Vincalis the Agitator (12 page)

And the mass of councilors gasped. The vote was unanimous. Every single ball that fell from the black jar into the clear jar
was purple.

Shocked, Rone leaned back in his chair and stared at his fellow councilors, who—wide-eyed—were staring at each other.

The Grand Master looked at the balls. He rolled them from the clear jar into the voting groove carved into the table. Each
ball rolled to a numbered slot. The vote lay clear before everyone. Twenty-five votes in favor of adopting the measure. No
abstentions except for that of the Grand Master. No abstentions with prejudice. No nays.

“Please record the vote,” the Grand Master said, looking at the Master of Histories. The Master of Histories nodded and wrote
the vote into the meeting log.

“The vote has been recorded,” the Master of Histories said.

“Then record this, also. ‘Following the unanimous vote by the membership of the Council of Dragons in favor of the question
of the use of human souls as fuel to run the Empire, the 872nd Grand Master of the Council of Dragons submitted notice of
his resignation from the Grand Mastership, from the Council, and from the Dragons, and announced both his retirement and his
decision to emigrate from the Empire of the Hars Ticlarim to the outlands—effective immediately.” He looked around the table
at all of them, his eyes meeting each of theirs in turn, and when he looked into Rone’s eyes, Rone felt the Grand Master’s
disgust with him, his distaste for this heinous thing they had all done—and in that one moment, Rone doubted that expediency
was the best course to follow.

But the Grand Master picked up his belongings and said, “I am ashamed that this iniquitous thing has happened on my watch,”
and turned to Rone and said, “You were third after Chrissa, and I do not doubt that she meant her resignation as deeply and
as sincerely as I mean mine. Which makes you acting Grand Master for the rest of my term, and obviously leaves the wolves
in charge of the sheep; I hope this nightmare that you and all your fellows have enacted does not soon turn and devour you.”
And he left.

And with the old Grand Master gone, and Rone placed abruptly and solidly in the Chair, he realized that all of his doubts
about the rightness of his vote were erased. His conscience eased. He was among men and women who understood what was best
for the Empire of the Hars Ticlarim, and who would do what had to be done to lead it to new heights of greatness.

I
n the warm summer currents, festival globes spun the sea into rainbows, and the many-colored streamers brought forth fish
by the tens of thousands, so that they became like living stars dancing in the liquid sky.

Music swept out into the currents—the sweet strains of romantic ballads, the cheerful lilt of dance music, the martial strains
of the military bands that were the only public remnant of the Hars Ticlarim’s warrior past. Mingling in the water, the many
strains produced not discord but a magnificent upwelling, a wondrous and stirring symphony that summoned up visions of life
and hope and passion, and that seemed to struggle to define the frailty and yet the magic that was humanity.

Through the crystalline arcs of the corridors of the city, thousands thronged, dressed in finery created especially for this
day, this moment, this place. Women painted like the fish that swam just beyond their reach and men masked and jeweled like
the primitive gods of the sea that they represented moved toward the Polyphony Center for the opening ceremonies of the First
Week Festival.

And Jess, wearing on her left wrist the bracelet that attested that she was indeed eligible to attend the festival, a bracelet
given to her by the Artis cousin who had attended the year before and who swore she would never go again, moved in the throng
with those who truly had the right to pass beneath the golden arch. She wore a simple green sequined mask that covered her
eyes, a headpiece that trailed a delicate line of feathers from her forehead over the top of her head and down her back, and
a green one-piece suit covered with iridescent scales and meant to mimic body paint. No one spoke to her, but then, she realized
no one spoke to anyone else, either. How strange, this crowd that murmured not a syllable, not a whisper, nor cracked a joke,
nor spoke in anger at an elbow carelessly jabbed or toes clumsily trampled. In all her years since the Warrens, Jess could
not remember any people who moved with such silence.

But she remembered well people who moved so silently within the Warrens, and she tasted a sharp, bitter burst of fear on her
tongue as the tide of people moved her ever forward.

