Vincalis the Agitator

by Holly Lisle

  “You can’t leave me,” Solander said.

  “I’m not going to spend time in Refinement for you,” she said, eyes locked straight forward, resolutely not looking at either Solander or Wraith. “So get this person and let’s get out of here.”

  Wraith took a deep breath and opened the door nearest the basement.

  Chapter 3

  Solander had no difficulty imagining a disastrous outcome for this whole exercise. He wanted to stay in the aircar. Hells, he wanted to tell Velyn to forget the whole thing, leave Wraith with Jess, and get out of the Warrens before something horrible happened. But he wasn’t going to find another Wraith out there somewhere, just waiting to make him famous. Wraith was a miracle, and Solander knew it—and above all, he had to protect him, as he would protect any other investment in his future.

  So—unasked—he followed.

  Across the narrow strip of walk at a crouch, down the stairs, through the already opened door into—

  Gloom. A stink that rolled over him with horrific potency; filth and sweat and food gone bad, things he couldn’t pin down and didn’t want to. His eyes adjusted, and he saw a pile of dirty blankets, and a stick-thin person in white rags gathering up blankets and little boxes and turning to look in terror at him. He flattened himself against the wall, thinking with horror, That stinking stick is going to sit its filthy body in my father’s state aircar?

  And then Wraith was dragging the girl and her things and the box of food he’d given them the day before up the stairs, and grabbing Solander by the shirt and dragging him along behind, and Solander, finding himself flung back into the aircar, could only think, Wraith didn’t need me along after all.

  “Go,” he heard Wraith tell Velyn, and he sat up in time to see guards moving toward the car from two different directions, their stop-sticks drawn and suspicious expressions on their faces. Did they not see the insignia on the sides of the car? This aircar couldn’t be stopped; Solander knew neither he nor Velyn could offer adequate registration for the state carriage they were in—and they certainly couldn’t provide documentation for the two scruffy children hiding in the back.

  “I’m going,” Velyn said. She veered the vehicle out onto the street and accelerated it almost straight up. In the backseat, Jess screamed.

  “Rooming house first,” Velyn said, looking back at Solander. “We’ll drop her and Wraith off to let them shower, and then I will get rid of this aircar, and then you and I will go out and buy them some clothing. Something loose and casual and expensive—maybe a little out of fashion. After all, they are supposed to be from the backwaters. You have your cards with you, don’t you?”

  Solander nodded. He was going to buy both of them expensive clothing? Well … yes, he was. The price of fame, he told himself. The price of immortality, of making his mark in the science of magic, of changing the way the masters in the field understood the workings of their universe. Stolti clothing for two Warreners versus the whole of a world in his hand, to create and reshape in his vision … yes. He would buy them clothes. Rent them a couple of rooms for a few days. Pay for their false documents. His parents gave him a generous allowance, and he never really spent it on much except for research books and gadgets. He had money saved away that he would never miss.

  Velyn took them not through but over the gate—they went sailing through an arc shield that sputtered and played light across the surface of the aircar as they blasted through it—but the car did have clearances for every place in the city. It passed through without damage, and Velyn headed them directly for a good neighborhood in the Belows.

  “Rainsbury Park has some excellent little rooming houses,” she told Solander. “I’ve been to a few of them.”

  Solander noticed that the back of her neck turned bright pink when she said that, and he wondered if Wraith had noticed.

  She brought the aircar to a stop at the side of an attractive house artistically hidden beneath a canopy of ancient oaks. “Wait here, all of you,” she said, and then glared when Solander didn’t move. “Not you. You have to go in and pay.”

  The manager of the house, a bored young man with his attention focused on a triphase display of the ongoing Oel Artis/Chamilleri phaeton races, barely even looked at either of them as they took keys and signed in for two rooms at the back of the house.

  “He gets paid extra not to pay too much attention,” Velyn told Solander as they hurried to the aircar.

