Vincalis the Agitator (65 page)

The Empire’s soul-fed magic had to end, though. Even a god was willing to offer his assistance in ending this unimaginable
evil. Wraith knew he and his people stood on the side of right. He just wondered what price the world would have to pay for
the end of evil.

It all might come to nothing, of course. If the words he’d written in Vincalis’s hand, channeling the words of Solander, were
true, at the appointed hour—or should he think of it as the Appointed Hour?—Vodor Imrish would gather up each of the Falcons’
aircar-shaped boxes and transport them and everyone in them to the many Warrens around the world. In each aircar, the wizard
and his team would deploy the spell-set, Vodor Imrish would take them to the next Warren on their route, and they would deploy
their spell-set there. According to Wraith’s estimation, each Falcon and his associates would have to deploy five spell-sets
before Vodor Imrish took them to Oel Artis for the final part of their plan. Some of the spell-sets would have to go to Warrens
in underwater cities. Some would have to go to cities across oceans, mountain ranges, and deserts. The whole process, including
the concerted attack on the Oel Artis Energy Department Power Processing Center, was supposed to take a mere one hour.

If Vodor Imrish never showed, it wouldn’t happen at all, because the aircar shells weren’t real aircars. They simply looked
like them—and then only from a distance and when viewed by a noncritical eye.

Wraith closed his eyes, feeling the room reeling around him. He could not stop what would happen. He could not change it.
He had spent his life fighting for it, and now that the reality raced toward him with terrifying speed, he wondered if he’d
been wrong. They were going to bring a great empire to its knees, and they had little to offer in recompense. He dreaded the
hardship that would follow. He dreaded the world that he and his colleagues intended to create.

And how it was out of his hands, and in the hands of a god.

Perhaps Vodor Imrish would lose interest, he thought. Perhaps he would go someplace else, miss his appointment with destruction,
get busy doing whatever it was that gods did for all of eternity. And Wraith could honestly say that he had tried. His conscience
would be clear. And the beautiful, glittering white Empire of the Hars Ticlarim would go on as it had gone on for three thousand
years.

Maybe that would be the best outcome after all.

And later by days and a week, beneath the painfully bright lights on the floor of the spell manufactory, the associate dragon
from Research in charge of manufacturing the spell-birds stood before Addis Woodsing, Master of Energy, and said, “We have
the final bird forms completed, and one working prototype for each of the self-delivering and hand-delivery models. We await
only your approval of the specifications we’ve used to manufacture these; with your signature, we’ll begin installing the
final spell-sets for the order.”

The Master nodded, and looked over the specifications the asssociate provided. Or rather, he appeared to look over the specifications.
His finger trailed along the lines of equations and the outmargined errata notes and working fixes, and for all the world
he looked like a man intent on his work.

But he’d discovered only that morning that his young mistress, in whom he had taken a great deal of pleasure, had been keeping
a young man of her own on the side, and using the allotment money he gave her for her entertainment to keep him available.
He had discovered this, unfortunately, in the most humiliating and expensive of ways: His vowmate and her overpriced investigative
team had presented him with the evidence of his infidelities in graphic detail, and to rub salt deep into wounds they would
be prodding and freshening for quite some time, they had spread before him vivid evidence of his mistress’s free-time activities.
Then they had laughed, and his vowmate—vile old harridan— placed before him the thirty-year-old contract, in which he and
she had most clearly decreed any side-mates would be chosen with the approval of the vowmate, and all financing of consorts
and mistresses be done from joint funds, with spending subject to the approval of the vowmate, who held veto.

That damned contract clause had seemed a good idea at the time, when his vowmate had been young and beautiful and willing
as a ferret in heat. As time wore on—and as she wore out and became one of the busy society matrons focused on her own stature
and lost in her own busy-work activities—he began chafing under her more frequently used veto. She’d agree to mistresses her
own age. Plain-faced, dull, charmless … those satisfied her.

And now his contract was going to cost him his family’s ancestral home in the Aboves, and a massive portion of his investment
income, and he was going to be shamed as a contract breaker.

His finger trailed over the specifications, but his mind ran to associates of his who claimed to know people of a certain
sort. People who might be approached with money and offers of special treatment, special privileges, and who for considerations
might make his vowmate and her investigators and their information simply …

… disappear.

He signed off on the specifications for both spell-sets, having failed to actually read a single word of either of them.

Such are the events that shape fate and change the world.

L
uercas sat at one of the little tables outside the restaurant HaFerlingetta, sipping cool, herbal jabemeya from a broad, shallow
bowl. He’d been waiting already for nearly an hour, growing increasingly annoyed. The oblivious crowds moved past him in two
directions, jabbering, stupid, a herd in search of a shepherd. They could not see the disaster that waited to befall them;
they did not know that they would, one day soon, bow in gratitude when he rose up from among commoners and saved them from
the complacent monsters who owned them.

He noted a flash of bright red off to his right. And there came Dafril, late as usual, running, looking flushed and flustered
and wearing something both new and gaudy—he spent far too much money on fashion. But Luercas noted that along with everything
else, Dafril looked pleased. Even triumphant.

Dafril grabbed a chair, plopped into it with all the grace of a sack of rocks thrown to the ground, waved for a servant, and,
as if he were speaking to everyone beneath the awning and even all the passersby, said, “Give me a casklet of the best ferrouce
in the house, and a plate of whitling, rare and spiced, and whatever my friend will have. We have much—
much
—to celebrate!”

