by Holly Lisle
Luercas pursed his lips. “I don’t have to like it. I’m not comfortable with the technology.”
“You’re proof that it works.”
Luercas shrugged. “You don’t know what it feels like from the inside. To feel another soul still tied to the body that ought to be yours. You don’t know the ghost rage, the nightmares, the compulsions … but if we do this, you will. And so will every one of the people we take with us.” He looked away from Dafril, picked up a cluster of grapes, and stared at them as if they held the answer. “When I’m alone, even now, I can feel the screaming.”
Dafril looked shaken. “Screaming? But the soul your body originally had is in the Warrens. It was a Warrener soul. It shouldn’t be feeling anything.”
Luercas said, “Perhaps it resents being burned a bit at a time. The Way-fare may numb the body and the mind, but I promise you it does not reach beyond physical space.”
Dafril stared at him, clearly horrified. “I wish you’d said something about this sooner.” He buried his head in his hands. “By the Obscure, Luercas, I had no idea you could still feel that damned soul.” He looked up, then stared off into space, thinking. “We’ll have to revise the design on the soul-keeper—the Mirror of Souls—a bit. We’ll add in a buffer spell. Something that will prevent any communication between the displaced soul and the body—or maybe just a suppressor. Keep the original souls in the bodies, but put them in tight cages.” He smiled, looking happier. “Don’t worry. It’s just a design problem. We’ll have it worked out by the time we need it.”
In darkness a sleek stolen aircar lifted above the unnatural stillness that pervaded Oel Artis. Because of the state of emergency declared by the Empire, alarms should have gone off from one end of the city to the other. City guards and Empire warriors should have scrambled to intercept the aircar, Masters should have received notification of the breach, Inquisitors should have readied their chambers to receive people who were undoubtedly traitors to all that the Empire held dear.
But none of these things happened. Instead, the aircar, carrying the three fugitives most wanted by the Dragon Council and the Silent Inquest moved silently and swiftly to the south and west, out over the ocean. Unseen. Unnoted.
The touch of a god is a powerful gift.
In the Red Water Kingdom, the initial madness had died down a bit. Early that day, twice as many people as lived in the Camp of the Red Water King had erupted out of a cloud-filled sky with a crack of thunder and fire that shattered the Bell of First Voice and scattered goats, women, and warriors alike.
Of all of the recent arrivals, Sunsta Go-Lightly-Overland was first to get her bearings. Sunsta was Gyrunalle-born; she’d left the Red Water Kingdom—a kingdom on wheels, but a kingdom nonetheless—to seek wealth and a future in the grand cities of the Empire of the Hars, and while disconcerted at finding herself so abruptly back home again, she felt that her mode of arrival would give her standing with the siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles that her Hars job as a census taker would never have conferred. She promptly announced that she and her companions had been transported in the hand of the god Vodor Imrish, who had claimed the lot of them as his messengers—and then gave her relatives and onetime neighbors the message that the god Vodor Imrish wanted his messengers treated well.
Were not the whole lot of them glowing like small suns from the moment they arrived, and had the Bell of First Voice not shattered—a clear sign of divine intervention—people might have been more skeptical. The True People had their own wizards, though they held kings in much higher regard. Gods, though, still mattered in places like Three Spears, and though no one had heard of Vodor Imrish, the majority were willing to give him a fair hearing—and were, at least for the moment, willing to consider as a sign of favor the fact that the god chose their kingdom for this visitation instead of a rival kingdom.
The warriors, the women, the wizards, and even the king pitched in, putting out extra hammocks, sacrificing garden crops and goats to extra dinners, and taking the newcomers into their wagons and the circle of their trust as if they were all as much family as Sunsta.
She felt good about that. These were her people, and for all their terrible reputation among those who did not know them, they had made a good showing for themselves. They had been hospitable, charming, and— at least so far—they hadn’t declared undying hatred or war on anyone.
