by Holly Lisle
“But I never plotted any such thing. I wanted to free the Warreners, nothing more. The Dragons are burning their souls as fuel for the Empire; they can’t be permitted to do that. But Solander came up with a form of magic that would permit civilization to continue, and neither of us would ever have permitted harm to come to the Empire’s citizens.”
Faregan glanced at him, started to say something, stopped himself, and then shook his head and laughed. “Gellas, you probably are Vincalis, for what it’s worth. I thought it likely when we brought you in. No one has traced any of the work directly to you, and you were careful enough that we could never prove anything … but that knife cuts both ways. You can never prove anything, either. And for our purposes, that’s infinitely better.”
Wraith frowned at him, not understanding. “Why?”
“If you’re Vincalis, then the threat to the Empire is over as soon as we execute you. People go back to life as it was—they resume their dayto-day activities and expect all the details of their lives to return to normal. But your … well, your experiment in conspiracy has highlighted a few weaknesses in our system, and in order to patch them, we’re going to have to do away with some privileges that people currently consider rights. In order to do that, they have to perceive a threat to their lives and the lives of their children, and they have to think that the government is the only entity that can protect them from that threat. And as long as ‘Vincalis the Agitator’ is free and causing problems, we have our necessary threat. The Dragons can eliminate rights with impunity, increase surveillance on the populace as a whole—including the stolti class, which has until now been terribly resistant to such invasion—and increase revenues while we do it. Less for more.”
“That’s evil.”
“That’s government, my boy. Government is all about its own survival; it’s as much a living, breathing entity as any snake … and much more cold-bloodedly deadly.” His smile turned sly. “Meanwhile, as we play along, acting the part of the Dragons’ allies, the Silent Inquest has its own agenda. We increase our pressure on the Dragons—the Masters of the Silent Inquest watch even them. Once the hysteria is at its highest peak, we intend to put a few Masters into the uncomfortable position of being discovered as part of your conspiracy. We’ll supply all the evidence to the public and the rest of the Masters simultaneously to prove that these few chosen ones were deeply involved. Once the Dragons find them guilty—as they must after all their public outcry—and once they hold the necessary executions, we’ll prove to the survivors how vulnerable they have become to their own hysteria.” He laughed softly. “And the remaining Dragons will be more than willing to fall in line with our objectives.”
Wraith’s head hurt. “You want people to die.”
“The right people—yes. That shouldn’t surprise you.”
“It doesn’t. Nothing surprises me anymore.”
The old man laughed. “Such cynicism. Well, you’ll live, boy. You’ll be our permanent guest … and at some point you’ll probably wish we’d killed you with your friends. But you’ll live. I have a team of the Inquest’s private researchers flying in to convene here. Once the executions are over, they’ll begin studying you. If we can acquire your immunity to magic, the Dragons will have no hold over us at all—and control of the Hars will once again reside with us.”
Wraith turned away. “No truth will stop you. No pleading will stop you. The innocence of your victims won’t stop you. What will stop you?”
Grath Faregan raised an eyebrow. “Something bigger and meaner than us, boy. That’s the only thing.”
He rose and said, “If you truly are Vincalis, let me say that I did enjoy your work. You were a talented writer. Pity for your sake you didn’t find an acceptable outlet for all that talent—but your … ambition, for want of a better word, worked out well enough for us. I won’t see you again. You’ll attend the executions as a guest of the Inquest, and then you’ll go to your new home, which will be your last home. You have any last thing you want to say to me?”
Wraith turned and stared at him. “Only that this won’t be the last time we meet. If you hurt my friends, I’ll walk through seven hells to come for you.”
Faregan nodded politely. “I hear that a lot, actually.” He bowed slightly. “I offer you my best wishes, then, and take my leave.” Suddenly he stopped. “One thing. Every time I’ve met you, I’ve had the nagging feeling that we’d met before. Why is that?”
For just an instant, Wraith managed a thin smile. “You really don’t know.”
“No. But don’t think you’ll win any concessions by withholding the information. I’ve lived this long without it. I won’t lose a minute’s sleep if you don’t tell me.”
“I don’t imagine you lose sleep over anything, you lizard. But I’ll tell you. You met me for the first time in the Oel Artis Travia fresh market, where I was attempting to steal food for my friends.” Wraith’s smile stretched fractionally. “You tried to stop me with magic. And you failed. So you tried to have me killed. You failed again. And you know something? I think you’re going to fail this time, too.”
It was sheerest bravado, Wraith knew—but seeing the recognition on Faregan’s face, followed by a look of shock, and for one beautiful instant fear, made whatever Faregan might do to him as a result worth it.
Then Faregan regained his composure. “Ah. Yes. Well, let me tell you something, young thief. I’ll make you wish you’d died that day—and a hundred times over—before I’m done with you.” And Faregan, escorted by the guards at his sides, bowed lightly and left.
“There has to be some way to stop them from executing everyone!” Jess, her fingers claw-hooked into the material of Patr’s tunic, glared up into his face. “We can’t let them all die without doing something.”
