Vincalis the Agitator

by Holly Lisle

  And Polyphony Center already had some of the worst damage of any building in the city.

  He rubbed his temples and frowned. Should he cancel the festival and evacuate everyone? As Grand Master of the Dragon Council of the sister cities, he had the power to do it—but it would cost him tremendous goodwill. And not just among the citizens, but also among the Council and his staff. He could afford to have some people angry with him, but he could not afford to have everyone angry with him. No leader whose power often depended upon consensus could.

  Rone wished he could pass this all off on the new Master of Energy, but he had yet to appoint one—he had to admit that he hated the feeling of giving up control of the office. Energy ran everything directly— and though he was now Grand Master of the Council and in theory had control over every aspect of the cities, he discovered in fact that he would be at one remove from the thing he knew best and cared most about.

  He did not want to put the design of the new buffers or the new spellchannels in the hands of any of his assistants, either. Talented though they were—and there were some among them who had created some amazing practical applications for the Department of Energy—he could not think of one who would be able to handle the delicate mechanisms of buffering as well as he could. He did wish that a few of his closest assistants had decided not to go to the festival—he would have been happy to have the extra hands. But again, he stood to lose more than he gained by recalling them from their all-too-brief holiday.

  He looked around the Department of Energy. The skeleton crew running things were almost all low-level employees of the department: simple spell-readers, gauge-watchers, knob-turners. He checked the sign-in board and saw two on the list who might be of some use to him: Maidan Quay, who stood for a promotion to associate spellcaster in the next few months if she passed her final Level Fours in the Academy, and Luercas tal Jernas, a genuine young star of the department, though with some negative marks on his citizen record that were standing in the way of his achieving his full potential. The rest were worthless.

  He called Maidan and Luercas in.

  “We have a problem,” he said. “Polyphony Center is draining us.” He pointed to the flowsheet and watched both of them pale.

  “I’ll go switch down the nonessential areas of the city to minimum power,” Maidan said.

  “Do that,” Rone told her, “and then come back. We have another alternative that we’re going to take. We can’t leave any part of the city underpowered for long.” Maidan nodded and ran off. Rone turned to Luercas. “You’ve finished your Level Fives already, haven’t you? Got your security clearances?”

  Luercas, his eyes still on the pale cycle bars on the flowsheet, just nodded.

  “And your security level is … ?”

  “Nine.”

  Nine was good enough. Rone said, “There’s more to the problem than I told Maidan. She can’t know how serious this is, but we have pressure damage in some of the buildings of the periphery. The worst-damaged of the buildings in the entire city is the Polyphony Center.”

  “Damage and low energy?” Luercas finally looked directly at Rone. “Then why do we have people in there at all?”

  “Because we cannot cancel the festival without serious repercussions to the government. And we cannot move the festival, because there’s no place else to put it.”

  “Then we need to move more units into the Warrens.”

  “We don’t have more units, but we have a new energy source we can draw on to make the best possible use of the ones we have.” He spread the sheets of spell schematics out in front of the young man and watched, pleased, as Luercas traced along the lines and figured out what the spell was and how it worked.

  “But this is excellent. If the output figures on this are correct, we won’t ever have to worry about energy underruns again.”

  “They’re correct. Our problem is buffering.”

  Luercas had reached that part of the diagram, and he winced. “We’ve never tried working with anything this dangerous.”

  “No. We haven’t. And we have to put it together today. Now.”

  “We, Master Rone?”

  “We. Me … you … Maidan. She has minimal clearances—she cannot know the source we’re tapping, nor can she know the reason why we’re doing it today. The citizens’ confidence in the safety of the city has to be absolute.”

  Luercas looked like he might question that, but then he just nodded. “There are things they don’t need to know.”

  “A lot of them.”

  “Of course. And what shall I do to assist you?”

  Rone liked the young man. He got straight to action.

  “We’re going to set up a triad spell with buffer channels starting straight into the sea, and then switching slowly to our Warrens once we have the flow stabilized. I’m going to be the apex of the triad—the lead caster. I’ve already done some work with this kind of energy, and I’ve gotten a bit of a feel for it. It’s … well, it’s pretty unpleasant. You’re going to need to brace yourself for that part of it. You’re going to be buffer control; you’ll direct the energy of the rewhah into the sea until the backflow settles down. I had a nasty fifty percent over the anticipated burst with the small spell I started last night. If we get a simple one-for-one increase in energy-to-rewhah, you’re going to be dealing with a blast of …” He took a pen and scribbled figures. “About five hundred thousand luns.”

  “Enough to incinerate the entire City Center.”

  “Yes. And if there’s some sort of penalty rewhah—”

  “Which, considering our energy source, could be a real possibility—”

  “Yes, it could. Then you could be dealing with—what?—twice that? Maybe three times that.”

  “One to one and a half sols. Damn.”

  “You don’t want to slip.”

  “And what is Maidan going to be doing?”

  Rone said, “She’s going to man the panic button. If things go wrong—”

  “The panic button?”

