Vincalis the Agitator (35 page)

“Shield,” Borlen said.

Solander went over the equations. “Yes. Almost. You have the right idea, but you’ve missed critical inputs here … and here….”
He shook his head, amazed. “Still, for just roughing it from a raw start, you’ve done a real piece of work here. There’s something
missing….” He went over Borlen’s formula again. Some part of the application of the magic didn’t quite fit with the system
Solander had developed—it felt like a reuse of the Dragon-style magic. But Solander would find that and fix it. It was the
concept of the thing that was so beautiful.

Borlen hadn’t designed a shield that would merely buffer—the sort of shield that wizards always used to try to keep down the
rewhah
damage to themselves. If Solander could figure out the off bit of it, the damned thing would be impermeable to any attack,
sending one hundred percent of the
rewhah
plus one hundred percent of the spell itself in a tightly focused beam straight back to the attacker: purely defensive magic
with a brutally offensive kick. No doubt an attacker would be able to bleed off some of his rebounded
rewhah
onto available sacrifices, but that
rewhah
would be hunting for him specifically, and the harder he’d tried to hit the shielded parties, the harder he was going to
get slammed in return. And if he hadn’t calculated getting hit with his own spell … “The poor bastard would fry himself,”
Solander muttered. No normal shield had ever been able to send the attack back alongside the
rewhah
. That was simply beyond the known laws of magic. Until now.

“What poor bastard?”

“The attacker who came at this thing thinking he was attacking a normal spellshield.”

“That’s sort of the idea. You have a defensive magic here that actually eliminates the need for offensive magic. You’re attacked,
you simply send the attack back to the attacker. You huddle under your little shield and the harder they hit you, the more
they hurt themselves. And you expend almost no energy.” He paused. “Assuming you actually got your base theory numbers right
and your new form of magic works. I mean … we still haven’t done tests to make sure that you weren’t just getting error readings
on the instruments.”

Solander was staring at the formula for that shield. A single person could hold off the attacks of an army of wizards and
send the weight of their attacks straight back at them—and they would know nothing but that they were attacking a fierce and
determined enemy. They wouldn’t know that they were getting hit by their own fire.

His skin started to crawl. He tried to imagine what the Dragons would say about his self-powered spells, about his magic that
did not permit attacks but only defense, that did not permit the caster to cause any harm in order to work without
rewhah,
and that required the caster to take on the
rewhah
for any harm he caused himself. And he had an unpleasant moment of clarity.

The Hars Ticlarim was an empire built on the suffering of others. It was built that way because the builders wanted it that
way. They didn’t want to take responsibility for their own spells. They didn’t want to limit what they could do to defense,
to passive positions, to things that would cause no harm. By such limitation, they would no longer be able to use magic to
expand the Empire, or to keep the parts of it already acquired in line. Magic would cease to have an element of fear about
it—for what wizard would use magic as a form of public punishment and torture for wrongdoers if he had to take the cost of
the spell from his own flesh and blood and bones and life? What wizard would pay that price, and
then
take all of the
rewhah
from the spell he had cast onto his own body? Why would he do that, when he could channel both the power to fuel his spell
and the rebound from it into caged creatures that he had convinced himself were not truly human, that he had convinced himself
were mindless and of no other value to anyone—even themselves?

Who was going to overturn three-thousand-plus years of “this is the way we do things” for a system that might be morally superior
but that was self-limiting and required individual sacrifice? No one, that was who.

And what was going to happen when he took this system before the Council of Dragons and said,
Hey, look, people, I just found a better way to do things, and now we can free all the Warreners and shut down all the Warrens
and close down all the power stations. We won’t be able to do half the things we can do right now, but …?

He could envision several outcomes to his revelation of new laws of magic—and none of them were good. The Dragons could simply
ridicule him and refuse to review his work. That happened sometimes with promising theories that offered challenges to current
and in-favor theories. Or they might remove him from the Dragons. Or they might accuse him of treason and exile him from the
Empire.

He couldn’t envision a single situation in which they would look at what he had done and say,
Solander, great work! This is what we’ve been waiting three thousand years for someone to discover.

Solander turned to Borlen and said, “You know, I think the two of us need to take off for the rest of the day. Go get a drink,
develop a testing schedule that we can carry out over the next few days, and just talk.”

Borlen wasn’t smiling. He’d caught something in Solander’s tone, and suddenly he looked nervous. He nodded slowly. “I’m good
for a beer. I even know a nice quiet bar with big tables where we can spread out our work and no one will bother us.”

Solander started rolling up the sheets with the formulas and equations and theories on them. “Excellent. I’m buying. We can
get a good night’s sleep and get in here early tomorrow and hit this hard. But I want to make sure we’ve covered all the safeguards
before we do any live testing—and I want to triple-check the equipment. If it’s just a calibration error, I don’t want to
embarrass myself in front of the Dragons, spouting off about finding some whole new law of magic.”

Borlen said, “Right, then. Let’s get that beer.”

They left the workroom, and as he always did, Solander sealed it. He told himself that he had to make it look like he planned
to come back in the morning. He had to do everything the same as he did every day when he left. Borlen walked beside him,
still looking a bit nervous. They waved to a couple of colleagues who worked with their doors opened. One called, “Knocking
off early, you slackard?” and Solander managed to laugh. “Beer calleth, and methinks I must listen.” He shrugged and added,
“We have a huge workload tomorrow. We want to be rested before we start doing live testing.”

