Vincalis the Agitator (20 page)

His collection would have a gaping hole in it until he added her— until he decorated her with his tools, and posed her, and
suspended her in time in the prized center position of his gallery. He closed his eyes and he could see the artwork he could
make of her. He could taste her terror. He yearned, he ached, he throbbed for her.

She lived in a fortress to which he had no access, however—he could not hope to get through the doors of Artis House in Oel
Artis; it stood alone, with no common through-corridors like the Artis sector of Oel Maritias. His spy told him the girl always
had friends with her and never left the house alone.

Faregan did not think he’d be able to get to her by force. Which left finesse.

He worked out a spell that would permit him to watch her whenever she was out from under the shields of Artis House. He determined
that he would win her trust.

“I’m free from the Academy for the week,” Solander said. “We’ve a surprise holiday; the Master of Subliminals is to take vows
with a harine from Bainjat, and they’re having a giant do. We’re to be invited, but because she’s Bainjati, they’ve a week
of purification rituals, meditation, and testing before the big day. All the Masters are involved, so none of us students
have any requirements.” He grinned at Wraith. “So that gives me some time to work on my private projects for the first time
in months. How are yours coming?”

Wraith sighed and stretched and pushed himself away from his desk. “I’m lost, Sol. My head hurts, and I’ve discovered that
I can write bad poetry all day, but the second I try to write something that matters, I get all awkward and the words refuse
to go in the right places. I’ve done a play. But it’s dreadful.”

“Let me see.”

“I’d rather you didn’t. I’d like to still have your respect tomorrow.”

Solander looked at his friend and laughed. “Here’s my deal. I’ll show you what I’ve done, but only if you show me what you’ve
done.”

Wraith said, “You’ve had a breakthrough?”

Solander just smiled. “You show me first.”

Wraith went to a cabinet and opened the bottom drawer. From it he pulled out a sheaf of papers. “At least you can’t say I
haven’t been busy.” He handed the pages to Solander and sat back in his chair.

And that was the danger of being the friend of someone who fancied himself a writer, wasn’t it? Solander dreaded the idea
of working his way through a play, no matter what rhyme scheme it was done in or whether the gods declaimed in Akrenian or
Common, and then being forced afterward to say something polite about it. Every time he thought of actors on a stage, spouting
the words of some much-lionized playwright, he wanted to flee in the other direction—and if the works of the greatest playwrights
in the world could have that effect on him, he could just imagine the horror his friend the amateur was about to inflict on
him. But he couldn’t think of a graceful excuse. He had, after all, put Wraith through years of grueling experimentation to
fuel his own career. So, with the air of a man condemned, he began to read
A Man of Dreams—A Play in Three Acts.

After a quick description of a very plain set, Wraith started in with a child from the Belows wandering through the street
with a basket on his back, from which he was trying to sell something he called
daffiabejong
—casually translated as “fruits of dreams.” A young wizard met the boy in the street and asked if he could be assured that
the dreams he bought would be good ones, and the boy told him that if his conscience was clear and his heart was pure, his
dreams would be good ones—but that under no circumstances should he eat of the fruit if he carried a guilty secret with him.

“Um …” Solander looked up, a bit puzzled. “When I saw the first page and everything was written in Common instead of Akrenian,
I thought you had your gods declaiming in Common. But you don’t actually seem to
have
any gods….”

“No gods,” Wraith said. “Keep reading.”

“No gods at all. Oh. I thought gods declaiming at the beginning of a play was a requirement.”

“I didn’t follow the form,” Wraith said. “Keep reading.”

Interested in spite of himself, Solander returned to the play and to the boy selling dreams. By saying that only the guilty
dared not buy his fruits, the boy selling the dreams forced the wizard to buy one—for who would ever admit that he carried
a guilty secret when others were walking past, listening to what was said, and looking at him?

The wizard took the fruit of dreams home and attempted to dispose of it by burying it, only to discover that it grew into
a tree in his yard in merest moments, and that new fruits sprang forth on the branches, and that the fruits cried out to the
man to eat them. Their voices haunted him day and night, leaving him ever more haggard and desperate. When he tried to cut
down the tree, two grew in its place, and when he tried to burn the two trees, the flames scattered the seeds so thoroughly
that a forest of the trees filled his yard, and what had once been a bright and beautiful place became a dark and haunting
miniature forest that moaned and wailed and gave the poor wizard no rest.

The wizard used all sorts of enchantments to avoid the fruits of his tree, of course—but the
daffia-bejong
were nothing if not persistent, and finally, unable to stand another moment of their presence, he fell to his knees, swearing
to the little grove that he would eat one of the fruits if they would simply allow him to rest.

The trees agreed.

Thus to the second act, where the man ate, and fell asleep, and his dreaming self suddenly confronted the ghosts of the damned
crying out for retribution for the tortures and the suffering that he had caused them. Solander discovered that the wizard
had found a spell by which he could turn convicted prisoners into a special form of water that kept anyone who drank it young.
But when he ran out of guilty men on whom to use his spell, he had to either find innocent fuel or tell his many customers
that they could no longer be young.

He had decided that he would continue supplying his customers, because they made him very rich, and sat him at the center
of the table during their great feasts, and applauded him in the streets—but the souls of those who had been so badly used
would not rest, and hunted him down in the form of fruit from the magical
daffia-bejong
. And in his sleep, those whose deaths he had caused finally got a chance to protest their treatment in his hands. They haunted
him, and swore that he would never wake until he repented his evil and cast a special spell to free them from the limbo to
which they had been consigned.

