Vincalis the Agitator (28 page)

By the time the play was over, he’d forgotten Faregan and his old cronies. He left in a hurry to contact Luercas and to let
him know that an opportunity had fallen into their hands.

After the show, Jess went back two aisles to greet Ander Penangueli, whom she and Jyn had met when they were putting together
a proposal for their live-music scheme. “Master Penangueli!” She held out her arms, and exchanged a polite brush of cheeks
with him. “Did you enjoy the show?”

“Dear child, what a delight! The young man who wrote that is a genius. But it was a very dark theme—very dark. I found myself
laughing during the show, but now it’s over and I find myself thinking instead. Such a sad tale—such sad little lives. And
the poor wizard, too.” The old man stroked his beard and said, “You know the producer, don’t you?”

Jess nodded. “We were great friends as children. We don’t actually see each other anymore, sadly, but …” She shrugged.

“You must introduce us. And perhaps the writer, too?”

“I don’t know the writer,” Jess said. “But Gellas is around somewhere—I know he’d love to meet you.”

Penangueli nodded. “He found quite a work of art in this play. A tragedy that makes one laugh—or perhaps it was a comedy that
makes one cry. Quite unexpected.” Master Penangueli said, “And now let me introduce you to my friends. This is Jess Covitach-Artis,
the girl who will be bringing live musicians to our homes—and evidently touring them around the empire, as well. Jess, Master
Grath Faregan and Master Noano Omwi.” He turned to his associates. “Jess and the daughter of a dear friend of mine had the
lovely idea of gathering up musicians and placing them on stages for a more intimate entertainment. Can you imagine?”

“But then their audience will be present if they make errors in their playing,” Master Omwi said. He looked to her for an
explanation.

She nodded. “They will. But their listeners will hear the living music, with natural variations and the passions of the moment—it
will not have the perfection of a performance preserved for the videograph, but no one else save those who are there at that
moment will ever hear that exact performance. It will be like the theater tonight—the actors may play all their parts slightly
differently tomorrow night. It will be a different experience for tomorrow’s audience. You see?”

And the three men smiled and nodded. Then Master Faregan, who seemed quite familiar, though she could not place him, said,
“CovitachArtis? Which branch of the family is that?”

And she felt the same fear that had plagued her since she’d come to Artis House. “Most of the Covitach-Artises are in Ynjarval,”
she said. “We’re from the Beyron Artis lineage that settled in the area about three hundred years ago.”

She chatted about the lineage—patter she had memorized years ago—and they smiled and nodded, smiled and nodded. And then she
noticed that two of them, Penangueli and Omwi, were looking past her as they smiled and nodded—that something down around
the stage seemed to have their real attention, and that while they were pretending to give her and her dull family history
their attention, they were in fact surreptitiously watching something behind her that interested them much more.

The same could not be said for Faregan. He watched her—watched her with such unblinking intensity that she began to feel sick
to her stomach.

She did not turn around, either to avoid Faregan’s stare or to see what the other two men were watching, though the impulse
to do so was almost overwhelming. Instead, she claimed a prior engagement for which she was rapidly growing late, and gave
cheerful good-byes.

When she finally dared to turn away, Wraith was accepting the congratulations of some of the members of his opening-night
crowd in front of the stage. Some of the actors stood with him. They were all in the right area to have caught the old men’s
attention.

She suddenly wondered at the business of the three old men. Jyn had only introduced Master Penangueli by name, not mentioning
that he held a position anywhere, so Jess had assumed he was a covil-osset. Somehow, now she thought he might have some other
interest—something unpleasant, though she could not imagine what. That he could choose to be in the company of Master Faregan
made her think him not such a nice man after all.

And this outing might not have been as casual and friendly as it appeared: Three old Masters braving the Belows after dark
could speak well of the play—or it could suggest that after all these years, someone was starting to have questions about
Wraith. Or her. Or both.

The Silent Inquest gathered in the Gold Building, named not for its color or its construction materials, but for its putative
designer, Camus Gold, said to have been the greatest architect of the Third Age. The Gold Building gathered its aura of power
around itself like an ancient goddess; it stood atop the highest of the Merocalins, the seven hills that had been the heart
of Oel Artis before the wizards built the Aboves and sent them sailing into the clouds, and stared haughtily down onto the
lower city that had been the whole of the city, once upon a time.

Many of the old buildings had lost their luster and their pride of place as the true heart of Oel Artis moved into the sky,
but the walled and mazelike Gold Building was different. For more than seven hundred years it had been the place where little
cabals of powerful old men gathered secretly to decide the fates of those beneath them, and its soul echoed with the resonance
of those old men, that power, those choices.

Now a Dragon of the Council, a man of great power and respect, came with his face hidden to stand before three old men dressed
in green and black robes.

“You saw it?”

“We saw it,” Ander Penangueli, Grand Master of the Inquestors, said.

“The play presents a view of magic that I am not sure we in the Dragons wish to permit to exist. The writer was reaching for
metaphor, I believe, but he has managed to lay bare an unfortunate literal truth by doing so. He used magic as his metaphor,
and used the sacrificing of lives as fuel for a wizard’s petty spell as the engine that ran his story.”

