Vincalis the Agitator (5 page)

Wraith sat in the basement, listening to Jess breathe. For a while he sat next to her, watching her curled on her little pile
of rags. In the next few days her life would change, and he couldn’t know whether he was taking her into a disaster or rescuing
her from hell. Trusting, she slept.

Wraith couldn’t sleep, though.

He moved to the top of the stairs and opened the door just a bit and stared up at the sky above, and at the dark spots that
blotted out some of the stars—blots that were the grand homes of the Aboves floating overhead. Solander waited up there at
that very moment.

Solander had said he thought he might be able to move them in as little as three days.

Wraith listened to the silence around him. The Warrens were always quiet at night—people went to bed soon after the sun set
and got up just as it rose—mindlessly obedient to the dictates of the gods, the lessons, the prayers, and the distribution
of the Way-fare.

He had created Jess and Smoke—had stolen them away from their worlds of prayers and lessons and Way-fare because he had been
lonely. A lost, lonely little boy, surrounded from the moment of his birth by people who could not see him—who fed him and
changed him by rote and dictates, but who did not understand when he cried, and did not respond to his pleas for someone to
play with him. Wraith was in his world but not a part of it, and he had discovered early that in his world, he could do almost
anything without reprimand, censure, or even notice. He could skip lessons, could skip prayers, could go out the doors after
dark—and contrary to the endless droning teachings, the gods never struck him down for his blasphemy.

But he could not get his mother to see him. Nor his brothers, nor his sisters. He went to his daily lessons because he could
think of nothing better to do—and when he was there, he began to notice children whose eyes wandered from the teacher-screen.
They did not speak to him when he spoke to them, but sometimes they looked his way for a moment— and for the first time since
his birth, he thought he might not have to spend his life alone.

So he’d led the children whose attention wandered away from lessons, only to find that they would not stay with him. They
fought him stubbornly, returning to the nearest homes and prayer-lights as soon as they could break away from him, and going
the next day to their lessons and the teacher-screen as if nothing had happened. They did not recognize him. They did not
seem to remember anything. But when he spoke to them, they sometimes briefly glanced his way.

A girl he’d called Shina had been his first success. She’d been closer to the surface all along than the rest of his classmates,
and when he spoke to her one day, she’d managed to make an actual sound. She had not made any words, but just the sound had
been so exciting to Wraith that he had wept. He pulled her to his little hideout, and this time he locked the door with both
of them inside. He’d stolen food from beyond the gates, for even then he suspected that the food was part of what was wrong
with everyone in the Warrens—that something about the Way-fare, the manna of the beneficent gods, held a deadly bite within
it.

He’d ventured out of the Warrens before, startled but unscathed by the flashing gate light, to find a wonderland beyond. He
kept in his hideout a little stash of foods he’d found or stolen—wonderful foods, with flavors and textures and colors—and
when his still-nameless captive stopped trying to get out the locked door, he’d shared with her.

It had been a hard night. She would sleep, and in her sleep rise and try to leave, and Wraith had worried that she would hurt
herself on the stairs or the crates. Finally he’d taken off his shirt and used it to tie her feet together.

When morning came, she was … herself. She looked around her— the first person in the Warrens that Wraith had ever seen do
that except for himself—and then looked right at him.

And her first words were the first words each of his subsequent rescues had asked, in one way or another. “Are you one of
the gods?”

He did not know what to say. He’d once thought he might be one of the gods. So he told her his name was Wraith—the Unseen
One. That seemed right to him. And he told her she was Shina. The Mother Goddess. He’d liked the name, and the image of lovely,
dark-eyed Shina (one of the few benevolent gods of the Warreners’ pantheon) speaking from the prayer-lights reminded Wraith
of the girl who sat before him.

“Am I a god, then?” she had asked. And because she had not been struck down by the gods for the heresy of not praying the
night prayers or going that morning to lessons, he told her that he thought she might be.

Three days later, never suspecting that the gate would do more than shine light on anyone who dared trespass it, he tried
to take her out to see the city beyond the Warrens’ walls. He’d been holding her hand when they started across, had been staring
into her eyes with a delight and a joy that he had not imagined possible in his pale, lonely existence. And in the moment
of crossing, the gates that could not touch him devoured her utterly. She did not have time to cry out. Did not have time
to blink. He was staring into her eyes, and then staring into nothing. Nothing remained of her except the rags she’d been
wearing.

Shina. He tried not to think of her, but every time he lost another friend, he found himself staring into her lovely brown
eyes in that single last instant they shared, and wondering what his life might have been like had she lived to share it with
him.

That had been long ago, with its brutal lesson not lost on Wraith. Never again had he let anyone try to cross the gate. Never
again had he tried to make one of his made friends into a true equal, a true partner.

Wraith, sitting in the doorway staring up at the sky, thought of the ones he’d rescued after. Red-haired, freckled Smoke.
A boy he’d named Trev, lost to guards perhaps a year ago. Jess. His own older brother—the first and last member of his true
family that he’d tried to save—who had won his way to awareness, had wept his thanks for the freedom of mind and body, and
then had died in wracking, horrible pain because he was too old to escape the poisons of the Way-fare.

Those who lived had kept the names Wraith gave them because those names were gifts. To have a name at all was a gift. To be
aware of names, to see the world, to do things by choice and understand that the choice existed—all gifts. Of all of them,
only Wraith had been born free. The rest of them had come to freedom through him, and they held him in a place of honor for
that.

