Vincalis the Agitator Read online

  But Zider smiled grimly. “That wasn’t a disaster. That was a save. The only long-term repercussions we’ve had from that are the bad spot in the sea where the city used to be, and having to drag the city itself thirty miles to the south before we could resink it.”

  “A lot of people died.”

  “People are the least of your problems when magic goes bad.”

  They didn’t talk about Kirbin’s mother, Zider’s sister. She was a save, too, technically. Her strange choices after the accident had little to do with reality, and much to do with the paranoia that gripped her and refused to let go.

  Kirbin realized their discussion was at an end. “Would you have me do anything else, then, Aunt Zider?” he asked.

  Zider frowned. “Have someone get me radiuses and total mass data for all of the Warrens. I want to figure energy expenditures. We’ve configured for the rewhah from all of these spells to go through the Oel Artis Processing Center, but I think, as I consider safety, that we might be better off adding a hand-clasp pass and moving rewhah-handling to the area centers. We could have a real mess if we fail to adequately buffer all of the centers.”

  Kirbin said, “I’ll have the information to you as soon as someone can figure it. Do you have a tolerance range you’d like to specify for mass averages?”

  “I’d like exact measurements, but if we can’t get those in time, then I want the tightest tolerances possible, and in every instance we need to round our estimates up, not down.”

  “I’ll pass it on.”

  Patr kept watching the sky. He tried not to get caught at it, and so far he had managed to deflect the few comments with generalities about the weather and fear of coming thunderstorms, but with every minute that passed, he knew disaster was racing closer. He could sense the Inquest searching for him. His betrayal would not go unpunished, and his presence would betray the rest of these people. When the Inquestors came, they would come in low, he thought—and no one would have time to react. And the Inquestors would destroy the Gyrunalles and their pretty, painted wagons. All the warriors would die, and the women and the wild, unfettered children, and the wizards. And with them would die the Kaan, and the outcast citizens of the Empire, and the brethren of Resonance, and the newly minted Falcons, and that lunatic Wraith, and Patr himself. And Jess.

  So when Jess came pounding through the brush with her hair wild and her face pale as death, Patr’s heart jammed into his throat and he couldn’t breathe and couldn’t think. They’d come, and it was all over, and he hadn’t been able to save her.

  But she was babbling something about Wraith.

  Wraith.

  The din of panic in his ears died down a little, and he said, “Wait. Catch your breath. What about Wraith? Did he die?” That would only be partly bad news for Patr. He’d come to like Wraith, but the fact remained that Jess carried her unrequited love for him around her like a wall, and it wouldn’t be until the man was dead that she might see how much Patr loved her.

  “He … he … woke up.” She was crying, too, Patr realized. Tears dripped from the corners of her eyes and down the tip of her nose. Her face crumpled when she cried.

  Just his luck, then. “Well, if he’s alive and awake … that’s good news, Jess. So why are you crying? I’d think you would be happy.”

  She closed her eyes, took a long, shaky breath, and blotted her face on her sleeve. “I’m scared,” she said. “Wraith can’t remember writing anything from all of those notebooks. He can’t remember a single thing from the time he started writing them until he woke up today. He asked me if maybe he wasn’t sick—even delusional—when he wrote them. He’d just lost his best friend, Patr. And the woman he loved since the day he first went to the Aboves. Maybe he was out of his mind with grief.”

  Patr snorted. “Nonsense.” He held her shoulders, turned her until she was facing him, and waited until she looked into his eyes. “Think about this for a moment. He worked all day that whole month. And he wrote all night. He slept a little around dawn—but he never took a rest, he never quit. Remember?”

  “Of course I remember.”

  “He wore himself out. And the ordeal has blotted itself from his memory. The same thing happened to Inquestors who worked with me. They’d take a tough assignment, and they would get no sleep and little food for days on end, and when they finally had a chance to catch up, their bodies would nearly shut down. Just like Wraith’s did. And when they woke up, they never knew what had happened.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. It happened to so many people we had a name for it. We said they’d gone losters.”

  “Did it ever happen to you?”

  “No. But I had a friend in an upper level of the organization, and he kept me away from the worst assignments.”

  “So you don’t think Wraith was out of his mind when he wrote the words upon which everyone is basing their lives?”

  Patr sighed. “I wish I could say I thought he was. It would mean you and I could walk away from all of this; that we had no reason to stay and involve ourselves with the Falcons or Vodor Imrish or all of these plans against the Empire. We could go to Strithia or Ynjarval or Manarkas and find a place to hide from the Inquest, and maybe we could live long lives. Together. I’d love to have the chance to be happy with just you someplace far from here.” He brushed a stray tear from her cheek with his thumb and smiled sadly. “I’ve read what he wrote. I don’t understand any of the things in the books of prophecy, but I understood his battle plan well enough. It’s solid. It’s the only way I could imagine that the smallest of small forces could have a chance against the massed might of the most powerful organization of wizards in the world. In fact, I could never have imagined it. The wizards who came with us and the Gyrunalle wizards have both said the spells he wrote out not only work, but work precisely within the guidelines of Solander’s magic—the Falcon magic. According to everyone who knows about those things, the work is simply brilliant.”