  They moved Wraith and Jess into their rooms, made sure the dividing door between the two rooms was working, then they took the aircar straight back to the house car pool. Velyn hurried over to a young man in uniform, who gave her a smarmy smile that Solander didn’t like.

  Velyn, in a foul mood, came back and led Solander to another vehicle—a little red all-terrain sportster with water wings and a bubble hood. “Let’s go,” she said, and refused to speak to him for most of the rest of the trip.

  The pounding water of the shower soothed Jess. Apartments in the Warrens had showers, but none with warm or hot water, none with any real water pressure, none with the glorious array of perfumes and soaps that sprayed from the nozzle when different buttons on the console were pushed. Jess had a hard time forcing herself out from beneath the clean-scented spray, and only Wraith’s worried voice finally moved her to try one of the thick towels. When she was done, she wrapped the towel around herself and headed out to the main room; she couldn’t bear to put on the stinking Warrener rags.

  Then she waited, sitting on the edge of one of the two enormous, wondrously soft beds in the room. Wraith sat with her. Neither of them moved; they weren’t sure what they were permitted to touch and what was forbidden. Jess tried to realize that she was out of the Warrens, that this beautiful room—with so many colors that her eyes had a hard time seeing them all—was her room alone, not even to be shared with Wraith. But none of it seemed real. The guards loading Warreners by the hundreds into the back of trucks—yes. That seemed real. But this felt like an impossible dream.

  Then Wraith opened a large copper box that sat against one wall of his room and said, “Jess, there’s food in here!”

  Jess walked over to take a look. Cold air washed over her, air that smelled deliciously of winter and snow. She saw all sorts of foods and drinks she didn’t recognize, with perfect fresh fruits, delicious sweets wrapped in lovely colored papers, and things she couldn’t begin to recognize by their look or their smell.

  “Can we eat them?” she asked.

  “Just a few bites, perhaps,” Wraith said.

  Tentatively, he unwrapped one of the bright papers and took a little bite of the brown sphere inside. “Oh,” he whispered, and handed the rest to her.

  She took a bite, and the flavor hit her like a shock. She closed her eyes and let the sweetness and the richness and the faint bitterness all melt into her mouth at the same time.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is there more?”

  Wraith unwrapped another of the colored papers. “This one looks a little different. You want to try it first?”

  She nodded and took a bite. It was different. The same rich brown stuff, but this time with a fruit-flavored filling. “Oh. Wraith.” She handed him the other half. “We’ve died and gone to the God-home.”

  The knock at the door froze them—it wasn’t the right tap. Not two quick, soft knocks and a finger scratched from the left of the door to the right. Just a flurry of loud raps. They looked at each other, wild-eyed with terror, and Jess grabbed Wraith and fled for the bathroom in her suite. She’d seen a lock on that door.

  But Solander walked into the room carrying a stack of boxes almost as tall as himself. “Wraith? Jess? Where are you?”

  “You didn’t use the knock I showed you,” Wraith said. He looked a little pale still.

  Solander shrugged. “I forgot. And my hands were full.”

  They edged out of the bathroom and looked at Solander and his stack of boxes. Jess’s heart conti
nued to pound in her chest; this place was too different, too alien for her to feel safe. She wondered if she would ever be able to feel safe.

  “We brought clothes and food,” Solander was saying, and behind him, the golden-skinned girl with the copper eyes came through the door, studied them, and shook her head.

  “Oh, gods! They look even thinner wrapped in towels,” she said. “We’ll have to hide them here until they put on a bit of weight.”

  Jess looked from that girl’s sleek, rounded body to her own sharp angles, and felt her cheeks go hot with shame. Her thighs were thinner than her knees, her upper arms thinner than her elbows. She could clearly make out every bone in her own ribcage, and could clearly see both the bones and the tendons outlined on the backs of her hands. Wraith was the same. But the white Warrener robes hid a lot of that— not even she had noticed how very thin they were until she compared them to Solander’s cousin Velyn.

