Vincalis the Agitator

by Holly Lisle

  “If you lived in the Warrens, you wouldn’t be here,” the boy said. “Because the Warrens are gated to keep the criminals in; you couldn’t have gotten out. And you certainly couldn’t have come to Oel Artis Travia.”

  “I just walked here. Walked out of the Warrens, too.”

  “How?”

  “The same way I ran into your yard.”

  “The gates in the Warrens are malfunctioning, too? My father will have a fit. He’s going to be upset enough that something’s wrong with our gate. Lucky for you those guards didn’t try it.”

  “The Warren gate worked the same way all gates work for me. I can walk through any of them that don’t have real locks on them.”

  The boy shook his head. “Nonsense. I saw you go through the gate. It lit up, but it didn’t do it right.”

  “They always look like that when I go through them.”

  Solander thought about this for a moment, staring down at the floor and frowning. “You mean our gate might be working? If I’d told the guard the gate was malfunctioning and he’d tried to cross, he might have been killed? Oh, hells, I would have gotten into trouble for that.” The boy gave Wraith a speculative look, and then a tentative smile. “My name is Solander Artis,” he said.

  “I know. I heard you tell the guards.”

  “Now you’re supposed to tell me your name.”

  “It’s Wraith.”

  “Wraith what?”

  “Just Wraith.”

  “That’s a funny sort of name.”

  Wraith shrugged. “I liked it. That’s why I picked it.”

  “You picked your own name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s different. Wraith, I want you to show me how you got through our gate.”

  “All right.” The two of them rose, walked out into the yard together, and after Solander checked to see that no one who mattered was looking, Wraith walked through the gate. The lights played over him—and then he was on the other side. So he turned around and walked back.

  The boy frowned. “That can’t be. It looks like it’s working, but … Wait right here. I have to go get something. Don’t go anywhere,” he said, and raced to the big house.

  Wraith waited, and waited, and at long last the boy came racing back, carrying a small bag full of greenish lumpy balls.

  “You took long enough.”

  “It’s a big house,” the boy said, “and I had to get the testers out from under the watchman’s nose without him catching me.”

  “Testers?”

  “Gates only attack living human beings. Otherwise, they would have to be constantly raised and lowered for deliveries of supplies and other things that come via mage-carts. Pets and birds and other wildlife wouldn’t be able to pass through them, either, and the families do love their deer and peacocks and griffonelles. They’d be most upset to find their expensive pets roasted by a gate. So it used to be that the only way to test a gate was to shove a prisoner through it. Only now prisoners are used in work gangs, and they’re too valuable to just roast; so the wizards had to develop gate testers. You throw one through, and the gate thinks it’s a person who isn’t supposed to be there, and …” He pulled one out of the bag. “Here. I’ll show you.”

  He tossed the ball through the gate. The lights erupted again, but this time, along with the light, Wraith heard an eerie hum, and the ball stopped dead in midair, turned a brilliant glowing red, and exploded into dust with a crack so loud and sudden and emphatic it made both boys jump.

  Wraith closed his eyes. He’d seen the gates work on something other than testers before, and all because of his stupidity in thinking that if he could walk through them, anyone could.

  “It’s working,” the boy whispered.

  Wraith nodded. “They always are, I think. Gates just don’t work on me. The man in the market who sent his guards after me pointed his finger at me first, and the same sort of light came out of it. But that didn’t do anything, either, though I’m pretty sure he expected it to.”

  Solander leaned against a wall and closed his eyes. “Oh, dorfing hell-dogs! Master Faregan took a shot at you and it didn’t do anything? Drowning dorfing hell-dogs! No wonder he wanted his guards to grab you.” He stared at Wraith, his expression an eloquent testimony to awe. Without another word, he traced a short series of loops in the air. To Wraith’s amazement, a line of light glowed in the air in the wake of the boy’s finger. “Cover,” the boy said.

  The loops coalesced into a thin, wavering sphere of light that bobbled through the air to Wraith, touched him … and popped like a soap bubble, disappearing without a trace.

