Vincalis the Agitator (9 page)

Solander greeted Wraith and Jess as cousins whom he had met and was expecting, with an enthusiasm greater than he usually
displayed, and the old patriarch, who knew Solander as the son of a major Dragon of the Council, gave their papers a polite,
perfunctory glance and filed them, giving them not another moment’s thought.

We shed lives the way snakes shed skins, Wraith thought, remembering the nest of snakes he’d discovered in one of his early
hiding places. We peel away old people, and emerge with new ones. New names. New faces.

He stood just inside the door, a heavier boy now, though still thin, with his dark hair neatly cropped and the beginnings
of a fashionable braid down his back. He had a new name—Gellas Tomersin—a good story about a family far away who cared about
him, a friend who had been born into freedom and who knew the joys of comfort and the pleasures of wealth and security. He
had a chance to live a wonderful life.

Why should we ever go back and pick up those dead skins? he wondered. When we’re free of them, can’t we simply put them behind
us and forget they ever existed? Can’t we simply be happy and beautiful in our new skins?

He’d thought he wanted to free the Warreners. But now, standing at the beginning of his new life, he discovered that more
than anything, he wanted to be sure that he stayed free himself.

Rone Artis held the paper in front of him and sighed. “Ten years of research, and all we have to show for our work is … well,
simply more of the same.”

His assistant shrugged. “Everyone has followed every lead. Just because we can’t find a way to pump enough magic out of the
sun right now to keep the Empire running doesn’t mean that we’ll never find the key. The same with the sea, and with the world-heart.
Sometime soon, someone will figure out how to make those power sources work. This is just a temporary measure.”

Rone laughed. “Do you really believe that?”

“Of course. The Empire would never accept this as a permanent solution.”

“Do you know how long this temporary solution has gone on so far?”

“Not long, certainly. Five years, perhaps. Or maybe … ten?”

Rone Artis, Master of Energy for the city of Oel Artis, smiled at her slowly. “In its current form, more than a thousand years.”

She paled and looked sick. “That can’t be.”

“It is. And before that, we were doing the same thing, but in a less organized fashion.”

“But … that’s not right.”

“No,” he agreed, and took out his official pen, and checked the tip on a plain piece of paper to make sure it was working.
“It isn’t right at all. But what are our options? Let Oel Artis Travia fall into the Belows? Let the citizens starve and live
without light and heat? Let the seas crush Oel Maritias and the other undersea cities? Give up flight? Give up magic?”

“Well … no … not that.”

He nodded. “No. Not that. We maintain a magnificent civilization, but men pay a price for civilization. We do the best we
can. Sometimes our best is …” He slowly signed his name across the bottom of the paper that permitted the Research Department
of the Dragons to take an additional five hundred units a month from the Warrens for energy experimentation. “Sometimes our
best is very, very bad.”

Master Gellas

I stood with one foot in three worlds—which is one foot too many. The Warreners, the stolti, and the Kaan all owned a piece
of me: I loved the beauty, the grace, and the luxury of the stolti world, which I knew to be fed by unthinkable evil; I could
see the impracticality of the Kaan world, which worked well enough for a few people, but which would leave Matrin a stinking
ruin were it the only option; and my heart cried out for the Warreners, dying body and soul for a life they could never experience,
while remembering that the price of the Warreners’ freedom would be the lives of innocents.

I knew the costs and the benefits, had discovered and listed for myself the favorables and the unfavorables. The only thing
I could not find was an answer.

V
INCALIS THE
A
GITATOR
T
HE
S
ECRET
T
EXTS
—O
F THE
F
ALCONS

I
n the last days of spring, when the sun in Oel Artis begins to roll across the land like an invading army and the heat turns
everything green to brown, the rich and powerful of the Aboves begin their annual migration to their city beneath the sea,
Oel Maritias.

In the spring of the year that Solander turned twenty, and that Wraith, still known by all but Solander, Jess, and Velyn as
Gellas, guessed that he must have turned nineteen or twenty, the household took itself down to the cool blue depths of the
summerhouse yet again, down to the world of perpetual twilight where the sun was merely a promise of light that lay, painted
and flat and dull, on the top of the blue-black liquid sky.

To celebrate their arrival, they and the other families who summered there held each year a First Week Festival, and for the
first time, both Wraith and Solander were deemed old enough to attend the adult celebration, instead of being kept with the
children.

“What do you suppose is the difference between the adult celebration and the children’s festival?” Wraith asked.

Solander, stretched out on his bed with his feet propped on the wall, said, “No one will ever really say. They serve distilled
wines and set up vision chambers, I know. And sometimes the adults go into the festival chambers and don’t come out again
until the end of the week. I know my parents used to leave me with the house staff when I was younger. I wouldn’t even see
them for days, and when they did come back, they looked tired.”

Wraith laughed. “That sounds promising.” He draped himself over one of Solander’s overstuffed chairs, head on one arm and
legs across the other, and sighed. “Jess is furious that we’re going and she can’t.”

Solander let his head hang off the side of the bed so that he was looking at Wraith upside down. “I’d take her with me if
I could. I wish she would go places with me.”