In the third act, the wizard, haggard and changed, cast the spell to free the dead from limbo, and all the ghosts of innocents
appeared before him and began to follow him, telling him that he was not done with them. Other wizards had found the secrets
of his spell, and they offered the same magical water. For him to gain his freedom from the dead, he would have to sell one
of the fruits of dreams to other guilty wizards. The play ended with the wizard, his cart loaded with the
daffia-bejong
he had grown from his tree, wandering the streets, selling his produce to unsuspecting wizards who shared his guilty secret.

Solander sat there staring at the last page for a long time—not reading, just thinking about the souls of the damned in the
play and the souls of the doubly damned in the Warrens of the Empire—souls that would not even have a chance to cry out for
vengeance. Finally he put down the play and looked up. “The way you have it written, I can imagine watching it on a stage—but
it would be more like being secretly inside someone else’s life. People would love to watch this. Not even just the stolti,
though. I bet if you offered cheaper tickets to the chadri, maybe even the mufere, you could sell them. It’s a good story,
and even they could follow it since it’s in Common. And the fact that it isn’t told in poetry …” Solander shrugged, at a loss
for a clear explanation for what prose gave the play that poetry wouldn’t have. “It would have been more artistic if you had
done it in poetry, and you would have been looked at as a better writer. But I don’t know that you truly would have been a
better writer, because people would have slept through your play just as they sleep through the plays of all the so-called
greats. I think if you can actually get the audience interested in what is happening on the stage rather than in what the
other people in the audience are wearing or who they came with, you might be the better writer. The fact that this doesn’t
have any visits by gods doesn’t hurt it at all—after all, who really believes in the gods these days? And as for it being
written in Common … I thought that made it all the better.” He paused. “The people in it sounded real—only a lot more interesting
in the way that they said things than most people anyone ever hears speaking.”

Wraith managed a smile. “So it wasn’t the worst thing you’ve ever read. That’s reassuring, anyway.”

But Solander had only half heard what Wraith said. He’d been captivated by a sudden, certainly ludicrous, but also delightful
inspiration. If he wanted to, he
might
be able to put
A Man of Dreams
on a stage. Since his father’s death, he’d had a monthly allowance that came to him as payment from the Council of Dragons—support
based on the fact that his father had died in service to the Empire, and that had he lived, he would have continued to contribute
to his son’s education and welfare. This was money over and above investments that his father had put aside, Solander’s share
of the family money—which was extensive—and Solander’s own fledgling investments. Because his father had been nothing less
than the Grand Master of the Council of Dragons of Oel Artis and Oel Maritias at the time of his death, the stipend was almost
breathtakingly generous.

Solander could not be seen funding the play personally, of course; in order to continue with his education in the Academy
and to keep from alienating the Masters whose recommendations he would need when he got ready to find his place within the
ranks of the Dragons, he needed to keep his distance from anything that so clearly questioned the always sacrosanct nature
of the work of wizards. If he wanted to change the Dragons from the inside, first he had to get inside. And he would never
get there by being patron to a play that suggested a wizard (and a stolti) might also be a murderer.

And of course Wraith, in his stolti persona as Gellas, student in the Materan Ground School and respected member of upper
society, couldn’t be known to have written such a piece of inflammatory prose. But Wraith could deny any connection with the
thing. Could attribute it to some other writer, and produce the play as part of his graduate projects for the Materan School.

Solander could fund the staging of the play in a moderate venue if he used third parties that would be difficult or impossible
to trace back to him. That would be … He smiled. That would be a challenge, and a great deal of fun. As for finding actors
to take such interesting parts— well, because the play had been written in Common, it wouldn’t have to be acted by the stolti
Poets’ Presentation Covil dilettantes who were fluent in half a dozen dead languages—but who would, no doubt, insist on proper
structure, Skursive rhyme, and coma-inducing content. Instead, Wraith would have his choice of people from all walks of life—anyone
who could speak and read Common would be a potential actor.

Solander suddenly realized that Wraith was talking to him.

“What?”

“Where did you go? One moment we were discussing my pathetic play, and the next, you were a world away and deaf as the dead.”

“I’m going to underwrite
A Man of Dreams.
”

“You’re
what
?”

“I’m going to underwrite it. I’m going to put up the money, channeled through a couple of reliable people I know so that no
one knows I’m the one who’s paying to produce it, and you are going to produce the play on a stage. You’re sure no one knows
you wrote it?”

“Very sure.”

“Good. Attribute it to someone else. That way, if anyone has problems with what it says, you’re just the fellow who thought
it was clever and who decided to give it an airing. Your imaginary writer can take the heat for its actual production.”

“You don’t think people will wonder?”

“Give your writer a life of his own. Create him as you’d create a character in a play—know where he lives and who he knows
and how he gets around. Set up a way to pay him, and always remember to pay him. Send him notes by messenger, and make sure
to read his replies. Make him clever. Make him careful. Make him solitary. And never forget that he is someone other than
you—not with anyone. Not even me.”

Wraith nodded thoughtfully. “That should keep me from being banned from the Empire or sent to the mines.”

“What shall you call him?”

“I don’t know. Something. Something from the Warrens, to stick a finger in the Empire’s eye.” Wraith closed his eyes and thought.
Finally he shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ll think of something sooner or later.”