Vincalis the Agitator Read online

  “That’s not a good thing to know,” Solander said softly.

  “It would be a wise thing to forget,” Wraith agreed. “And it would be wise, also, to stop silencing our conversation. I have a feeling you might not have much more time.”

  Solander did not turn his head, but looked out of the corner of one eye at the front entry. He caught the movement of robes—an upper-level Dragon, by the colors, one who would get his choice of tables.

  Solander dissolved the shield with a whisper and said, “And then she told me that she wanted to have a dozen children, and that was the end of that relationship. I could imagine fathering one. Maybe. But a dozen?”

  Wraith laughed. “I’ve managed to avoid romance, too.”

  “I don’t want to avoid romance,” Solander said. “But there aren’t very many women out there who are … who are Jess. You know?”

  Wraith smiled. “Only the one, I should think. She seems to be doing quite well. The last I heard, she’d bought out her partner and had gone on tour in Arim as manager for one of her orchestras.”

  Solander said, “Oh. Maybe I shouldn’t even mention this, but I’ve heard some strange things about Velyn lately. About her and Luercas, I mean. Things that … ah, drift up the stairs from the servants’ quarters, if you know what I mean.”

  Wraith looked down at his hands and sighed heavily. “She came to see me today,” he said.

  “Velyn? You jest.”

  “No. Luercas had beaten her. Badly. Tried to kill her. I took her to see a judge friend of mine, and she gave spelled testimony, and on the basis of it, my friend dissolved their contract with prejudice. Luercas is going to owe Velyn and her family major reparations. I suspect it will get … ugly.”

  “With the temper he has, I suspect you’re right.” Solander tried to figure out Wraith’s angle on all of this—Wraith still sat there staring at his hands as if they’d suddenly done something fascinating, like twin themselves. It wasn’t like Wraith to say anything without looking his listener in the eye, and Solander thought he kept his head down this time because he was hiding something. But what? The fact that he still had feelings for Velyn? Anyone who truly knew him knew he still loved her.

  “Considering your past history with her, I’m surprised you involved yourself.”

  “I didn’t have much choice,” Wraith said, looking up and straight into his eyes. He looked hurt, but not evasive. Well … maybe his hands really had been doing something interesting. “She was waiting for me in my office when I went in today. Rather like you, actually, except she looked like a rag trampled by a mob. I couldn’t just turn her away, in spite of the fact that I suspect Luercas will come looking for me.”

  “I wouldn’t want to have him after me,” Borlen said. “I’ve heard some terribly nasty things about him lately.”

  Wraith said, “I helped her, I paid for bodyguards and a room for her, and I sent her on her way. I don’t have a place for her in my life; I have no wish to have my heart broken again, and that seems to be what she’s best at. So I gave her the help I could.”

  Solander didn’t believe what he was hearing. “And that’s it? She comes to you, surely hoping that she can correct the mistake she made when she took vows with Luercas, and you give her a room and some protection and kick her out of your life?”

  “Yes. It seems to me to be the best thing I can do, for her and me.” Softly, he added, “Especially for me.”

  “And that’s why you were hiding your eyes. You feel guilty.” Solander leaned back in his padded chair and stared at his old friend. “And you should feel guilty. Good gods! If Jess came to me and asked me to take her back, I would in a second. I wouldn’t have to think about it. If you love someone—”

  Wraith held up a hand. “You didn’t want to discuss my politics, I don’t want to discuss my love life. Not even a little bit. She’s safe, she’s out of my life, and that’s the way I want it.”

  Solander shrugged. The three of them sat at the table, looking everywhere but at each other, until the silence grew agonizing. Finally, Solander said, “I suppose we should pay the bill and be on our way. Borlen and I have to check the work on our formulas before we go in tomorrow to present our findings. I’m not at all comfortable with what we have—I’m suspecting errors. But I got some strange readings on our equipment today, so I feel that I really must request observers.”

