Vincalis the Agitator

by Holly Lisle

  As liquid, she thought they might suffer for quite some time.

  And she was fine with that.

  In the ten nearest mainland cities, other members of the Department of Research placed their spell-birds by hand. They had no more difficulty than the Master of the department herself—and they, too, noticed that the Warrens were no longer silent places.

  The spell-birds flew on their own to farther destinations, and neatly delivered themselves into the hearts of their respective Warrens. The spells the rebels claimed to have cast kept out not a single official, and not a single spell-bird.

  All twenty-seven readied spell-birds reached their destinations—the biggest cities in the Empire, and the largest Warrens. The smaller Warrens would become liquid in the next day, or perhaps within two days. But, on land and undersea, the greatest Warrens, which supported the greatest cities, were the first and most essential targets. Their demise would be what broke the back of the resistance.

  In the moments before spell detonation, the Master of Research— now returned to the department core where she could remotely monitor the integrity of the shields that would keep the spell-birds from damaging people or territory beyond their targets, and where, too, she could keep an eye on rewhah levels—declared the shields for each of the target Warrens intact. She told the men handling remote switching for those spell-birds that had switches to stand down.

  “The birds will do what they’re supposed to do, and nothing more,” she said. “They’re all on target, and they’re all safe.”

  Her people watched the transmissions from mage-viewers placed at the closest of the Warrens—where nothing changed.

  Zider Rost, Master of Research, listened to her people start counting down the last few seconds of the time remaining until the spell-birds detonated, and she smiled. Her name would stand in history for all time: the woman who delivered peace and energy to the Empire and eliminated the threat of the rebels in one master stroke. She would probably become head of the Dragon Council in a few years, and Landimyn of the Hars in only a few more. Who else had contributed so much? In the grand history of the entire Empire of the Hars Ticlarim, the Jewel of Time, who had contributed as much as she?

  “Ten … nine … eight … seven … six …”

  Twenty-seven spell-birds, tossed around the globe of Matrin into the glittering hearts of the twenty-seven greatest cities of the Empire, fluttered their wings in the last second of their existence, as if they knew what was about to happen and would have fled, had they the capability to do so.

  The twenty-seven greatest cities of the Empire of the Hars Ticlarim, the Jewel of Time, the grandest and most glorious statement of the hand of man and the magic of gods ever known—or perhaps ever known within the written history of the Hars itself, but that is neither here nor there. History is all that humankind can hold and encompass and pin down, not all that is. History is neither truth nor completeness. It is simply the best story people can string together at the time, out of whatever facts and snippets they might have at hand.

  The twenty-seven greatest cities of the Empire of the Hars Ticlarim, homes of art and artists, music and sport, great lovers, great killers, governments on both the small and the large scale. And of those twenty-seven cities, which held between them eighty-one thousand years of accumulated history, the correct names of only five would survive the fall of the spell-birds to resurface a thousand years later.

  Twenty-seven spell-birds, each small enough for a child to pick it up, each lovely enough that, had it fallen where a child might find it, such a thing could have happened.

  The spell-artificers in the Department of Research had been most thorough in their casting of the spell-sets for the first twenty-seven birds. None were duds—all detonated as they had been designed to. With one small exception.

  The casting of spells can be compared to a form of martial art. A much smaller opponent with the correct focus and the correct leverage, who is in the right place at the right time, and with the right skills, can not only hold off, but utterly destroy a larger and more powerful opponent.

  The Master of the Department of Research had been correct when she surmised that the spells cast by the rebels—the Falcons—were comparatively weak. She was not correct, however, in assuming that the power-heavy Dragon spells would blast through them, as would have happened had they been other Dragon-cast, rewhah-laden spells. Though it was entirely defensive, rewhahless magic had every advantage over magic that had to deal with a powerful backlash.

  A shield cast using stolen energy—a Dragon-type shield—was a bubble of magic that surrounded the potential target. It had to be a bubble because the magic would do harm to anyone or anything it touched. But this meant that, if an attacker could penetrate the bubble, the target that lay beneath would find itself defenseless.

  Falcon shields didn’t work that way. They were drawn from clean magic—magic that could touch, could even penetrate, everything it was set to protect without doing any damage. The Falcon shields had no need to keep anyone out of the Warrens, because the shields penetrated and protected each object and each person within their sphere. Thus the Dragons carrying their spell-birds could enter freely. Their mere presence did not harm, so the shields did not expel them, or the quiescent spell-birds. Because of this, the Dragons thought no shields existed; after all, they only truly understood their own form of shield, and did not know they were not looking for thin, deadly bubbles that would fight their presence. It was an honest enough mistake, born of ignorance. It turned out, however, to be the single worst mistake made in the world of Matrin.

  For when the spell-birds came to life within each chosen Warren, the living energy of the shields rose up from underneath each spell-bird and pushed. Gently, gently—but with irrevocable, unstoppable firmness.

  The spell-birds seemed briefly to come to life. As their inner workings summoned the spells and set them in motion, and thus as the spell-birds became a danger, the Falcon shields moved them to a place where they would not pose a danger to Warrens or Warreners. The spell-birds rose into the air, wings fluttering, and soared in long, curving arcs—over Warren walls.

