Vincalis the Agitator

by Holly Lisle

  “She’s moderately clever. She plays zith and metachord well enough not to offend, but she’d never be able to play for anyone but us. She has no skill with numbers, is only moderately successful at getting off a spell correctly, can’t find her way from one part of Oel Artis to another without getting lost, and is useless at history, science, and literature. She doesn’t even like to read. Beyond that, she’s bothersome and domineering and vexing and always certain that she’s right and that she knows best.”

  “She adores you.”

  “Mmmm. I’m glad to have her for a friend, but I truly wish she adored you. Every time she sees me talking to a girl, her eyes go all daggers at me.”

  Solander flopped over and rested his chin on his hands. “We’ll get back to research after the festival.”

  Wraith said, “You only have another two months before you have to present your research before the Board of Advisors, and you still don’t have anything.”

  “I have a lot. It’s all work that I got as spin-offs from trying to figure out why you are the way you are, but if nothing else, I can present that. I have a refinement for a spell’s energy transport mechanism that’s rather elegant, and a few applications for the self-powered magic system that I’m developing—those are completely original. And I have my theory on you. I simply don’t have any real-world proofs yet, and I can’t drag you in with me, for obvious reasons.”

  “No, you can’t. I don’t want to be a caged exhibit, or a study case for the entire Division of Theoretical Magics.”

  “Have you given thought to what you will be doing?”

  “I’ve had offers from some of the covils. I scored so highly on history that the Ancients and Devoteds of the Fen Han Covil have been at me to join them right after the festival. One of the literary covils offered me a seat, too.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one that thinks all of Premish’s work is excrement.”

  “Oh. The Clickers.”

  Wraith nodded. “But those are covils. They don’t … matter. And the fact that my roll of tutelage lists nothing but theoretical magics makes anything worthwhile off limits. No one needs a stolti with theoretical but no practical magical skills. Which takes us back to you and what you’re doing.” Wraith shrugged. “I would help you with more than the theory if I could.”

  Solander nodded. “I know. But if you could, you would be just like everyone else. The fact that you can’t do any of the basic prep work or anything magical is part of what makes you unique.”

  Wraith considered the frightening truth of that for a while. His uniqueness was the only thing that had let him be a human in the prison of the Warrens, that had given him a ticket out and allowed him to bring Jess with him, that had moved him into the highest circles of Harsian society and had given him access to science, history, philosophy, magic— he knew the theories well, even if his uniqueness prevented him from gaining any practical experience—literature, music, art, and government.

  Why? Why had he been born different? It was the question he and Solander had spent the last five years trying to answer, without success. But why did the Warrens exist in the first place? He once had a family somewhere in the Warrens. He might still have, if they hadn’t been rounded up and put into trucks and hauled away; they might at that minute be sitting in a tiny, stinking apartment, growing older and fatter, oblivious to their lives and yet chained to those appalling lives by the very food that sustained them. If they still lived, his parents and brothers and sisters lived out their days in a prison and a hell. What purpose did that hell and its inhabitants serve?

  He’d spent years avoiding that question—until he began having nightmares.

  In those dreams, a great golden bird of prey caught him up in its talons and carried him off, depositing him at last back in the little basement where he and Jess—and, once, others—had hidden. On waking, he remembered the bird, and with a bit of research, he’d identified it as a falcon. Gold-crested fish-falcon, to be specific, but since he’d never seen any other sort, he was happy enough to think of it simply as a falcon. He would have been happier not to think of it at all, but it wouldn’t leave him alone. When he slept, it haunted him with memories of the Warrens, and guilt and a vague uneasiness that there was something that he was supposed to be doing.

  So recently, on his own, he’d tried to locate the truth about the Warrens—to find any sort of information about the area and its people in public records, to find some sort of history of how one section of society had been locked behind high walls and drugged and then forgotten— but there were no true records of the Warrens available anywhere. None. Only the false reports of riots and prostitution and crime rings and murders and rapes and mob rule, complete with recorded “live” images.

  “When do you think your father is going to let you use his work-room?” Wraith asked.

  Solander said, “Never. Why?”

  “Never?”

  “No. I don’t know of a Dragon anywhere who permits anyone in his workroom. Ever. When a Dragon dies, the spells he has that shield it usually weaken enough that another Dragon can force his way through, but prior to that, the workshops are impregnable….” He sat up and looked at Wraith.

  “They wouldn’t be to me, would they?”

  “If my father found you in his workroom, he would kill you. I mean—quite literally—he would kill you. No one is permitted into a Dragon’s workroom. They keep all the government’s secret documents and defense-project plans and things like that in there. I’ve overheard my father talking to other Dragons about what he’s working on and …” He shook his head vehemently. “If you went in, you would be committing treason against the whole Empire of the Hars Ticlarim.”

  “I want to find out the truth about the Warrens. I want to find out about why my family was … the way they were. Maybe still are, if they aren’t all dead. I’ve looked through the public records, I’ve scoured the archives, I’ve read up on history, and I haven’t found anything.”

  Solander said, “You’re out. You’re free of the place, and so is Jess. Why are you suddenly going back to that?”