  Wraith nodded. “If you must be going, I understand. I’m heading back to the playhouse. We’ve been working long hours on a new production, and my set director, my score writer, my choreographer, and I have been staying at the theater nights to put all the pieces together. I haven’t been home in days.”

  “You’re headed back there?”

  “We aren’t even close to finishing our work.” Wraith raised a finger, and one of the waiters hurried over to see what he needed. “We’ll be leaving now.”

  “Yes, Master Gellas. The owner has instructed me to tell you that you and your friends were our guests tonight. I hope you will have a pleasant evening.”

  Wraith rose. “Please tell Daymin that I cannot permit him to pick up every check. Next time, I’ll expect the bill. And in the meantime, I’ll send him some good tickets to my newest work.”

  The waiter smiled and bowed. “I’ll tell him.”

  Jess had long given up listening to the wild rumors she heard about Wraith. He seemed to attract attention to himself the way high places attracted lightning; she’d learned not to put much faith in any of the wild tales people whispered in her ear about the eccentric Master Gellas. Yet something about this latest rumor set her teeth on edge, and sent little shudders of apprehension scurrying down her spine.

  She leaned against the park bench and stared out at the grassy glade; people walked arm in arm along the edge of an artificial lake, their heads dipping and bobbing as they talked, as if they were somehow bound to the swans that swam in the lake’s center. Her young assistant, Patr, paid no attention to her change in mood or her sudden cautious silence. In between bites of his steaming benjor, a long hard roll filled with cooked pickled cabbage, three types of spiced meat, and a half dozen melted cheeses, he continued his tale. “So then Buelin says that Gellas is supposed to have garnered this private army of his through his theaters, where he’s using magic to control the patrons’ minds and seduce them into his clutches. And his actors are supposed to be some sort of subhuman creatures who wear their costumes to hide their monstrous true natures.”

  “Ridiculous,” Jess said.

  “Isn’t it? But Buelin has heard several variations of the tale, and the main points that each version agree on are that he’s raising his own private army to overthrow the Empire, that he’s hiring outcasts or freaks of some sort as his actors, and that he’s controlling the minds of his audiences and making them do things they would not otherwise do.”

  Jess laughed, but it came out sounding rather strangled. “Why would people say such things? Gellas is a …a treasure of the Empire. I’ve heard he is to be given the Star of the Hars Ticlarim. He single-handedly revived interest in live theater—people actually go to watch the plays now, which I don’t believe they’d done for a hundred years. He’s brought forth something wonderful, and now there are a hundred playwrights working to emulate what his discovery of Vincalis has done—to create new, living forms of theater instead of just copying over and over the static form that served for centuries.”

  Around a huge bite of his meal, Patr laughed. “And there, I think, is your answer. Don’t you suppose the Masters of Literature—all those vile old covil-ossets who held the field all to themselves for centuries, and who dictated what was and what was not a play—are furious to find themselves shoved into a corner and relegated to a position of irrelevance? Don’t you think they resent being shown up? Being made fools of?” Patr took a seat on the bench where she rested her foot, and balanced the remains of his benjor on his knees while he tried to remove the stopper from the disposable flagon of beer he’d purchased
from the vendor. “If I were looking for creators of rumors, the jealous old Masters would be the first to whom I’d look.”

  Which would have been good advice, Jess thought, and something that would have allowed her to put Patr’s recitation of the rumors behind her as mere vengeful gossip—except that, last she had heard, Wraith did want to overthrow the government, or at least overthrow the way that it used magic; and he did hire outcasts as actors, even if they were fully human; and he did try to change the way his audiences looked at their world, even if he didn’t cheat by using magic. There was more truth to the rumor than she dared to discount; for all the trappings of hysteria and nonsense, someone had gotten the core of the story right.

  That suggested a traitor, to Jess.

