Vincalis the Agitator (15 page)

Pity Solander wasn’t a bit older, with at least a few years of Academy behind him. Rone had to move someone into the Master
of Energy seat, and he would have loved to have put his son there. Solander would learn a lot from the post, and one guaranteed
friendly vote would always be good.

In a few years, he’d make sure the boy got a good post. Solander was shaping up beautifully—had a deft hand at spellcraft;
a keen, questioning mind that had finally developed some focus; absolute dedication to his goal; and even a good way with
people—something that Rone wished he had more talent with. Solander had friends, but managed to have all of them working on
his projects with him. Free labor, a devoted little triad of followers—and if they were cousins from a minor sub-branch, no
matter. Gellas and Jess were distant cousins to whom the Artis family owed nothing more than room and board in their home,
and Velyn would make a decent pairing with a Dragon soon enough and provide Solander with excellent connections via a lateral
line of attachment; Solander would not turn around in later years to find that his friendships had cost him debts in distant
cities.

Rone smiled. The boy was no doubt enjoying his first real festival at that very moment. First Festivals were wondrous things—a
young man full of drives and hungers found spread before him an endless and eager banquet, and had no more responsibility
for the whole of the week than to sate his appetite in a hundred different ways. Rone had actually helped his son design his
first costume, and had brought in the finest tailor in the city to make sure it fit perfectly. Solander would be a Dragon—
as the son of a Dragon and a young man on his way to the Academy, Solander could legally wear the mask, spined headdress,
and winged cloak that set the Dragon costume apart from all others.

The women would be standing in line for his boy, Rone thought, and walked into Artis House whistling under his breath. Life
gave of itself to those who deserved good things. It gave of itself to him.

Then he reached his workroom, and shoved all pleasant thoughts behind him. For the next hours—perhaps days—his focus had to
be on the preservation of Oel Maritias, and beyond that, the energy needs of the Empire.

He set the temporary spell he’d created to link itself to the Department of Energy in the City Center building. He put a contingency
in its basic run order. The instant he successfully summoned soul-energy in the Department of Energy, it would shut itself
down. With that bit of housekeeping out of the way, he created travel copies of all the important documents he needed, put
them inside a case that would turn itself and everything within it into dust if anyone but him attempted to open it, and left,
making sure, as he always did, that the door closed completely and the locks reset as soon as it did. As an added precaution,
he reset the spells—he had changed them just the day before, but considering what his workroom held right then, he thought
extra caution only made sense.

Satisfied, he headed for the center of the city.

Jess didn’t bother to knock—she was sure Wraith’s room would be empty. So the presence and the panicked reactions of not just
Wraith, but Solander and Velyn, too, as she burst through the door scared a shriek from her.

Velyn. She
would
be with Wraith, wouldn’t she?

Wraith’s festival costume hung untouched in his opened closet. He and Solander looked like they were working; further, from
their harried expressions and the amount of paper scattered around the room, and from the sheets of paper pinned in rows on
the wall, all of them covered with formulas, they’d been at work for quite some time. They acted for all the world like people
who didn’t even know such a thing as a festival existed.

“Missing the festival?” Jess asked, her voice sharp and her eyes on Velyn.

Wraith said, “About time you got here,” as if she’d been summoned and expected.

And Solander flushed and said, “I tried to find you as soon as we realized we needed you, but you weren’t in your room and
you weren’t at the … er … children’s festival.”

“No. I wasn’t,” she agreed. She didn’t elaborate. Better neither of them knew what a fool she’d made of herself. Their response
soothed her, though. They’d wanted her. They’d been looking for her.

Solander’s expression of bone-weary dismay washed away, and he smiled at her as if she were the first light of morning, and
he a man condemned to die unless he stayed awake to see it.

That smile always unnerved her. Solander liked her, and while she liked him well enough as a friend, she couldn’t imagine
ever feeling about him the way she felt about Wraith.

But he was on his feet and coming toward her, saying, “You couldn’t have picked a better time to get here—we found out some
things tonight that have just … have just …” and his face bleached out again, and he wrapped his arms around her and pulled
her close.

Wraith stood, too; he’d been crouched over a line of equations that Jess vaguely identified as defining a spell in spatial
and differential magic. But he simply smiled weakly at her, stretched, and rubbed his thumbs over his eyes in tight, tired
circles. “You and I are lucky to be out of the Warrens,” he said. “We never knew how lucky until tonight. But now that we
do know …” He glanced at Solander and Velyn and said, “The three of us have been trying to figure out just how this spell
works, so that maybe Solander can develop something to counter it. It’s the scariest thing any of us has ever seen.”

“Wait. Just wait. What are you talking about?”