  Out beyond the shields intended to contain the spell-birds’ damage, out into the beautiful glittering white cities, the spellbirds toppled. They fell into cities beneath the sea. They landed outside the boundaries of the Warrens on each of Matrin’s continents, and on the island of Glavia that was the cradle of civilization, home to the mother city of the Empire, Oel Artis.

  A beautiful white glow radiated from each of the birds, but the glow could only be seen for an instant. Then the hard earth turned liquid and each spell-bird turned to liquid with it. This thick, crystal-clear fluid spread out and down, silently, absorbing and converting everything it touched into more of the same. Roads and buildings and people collapsed into each puddle, which became a pond, which became a lake. In perfect circles, the fluid expanded, devoured, expanded, always adding to the wave that forced the clear, viscous fluid not just downward, but outward. With each human devoured by the spell, the Dragon magic increased its strength and its speed.

  The force of the magic as it pushed outward lifted mounds—and then mountains—of earth and debris before it, piling ground and masonry and scrambling people upward and outward in a roiling, churning, screaming mass. As the mountains built along the outer circle, they dissolved into the liquid on the inner circle. The roar of heaving, sliding earth—the grinding of the bones of Matrin—and the cries of the people trying desperately to get to safety, signaled the start of the next phase of the disaster.

  The second phase of the nightmare spawned itself from the wash of the first. The rewhah birthed from the destruction of lives, the stealing and binding of flesh and bone, blood and will, and most of all soul— which was never meant to be bound by anything—built into storms than ran just behind the leading edges of the spreading, sprawling seas.

  If the energy of the spreading seas was invisible, the effects of the rewhah
could be seen by anyone. The rewhah storms rose like fiery clouds, upward in billowing, spiraling fury, outward with the crack of thunder and the flash of lightning, and they transformed all they touched. The cities in the air were no havens, nor were the aircars that floated above the ground, for the rewhah storms hit them, and tore through them, and left everyone within them twisted, transformed, transmuted … irrevocably Scarred. Those whom the rewhah storms did not devour and char into dust outright, they left monstrous. Anyone suspended above the maelstrom, thus changed, was not even then free—for the shields cast by the Falcons increased in intensity relative to the onslaught of the nightmare raging around them, and as they protected all those within the Warrens, they cut off all magical power to those outside the Warrens. The cities fell silent for an instant as every magical device ceased to function at once. So outward, in those portions of floating cities where the liquefaction spells had not yet hit, the screaming started as the cities dropped without grace to the ground below. And below, more screaming, as those who heard the whistling wind of the falling cities and looked up in time recognized the disaster that they could not escape.

  No one suffered long in the flesh, however, for the wizard-cast seas grew at a pace far faster than a man could run—faster even than most aircars could fly. Mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, innocent and guilty, pure and evil, all became fodder that fed the swelling seas, the blazing storms.

  From sea-birth to spell-stop, no spell-set ran for more than half of one hour. In that time, each expanded either to the predetermined maximum perimeter or to the point where it ran out of human life upon which to feed itself. But though each of the seas came to a shuddering, careening halt, nothing stopped the rewhah storms that the seas fed. Towering now up to the extreme edge of Matrin’s atmosphere, blazing like infernos, these monster storms blasted outward across the surface of the world, wreaking havoc. In places two of them would intersect, and at the point where they intersected the storm would die out. In places, the expanding circle would thin out, and so some patches of the planet were spared. One massive storm tore up to the western coast of Strithia, and the magic of the Strithians diverted it southward; it met storms coming up from the southeastern coast of Strithia, and the whole blazing nightmare devoured itself.

  Each of the greatest cities in the Empire of the Hars Ticlarim—as well as the Empire itself—died in that half-hour hell. Those cities and the surrounding areas had housed between them nearly three hundred fifty million free citizens. All but a few of those people, whether instantly dissolved into the mage-spawned seas, or first twisted by the rewhah and then tossed down into the crystalline depths, died within that first half hour.

  Beyond the circles of first-spell destruction, the paths of the rewhah changed or killed every living thing within twenty-five leagues of the edge of any soul-sea. Beyond that, the rewhah storms thinned and took erratic paths, so that some places were spared entirely from the devastation, while the storms twisted others into nightmares beyond recognition.

  More than a billion people died in the rewhah storms. And twice that many lived but had reason to wish they hadn’t.

  Even in the places spared from the touch of the rewhah storms, though, everything changed. Because of the massive and deadly rise of ambient magic, the Falcon shields in every Warren in Matrin shut the Warrens down tight. Dragon magic, which in the cities untouched by the spell-birds and the rewhah storms could have sustained those cities as they had always been, died suddenly and without warning. Cities built on air toppled, crushing everything that lay beneath them. Cities under the sea drowned, and with those undersea wonderlands, every free inhabitant. And even those places uncrushed and undrowned suffered, for all magical transportation, all magic-based water delivery and plumbing, all magic-augmented food services and farms—everything that depended on magic; in short, everything—stopped dead. In those parts of the world which lay in darkness, the sudden death of light felt absolute and terrifying. Everywhere, the abrupt cessation of industry, transportation, entertainment—civilization—held in its echoes the whispering death of the world as it had been.