She had hoped to find Wraith and, disguised, to watch him. She did not want him to know that she had gone to the festival
to spy on him; she was ashamed of her jealousy, ashamed of her need for him, ashamed of the painful hunger that she felt but
hid because he never looked at her with anything but friendship and a kind of amused tolerance—and sometimes with regret.
She was ashamed—but she feared that at the festival he would meet someone who caught his fancy. That he would dance with some
woman who would see in him all the wonderful things Jess had seen in him first, and that Wraith, his head turned by a new
face, a clever turn of phrase, a mind that challenged him in a way he found attractive, would leave, never to return. She
did not know what she planned to do if she saw him dancing or talking with a stranger—but if she did not go she would be helpless
to do anything.

She had not anticipated the number of people who would be attending the festival, though. Children’s festivals were small
by comparison, though they had always felt quite large and busy to her—several hundred children gathered in one place, mostly
free of adult supervision, had seemed to her a veritable throng. But each house held its own separate festival for children.
There was only one for adults, and it was for every adult in the city, and from all appearances almost every adult in the
city was attending.

How, in this impossible mass of humanity, could she hope to find Wraith?

She became aware of the steady, soft chiming of a bell from somewhere ahead of her. Then she saw a lovely golden arch above
a doorway, and she realized that she neared her destination. As she moved toward the sound, the chiming became slightly louder,
but remained pleasant. Abruptly, the cluster of people in front of her each lifted one arm, and she saw a tiny flicker of
light dance around the bracelets that each wore on the wrists they presented to the arch. She did as she had seen them do,
and felt a faint tickling along her skin. And then she was beyond the arch.

The crowd thinned out. The Polyphony Center, layered like a hive and sprawling for half a dozen furlongs in all directions,
swallowed the people thronging in from the many corridors and channeled them in a hundred directions, and seemed always to
have room for more. She found a place along the railing of a balcony, and stopped and simply stared. Though she had been to
Polyphony, she had never entered the immense Hall of Triumphs, which was used only for the festival, and sometimes for the
affairs of state.

She felt like she was standing inside the radiant heart of a faceted gemstone. The distant walls of the center, clear and
seamless, spread before her the panorama of the illuminated sea, in which swam both the angels and the demons of the aquatic
universe. All of them, drawn by the twisting, dancing sheets of colored lights, arced and curvetted, sometimes hidden in darkness
only to be revealed again as the light spiraled around and caressed them. Hunter and hunted moved in weightless beauty—and
if that vast domed wall had been the only decoration for the festival, Jess would have thought it enough. But nearer, fountains
glittered and danced in the air, lit from within by fires of red or gold or green or silver or blue. The floor, worked in
a rich stone mosaic of undersea designs, seemed in scale with the space in which she found herself—but it made the people
moving across its lovely surface appear as inconsequential as insects. Perfumes of summer flowers, of meadows and leaves and
rushing streams, filled a breeze that brushed against her skin. Between the mosaicked lanes, glades of grass surrounded by
flowering trees held benches and tented pavilions, and formal gardens displayed flowers and shrubs and trees, and provided
privacy within their mazy twists and turns for couples and groups, and swimming pools let humans dive and float and play as
if they were denizens of the sea. She saw floating floors for dancing, and courts for eating, and things she could not identify.

“First time?” A hand brushed lightly across the little tail of feathers that she wore and settled on the bare skin of her
back. She turned and looked up. The masked man who looked down at her had a pleasant smile and very pale, silvery eyes.

“I feel … rather lost,” she said.

He nodded and smiled again, encouragingly.

“I’m … well, not really sure what I’m supposed to be doing here. This doesn’t look anything like the …” She felt her cheeks
heat up. “Like the children’s festivals I’ve been to.”

“Of course not. Adult activities would hardly be appropriate—or even enjoyable—for children. But …” He smiled again, broadly
this time, and said, “I had friends meeting me, but I remember how confused I was my first festival. Why don’t you let me
show you around a bit?”