Solander finally let go of Jess. “You’d better sit down,” he told her. When she took a good look at him, she could see the
streaking of tears down his cheeks and how red and swollen his eyes were. She felt a chill working its way from her shoulders
and back all the way down her arms and legs. She shivered in spite of herself and sat.

And between them, Wraith and Solander introduced her to a real and present hell.

When they finished, she stood up. Crossed her arms tightly over her chest—her heart felt like it was going to explode out
of her body, it hammered so hard at her ribs. “Leave it alone,” she said.

Solander and Wraith stared at each other as if they couldn’t have heard her correctly.

“What?” Wraith said. “You can’t mean that. You have family there. So do I. Smoke is still in there—somewhere—”

“Smoke is dead.” She cut him off and glared at him. “Our families are dead. They were born dead, and if they stay dead, so
what?
You’re
my family, Wraith. You. Solander. That’s it. And if the two of you get involved in this, something terrible will happen,
and I’ll lose both of you. I can feel it. I just know it.”

“Smoke is
in there,
” Wraith repeated.

Tears welled up in Jess’s eyes. “You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t remember that he went back to Sleep so that
you could be free? You
can’t
help him, Wraith. You can’t save him, you can’t set him free—so don’t waste the sacrifice he made for you. He
died
for you, Wraith—he died so that you could be free of that hell.” She balled her hands into fists and through clenched teeth
said, “So live for him. Stay free of that place, and live, and make your life something wonderful. And never look back.”

The door chime rang, and all four of the room’s occupants turned toward it. Wraith and Solander quickly threw evidence of
their foray into the magic workroom under the bed; Velyn sprawled on the floor in front of the bed with a viewsphere, and
pretended that she was watching one of Wraith’s collection of ancient dance recreations.

And Jess, blinking away tears that she refused to let the other three see her shed, went to see who was at the door.

A short, dark-haired man in a Security uniform that fit so badly he seemed to have shrunk inside of it looked at her and said,
“We have a missing girl from one of the children’s festivals. I need your name, miss—and …” He shook his head, looking at
the other three. “It looks like your name will do.”

Jess flushed. “Jess Covitach-Artis,” she said.

He looked at the little board in his hand and said, “Not the one. Thank you.” And left.

Jess closed the door and turned back to her friends and Velyn.

“We’re going to have to find someplace safe to work on this,” Solander said to Wraith.

And Wraith nodded.

Neither of them had listened to a word she’d said.

Grath Faregan took back the Security uniform he’d borrowed from the Silent Inquest’s costume room and tucked it away in a
bag. “Jess Covitach-Artis?”

“Yes, Master Faregan.”

“I see.”

“Shall I watch her? Or remove her?”

“No. I’ll find out about her. I’m in no hurry. She’s a lovely little thing, and she’ll still be a lovely little thing when
I …” He looked at his servant, who knew the details of Faregan’s private hobby, and smiled.

The servant, who sometimes got to play with discards from Faregan’s collection when they broke—before Faregan disposed of
them—returned the smile. “Of course, Master Faregan.”

By the time Wraith finally got everyone out of his room, the night was half over; Oel Maritias would be getting ready to light
the sunlights soon. He fell into bed, so tired the mattress seemed to roll and slide beneath him—and someone knocked on his
door.

“You cannot mean to bother me at this hour,” he muttered, but he rose and made his way through the dark room without doing
too much damage to his shins, and opened it to find Velyn there again.

Wraith leaned against the door and managed a weak smile. “Forgot something?”

“Yes,” she said, and brushed past him, pulled the door closed, and took his face in her hands. She kissed him—kissed him with
such passion and such hunger that his knees turned liquid and his spine tingled and every part of his body woke up. “You were
supposed to go to the festival today. This was to be your initiation into adulthood, and I was going to make sure that I met
you there, so that I could be the one who … initiated you. And then”—her thumb started moving in circles on his chest, each
circle a little lower than the one before—“you didn’t go to the festival, and when I checked for your bracelet, I found that
you hadn’t even put it on yet. It was still in your room. So I came here to find you”—the hand had moved much lower, and Wraith
discovered that he was having a hard time following what she was saying—“and you were here, but so was Solander, and then
along came Jess. And I couldn’t very well interrupt this work to … well. But this is the festival. And if you can’t go—and
I understand why you can’t—at least the two of us can celebrate here.”

To Wraith’s amazement, his sleep pants slipped free of his waist and slithered down his legs to pile around his ankles as
if they had a life of their own.

“I’ve waited, Wraith,” Velyn was saying, as she undid the laces of his sleep shirt. “I’ve waited for you for a very long time,
when I didn’t want to wait a day, because I knew you were special, and because this needed to be … right. You had to be a
man, not a child. And now you’re a man, and so help me, I don’t want to wait another instant.”