up in the pits under the Serei temple right now.
My heart tightens. If she’s even alive.
So even though we share a tent, Isang and I have kept our distance. Or I’ve kept it. Though every night, as my loneliness for Gaxna erodes into simple loneliness for touch, that distance gets smaller and smaller.
Isang rolls over on his pallet, holding some papers up to the candlelight. “What about this section?” he asks, gesturing to one of the earliest recorded immersions, and my father’s copious notes on them. “Doesn’t it seem like your father puts special weight on them, like they meant something more to him? There are three or four in a row like this.”
“I saw that,” I say, messing with the flap letting in a deliciously cool breeze. “But the only thing he really seems to say about them is they’re not hallucinations, like he’s just figuring that out, but not necessarily what any of them mean. Uniting the ways? That could mean anything.”
He sighs. “Well. I might call it a night. I think the wine diluted any remaining ability to think on my part.”
I purse my lips. I should do the same, but the days are long and frustrating, with me itching to read and the motion of the wagon keeping me from it. “Think I’ll stay up a while more.”
He nods, then hesitates. I know this is weird for him. We haven’t talked about it. Haven’t even really talked about what happened on the sands, even though we’re obviously more than friends. Whatever that means.
“Thank you,” I say, in the suddenly awkward silence after my words. “For figuring out the wheel today. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t stand the thought of taking a whole day to fix it.”
“You couldn’t stand it because you know how important this is,” he says, taking my hand. We sleep like that sometimes, fingers entwined. Me torn between loving the warmth coming through our bond and hating myself for enjoying it while Gaxna rots somewhere, alone.
I sigh. “I just wish I knew we were on the right path.”
He gives my hands a squeeze, and I feel another pulse of that heat. “We are. Or we’re looking for it, anyway. Better to search a day than run a week in the wrong direction, my master used to say.”
“Well, thanks for searching with me,” I say, still not sure what to do with the tension between us. Sometimes I wish he’d just kiss me, if he’s going to do it. Other times I’m grateful he hasn’t. “I know you probably have people you want to see back in the Deul.”
He doesn’t bite at the reference to the woman from his past. Maybe he feels as guilty about this as I do.
“The main Deul I need to see isn’t there,” he says instead. “She’s in Serei. And helping you with this search seems like my best chance of paying her back for what she did to me. To my people.”
Ieolat. I nod, and things seem a little clearer again. This is one of the things I love about Isang. He doesn’t say it, but I can hear To the world at the end of his speech, a thing Gaxna would never say. He cares about the world the way I do, about the people outside his immediate bubble. Wants to help them. And the more time I spend away from the temple, the rarer I realize that is. Floods, the rarer I realize it is inside the temple.
I clear my throat and give his hand a last squeeze before letting go. “Well, if we’re going to do that, I guess I need to keep reading.”
I see a flash of disappointment in his eyes when we lose touch, but I don’t know what to do with that, or with the echo of it in my own chest, so I ice it. On the hierarchy of desperate problems, my and Isang’s feelings end up pretty low, even if it doesn’t always feel like it. Deluge first. Impossibly powerful enemies next. Or Gaxna. I don’t know. Isang rolls away from the lantern burning between us, and I turn back to my father’s words.
