Vincalis the Agitator (27 page)

At the same time, in the higher circles of the city, an art critic friend of Wraith’s published an intriguing little review
of the play’s dress rehearsal. He was careful to neither praise the play nor to criticize it, but only to mention in several
different ways that it was completely different from anything he had ever seen, and that, because of its complete departure
from conventional theater, it was apt to disappear as quickly as it appeared. He noted that seats were extremely limited,
that some of the best of them already could not be had for any price, and that, with a showing of only six days, only a very
few would have the privilege of witnessing this rare and surprising performance.

He might as well have told the rich and powerful of the city that he had the secret elixir of immortality but only the first
fifty people who applied to him would get any.

The expensive seats outsold the cheap ones, and the clever who had bought more seats than they needed were able to resell
their extra tickets for prices that ranged from the extravagant to the obscene.

Word of the rush for the best seats trickled to the lower classes, who discovered that their tickets were suddenly worth much,
much more than they had paid for them. Most—but not all—sold them at a profit that made not just their month but, in some
cases, their year.

Wraith, from his place in the theater’s inner office, watched the money pouring in with some amazement. Before the first show,
he had the money to pay all of his actors for the run he actually planned—one month, not six days—maintain the sets, and start
to work on the next production.

Every one of his six announced days was a sellout a week before the first show—but no one had yet seen
A Man of Dreams.
Everything depended on what happened when people actually saw the play. If the stolti gave the thing good word of mouth,
then everyone would keep coming—the other stolti because they did not want to miss something, and the lesser classes because
they would take any opportunity to be seen with the stolti in social situations, and few such opportunities existed. But if
they were horrified by what he had done, they would find a way to shut him down, and that would be the end of the experiment.

“You look like the puppy that cornered the bear,” Meachaan, one of his “trees,” said as she scrubbed makeup off of her face.
They’d finished up the last dress rehearsal; the first real show would come that night.

“If I felt half as confident as the puppy, I’d be doing well.”

“You’ll be fine. You’ve done something good here,” she said. “They’ll come; it won’t be what they’re expecting, but it will
be truly good, and truly thought-provoking. I’m guessing most of them haven’t had their thoughts provoked in a long, long
time.”

“You’re better off not thinking about consequences when you’re stolti,” Wraith said, tempering the sadness in his voice with
a little smile. “If you think about consequences, you have nightmares.” He shrugged. “Maybe they’ll see themselves in this,
maybe they’ll see someone else that they know … or maybe they’ll just see a fantasy story with no meaning beyond what it says
on the surface. I don’t know. Now that we’re here, this seems like such a stupid, piddling way to try to change anything.
What difference can it possibly make? Who will be affected by it? Who will be changed?”

Meachaan laughed. “You can’t know that, and you can’t worry about it. You’ve put the food out. Now others must eat—and how
they eat is not for you to say.”

“But I want this to lead to the freedom of the Warreners. I want this to lead to the end of the misuse of magic.”

“You want what you want, and you want it now … but life doesn’t work that way. One man can move the world, but to do it, he
needs a long lever and a lot of time.” Her smile to him was enigmatic. “Just wait. Tonight is the first drop of rain. Tomorrow
is the second. Rain carves rivers and wears away mountains. Your changes will come; you’ve started the storm.”

He looked at the box of money, at the list of seats sold, and at the longer list of requests for seats that had come in. He’d
started the storm—but who could tell whether it would be a sprinkle that didn’t even dampen down the dust, or if it would
be a typhoon that washed away the city? Certainly not him.

Dafril Crow-Hjaben took his seat next to Velyn, who had somehow managed to acquire two seats in the very best section. He’d
accepted her invitation to be her escort; everyone knew that she was preparing for her nutevaz and needed to be seen only
with trusted male escorts for a while—and since he and Luercas were close friends, that put him in the position of trusted
escort. This amused Dafril; he hadn’t had her in years, but he certainly knew his way around her terrain. But he’d act perfectly
respectable; he gained no glory from claiming as a conquest a woman as comfortable with her virtue as Velyn.

He found Jess Covitach-Artis seated to his left and immediately felt luckier. He’d heard rumors that Jess and Solander had
parted company, and to the best of anyone’s knowledge, Jess had never had another companion, either serious or casual. He’d
always found her pretty, clever, amusing … and distant. He got the feeling that she didn’t like him very much, and that intrigued
him.

So he leaned back in his seat, trying to find a comfortable position, and discovered that whatever the seats had been designed
for, it hadn’t been for comfort. Velyn had glared once at Jess and turned away; Jess had looked at Velyn with an utterly blank
expression, then stared stonily ahead at the stage. Interesting. Velyn had stopped seeing Gellas, the producer of this whole
charade, some months earlier—and everyone knew that Gellas and Jess had been friends since they’d arrived on the Artis doorstep
with their apprentice papers in hand. He found himself wondering if the bad blood between Velyn and Jess came from a conflict
over Gellas.

Gellas had been absent from Artis House for almost a year. Dafril didn’t pay much attention to most of the Artises, but something
about Gellas had always struck him as off. Dafril knew Gellas had come to Artis House from one of the territories to avail
himself of the opportunities to which he was entitled by birth and kin ties. But in spite of being best friends with that
weasel Solander, Gellas never pursued the single path for which the Artis family could open every door—magic. He’d chosen
instead to pursue some sort of philosophical nonsense, when the Artises had no ties to any of the many priesthoods or monasteries
where philosophers held sway, and he had ended up here, doing theater as if he were one of the covil-ossets, who spent their
lives taking trips to dig in the ruins of Fen Han and Crobadi, or producing books of each other’s poetry, or translating the
lost literature of the Mehattins. Powerless dilettantes, all of them—and Gellas, who had the right connections and the name,
was acting just like them.