The colleague grinned and waved him on. “The beer would be good enough reason for me. See you tomorrow.”

At the access gate, the young wizard who did the workroom monitoring said, “Got something big today, eh, Master Solander?”

Solander said, “I’d like to think so. But there’s always a chance that I didn’t calibrate my instruments correctly—and if
that’s the case, I have another big nothing. Tonight we’re double-checking equations so we don’t accidentally fry ourselves.
Tomorrow we’re doing testing.”

“Well, good luck to you, then. I won’t see you—I have a two-day off.”

Solander smiled. One lucky break, then. He nodded to the intern and he and Borlen exited through the guard portal. He felt
the slight buzz as the spell slid over his skin—but he hadn’t done anything wrong. Yet. He and Borlen exited safely.

As soon as they were safely in the aircar and away from the Research Center, Solander told Borlen, “We aren’t going to get
a beer.”

“I didn’t think we were, Master Solander. Something is the matter, isn’t it?”

“I think so. I think we’re in trouble. The question is, how much trouble are we in, and is it too late to get out of it?”

“So where are we going?”

Solander, who had the controls, frowned. “I don’t know. We can’t go anyplace that the Dragons routinely monitor—which means
that I can’t go home, and you can’t go home. We can’t go to any of the places we usually go.”

The color drained from Borlen’s face. “We’re … we’re monitored?”

“Certainly,” Solander said. “We are working on the most sensitive information in the Empire. The procedures we develop, in
the hands of the wrong people, could overturn the current government, could destroy lives … could topple the Hars Ticlarim.
Three thousand years of the most magnificent civilization ever to grace the planet threatened by a few men working in secret
on a few projects.” Solander laughed softly. “There are probably no portions of your life that are not under constant outside
scrutiny. The watchers for the Dragons of the Council have distance viewers with capabilities that exceed anything you or
I might be able to get our hands on. They use secret spells, and there is one division of Research that is responsible for
keeping those spells ahead of anything that anyone else can counter.”

“Except maybe us,” Borlen whispered.

Solander looked at him, and realization dawned. “Yes. Except maybe us. Gods-all, are we in trouble.”

“You don’t think they’ll be happy with this new law you’ve discovered?”

“I think if they find out we’ve actually got something real, they’ll have us killed. The more I think about this, and the
more I consider what our work would mean to established magic, the more I think they wouldn’t be satisfied with sending us
to the mines, or even into the Warrens. You and I and what we know represent a threat to them.”

“We
are
them.”

Solander shook his head. “We
were
them. And then I discovered something that they are not going to want to use, and are definitely not going to want anyone
else to use, and you added a refinement to it that I could never even have imagined. You think the Empire uses the best magical
paradigms? It doesn’t. It suppresses the best ones because they are so good it can’t counter them. What we are taught, what
we are directed to develop, are techniques that are just good enough to accomplish what needs to be done without threatening
the established seats of power. And we have just jumped way outside of our bounds.”

Borlen leaned back in his seat and covered his face with his hands. “Why were you working on non-
rewhah
magic?”

“I thought it was important. And I was thinking about it from a power-usage standpoint. I had never even considered military
applications. But the first thing you came up with, after looking at my work for practically no time, was a military application.
If you could use my theory to develop that, so could someone else.” He glanced over at Borlen, who even in the midst of this
disaster took the time to look offended. “You’re brilliant, Borlen—but you aren’t the only brilliant research intern around.”

They were down off the Aboves, cruising along the back streets of a district of the city that Solander did not know well.
It was a pretty part of the city, he thought. A lot of trees, a lot of fountains, an old air to it that made him think of
the First and Second Dynasties. Because the buildings were all of mages’ whitestone, they hadn’t aged—they might have been
three thousand years old, or three. But they had ornaments on the archwork, and decorative, lacy spires far out of the current
sleek architectural fashion.

Wraith had mentioned putting a theater in one of the oldest districts of the city. Solander wondered if it could be anywhere
close.

He’d fallen out of touch with Wraith. They’d both gone their own ways—Wraith had fallen away from the Aboves and the people
who inhabited it, and Solander had found most of his life sequestered not just in the Aboves, but in the few rooms of the
Research Center that offered the equipment and space that he needed for his work. Once in a while Solander would go to one
of Wraith’s plays and speak to him afterward, but Wraith seemed to have let go of his dream of freeing the Warreners from
their prison. Truth be told, Solander hadn’t given it much thought, either.

But Wraith would have an idea of what to do, Solander thought. Because Wraith had to constantly pretend to be someone he was
not, he had never lost that edge of wariness that kept him alive. He produced his plays, he made his money, he did whatever
it was that he did in his spare time—but he had never made the mistake of thinking the Empire existed to serve him or help
him. Wraith had always considered the Dragons of the Council and the Hars Ticlarim evil. He had never lost that image of them,
and so he had never relaxed.

He would be able to tell Solander what to do. Wraith would have some ideas for how Borlen and Solander could disguise the
importance of what they’d discovered; or perhaps he might be able to suggest some method by which the two of them could safely
disappear.

Solander started actively looking for the theater. Wraith might not be there—probably wouldn’t, really. He had three theaters
in the city and a number of other business interests now. But someone at the theater would know how to find him quickly, and
that was the thing that mattered most to Solander at that moment.