Vincalis the Agitator

by Holly Lisle

  They were going to torture her, weren’t they? This wasn’t just them waiting for her to talk. They could have the answers they wanted from her at any time; so why make her wait here, humiliated and powerless, unless they had a reason to want her scared? This was ugly.

  Silence, and the infinite blackness beyond the bleeding white light. She shivered, having a hard time catching her breath. She wanted to go home. She wanted to be with her parents. She wanted to be back with Wraith. She wanted to be anywhere but where she was.

  Silence.

  And then a single soft voice that signaled the end of silence.

  “You’ve been found guilty of treason, and you’re to be executed in three days, along with the rest of the conspirators against the Empire.”

  And that was all he said.

  The silence descended again, and into it she said, “Wait. I haven’t done anything against the Empire. I’m no traitor. Look—I don’t deserve to die. I’m a stolti, damnall. The most you can do to me is sentence me to Refinement! You can’t execute me!”

  The silence continued, like a blanket over her.

  Her voice, thin and quavering, rose as she tried to push it out through the lights, into the impenetrable darkness beyond, to the ears and hearts of those who had already judged her.

  “I’m innocent. But I can tell you who isn’t.”

  Silence, like shuttered windows. And then a laugh. And the silence again.

  “Please,” she said. And, “Please,” she whispered.

  Strangers came, unbound her from the chair, untied her, threw a blanket around her, and led her—nearly blind, mad with fear—away from the bright light, into the hellish darkness.

  “But I can help you,” she shouted. “I can help you.”

  Faregan paced in the corridor. “All of them but her,” he said. “I put my most loyal man on her with orders to bring her in to me when this all came together, and the bastard vanishes, and her with him.” He punched his fist into the open palm of his other hand. “I was going to offer her the choice between survival with me and death with the traitors. She would have been mine. Mine. So where is she? Where is Jethis?”

  He walked faster, up and down the empty hall—a dozen steps, turn, a dozen more, turn. Rage ate into his gut like poison—twisting, hurting. Cheated. He’d been cheated of his prize, his due reward. He’d waited, he’d been patient, he’d taken her refusals and her rudenesses, and each time he’d simply put them aside, for that was what men did. They were patient, they made plans, and when the time was right, they made offers that could not be refused.

  “Jethis was a double agent,” Faregan said suddenly, stopping in mid-stride. He stared up at the ceiling. “A double agent. One of them. He’s taken her to whatever place these traitors had set aside as a bolt-hole.”

  Everything was all right, then. Faregan would still find Jess CovitachArtis; when all the traitors’ stories under mage-interrogation and torture started coming in, the locations of the few holdouts would come to light. Then loyal Inquestors could go and retrieve Jess. And Jethis.

  After Jess was safely in his possession—the toy he’d waited so long to acquire, the finest of his collection—he thought he would participate personally in the torture of Jethis. The double-dealing bastard would have a long, long time to wish he was dead.

  Wraith and Solander moved through empty corridors, and at each intersection Solander had to force open locks by magic. Each time, Wraith expected someone to come after them, yet each time, Solander eventually succeeded with the lock, and they moved forward.

  “They’ve thrown everything they have at these locks,” he muttered once. “That’s the reason they don’t have anyone guarding the corridors— not even the Master of the Dragons could hope to get through all of these locks without a massive pipeline into the Warrens, and they’ve somehow blocked magic access to everyone but themselves. If I wasn’t drawing on my own forces, we’d never have a chance.”

  “They’ve got to know we’re out,” Wraith said. “How could they not? I haven’t shown up wherever they were going to take me. The guards are welded into your cell—the Masters are going to miss them soon enough.”

  “We’re not leaving any tracks. The shield I have around us will keep us from setting off any alarms, and as long as you stay close to me, neither of us will even be visible.”

  “You hope.”

  “Could you see me when I shielded?”

  “No.”

  “Then it’s more than a hope.”