  “How did you do that?” Solander asked.

  Wraith said, “I didn’t do anything. I don’t do anything when I go through the gates, I didn’t do anything when that man pointed his finger at me and hit me with light. I don’t ever do anything.”

  “Would you walk through it for me one more time? I want you to carry a tester with you and see what happens.”

  Wraith nodded. Solander handed him a tester, and Wraith walked through the gate. Lights crackled and hummed around him, the tester exploded in his hand with a heat and a force that scared the breath out of him, but as before he remained unscathed. He turned around and stepped back through the gate again.

  The boy looked pale. He said, “Let’s go back in the playhouse to talk. I’m not due for lessons for a bit, and none of the juniors will be out in the yard until after midmeal. Once they get out here, the place will be hell, but for at least a while we have it to ourselves.”

  They both returned to the little house and drew up chairs, and Solander leaned his elbows on the table and said, “I’m the only child of Rone Artis, who is one of the top Dragons in the world, and Torra Field Artis, who is the daughter of one of the great wizards of all time. Qater Field—you’ve heard of him?”

  “No.”

  “Of course not.” Another exasperated sigh. “No matter. According to my parents—hells-all, according to everyone—I’ll become a powerful wizard when I grow up, because I already show incredible talent and aptitude, and have remarkable visual-spatial memory, and … I don’t even remember all the things they say. But if they’re right, I have a good chance of ruling Matrin. I can already build minor gates of my own. But I can’t walk through a gate untouched. Neither can my father. If wizards could cross armed gates, the gates would be worthless. You have something special going on with you. And I want to find out what it is, because it has to be important.”

  Wraith said, “All I want to do is find food for my friends and go back home. They have to be getting scared by now—I couldn’t return there yesterday.”

  Solander considered that in silence for a long while. “Your parents didn’t look for you when you weren’t there?”

  “My parents don’t know who I am.”

  Solander’s face went blank. “I don’t understand—but you’ll have plenty of time to tell me. If your parents don’t know who you are, they won’t miss you, right? So just stay here. You can live in my house.”

  “I can’t. If I don’t go back, my friends will starve to death.”

  “Well, are their parents as terrible as yours?”

  Wraith considered that for a moment. “My parents aren’t terrible. They’re just … Sleeping.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Are your friends’ parents like yours? They must be, or they’d see to it that all of you had food.”

  “They’re all the same.”

  “Fine. Then bring your friends with you. More than a thousand family members and friends live in our winterhouse here, and about twice that many staff. I won’t have any trouble moving you and your friends in and creating a story for you. How many friends do you have?”

  “Two. Jess and Smoke.”

  “That’s no problem. We’ll just pretend you’re distant relatives from somewhere, here on the career exchange program. No one ever checks the paperwork on that very carefully.” Solander shrugged.

 
Wraith, whose hard life had taught him that the time to be most suspicious was when anything looked too good, asked, “Why would you have us come here? Why offer rooms or food to people you don’t know?”

  “I could use some friends. My cousins are creeps or dullards, and if you can walk through gates, you can do things they could never do. Your friends will have a good place to live, and you can take classes with me, and I can figure out why gates don’t work on you. I’m going to specialize in magical research,” he added. “You’d make a perfect case study.”

  Wraith stared through the door of the little house up to the big house, and tried to imagine walking through those grand front doors as if he belonged there. He tried to imagine never going back to the hollow, chilling silence of the Warrens. All of his life so far had been a dare—a strange, lonely challenge. This next step made an odd sort of sense to him. He’d been leaving the Warrens a little at a time since he was born.

  “We’ll do it,” he said.

  “Bring them with you tomorrow, then,” Solander said, but Wraith was already shaking his head in disagreement. “No? You won’t bring your friends?”

  “I can go through the gates. They can’t.”

