Vincalis the Agitator

by Holly Lisle

  “He’ll get over it, won’t he?”

  “You would get over it. But he’s … different. He’s different about everything. I don’t know that he will.”

  She looked stunned. “You mean—you mean you think he might truly not want to see me again? To be with me again? But … that’s ridiculous.”

  Solander looked around the theater that Wraith and Velyn had designed together, that embodied so many of Wraith’s dreams and so many of Velyn’s interests, and all he could think of was Wraith talking in dreamy tones about how he and Velyn were going to do this and that, how he would write plays and she would create the sets to make them come to life, and how the two of them were going to change the world together. But Velyn, who Solander thought did love Wraith in her own way, had no passion for changing the world. Because it had been challenging and fun, because it had been something that Wraith had made powerful and intriguing by his passion, she had wanted to be a part of it. But it hadn’t been her dream. For Wraith, saving the Warreners and changing the magic system of the Empire had become—along with Velyn—the air that he breathed.

  Velyn rose, gathered up her brushes and paints, and carefully cleaned everything. She didn’t say anything to either him or to Jess; she just cleaned and straightened. And then, when she had finished, she gathered up her belongings. “I’ll be at the house,” she said. “If he wants to talk to me. For a while, anyway.”

  Solander said, “If he wants to know, I’ll tell him.”

  She didn’t look happy about that “if.” She nodded without saying anything else and left.

  After Velyn left, Solander turned to Jess, who sat quietly on the edge of the stage. He shook his head. And then he waited for her to say something about Velyn, because in all the years he’d known her, she’d been rock-solid on one thing: She hated Velyn.

  But Jess said nothing.

  “You aren’t happy he got rid of her?”

  “She broke his heart. What sort of friend would I be if I could be happy about that?”

  Solander walked over to the stage, vaulted onto it, and wrapped Jess in his arms. With his face buried in her hair, he said, “And that is precisely why I love you.”

  She kissed the side of his neck and said, “And I love you because you would think to ask.” And then she said, “I hope he’s safe.”

  Just for a moment, chilled by the worry in her voice, Solander wondered if this was the moment that would take her away from him and carry her back to Wraith. He forced the fear aside. After all, he was concerned about Wraith, too.

  As the fire began to die down and the dancers pulled on robes and settled around the fire, the time came for the singers and the talkers to begin their turn. Wraith sat in the circle, watching a small carved stone being passed from hand to hand, and listened as, one after another, the recipients of the stone told stories. Their stories were of the ways of the Kaan, the name these people named themselves, kaan meaning “powerless” in the ancient tongue of the Brigomen, whose descendants this small village of men and women claimed to be. This night they told their stories for him, because he was an outsider, but also a guest; so their tales were of the settling of the islands of middle Arim by the Brigomen, and of the capture and enslavement of the people, and of their clever escapes, successful protests, and delightful evasions and trickeries played upon authorities.

  Wraith listened, enchanted, and then the stone passed into his hands, and after a moment’s thought, he told them who he was, where he came from, and how he came to be among them that night. His was a long story, but no one protested, no one left, and as the flames dropped lower and the Kaan moved their circle closer around it to conserve heat, more and more of them met his eyes with understanding in their own.

  If he had never felt that he belonged within the Warrens, if he had always felt that he was an outsider in the grand houses and high cities of the stolti, in this place of hard and heavy stone dwellings, wood fires, and men and women who eschewed all magic he felt he had at last found his place in the world.

  When his story was finished, with the brief telling of the creation of his theater, his plans to make the people of the Empire see the price of the magic they used so carelessly, and his sudden and painful loss of the woman he loved, the men clapped him on the back and the women, with tears in their eyes, told him that a spirit such as his had not been born to wander alone.

  And then one of the men said, “So—who will act in this theater of yours? Have you filled the roles? Have you found people who can do the effects you hope for without using magic?”

  He had to admit that he had not—that he would be holding the first open tryouts for actors, stagehands, makeup artists, and others soon. That is, if he could find his way back in time.

  “Why don’t you fill your major roles with the Kaan?” the same man asked him. “We could do everything you need, couldn’t we? Perhaps there would not be enough of us in this village who were free to do everything you needed, but with some of us there, you would have less trouble with your magic cripples, who will have to learn the simplest of nonmagical skills from the beginning.”

  Wraith laughed. “You’d consider this?”

  “We’ve finished our harvest of the foods that we plant and grow. Our larders are full enough, but winter money comes hard to us. I suspect that those among us who have no children to tend would be happy to join this endeavor of yours.”

  One of the younger women said, “We’d be happy to get you back to your theater, too—but only once morning has come. There are areas around us where we don’t willingly go after dark. We … well, we are not always well liked by the magic-using majority.”

  They gave him food to eat and a comfortable bed to sleep in. He fell asleep to the sound of a fire crackling in the hearth by his bed, and the sweetness of wood smoke, and with a freedom of spirit that he had not imagined he could ever feel. If he could only free them, his Warreners could find a place among the Kaan. He and Velyn …

  But he had, in his happiness, managed to put aside for just a while the grief that had brought him to this wonderful haven. He would not be bringing Velyn here; he would not be seeing her again, touching her again, talking to her again. The pain that had eased for just a little while rolled back over him like a smothering blanket.