  “We’re really going to just walk out of here?”

  They moved around a corner and three routes confronted them. Solander swore. “Assuming we don’t get lost, yes.”

  Wraith spent so much of his time anymore away from magic, he sometimes forgot just how much it could accomplish. “This place is a maze—designed to confuse. I’ve read the histories of it. Do you have any way of using magic to find a safe way out?”

  “Doing it now,” Solander said. His face was pale, his forehead gleaming with sweat. “Don’t … talk. I need my focus. I can’t guarantee anything, but …” He shrugged.

  Wraith nodded and, silent, stayed as close to his friend as he could. They made little sound, walking through long corridors past closed doors, the near-darkness broken only by the infrequent green glow of wizard globes along the walls. This part of the Gold Building had the feel of the abandoned, the forgotten. It gave Wraith the shudders; he could imagine himself or someone else languishing behind one of those locked and barred doors, starving into oblivion, misplaced by everyone. Did the Inquest—this startling group of madmen and fiends that lived and thrived under the noses of the Dragons, almost as a second government—rid itself of its most troublesome targets in such a callous, simple manner?

  Solander only spoke once more during their traverse of the corridors. “Every one of these locks is different,” he whispered. “Every one takes some special combination of tricks to break through. I’m not sure how many more of these I have the energy to open.”

  “How can I help?”

  Solander laughed softly and shook his head. “You can carry me if we make it outside.”

  “That’s it?”

  Solander nodded.

  Long corridors, and twists left and right, and the intermittent splashes of green. Then a change. Darker walls, an unexpected older part of the building not built of the mages’ whitestone, but of actual stone— of cut and fitted blocks. Wraith had never seen anything outside of the Kaan enclaves even remotely like it. Solander and Wraith stopped, looked at each other.

  “Close?” Wraith whispered.

  Solander nodded, pointed them onward.

  No more gates now. They walked faster, Solander leaning on Wraith and breathing hard. And finally the last door lay ahead. Solid metal, barred. Solander leaned against it, concentrated as he had with the other gates, and finally sagged to the floor. “I can’t touch this one.”

  Wraith looked at him. “The spell too strong?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t get close enough to the lock to see the spell. Something is keeping me back.”

  Wraith studied the door and the mechanism of the lock with a desperation approaching panic. On the other side lay freedom. He could feel it. But he had no tools with which to manipulate the lock’s tumblers, nothing with which to cut through the metal, no way to break down this one last door.

  He didn’t understand this setback. He could have understood if the door had no magic to it—though in the Gold Building, he would imagine no such door existed. But that Solander could not manipulate it by magic—that he did not understand. Had the Dragons found the secret that would explain what made Wraith the way he was? Had they discovered how to make things oblivious to magic?

  A voice behind him said, “Final spell, you see. A magic repeller.”

  Wraith and Solander turned. They faced what looked like the whole of the Silent Inquest: the three men he recognized as the Masters, with Master Noano Omwi at their head; behind hi
m a dozen or more keppins—middle-aged men who took orders directly from the Masters; the keppins’ assembled solitars—young men coming up in the organization; and the solitars’ many investigators, watchers, and drones. The mass of black and green robes, of hooded and shadowed faces, of fanatical eyes, caused Wraith’s stomach to clench so violently that he had to fight back simultaneous desperate urges to puke and shit himself.

  Omwi said, “Not expecting us? Ah, but we’ve been expecting the two of you. We created a test for you, and you did beautifully. We couldn’t see you, we couldn’t hear you, we couldn’t track you except that each time you passed through a door, our watching spells could see the door open. Had it not been for that, we’d have lost you almost immediately. Lucky for us that doors are such physical things.”

  And Faregan, to Omwi’s right, smiled and asked, “So were you impressed with this last gate? It’s something new that we’ve just tried out— and well that we did, too, though the cost of using the spell with any sort of regularity would bankrupt the Empire’s magic reserves in no time.”