“I keep telling you, Jess. I didn’t let them all die. I saved you. Beyond that, there’s nothing we can do that won’t get both of us killed, too.”
They stood in the tiny house’s doorway, watching dust blowing in front of the house. Jess wanted to go back to Oel Artis immediately—to disguise herself as some out-country bumpkin if necessary, and find some way to Wraith no matter what it took. Solander, too—but if she could only save one, she would save Wraith.
“If Solander and Wraith die, I don’t want to live.”
Patr’s face creased with pain. Her rejection, Jess thought, of him and his hopes. He wanted her to love him, and she didn’t. And every time she opened her mouth about Wraith, she stuck the knife in a little deeper. “Avenge them if you want. I’ll help you. But you can’t save them.”
“You know where they’re being kept.”
“Yes.”
“You must know some way to get in—some secret passage, perhaps, or friends who will let you pass and look the other way….”
He laughed softly. “Friends. In the Inquest. My friends are just like me. They’ve been told now to kill me, and they took the oath when they were sworn to the Friends of Truth—the Secret and Honorable Society of the Silent Inquest; they would smile at me, and welcome me with open arms, and as soon as I was within reach, they’d cut my heart out. They are men I’ve loved like brothers, but they are as far beyond my reach now as the moon or the sun.”
Jess frowned at him. “Surely you have someone you can trust….”
But he shook his head. “Trust runs downhill among the Friends. The Masters hold all of the trust in their hands and dispense it at will; the lowest of the solitars hold none of the trust, and act out of obedience and hope that someday they, too will be worthy of trust. Obedience earns a higher place, and more chance that a man will live to see the next dawn. But we swear loyalty to the truth above all, and that means that friends, family, everything comes after the truth and the orders of the Masters, and our superiors.”
“Have you ever killed anyone?”
He looked away from her and said evenly, “A long time ago I learned not to ask a question if I didn’t want to know the answer.”
; Jess rested a finger under his chin and turned his head so that he was looking into her eyes. “I’m asking. Have you ever killed anyone?”
“To become a member of the Friends of Truth, you have to kill someone.”
“Then the answer is yes.”
“The answer would have been yes anyway. I told you, I’m not a good man.”
“But you saved me.”
“Even bad men are capable of love.”
She turned away from him. She didn’t want to think that he loved her. She didn’t want to hurt him—and she didn’t want him to hurt her when he discovered that she wasn’t going to love him. She wondered how he defined love; if he had any idea of what love really was.
She said, “Love isn’t passion—isn’t the heat in your blood and the way your heart races when you see your beloved. Love is … sacrifice. Duty and honor. Being willing to give up your own life for the life of the one you love.”
She turned and found him smiling at her. Without a word he spread his arms to encompass the hovel in which they stood and the bleak world beyond the door.
She looked at him and felt her face grow hot. Maybe he did know what love was. But so did she.
“I love Wraith,” she said. “He gave me my life—you cannot understand this, you may not even believe it, but without him, I would never have known who I was, I would never have walked freely beneath an open sky, I would never have looked at the clouds and the sun, buildings and rivers and the sea, and known what any of them were. I owe him not just my life, but my soul. To him and Solander, really. I have a life-debt to the two of them that I can never, never repay. I have to try to save them.”
Patr frowned. “How can you owe someone your soul? That sounds like exaggeration, like words just for their dramatic effect.”
Jess swallowed hard, considered her options, and then told him. She told Patr about the Warrens, about magic and where it came from and how she fit into the picture, about Wraith and how he and Solander had found a way to take her away from the hell of her life and how they had given her a new life—one built on lies—and how she had fought to bring some truth and some beauty to the world in repayment for her freedom—but how, when it came right down to the bone of the thing, she did not have the coin to repay all she owed. Or hadn’t until Wraith and Solander fell into the hands of the Inquest. Now she could repay. Life for life, and soul for soul.
When she finished, Patr stood staring out the door for so long she thought perhaps he’d stopped listening to her—that somewhere along the way he’d grown bored with her story. Or that he was disgusted that he’d allowed himself to think he loved a Warrener.
Finally, though, he said, “I’ll take you back to Oel Artis. I’ll do what I can to help you get to Wraith and to Solander. We’ll probably die in the process, and you may very well end up losing your soul anyway—we have no guarantee that if they catch us, they won’t just throw us into the Warrens to use as fuel. But I understand honor, and I understand debts.” He sighed and leaned his head against the doorframe and stared up at the ceiling. “Gods-all, what a nightmare. I guess I’ll have to find us a reworked, untraceable aircar. It will take a day or two. I’ll do the best I can, but you have to understand, we may not be able to get there in time, no matter what I do.”
“I understand. Move the heavens if you must—just give me the chance. Please.”
He nodded. “The chance. You’ll have that. If we die for it, you can’t say I didn’t tell you that was what would happen. But I’ll do what I can.”
