Vincalis the Agitator Read online

  Who was going to overturn three-thousand-plus years of “this is the way we do things” for a system that might be morally superior but that was self-limiting and required individual sacrifice? No one, that was who.

  And what was going to happen when he took this system before the Council of Dragons and said, Hey, look, people, I just found a better way to do things, and now we can free all the Warreners and shut down all the Warrens and close down all the power stations. We won’t be able to do half the things we can do right now, but …?

  He could envision several outcomes to his revelation of new laws of magic—and none of them were good. The Dragons could simply ridicule him and refuse to review his work. That happened sometimes with promising theories that offered challenges to current and in-favor theories. Or they might remove him from the Dragons. Or they might accuse him of treason and exile him from the Empire.

  He couldn’t envision a single situation in which they would look at what he had done and say, Solander, great work! This is what we’ve been waiting three thousand years for someone to discover.

  Solander turned to Borlen and said, “You know, I think the two of us need to take off for the rest of the day. Go get a drink, develop a testing schedule that we can carry out over the next few days, and just talk.”

  Borlen wasn’t smiling. He’d caught something in Solander’s tone, and suddenly he looked nervous. He nodded slowly. “I’m good for a beer. I even know a nice quiet bar with big tables where we can spread out our work and no one will bother us.”

  Solander started rolling up the sheets with the formulas and equations and theories on them. “Excellent. I’m buying. We can get a good night’s sleep and get in here early tomorrow and hit this hard. But I want to make sure we’ve covered all the safeguards before we do any live testing—and I want to triple-check the equipment. If it’s just a calibration error, I don’t want to embarrass myself in front of the Dragons, spouting off about finding some whole new law of magic.”

  Borlen said, “Right, then. Let’s get that beer.”

  They left the workroom, and as he always did, Solander sealed it. He told himself that he had to make it look like he planned to come back in the morning. He had to do everything the same as he did every day when he left. Borlen walked beside him, still looking a bit nervous. They waved to a couple of colleagues who worked with their doors opened. One called, “Knocking off early, you slackard?” and Solander managed to laugh. “Beer calleth, and methinks I must listen.” He shrugged and added, “We have a huge workload tomorrow. We want to be rested before we start doing live testing.”

  The colleague grinned and waved him on. “The beer would be good enough reason for me. See you tomorrow.”

  At the access gate, the young wizard who did the workroom monitoring said, “Got something big today, eh, Master Solander?”

  Solander said, “I’d like to think so. But there’s always a chance that I didn’t calibrate my instruments correctly—and if that’s the case, I have another big nothing. Tonight we’re double-checking equations so we don’t accidentally fry ourselves. Tomorrow we’re doing testing.”

  “Well, good luck to you, then. I won’t see you—I have a two-day off.”

  Solander smiled. One lucky break, then. He nodded to the intern and he and Borlen exited through the guard portal. He felt the slight buzz as the spell slid over his skin—but he hadn’t done anything wrong. Yet. He and Borlen exited safely.

  As soon as they were safely in the aircar and away from the Research Center, Solander told Borlen, “We aren’t going to get a beer.”

  “I didn’t think we were, Master Solander. Something is the matter, isn’t it?”

  “I think so. I think we’re in trouble. The question is, how much trouble are we in, and is it too late to get out of it?”

  “So where are we going?”

  Solander, who had the controls, frowned. “I don’t know. We can’t go anyplace that the Dragons routinely monitor—which means that I can’t go home, and you can’t go home. We can’t go to any of the places we usually go.”

  The color drained from Borlen’s face. “We’re … we’re monitored?”

  “Certainly,” Solander said. “We are working on the most sensitive information in the Empire. The procedures we develop, in the hands of the wrong people, could overturn the current government, could destroy lives … could topple the Hars Ticlarim. Three thousand years of the most magnificent civilization ever to grace the planet threatened by a few men working in secret on a few projects.” Solander laughed softly. “There are probably no portions of your life that are not under constant outside scrutiny. The watchers for the Dragons of the Council have distance viewers with capabilities that exceed anything you or I might be able to get our hands on. They use secret spells, and there is one division of Research that is responsible for keeping those spells ahead of anything that anyone else can counter.”

  “Except maybe us,” Borlen whispered.

  Solander looked at him, and realization dawned. “Yes. Except maybe us. Gods-all, are we in trouble.”

  “You don’t think they’ll be happy with this new law you’ve discovered?”

  “I think if they find out we’ve actually got something real, they’ll have us killed. The more I think about this, and the more I consider what our work would mean to established magic, the more I think they wouldn’t be satisfied with sending us to the mines, or even into the Warrens. You and I and what we know represent a threat to them.”

  “We are them.”