  In the Warrens themselves, the situation was, in most cases, better, at least for a while. The Dragon shields worked in reverse, protecting the Warrens that were supposed to be the focus of all the Dragons’ destructive power. But those shields could not survive the universal shutdown of Dragon magic when the rewhah storms erupted, and they died. The Falcon spells protected the Warrens, but not the ground beneath them. So the mage-born seas burrowed under each Warren as well as encircling it, and those Warrens aboveground became in mere moments floating bubbles in the centers of hellish, outward-racing seas.

  The Warrens in undersea cities destroyed by spell-birds floated upward, their Falcon magic protecting them, holding them together. Those in undersea cities not destroyed, however, stayed trapped beneath the surface of the sea, their inhabitants now awake, foodless, with dwindling air supplies and the utter, awful darkness of their final grave the last thing any of them ever saw.

  Afterward, survivors whispered that half the world had died that day and that half had been changed. It was not so many, but the civilized peoples had forgotten how to live in hostile places, and of the many who survived the rewhah storms as true humans, only a few would live to see the end of the first year after the destruction of the Wizards’ War.

  Faregan left the meeting excited. He did not go to the observation of the Warrens’ destruction with the Dragons of the Council—he didn’t really care to watch what would, from the outside, be a lot of nothing. Instead he went home to his collection, to his pretty little girls and boys, some of whom he’d kept suspended in time for fifty years. He thought he would take them out and play with them while he waited for the news that the Warrens were no more.

  The blank space in the center of his collection mocked him; he still didn’t have Jess. He would never have Jess. But now no one else would have her, either. He felt … fulfilled, as if he had accomplished something both difficult and worthwhile. As if, in guaranteeing her destruction and the destruction of something that had been important to her, he’d won a long and difficult game.

  And such a game demanded a reward, he thought.

  Perhaps the destruction of his collection. He could start a new one afterward, and it would never be tainted by an empty space at the center.

  Yes. He would break all of them, one at a time or maybe in pairs— at least for the small, weak ones.

  He reached for sweet little Jherrie, who had been nine for nearly fifty years, whom he had healed of lethal wounds a hundred times, and whispered, “Today we finish our game, darling.”

  And then he heard a roar.

  He waved a hand and murmured, “Windows clear,” and his spell turned his walls to windows. In three directions he saw blue sky, and the perfection of the sea, and the Belows in the hazy distance, with a light scattering of clouds racing beneath him.

  In the fourth …

  He screamed at the pillar of fire that blocked out the earth and the sky, that exploded out from where he stood in all directions, that devoured the world. He had time only for that one scream and then the fire was upon him, and pain ate him and tore him and ripped him to pieces—deformed him and flung him to the ground even as the magic all around him died; and his toys, his dolls, his playthings, broke free from the prison in which he had held them. They fought toward him— but the rewhah that destroyed him destroyed them, too.

  Bad became worse, as all magic-driven power in Oel Artis Travia died. With a screech of ripping whitestone, the city toppled into the soul-sea beneath, and the soul-sea consumed it and everyone in it. To the last atom, to the last soul.

  Faregan became aware. Aware of who he was, of what he was, of his death, of the screaming horror of every other soul mingled with his. And in the instant that he became aware, the souls that had been his playthings for so long became aware of him.

  But now each of them was his equal in size, in strength.
And all of them together were more than his equal in rage.

  People create their own hells. Faregan would have a very long time to regret all the effort he had put into building his.

  Chapter 27

  Of Oel Artis, and of the glorious island Glavia, upon which the Jewel of Time had been set like a diamond in emerald, nothing remained. The circle that spun out from the heart of the island devoured it whole, and in its place left nothing but a pathetic Warren bobbing in the center of a sea of damned souls.

  Magic birthed the seas in half an hour, and magic sent the rewhah storms tearing across the surface of the world and twisting along the floor of the sea for half a day. Such a little slice of time, such an insignificant percentage when weighed against the life of the whole of the world of Matrin. Matrin was one world when it started, and someplace else entirely when it heaved to its dying close.

  In the shocked silence that followed the storms, twenty-seven seas of souls cried out to the gods for vengeance. But if the gods heard, they did not choose to answer. Or perhaps it was that they had worked so hard trying to save something beautiful of the world they had once loved, and their power was spent.

  Do gods ever tire?

  What had the gods been doing while their world and worshipers were run to ruin?

  In the remains of Cachrim, in Ynjarval, not far from where the storm from the west and the storms from the east smashed into each other to their mutual destruction, creatures, sprawled on the ground as if dead, began to wake and to move through the unscathed streets. Furred, heavy-bodied, with flexible ears and mobile faces, they did not look like accidents of magic. They had a strange beauty, a solid grace that had nothing of the human about it, but that did not lack for that.