Vincalis the Agitator (69 page)

“We go to join the god, who has summoned us,” Luercas told the head of the priests. “When our spirits have left our flesh,
you must clear our bodies away from this place. Burn them or bury them, whichever is more convenient to you—they have no importance,
and must not be permitted to become a source of disease for you or your priests.”

The head priest nodded. “Will the god summon us to his side someday?”

Luercas shrugged. “I cannot speak for the god. Perhaps. Perhaps you will serve until you are an old man—perhaps you will join
us with the god soon. But never question; if the god summons you, you will have no doubt in your mind that you have been called.
And if you are called, you must come immediately.”

“I serve with joy and reverence,” the priest told him. “We all do. Whatever the god may command of us, we will do.” He looked
somewhat askance at the number of people filing into the temple chamber that housed the Mirror of Souls. “All of these have
been called?”

Luercas said, “The god has need for servants in the beyond, as well as in this realm. We have been called to serve, and we
do not question. And neither should you.”

Chastened, the priest hung his head.

“Everyone who’s coming is here, I think,” Dafril whispered in Luercas’s ear. “Or if not, we at least have enough to put together
a full government when we return.”

“Is the Mirror ready?”

“Waiting only the final button combination.”

Luercas felt an edge of dread. They knew the Mirror would take them in and hold them, but had only the promise of untried
numbers and equations that it would release them when the time came. So many things remained untested. But the faction of
Dragons in power was about to make itself hideously, hellishly unpopular. He and his people could wait no longer. They could
not afford to be associated with the debacle of wizard war and wizard resistance that was about to ensue. He guessed that
in five years, much of the Empire would be a shambles, and would be ripe for the arrival of heroes who could set things right—but
if things became entrenched, ten years could pass.

“The priests must guard the gates of the temple now,” Luercas said. “You are sworn upon threat of death never to touch the
receptacle of the god; swear each of your priests to this same oath, or surely the god who summons us now will destroy you
totally.”

The priests were bound to the site by magic. And their fervor would bring new acolytes—new men and women who wished to serve
a living, present god. Luercas had to trust. In this moment, he had to have faith: that the thing would work as he planned,
that one day he would have a body that truly belonged to him and only him, and that he would stand at the head of his own
Empire.

The priests left, closing the doors behind them. They would return later and remove the bodies. He shuddered a little, thinking
of leaving his flesh behind in a cooling heap on the floor. Nevertheless, he acted for the future.

“Ready,” he said. “As ranking Dragon, I will operate the Mirror and pass through last.”

Dafril said, “It’s set to take us all at once. With our concern for time, I thought we did not dare a slower course of action.”

Luercas felt ill. “Reset it, then.”

“We would have to power it completely down and bring it back up again, and then put in the new commands—that alone will take
nearly an hour. And the process of moving people through individually will take more than a minute apiece.”

Luercas backed away. He could still flee. He could change his mind—and those who stayed behind would know his shame. But what
would that matter if, once they were inside the Mirror of Souls and he alone remained outside, he destroyed the mechanism?
They would never be able to tell anyone of his cowardice, or his treachery.

But if he didn’t go, he would lose his chance to be Master of the Empire. And that was not a chance he would throw away lightly.

Luercas stood before the Mirror of Souls. It was a thing of tremendous beauty—a column of glowing blue energy surrounded by
a tripod of the purest cithmerium, the best of all metals for magic work. The energy flowed upward into a basin of six curved
cithmerium petals, and swirled smoothly within the basin. Carved gemstone buttons, their meanings carefully disguised by the
use of wizard glyphs, looked more part of art than of function. The Mirror of Souls looked like a huge metal flower—half the
height of a man—but a metal flower alive and alight with power.

It was a thing of beauty, but, too, a thing of terror. Of death now, and death to feed its power, and death in the future
to give those within it new life. If he used the Mirror, he would die. Die. How could he let himself embrace physical nonexistence,
even for the promise of future power? How? But how could he bypass potential ascent to virtual—or even actual—godhood? Survival
now? Greatness later?

He rested his fingers on the buttons that would transport everyone in the room into the realm of death. He looked into the
eyes of those around him, and saw his own fear reflected a hundredfold.

No warning, he thought. No good-byes—no see-you-on-the-othersides—no chances for second thoughts. He pressed the button, and
radiance red as arterial blood rose from the column and billowed from the central pool like bread risen beyond its pan, and
then the light embraced him and everyone with him.

He felt a sharp snap.

He felt a single moment of nightmarish pain, and fear that eclipsed anything he had ever experienced before, including taking
the
rewhah
from Rone Artis’s failed power spell.

He felt cold. With the horrible finality of death, darkness descended, and silence, and senselessness. If he could have, he
would have wept, but all the functions of body were gone. He hung, abandoned and alone, in the infinity of nothingness, and
he understood for the first time the absolute magnitude of the error he had made.

The spell-birds flew, or were flown, according to their nature. The first to land was the massive bird built for the Warren
of Oel Artis—delivered personally by the Master of Research herself, who carried it through the gates of the Warren, which
still permitted entrance to those with appropriate passes, and laid it in a stairwell out of clear view of the street. How
unfortunate if some guard, doing rounds, discovered it, guessed its nature, and tried to disarm it or remove it from the Warrens.
She checked its timer—the spell-set would activate at naught-and-one by Pale, the first minute of the first hour of new day.

Satisfied that the spell-bird would perform correctly and at the appropriate time, the Master of Research left the Warrens.

Liquid, she thought. They would all be liquid—and when they were liquid they would be no more trouble at all. She could hear
them moving around, crying out as if they were lost, as if they were in pain—making sounds within their buildings for the
first time. Animal noises. Horrible, sickening animal noises. Perhaps, then, the rebels had managed to free them from the
blessing of numbness in which they had lived their lives, into the pain of captivity in their flesh, in these Warrens, in
the vacant spaces of their lives. If so, they would not suffer long. Or at least they would not suffer in human form for long.

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,
rewhah
less 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.