Vincalis the Agitator

by Holly Lisle

  Wraith shook his head. “Have you tried anything big yet?”

  “Big? How big? I’m almost certain what I’m doing can work.”

  “Big. Have you floated a house? Run an aircar? Routed traffic without a mishap?”

  Solander sighed. “One person couldn’t do that alone. It’s too much.”

  “So the …” Wraith grunted as the load they were shifting slipped suddenly onto him. For a moment he thought he would collapse. Then the other men caught their part of it, and Wraith staggered upright and caught his breath. “So the Dragons would not only have to offer themselves as sacrifices for your magic—with the real and painful costs that would entail—but they’d have to do it in collaboration with each other.”

  “Well, yes. I suppose things like the floating cities and the underwater cities and the aircars would have to go—they’re awfully wasteful of energy.”

  Wraith looked at him sidelong and said nothing.

  Solander flushed. “They won’t do it, will they? They won’t give up the things that they love to save the lives—or the souls—of strangers.”

  Wraith slowly shook his head. “Not unless we make them.”

  “We? You mean you and me?”

  “You, me, Jess, Velyn … and the people we manage to rally to the cause.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking of getting the truth out there. Of proving to the citizens of the Hars that the Dragons don’t get the energy to run the cities from the sun or the earth or the sea. I’m thinking of showing them the insides of the Warrens, letting them look at the people that are being sacrificed so that they can live in the clouds. I don’t know how we can do it, but we have to find a way. The Dragons will never walk away from sacrifice-magic on their own—but they can be pushed, I think.”

  Solander said nothing through the next two pieces of rubble that they moved. Then he asked, “What if the Dragons push back?”

  Luercas, his body crusted and in terrible agony, lay on a stretcher on one of the converted docks among the thousands of surviving injured.

  “Last count is over fifteen hundred stolti dead,” Dafril said. Dafril had been Luercas’s only real friend and greatest admirer since the two of them were children. He squatted in the blazing sun beside Luercas, dipping a towel into a bucket of fresh water from time to time and rinsing off the worst of Luercas’s crusts. They were waiting for the rescue ships.

  “They’re still pulling bodies out of the rubble,” Luercas said.

  “Oh, of course. Will be for days—it’s a nightmare in there. But only the chadri and the mufere are cleaning up the mess now—someone finally saw reason and released the stolti to go about their lives.”

  Luercas glanced at his fellow survivors and made a face. “I can tell right now that the disaster didn’t get the right people.”

  Dafril leaned close and grinned at him. “More than you’d think. We’ve found the bodies of some of the ones who you know were voting to keep you out of the Council. Next time you come up for a position— especially considering what a hero you are for getting us all out of that mess alive—I’m guessing you’ll get a seat.”

  “And if I can sit in it, it will be a miracle.”

  “The wizards will get you back to yourself in no time. A good body-mage will be able to fix this.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  Luercas heard soft cheers from all around him, and raised his head enough to look out to see. One grand ship, and then another, and then a third, rose on the horizon.

  “Excellent,” Dafril said. “You’ll be out of this heat in no time. The injured are to go in the first ship—the best bodymages are already aboard to make sure all of you are fit by the time you get to Oel Maritias.”

  All three vessels moved forward with incredible speed. And then the first encountered the circle of glowing sea around the floating remains of Oel Maritias, and the sea formed itself into hands that reached up on powerful arms and gripped the ship’s bow. In the path of the ship, a mouth opened. The arms pulled the bow downward, beneath the surface of the water—the stern of the ship lifted into the air and, as it lifted higher and higher, began to collapse backward. The air filled with the sound of rending metals; the ship ripped in two; bodies with flailing arms and legs flew into the air, crashed into the sea, and vanished; and in an instant the poisoned, angry water pulled down both halves of the broken ship.

  Not a single head bobbed above the glass-smooth, glowing surface when it vanished. Not one survivor swam toward the city or back toward the two remaining ships.

  For an instant, on the deck where so many awaited rescue, silence as deep as the sea itself greeted the shocking finality of the disappearance of the first rescue ship. Then people began to scream, to shout for someone to come get them, to take them back into the corridors of Oel Maritias, to save them from the sea.

  “The bodymages,” Dafril whispered.

  “The rewhah,” Luercas said. “Gods-all, what kind of magic could turn the sea into a living, vengeful monster?”

  The other two ships managed to turn before they hit the green-gold shimmer that marked the living sea as something other than mere water. On the deck of one, someone used a voice amplifier and announced, “We’re turning back. We’ve already sent for help by air. Airibles are being cleared for your use and sent for you now.”

  “Bad magic,” Dafril said. “But we aren’t going to worry about that right now.” He helped Luercas to his feet, supported him, and started moving him toward the port that led inside. “We’re just going back inside until better transport gets here.”

  Airibles? Luercas wondered. Huge, gas-filled throwbacks to a more primitive age. Using them did make sense, he supposed. An airible could anchor to the floating city without landing, and could transport more than a thousand people at once rather than the several dozen that the largest aircar could hold.