  Luercas, still scarred beyond any recognizable connection with humanity, sat in private council with his old friend Dafril Crow-Hjaben. He finished a lengthy account of his endeavors to regain his old form by saying, “So that’s it. The top specialists as far away as Winter City in Ynjarval; most of the funds that the Council gave me in compensation for my injuries—and this is it. This is the best that the best of them can do— that the best of them will ever be able to do.”

  Dafril held a new-model spell-minder in one hand—a little hand-sized recorder that could hold and play back tens of thousands of spells, or simply project the words of them into the air as text so that the spell-caster could put his own focus and inflection into them. He kept playing with it instead of giving his full attention to Luercas, something that annoyed Luercas almost beyond reason. Dafril pressed the stylus against an item on the list and told Luercas, “See what I’ve been working on?”

  Luercas exploded. “Did you hear a single word I’ve said? Have you been listening, or have you been so engrossed in that gods’-damned toy of yours that you’ve managed to miss it all?”

  “Heard every word,” Dafril said. “Look, Luercas. Look. I think you’ll find this interesting.”

  Luercas glanced at the words of the spell spun of light that hung in the air before him—preparatory, he thought, to taking Dafril’s toy from him and smashing it to pieces. But one of the stanzas of the spell caught his attention.

  Draw from flesh, soul,

  Draw from flesh, soul,

  Two bodies, two souls,

  And a single exchange.

  And new flesh I claim,

  New flesh I claim,

  And old flesh I relinquish, Old flesh
>
  I relinquish …

  It went on from there, but Luercas did not keep reading. Instead he started at the beginning, and partway down he began taking notes, checking and cross-checking parameters, figuring energy constants and flux and rewhah controls.

  By the time he finally made it to the end, he sat in stunned silence.

  “Decent, don’t you think?” Dafril finally asked him.

  “Have you tested it?”

  “Animal tests only. But you know how untrustworthy those are— especially when you’re doing something as large and complex as this.”

  “I can’t figure out where you send the rewhah for the whole thing.”

  Dafril laughed. “That has to be the best and cleverest bit of spell design I’ve ever done. You take every bit of it into your own flesh. Every bit.”

  Luercas said, “That’s insane, Dafril.” He held out his arms, pointed to his own horribly twisted, inhuman visage. “This is what happens when you take the rewhah yourself.”

  “But that’s the beauty of it. You’re trading bodies—so the body you’re getting rid of takes the hit, and you get the one that comes through unscathed. If you’re lucky, your old body will die, releasing the soul, so that you own the new one free and clear.”

  Luercas began to laugh, softly at first, but then louder and more merrily. “You … are … a … dorfing genius!”

  Dafril looked pleased. “I thought you might like this. I’ve been working on it ever since you gave me the copy of the spell Rone did that caused your problem.”

  Luercas felt his heart accelerate. “You based this spell on that?”

  “No. Well, partly. I got the majority of my preliminary work from texts I unearthed that were used by the Three Sleeping Stones when they transferred their souls into inanimate objects as their bodies neared death. That’s the baseline spell for soul usage—the only part I had to use Rone’s spell for was the transfer of a soul from an unwilling subject; that is difficult, and the part where we’re going to generate the most rewhah. We won’t have the sort of backlash that we would have had if we’d destroyed the soul in our target body; I’d played with the idea of using our target’s soul for the energy to run the spell, but the feedback numbers just got to be horrendous.”

  Luercas leaned forward and looked at the sheets of computations that Dafril shoved toward him.

  After long moments of studying the equations, he nodded. “Your payoff by simply swapping out the souls is well worth the risk of having someone in this body who wants revenge. It makes the whole procedure almost … safe.”

  Dafril sat there grinning like a lunatic. “But I haven’t told you the best part yet. I’ve found a way to cover any evidence that we’ve even done this. We can get you a body that will never be missed, we can dump your body where it will never be found, and the person inside of it won’t even be able to tell.”

  Luercas studied his friend with disbelief. “I’m listening. I don’t believe what I’m hearing, but I’m listening.”

  “We can kidnap a Warrener—a young, healthy one, so that you don’t get a body that’s too fat. We can inject the antidote to the Way-fare toxins, so the body doesn’t die on you—pretty pointless to do this if you have to live on Way-fare and spend your life in twilight. Then we start pumping your true body full of Way-fare. I think I read in the revision paper the developers presented when they changed the formula that it now only takes three doses to become addictive to the system. So we hide you and our transplant until the third dose is in, and when your body is addicted and drugged, I do the spell to make the switch. And we dump your body with the Warrener’s soul in it back into the Warrens, and we send you to a visage-wizard who can make you look the way you used to, and we tell people that you finally found someone who could completely counteract the spells. In Manarkas, maybe, or one of the island chains.”