  “If things go wrong,” Rone overrode him, “the only hope anyone will have is if she floats the city. Because if we blow up the department, they’ll be without pressure controls and lights in a matter of seconds, and air in about two hours. I don’t choose to kill almost a million people today— how about you?”

  “Not today, Master Rone,” Luercas said. He looked scared. Really scared.

  Good. The young wizard would pay attention to what he was doing, and he wouldn’t take stupid chances or get cocky.

  Rone set up the buffering rods for the two of them. Rewhah always returned with equal force to the casting source, but the Dragons had developed a sort of lightning rod that collected it and allowed it to be channeled and redirected. This one mechanism was the foundation upon which the entire Empire of the Hars Ticlarim was built—for without a way to safely channel rewhah, no one would have dared handle life-drawn magic in the amounts and types that the running of an empire required.

  Once the rods were set, Rone spelled copies of the schematics for Luercas. Then the two of them waited for Maidan to return.

  When she came through the door, Rone told her, “We’re ready to bring extra energy on-line. Your job is to monitor our results—keep me apprised of the amount of energy we have going into the Polyphony Center, let me know when we’re back in the purple.”

  Maidan nodded.

  Rone added, as casually as he could, “And as a precautionary measure, you’re going to be running the blast switch. Give me the parameters for using it.”

  Maidan frowned a bit. “Total energy loss, disruption of more than fifty percent of the inflow channels, warning lights signaling pressure spell failure or pending perimeter collapse.”

  “That’s right. If any of those things happen, don’t hesitate. You understand?”

  “Are you considering this a possibility?”

  Rone looked at her. “Anytime we bring new energy on-line, it’s a possibility. Do I think there’s any
real chance of it? No. But we’re not going to do anything potentially risky without having our backups in place.”

  She smiled, relieved. “Of course, Master Rone. I understand. Oh— and I heard that you’ve accepted the Grand Mastership of the Council of Dragons.”

  Rone nodded. “I think Energy will start getting the respect it deserves now.”

  Rone stepped under the arch of his buffer rods and signaled Luercas to do the same. Beneath Luercas’s arc the two of them had placed a series of channel analogs. They would make the complicated process of gathering the rewhah energy and directing it into the sea, and then from the sea to the Warrens, simpler. Maidan rested her hand on the blast switch and turned the flowsheet so that she could read it more clearly.

  “I’m ready when you are,” she said.

  Luercas moved all of the analog channels to open. “Also ready,” he said.

  Rone nodded, and began casting the spell that would bind the souls of ten thousand Warreners to Oel Maritias and begin burning them for fuel.

  “Rewhah starting,” Luercas reported.

  Rone nodded, but continued his chanting. Distantly, he felt the little ping of the temporary spell he’d set up in his workroom dissolving.

  “First movement in the inflow bar,” Maidan said. “We’re up two … five … nine and a quarter …”

  Rone managed a tiny smile, but he kept his focus on the incantation; he could feel it building around him, and he could feel the wild, angry energy of the rewhah pouring into the bar above his head and running down the cage around him like water down an overflowing dam. The spell, cast fully, had more power to it than he had imagined, and he could feel the energy starting to slip. It had an edge to it—dark and greasy and frightening. He’d dealt with the darkest magics in the Empire, but he’d never felt anything like this, and suddenly he was wishing that he hadn’t tried to do the spell alone. His whole team should have been with him. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Luercas sweating, the confidence gone from his face.

  “Twenty-five …” Maidan said, eyes on the gauges and bars, “thirty … fifty … seventy … good gods-all, I’ve never seen anything bring energy on-line like this. This is amazing. One hundred … one hundred forty-five … one hundred eighty … two hundred thirty …” Her voice trailed off and she looked over at them. “You’re overrunning the main system and going into overflow buffers,” she said softly. “You need to back it down.”

  He heard her. He knew she was right. But he did not dare interrupt this spell. He could not temper it, could not stop it, could not alter it. The magic he was summoning came too hard, too insistently, too fiercely, and in the instant that he broke his focus, the rewhah from it would smash down on top of the buffer bar and crush the life out of him—and then the magic, loosed and uncontrolled, would flash out from the City Center like an explosion, warping and twisting and destroying everyone in its path.

  So he held on, and he kept reciting the incantation, focusing on the controls built into it, praying that he could get through the summoning and the binding without destroying the city or himself.

  “It’s slipping on me,” Luercas said, at the same instant that Maidan said, “Buffers almost to capacity—should I flush the extra out of the city?”

  He barely had the strength to nod to her. Yes. Flush the extra. Wild magic pouring into the ocean without any specific target or any specific spell could have its own awful effects, and the fact that it was pouring into the ocean in union with the rewhah that it had spawned would definitely cause fallout that people in Oel Maritias would be dealing with for the next several hundred years. He tried not to think about the hell that this moment would leave for the future; he tried to keep his mind on the needs of the moment alone. He could hear Luercas gasping, and he could see the young man on his knees, barely inside the arch of the buffer bar, sweat-beaded brow focused on keeping the rewhah pouring through the channels and into the sea outside of the city.