  She watched the Arimese men and women who had come out to enjoy the unseasonably lovely day; she watched the swans. She tried to tell herself that Wraith would be fine, that rumors meant nothing, that his position as a beloved presenter of popular entertainment created by the most reclusive genius in the Empire would save him from anyone who would want to hurt him. A traitor, though, might know more about Wraith than his plans.

  Jess considered her schedule, which would keep her out of Oel Artis for another five months, touring Arim, Tartura, and Benedicta. Chances were good that these rumors would lead to nothing; if she returned to Oel Artis to talk with Wraith, she would be inconveniencing herself and her plans, and probably inconveniencing Wraith as well, and with nothing to show for it but a discussion of a story that both of them could easily dismiss as silliness.

  She walked away from the bench, down to the water’s edge. The delicate spires of the heart of the city of Granorett rose before her, reflecting in the lake like gold-tinged daggers. She had come on this tour to see the world; she’d spent so much of her time working that she had almost forgotten about the wonders that existed beyond Oel Artis. She’d thought nothing could compare to the grand old city with its magical Aboves and stunning, historic Belows. But she’d been wrong.

  Every single place she’d gone had offered her something wonderful, a new world, a new way of looking at herself and the people around her, new vistas, new customs, new languages. Music spoke to everyone, and she’d met people she would cherish for the rest of her life. If, at that moment, someone told her that she could never go back to Oel Artis, she would have shrugged and spread her hands in a gesture that encompassed the rest of Matrin. She’d seen almost nothing; she could not imagine what wonders awaited her on each breaking morn.

  If she went back to Oel Artis now, she would be walking away from … everything.

  Yet she owed Wraith her life. She owed Wraith her ability to look at Granorett and wonder at its beauty. Without him, she would have been a caged and insensate prisoner, living fuel without even the sanctity of a soul that she could call her own. How could anyone ever repay a debt that great?

  By going home, she thought. By making up some spurious excuse and returning to Oel Artis, and finding a reason to meet with Wraith alone for a few minutes, and passing him the information that he might need to start looking for a traitor within his own ranks. She owed him her soul—her chance at eternity in whatever form it might take. The vast and varied wonders of Matrin would wait for her return.

  A week, she thought. A week to return, create some business that would require her to sit down in conference with Wraith and pass him a note that he could then destroy, cover that meeting with a flurry of other, seemingly equally important meetings with other creative and business people, and then she could rejoin the Live Classics Orchestra. The orchestra, in a week, would have traveled to Bastime, in the southern Arimese Islands. She’d miss two cities, Winehall and Saviay. They would still be there when she was ready to revisit them—and when she did get the chance to tour them, she would do so with a clear conscience.

  Two weeks. Sixteen days. She owed that to Wraith, for giving her the world.

  A girl came into Wraith’s office without knocking at seven-and-forty by Dark, and said, “Ah. I thought this was the jakes. I must have taken a wrong turn out in the corridors.” She turned and left without another word, and Wraith looked after her for a moment, bemused. He had never seen her before, yet at some level she worked for him. She had given him the code phrase that stated that Velyn had been successfully kidnapped away from her boardinghouse and hidden with members of Wraith’s anti-magic underground. She had to be a member of that underground, and the fact that he had never seen her before and might never see her again vaguely disturbed him. It had grown past him— more people belonged now than he could know. They’d spread beyond Oel Artis to other Harsian cities, and no one person knew who they all were or where they all were. Not even him, though at the beginning he could have said with confidence that he knew every single person who had joined him, by name and face and even history.

  Perhaps this meant that the movement was a success, even though not a single Warrener had yet been freed. Undergrounders sabotaged magic-channeling installations; inserted messages and dimensionals that showed life in the Warrens and the horrible conditions of the captive sacrifices held prisoner there into public broadcasts; ran businesses that didn’t use magic or trade with people who did; and a hundred other things that were slowly, slowly reshaping little pieces of the Empire.

  Perhaps freedom for the Warreners would not happen in his lifetime, Wraith thought. Perhaps he had to resign himself to the fact that what he was doing was working, but with glacial slowness—and that maybe that was the best he could hope for.