  Solander looked startled. “Oh. I forgot about that.” He frowned thoughtfully and said, “And you and your two friends live in the Warrens.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I have to figure out some way to get an aircar with universal clearance into the Warrens. That might take a day or two. Going through gates like that—well, that isn’t the sort of thing you want to make a mistake about.”

  Solander thought for another minute, then said, “I’ll figure something out. In the meantime, we’re going to steal some food for you and your friends.”

  Wraith and Solander stood in one of the pantries of the house’s enormous kitchen, loading food into a box. Wraith had a hard time believing his eyes—he could not begin to guess the purpose of all the equipment in the huge outer room, nor what most of the many people out there were doing. Cooking, obviously—the smells alone whispered every wonderful promise possible about the food being prepared—but none of them did anything that looked like drawing Way-fare out of the wall-tube. Wraith knew of no other method of food preparation, so he kept peeking over his shoulder to see just what they did.

  That was how Wraith saw a hard-faced older boy coming toward the pantry where he and Solander picked out supplies for him, Smoke, and Jess. “Solander,” he said, keeping his voice low, “someone’s coming.”

  Solander looked toward the door and groaned. “Luercas—he’s a distant cousin.” Solander hid the box in with other boxes on the floor behind him and turned quickly, several small pies in hand. He passed one to Wraith and started chewing on the other one. “He’s … awful.”

  Wraith said, “Oh,” and then took a bite of the pie. It tasted so impossibly good, tears started in the corners of his eyes—and at that moment Luercas sauntered into the pantry.

  “You,” he said, looking past Wraith to Solander. “What are you doing in here, you little rodent? Your parents should keep a tighter leash on you.”

  “I have as much right to be in the pantry as you do.” He muttered something the tone of which sounded insulting to Wraith, though he couldn’t make out the words.

  Apparently neither could Luercas, because he glared at Solander. “Not if I tell you that you don’t, worm.” Luercas then looked at Wraith, and his eyes narrowed. “And what in all the hells is this thing?”

  “A … distant cousin from … Ynjarval,” Wraith lied. “Here on temporaries.”

  “Looks like something you found in the street. You, street-dirt. Disgusting black-haired stick. All by yourself in the real city, eh? Let me see you bow to your superiors.” He smiled at Wraith, a most unpleasant smile.

  Wraith felt sick to his stomach. But he looked Luercas in the eyes and said, “I don’t think so.”

  “Don’t you, street-dirt? With Mama and Papa back in Ynjarval, they’re not going to be able to do much to help you. Better get used to bowing if you’re planning on transferring here.”

  “No,” Wraith said, shaking his head. He felt pretty certain if he’d had more than that single bite of pie in his stomach over the last day, he would have thrown up right there, but he tried not to let it show in his face or in his voice.

  Luercas pointed at Wraith, and Wraith heard Solander gasp. “I said bow,” Luercas said, and a pale line of fire sketched itself from Luercas to Wraith … and promptly died.

  Wraith crossed his arms over his chest and tried to look confident. He said nothing. His heart was racing, and his knees were so weak he could feel them trembling. He leaned back against the shelving for support, but it apparently had the effect of making him look self-assured.

  “I said bow!” Luercas snarled. The second bolt of radiance that leaped toward Wraith looked big.

  “No, Luercas!” Solander said, but he need not have protested. This attack, too, died before it reached Wraith.

  Luercas’s face went red. “Think you’re clever, do you? Think your little trick is amusing. Let’s see how funny you think real magic is. BOW, you filthy bastard!” Luercas bellowed, as outside Wraith heard running feet. Two adults burst into the pantry just as Luercas’s third—huge—attack blasted toward Wraith and died.

  Both adults grabbed Luercas and dragged him out, and Wraith heard them shouting about him bothering children, about using magic attacks large enough to set off alarms all over the house to try to hurt children— about how he was suspended from his sessions and how this incident was going before the reviewers and certainly going to go on his records, and how he’d find it difficult to get any sort of good posting with the Dragons after demonstrating such poor judgment and poor self-control. The adults, dragging Luercas with them, moved out of earshot then, and Wraith turned to Solander.