  “Nightmares,” Wraith said. “And … I don’t know. I think once I understand the reason why the Warrens exist, I’ll be able to let it go, but I … I have to know. Why is this being done? Who are the Warreners? What did they—we—do that was so terrible?”

  Solander stared down at his hands. “When I’m accepted into the Academy, I’ll get a workroom of my own, and I’ll start getting the Dragon references that my father uses, and then you won’t have to take any chances going into his office.”

  Wraith said, “By the time you’ve finished your first degree in the Academy, that will be five years—”

  “I’m thinking I’ll be able to do it in three,” Solander interrupted, but Wraith shook his head.

  “Or maybe you can do it in three, but that’s still three more years before I find out the truth. If I do then. You might not get the truth even when you become a first-level Dragon. Maybe what’s going on in the Warrens is some sort of government secret, and no one but the people at the very top know the truth.”

  Solander laughed. “That’s ridiculous. What kind of government secret would involve slums?”

  “If it isn’t important, why is it that the only things we can find out about the Warrens are lies? Why are the Warrens shielded so tightly that your best viewer has never been able to so much as peek over the walls?”

  Solander shrugged. “What difference does it make, Wraith? Really? You know what I think? I think that the Warrens really were as awful as the reports show. I think the images of riots and other things shown on the nightlies are from the Warrens, only before the Dragons started a program to settle things down. They …” He shrugged. “They put the walls up first, but the walls didn’t take care of the problem. So the Dragons created a food distribution system, and put something into the food to calm the criminals down. And now they keep the stuff in the food so that the troub
les won’t start up again.”

  Wraith sat up and put his feet on the floor. Carefully. He felt his hands curling into fists and forced himself to relax them. “So the people in the Warrens are natural criminals—if they weren’t drugged, they would be rioting and murdering and raping and robbing.”

  “Well … yes. I guess so.”

  “Like me. Like my friends who never managed to escape.” He paused. “Like Jess.”

  Solander’s face flushed deep red, and he averted his eyes. “Well … you got out of there. If you’d had to live there your whole lives—”

  “We are who we are. The Warreners live behind walls and gates that would kill them if they tried to cross. And those same gates would kill anyone who tried to get in without authorization. So how are the Warreners supposed to improve their lives or do something to make themselves better? Even if they weren’t drugged into a stupor, they wouldn’t have any chance for a better life.”

  “Maybe it is a prison, and everyone in it has been sentenced to be there.”

  “You mean like me? And Jess? We were born there, and both of us have older brothers and sisters who were born there—people who are old enough that they’ll have their own children by now … if they’re still alive. People aren’t born with criminal records, Sol.”

  Now Solander sat up, too. “Look, you’re suggesting that the Dragons are doing something wrong. Something big, and secret, and bad.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s treason.”

  “No—it’s just looking at the situation and seeing how the pieces fit.”

  Solander leaned forward. “And what do you want to do about this conspiracy you’re alleging? This awful thing you’re hinting that my father and other great men in the Hars are responsible for?”

  “I want to find out the truth. That’s all.”

  “What if there is no ‘truth’? What if there is a good, simple, reasonable explanation?”

  Wraith said, “If your brother died because you tried to set him free, if your parents and brothers and sisters were in a cage they could never escape, what sort of good, simple, reasonable explanation would satisfy you?”

  “You’re obsessed.”

  “More like haunted. I haven’t had a real night’s sleep in a month.”

  “I don’t want to have anything to do with this.”

  “Then I’ll leave and find another way to help my family.”

  Solander rose and paced across the floor. Outside his window, a school of fish flashed into range of the lights that ringed the mansion, and for a moment their black shapes erupted into a riot of reds and yellows and silvers and blues. And then they were gone again.

  “Why now?” Solander asked at last. “Why are you pushing this now?”

  “Because I’m not a child anymore. And I owe something to the people who gave me life and to the world I came from—even if it’s nothing more than finding out why that world exists.”

  “All you want is answers? Once you get your answers, you’ll be satisfied with them, and that will be the end of any interest in the Warrens?”

  Wraith thought about that for a moment. “If we find a good reason for the existence of the Warrens, I’ll let it go.”

  “Which means if the Dragons are involved in something you don’t agree with, you’re going to insist on getting yourself into trouble?”

  “If you’re right, there’s no conspiracy related to the Warrens. You’re convinced that the Dragons’ motives in broadcasting their propaganda and keeping the Warrens beneath a tight shield are completely innocent. So put your convictions where your mouth is. Help me find the truth.”

  Solander closed his eyes, covered his face with his arms, and groaned. “You want to get both of us killed.”

  “I won’t get you killed, Sol. I swear it.”

  Solander moved one arm just enough that he could give Wraith a one-eyed glare from underneath it. “All right, then. I’ll help you. My parents will be at the festival a lot of the time. Everyone will expect us to stay for the entire week—most of the people our age will. But we won’t. We’ll go, we’ll make sure people see us there, and then we’ll leave separately and meet back here. You’ll go into my father’s workroom, and I’ll stand guard to make sure that you don’t get caught. You’ll look for anything you can find on the Warrens, and then you’ll get out of there. And that will be it. Agreed? If you find something, good. If you don’t find anything, we still aren’t going back. This will be the only time we do this.”