  Souls were dying, though—being erased as completely as if they had never been, and not just from one lifetime, but from the whole span of eternity. That knowledge kept prodding him to find a way to do more, to bring the situation to a head. The Empire had to stop using human beings as fuel. He alone could move anywhere without fear of magical reprisal; that made him not just the best choice but the only choice to bring about change. When he grew too old, or when he died, who could carry on what he left undone?

  No one. No one else like him existed.

  So he could not let himself find comfort in the fact that people were becoming more aware. He only had one lifetime to accomplish his work, and far too much remained undone.

  He rested his head on his desk, using his forearms as a pillow.

  Why couldn’t he be ten men, or a thousand? Why did the weight of uncounted hundreds of thousands of souls rest on his shoulders alone? Why had the gods singled him out?

  His eyes drifted closed, and his last conscious thought was that if the gods wanted everything done immediately, they should have made more of him, or made him impervious to exhaustion.

  Chapter 15

  Velyn paced from one side of her tiny room to the other. Healed, fed, bathed, and wearing bizarre new clothes and with newly colored and cut hair, she didn’t look like the same woman who had gone to Wraith for help. She didn’t feel like the same woman, either. She’d thought he would help her—give her shelter in his home, protect her from Luercas, fight for her. Instead, he had passed her off to strangers, and those strangers had passed her off to other strangers who had pretended to kidnap her in order to remove any taint of liability for her vanishing from Wraith’s famous and oh-so-pure hands.

  He’d dumped her without even asking her how she felt about being dumped. Oh, he’d asked her how she felt about the Warreners, about the Empire’s use of magic, about Luercas and all he stood for, about her own patterns of magic use, about whether any of the things she’d professed to care about back when they had been together had truly mattered to her.

  She’d told him what he wanted to hear, because she’d thought all those questions meant he wanted to take her back. That he wanted her.

  She was a fool.

  But she was a fool with eyes and ears and a sharp mind, and she could see what she’d fallen into. This was some portion of Wraith’s underground; the movement he had dreamed about creating only those few years ago was now a reality, and one unsuspected by
the Masters of the Hars. Or, if it was suspected, at least its presence remained unproved.

  “Are you ready, Sister?” A young man had entered the door behind her without her noticing him. He stood there now, looking eager and trusting and full of idealism.

  She put a smile on her face and said, “I am. Where are we to go, and what are we to do?”

  “You’ll talk with the head Brother. He’ll tell you what you need to know to help you build a new life for yourself. You need never return to the people who hurt you, or to the ones who allowed you to be hurt.” He smiled broadly at her. “This is a good place, Sister. You’ll find much of comfort here.”

  She flexed her fingers, reveling in being able to move them completely and without pain for the first time in at least a year. “Comfort. Yes. I could do with comfort.”

  She stepped out of her cool, tiny room into a broad corridor lined on both sides with doors to dozens of identical rooms. The boy led her past people dressed in clothing of the same cut as hers—loose tunic with draped hood, fitted leggings, soft, ankle-high boots—but where her clothes were of palest green, theirs ranged from deep, vibrant ruby reds to earthy browns to jewel-tone blues to the green of the finest emeralds. All the clothes had the same cut, the same graceful draping—but she noticed that the colors tended to cluster together, with little knots of reds standing and talking in whispers, and deep greens dragging something down the hall together, and blues walking silently in the same direction, hoods up and heads lowered.

  The boy, dressed in the same pale green that she wore, moved out of the way of each of the others with a quick, deferential nod of his head. Velyn did not. Whatever these people were, they were not stolti—and stolti neither moved for nor bowed to anyone.

  Some of them looked at her in surprise—and each time the boy whispered, “Master Gellas’s friend.”

  And at that, comprehension flickered in their eyes and they gave her polite little smiles and went on their way. Almost as if they were humoring her.