by Holly Lisle
Jess stared at him, shocked. “You sound like you’re proud of this— like you expect me to be flattered that you left me under suspicion so that you could be with me. You actually think what you did was … good?”
He looked at her and shrugged, and she saw in his face and movements a hardness she had never seen there before. “You want me to say I did all this for you? That would be a lie. I did all of this for me. I wanted to be with you, I made it happen.” He leaned forward and looked into her eyes. “I never said—I never implied—that I was a good man. I’m not. I’ve killed people, I’ve had people killed. The people I usually deal with are like me—people who will smile at a friend and kill him on orders from above, and then go out and have a big meal with a couple of other friends and their favorite whores.” He looked away from her then, and his voice softened. “In you, though, I see another life. Another world. You’re pure. Good. You’ve never hurt anyone, never allowed yourself to take an easy road. Your people—the Artises … bad people. I’ve worked with them; I know them. Through the Inquest, they’ve had me do a few things for them. They’re as deep into the mire as anyone, grabbing for the same few fistfuls of power just as hard as they can and sinking anyone they can sink just to improve their own footing. You came out of that family, out of that world, and it’s like none of it ever touched you. You just walked away from it all—you and Wraith both. It’s almost as if the two of you grew up in a completely different world from the rest of your family.”
He laughed a little, and looked at her again, and she hoped he couldn’t see any of the dismay in her eyes at how close he had come to her real secret. He said, “And, I have to admit, you’re beautiful, and you’re smart and kind, and you’re soft, and you smell good … and I hoped if I hung around long enough, I’d get you into bed.”
“I’m grateful to be alive,” she said, “but from what you tell me, I wouldn’t even have been in danger had it not been for you. How are you hoping that I’ll react to what you’re telling me? That I’ll … what? Fall in love with you because you saved my life?”
“First,” he said, “Faregan had me watching you because he wanted you. He wasn’t looking for your innocence. He didn’t care if you were innocent; he simply wanted you. And sooner or later he would have either found or manufactured what he needed to have you brought in and put into his power. I stood between you and him. If I’d failed outright or tried to claim your innocence, he would have put someone else with you, and chances are that other Inquestor would have found a way to give you to him. So you would have been in danger. You simply wouldn’t have been with someone who cared what happened to you.”
“That’s horrible,” Jess said. “You’re horrible.”
He watched her without expression, and for a long time said nothing. Finally, he shook his head. “Would you rather I’d lied to you? It would have been easy enough to hide my associations with the Silent Inquest, to simply let you think a friend tipped me off that you were in trouble, and that we were lucky to get away when we did. I could have made myself your hero easily enough; probably could have gotten you into bed the same way without too much trouble. I’m not looking to be some false hero in your eyes—not looking to lie to you about who I am or what I am. I helped you because I could. I love you because I do. I stayed with you because I wanted to. What you do about it—what you think about it—is up to you.”
He looked out the window at the bleak, hot expanse beyond, and said, “We’ll have furniture here soon: beds, food, clothing appropriate for the area, a good supply of water. When it gets here, you direct the people to put things where you want them. Make this your home.”
Jess almost laughed then. “You’re not with the Inquest anymore, are you? I mean, they’d drag you in as fast as they would me right now, wouldn’t they?”
“They’d kill me on sight. There’s no ‘dragging in’ about it. Why? Thinking about selling me to them for your own safety? Don’t. They’ll double-cross you as fast as you apparently would me.”
“It hadn’t even crossed my mind. I was just thinking … if you don’t have the Inquest behind you anymore, what makes you think the man who took our aircar away from here will ever come back with anything? If he doesn’t, what are you going to do about it?”
Now Patr smiled. “I’d like to see him try that.” He leaned against a wall at a right angle to her and said, “Jess, I didn’t turn into a bad, hard man because I joined the Inquest. The Inquest recruited me because I was already a bad, hard man. If my … friend … doesn’t come back here with the things I paid him for, I’ll make sure it’s the last mistake he ever makes.”
The words, and the pleasant smile he wore while he said them, sent a chill through Jess’s veins. No matter what else she did, she decided she would not cross Patr.
Chapter 20
The Masters of the Inquest made Wraith an involuntary witness to the interrogations, and then to the trials. Bound to a chair at the back of the amphitheater that served as courtroom for the whole hellish charade, silenced by a gag, he sat through hour upon hour of watching while friends and colleagues underwent beatings and horrible tortures; he listened helplessly as they confessed to things they had done, and to things they had never done. He wept, and each night when the ordeal was over, he begged to be taken before the Inquest to offer his own testimony. Endlessly he confessed to being Vincalis, whom the interrogators claimed to be seeking.
No one listened. No one cared what he said.
He watched the Kaan broken one by one. Beneath the hands of the interrogators, “Vincalis the Agitator” came to life in shadowy, strange detail; the Silent Inquest’s victims first said nothing, and then said anything when the humiliation, the brutality, and the anguish became too much for them to bear. Vincalis took shape beneath these forced confessions as a powerful member of the stolti class and a wizard of some repute, a man so powerful he managed to remain hidden, so well connected that he controlled vast secret armies with a single word. He was varyingly tall and short, gaunt and fat, pale and dark—and even occasionally female, though usually the interrogation victims said he was male.