  Solander shook his head. “We were them. And then I discovered something that they are not going to want to use, and are definitely not going to want anyone else to use, and you added a refinement to it that I could never even have imagined. You think the Empire uses the best magical paradigms? It doesn’t. It suppresses the best ones because they are so good it can’t counter them. What we are taught, what we are directed to develop, are techniques that are just good enough to accomplish what needs to be done without threatening the established seats of power. And we have just jumped way outside of our bounds.”

  Borlen leaned back in his seat and covered his face with his hands. “Why were you working on non-rewhah magic?”

  “I thought it was important. And I was thinking about it from a power-usage standpoint. I had never even considered military applications. But the first thing you came up with, after looking at my work for practically no time, was a military application. If you could use my theory to develop that, so could someone else.” He glanced over at Borlen, who even in the midst of this disaster took the time to look offended. “You’re brilliant, Borlen—but you aren’t the only brilliant research intern around.”

  They were down off the Aboves, cruising along the back streets of a district of the city that Solander did not know well. It was a pretty part of the city, he thought. A lot of trees, a lot of fountains, an old air to it that made him think of the First and Second Dynasties. Because the buildings were all of mages’ whitestone, they hadn’t aged—they might have been three thousand years old, or three. But they had ornaments on the archwork, and decorative, lacy spires far out of the current sleek architectural fashion.

  Wraith had mentioned putting a theater in one of the oldest districts of the city. Solander wondered if it could be anywhere close.

  He’d fallen out of touch with Wraith. They’d both gone their own ways—Wraith had fallen away from the Aboves and the people who inhabited it, and Solander had found most of his life sequestered not just in the Aboves, but in the few rooms of the Research Center that offered the equipment and space that he needed for his work. Once in a while Solander would go to one of Wraith’s plays and speak to him afterward, but Wraith seemed to have let go of his dream of freeing the Warreners from their prison. Truth be told, Solander hadn’t given it much thought, either.

  But Wraith would have an idea of what to do, Solander thought. Because Wraith had to constantly pretend to be someone he was not, he had nev
er lost that edge of wariness that kept him alive. He produced his plays, he made his money, he did whatever it was that he did in his spare time—but he had never made the mistake of thinking the Empire existed to serve him or help him. Wraith had always considered the Dragons of the Council and the Hars Ticlarim evil. He had never lost that image of them, and so he had never relaxed.

  He would be able to tell Solander what to do. Wraith would have some ideas for how Borlen and Solander could disguise the importance of what they’d discovered; or perhaps he might be able to suggest some method by which the two of them could safely disappear.

  Solander started actively looking for the theater. Wraith might not be there—probably wouldn’t, really. He had three theaters in the city and a number of other business interests now. But someone at the theater would know how to find him quickly, and that was the thing that mattered most to Solander at that moment.

  He saw a cluster of well-dressed women standing in front of a large building talking, and pulled the aircar to the curb. “Do any of you know where the playhouse is? The one where Gellas Tomersin presents the plays of Vincalis?”

  Several of them giggled, and one walked to the aircar. “I’ll take you and your friend there … for a price,” she said. She gave him a sultry smile, and Solander realized that he had chosen just the wrong group of women to query. “And I can give you two a wonderful experience on the way.”

  Borlen flushed pink all the way to the tips of his ears. Solander felt the collar of his tunic constricting around his neck. “I’ll … um, pay for the directions,” he said, “but I don’t … ah … we aren’t …”

  She laughed. “You really aren’t, are you? I thought you boys had come up with an interesting new line.”

  Solander shook his head, for the moment speechless.

  “You don’t need to pay me.” She smiled again, and this time it was a real smile, and rather pleasant. “Straight down this road, cross two intersections, turn left, it’s on the left. Easy to find.” She shrugged. “But the play they’re doing right now isn’t one of his best. It’s the new one. Girl of the Winter City. It felt kind of … I don’t know. Cynical. I think he’s sort of lost the heart that made his early work so good.”

  Solander thanked her and drove off, bemused. Whores as theater critics. He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. Wraith had been writing for everyone, and it seemed everyone had seen something of his at one time or another. His popularity was the reason the city could support three theaters that rotated his plays through them at regular intervals.

  Luercas returned home late, and found the servants scurrying around like panicked ants in an anthill just stirred by a stick.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “We can’t find the stolta,” one of the servants said. “She left this morning—she told the cook she would be gone briefly and gave a list of the meal items for the day. She did not tell Dorsea where she planned to go. And then she did not come back. The Payswi two-seater is missing. But none of her things are gone. We’ve heard nothing from her all day. And we have been scouring the house for a note, or a message, or anything that might tell us what happened to her. We fear she might have been … injured.” He averted his eyes from Luercas at that last word, and Luercas understood. The servants feared that he had somehow done away with his wife.

  Luercas nodded. He did not let his fury show; no matter what they might be thinking of him or what they might believe he was capable of, good servants were hard to come by, and some of these had been with his family for most of their lives. He valued them. He said, “Do not worry about her. She is thoughtless and erratic, but I am sure she has come to no harm. She does things without considering the consequences or who she might inconvenience. She didn’t mention any plans to me today, but then, she rarely does what she should.” He waved a hand in dismissal. “Call off your search. I’ll take care of this personally. And … thank you, Otryn. I will not hold any of the staff responsible for my vowmate’s thoughtless behavior. Please pass that on to them for me.”

