Vincalis the Agitator (49 page)

“So, who knows you’re with me?”

“Young Idrik, at least as much as he is capable of knowing,” Farsee said. “And when someone thinks to question him, the questioner
will know what Idrik knows.”

“Then we’re likely to have someone charging in on us at an inopportune time.”

“Hardly. You have no keeper in the village. If you choose to wander about the island, none will question you. And none are
likely to come to your rescue, either—so I suggest you stay out of the jungle unless accompanied. It can be a dangerous place.”

Velyn nodded. “I see.”

The jungle’s darkness seemed oppressive to Velyn. She liked the coolness of the lush, light-obscuring greenery, but she found
her eyes straying to movements at the periphery of her vision, and discovered that she kept more quiet than was her wont while
her ears strained to pick up the soft padding of heavy, careful feet, or to notice first the hiss that would precede the dropping
of a giant snake onto her slender shoulders from the branches that arched overhead.

“You seem nervous,” Farsee said after a while.

“I’m a city girl by nature and preference.”

“You’ll like the city I’m taking you to—or at least what remains of it. It’s truly amazing.”

“Well … a city sounds good. Hard to imagine that there could ever have been one on this little island.”

“It once housed a part of a great civilization. That civilization has crumbled to dust, leaving little more behind it than
stones and statues and a few carved messages that no one has figured out how to decipher. The people of this place were artists,
though. But you’ll see. We haven’t much farther.”

He was as good as his word. They walked only a few more moments before they reached a cliff along which ran a narrow, paved
stone road and a low stone wall no doubt meant to keep passersby from falling to their death as they traversed the high thoroughfare.
Farsee stopped her and pointed to her left. “That way, you would find the ruins of many small houses, a once-grand market,
baths, and a few other public buildings. Some of the villagers still go there regularly to study the inscriptions on the stone
and see if they can make sense of them. I don’t busy myself with such things; the words of the dead and dust hold little appeal
to me. But to the right, there is a secluded chapel.” He shrugged. “At least I must guess that it is a chapel, since it follows
the architectural pattern for chapels built by these people. It
doesn’t
get many visits from the villagers, since it has no inscriptions carved anywhere around it, and since it is so inconveniently
located to the rest of this little city.”

“We’re going right, then?”

Farsee smiled. “You’ll start hearing the waterfall in just a moment. Wait until you see it; to me it looks like a thing alive.”

The two of them stepped carefully over vines and roots that had grown into and over the ancient road, worked their way around
a steep bend, and then Velyn did hear the waterfall. As they came to a ravine, water echoed through the steep valley. The
sound faded again once they were past the bridge, but returned when, on the other side, they went into an unlit tunnel. They
had not touched each other until this time, but Farsee took her hand as the utter darkness of the tunnel blanked out the rest
of the world. The sound of the waterfall roared through the darkness, providing a hint of the direction they must follow.
Farsee, his voice raised over the distant roar, said, “This isn’t terribly far, but the stone paving becomes increasingly
slippery the closer we get to our destination. Just take your time and hold tight to my hand.”

Velyn thought this was going to extremes for an afternoon of amusement. Had he told her how far they would have to travel,
that they would be so tired and sweaty by the end of their journey—or that some portion of it would be through a tunnel that
she wouldn’t enter alone for double shares of her father’s fortune—she would have said she could be hot and sweaty in her
little room and entirely bypass the entertainment value of fear.

Instead, she let him lead her through the darkness, and she wondered how he navigated. Could he see in darkness, as cats could?
Did he have some marks cut into the path that he could follow with his feet alone? She didn’t know. She knew only that the
sense she got of the place they traveled through was that the tunnel walls were very far away—and that if she pulled free
of Farsee, she could become lost in the darkness and never find her way to light.

And then, after interminable creeping along, Farsee asked, “See up ahead?”

She squinted in the darkness, not seeing anything. Then she realized that the little spot up ahead that she thought she’d
imagined was in fact real—green and light and growing closer with each step.

“Wonderful,” she said, and now she pulled him forward, eager to be free of the tunnel’s unending reign of night.

He reined her in with an arm around her waist. “Careful,” he told her. “It wouldn’t pay to hurry. You step off the path here
and I’d have the demons’ own time finding you again, assuming I ever could. The tunnel, I suspect, tested the faithful. But
it weeded out a lot of the faithless at the same time.”

She shivered—the cool and damp of the tunnel would give her an excuse if he should ask her what bothered her, but she felt
her fear and a sense of ghostly presences much more.

“I can’t imagine anything being worth this sort of a trek,” she said.

A moment later, he led them free of the tunnel, and she took back the words. On
this
side of the tunnel, fruit trees and flowering trees grew in rampant, unchecked, glorious profusion. Here, light filtered
through a low, sparse canopy and dappled the richly green, grassy ground. Off to her left, she could see a domed building,
its windows long gone but the gracefully curving lines of its ancient architecture still as stunning as they had been the
day it was built. And behind and to the right of it, perfectly framed by the mouth of the tunnel in a manner that could only
have been planned, the waterfall tumbled from high black cliffs—a thin, twisting ribbon of rainbow-tinted living art.

“Oh,” Velyn whispered.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“I’ve never seen anything more flawlessly created, or more soothing to the eye.”

Farsee laughed. “You will. We’re going to the chapel now.”

To the chapel? Yes, she’d been in the mood to be entertained, amused, and, if she was lucky, driven out of her body for a
short while by a talented lover—but that had been back at the house into which the bastards of the Order had installed her
before going on their way, abandoning her in this steaming hellhole. The mood had passed. Now she felt the urge to eat, then
maybe sleep—and then she thought she might give some thought to sex.