  He fought with everything in him, and somehow Rone made it to the end of the incantation. The worst—for him—was done.

  But not for Luercas. Closure of the spell released the full impact of the rewhah, and it was a thousand times greater than Rone had calculated. Monstrous. Monstrous. And the young wizard trying to control it simply did not have the skills or the experience to keep the backlash energy within the channels and flowing fast enough to keep the channels clear. The rewhah bottlenecked, blasted the channel analogs into a million motes, and whipped straight back at Rone. The caster. The sacrificial lamb.

  It hit him like a wall of fire, and he felt his bones melting, felt his skin searing off, felt his flesh running in rivulets to the floor. He wasn’t enough to feed it—wasn’t nearly enough, and it flashed out again, taking in Luercas and Maidan and rolling outward again. His last vision was of Luercas twisting and reforming into something hideous, of Maidan stretching and bubbling like tar, and of her hand on the panic button, the blast switch, cutting the city loose from its moorings and sending it in an uncontrolled spin toward the surface of the sea.

  Chapter 7

  Wraith and Velyn came awake in a tangle of arms and legs and covers, to the accompaniment of noise and impossible movement.

  “The room is sideways,” Velyn shouted. “We’re lying on a wall.”

  Wraith shouted back at her, “We’re heading for the surface!”

  Velyn scrunched her eyes tightly closed and held on to him tightly.

  He looked for something solid that they could cling to—when the city reached the surface it would go back to level again, either right side up or upside down, and either way, heavy things were going to go crashing past them, and they were going to get thrown around. So far, they were both mostly all right. Velyn had blood on her forehead and her mouth, and Wraith thought he might have cracked a couple of ribs, but they weren’t seriously injured. He wanted to keep it that way.

  There was, however, nothing to grab.

  So when the room burst into sunlight, he lay flat, held Velyn tight against him, and hoped for the best. The room began to right itself— slowly. Slowly—that was good. He and Velyn started sliding toward the floor and things above their heads slid, too, but they were going to be able to get out of the way without too much trouble.

  The surface of the water had a bad gold-green glow to it, and Wraith didn’t want to be distracted, but when the water began to form itself into hands, and the hands began to beat on the windows, he thought perhaps he and Velyn and Oel Maritias had more problems than just the city launching itself toward the surface.

  The Automatic Emergency Pressurization lights were on and flashing—that meant, if Wraith remembered his emergency procedures correctly, that no one dared step out of the city into the world beyond yet, or they would die of the “deeps”—a nasty, painful sickness that came to anyone who rose from the bottom of the sea to the surface too quickly. Leg pain, vomiting, confusion, paralysis, and death could hit just minutes, or sometimes hours, after a deeps-dweller came to the surface. Spells usually kept people at the correct pressure so that they could move about freely from city to surface—but if something went wrong with the spells, that would all change. And if the city had launched itself to the surface, then by definition something had gone wrong with the spells.

  So no one would be able to use the emergency launches or leave the city yet.

  Quiet came to the room, except for sounds of compartment doors slamming shut and those liquid fists drumming on the windows.

  He told Velyn, “We need to get out of here.”

  She stared at the fists and nodded. “Family meeting room, I suppose.”

  Wraith wanted to make sure Solander and Jess were unhurt, but he nodded. In times of emergency, the people who ended up in trouble were those who didn’t follow the plan.

  “Let’s hurry,” he said. “The sooner we get there, the sooner they’ll have an accurate count.”

  Luercas made his way out of the ruins of the suddenly too-bright City C
enter, for the first time lit by the sun, and struggled toward Artis House. He dragged Maidan with him—she could barely move forward with his assistance, and would not be able to walk at all without it. They’d both been scarred horribly by the rewhah from Rone’s spellcasting, but while Luercas’s scars were uglier, Maidan’s were more crippling.

  “How much farther?” she asked again, as he lifted her over an area of corridor completely blocked by the toppled remains of a decorative coral arch.

  “Not much,” he said, hoping that it was true and that he had not lost track of the turns and straightaways, all so unfamiliar beneath their layers of rubble and debris. The sun heated the corridors almost unbearably. Beneath the sea, the clear, flexible mageglass that made up the majority of each corridor simply provided an entertaining view of undersea life for passersby; but on the surface, the sun poured in and baked everything, turning each corridor into a hothouse. And the bulkhead doors that had closed automatically when the city broke free of its moorings and started to race toward the surface kept the ventilation system from setting up an effective breeze.

  No doubt rescue ships were being launched from Oel Artis to pick up the survivors of Oel Maritias, however many there might be—but in the meantime, the city was going to become rapidly more unlivable. And with the air pressure warning lights on, no one dared leave, or vent in fresh air from outside, or even blast holes in some of the windows. The only thing he could really do to help himself at the moment was get away from the center of the city. Luercas wanted to get out of Oel Maritias alive—and in order to do that, he needed to be at the periphery, where survivors were going to congregate. And he needed to be in a house that was going to get first pick of rescue ships, that would have its own people from the upper city on hand to make sure everyone got taken, that no one was forgotten.