Vincalis the Agitator (21 page)

Solander shook his head and crossed his arms over his chest. “This secretive writer of yours needs to come to life today,
because I’ll give you money to start financing your theater, and some of it has to go to him to pay for his work.”

Wraith suddenly laughed. “Here’s something. Why not? Call him Vincalis, for all that it will ever matter.”

“Vincalis?”

“The name of the gate the beautiful and unsuspecting Shina and I went through, when I first discovered the nature of the Warrens.
The gate you and Velyn came through to take Jess and me out. The gate my family is going to walk out of one day.”

“Doesn’t sound much like a person’s name.”

“Doesn’t matter, does it? This Vincalis is a fellow who’s concerned with his privacy. No one’s ever going to think that’s
his real name, anyway.”

“Vincalis it is, then.” Solander raised his glass. “Here’s hoping he doesn’t make a fool of all three of us.”

Wraith raised the bottle he’d been drinking from and said, “From your mouth to the gods’ ears.” They drank. “And now, what
of the breakthrough you’ve been hinting at?”

Solander grinned. “Actually, I’ve had two.”

“Damn braggart.”

They both laughed, and Solander said, “Personal or professional first?”

Wraith’s eyebrows rose. “Oh, personal, of course.”

“You’re as much a gossip as any covil-osset, aren’t you?” He leaned forward and his voice dropped. “This is good, though.”

“Well … ?”

“Jess and I are a couple. Or will be tomorrow, when she becomes a legal adult.”

Wraith rose, lifted his bottle, and said, “A prayer answered.” He drank the remaining contents in one long, hard gulp, and
wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Then he smashed the bottle into his trash basket. “That was to your happiness,
and mine.”

Solander said, “You’re too hard on her.”

Wraith just looked at Solander from under his eyebrows and said nothing.

“My other news, then.”

“Please. But I’m not sure my heart can take it.”

“I think I may have figured out why you are the way you are.”

“You’re joking.”

“Didn’t say I’d learned how to use it yet. But with those documents you … acquired, I’ve been doing equations, trying to figure
out the effects of all those different spells that are pouring into the Warrens all the time. The spells on the food, the
shield spell around the place, the control spells that go in through the daily lessons and daily prayers. And I hit on something.”

“Toxic magic overdose.”

Solander pointed a finger at Wraith. “Close. I was using the school’s equipment after hours, running all the equations and
testing them at different power levels. And suddenly I got what I thought was an artifact. All my waveforms went flat. I got
a paper copy of what was running at that instant, and saw that it wasn’t really an artifact at all. All those spells, and
all that power, blasting through the Warrens—and all that energy being drawn back out of the Warrens—and all those levels
constantly adjusting themselves. I think, just once … or maybe more than once, but you’re the only one who got hit by it,
I don’t know—anyway, in your Warren, at the moment you were conceived, I think everything hit that single flat note that I
discovered, and the result was that you were saturated with every conceivable form of magic for one critical instant. You
probably shouldn’t have lived. Most babies conceived at that instant—if there were any others—probably didn’t.”

“It was a fluke, then.”

Solander looked at Wraith and shook his head. “Was it? I think I found the mechanism that made you the way you are—but the
fact that you survived something that I think should have killed you might have been … fate. A higher destiny.”

“The gods?” Wraith laughed. “It’s interesting, anyway. Theoretically, then, I might not be the only one in the world like
me.”

“Right. But you probably are. I couldn’t find another series of power levels that had the same result, and I ran up and down
the scale in every direction as far as I could—for as long as I could get away with using the school equipment without having
anyone ask me what I was doing, anyway.” Solander shuddered, recalling more than a month of nights when he’d used every spellchecker
in the student lab, all the while listening for footsteps and knowing that if anyone came in, there was no way he could hope
to get everything shut down in time—and knowing that the spells he was checking were government secrets, and that the penalty
he’d incur just for having them in his possession was death. Bad memories. He’d finally decided he’d found as much as he wanted
to find.

“Will what you discovered finally give you what you’ve been looking for all these years?” Wraith asked after a moment. “Is
it the key to magic with no
rewhah
?”

“I don’t know. I think it’s a start.”

With Solander in the Belows visiting Wraith, Jess found herself with too much time to think, and too many things to think
about. She walked slowly through the Rone Artis Memorial Starpark, watching the starsetters changing the seasonal displays
to either side of the thin ribbon of translucent pathway that led around the starpond. The following day would mark her last
day of childhood, according to her forged documents, and her last day of tutoring within Artis House. As an adult, she would
be at loose ends. The stolti could not hold paying jobs, as this was below them; if she had been good at theoretical magic,
she could have found a position in government, which was considered the realm of the stolti. But she’d hated the necessary
maths, and had no real aptitude for the poetic forms of spellcasting beyond the simplest spellwork. So government would be
out. She might develop and manage a business—a lot of stolti did that to augment their family fortunes. Her Artis stipend,
plus a few investments that Solander had made and then turned over to her management, would keep her going. She could live
in Artis House as long as she wanted. But what was she to do with herself?

