Vincalis the Agitator (32 page)

A steep and narrow stairway rises at right stage from the working area up to a loft, which holds a narrow wooden bed with
a thin and pitiful mattress covered by a tattered blanket.

Doors open to both left and right stage, and through the window backing center stage, we see a bay full of ships, and beyond,
the sea.

The curtain rises to reveal TRUUTHMAN, a pirate dressed in full pirate regalia, as in the ancient scroll side-illuminations,
who paces at center stage. He glares at the left door, at the audience, at the right door, and then sees the meal and the
beer. Glancing around, for he is clearly not in his own home and the meal clearly is not his, he sneaks over to it and raises
the beer to his lips. As he takes a huge gulp, GREYVMIAN bursts into the room through the right door, panting hard and startling
the pirate, who spews beer across the room.

GREYVMIAN: (still panting, but looking with mournful eyes at his now nearly empty tankard) My
beer.
(And then, noticing that some of the beer has speckled his maps) My
maps
.

TRUUTHMAN: (putting the beer down behind him) You’re late.

GREYVMIAN: My landlady was after me for the rent. I found a good dogfight and jumped into the middle of it, and thus lost
her— but it was a near thing. The dogs mistook her for one of their own and most fled in fear. (Pause) Were it not for one
big fellow—more a lover than a fighter—who took a fancy to her, I would not be here yet.

TRUUTHMAN: (laughing) For just such reasons do I keep to the sea. All landladies are an evil brood, I swear—worshipers of
dark and vengeful gods. I’ll take my chances with monsters, typhoons, and the bottomless ocean. Which brings me to my purpose:
You have my map?

GREYVMIAN: If you have my coastline. The Golden Chain of Manarkas for the southern tip of Strithia—that was our agreement.

TRUUTHMAN: I remember it. And I have made a true copy of my logs for you—my reckonings each day we sailed along the coast,
and the positions of the stars at night. I found a lovely bay at the northern edge of my journey this time that is full of
islands—I did not chart them, or even try. But south of that, you should get a good line. (Offers a sheaf of loose papers.)

GREYVMIAN: (taking the papers and glancing through them) These look good. Very good. You write a nice hand, and are remarkably
concise with your whereabouts for a pirate.

TRUUTHMAN: (looks around nervously, as if afraid the two of them will be overheard. GREYVMIAN, infected by his nervousness,
also looks around, though clearly with no idea what he is looking for) Have you a close tongue in your mouth?

GREYVMIAN: Close as a bound trunk with no key. Why?

TRUUTHMAN: Because you aren’t the only one to get copies of my logs. I make a copy as well for the Master of the City—from
here I go to meet with his man Crobitt. But none may know the Master of the Hars puts gold in the coffers of pirates.

GREYVMIAN: (astonished) Truly! My head rolls if any find that you have stepped one foot into my house, but the Master of the
City keeps you on his payroll. It simply proves that one should be born a Master, not a mapmaker.

TRUUTHMAN: (grinning) I hold the gods accountable for such things. I tell them what they shall give me, in women and wealth
and weather fair, and because I am Truuthman the Ruthless, they listen.

GREYVMIAN: (kissing his palm and pressing it to his forehead to ward off the evil of such hubris) Don’t play on the gods’
fields—you won’t like their games, and in any case, they cheat.

Wraith sighed and pushed away from his pages. He needed to get both the landlady and the pirate’s beautiful mistress on the
stage quickly, and while he had a grand idea for the landlady—perhaps in a ripped dress and with a huge dog still panting
and grinning behind her—for the life of him, he couldn’t think of any circumstance that would bring the fair Nalritha into
Greyvmian’s humble abode.

Wraith rested his chin in one cupped hand and listened to the dancing down the street from the little room he’d taken in the
Kaan village. He wanted to be out there with them. He wanted to be dancing in the night air—or at least learning the steps,
which was all he could claim to be doing, really. He wanted to be listening to the stories and the songs, sharing the evening
meal, laughing and celebrating life. He wanted to feel the freedom that the Kaan felt.