“Is there any way to find someone specific?” she asked as they left the balcony and started down the spiraling ramp to the
main floor.

“Sometimes. If the person you’re looking for has not requested privacy, you can locate him or her by asking your bracelet.
Friends can find you in the same manner.”

“Really?” She was startled.

“Certainly. Your bracelet was spelled with information about you before it was sent to you. It
isn’t merely a bracelet, or your ticket to the event. It also tells anyone who cares to look that you are safe and well— and,
if you don’t mind being found, where to find you.”

Which meant that she was parading around as Sharawn Artis, a deception that was going to get her into real trouble if someone
came looking for the real Sharawn Artis.

“How do you keep people from finding you?”

The corner of her companion’s mouth twitched just a bit, and through his mask she could see his eyes narrow. “You simply tell
the bracelet, ‘Give me privacy.’ When you don’t want to be private anymore, you tell it, ‘Make me public.’ It will do what
you want. The instructions did come in the package,” he added.

“I don’t remember seeing them there.”

“All first-year attendees get them.”

Which explained it. Sharawn wouldn’t have been coming for her first year, but for her second. “I didn’t see them,” she murmured.

They reached the main floor, and her guide said, “So what would you like to do first? Dance? Have something to eat? Try out
one of the vision booths? Go to a park?”

“I don’t know. Aren’t you going to tell me your name?” she asked. To her right, a booth selling sparkling festival necklaces
and headdresses glittered at her so temptingly that she looked away from her guide for a moment. And then, to the left of
the path they’d taken, a pair of tadaka dancers returned from their break and they erupted into incredible, heel-pounding,
sword-swinging gyrations as a trio of decalyre players bowed out music that sounded to Jess like standing in the middle of
war itself.

Her guide hurried her forward, shaking his head. “Too loud to think,” he said, and aimed her away from the booths and demonstrations,
down a quieter path. “Did you read
any
of the information that came with your bracelet?”

“Nothing came in my package but the bracelet,” she said.

“They get sloppier every year.” He looked a bit exasperated. “Here are the rules, little feathered fish. You don’t ask names.
You don’t try to find out names. If you want to find your friends you can, but you cannot find out the identity of a stranger
unless the stranger gives it to you, or unless a crime is committed. Anonymity is a part of the joy of the festival. Here
you can be anyone, do anything within the bounds of law, experience pleasures forbidden elsewhere without the repercussions
of public censure, and for one week be free from consequences, free from burdens, free from everything except the thrill of
the moment. If you have fantasies, here you can act them out with one partner or a dozen; anything you have ever dreamed you
can make real for this small span of days. Anything you want, here you can have.”

Jess looked at the stranger, startled. She had fantasies of taking vows with Wraith someday, of becoming a brilliant, acclaimed
metachord player for one of the symphonic interpretation packagers, of having a grand house in Oel Artis Travia that she could
call her own, of having children … but somehow those did not sound like the sort of fantasies this man was talking about.

Then they reached the end of the narrow path they’d been following, and her guide gave her a gentle push to the left, through
a pretty gate of shimmering magical vines and ruby flowers, and into a writhing cluster of naked and half-naked bodies that
made her gorge rise. Men and women, men and men, women and women, in pairs, in clusters—her hands knotted into fists and she
twisted away from the hand her guide rested on her bare back.

She had envisioned a grand showplace for the arts and sciences, a refined and magnificent display of all the highest and best
of human achievement. After all, this was … And instead she was entering into a parade of magic-drunk debauchery. Magic-drunk
debauchery that her guide—who, from the lines at the corners of his mouth and the coarseness of the skin on the back of his
hands, was old enough to have fathered her
and
a whole raft of older siblings—apparently intended to partake in it with her.

She wanted to scream. She wanted to run. But more than anything, she wanted to find Wraith.

“I think I’ll be on my way,” she said, and her erstwhile companion frowned.