But he had never let himself care for or love them the way he had cared for and loved Shina. They were his friends … but fragile
friends, held always at a slight remove, so that if he lost them—the way he had now lost Smoke, second-born of the free—he
would still be able to sleep at night, at least a little. Would still be able to rise to face the new day. Would still be
able to go on, sneaking out the gate, gathering food for his … companions? Associates? Pets?

Wraith leaned back against the doorframe and felt the movement of air against his cheek, and smelled the night smells of the
city, and wondered what mistake had created him free in this city-within-a-city of helpless slaves. Solander said that magic
couldn’t touch him. But why? Why was he different? Why had he been so long alone, so long hungry for simple acknowledgment
from another human being?

Wraith ran a finger over one of the pieces of fruit Solander had sent. He’d lost so many people. With each one he lost, he
lost another part of himself, because when he alone remembered the things that happened, it was as if they had not happened.
Only when he had someone to talk to and to remember with did he feel that he had really existed at all.

He took a bite of the fruit, marveling at its sweetness and the way it quenched both his thirst and his hunger at the same
time. To him it represented wealth—more than the grand houses of the Aboves, more than the streets built on air, that single
piece of fresh fruit, intact, unbruised, and free from maggots and flies, spoke of a life that he wanted to have, and wanted
to share. With Shina—the dark-haired, dark-eyed girl he still loved and still cried out for in his nightmares. It was the
best of the world he had wanted to give her. Of everything that he had fought for, of everyone he had tried to save, only
Jess remained—the youngest. The one who had shared the least with him. He would have traded her for any of the rest.

But he tried to be grateful that at least she survived, and that he did not go to his new life alone.

Solander sat in his room working on the distance viewing kit his father had brought for him from the research base in Benedicta,
when the doorman rang his room. Solander snapped his fingers to activate the speaking spell and said, “I’m here, Enry. What
do you need?”

“There’s a boy here for you,
Ris
Solander. He says his name is … er, Wraith. Were you expecting him?”

“He’s a friend of mine,” Solander said. “Bring him in, will you? I can’t get the pieces on this
dorfing
kit to go together, but I don’t want to leave it right now. I think I almost see where I’m going wrong.”

“Yes,
ris.
I’ll bring him straightaway.”

He must have taken Wraith by the long way, though, for Solander already had the lens fitted against the spell-projector and
was connecting them when Wraith finally tapped at his door.

Solander watched Wraith as the Warrener nodded polite thanks to Enry. Nothing the boy did would have told Solander that he
was from the lowest of the lower classes. A chadri like the merchant who imported silks and brought samples to the house would
duck his head to any stolti. A mufere like Enry kept his head down and averted his eyes unless spoken to directly, and never
spoke uninvited or about something not within the realm of his duty as houseman. A parvoi would have hidden himself from the
presence of a stolti. And Wraith was a Warrener, even lower—if not by much—than a parvoi. Considering that, Wraith’s complete
lack of awe or respect seemed to Solander astonishing, if fortunate. Just as well Solander had given the boy some of his own
clothing, though; the questions Wraith’s old clothes would have raised with the houseman might have found their way to Solander’s
father—and who needed that? Not Solander. He was simply grateful to have come through his father’s last test without making
an ass of himself again.

The houseman gave Wraith the same bow he would have given Solander and said, “
Ris
Wraith, when you need to leave you may call on me. I have greatly enjoyed our talk.” Wraith nodded politely and smiled at
Enry, and met his eye; the houseman was first to look away.

This pleased Solander. Wraith had none of the subservient characteristics of the lower classes. He acted exactly like the
highest of the stolti—like Solander or any of his cousins. When Solander brought Wraith and his friends into the house and
presented them to his father as relatives from someplace far away, Wraith would have to look Solander’s father in the eye—Solander’s
father, who made everyone nervous— lie about where he came from and who he was, and exhibit no fear of the great man. And
then Wraith would have to live that lie for gods-only-knew-how-many months or years. Maybe forever. And his friends would,
too.

Solander had a brief, niggling sense that perhaps this plan of his was not the best—that if he enlisted his father in it as
an ally, he might hope to at least gain some of the credit for the discovery of the magical rules that Wraith broke simply
by existing. Solander would still further his career, would still get an appointment into the Academy, would still be able
to become a researcher.

But he wouldn’t have the discovery under his name alone. He would be a minor footnote to the single greatest proof ever presented
that the Dragons’ view of the magical universe was incomplete, when what he wanted was to be that theory’s sole author. The
difference would be one of degree, but at fifteen he was sensitive to how great a degree that would be.

And his father might decide not to share at all. Rone might decide that the secrets to be found on Wraith’s person were far
too important to be entrusted to a child; he might classify Wraith “Secret—With Prejudice,” as he did anything that he thought
might be of real interest to his competitors, and if he did that, Solander wouldn’t even be able to find out what was happening.

Wraith might not like becoming a classified study object, either, Solander thought.

Wraith came over and looked at the equipment Solander was putting together and said, “That looks complicated. What is it going
to do?”

“It’s a distance viewer—one of the really good new models with focusable sound. My father told me he wouldn’t buy the completed
model for me because it was much more expensive and had more features than I could justify, but he told me that he would get
the kit for me if I’d do all the preliminary studies so that I could put it together when I got it. He tested me, too. When
I had the theory down, he got me the kit.”