Greyvmian the Ponderer
sat on his shoulders like an evil giant, weighing him to the ground and sucking the joy out of him. He liked his ideas for
the play. He even felt a current of excitement about the way he was going to sneak his subversive messages about the dangers
of magic and the truths of government abuses of regular citizens and men’s right to control their own lives into this seemingly
funny bit of fluff.

But he wrote to a hellish deadline, and he wrote to the specifications of the Dragon Council, and he wrote under the shadow
of Velyn’s betrayal. And he kept seeing Nalritha as Velyn, who loved a poor map-maker but chose a rich and cruel pirate. It
would take everything he had in him to keep
Greyvmian the Ponderer
from becoming a tragedy.

At his door, tapping.

He pushed his pens and sheets away and rose, suddenly conscious as he did of the dull ache between his shoulders and the throbbing
at his temples, and the fact that two of his three lanterns had run out of oil and guttered into darkness. He remembered at
the same time that he had forgotten to eat, and realized that his bladder had filled to the point of pain.

He shouted at the door, “Just come in—I’ll be with you in a moment,” and ran to the back, to the mechanical toilet that did
not magically purify waste but merely moved it to a leach pit on the downhill side of the village. He considered, as he did
every time he used the odd toilet, what effect such toilets would have on the Empire if everyone were forced to use them—plentiful
clean water would become scarce, while leach pits sufficient to cleanse waste for the hundreds of millions of people living
under the rule of the Hars would take valuable land away from agriculture and at the same time would foul the air. He tried
not to think about that too much—about the Hars without magic. He kept telling himself that if everyone lived without magic,
they would still find ways to keep the air and water clean; they would still find ways to grow crops in the desert instead
of using prime land for farming; they would still find ways to transport the uncounted millions where they needed to be. They
would have enough food, enough space, enough of everything.

He didn’t believe himself when he thought it, though, and so his second fantasy was that people would find ways to use magic
responsibly, without human sacrifice or the destruction of men’s eternal souls.

He heard his guest moving around the little room that acted as living room and bedroom for him. He wondered which of the Kaan
had come to visit—one or another of his actresses and dancers would appear from time to time to see if he could be enticed
into bed for a bit of fun. He couldn’t. He knew he should go ahead and take one or two up on their offers, if nothing more
than to start the process of changing Velyn from ever-present agony to distant memory, but he didn’t care for the idea of
using any of the young women who came to him, and in his current state of mind, that was all he would be doing.

So he had a polite no already framed when he came out the door and found, not one of the Kaan women, but Velyn, standing nervously
in the center of his little room, carefully not touching anything.

“I had a hard time finding you,” she said.

“You shouldn’t have looked.”

“Solander gave me a general idea of where you might be. Beyond that …” She shrugged. She was studying him, as if trying to
read his thoughts from his face. He saw dark circles under her eyes, and noticed that her eyelids and nose were red and swollen,
as if she had been crying. He saw lines of little round bruises on her upper arms, too, as if she had been roughly grabbed—more
than once—by someone with strong hands. “I shouldn’t be here,” she said. “I shouldn’t have come at all, but … but I thought
you ought to know.”

Wraith could not see her standing in his room without also seeing her by the fountain on the night she took vows, with someone
who was not him and who wasn’t even the man to whom she’d sworn faithfulness, however temporary the term of that faithfulness
was supposed to be. He turned so that he wasn’t looking at her, but instead at his desk, and said, “What should I know, Velyn?
That I never really mattered to you? That you always had other men—that the whole time we were together, you had other lovers?
I know all of that now. After your nutevaz, I spent a little time looking. Stupid of me, I know, but I think it’s helped me
to come to terms with losing you.”