She liked art and music and dance. She could join a covil, perhaps, and spend time with other stolti who liked the same things.
Maybe she could find some direction there.

“Pretty, aren’t they?”

Jess jumped, and turned to find a gray-haired man behind her, smiling at her with an expression of mild amusement on his face.

“Pretty?” she asked. And then realized he meant the displays. “Oh, the starpond and the staryards. They’re lovely. Considerably
more dramatic than ours. The comets are especially nice.” She turned away from him, hoping that this brief exchange would
satisfy his urge for conversation, and that he would move on. She didn’t like him, though she couldn’t say why.

But he didn’t move on. Instead, he said, “You look terribly familiar.”

She studied him and shook her head. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

“Then let’s meet now. Come with me to Ha-Ferlingetta, and I’ll buy you a meal and a drink, and we can get to know each other.
You’re a lovely young woman.”

Jess suppressed a shudder and forced a smile to her face. Everything about this man sent her skin crawling and scared the
breath out of her. “Actually, I’m a child,” she said, and managed to put a note of apology into the statement. “I’m afraid
I can’t accept your kind offer.”

He frowned. “A child?”

She pulled the locket from beneath her tunic and showed it to him. It glowed—proof that she was, indeed, still under the protection
of the Childlaw.

He took a step back, nodded, and said, “My forgiveness, then. You look older than your age.”

Which was a lie. She looked considerably younger than her age and knew it. But she merely nodded and said, “No harm done.”
And then, with a smile and a bow, she excused herself, and hurried back to Artis House, trying to figure out what it was about
the man that so filled her with dread, and thanking all the gods of her childhood that she’d had the locket for one more day.

A spring, a summer, an autumn, and a winter. And back again to spring, as Wraith and Solander walked through the theater in
the New Brinch District. “Hard to believe it was a warehouse a year ago.”

“Not for me,” Wraith said with a laugh. “I’ve been here every day. I have no trouble believing it at all.”

“It’s beautiful.” Solander pointed to the tiers of seats that rose up almost to the ceiling. “But those don’t look very comfortable.”

“They aren’t supposed to be. They’re fine if you’re sitting up in them, but not at all friendly if you try to take a nap.”

“Still determined not to cater to the covil-ossets, eh?”

Wraith shook his head. “I’m not trying to win their awards. I want to reach people.” He paused, vaulted onto the raised circular
stage, and sat with his legs dangling over the edge. “True what I heard about Jess?”

“Depends on what you heard, I suppose.”

“I heard she joined a covil.”

Solander wrinkled his nose. “Music Council—spreading pretty sounds and telling the stolti what they’re supposed to think about
them.” He chuckled a little, but Wraith didn’t.

“Why is she wasting herself with a thing like that? Endless committees, arguments about which music is appropriate and should
be accepted as part of the canon and which is somehow unworthy, nasty little in-groups, petty backstabbing….” Wraith frowned
and drummed his heels against the stage. “She could be doing something worthwhile with her life.”

Solander hopped onto the stage beside him, and sat staring up at the vast dark cavern of seats. “Scary,” he said. And then,
after a moment, “You think she should be working alongside you and Velyn—that she should be here every day, directing the
workers, planning the production, trying to figure out how to save the Warreners, whatever the cost. But that isn’t what she
wants. She can’t stand to see you and Velyn together, she doesn’t ever want to have anything to do with the Warrens again
… and what is she supposed to do with her life? She’s stolti; she can’t take employment, she has no particular talents to
follow like you do—or like I do, for that matter—and I think her days are starting to stretch out in front of her now, looking
all much the same. She doesn’t want to take vows—I asked—and the covil is
something
. She talked about an exploratory covil that does digs all over the world, but they’ll be working in the ruins over in the
territories east of the Strithian Empire for the next several years, so I finally managed to talk her out of that.” He shrugged,
looking a little ashamed of himself. “I didn’t want her to be gone for so long.”

Wraith lay back on the stage with an exasperated sigh. “She’s with you, but she resents Velyn being with me?”

“She’s with me,” Solander said. “But she doesn’t love me—she never has. I’m just her fallback position from you.”

“I’m sorry,” Wraith said after a while. “I truly thought she would outgrow that infatuation of hers.”

“She loves you,” Solander said. He sounded testy, and Wraith looked at him with surprise. “She’s always loved you. At least
have the courtesy to call it what it is.”

“I know. But I can’t love her,” Wraith said. “She’s a memory of every failure, every lost friend, every death I caused in
the Warrens. I look at her and all I can see is everyone who
didn’t
get free.”

“Just as well for me that she doesn’t know that, then,” Solander said after a long silence. “Because if she did, she would
probably be here helping you—in the hopes that if all the Warreners were suddenly free, you might find a way to love her.”

Wraith looked puzzled. “And … ?”

“Don’t be an idiot, Wraith. Just because she doesn’t love me doesn’t mean that I don’t love her. I have only as much of her
as she’ll give me— but I don’t want to lose that.”