  “We got food,” Solander told Velyn. “They’ll look a little better soon.”

  “They’ll have to. I don’t think we can pass two starvelings off as the children of colonists—not even colonists from Ynjarval.”

  Wraith sighed.

  Velyn said, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll manage. In the meantime, Solander and I found the two of you some clothes. These are guaranteed to fit—they’re spelled, so that no matter which of you wears them, they’ll look like they were tailored just for you.

  “Tomorrow,” she continued, “I’ll come back here and take you to different salons to get your hair cut and styled, your skin colored, and your hands manicured.” She turned to Solander. “You can find your own way home unless you’re coming with me now. I have things I have to do.”

  Solander and Wraith conferred for a moment, and then, with a slight nod of the head to all of them, Solander and Velyn left.

  Jess was relieved when they were gone. She’d liked Solander well enough, but she hadn’t liked Velyn at all. She’d seen the way Wraith looked at the other girl—with his eyes all wide and wondering. That was the way she wanted him to look at her. But he didn’t. She was too scrawny, she thought. To skinny, too plain, too young—and he had saved her from the Way-fare twilight, from being a horrible fat lifeless slug. How could he ever see her as anyone but someone he had rescued?

  Velyn would never look like that to him. He would see her perfect, as she was the first time he met her, and not hideous, helpless, someone who needed to be saved.

  Jess, in that moment, decided that she hated Velyn—for everything Velyn was, for everything that Jess could never be.

  A week of searching for someone to make papers for them. A month beyond that to learn to speak with a bit of the accent of the colony from whence they supposedly came—one carefully obscure, with few ties to Oel Artis, a colony clear across the Bregian Ocean, in the southern hemisphere, on the Strithian continent, in lands only held with difficulty by the Hars. Beyond that, another two months for the Warreners to fill out to a point that Velyn announced was acceptable.

  And then the move; the day Wraith and Jess had come to both yearn for and dread, when, carrying their false Letter of Presentation sealed with the signet of a real, if very minor, Dragon from the far city of Cachrim, they appeared on the front porch of the great house in the Aboves at Oel Artis. They brought carefully collected bags filled with clothes meant to look like styles from a colony behind the times—a bit shabby around the edges but still respectable; and they offered their papers to the Master of the House, an old patriarch who still maintained his Dragon ties, even though he had for all purposes given over all responsibility except for the greeting of newcomers to the house and the verification of their status to younger and stronger men.

  Solander greeted Wraith and Jess as cousins whom he had met and was expecting, with an enthusiasm greater than he usually displayed, and the old patriarch, who knew Solander as the son of a major Dragon of the Council, gave their papers a polite, perfunctory glance and filed them, giving them not another moment’s thought.

  We shed lives the way snakes shed skins, Wraith thought, remembering the nest of snakes he’d discovered in one of his early hiding places. We peel away old people, and emerge with new ones. New names. New faces.

  He stood just inside the door, a heavier boy now, though still thin, with his dark hair neatly cropped and the beginnings of a fashionable braid down his back. He had a new name—Gellas Tomersin—a good story about a family far away who cared about him, a friend who had been born into freedom and who knew the joys of comfort and the pleasures of wealth and security. He had a chance to live a wonderful life.

  Why should we ever go back and pick up those dead skins? he wondered. When we’re free of them, can’t we simply put them behind us and forget they ever existed? Can’t we simply be happy and beautiful in our new skins?

  He’d thought he wanted to free the Warreners. But now, standing at the beginning of his new life, he discovered that more than anything, he wanted to be sure that he stayed free himself.

  Rone Artis held the paper in front of him and sighed. “Ten years of research, and all we have to show for our work is … well, simply more of the same.”

  His assistant shrugged. “Everyone has followed every lead. Just because we can’t find a way to pump enough magic out of the sun right now to keep the Empire running doesn’t mean that we’ll never find the key. The same with the sea, and with the world-heart. Sometime soon, someone will figure out how to make those power sources work. This is just a temporary measure.”