  “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “He’s going to hate you forever for that,” Solander said, awed. “I can’t believe you didn’t just … bow.”

  “I looked in his eyes. If I’d given him what he wanted that time, the next time we met, he would have tried to make me do something worse. He’s … I don’t like him at all.”

  Solander dragged the box out from under the shelves and sighed. “I don’t think anybody likes him. Most people don’t manage to get so completely on his bad side so fast, though.” He handed the box to Wraith. “You’d better get out of here. I’ll walk you to the gate. Will you be all right getting home?”

  “I’ll be fine. Nobody ever pays me much attention. I’m good at not being noticed.”

  Solander looked at him sadly. “Not good enough, apparently. When we move you back here, we’re going to have to make sure you look different.”

  Wraith took the box of food, and followed Solander out the door and out of the house. Maybe I should have bowed, he thought. Maybe it would have worked out better that way.

  But he didn’t think so. He’d seen something in Luercas’s eyes that hunted for weakness, that took pleasure in pain.

  Wraith decided to make avoiding Luercas one of his big objectives in the future.

  Solander sat in his room after Wraith left, idly balancing the three gold balls in the air, and wondered what his father would make of the boy. Wraith showed every sign of being impervious to magic. Yet Solander’s father had told him many times that magic affected everyone—that magic was the sixth force of physics, and that one might as well look for a man who wasn’t affected by gravity as a man who wasn’t affected by magic.

  The balls spun in a neat little circle before Solander, swimming through the air like trained fish. Light from the window gleamed off of them. They were solid gold and terribly heavy; without magic, Solander wasn’t strong enough to lift one of them off the floor. But, as he’d told Wraith, he had a remarkable aptitude for magic. And, he thought, a remarkable aptitude for spotting what might be the biggest flaw in theoretical magic in the last two thousand years when it presented itsel
f to him.

  I probably should tell my father about Wraith, Solander thought. He’d want to know that such a person could exist.

  But visions of unveiling Wraith on his own—and with him a new theory of magic that included proofs for Laws of Exclusion, those heretofore mythical and much yearned-after laws that would permit wizards to create spells without any rebound effects, or rewhah—sang to him like the Temptresses of Calare. He wanted to earn his place in the Academy. No. He wanted to earn the highest place in the Academy, and he only had four more years to do something that would place him above all the other applicants. His father had said Solander was on his own in gaining admission—that the elder Artis would not use his influence or his position on the Council of Dragons to gain a place for his son. And his reasons seemed valid—that if Solander did not earn his way into the Academy without parental assistance, men who stood against him in later years would question his qualifications for any worthwhile position on the Council of Dragons, or for any worthwhile appointment within the sphere of influence of the Empire of the Hars Ticlarim.

  If Solander could disprove one of the central tenets of current magical theory, though, and take not just a stack of papers into the exam room but physical demonstrations of his theory, no one would ever be able to question his right to stand among the Masters—to lead the Empire—to become head of the Dragons and eventually Landimyn of the Hars. He balanced the three gold balls in the air and smiled, imagining himself carried through the underwater streets of Oel Maritias, dressed in glorious robes of state, cheered on by the thousands who lined the Triumph Road beneath the glittering arch of the ocean above. He would smile slightly. Wave his hand just … so … to let the people know that he had once been like them. One of them. Once—but not anymore.

  He sent the balls spiraling to the floor, then pulled his knees up to his chest and stared out the window by his bedside, which overlooked one of the many hidden courtyards in the grand old house. In that courtyard, three young girls played a game of skippers, laughing at the patterns the skipper-stones created in the floating fountain. Watching them, Solander was reminded that he would have to create identities for Wraith and his friends if they were to be successfully hidden in plain sight within the household. He might, he thought, create them as the children of distant relatives from across the Bregian Ocean. He liked Ynjarval. It was distant and poor, and adults seemed to mostly ignore anyone from there.