The initiates of the Order of Resonance came next into the dark room to bleed, and from them the interrogators extracted the details of plans to free the Warreners, and copious information about their search for an antidote to the addictive poisons in Way-fare, and the ways that they subverted art to bring others around to their cause. And they, too, described Vincalis the Agitator—half man and half god, a shadowy over-lord so hidden none of them had ever seen his face, though many had spoken to his associates and all knew of him.
And finally they brought in Velyn. And Wraith nearly lost his mind, watching her sit calmly before them and tell them everything about him and Jess and Solander, about how she’d had a part in rescuing Jess from the Warrens, about how Wraith had come from there, too, about how Wraith and Solander had planned all along to use Solander’s magic and Wraith’s knowledge of the Warrens to destroy the magic of the Empire and free the human animals the Empire used as fuel. She told them that Wraith, who was Gellas, was also Vincalis. She told them that Solander planned to overthrow the magic of the Empire with his new form of magic. She gave them everything, and embellished what she gave them with things designed to make her look better and them look worse. She just handed it to the Inquestors, without a sign of remorse, without a single threat or struggle. And when she was finished, they tortured her as completely and as brutally as they tortured everyone else—and she told them more or less the same thing.
Wraith wanted to die. He loved her and knew he was a fool for it. And she seemed determined to prove him a fool—and to throw his every attempt at helping her back in his face.
The man who sat next to him, who had commented with amused and loving detail on each of the tortures inflicted on Velyn, looked at Wraith with some interest and said, “She hates you, man. If we gave you to her and handed her a knife, I’m betting she wouldn’t have the kindness to kill you quickly
.” He shook his head and laughed. “I’d love to hear what you did to her.”
Wraith would have told him. He would have told him about Velyn, about his own role in everything; he would have taken on the weight of every sin committed by every one of the people who had trusted him, as well as the things he had done himself, if only someone would have listened to him. But he remained bound and gagged, given sips of water at intervals, beaten when he attempted to speak.
He had to face a dark, horrible fact. The Inquest didn’t want the truth. The Masters of the Silent Inquest could have had the truth in a heartbeat, from anyone brought before them except for Solander or him, for nothing more than the expenditure of a small amount of magic. The truth would have lain bare before them, unembellished, unadorned, un-twisted, for them to do with what they chose.
After they got the truth by magic, the Inquestors tortured their prisoners until they forced lies from them—and it was the lies they seemed to most want. But why? What purpose did these lies serve that the truth did not? Wraith worried it around in his thoughts, but could not think of anything that would explain the actions of the Inquestors.
Then one of the guards brought a viewscreen into his cell the evening of the day that the Inquest interrogated Velyn and said, “You’re to watch this. It has to do with you.”
On the viewscreen, he saw the nightlies. Not the usual discussion of art and literature, or of public meetings for the benefit of one community or another. This was a spectacle, with dramatic music and well-dressed commentators discussing the discovery of a plot against the Empire of the Hars Ticlarim, and scenes straight from the interrogation room, of person after person confessing to crimes against the Empire, and reference after reference to the mysterious Vincalis, mastermind of the entire attempted destruction of civilization. No mention of the Warrens in connection to Vincalis, of course, or of the source of the Empire’s magic. No mention of the burning of souls to keep houses afloat in the air, or aircars soaring on their merry way. No. That would never reach the screens.
But the indictment of art made its way into the commentators’ discussions clearly enough. They branded art and artists as subversives. They declared that the Empire had only managed to bring in a small fraction of the evildoers connected with this potentially world-shattering plot. They suggested that good citizens of the Empire would search out and bring forward all subversives who had so far eluded their net. And they added the final bit of fear-mongering to their report: Vincalis the Agitator had so far escaped capture, and was thought to be very much active in attempting to carry out his plot against the Empire. No less than the Landimyn of the Hars had offered a massive reward for Vincalis’s capture, including money, a grand home in the Aboves of Oel Artis, and a raise of status to stolti for the informant—and all of his family—whose information led to the capture and conviction of the dangerous fugitive.
“I’m Vincalis!” Wraith screamed out the door to the guards. “Didn’t you hear Velyn? She told you I’m Vincalis. I wrote every one of the plays, I’m the one who plotted to free the Warreners, I’m the man you’re looking for!”
He beat his fists on the door of his cell, but no one came. No one wanted to hear the truth. Lies suited the needs of the Empire so much better.
Patr had been right: Everything he’d ordered arrived, including a small, decrepit aircar that Jess doubted would carry them much farther than to the village and back—if that. She said as little as possible to the villagers who brought things into the house; she busied herself in finding places for the food, the furniture, the few small amenities that Patr had managed to acquire for the two of them.
The little viewsphere surprised her. She’d never given much thought to the nightlies, but considering her status as a fugitive, she thought she might do well to see if she and Patr got any mention.