But Farsee, pulling her forward like an excited child dragging a reluctant parent, managed to impart some of his enthusiasm
to her. And when he ushered her beneath the moss-edged arch and into the chapel itself, she stopped and gasped.

A combination of art and nature had turned what had once been a lovely chapel into what could only be considered a bower for
romance. Enough of the roof had caved in to permit light for growing things—and the flowering vines that covered the beautiful
stone walls filled the still air with a sweet, heady scent as compelling as the musk of sex itself. At the back of the chapel,
what might have once been a sacrificial fount or a baptismal font or even a sacred spring bubbled from the wall into a clear,
moss-edged round pond. Water poured from the pond into a stream carved into the floor; the stream split into two waterfalls
at the steps leading down to the main portion of the chapel, and then ran out in two pretty, softly burbling little rivulets
in which tiny, jewel-colored fish darted and flashed. Iridescent birds spun in and out of the vines above, their wings so
quick Velyn could only see the blur of them; they darted from flower to flower and hung in the air as if suspended by their
own magic before shooting out of the open roof at last, like tiny, fiery festival rockets.

And at the juncture just beneath the twinned waterfalls sat an enormous ivory basin—and in the basin rested cushions and comforters
of silk and linen. Right in the falls beside the basin, a bottle of golden wine was chilling. Bread and seppe fruit and taratale
pastries, legendary for their aphrodisiac properties, sat on an altar. A lutelle stood on its own little stand, and a gold-bound
book lay amid the cushions, an invitation to read. Velyn thought she recognized it simply by its exquisite binding— Carmathi
Toruri’s
Poetry of Lovers
.

“But for the food, I would think you had this little lovenest ready-prepared for any woman you could lure here.”

“And you would be mistaken. When I saw you walking across the compound your first day there, I thought that never had I seen
a woman I so wanted—and never had I seen one I was so unlikely to get.” Farsee leaned close to her and brushed his lips along
the side of her neck, and she shivered, wonderfully. “And yet, here you are, and all my preparations these last few days are
suddenly made worthwhile.”

She turned into his embrace and whispered, “And yet you could have shared sport with me in my little room.”

He nodded solemnly. “And chanced the interruptions of villagers curious about you, and suffered the heat of that tiny enclosed
space, where here we have air cooled by waterfalls and the wings of lovely birds, and we have food, and music, and poetry.”

She slid a hand down his chest, down his belly, and down—and stroked him through his coarse clothing, and felt him respond.
He was all over her then, food and music and poetry forgotten as they shed clothes and inhibitions with equal speed. Their
mating, like the rough coupling of lions, had as much of fight to it as of lust. He held her down, bit the back of her neck,
and she cried out in the shock of pain become pleasure; she turned and pivoted a hip into him, caught him off balance and
threw him into the basin of cushions, and dove on top of him, forcing his hands above his head, riding him hard. They tangled,
untangled, crashed together again and again, in configurations new to one or both of them, and at endless last when they lay
sodden and spent across the cool linen and warmer silk, he laughed, reached across her, and pulled the wine from the tiny,
murmuring waterfall.

“Drink?” he asked.

“I could drink it dry by myself.”

“But I won’t let you do that, greedy girl.” He poured her a glass, handed it to her, and poured one for himself. Then, the
effort more than he had energy for, he flopped back into the cushions and said, “My gods-all, what a gloriously beddable bitch
you are, woman. You have thighs like pythons; I thought my ribs would break from the strain.”

Velyn didn’t inhale her wine, but it was a near thing. She coughed a little and said, “Nor have I ever experienced a talent
quite like yours. Could we just stay here? At least a day or a week or maybe a month or two? I don’t relish the walk back—and
you did things I didn’t even know were possible.”

He sighed. “Well, we don’t have to walk back. I hid an aircar here— that was how I got all the cushions and the food here
ahead of time and still managed to have them fresh. We can stay awhile longer, but not overnight.” He brushed her breast with
his lips. “Sadly. Wondrous as this place is during the daylight hours, I would not wish to be here once darkness falls. The
jungle has no respect for humans then.”

Velyn sighed her disappointment, then brightened. “No matter. You have the aircar. We can fly to civilization and continue
our entertainment there.”

He smiled and said, “Perhaps we can, at that.” She sipped the last of her wine and held out her glass, and he reached over
and refilled it for her. He fed her one of the pastries. She had a bit more of the wine. And then she slept.

She woke to find herself still naked, but now bound. The last rays of the sun illuminated the broken edge of the roof; inside
the chapel, night had already come. Farsee had gone, and had taken the food, her clothing, the book of poetry, the musical
instrument, and even all the cushions upon which she had been lying; instead, she found herself stretched out in the smooth
ivory basin like a sacrifice chained and awaiting the knife-wielding priest. She wondered if she had become just that.

Her heart thudded as something big moved outside the chapel. She tried the bindings at her wrists, working to free her hands.
But they fit to her as if they were a part of her. She struggled to her feet, and found that, though Farsee—or someone else,
if not Farsee—had bound both her hands and feet, she had not been tethered to the basin or anything else that might keep her
within the chapel. She could flee. Hobbled, naked, nearly blind in the darkness, and with a headache and a foul taste in her
mouth that suggested Farsee had poured more than wine into her glass, she did not, however, think she would get far. If Farsee
feared for his own life in the jungle at night, she doubted she would have any chance at all.

She had to find shelter—something she could barricade. She would have to go through that hellish dark passageway to get away
from the chapel; would have to find one of the complete, regularly visited buildings on the other side. If she could hold
out this one night, maybe one of the villagers would find her in the ruins in the morning.