Solander paced from one end of his tiny holding cell to the other, frantic. He’d lost track of how long he’d been a prisoner. Days? A week? He had no true day, no true night. He existed in perpetual, maddening twilight, punctuated rarely by meals tossed at him—and by nothing else. The Inquest was taking no chances with him. He occupied a wizards’ holding cell—it was designed to be away from and shielded from any connections to the city’s magic streams. But the Masters of the Inquest had added an additional shield around him, so that any spell he drew from his own power that attacked the shield would rebound on him. Had he been willing to incur the rewhah of an offensive spell, he still would not have been able to attack.
He tried anyway, thinking that if he could break free he might find some way to free the rest of the Inquest’s captives, and in the ensuing pandemonium, make his way back to Wraith. But the Inquest had done its work too well. He hurt himself, drained away most of his energy, and when the fireworks died down, he was still a prisoner.
The only route left him was the one that led inward.
Exhausted, frantic, scared to death, he took it. He settled himself cross-legged on the narrow cot, pressed his hands together hard enough that he could feel the rhythm of his blood running through his fingertips, and closed his eyes. With his eyes closed tightly, he stared upward at the inside of his forehead, and breathed in and out as slowly as he could. The fear began to subside.
Solander had never been one for prayer. Had never seen much purpose in the gods, when men could become near-gods by the use of magic. But now he sat, captive, in a place where magic could offer him nothing, and he yearned for the comfort of a power beyond his own.
In darkness and silence, he tapped the last of his energy, and offered himself, not anonymously, as he would have offered payment for a spell cast—but personally. “I’m here,” he told the heavens. “I’m here, and I’m in trouble. I am alone.”
For a long, desperate moment, he shared his fear with the vastness of an uncaring universe.
Then power not his own flowed into him, and he felt the world fall away beneath him. I’m here, something—someone—whispered to his soul. You are not alone, nor have you ever been. You are part of a plan.
“I don’t want to die.”
No. Of course not. But you have done almost everything you came to do— you have achieved the objectives you set for yourself this lifetime. And, as you had planned, even your death will serve.
“I want to be part of a different plan. Please. I have so much left to do—I have people I love, and goals I’ve set for myself, and—”
You swore yourself to my service lifetimes ago, seeking to learn the pathway to godhood. Have trust in me—you are on your path. Do not let fear throw you astray.
“Fear isn’t the real problem. Dying at the hands of the Silent Inquest and the Dragon Council, and taking with me my friends and the other people who fought so long and so hard to free the Warreners and end the Dragon misuse of magic—that’s the problem.”
I’ve already told you that you’ve achieved almost all that you have come to do, and that in dying you will finish your chosen task. That you cannot hear what I have to say and find comfort in it comes from fear.
“I don’t know you.”
I am Vodor Imrish.
“That means nothing to me. Are you a god?”
I am as much a god as any soul can be—all souls have the potential of godhood, which is the power of creation. And it means nothing to you because at the moment you are bound in the forgetful flesh. You will soon be free, and then you will remember.
“This isn’t quite the comforting experience I’d imagined it might be,” Solander said.
Do you want comfort, or do you want truth?
“At the moment I want out of here. You’re a god. You say you’re my friend. Can you get me out of here?”
You can call on me in your moment of need.
Solander felt the wall at his back and the thin cot beneath him, smelled the stuffy, still air of his magic-bounded cell, and fought off the urge to scream. “This is a moment of need. This is a big moment of need. I’m calling on you now.”
To do what, Solander, my friend?
“To get me out of here? To open the doors, blow down the walls, free me, free the Inquest’s other captives, free Wraith….”
Wraith is as much my servant, my associate, and my apprentice as you are. He, too, moves along the path he chose before he came to this life. H
is path now diverges from yours, Solander, but this is as you both decreed. Would you have me go against the path you chose for yourself? Would you have me undo in an instant the work of a lifetime?
“Yes,” Solander said. “Yes. I wanted to stop the Dragons from burning souls for fuel, but I don’t want to be a martyr to them. My death now will solve nothing. Nothing! I haven’t trained anyone in the new system of magic. I haven’t had the chance to—”
You have done what you came to do. And when you need me—when you truly need me—I will be with you. You will find godhood in your own time and on your own path—but be careful that you remember: Each mortal begins and ends the work of a lifetime in that lifetime. When the time comes to let go, you must resist the temptation to impose your will on the future. The future is for your soul—not for Solander, who is your shape and passion of the moment, but for the part of you that has no name, nor needs one.
“I’m not done here.”
You are near a revelation. Very soon, you will have the chance to find it, and with it, your godhood. A door will open for you, and you will either pass through it or not. Fail to go through that door, and you will delay your ascension for a lifetime, or a hundred lifetimes…or forever.
“There’s only one door I want to go through right now,” Solander muttered.
And so you shall.
And the god who called himself Vodor Imrish was gone.
In the next instant, rough hands grabbed Solander and bound his wrists before him with a spell so heavy it must have cost the souls of a hundred men to cast it. He opened his eyes to find the executioners before him.
“Time,” one of them said.
