Vincalis the Agitator

by Holly Lisle

  Luercas hurt. The rewhah had turned his skin hard and brittle, and when he moved wrong he broke off pieces of it. His joints didn’t hinge in the same directions anymore, and every time he got too confident while moving over the rubble, he would forget and try to bend a knee forward when it could only bend backward, and he would fall flat on his face, taking Maidan down with him.

  She bled, he bled, the two of them had to look like something from the lower reaches of hell, and all he could think of was, Am I covered by the city employees policy for the magework that will repair all of this, or is the cost of repair work for my injuries going to end up coming out of my pocket?

  He felt guilty that he could not grieve for Rone Artis. Of Rone nothing survived but a bit of ash and a few scraps of bone that had fallen far enough from the main blast of the rewhah that they were not consumed; the brand-new Grand Master of the Council of Dragons had died bringing energy to his city. Died badly. Luercas thought he should have felt more than a dull, angry distaste for the man.

  Rone would get the gods’ serving of attention when the news came out. The city had all the energy it could use—more energy than it and another five cities like it could use. Rone had not died in vain, and because of that, the magic he had done would be done again, and again, and again. Certainly the use of the spell—the clever soul-spell—would get safer. And Rone would become a hero. That, at least, was to the good. If Luercas and Maidan played the game right, they would be heroes, too.

  So Luercas, who wanted only to lie in something cool and soothing while waiting for someone to come and make better all the awful things that were wrong with him, headed to Artis House on the periphery of the city, dragging his fellow hero-to-be, to make sure that he announced the death of the most important man in the city to that man’s family first. That was, after all, the right way to do things. He would do his duty. He would accept his kudos as gracefully as any shy and retiring debutante, and then he would reap the rewards.

  He figured, once he’d had the magework to repair the damage from the rewhah, he could ride this thing at least as far as a high seat in Council. Beyond that, he’d have to succeed on merit—but he had plenty of merit, too.

  Wraith and Velyn and Solander and Jess arrived in the meeting room from opposite ends of the house but at almost the same time; Wraith saw Jess look from him to Velyn, and watched the expression on her face turn from worry, to hurt, to something he didn’t quite recognize. She turned her attention to Solander, and didn’t look back at Wraith again as they took their seats.

  A very junior member of the family stood on the dais, waiting. As new groups moved in, he kept asking, “Anyone higher than a Four clearance can take over from me. Four? Anyone?” And then he’d wait, and the next handful of battered, shocked-looking people would make their way in, and—ever hopeful—he would ask again.

  His relief when a gray-haired Artis—Master of the House Watch—finally came through the door was so palpable that Wraith almost laughed. “Master Tromiel, Master Tromiel, so very glad to see you. Please, you’re the ranking member of the family; you need to take the census and determine our course of action.”

  And Tromiel, whose bruised face, torn clothing, and cautious, pained movements hinted that what he really wanted to do was sit down, nodded with the grace of a statesman, walked instead to the dais, and took the place of the nervous young man. Wraith heard him say, “How are we doing so far?”

  “Badly,” the young man said softly. “You’re the only person here so far who can actually make a decision for the whole family. I’m Level Four, and I was ranking until you came through the door. And this is everyone—I haven’t sent anyone out on reconnaissance yet or to look for survivors. I would have had I remained the ranking member, but …”

  Tromiel glanced around the room, and for a moment his eyes seemed to glaze. Then he nodded slowly. “You did well. We’ll wait a few more minutes, get our count, and then set up a communications station in here and send out parties to find survivors. You’re my assistant.”

  The young man nodded. “Yes, Master.”

  Wraith, as a newly minted and untried adult, held a rank of One, which was at least better than his previous child-rank of Zero. This new rank, however, meant he was going to be taking orders for a while. He and Solander both, most likely. He suspected that Velyn held a slightly higher rank, but she’d never done any of the favor-mongering that tended to win rapid in-family promotions; she would most likely be slogging it, too. Jess, technically still a child and unranked, would probably find herself in one of the nurseries baby-sitting younger children. That would probably infuriate her.