“I wish she would, too. She’s about to drive me mad.”

“How can you not be in love with her?” Solander asked. Wraith guessed that his expression was meant to be mournful, but upside
down it wasn’t coming across. “She’s beautiful, she’s clever—”

“She’s moderately clever. She plays zith and metachord well enough not to offend, but she’d never be able to play for anyone
but us. She has no skill with numbers, is only moderately successful at getting off a spell correctly, can’t find her way
from one part of Oel Artis to another without getting lost, and is useless at history, science, and literature. She doesn’t
even like to read. Beyond that, she’s bothersome and domineering and vexing and always certain that she’s right and that she
knows best.”

“She adores you.”

“Mmmm. I’m glad to have her for a friend, but I truly wish she adored you. Every time she sees me talking to a girl, her eyes
go all daggers at me.”

Solander flopped over and rested his chin on his hands. “We’ll get back to research after the festival.”

Wraith said, “You only have another two months before you have to present your research before the Board of Advisors, and
you still don’t have anything.”

“I have a lot. It’s all work that I got as spin-offs from trying to figure out why you are the way you are, but if nothing
else, I can present that. I have a refinement for a spell’s energy transport mechanism that’s rather elegant, and a few applications
for the self-powered magic system that I’m developing—those are completely original. And I have my theory on you. I simply
don’t have any real-world proofs yet, and I can’t drag you in with me, for obvious reasons.”

“No, you can’t. I don’t want to be a caged exhibit, or a study case for the entire Division of Theoretical Magics.”

“Have you given thought to what you will be doing?”

“I’ve had offers from some of the covils. I scored so highly on history that the Ancients and Devoteds of the Fen Han Covil
have been at me to join them right after the festival. One of the literary covils offered me a seat, too.”

“Which one?”

“The one that thinks all of Premish’s work is excrement.”

“Oh. The Clickers.”

Wraith nodded. “But those are covils. They don’t … matter. And the fact that my roll of tutelage lists nothing but theoretical
magics makes anything worthwhile off limits.
No one
needs a stolti with theoretical but no practical magical skills. Which takes us back to you and what you’re doing.” Wraith
shrugged. “I would help you with more than the theory if I could.”

Solander nodded. “I know. But if you could, you would be just like everyone else. The fact that you can’t do any of the basic
prep work or
anything
magical is part of what makes you unique.”

Wraith considered the frightening truth of that for a while. His uniqueness was the only thing that had let him be a human
in the prison of the Warrens, that had given him a ticket out and allowed him to bring Jess with him, that had moved him into
the highest circles of Harsian society and had given him access to science, history, philosophy, magic— he knew the theories
well, even if his uniqueness prevented him from gaining any practical experience—literature, music, art, and government.

Why? Why had he been born different? It was the question he and Solander had spent the last five years trying to answer, without
success. But why did the Warrens exist in the first place? He once had a family somewhere in the Warrens. He might still have,
if they hadn’t been rounded up and put into trucks and hauled away; they might at that minute be sitting in a tiny, stinking
apartment, growing older and fatter, oblivious to their lives and yet chained to those appalling lives by the very food that
sustained them. If they still lived, his parents and brothers and sisters lived out their days in a prison and a hell. What
purpose did that hell and its inhabitants serve?

He’d spent years avoiding that question—until he began having nightmares.

In those dreams, a great golden bird of prey caught him up in its talons and carried him off, depositing him at last back
in the little basement where he and Jess—and, once, others—had hidden. On waking, he remembered the bird, and with a bit of
research, he’d identified it as a falcon. Gold-crested fish-falcon, to be specific, but since he’d never seen any other sort,
he was happy enough to think of it simply as a falcon. He would have been happier not to think of it at all, but it wouldn’t
leave him alone. When he slept, it haunted him with memories of the Warrens, and guilt and a vague uneasiness that there was
something that he was supposed to be doing.

So recently, on his own, he’d tried to locate the truth about the Warrens—to find any sort of information about the area and
its people in public records, to find some sort of history of how one section of society had been locked behind high walls
and drugged and then forgotten— but there were no true records of the Warrens available anywhere. None. Only the false reports
of riots and prostitution and crime rings and murders and rapes and mob rule, complete with recorded “live” images.

“When do you think your father is going to let you use his work-room?” Wraith asked.

Solander said, “Never. Why?”

“Never?”

“No. I don’t know of a Dragon anywhere who permits anyone in his workroom. Ever. When a Dragon dies, the spells he has that
shield it usually weaken enough that another Dragon can force his way through, but prior to that, the workshops are impregnable….”
He sat up and looked at Wraith.

“They wouldn’t be to me, would they?”

“If my father found you in his workroom, he would kill you. I mean—quite literally—he would kill you. No one is permitted
into a Dragon’s workroom. They keep all the government’s secret documents and defense-project plans and things like that in
there. I’ve overheard my father talking to other Dragons about what he’s working on and …” He shook his head vehemently. “If
you went in, you would be committing treason against the whole Empire of the Hars Ticlarim.”