As they sat eating a dinner badly cooked over fire, with food much stronger in flavor than any she was accustomed to, Patr turned on the viewsphere, and the nightlies sprang to life in the tiny room. And she saw the roundup of Wraith, Solander, the Kaan, the initiates of the Order of Resonance, office personnel in Wraith’s several theaters, lower-level wizards who had worked with Solander….
She stopped eating, put bowl and fork on the table, and stared. People she knew flashed onto the screen, telling unimaginable lies about a huge conspiracy to destroy the Empire, overthrow the government, and place the playwright Vincalis—whom the nightlies had dubbed “Vincalis the Agitator”—at the head of a new world order that forbade magic, made men and women live like animals, and would bring misery, starvation, and war to this peaceful place. She clenched her hands into fists and ground her teeth; she stared from the images to Patr, and helplessly back at the travesty before her, and when the lies were done, and the Empire’s plan to eradicate art and artists in the name of safety and to turn everyone against each other as they sought to win some ludicrous reward for their treachery became clear, she closed her eyes and wept silently.
“Madness,” she whispered.
“Not at all,” Patr said. “What they’re doing will serve any number of larger purposes. All sorts of dissidents will be shoved out into the light of day, and from the Empire’s standpoint, if a few innocents—or many innocents—get caught in the same net, what of that? There will always be more innocents; the Empire makes them every day. Further, the Masters of the Empire can instill a great deal of fear and respect with very little effort, simply by publicizing the executions and making sure that everyone knows the search for traitors is ongoing, and that everyone is more or less a suspect. Third, by leaving Vincalis the Agitator at large in the public mind, people no longer trust their neighbors and friends—and no new conspiracies will have good ground in which to grow for a long, long time.
“When the Dragon Council made its deal with the Silent Inquest to hunt you people down and turn you over to them, I’m sure they had just this sort of sweeping power grab in mind.”
“What did the Dragons pay you for this? What is the price of all these lives?”
“A favor,” Patr said with a tiny smile. “A favor to be named later.”
“Please tell me they don’t intend to execute everyone they’ve taken. Not really.”
“They’re planning mass executions. I doubt that anyone they’ve taken in will live—and the more they know, the more I’m sure they’ll be killed.”
“But they have Solander … and Wraith … and so many friends, so many of my friends, so many actors and dancers and singers and writers….”
“They don’t have you,” Patr said.
A week passed, and in that week the nightlies showed a steady stream of conspirators confessing. And each night, the commentators discussed not only the confessions, but their import: how the success of the conspiracy would have led to famine, plague, genocide, wholesale destruction of the Empire, its citizens, and their children. Vincalis—Vincalis the Agitator, the conspirator, plotter, devil spawned to destroy the hopes and plans of millions of innocents—stayed at the center of the nightlies’ coverage.
Special investigators sat with the commentators, discussing methods of ferreting out traitors, of recognizing people who might have passed as solid citizens but who lived secret and dangerous lives beneath the surface. Masters of wizardry described the real danger that unsanctioned methods of magic posed to the Empire’s power delivery structure, and ultimately to the very existence of the Empire. Wizard trackers displayed some of their methods as they attempted to use their magic to locate the elusive Vincalis.
Among the population, interest became obsession and obsession became dread as the coverage wore on, and in the streets, both spontaneous and orchestrated marches calling for the deaths of all the traitors began erupting throughout the Empire.
In the second week after the arrests, power outages in a poor section of Oel Artis caused the deaths of hundreds of mufere and parvoi citizens when the river that the magic held back flowed into the homes at night, drowning everyone in that dist
rict. Vincalis and his traitors took the blame, and the Silent Inquest rounded up another hundred people from around the city and herded them into the Gold Building. These “conspirators” were never even questioned—they were, instead, moved under cover of darkness to the Warrens.
No one mentioned that the part of the city drowned had been fighting eviction notices and demolition orders for more than ten years, or that the Masters of the City wanted the land for special waterfront resorts of their own. No one seemed to notice that the people who just vanished, taken in by the Silent Inquest—which was working as the secret right hand of the Dragon Council—had nothing to do with the arts, that they were all small property owners who held land in coveted locations.
No one questioned the Dragon Council. No one questioned the hysteria—at least not publicly. No one stood up to the Masters of the City. Citizens from one end of the Empire to the other kept still and quiet and hoped that no fingers would be pointed at them. Which, of course, was exactly what the Masters of the Dragon Council wanted.
Master Grath Faregan stepped into Wraith’s cell and sat on the bench that ran the length of the wall opposite him. “I hear you’ve had much to say,” he said. “That you have requested an audience. I find myself with a bit of free time, and a little curiosity about what you might have to say. Would you care to enlighten me?”
Wraith nodded. “I’m Vincalis,” he said. “There isn’t anyone else. There’s no mysterious master conspirator, no one who is waiting out there to strike and destroy the Empire. There’s just me.”
Faregan said, “Quite a few of your colleagues have also confessed to being Vincalis. Rather generous of you all, considering that when Vincalis is brought before the people, it’s likely that he’ll be burned alive, or perhaps ripped limb from limb. Public sentiment isn’t running much in his favor these days. Funny how people forget how much they loved all those little plays when they think a man’s been plotting underneath it all to murder their children.”