Sunsta at last fell exhausted into the hammock in which she and several sisters had spent many a childhood night. She was home. And alive. Good things, these. The lapping of the waves on the beach in the bay just below the place where the clan had stopped its wagons for the month, and the steady roll of the surf out along the point, soothed her. The singing of the nightchukkar, low and melodious, made her for a few moments a seven-year-old again, and left her yearning for the bony knees and elbows and hushed confidences of her sisters, now married and with wagons of their own, and children. The breeze kissed her, sweet with blooming redweed and childbud. Home, which she’d been sure earlier that day she would never see in this lifetime again; and family, glad to see her and willing not to ask too many questions; and the impossible, wonderful voice of the god that still hung in her head.
Wait. Your time to leave this world has not yet come. I have much for you to do.
She still had a future. She had the promise of a god on that.
Wraith brought the aircar down in the bay near the one village where lights still burned.
“Why here?” Jess asked.
Wraith said, “It’s where we’re supposed to be. I don’t know how I know. I just know.”
Patr muttered, “I hate that mystical stuff.”
“Nothing but clear-cut, sensible magic for you, right?” Jess asked. Wraith heard a hint of sharpness in her voice. “Which has been so good for all of us up until now.”
Wraith kept out of it. He floated the aircar up to the beach and grounded it, popped the nose door open, and got out. There was this to be said for packing light, he thought: Unpacking didn’t interfere with the hunt for dinner. Or, in this case, breakfast. Along the eastern edge of the bay, the first gray arrow of dawn cleaved sea from sky. Wraith thought it odd that the village still had lights burning at such an hour. In his experience from traveling with the theater troupes, the Gyrunalles started their days along with the sun or somewhat after it made some headway on its daily trek. He’d never heard of Gyrus who beat the sun out of bed.
Behind him, he heard Patr and Jess getting out of the aircar; Jess still sounded unhappy, while Patr merely sounded exhausted.
“What are we supposed to do here, Wraith?” Patr asked. “As a hiding place, it doesn’t seem too bad. I don’t know of any of the Inquest’s agents who have ever been posted to Three Spears, even for short-term duty. And it’s out of the Empire’s full-service area, which will inconvenience anyone pursuing us as much as it will inconvenience us.”
“Maybe we are just supposed to hide here,” Wraith said. “Vodor Imrish isn’t … speaking to me, precisely. I just have this …” He faltered to a stop. “I don’t have any words for it, really. It’s sort of a tug at my gut. When I’m headed the right way, doing the right thing, I can feel it. When I start to drift, I can feel that, too.”
“Couldn’t just ask him for a map and a schedule, eh?” Patr asked.
Wraith laughed.
“That’s not funny,” Jess said. “That’s disrespectful. You shouldn’t question the workings of a god that way, especially not the god that saved your life.”
Wraith looked at her. “Why not? As far I can tell, that’s the entire purpose of having a brain and free will—to ask questions, make decisions, then act on them. Why should gods be immune to our questions … or our opinions, for that matter? I have to agree with Patr. I wish we had a map and a schedule; I wouldn’t be standing here wondering if I’ve dragged the three of us across half an ocean out of idiocy and imagining that the queasiness in my gut was anything more than a mild case of food poisoning. And as for
Vodor Imrish saving our lives … fine. Yes. He saved our lives. But he didn’t save Solander, and he could have. He didn’t save Velyn, or any of the people who were with her. Maybe he didn’t even save the people who were with Sol, though it looked like he did. I think we have a right to question his actions.”
The steep, rocky beach provided enough obstacles that none of them could speak until they’d reached the top.
At the top of the rise, none of them could think of anything to say. Masses of the Kaan, and clusters of Wraith’s employees, and whole mobs of initiates of the Order of Resonance stood at the edge of the village, waiting in silence, staring back at them. Soft light radiated from the crowd, as if they were mage-lights set in a night garden to illuminate a path without distracting from the stars.