  Wraith nodded. “I don’t want to spy on your father. It’s just that he’s the only one I could think of who might have access to the answers I need.”

  Solander said, “I understand, I guess. If I had escaped from that place, I would want to know why it was there, too.”

  Rone Artis met with the rest of the Dragon Council in secret, in the tower that was the true—if unsuspected—heart of Oel Maritias.

  He settled into his seat at due north on the round table and said, “We’re called to order. What crisis have you found so great that it has to disrupt my preparations for the festival?”

  Tare Desttor-fator, Master of Cities, an old man who had always loved his work, looked grimmer and unhappier than Rone had ever seen him. He said, “There’s some cracking at the periphery of the city. Spell-shields there have been suffering from fluctuating energy levels, and a few of us have added braces. But we’re going to have to increase our base power level.”

  Rone tried not to show any expression, but he feared his colleagues might have seen some hint of his dismay in his eyes. “Cracks?”

  “The Polyphony Center has severe weakening along the second-tier dome. Several of the houses along Sea Cliff Corridor have minor compression damage. Almost all of the buildings right up against the Upwelling have some shear damage. Nothing has started leaking yet, but you know that most of the year-rounders, myself included, stay in the city core—the scenic peripheral properties are mostly occupied by those of you who aren’t here for half the year. A lot of damage can happen during half a year.”

  “But fluctuations should have been noticeable to everyone,” Jonn Dart, Master of the Air, said.

  “They’ve apparently been quite small but also quite persistent,” Tare told everyone. “I’ve been doing some checking—the spellshields are running at a constant underpower of.00125 percent—not enough to show unless you’re looking for it, but enough to allow the pressure to work constant, tiny damage.”

  Around the circle of Dragons, heads shook, faces paled, knuckles whitened.

  “I thought we had surplus power,” the Master of Transports, Kenyan Inmaris, said softly.

  Rone, the Master of Energy, said, “We’ve been running tight Upstairs for the last year. A number of new projects have put a drain on the supply, and we haven’t been pouring in resources as quickly as we need. No wars, empty prisons, and a declining birthrate in the Warrens due to several centuries of serious inbreeding have kept us behind the curve. I’d like to say that this is an easy fix, but it isn’t. We’re going to have to find a new energy source, and we’re going to have to do it fast. Research— you’ve had people working on alternative energy for the past twenty years. I know we’ve been funneling whole breeder pods out of the Oel Artis Warrens on a regular basis for you to use as research subjects. I’ve heard that you’ve had some breakthroughs, but none of them have ever come as far as Council.”

  Chrissa Falkes, Master of Research, a stunning, young-looking woman who was in fact several years Rone’s senior, said, “I don’t like the direction some of our research has taken. Yes, we have some possible alternatives. But our current energy sources were supposed to be temporary—until we found non-human alternatives. And my alternatives are simply going to increase our dependence on human-based energy.”

  Rone sighed. This again. Every time they tried to make changes, to expand services or improve the city, it came back to the complaint about human-based energy as the fuel that fed the Hars Ticlarim. �
�Stolta Falkes, solar-driven magic is weak. Core-driven magic is weak. Elemental magic is weak. Even sea-driven magic is weak. Every attempt at amplification has failed to produce anything that would even come close to meeting the needs of the Empire. We have eight billion people pulling off of just eighteen main centers and one hundred fifteen secondary buffer sources. We’re an absolute marvel of economy—but the only source that will allow us to support eight billion energy-using citizens at even our current level of civilization—never mind making things better—is human-based.” Rone looked directly at Chrissa. “Unless you’ve found something outside of flesh and bone and blood and life that will fuel spells of the magnitude and multitude we have to work with.”

  Chrissa bit her lip and looked down at her hands. “How bad is the shortage?”

  The Master of Cities said, “I predict a collapse along the outer rim within the year unless we shore up the spellshields and repair the damage. And a collapse anywhere in the city will put extra pressure on the buildings closest to the one that goes: If we lose something sufficiently big in the first blow—like Polyphony, for example—the whole of the city could explode around us in a matter of minutes. We aren’t likely to have any more warning than what we already have.”

  “Oh, gods.” The stolta buried her face in her arms and sat there for a long time. Everyone watched her, silent, waiting. At last she lifted her head. “The greater good,” she whispered, then said, “We’ve developed something that gives spell energy at an order of magnitude greater than the combined energies of flesh, bone, blood, and life. But it’s a dirty source. Dirtier than all of those together.”

  Dirty meant that anyone using it was at risk of serious magical rebound effects, or rewhah. Rewhah was the bane of all magical research— it could turn a man into a smoking pile of twitching tissue in an instant if not properly handled—and life energy was so dirty and so dangerous that Dragons only dared operate with it from a distance, and through mechanical devices that diverted the rewhah and spread the effects over the entire population. Rone couldn’t imagine a source of energy dirtier than life energy.