  Rone laughed. “Do you really believe that?”

  “Of course. The Empire would never accept this as a permanent solution.”

  “Do you know how long this temporary solution has gone on so far?”

  “Not long, certainly. Five years, perhaps. Or maybe … ten?”

  Rone Artis, Master of Energy for the city of Oel Artis, smiled at her slowly. “In its current form, more than a thousand years.”

  She paled and looked sick. “That can’t be.”

  “It is. And before that, we were doing the same thing, but in a less organized fashion.”

  “But … that’s not right.”

  “No,” he agreed, and took out his official pen, and checked the tip on a plain piece of paper to make sure it was working. “It isn’t right at all. But what are our options? Let Oel Artis Travia fall into the Belows? Let the citizens starve and live without light and heat? Let the seas crush Oel Maritias and the other undersea cities? Give up flight? Give up magic?”

  “Well … no … not that.”

  He nodded. “No. Not that. We maintain a magnificent civilization, but men pay a price for civilization. We do the best we can. Sometimes our best is …” He slowly signed his name across the bottom of the paper that permitted the Research Department of the Dragons to take an additional five hundred units a month from the Warrens for energy experimentation. “Sometimes our best is very, very bad.”

  Book Two

  Master Gellas

  I stood with one foot in three worlds—which is one foot too many. The Warreners, the stolti, and the Kaan all owned a piece of me: I loved the beauty, the grace, and the luxury of the stolti world, which I knew to be fed by unthinkable evil; I could see the impracticality of the Kaan world, which worked well enough for a few people, but which would leave Matrin a stinking ruin were it the only option; and my heart cried out for the Warreners, dying body and soul for a life they could never experience, while remembering that the price of the Warreners’ freedom would be the lives of innocents.

  I knew the costs and the benefits, had discovered and listed for myself the favorables and the unfavorables. The only thing I could not find was an answer.

  VINCALIS THE AGITATOR

  THE SECRET TEXTS—OF THE FALCONS

  Chapter 4

  In the last days of spring, when the sun in Oel Artis begins to roll across the land like an invading army and the heat turns everything green to brown, the rich and powerful of the Aboves be
gin their annual migration to their city beneath the sea, Oel Maritias.

  In the spring of the year that Solander turned twenty, and that Wraith, still known by all but Solander, Jess, and Velyn as Gellas, guessed that he must have turned nineteen or twenty, the household took itself down to the cool blue depths of the summerhouse yet again, down to the world of perpetual twilight where the sun was merely a promise of light that lay, painted and flat and dull, on the top of the blue-black liquid sky.

  To celebrate their arrival, they and the other families who summered there held each year a First Week Festival, and for the first time, both Wraith and Solander were deemed old enough to attend the adult celebration, instead of being kept with the children.

  “What do you suppose is the difference between the adult celebration and the children’s festival?” Wraith asked.

  Solander, stretched out on his bed with his feet propped on the wall, said, “No one will ever really say. They serve distilled wines and set up vision chambers, I know. And sometimes the adults go into the festival chambers and don’t come out again until the end of the week. I know my parents used to leave me with the house staff when I was younger. I wouldn’t even see them for days, and when they did come back, they looked tired.”

  Wraith laughed. “That sounds promising.” He draped himself over one of Solander’s overstuffed chairs, head on one arm and legs across the other, and sighed. “Jess is furious that we’re going and she can’t.”

  Solander let his head hang off the side of the bed so that he was looking at Wraith upside down. “I’d take her with me if I could. I wish she would go places with me.”

  “I wish she would, too. She’s about to drive me mad.”

  “How can you not be in love with her?” Solander asked. Wraith guessed that his expression was meant to be mournful, but upside down it wasn’t coming across. “She’s beautiful, she’s clever—”