Heads nodded. “We saw. Get on with it.”

The Dragon swallowed hard and said, “
A Man of Dreams
is going to make people think. It’s going to point them straight at the things we don’t want them to think about, and it’s
going to make some of them ask some very dangerous questions.”

“Then close the play,” Penangueli said. “Why should we even be here on this late night for this discussion? Close the damned
thing and be done with it, and let’s get home to our beds and the sleep we’re missing.”

The Dragon said, “If we step in and order it closed, we raise curiosity about why the Dragon Council would choose to involve
itself in harmless entertainment. We don’t want to raise curiosity.”

Master Omwi said, “You say you think the writer trespassed accidentally on this issue. Is there any chance he knew what he
was doing?”

The Dragon shrugged. “No way to tell. We don’t know the writer. The producer is an Artis. He’s spent his life surrounded by
magic—learned the mathematics of it, as does every child with an Artis tutor, and lived in a house where magic was the sun,
the moon, and the stars. But he has never— and I have checked this carefully—absolutely never, done anything with magic of
any sort. His interests have always lain within the realms of literature and philosophy, and even his best friend for years,
who is a rising young wizard heading toward a place in Research and before long, I’m sure, a seat on the Council, has said
that he tried for years to get the boy to choose a more practical course of study. Apparently, clever though he is with words,
the lad has no aptitude for even the simplest of spells.”

“But you don’t think he’s aware of the Warrens?”

“Why would he be? That is information never available to anyone who is not a Council member or working directly the spells
that actually fuel the city—and the people who do
that
job always become Council members. It’s one of the perks, and they know it. There is no way he could get to that information.”

“You want the producer killed?” Penangueli asked.

The Dragon swallowed again. “I’d rather not take that step. He’s stolti. But I need a way to get rid of this play quietly.”

The Inquestor Triad sat silently for a short while. Finally Penangueli said, “Use money. And a diversion. Commission the boy
to produce something else in the style of this one. Something less volatile. He can hire a different writer, or have the same
one work on a theme of your choosing.”

Faregan asked, “And what of the writer of this play? What might he know?”

Here the Dragon faltered. “We do not know any Vincalis, nor have we had good fortune in finding out about him. He takes his
pay in cash, has someone pick it up for him, has never attended rehearsals, sends changes and corrections via courier from
a variety of courier stations, none of whom know him personally or can describe the person who brought them their package.”

Faregan began to laugh softly. “Ah. Those are not the actions of an innocent man. This Vincalis, I wager, knows exactly what
he is about. I think in Gellas Tomersin he’s found himself a convenient sheep. A front. I’d guess he might be a disgruntled
member of the Council itself—perhaps his money funded the renovation of the playhouse.”

“We’ve checked that. A group of dummy investors funded it. They don’t know where they received their funds, only that they
got a twenty percent commission for handling the deal.”

Murmurs around the room. Old voices whispering through the chamber that had heard nothing but old voices, carefully measured
tones, thoughtful whispers, for seven hundred years and more. The Silent Inquest, not even known by most of the people of
the Empire to exist, dreaded with reason by all who knew it, had predated the building it occupied by nearly two thousand
years. The Silent Inquest had survived dynasties, revolutions, wars, famines, disasters, and periods of vast, sloth-inducing
abundance by being slow, patient, careful … and right.

“Yes,” Penangueli said at last. “Vincalis is your problem, I think. Give young Gellas Tomersin a commission, then. Let him
give you a great comedy—something light and frivolous and far from souls and wizardry. We will have people watch him. And
watch his friends. And we will see who he hires as a writer, and see if, in this second work, we find the same threads of
treason. If we do, we will know that the first time was no mistake, and we will act.”

“And of the current play?”

“Let it run its scheduled handful of days. But make sure the pressure is on Tomersin to get the next one out immediately—that
it is needed for some close holiday for which he must meet a specific date. Give him no option but to close this one when
its initial run is finished.”

The Dragon bowed. “Yes, Inquestors. We will do this—or, if necessary, I shall do it myself. If we have a traitor on the Council,
better he or she not know anyone suspects.” With his palms sliding back and forth over each other, the Dragon then asked,
“And the price of your assistance, so that I may draw your fee from the private funds?”

Penangueli smiled slowly, no longer looking much like a sweet, charming old man. “You can owe the Silent Inquest a favor at
a later date. You may leave us now. We have implementations to discuss.”

The Dragon grew pale, but bowed and backed his way to the door, and hurried from the chamber.

When he was gone, Penangueli leaned back. “We’ll hold this favor for the day that we need a vote to go our way in Council.
Or possibly for something greater. Its worth will depend on what we can discover—so make sure that the Dragons owe us greatly.”
He smiled again.

Faregan said, “The girl who came up to you tonight might be a key.”

Penangueli raised an eyebrow. “Jess? She’s harmless, I suspect.”

“I’m sure she is. But she is and always has been great friends with Gellas Tomersin. They’re from the same part of Ynjarval.
And until recently, she was none other than Solander Artis’s lover. Solander is the only son of the late Rone Artis.”