  “But it won’t be necessary. We needed it for these two, but the secret of this new magic dies with them, for the good of the Empire.” Omwi chuckled. “Quite a little discovery you seem to have made, Solander. You and Gellas both—to all appearances impervious to magical questioning, and shielded from magical manipulation thanks to this new magical system of yours. To have gotten through every other barrier we placed before you—and to do it without setting off a single alarm, or tapping into the Warrens’ energy pools—you’ve had to pull from yourself as much power as we’ve drawn from at least a dozen souls. And while we’ve had to expend effort and power in diverting the rewhah, you seem to have no rewhah issues at all. It’s been a breathtaking demonstration.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “But now, unless I miss my guess, the two of you are at last reserves. Just as well. We didn’t want to have to hurt you before we took you to the interrogation rooms. We want you to be healthy and … and, well, cooperative for questioning. After all, we’re going to have to have your secret. What would be a disaster in the hands of the citizenry will to us be … valuable.”

  The keppins and the solitars brought up weapons and aimed them at Wraith and Solander. “No,” Solander said. “We’ll go with you without a fight.”

  “You will,” Omwi said. “But on our terms.” And keppins and solitars fired simultaneously.

  Gold and green and red and yellow fires erupted from the weapons and exploded around Solander and Wraith, and Solander collapsed instantly. Wraith simply stood there while the cold fires splashed against him and swirled around him, crackling and roaring. He thought perhaps he ought to collapse as Solander had, but he didn’t think it quickly enough. Omwi gave a signal an instant before he thought to drop, and keppins and solitars switched off their weapons and lowered them.

  “No,” Omwi said. “That wasn’t a shield. You weren’t using the sort of magic he was; you weren’t using anything. The spells went right through you, but they didn’t touch you.” He looked from Wraith to Solander, and back to Wraith. “Him I understand. I don’t know how his system works yet, but I know he has a system, and I know I can get the details. But you …” He shook his head. “All the time I’ve been watching you, Gellas, I never noticed anything wrong with you. But you’re quite, quite wrong, aren’t you? Fascinating.”

  Omwi turned his back on Wraith, and to his keppins he said, “Take Solander to interrogation. And when you have what you need from him, lock him away with the rest of the traitors.” He turned back to Wraith. “You … well, you’ll have a different fate, I think. We have to find out first what makes you work, don’t we? We can’t waste someone for whom the laws of magic don’t seem to work. No telling what fascinating things we’ll find out about magic if we study you.”

  Wraith closed his eyes. He should have fallen to the ground along with Solander. He should have. Too late to do it now. Now he could only allow himself to be taken back the way he had come, allow himself to be escorted into a single, lonely cell. Could only listen to the heavy, physical, real bar on the other side of the door falling into place, and to the physical—not magical—lock clicking.

  One of the lonely cells in one of the labyrinthine corridors, somewhere in the heart of oblivion.

  The end of the road, he thought. He’d reached the end of the road, and neither he nor Solander had managed, for all their idealism, to save anyone.

  “Why are we here?” Jess asked Patr.

  Patr paid the little man from whom he had ordered an extraordinary amount of supplies, clothing, and foods. He turned to Jess and pointed to the little house to which he’d brought them.

  “Inside first.”

  Jess looked over his shoulder and said, “Wait. That man is taking our aircar.”

  “That’s part of how we paid for the things we’re getting. Believe me, we don’t want it anywhere around us. My superiors may have ways of locating us through it.”

  “Patr …”

  “Inside. I promise, love—this is something that can’t be said in open air.”

  Jess stared at him, then turned and walked into the tiny, run-down house. The three rooms were all empty, the adobe walls cracked, the windows unfettered by any such niceties as mageglass, or simple glass, or even shutters or screens—the wind blew in as freely as it blew across the plains of this bleak, sun-scorched place, bringing with it bits of dirt and sand, insects, and the occasional tiny float-lizard.