  Wraith tried to focus on the good news—that all four of them were alive—but his mind kept wandering to the inevitable bad news and wondering how bad it was going to be. Those watery hands hammering on the glass, the city being shuttled to the surface, the absence of most of the adults in the family. In a room that should have held seven hundred Artis adults, he so far counted just over thirty. What had happened to the city? To the people? To the surface of the sea?

  And then two monsters dragged themselves through the door. One, scaled and horned and black as sea sludge, covered with bleeding crusts and twisted in ways that made each of his movements like watching the unfolding of a broken ladder, dragged the second, who still had a bit of the recognizable human about her, but who seemed to be now a bag of jelly poured into a stretchy and shapeless human skin. A few people screamed softly and got smaller in their chairs. Others stared and paled or whispered to those seated beside them. Solander turned to Wraith and murmured, “Ah, no … this is going to be a nightmare.”

  The black, scaled monster dragged his companion to the dais, climbed with agonizing slowness to the top of it, put the jelly-creature down, and turned to the Master. “I have news,” he said.

  With horror, Wraith realized that he recognized the monster’s voice. In spite of all the rest of the damage, the creature’s vocal cords and lips still worked right. Wraith tried to comprehend the truth—that bastard Luercas, who had tried to force him to bow on their first meeting and who had hated him and harassed him ever since, existed now inside that magic-twisted casing. Wraith had a hard time not feeling that justice had been served.

  “Tell us,” Tromiel said.

  “I know you can’t recognize me, but I am Luercas tal Jernas, the son of Emi Artis and Gregor tal Jernas, and I am also an associate attached to the Department of Energy. I have come to bring you the news that Rone Artis, the new Grand Master of the Council of Dragons and Master of the City, is dead.”

  Wraith’s gaze slipped sideways to Solander, whose face had gone slack and pale.

  Luercas continued, “Last night, we discovered that the periphery of the city had gone underpowered and was on the verge of collapse. Rone Artis could have waited to get extra help, but had he done so we might have lost the whole city and everyone in it. Instead, he dared to bring a new source of power on-line, and by doing so, warded off the collapse of the Polyphony Center and the resultant chain reaction of depressurization of the city that would have killed us all. However, when he brought the new power up, he couldn’t handle it alone, and it killed him and nearly killed Maidan and me.”

  A new source of power. Wraith had no doubt about what that was. The city of Oel Maritias was now burning souls. He wanted to be sick.

  He glanced back to Solander and saw his friend shaking, white-knuckled, white-lipped. And Wraith, who wanted to scream that justice had been done—that people who would burn the souls of innocents deserved to suffer or die—remembered that Solander had been close to his father; even the revelation of the day before that his father’s activities fell outside of any acceptable standard of behavior had not diminished the Dragon in Solander’s eyes.

  To Solander, this was not justice served for evil done; this was, instead, the destruction of his hopes. He loved his father, even though he sometimes feared him. He admired Rone Artis, too, had wanted to be like him, and when Sol
ander discovered what sort of magic his father did, his first hope had been to take Rone aside, and ask him about his work and how and why he chose to do what he did. Solander wanted to hold on to the good in his father. He wanted to understand, to find some extenuating circumstances, some mitigating factors for the horrible magic his father chose to do, that would allow him to keep the man who had always been his hero on a pedestal.

  With Rone dead, all hope of understanding and making peace with the man his father had been died.

  Luercas was still talking. “Rone Artis risked everything to save the people of Oel Maritias,” he said. “He lost his life, and we’ve suffered tremendous damage—but the new power is on-line and running now. We have enough magic to repair the city and drop it again to the sea floor. We have enough power now to make it safe. He did this for you— for all of us. Rone Artis was a great man, and it was an honor being his associate, his friend, and at the end, his protégé. Maidan and I wish we could have saved him. We weren’t strong enough, but we tried.”