  But airibles were slow—and who had any that were ready for use? Poor merchants, perhaps, who couldn’t afford the more expensive fast-ships or aircars to ship their products. Bulk shippers, maybe.

  Help would arrive, if the sea didn’t decide to pull the battered city of Oel Maritias beneath it. And if it came in time, Luercas decided, he would leave with gratitude and never live beneath the water again. He doubted that he would be the only one to give up Oel Maritias—or, more realistically, to give up the new city far from this patch of poisoned water that would become Oel Maritias, as the Dragons carefully rewrote history so that this disaster became something that had never happened.

  Chapter 8

  Within a year, Oel Maritias the broken wallowed at the bottom of its poisoned sea, never mentioned and mostly forgotten, and Oel Maritias the new and fair lay glittering like a gem tossed by gods, thirty furlongs to the east of its old location and on a fine solid shelf of rock at the edge of a great drop. Life moved on. Wraith turned down the covils in favor of the study of literature and history in a fine old school; Solander took his first steps toward the future he yearned for in Research; Velyn kept company with Wraith when the two of them could find the time; and Jess finished her mandatory classes.

  Luercas traveled from bodymage to wizard to healer in search of the reversal of the damage done to his flesh. Dafril buried himself in the study of old magics and dark paths.

  And the Empire grew. And grew. Beautiful, graceful, hungry for energy. The Hars provided for its citizens. None were ever hungry, none wanted for shelter. At its need and convenience, however, the Empire rewrote its definition of “citizen.” Those who failed to meet its current preferences paid their taxes in more than money; they paid with their lives, and with their souls.

  Grath Faregan finished the meeting with his keppin—his immediate superior in the Inquest. His keppin was to be raised to Mastery, and he, Grath Faregan, was to become the new keppin, with a squad of solitars of his own, and access to a vast array of single agents who would do his bidding without question.

  He was on his way
up.

  Thoughtfully, he returned to his play chambers, hidden in the top floors of his private quarters in Faregan House, where he kept his collection. He thought he might … But for the first time in ages, his collection left him cold. All of his dolls, magically frozen in artful poses, waiting for him to choose one and wake her for a bit of play, seemed dull and common to him. He studied his whips, his prods, his chains and pincers and brands and knives, and all he could think of was the beautiful young girl from the festival. Jess Covitach-Artis.

  His collection would have a gaping hole in it until he added her— until he decorated her with his tools, and posed her, and suspended her in time in the prized center position of his gallery. He closed his eyes and he could see the artwork he could make of her. He could taste her terror. He yearned, he ached, he throbbed for her.

  She lived in a fortress to which he had no access, however—he could not hope to get through the doors of Artis House in Oel Artis; it stood alone, with no common through-corridors like the Artis sector of Oel Maritias. His spy told him the girl always had friends with her and never left the house alone.

  Faregan did not think he’d be able to get to her by force. Which left finesse.

  He worked out a spell that would permit him to watch her whenever she was out from under the shields of Artis House. He determined that he would win her trust.

  “I’m free from the Academy for the week,” Solander said. “We’ve a surprise holiday; the Master of Subliminals is to take vows with a harine from Bainjat, and they’re having a giant do. We’re to be invited, but because she’s Bainjati, they’ve a week of purification rituals, meditation, and testing before the big day. All the Masters are involved, so none of us students have any requirements.” He grinned at Wraith. “So that gives me some time to work on my private projects for the first time in months. How are yours coming?”

  Wraith sighed and stretched and pushed himself away from his desk. “I’m lost, Sol. My head hurts, and I’ve discovered that I can write bad poetry all day, but the second I try to write something that matters, I get all awkward and the words refuse to go in the right places. I’ve done a play. But it’s dreadful.”

  “Let me see.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t. I’d like to still have your respect tomorrow.”

  Solander looked at his friend and laughed. “Here’s my deal. I’ll show you what I’ve done, but only if you show me what you’ve done.”

  Wraith said, “You’ve had a breakthrough?”

  Solander just smiled. “You show me first.”

  Wraith went to a cabinet and opened the bottom drawer. From it he pulled out a sheaf of papers. “At least you can’t say I haven’t been busy.” He handed the pages to Solander and sat back in his chair.

  And that was the danger of being the friend of someone who fancied himself a writer, wasn’t it? Solander dreaded the idea of working his way through a play, no matter what rhyme scheme it was done in or whether the gods declaimed in Akrenian or Common, and then being forced afterward to say something polite about it. Every time he thought of actors on a stage, spouting the words of some much-lionized playwright, he wanted to flee in the other direction—and if the works of the greatest playwrights in the world could have that effect on him, he could just imagine the horror his friend the amateur was about to inflict on him. But he couldn’t think of a graceful excuse. He had, after all, put Wraith through years of grueling experimentation to fuel his own career. So, with the air of a man condemned, he began to read A Man of Dreams—A Play in Three Acts.

  After a quick description of a very plain set, Wraith started in with a child from the Belows wandering through the street with a basket on his back, from which he was trying to sell something he called daffiabejong—casually translated as “fruits of dreams.” A young wizard met the boy in the street and asked if he could be assured that the dreams he bought would be good ones, and the boy told him that if his conscience was clear and his heart was pure, his dreams would be good ones—but that under no circumstances should he eat of the fruit if he carried a guilty secret with him.

