Vincalis the Agitator (60 page)

Behind him, he heard Patr and Jess getting out of the aircar; Jess still sounded unhappy, while Patr merely sounded exhausted.

“What are we supposed to do here, Wraith?” Patr asked. “As a hiding place, it doesn’t seem too bad. I don’t know of any of
the Inquest’s agents who have ever been posted to Three Spears, even for short-term duty. And it’s out of the Empire’s full-service
area, which will inconvenience anyone pursuing us as much as it will inconvenience us.”

“Maybe we
are
just supposed to hide here,” Wraith said. “Vodor Imrish isn’t … speaking to me, precisely. I just have this …” He faltered
to a stop. “I don’t have any words for it, really. It’s sort of a tug at my gut. When I’m headed the right way, doing the
right thing, I can feel it. When I start to drift, I can feel that, too.”

“Couldn’t just ask him for a map and a schedule, eh?” Patr asked.

Wraith laughed.

“That’s not funny,” Jess said. “That’s disrespectful. You shouldn’t question the workings of a god that way, especially not
the god that saved your life.”

Wraith looked at her. “Why not? As far I can tell, that’s the entire purpose of having a brain and free will—to ask questions,
make decisions, then act on them. Why should gods be immune to our questions … or our opinions, for that matter? I have to
agree with Patr. I wish we had a map and a schedule; I wouldn’t be standing here wondering if I’ve dragged the three of us
across half an ocean out of idiocy and imagining that the queasiness in my gut was anything more than a mild case of food
poisoning. And as for Vodor Imrish saving our lives … fine. Yes. He saved
our
lives. But he didn’t save Solander, and he could have. He didn’t save Velyn, or any of the people who were with her. Maybe
he didn’t even save the people who were with Sol, though it looked like he did. I think we have a right to question his actions.”

The steep, rocky beach provided enough obstacles that none of them could speak until they’d reached the top.

At the top of the rise, none of them could think of anything to say. Masses of the Kaan, and clusters of Wraith’s employees,
and whole mobs of initiates of the Order of Resonance stood at the edge of the village, waiting in silence, staring back at
them. Soft light radiated from the crowd, as if they were mage-lights set in a night garden to illuminate a path without distracting
from the stars.

They were the lights Wraith had seen from the air, the lights that had guided him in. He’d known to look for lights. Those
had been the only lights.

Wraith’s skin felt like ice. The touch of a god was a frightening thing—it had too much of caprice to its nature. He rejoiced
to see his people, but the circumstances frightened him.

“It’s Gellas,” someone said. “He’s come!”

Then, like a small sea of light, they ran to him and embraced him, and cheered his survival and his escape from the hands
of the Dragons and the Inquest. And his escape from death.

In the Dragon Council, the battle of words raged on. “We have to stop the rebels, agreed. But if we discontinue magic service
along the trade routes, we cut our own throats! We won’t have food coming into the city, we won’t have trade goods, and we
won’t have our import fuel from the Strithian borders.”

“We’re still getting slaves in from Strithia?”

“Eight percent of our new fuel supplies come from there,” the lucky survivor and new Master of Energy, Addis Woodsing, said.
“Would you care to cut eight percent off our power production and see what happens?”

Grath Faregan, new Grand Master of the Inquest, who’d gone straight from his safe room to the meeting, sat upright, his back
jammed uncomfortably against an edge of his seat. He’d called in the favor that the Dragon Council owed to the Inquest: He’d
demanded a voting seat on the Council in exchange for the conspirators that the Inquest had delivered—and that the Council
had lost. The Dragons resented bitterly keeping their end of the bargain, but previous demonstrations of the Inquest’s power—family
members taken, then returned home in pieces, stolti fortunes overturned, stolti lives ruined—kept the councilors to their
bargain.

When the Master of Energy fell silent, Zider Rost, the new Master of Research—who acquired her post by being the highest-ranking
member of the Research Department not required to attend the executions, thus now the highest-ranking member of the department,
period—stood and cleared her throat. She was a thin-faced woman, clearly uncomfortable with her abrupt lurch into power. “If
we destroy the one thing the rebels all seem to want to save,” she said, “they’ll have nothing left with which to rally others
to their cause. Their rebellion will die, and then we can round them up at our leisure.”