  Otryn nodded and faded out of the way.

  Luercas considered the beating he’d given her the night before. He’d outdone himself, really. He usually tried to keep most of the marks from showing—inflicting deep and lasting pain, but making sure she could not gain sympathy for it by showing her injuries, had a better effect than leaving cuts and bruises that might encourage the staff to pity or support her—but she had utterly incensed him and he had let his anger loose. He’d wanted to crush her.

  He stared down at the floor. Actually, most of the time he was beating her, he had wanted to kill her. And last night he’d come close to doing it. He took a slow breath and stared at his hands—at the scrapes on his knuckles that he’d left in place to remind himself of how close he’d come to doing something he wouldn’t be able to take back.

  He hated Velyn. He hated her tawdriness, her dreadful, embarrassing past, her fascination with the lower classes. How she, who had been born to the highest and the best that life had to offer, could have ever bedded the long list of chadri, mufere, and parvoi ground-grubbers— not to mention her horrifying tendency to take up with family members—was a source of both bewilderment and irritation to him. The only acceptable man he’d ever been able to find among her long list of conquests was Gellas Tomersin; and Luercas hated Gellas more than he hated the nonstolti.

  But for all Luercas’s hatred of her, he could not lay blame for his violence entirely on her.

  In the past years, he had been subject to terrible rages; he had allowed himself to be violent with Velyn, but he had felt an equal fury for the wizards with whom he worked, for the councilors on the Dragon Council who cowered in fear of taking progressive action, for complete strangers who inconvenienced him or did things he did not like.

  Luercas did not think that the rages came from him. While he had always had a short temper, he had never been subject to violent and even murderous impulses until he acquired the stolen body. Only a few days after he had finally been released from the horrible travesty of a body in which the accident had trapped him, he had fallen into a fit of blinding rage and broken the neck of one of the inept, stupid servants in the house of the healer whose guest he had been. That had been an unpleasant and expensive fiasco. And since then, those rages had only gotten worse and more frequent.

  Luercas believed his true body was trying to get him back into it, and that the lovely body he had stolen wanted to creep back to its rightful soul, and he lived in fear. He felt the tug of his true flesh pulling him toward the Warrens—toward the place where he had hidden the scarred monstrosity he had cast aside, and the soul he had wrongfully trapped in the prison he had escaped.

  At night sometimes he woke to find that he had sleepwalked toward the door, toward the Warrens. He dreaded the time when someone should come upon him and catch him at this sleepwalking, and wonder what demons might possess his soul that could drive him to such disturbed behavior. He promised himself that he would never inhabit another body that did not truly belong to him. He could not think of any manner in which he might acquire a body that could truly belong to his soul—he would never take back that scaly, horned nightmare in which he had been encased for so long. But …

  But he frightened himself. He seemed less and less in control of himself. The body wanted to murder, strangle, torture, destroy. The body. He was its victim, he decided. And it used him, and would continue to use him, until he got rid of it. That was it. He had acquired an evil body. He needed to find a way to get one that had no taint of evil in it.

  He closed his eyes, and leaned against the cool whitestone wall, and listened to the soothing hum of the house, the soft chiming that all such houses made when the wind played over them. He was stolti. He had power and wealth and freedom; he had his native intelligence, his fine education; he had the strength of character to control both himself and the people around him. He had to accept the fact that he could not control Velyn, however. He’d spent
the last three years trying to convince himself that sooner or later she would learn to obey him and would understand that he was in charge. But she did not. She would not.

  So he needed to put her aside—but in a fashion that would not jeopardize his fortunes, that would make her clearly the party at fault. Since he did not wish to murder Velyn—well, since he did not wish to be punished for murdering Velyn, or to have to pay the massive fines and punitive damages he would have to pay were he to take that rash action—he would decide on some more palatable method of getting her out of his life.

  First thing in the morning, he would speak to an associate who knew useful people. One of those people would certainly be able to help him.

  Chapter 14

  Wraith wished he could have pawned Velyn off on one of his associates, but this part of his plan for helping her escape from Luercas he had to carry out himself. He had to be seen as the one who dispassionately brought her before the justice system of the Hars and asked that she be given justice. Since she had involved him in her unhappy situation, his willingness to follow legal precedent would be his only alibi when she disappeared. Why would he take her before the justices of the Grand Court if he intended to help her disappear?

  So he walked beside her into the House of the Landimyn’s Justice, and led her through the maze of broad, ornate old corridors to the Court of the Family. And there he presented her to an old man whom he had known since he was a boy in the Artis household—a man who now called him from time to time to ask for tickets, better seats, and special favors. Wraith called in the first of his debts.