  Luercas couldn’t believe his ears. “How long have you been thinking about this?”

  “Since I realized that you weren’t going to get back to being yourself until I figured out a way around the fact that no one was powerful enough to counteract the rewhah that came from the destruction of souls.”

  Luercas smiled—and really felt like smiling, inside and outside—for the first time since the accident. “You’re a friend, Dafril. A real friend. I’ll never forget what you’ve done for me.”

  Dafril shrugged. “You would have done the same for me.”

  And Luercas thought, No. I wouldn’t have.

  But it didn’t hurt for Dafril to think otherwise.

  Velyn paced through her suite, by turns furious and shocked. How could Wraith treat her like some street girl, put out of sight the moment he didn’t get his way? How could he think that he could dismiss her— that she would be put in her place by a Warrener? He could pretend to be stolti for a thousand years and a day, but that wouldn’t change the truth.

  “This is all because of my fascination with guttermen,” she told her reflection. “My delight in rolling with the pigs—and one of the pigs finally turned and bit me, didn’t it? I could have taken vows with any of a dozen respectable, upward-bound stolti men by now; or maybe a rich man. One or two of the older, established men would have been happy to have had me, though perhaps only in the position of alternative mate. I don’t want that.”

  She turned away from the mirror, threw herself onto the bed she occupied so rarely, and stared up at her ceiling.

  “But Solander will tell me if Wraith wants to see me again. Jess will meet him at one place, stupid Solly at the other, and I’m to come wait in my room like a naughty child who’s been punished. And young Solander all superior and smug, looking down his nose at me because I led Wraith on, or because I didn’t want to take vows with him, or because cause … gods only know what he thinks he has to be superior about. I don’t see him taking vows with his little street urchin.” She sat up, angrier than when she’d flung herself down, far too restless to lie in one place, and jumped to the floor, where she began pacing again.

  “Or maybe she wouldn’t have him. Hah! Wouldn’t that just be the thing? One Warren-rat with aspirations to vow-lock a stolti, and another Warren-rat who thinks she’s too good for her stolti lover. That little bitch always did have her eye on Wraith. Perhaps she’s trying to unbreak his broken heart right now. Wouldn’t that be funny?”

  It wouldn’t, though. Velyn had wanted Wraith. She’d lusted after him even while she’d been slaking her appetites on aircar drivers and laborers and sons of merchants, and the occasional merchant’s daughter. In Wraith she had seen something that she had never seen before in anyone—a fire, a passion, a hunger for something beyond himself, beyond his own greed and his own self-advancement. He’d been the first human being she’d ever met who earned the description “unique.” He had come from nowhere, from nothing, and by his wits and his ability to make the right friends and by his odd disability that turned out more often than not to be to his advantage, he had brought himself and his friend out of hell and into a life of luxury. And then he had not even had the good grace to be spoiled by the same luxuries that had spoiled her. He still had his passion, his fire, his desires and aspirations and dreams.

  What’s more, he projected the goodness in himself onto her, so that while she was with him, she felt special. She felt that she was as unique as he, as deserving of awe and accolades. She’d come to think of herself as indispensable—as someone without whom his dreams would fall to pieces. But she wasn’t. He would go on without her; he would make his success of his theater; he might even succeed in changing the minds of a few people, in making them realize that the magic he so loathed truly was an evil thing.

  He’d never change the Empire, of course. The Hars Ticlarim was a mighty river, with a bed three thousand years deep. A boy and his lunatic passions would not succeed in diverting even a rivulet of it. But he would make a great deal of noise trying. And he would be interesting to watch.

  She stopped pacing when she reached her window for
the twelfth time. She placed her hands on the sleek sill and stared down—down through a faint haze of clouds, down to the dark sprawling smudge that was the city of the Belows. How could she ever have been willing to go down there for her amusement? How could she have allowed herself to be given chores like some mufere streetwasher, like some nobody? She’d painted scenery; she’d hammered nails; she gotten filthy, had torn clothing, had developed calluses on her hands and aches in her muscles—because of a Warrener.

  She took a deep breath.

  “I’ve forgotten who I am,” she said to the window. “I’ve forgotten my place in life, my station, my entitlements, my rights. In my ridiculous search for some transitory pleasure, for a boy who is nothing but a good lay and an occasionally interesting dinner companion, I’ve forgotten that I have a life of my own. But it’s time to start remembering that.”

  She moved away from the window, toward her room’s house-chime. “Past time. Wraith and his confused notions of who he is can go straight to all the hells.”

  She reached out. Rang the chime. When the servant answered, she said, “This is Velyn Artis-Tanquin. Please tell my mother and father that I will be dining with them tonight.”

  Wraith returned to the theater by the first light of dawn. Frost glittered on the streets, on the buildings, on the plants, and the pink pale light turned the city into rose diamonds, fairy crystals grown enormous in some madman’s happy dream. Though they kept their voices soft, still Wraith and his new friends, all talking at once, all wondrously excited about their new friendship, their discovery of each other, could hear the sudden sharp echoes of their laughter though the nearly silent streets.