And Gellas couldn’t even get the gods’-damned seats right.

If Dafril couldn’t sleep, though, at least he could chat with Jess. She looked like she would rather be anyplace in the world
but where she was; he knew this feeling intimately.

“So, Jess—couldn’t find an excuse not to make opening night?” he whispered, leaning close to her.

He was startled by the intensity of dislike in the gaze she turned on him. “I’m delighted to be here,” she said. “I was tremendously
grateful to get such a good seat. Now, though, I think I’d rather change places with one of the people in the cheap seats.”

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked. “I didn’t do anything to you.”

“You’ve shown a real taste for bad company,” she said.

He dropped his voice lower. “Velyn. My mother talked me into taking her. Her prospective vowmate hasn’t returned from the
islands yet, and her family wants her to be seen in the company of … well, friends of her vowmate until he gets back.”

The change in Jess’s face astonished him. She lit up like sunshine. “She’s taking vows? With whom?”

“Luercas tal Jernas. Her distant, distant cousin. He spent a few years at Artis House, but I don’t know if you know him. On
the Council of Dragons, the Master of Research, has ties through the tal Jernas family to most of the really big businesses
in Oel Artis and a lot of foreign connections, too.”

“The one who got … melted? Back when Solander’s father died? That Luercas?”

Dafril nodded.

“They’ll make a lovely couple,” Jess muttered.

“He finally found a wizard who could undo the damage. He looks good. Better than before, I think.”

“Does he know about her?”

Dafril grinned and chuckled softly. “You mean about her … hobbies? Is there anyone who doesn’t know about those?”

He saw Jess glance toward the stage, then back to him, almost too quick for the eye to see or the brain to note. Almost.

So Gellas hadn’t realized his woman had been almost everyone else’s woman, too? How hilarious.

Just before the play started, Dafril noted three men who looked out of place among the happy, excited theatergoers. He knew
only one of them—a terrifying wizard named Grath Faregan, who in the years since his removal as one of the Masters of the
Department of Security, was rumored to have gotten involved with a criminal organization. But here they were, with programs
in their hands and tickets that they checked as they worked their way up the aisle. Faregan’s eyes met Dafril’s as he passed,
and Faregan glared, and Dafril shuddered. So Faregan hadn’t forgotten or forgiven. The three of them ended up with seats two
rows behind him.

Dafril could feel sweat sliding between his shoulder blades. His mouth went dry and his bowels knotted. He kept his arms clamped
tight to his sides while his testicles tried to crawl back up into his belly, and he prayed that this was just one of those
silly coincidences that happened from time to time. He could hear the three of them talking about a rumor that this stood
a chance to be nominated for the Delcate Sphere, and that tickets were going to get harder to come by rather than easier.

But Dafril wasn’t soothed. He’d made the mistake of laughing at Faregan when he discovered the wizard had been removed from
his post—he’d laughed about old men getting caught with underage girls, and how much of an idiot a man would have to be to
make that mistake. And now the man and two vile old cronies were right behind him, and Dafril could feel their eyes on the
back of his neck.

When the lights went down and music began to play, Dafril breathed a tiny bit easier. But he didn’t bother trying to talk
to Jess anymore. He didn’t pay any attention to Velyn, either. He simply sat there, waiting for the ordeal to end, hoping
that he would be able to get out the exit before Faregan could catch up with him.

Except that, as the play wore on, Dafril found himself caught up in it—and not in a way that pleased him. He began to see
an anti-magic sentiment carefully couched in marvelous dancing, clever dialogue, humor, pathos, and wonder at the terrible
situation into which the poor wizard had gotten himself. As the main character’s life went from bad to worse to truly awful,
Dafril could see the audience’s sympathy going more and more to the lost souls, and less and less to the suffering wizard.

These were people who had been raised from birth to think that magic would be the answer to all their problems—people who
had been carefully trained by every controllable factor in their society to look to the wizards for answers. And yet, in the
blink of an eye, their sympathies turned away from magic and all that it represented.

That worried him. He didn’t think for a moment that any of these people were going to give up their aircars or their fine
houses or their magic-run appliances or anything else that made their lives easier—but he found their fickleness deeply disturbing.
It made him think that the ground upon which he had stood so trustingly and for so long had a fault line running through it,
one that could open up at any moment and turn on him and devour him.

In producing this work by—Dafril checked his program—an unknown named Vincalis, Gellas had taken a strange stance for a stolti.
Very strange.

But perhaps it wasn’t so strange at all. Look at what else Gellas had done. He had walked away from the woman everyone had
been under the impression that he loved, had ceased coming to Artis House even for holidays, and had even seemingly separated
from his dearest friends Solander and Jess.

Something about Gellas sat wrong with Dafril. It had something to do with this magnificent theater, converted from industrial
space; it had something to do with the play, written by a complete unknown, and with the astonishing actors, not one of whom
bore a familiar name or face….

Dafril sensed an opportunity. Neither he nor Luercas had ever liked that scrawny weirdling, Gellas. Luercas actively hated
him. But Dafril and Luercas could point the Dragon Council at Gellas and this anti-magic play; if they could raise any question
that this
A Man of Dreams
nonsense was more than just a play, they might win themselves promotions. Power.