  “Um …” Solander looked up, a bit puzzled. “When I saw the first page and everything was written in Common instead of Akrenian, I thought you had your gods declaiming in Common. But you don’t actually seem to have any gods….”

  “No gods,” Wraith said. “Keep reading.”

  “No gods at all. Oh. I thought gods declaiming at the beginning of a play was a requirement.”

  “I didn’t follow the form,” Wraith said. “Keep reading.”

  Interested in spite of himself, Solander returned to the play and to the boy selling dreams. By saying that only the guilty dared not buy his fruits, the boy selling the dreams forced the wizard to buy one—for who would ever admit that he carried a guilty secret when others were walking past, listening to what was said, and looking at him?

  The wizard took the fruit of dreams home and attempted to dispose of it by burying it, only to discover that it grew into a tree in his yard in merest moments, and that new fruits sprang forth on the branches, and that the fruits cried out to the man to eat them. Their voices haunted him day and night, leaving him ever more haggard and desperate. When he tried to cut down the tree, two grew in its place, and when he tried to burn the two trees, the flames scattered the seeds so thoroughly that a forest of the trees filled his yard, and what had once been a bright and beautiful place became a dark and haunting miniature forest that moaned and wailed and gave the poor wizard no rest.

  The wizard used all sorts of enchantments to avoid the fruits of his tree, of course—but the daffia-bejong were nothing if not persistent, and finally, unable to stand another moment of their presence, he fell to his knees, swearing to the little grove that he would eat one of the fruits if they would simply allow him to rest.

  The trees agreed.

  Thus to the second act, where the man ate, and fell asleep, and his dreaming self suddenly confronted the ghosts of the damned crying out for retribution for the tortures and the suffering that he had caused them. Solander discovered that the wizard had found a spell by which he could turn convicted prisoners into a special form of water that kept anyone who drank it young. But when he ran out of guilty men on whom to use his spell, he had to either find innocent fuel or tell his many customers that they could no longer be young.

  He had decided that he would continue supplying his customers, because they made him very rich, and sat him at the center of the table during their great feasts, and applauded him in the streets—but the souls of those who had been so badly used would not rest, and hunted him down in the form of fruit from the magical daffia-bejong. And in his sleep, those whose deaths he had caused finally got a chance to protest their treatment in his hands. They haunted him, and swore that he would never wake until he repented his evil and cast a special spell to free them from the limbo to which they had been consigned.

  In the third act, the wizard, haggard and changed, cast the spell to free the dead from limbo, and all the ghosts of innocents appeared before him and began to follow him, telling him that he was not done with them. Other wizards had found the secrets of his spell, and they offered the same magical water. For him to gain his freedom from the dead, he would have to sell one of the fruits of dreams to other guilty wizards. The play ended with the wizard, his cart loaded with the daffia-bejong he had grown from his tree, wandering the streets, selling his produce to unsuspecting wizards who shared his guilty secret.

  Solander sat there staring at the last page for a long time—not reading, just thinking about the souls of the damned in the play and the souls of the doubly damned in the Warrens of the Empire—souls that would not even have a chance to cry out for vengeance. Finally he put down the play and looked up. “The way you have it written, I can imagine watching it on a stage—but it would be more like being secretly inside someone else’s life. People would love to watch this. Not even just the stolti, though. I bet if you offered cheaper ticket
s to the chadri, maybe even the mufere, you could sell them. It’s a good story, and even they could follow it since it’s in Common. And the fact that it isn’t told in poetry …” Solander shrugged, at a loss for a clear explanation for what prose gave the play that poetry wouldn’t have. “It would have been more artistic if you had done it in poetry, and you would have been looked at as a better writer. But I don’t know that you truly would have been a better writer, because people would have slept through your play just as they sleep through the plays of all the so-called greats. I think if you can actually get the audience interested in what is happening on the stage rather than in what the other people in the audience are wearing or who they came with, you might be the better writer. The fact that this doesn’t have any visits by gods doesn’t hurt it at all—after all, who really believes in the gods these days? And as for it being written in Common … I thought that made it all the better.” He paused. “The people in it sounded real—only a lot more interesting in the way that they said things than most people anyone ever hears speaking.”

  Wraith managed a smile. “So it wasn’t the worst thing you’ve ever read. That’s reassuring, anyway.”

  But Solander had only half heard what Wraith said. He’d been captivated by a sudden, certainly ludicrous, but also delightful inspiration. If he wanted to, he might be able to put A Man of Dreams on a stage. Since his father’s death, he’d had a monthly allowance that came to him as payment from the Council of Dragons—support based on the fact that his father had died in service to the Empire, and that had he lived, he would have continued to contribute to his son’s education and welfare. This was money over and above investments that his father had put aside, Solander’s share of the family money—which was extensive—and Solander’s own fledgling investments. Because his father had been nothing less than the Grand Master of the Council of Dragons of Oel Artis and Oel Maritias at the time of his death, the stipend was almost breathtakingly generous.