  Wraith listened to Luercas’s words, but he watched Solander’s face. Solander loathed Luercas. Now Luercas stood before these few people, eulogizing Rone, calling Rone a fallen hero—and in the same breath nominating himself for the role of still-living hero. For if Rone, who had sacrificed his life, was a hero, then surely both Luercas and Maidan, who had suffered such physical torture, must be heroes, too.

  Solander looked at him, and the pain in his eyes had been erased by anger. “That bastard Luercas—middle-level wizard bent on aggrandizing a dead man in the hopes that some of the glory will reflect off of him secondhand.”

  Wraith nodded. “I know.”

  “It will, too. He’ll be a dorfing Master within two years for this—just watch.”

  “Not if we tell the people of the city how this happened to him.”

  “Won’t make a difference,” Solander said bitterly. “They’ll never believe it without proof. I wouldn’t have believed you without proof, and you’re my best friend. You’re talking about trying to sully the reputation of the Dragons. The people who make cities fly, give free food and shelter to the poor, and keep the night streets so safe that in most places, a three-year-old could wander them alone at night and the only thing that would happen is someone would notice and take him home. If we say, Well, yes, that’s all true, but they’re burning the souls of Warreners to do it, do you think anyone in the Empire of the Hars Ticlarim would believe us? Do you think, even if they did believe, that they would care? The people of the Empire have been trained to hate the Warreners, and even better, they’ve been trained to fear them. So if the Dragons are doing something to the people in the Warrens, citizens are going to say, A good end to wickedness, and that will be the end of that.”

  Wraith could almost see the future sprawling before him—the Dragons would cry loudly that Rone Artis was a martyr, a man who had given his life in the search for knowledge, and they would demand that knowledge so dearly gained could not be ignored or wasted. They would disguise their greed and callousness and hunger for more and more readily accessible power as carefully as they disguised the source of that power, and they would talk of bringing the most good to the most people with the least cost.

  And they would never count the cost, because neither they nor anyone they loved would ever pay it.

  Wraith could not permit them to lie to others. To lie to themselves. To disguise their evil behind a pretty face. He’d thought that he would let Solander discuss the issue with his father before he decided on his own course of action, but now all of that had changed. This disaster in Oel Maritias, and the “salvation” of the new source of magic that would prevent the city from going underpowered again would alter the face of the Empire; he had to be ready.

  He wished that he could do magic, that he could fight directly against the people who were destroying the Warreners for their own gain, but such wishes were worse than useless, because their self-pity occluded real actions that he could take.

  But what could he do? He’d spent his time learning philosophy and history, writing, poetry, doing equations for theoretical magics that he could never test. He had no skills as a tactician or a warrior. What did he have? He had to have something that would let him fight this horror.

  He’d missed the end of Luercas’s speech. Now Tromiel was standing on the dais, listening to a wild-haired, blood-smeared young woman who seemed to be stuttering and crying at the same time.

  At last Tromiel held up a hand and called the gathered survivors together. “We’re getting reports in from the Polyphony Center—some people there dead and a lot more injured and trapped in rubble. We’re going to need everyone who is healthy and strong to start digging them out.” He pointed to Solander. “You’re Rone’s son, aren’t you?”

  Solander, thin-lipped and pale, nodded.