  Jess nodded. “I’ve looked over the spells. I don’t have the training the wizards here have, but I’ve had enough theory to understand the basics of what Solander designed, and to understand that the way Wraith worked with Solander’s limitations was … amazing.”

  “Then why are you doubting?”

  Her trembling smile made him want to cry. Why couldn’t he have that smile turned on him, meant for him? “Because he was afraid … and his fear frightened me.”

  “What’s he doing now?”

  “Waiting for the two of us to get back. Probably dreading having consigned everyone to death with the things he wrote.”

  “Then let’s go back and tell him he’s fine. And that he didn’t do anything terrible.”

  “You’ll tell him about the … losters?”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  He wondered how long he could simultaneously admire Wraith and hope for his death—or even for his public removal from the world by the hand of the god Vodor Imrish—without the duality driving him mad.

  “There’s a problem,” a Research underling said to the associate in charge of his section. “When we implement the liquefaction spell, the damage radius limitation spell, the stop switch, the timing spell, and the guidance spell in one spell-set, rewhah-handling goes haywire. We can do any four and keep the rewhah under control, but in every instance the fifth spell sinks us like a reefed ship.”

  The associate read over the spell specifications the underling handed him and began marking out the equations, seeing what might cancel and balance, what might amplify, and what might simply set the whole thing wrong.

  He worked for a steady two hours, with an increasing itch between his shoulder blades and sweat trickling down his back. The spell-set was tricky. He found factors in the liquefaction spell that amplified factors in the guidance spell, that canceled portions of the damage radius spell, that wrecked the timing spell, and that caused the stop-switch spell to reverse. In each instance, talented members of his crew had gone in and done
very resourceful fixes. But the fixes clashed with each other, too. The problem was the liquefaction spell. It was the nastiest, dirtiest piece of work he’d ever touched, and rewhah-handling for it alone was going to be a nightmare. Yet it was the one portion of the whole mess that couldn’t be altered or removed entirely for cause. It had to stay.

  He found that if he removed the guidance spell, the other four spells and their fixes stayed stable. The equations meshed beautifully. In many cases, the birds could be hand-delivered if necessary, he thought. He would have to present that option to the Master of Research. In the rest of the cases, the alternatives that would still leave a working spell were removal of the damage radius control—and he wouldn’t even consider suggesting that one—or the stop switch.

  It made sense, he thought, that if the spell-birds were going to deliver themselves to Warrens in the remoter parts of the Empire, they wouldn’t have much need for stop switches. By the time they arrived at their destination and the liquefaction spell triggered, everyone would be quite certain that they fully intended to go through with the procedure.

  So he could easily leave the stop switches off of them.

  And of course the spell-birds that Dragons could hand-deliver would not need the guidance spells. So he could, with some relief, implement stop switches on those and leave the guidance spells off.

  He wondered how the Masters of the Dragon Council would feel about canceling the whole project, though. He’d never had a worse feeling about anything he’d worked on than he had looking at that horrid liquefaction spell. It was such an ugly piece of work, he felt guilty even belonging to the department where it had been created.

  He considered writing an anonymous message to the Council, telling them what he thought about the project. And then he came to his senses. People had disappeared for much less. He would keep his mouth shut, do his work, and pray that his requested transfer to the Research Department in his tiny hometown of Balgine came through soon.

  He took both the problem and his solution to his supervisor, two steps below the Master of the Department, who told him grimly that he could do whatever he had to do to make the damned things work, but that the Dragons were ready for their spell-birds immediately, and that he and his people were on notice until they were done—and that everyone could sleep in shifts on cots.

  The associate went back to tell his team, knowing the response he was going to get, and swore that when this crisis was past, he was going back to Balgine for good, whether he went there with a job or not.

  The Falcons presented their spell-set to Wraith on the same day that the Kaan and the yru-nalles finished the last of the aircar shells. At first, Wraith didn’t believe them when they told him they’d found a way to eliminate the addictive and deadly toxins from the Warreners’ bodies and package that spell with a buffer that would permit the Warreners to eat the Way-fare without it drugging them mindless. It wouldn’t be healthy food; it would still keep them immensely fat, because that was a physical, not magical, component of Way-fare. But until the Falcons found a way to get them safely through the gates and into the real world—and found a place to put them and a way to feed and clothe them once they were there—it would serve.

  The third and final spell in the spell-set was the one that was going to cause problems.

  Wraith looked it over and said, “I can see what you’ve done here, and why. The shield spell will block the Dragons from using any more energy of any sort from the Warrens, which will protect the Warreners’ lives and souls. But the second we put this into place anywhere in the Empire, the Dragons are going to descend on us like the last demons of Green Hell. If we save one Warren, we lose the rest, and probably all of ourselves in the process.”

  “The aircar shells are ready,” one of the Falcons said. “We’re planning to go to the Warrens individually and place the spell-sets, then travel straight to Oel Artis to disable the Dragons’ largest energy facility. Once that is done, we’ll be able to start getting the Warreners out of the Warrens.” He shrugged, as if the plan he described represented neither any great danger nor unreasonable risk. “With fortune and the hand of Vodor Imrish behind us, we’ll be able to dismantle the worst of the Empire’s evils in a day. And the rest will surely follow.”