They were the lights Wraith had seen from the air, the lights that had guided him in. He’d known to look for lights. Those had been the only lights.
Wraith’s skin felt like ice. The touch of a god was a frightening thing—it had too much of caprice to its nature. He rejoiced to see his people, but the circumstances frightened him.
“It’s Gellas,” someone said. “He’s come!”
Then, like a small sea of light, they ran to him and embraced him, and cheered his survival and his escape from the hands of the Dragons and the Inquest. And his escape from death.
In the Dragon Council, the battle of words raged on. “We have to stop the rebels, agreed. But if we discontinue magic service along the trade routes, we cut our own throats! We won’t have food coming into the city, we won’t have trade goods, and we won’t have our import fuel from the Strithian borders.”
“We’re still getting slaves in from Strithia?”
“Eight percent of our new fuel supplies come from there,” the lucky survivor and new Master of Energy, Addis Woodsing, said. “Would you care to cut eight percent off our power production and see what happens?”
Grath Faregan, new Grand Master of the Inquest, who’d gone straight from his safe room to the meeting, sat upright, his back jammed uncomfortably against an edge of his seat. He’d called in the favor that the Dragon Council owed to the Inquest: He’d demanded a voting seat on the Council in exchange for the conspirators that the Inquest had delivered—and that the Council had lost. The Dragons resented bitterly keeping their end of the bargain, but previous demonstrations of the Inquest’s power—family members taken, then returned home in pieces, stolti fortunes overturned, stolti lives ruined—kept the councilors to their bargain.
When the Master of Energy fell silent, Zider Rost, the new Master of Research—who acquired her post by being the highest-ranking member of the Research Department not required to attend the executions, thus now the highest-ranking member of the department, period—stood and cleared her throat. She was a thin-faced woman, clearly uncomfortable with her abrupt lurch into power. “If we destroy the one thing the rebels all seem to want to save,” she said, “they’ll have nothing left with which to rally others to their cause. Their rebellion will die, and then we can round them up at our leisure.”
The Council’s Grand Master frowned. “What do you mean, destroy the one thing they want to save?”
“The Warrens—and everyone in them. If there are no more Warrens, the bastards have no grand cause.”
“If there are no more Warrens, we have no magic,” Woodsing of Energy pointed out.
“You haven’t been following recent research, have you?” Rost of Research leaned forward and placed her hands flat on the table. She looked now at every master in the room in turn. “We are mere months away from liquid power. We’ve finished preliminary testing; we’re in the rewhah-handling phase of spell development now. It’s as neat a spell-set as anything I’ve seen in my entire career. We got the idea …” She chuckled softly. “We got the idea from that play by Vincalis—the one with the mage who turned people into an elixir of youth. We thought an elixir of pure energy would be more useful, and we have the spell now that will do it. Will liquefy a human, and bind the complete energy from blood and bone, flesh and will, and best of all, the entire soul, in a liquid matrix that never evaporates, is insoluble with water or other liquids, and that maintains one hundred percent of its potency until it’s tapped.”
“Right now our energy from the Warrens is renewable,” Woodsing said. “The Warreners breed.”
“The Warreners breed problems,” the Master of Transport said.
The Master of Cities rose to his feet. “Agreed. We could certainly replace the Warrens and our breeding stock at a later date. Nothing could be simpler. But by eliminating both Warrens and Warreners now—by leaving in their place a pool of liquid fuel that bears no resemblance to people—we could show citizens what was behind the Warren walls, state that all we’ve ever had in there was fuel derived from the sun and the earth and the power of the sea….” He smiled, a happy, happy man. “Oh, this is lovely. We demonstrate once and for all that the traitors’ propaganda against the Empire was nothing but lies, we discredit the entire group of them—and then we hunt them down and kill them.”
“And if the rebels are using this new magic of theirs to hide in the Warrens, as seems likely—since you people cannot find a trace of them anywhere else?” Faregan asked.