  Tromiel said, “I know you are going to want some time to yourself, son. That was a hellish loss—your father was a good man, and we won’t forget him, and we won’t forget what he did for us. But working will help you to ease your pain. The living need you now. The dead will understand—sometimes they have to wait.” He returned his attention to the assembly. “I’ll remain here with a few of the older children as runners. We’ve not yet established contact with Oel Artis, but we will. In the meantime, I need a single detail to go from room to room in Artis House and find anyone we’ve missed. Three people, one with healing magic skills.” Somewhere behind Wraith, hands evidently went up, for Tromiel pointed and said, “Yes, you three. And you”—he pointed to his assistant—“you’ll be liaison between here and the servants’ census. As soon as they check people off, get them down to Polyphony. You and you”— he pointed to Velyn and Jess—“will take over in the main nursery. Reports are that the children are a bit battered, but none died. They’re frightened, though, and they need some of their own with them right now. You may keep a servant with you to assist, but we can’t spare more than one. Keep the children busy. Find useful things for them to do, and let them know they’re helping. Don’t let them have too much time to wonder about their parents. We’ll have family come for them as we … find them.” He stared down at the floor for a moment, then cleared his throat and looked up again. “The rest of you go to Polyphony now. In emergencies, we have no rank or class—you’ll will work with whoever will help you and get our people to safety. We’ll get everyone out of this city and back to solid ground as quickly as we can.” He rubbed his eyes. “One final thing. Stay away from the windows. Something is wrong with the water, and until we know what it is and how to deal with it, we don’t want to … ah, antagonize it.”

  He dismissed them and sank into a seat.

  The distressed woman led the group toward the Polyphony Center. All the aircar passageways, even the deep transport lines, were too cluttered by debris to permit aircars. But servants had cleared some of the express paths, and though Wraith never wanted to use anything tainted with magic again, he kept silent and stepped on the glidewalk with everyone else.

  The two days that followed burned themselves into his brain. In the shattered remains of what had once been a grand and wondrous place lay bodies and bits of bodies, crushed, mangled, torn, and shredded. And alongside them, the weeping, begging living, crying out for a drop of water, for something to ease their pain, for someone to save them, for someone to give them the mercy of death. He had spent little time imagining hell before the two days and two nights he spent moving rubble, picking up bodies in an increasingly hot and unbreathable atmosphere, and carting both living and dead away from the wreckage. He had always thought that, coming as he did from the Warrens, he had a solid understanding of what hell was really like.

  He’d been wrong.

  He and Solander worked side by side, moving slabs of a fallen float-platform; they could hear people beneath it sobbing and clawing at the slick surface, trying to free themselves.

  Solander said, “Magic did this.”

  Wraith jammed his thighs un
der one section of a slab and levered it up enough that three other men could get a good grip. Together, they started dragging the slab to one side. “I know,” he said. “Without magic, there would never have been a city beneath the sea. No chance of collapse, no floating platforms, no spells gone wrong to destroy everything. Magic should be outlawed.”

  “No,” Solander said. “Magic feeds the masses, keeps them sheltered and safe, carries them from home to work and home again. Without magic, there could be no Empire. But the sort of magic that draws from other people, that gets its power from destruction, and that rebounds destruction at the wielders—that sort of magic should be outlawed.”

  Wraith grunted and, in unison with the other men, released his section of the slab. “That’s the only sort of magic there is.”

  “But it doesn’t have to be. It’s the only sort of magic that allows an individual to cast a tremendously powerful spell, but I’m on to something—one of the spin-offs from working with you, actually. I think I’ve found a way to cast a spell drawn from my own energy.”

  Wraith kept his voice down and made sure that only Solander could hear him. “I’ve seen the math. Hells-all, I’ve done the math. The power you can derive from a single human life is negligible. It’s only by having whole masses of people clustered together that you get enough power to do anything that would interest the Dragons or that would run the city. Besides, they wouldn’t choose to pay for their spells with their own lives. And if you have any sense, neither will you.”

  Solander glanced at the men to either side of them. None were paying them any attention. “The power the Dragons derive from one human life is negligible because it isn’t volunteered. It’s taken by force and deception. I can’t be sure of the power ratios yet, but I believe that I can get significantly more power from a self-powered spell than from one fueled by a sacrifice—and so far, I haven’t had any measurable rewhah in my tests. It isn’t the breakthrough that I wanted—it isn’t the answer to what makes you the way you are. But it could be the answer to the Empire’s energy needs.”