  Wraith stared at them.

  “When you cut the power that fuels the Empire, have you considered what will happen?”

  The Falcons all looked at each other. “Of course. Energy in the Empire will stop flowing. Or else the Dragons’ spells will automatically divert to accessible power sources—which will default to the citizens of the Hars. But they’ll have to cut that fast enough—they wouldn’t dare run their cities on the blood and souls of their own people.”

  Wraith, still weak and sick, leaned against a wall and shook his head vehemently. He wished the room would stop spinning, and he wished that he had the compelling presence in person that he had in his writing. “That isn’t all that’s going to happen,” he said softly. “The floating cities are going to fall to the ground, killing everyone in them and everyone beneath them. The aircars will crash to the ground; the cities beneath the sea will either flood or the weight of the ocean will crush them the instant the magic dies.”

  “But no.” The young wizard Mesinna spoke up. She had been a colleague and sometime research partner of Solander’s, and had thrown in her lot with the Falcons after the Dragons chose her at random in their final collection of “traitors against the Empire.” She’d lost her taste for Dragon magic and Dragon ethics—such as they were—on the killing field, with her hands clamped to a post. “We won’t let harm come to the innocents. Didn’t you see the power-down parameter we included in each of the spells?”

  Wraith had not. “Show me.”

  “Right here. Wait …” She thumbed through the sheaf of papers that represented the equations and spell-chants for the complete spell-set, and finally pointed to a cluster of lines on one of the many pages Wraith had skimmed. “You see—this part of the power-down increases the strength of our shield slowly from zero up to absolute. The Dragons will experience a gradual energy loss over a period of about a month. It will eventually become absolute, but in that length of time we will have been able to warn everyone of what is happening, and people will have time to evacuate from danger areas.”

  “Some of them won’t go,” Wraith said.

  She nodded. “Some people refuse to leave homes on the sides of volcanoes when lava starts erupting, too. And some won’t leave homes at the edge of the sea with a hurricane coming straight at them. We cannot save the stupid. We can tell them what is happening; with the information we give them, they’ll have to take responsibility for their own lives.”

  Wraith felt a little sick. The death toll from this was going to be bad, no matter how well the Falcons and their comrades got the message across. People wouldn’t believe until the last minute that the Dragons were not going to be able to save their homes. In the final stampedes, innocent idiots would die in droves. And truly stubborn fools who refused to believe would die in their homes—badly.

  The Empire’s soul-fed magic had to end, though. Even a god was willing to offer his assistance in ending this unimaginable evil. Wraith knew he and his people stood on the side of right. He just wondered what price the world would have to pay for the end of evil.

  It all might come to nothing, of course. If the words he’d written in Vincalis’s hand, channeling the words of Solander, were true, at the appointed hour—or should he think of it as the Appointed Hour?—Vodor Imrish would gather up each of the Falcons’ aircar-shaped boxes and transport them and everyone in them to the many Warrens around the world. In each aircar, the wizard and his team would deploy the spell-set, Vodor Imrish would take them to the next Warren on their route, and they would deploy their spell-set there. According to Wraith’s estimation, each Falcon and his associates would have to deploy five spell-sets before Vodor Imrish took them to Oel Artis for the final part of their plan. Some of the
spell-sets would have to go to Warrens in underwater cities. Some would have to go to cities across oceans, mountain ranges, and deserts. The whole process, including the concerted attack on the Oel Artis Energy Department Power Processing Center, was supposed to take a mere one hour.

  If Vodor Imrish never showed, it wouldn’t happen at all, because the aircar shells weren’t real aircars. They simply looked like them—and then only from a distance and when viewed by a noncritical eye.

  Wraith closed his eyes, feeling the room reeling around him. He could not stop what would happen. He could not change it. He had spent his life fighting for it, and now that the reality raced toward him with terrifying speed, he wondered if he’d been wrong. They were going to bring a great empire to its knees, and they had little to offer in recompense. He dreaded the hardship that would follow. He dreaded the world that he and his colleagues intended to create.

  And how it was out of his hands, and in the hands of a god.

  Perhaps Vodor Imrish would lose interest, he thought. Perhaps he would go someplace else, miss his appointment with destruction, get busy doing whatever it was that gods did for all of eternity. And Wraith could honestly say that he had tried. His conscience would be clear. And the beautiful, glittering white Empire of the Hars Ticlarim would go on as it had gone on for three thousand years.

  Maybe that would be the best outcome after all.

  And later by days and a week, beneath the painfully bright lights on the floor of the spell manufactory, the associate dragon from Research in charge of manufacturing the spell-birds stood before Addis Woodsing, Master of Energy, and said, “We have the final bird forms completed, and one working prototype for each of the self-delivering and hand-delivery models. We await only your approval of the specifications we’ve used to manufacture these; with your signature, we’ll begin installing the final spell-sets for the order.”