He glanced at her and found irritation rather than remorse in her expression. “Be quiet a minute,” she said. “I haven’t much
time, and if I’m found here—well, that would be disastrous. Both Luercas and Dafril are working to discredit you. Luercas
hates you—I suppose partly because I was with you before I was with him. But there’s more to it than that. He’s hired men
to check into your background, to see if you’ve been involved with any illegal activities.”

“I haven’t.”

“You’re here, in this proscribed village. You’ve hired these villagers to work for you. You could be banned from Oel Artis
for that—possibly from the whole of the Hars.” She sighed. “But that isn’t the thing that worries me most.”

“No?”

“Your papers are good, but if the men investigating you decide to write to your family in Ynjarval, they’re going to discover
that the people you and Jess are pretending to be both died in a tragic airible accident at about the same time that you appeared
here and moved into Artis House. And if they discover that, they’ll find a way to track you back to the Warrens.”

Wraith didn’t want to listen to her. He needed to be a playwright to free the Warreners. He needed to be able to go to and
from the Warrens to gather images to feed to his allies who had access to the nightlies. He needed to have access to the equipment
that produced the anti-magic flyers he wrote. And if he were being watched, investigated—hunted— he wouldn’t be able to do
any of those things.

Solander would soon be in a position to help him—as soon as he got his position in Research, he would be able to create diversions.
Another year, Wraith thought. Another year, and Solander would have finished his exit project and would be declared a Dragon.

Another year. Would Wraith be able to hold out for a year?

He had the patronage of the Dragon Council—but would that be of any value? Not if anyone in power discovered that he only
pretended to be stolti. The Silent Inquest would turn on him between two beats of a heart.

He didn’t want to listen to Velyn—but he didn’t dare ignore her. If people were checking into his background, he needed to
have a background that would withstand deep checking.

Which probably meant that, as soon as he had
Greyvmian the Ponderer
on the stage and running smoothly, he needed to take some of the large amount of money he’d accumulated recently and spend
it on a trip “home” to Ynjarval to buy himself an alibi. The dead parents would never betray him; he just had to be sure that
the rest of the “relatives” would come through for him in his moment of need.

And while he was at it, he thought he ought to make sure he covered Jess’s background, too. No sense making his own alibi
perfect and leaving a hole in hers that would destroy them both.

He took a deep breath, and turned and actually looked at Velyn. “Thank you for coming to tell me this. I’m sorry for the …
the rudeness of my reception. I appreciate your concern for my well-being—” A smile flickered at the left corner of Velyn’s
mouth; Wraith recognized that smile as one of superior amusement. He stopped his placating apology in mid-sentence. “What’s
so funny?”

“I didn’t risk my neck for your sake, Wraith. You—a Warrener— treated me, a stolta, as if you had both the right and the justification
to question my actions. If Luercas and Dafril could find out the truth about you without that truth also implicating me in
the keeping of your secret all these years, I wouldn’t whisper a single word of protest. As far as I’m concerned, you deserve
whatever is coming your way, and I’m quite sure sooner or later something will get you.” She laughed softly. “Just know that
I’ll be smiling when I get the news.” She turned toward the door. “My sole interest in this is in keeping myself out of the
little circle of people whose lives you destroy when you and your schemes are discovered.”

“Ah.” Wraith nodded and let himself look at her and really see her— not as he had wanted her to be, but as she was—a high-born
woman who had been slumming with him for the secret thrill of it, who may or may not have cared a little about him but who
had never cared enough to make a commitment to him, who felt certain that she was a better person than he was simply because
of an accident of birth; and, he had to admit, an unpleasant, vindictive bitch. He crossed his arms over his chest and said,
“Nice bruises, by the way. Luercas give those to you?”

She flushed and opened the door.

“Don’t come back,” he said. “I’d hate to have anyone I know see you here. You might give me a bad reputation.”

She stared at him and her mouth dropped open—and then, with an inarticulate growl of rage, she slammed the door behind her.

Wraith sagged against the wall and closed his eyes against the welling tears. Gods, he wished he could hate her.