The Council’s Grand Master frowned. “What do you mean, destroy the one thing they want to save?”

“The Warrens—and everyone in them. If there are no more Warrens, the bastards have no grand cause.”

“If there are no more Warrens, we have no magic,” Woodsing of Energy pointed out.

“You haven’t been following recent research, have you?” Rost of Research leaned forward and placed her hands flat on the table.
She looked now at every master in the room in turn. “We are mere months away from liquid power. We’ve finished preliminary
testing; we’re in the
rewhah
-handling phase of spell development now. It’s as neat a spell-set as anything I’ve seen in my entire career. We got the idea
…” She chuckled softly. “We got the idea from that play by Vincalis—the one with the mage who turned people into an elixir
of youth. We thought an elixir of pure energy would be more useful, and we have the spell now that will do it. Will liquefy
a human, and bind the complete energy from blood and bone, flesh and will, and best of all, the entire soul, in a liquid matrix
that never evaporates, is insoluble with water or other liquids, and that maintains one hundred percent of its potency until
it’s tapped.”

“Right now our energy from the Warrens is renewable,” Woodsing said. “The Warreners breed.”

“The Warreners breed problems,” the Master of Transport said.

The Master of Cities rose to his feet. “Agreed. We could certainly replace the Warrens and our breeding stock at a later date.
Nothing could be simpler. But by eliminating both Warrens and Warreners now—by leaving in their place a pool of liquid fuel
that bears no resemblance to people—we could show citizens what was behind the Warren walls, state that all we’ve ever had
in there was fuel derived from the sun and the earth and the power of the sea….” He smiled, a happy, happy man. “Oh, this
is lovely. We demonstrate once and for all that the traitors’ propaganda against the Empire was nothing but lies, we discredit
the entire group of them—and then we hunt them down and kill them.”

“And if the rebels are using this new magic of theirs to hide in the Warrens, as seems likely—since you people cannot find
a trace of them anywhere else?” Faregan asked.

“Then that’s a problem solved, isn’t it?” someone said under his breath.

“If we could create the right delivery device,” the Master of Defense said, leaning back in his chair, “we could time the
… ah … the conversion of our fuel sources into liquid fuel to hit all at the same time. Air attacks, I’m thinking. And then
we could say that the attacks came from the traitors, and that they attempted to destroy our fuel storage areas, but that
we stopped them. Maybe we could destroy a couple of the islands off the east coast and say they were hiding there, but that
we destroyed their bases and most of them at the same time. Thus, the Empire remains intact, the traitors have been stopped
yet again, and justice will prevail. We start a search for the remaining traitors. We make it thorough. People will be turning
in their own grandmothers to save themselves.”

The rest of the Masters smiled. Except for Faregan. He simply shook his head. “You’ve been pointing to the Warrens all these
years as the source of rioting, violence, criminal activity so bad that you had to keep the perpetrators locked behind walls.
Everyone in the Empire knows you have people in the Warrens. You can’t just suddenly pretend that every Warren in the Hars
is a fuel storage area.”

The Master of Diplomacy sighed heavily. “We don’t need to pretend no one lives in the Warrens. We can offer a story much closer
to the truth. We can claim that the members of the underground set the spells that destroyed the Warrens because not even
they were crazy enough to actually want to have to deal with Warreners, and that the underground then tried to make it look
like the Empire attacked.” He shrugged. “We can create all the evidence we need to prove our statements—and that will cost
the underground any sympathy it might have. Or we can claim that the traitors went into hiding within the Warrens and that
the Warreners were in league with them and ready to use criminal magic to break out. If we say that the Warreners were about
to erupt into cities throughout the Empire, raping, murdering, robbing and pillaging, any measures we choose to keep the Warreners
contained are going to receive the full support of the citizenry. They live in terror of the dangerous madmen we keep behind
those walls. The citizens of the Empire wouldn’t dare protest.”