  “Inside doesn’t seem to offer much of an improvement over outside, actually,” she said.

  “I know. And I apologize. This is the best I can offer on short notice; once I … well, once things changed, I’d planned something much better, but I ran out of time.”

  Jess found the one wall that looked more or less solid and almost clean, and leaned gingerly against it. It held. She said, “You’ve talked about things changing, and about running out of time, and about your plans—but you haven’t given me any details. One last time, then, Patr. Who were in the aircars that surrounded my house? Why did we run, and how did you know to get us out of there before they arrived? And what are we doing here?”

  He took a deep breath. “Easy things first. We’re here because we’re hiding. From the Silent Inquest—a group of evil men, and a group in which I was once a minor but trusted member. I had this place put aside in case I should ever run afoul of them. They … ah, they sometimes find the best way to keep a secret is to eliminate everyone who knows it. I’ve had friends who disappeared right after they worked on something big or sensitive. The Masters of the Inquest and their keppins are vicious; they claim a code of honor, but rarely find it convenient to follow it. So, when I realized what they were and how they worked, I acquired this place. Very carefully, through dummy buyers and layers upon layers of protective cover. I’ve never come here before.” He glanced around at it and wrinkled his nose. “I didn’t get much for my money, but if I got our lives, that will be enough.”

  She nodded. “Fine. Then the people who invaded my home just after we left it were … Silent Inquest?”

  “Yes.”

  “And this is about Wraith?”

  “Wraith? You mean Gellas?”

  “Yes. Gellas is Wraith.”

  “I don’t know if it’s about him. It’s about treason against the Empire, and I have to think your friend Wraith has some part in that, but I don’t believe he’s the only one the Inquest is after. I know they want Solander. I know they want Vincalis. And I know they’re after the Kaan; they’ve just been waiting for the Kaan to demonstrate their animosity to the Empire in a way that can be both proven and punished.”

  Jess cringed.

  “And they were after me.”

  “Yes. Because of your associations with both Gellas—or Wraith, I suppose—and Solander. You had the misfortune to make some, well … some ill-starred friendships, to say the least.”

  Jess smiled a little. Without those two friendships, she would be
either mindless magic fodder in the Warrens or already dead. Facts that Patr, secret soldier of the Inquest, would not get from her.

  “I understand why you are here, then,” she said after some thought. “But why am I here? Why not give me to the Inquest and be a hero, or simply leave me where I was and flee for your life? You would have had a safer and easier trip without me.”

  “I love you,” he said. “I’ve been falling in love with you since the day Master Faregan assigned me to you.”

  “Master Faregan is a member of the Inquest?”

  “Yes. He’s one of the Triad, the three most powerful Inquestors in all Matrin. He sits second, after only Master Omwi.”

  “He was briefly a member of a music covil with me,” Jess said softly. “He asked me to go home with him to listen to some music from his collection—he said he could guarantee I’d never heard anything like it before. But I didn’t like the way he looked at me. At other times, he asked me to go places with him.”

  Patr said, “He collects young women. No one knows what he does with them—though I spent a great deal of time and effort once trying to find out—but most of the Inquestors know he finds strays and takes them home. I think you were to have been part of his collection. I realized early on that I wasn’t going to be able to turn you in to him if that ever became an issue, but I also realized early on that you weren’t involved in any conspiracies against the Empire. I could have—I should have—cleared you with them after the first six months. If your innocence would have mattered to anyone, that is.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because then perhaps Faregan would have taken me away from you, and set me to watching someone else. And I didn’t want to watch anyone else. I wanted to be with you—to have an excuse to be with you every day, and to have the approval of my superiors to be with you. It made me happy.”

  “And it left me under suspicion.”

  “I told them that you didn’t know anything, but that you had friends who might be using you as an unsuspecting contact point, and that if I stayed with you, I might find out something useful. From time to time, I fed them pieces of information that weren’t completely true, but that weren’t completely lies, either—just enough to keep them on the hook.”