“Then that’s a problem solved, isn’t it?” someone said under his breath.
“If we could create the right delivery device,” the Master of Defense said, leaning back in his chair, “we could time the … ah … the conversion of our fuel sources into liquid fuel to hit all at the same time. Air attacks, I’m thinking. And then we could say that the attacks came from the traitors, and that they attempted to destroy our fuel storage areas, but that we stopped them. Maybe we could destroy a couple of the islands off the east coast and say they were hiding there, but that we destroyed their bases and most of them at the same time. Thus, the Empire remains intact, the traitors have been stopped yet again, and justice will prevail. We start a search for the remaining traitors. We make it thorough. People will be turning in their own grandmothers to save themselves.”
The rest of the Masters smiled. Except for Faregan. He simply shook his head. “You’ve been pointing to the Warrens all these years as the source of rioting, violence, criminal activity so bad that you had to keep the perpetrators locked behind walls. Everyone in the Empire knows you have people in the Warrens. You can’t just suddenly pretend that every Warren in the Hars is a fuel storage area.”
The Master of Diplomacy sighed heavily. “We don’t need to pretend no one lives in the Warrens. We can offer a story much closer to the truth. We can claim that the members of the underground set the spells that destroyed the Warrens because not even they were crazy enough to actually want to have to deal with Warreners, and that the underground then tried to make it look like the Empire attacked.” He shrugged. “We can create all the evidence we need to prove our statements—and that will cost the underground any sympathy it might have. Or we can claim that the traitors went into hiding within the Warrens and that the Warreners were in league with them and ready to use criminal magic to break out. If we say that the Warreners were about to erupt into cities throughout the Empire, raping, murdering, robbing and pillaging, any measures we choose to keep the Warreners contained are going to receive the full support of the citizenry. They live in terror of the dangerous madmen we keep behind those walls. The citizens of the Empire wouldn’t dare protest.”
“That works for me,” Luercas said.
The other Masters nodded.
“How long,” the Master of Cities asked, “until we have the completed liquefaction spell?”
“We thought we could finish it within six months with full testing. If you need it before that,” the Master of Research said, “you’ll get it, but with the understanding that rewhah-handling might not be … perfect.”
The Masters looked at each other, and it was clear from the expressions on their faces that each of them was thinking of the disaster in the Gold Building arena.
Everyone knew what imperfect rewhah-handling could do.
“You have three months,” the Grand Master said. “Sooner, if you feel confident that the spell won’t go wrong.”
“But no later,” one of the other Masters—Faregan didn’t see which one—said.
Faregan weighed their reactions. They were now hot for the chase— hungry for the destruction of the Warrens, ready to hunt down the traitors and wage an all-out war against them. He would have to make sure that they could find the traitors when the time came. Faregan now owned by blood oath the finest network of spies in the Hars; he had no doubt that he would be able to locate the rebels and get the information to the Council. In fact, it would give him a way to get back in the Council’s good graces when he needed to. Come bearing an excellent gift, and hope that the bastards didn’t look too closely at what it would cost them. Faregan had already decided on the price. The Council was going to destroy Gellas, destroy Jethis … and it was going to destroy Jess, because if he couldn’t have her, he would know that he had ended her.
And they were going to do this no matter what else it cost.
He would see to it.
Chapter 23
Gods inspire. In times of hardship, gods offer comfort. Gods occasionally, in the direst of circumstances, intervene and save their followers—or those they would claim as followers.
But even the most attentive of gods is too distant and too intangible to carry out the everyday tasks of leadership. These tasks, therefore, fell to Wraith. And Wraith, in mourning for the best friend he had not been able to save, felt like he was drowning in anxious demands. The survivors needed permanent places to stay. They needed food. They needed encouragement and comfort. But most of all, they needed a vision, direction, words to stir them to action, to bind them into a single force, and to lead them forward.