“That works for me,” Luercas said.

The other Masters nodded.

“How long,” the Master of Cities asked, “until we have the completed liquefaction spell?”

“We thought we could finish it within six months with full testing. If you need it before that,” the Master of Research said,
“you’ll get it, but with the understanding that
rewhah
-handling might not be … perfect.”

The Masters looked at each other, and it was clear from the expressions on their faces that each of them was thinking of the
disaster in the Gold Building arena. Everyone knew what imperfect
rewhah
-handling could do.

“You have three months,” the Grand Master said. “Sooner, if you feel confident that the spell won’t go wrong.”

“But no later,” one of the other Masters—Faregan didn’t see which one—said.

Faregan weighed their reactions. They were now hot for the chase— hungry for the destruction of the Warrens, ready to hunt
down the traitors and wage an all-out war against them. He would have to make sure that they could find the traitors when
the time came. Faregan now owned by blood oath the finest network of spies in the Hars; he had no doubt that he would be able
to locate the rebels and get the information to the Council. In fact, it would give him a way to get back in the Council’s
good graces when he needed to. Come bearing an excellent gift, and hope that the bastards didn’t look too closely at what
it would cost them. Faregan had already decided on the price. The Council was going to destroy Gellas, destroy Jethis … and
it was going to destroy Jess, because if he couldn’t have her, he would know that he had ended her.

And they were going to do this no matter what else it cost.

He would see to it.

G
ods inspire. In times of hardship, gods offer comfort. Gods occasionally, in the direst of circumstances, intervene and save
their followers—or those they would claim as followers.

But even the most attentive of gods is too distant and too intangible to carry out the everyday tasks of leadership. These
tasks, therefore, fell to Wraith. And Wraith, in mourning for the best friend he had not been able to save, felt like he was
drowning in anxious demands. The survivors needed permanent places to stay. They needed food. They needed encouragement and
comfort. But most of all, they needed a vision, direction, words to stir them to action, to bind them into a single force,
and to lead them forward.

Wraith tried to give them stirring words, yet to them he was only Master Gellas, a stolti one step up from a covil-osset,
a decent theater manager, perhaps, and the man who had once been the intermediary between the secretive Vincalis and the masses
who followed him—but not a visionary leader.

To Jess, after another discussion with dissatisfied, worried men and women, he muttered, “What we need is Vincalis.”

Jess looked at him and said, “Then get him.”

Wraith said, “I
am
him, Jess.”

“I know.”

“Then you know why I can’t get him. All of these people know me. I can’t stand up now and say, ‘Well, yes, I’m Master Gellas,
but I’m Vincalis, too, and now I’m going to … what? Lead you to the Good Ground?’” He shook his head. “They have the spells.
The ones who will have anything to do with magic are learning them. The rest are building shelters. But we have to go back,
Jess. We have to go to the cities and free the Warreners. We have to use Solander’s magic to release them from the poisons
of the Way-fare and their years of mindlessness. We have to save them from the Dragons’ spells. If Solander were here, he
could convince everyone to look to that. If Vincalis were real,
he
could convince everyone to move forward. But all we have left is me.”

“Then you’re going to have to do it.” Jess rested a hand on his shoulder, turned him to face her, and said, “Wraith, you know
I never wanted you to get involved in this, and I avoided it as much as I could—but I was wrong. I was wrong to try to abandon
who I am and where I came from, and I was wrong to try to get you to do that. Do what you have to do. I’m right with you,
and I’ll do everything in my power to help you. But I have the feeling that we don’t have much time. Something bad is going
to happen. The Dragons aren’t going to just let us get away without coming after us. We have to be ready. Use Vincalis if
you have to. Write his words, claim that he is in touch with the soul of Solander … pretend you’re writing another of his
plays. Work at night. Patr and I will figure out ways to cover for you during the day. When you have what you need, just …”
She shrugged. “Just say that Vincalis sent the messages to you in the dead of night. You could convince them of that. You
convinced them that Vincalis was a real person for all those years.”