The servant nodded, face tight, then smiled politely and said, “My congratulations, Master, and the congratulations of Ha-Ferlingetta.”
And scurried off like the insignificant bug that he was. Luercas turned to Dafril as soon as the man was out of earshot and
said, “Keep your voice down, man. I’m suspended, you’re currently far out of main favor, and the last thing we want anyone
to think is that we’ve had some personal triumph.”

“My vowmate’s test confirmed her pregnancy!” Dafril blurted, and all around him, those who had been watching out of the corners
of their eyes, curious and wary at once, smiled knowing smiles and went back to their meals and drinks.

Luercas frowned and his voice dropped to a whisper. “Your
vowmate
? When in all the little hells did you acquire one of those?”

“Pregnant,” Dafril crowed. And sotto voce he said, “And we’re going to name the baby Mirror of Souls.”

All the tension and anxiety and frustration drained out of Luercas in an instant, and he smiled so broadly that he thought
he might swallow his own ears. “The test … worked, then?”

Dafril grinned. “Like magic. We have one in the, ah,
you
know, right now. Went off perfectly—most beautiful bit of work I’ve ever seen. Even if I do say so myself.”

“You’ve earned the right to gloat.” Luercas thought for a moment. “You’ve … ah … talked with the …” He fell silent, unable
to think of any clever way to say
disembodied soul held in the Mirror.

But no matter. Dafril knew what he meant. “Had a good conversation with her. She’s delighted. Asked only that when she … er
… comes back, we make sure she’s prettier than she was.” He chuckled. “We could put her into the body of a hell-blevy fisherman
just freed from the gill net and she’d be happy, frankly.”

Luercas considered that for a moment, then smiled. “Ah. Our volunteer was Mellayne, eh?”

“Guessed it in one. I thought she’d go for it—opportunity to be beautiful, to get rid of that dreadful lump of flesh she’s
been lugging around her whole life while she waited for someone who could do a spell that could repair everything wrong with
her.”

“She jumped at the chance.”

“She did indeed. And we’ll let her be someone pretty; I’m sure we can locate a ‘traitor’ for her and manage to lose the girl
on the way to the Warrens.”

“When are we scheduling the reversal, then?”

Dafril smiled but didn’t answer. Instead, he greeted the servants who brought his food, dug into his drink and meal with every
appearance of delight, and was as gracious as a man could be when the last servant to the table presented him with a tiny
baby-cake, so delicate and perfect it seemed a shame to eat it.

Had he and his nonexistent vowmate actually been expecting a child, tradition would have required him to break the thing in
two and then devour the entire cake-and-spun-sugar mass to ensure his vowmate’s good health and fortune. The tradition had
been born in the days when men hoped to fool gods by destroying false infants, praying meanwhile that doing so would draw
those gods’ attention away from the real infants they desperately wanted to live. The gods were long forgotten— or at least
those with any sense of decency were, Luercas thought with some bitterness—but the tradition remained.

Dafril played along, though. He broke the cake, stuffed the pieces in his mouth with no regard for his dignity, and washed
it down with his dreadfully expensive ferrouce. Then he raised his hand and said, “To the child.”

And all around him, people raised their hands and repeated, “To the child.” And they, for just a moment, pounded on the table
as if they were their primitive, superstitious ancestors. Luercas went through the charade with them, amused that he was in
fact wishing luck to his and Dafril’s baby—the Mirror of Souls—and to his own ascent to the post of god of the Empire of the
Hars.

When people went back to their meals and conversations, Dafril said, “We’re looking for a good body for her. We want to wait
a few days, too—the thing used an amount of energy not to be believed. We had the spell-sets run through the main energy grid;
it’s going to look like the Long Wall District and part of Five Corners experienced a brief power drain. But I want us to
link in through a different district when we pull her out, just to make sure that they don’t trace the theft to us.”

“Reasonable.” Luercas took a bite of his salad and chewed thoughtfully. “Make sure it stays connected to power at all times,
though, just in case.”

Dafril, pin-sticks halfway to his mouth loaded with whitling, froze and frowned. “Whatever for? My sources tell me the Dragons
are a minimum of two weeks away from their first strike. They’re working hard, but these things tend to get waylaid by bureaucratic
red tape, safety worries … a million things. Best guess is their attack on the Warrens, and their follow-up against the rebels,
won’t be for a full month yet.”

Luercas said, “I know all of that. I have sources, too. But I’m … nervous. They haven’t found any sign of the rebels yet.
Nothing. Not which way they went, no sightings from people loyal to the Empire. If the rebels strike first, we’re going to
have to move fast.”

“You want to know what I think?” Dafril asked, mouth full of food.

Luercas didn’t, actually. But, polite for the moment with this necessary associate, he said, “Of course.”

“I think the rebels have vanished because their god Vodor Imrish took them home to the next world. They aren’t anywhere to
be found because they aren’t anywhere.”

Luercas shrugged. “You might be correct. But we have to assume that they are around somewhere, that they could hurt us, and
that they’ll at least try.”

Dafril shrugged. “No problem for me. I’ll make sure everything stays in a ready state. But I doubt the necessity. With everything
moved and in place, I figure we could have everyone on site and transported in two hours, maximum, from the moment of notification,
even if we weren’t connected to a source.”

Two hours sounded like entirely too long to Luercas. “I didn’t realize you’d located a permanent home for it already,” he
said. He didn’t appreciate this independent streak of Dafril’s. “Where is it?”

“We’ve moved it to the mainland. There’s no wilderness left on Glavia. I have it housed in a protected temple inland from
Freyirs City. The acolytes of the temple have sworn their souls to guarding it, and I’ve bound them by magic. I figure we
need to have it someplace where no one will bother it for the few weeks that we’re waiting for things to fall to pieces.”