Vincalis the Agitator (66 page)

Luercas smiled. “How clever of you. I would never have thought of giving the Mirror its own order of priests. How did you
convince them to take it in, though?”

“Simple. Mellayne in her current form can make herself look like anyone or anything when she’s summoned to speak. So she made
herself look like their god. They’re dead certain they’re housing the person of their deity—that they’ve been honored beyond
words. Good-looking bunch of kids, too, most of them. I figure we can use them as replacement bodies when we come back.”

Luercas leaned on an elbow and shook his head, momentarily silenced by genuine admiration. “Gods-all, Dafril,” he said at
last. “You stun me. What a brilliant stroke.”

Dafril looked delighted by the praise. “As long as we talk to them from the Mirror from time to time while we’re waiting,
we should be able to keep their converts coming—no worrying about the priesthood turning into a few wizened old decrepits
in case we end up stuck in there a bit longer.”

“None whatsoever.” Luercas chuckled. “So everything is in place. I believe I’ll fly out and take a look at the …ah… god today.
Make sure I know the route well enough to get there in a hurry.” He savored the last bite of his salad. “Meanwhile … lovely
work, Dafril. Just lovely. You should have been a Master long ago. You have the deviousness and the innocent face for it—and
a streak of brilliance far deeper than anyone would believe.”

A chill that passed over his body woke Wraith from deep sleep into darkness, and in that moment he knew. The time had come.
Time to get everyone who was going into the aircar shells, time to say good-bye to the rest, maybe forever, time to find the
words that he would say when the wizards took over the nightlies in time for him to tell everyone what they had done, and
why, and how they must leave their homes and their worlds in order to preserve their lives.

Time to find the words that would make them understand that he was doing the right thing, the good thing—when he could not
find even the words to convince himself. He would be destroying something three thousand years old, something beautiful beyond
imagining, something that offered comfort to the lives of so many, and security for most, and peace, and safety—and in its
place he would be offering … what? Lives and the preservation of their own souls to some, yes. But to the rest?

He could lie here in the bed and pretend that he did not know the time had come. And if he did, the time would pass, and he
would be able to apologize to everyone—tell them the
Secret Texts
had been written by a sick, delusional man, and that he was now better. And sorry. The opportunity to free the Warreners
would never be offered to him again. He would be free of it. Someday, perhaps someone else would pick up the burden and carry
on. He need never tell anyone that he now remembered what he had written in the
Secret Texts
—every word of it, as if it had been engraved on his brain—that he knew for certain that Solander had used all the energy
he could muster to reach Wraith from beyond death, to tell him everything he had been able to guess and understand about the
future from his position in the place beyond the worlds. If he so chose, Wraith could simply permit the moment to drain away
like rain falling on sand. Someday, someone else would save the Warreners.

Maybe.

But they wouldn’t save
these
Warreners. They might save their children, or their grandchildren—but these people, trapped in a hell not of their own making,
would die, not just for the time, but for eternity. They would die so that something beautiful might live, but the price they
paid was disproportionate. No one should be forced to give up immortality so that others might have beauty and convenience.

Wraith rose from the cot, shivering as if he’d been dunked in a lake and left on an ice field. He bore the weight of an empire
on his shoulders, and the lives of uncounted hundreds of millions, and he knew in that moment that he carried too much for
one man. He wished that Solander had lived and that he, Wraith, had died, for surely Solander would have been able to divine
through his magic the right course, or else he wished that this twin-headed horror that he must choose between would pass
from his care to the hands of someone stronger, someone purer, someone who could see more clearly. He wished Vodor Imrish
would come to him and tell him what he must choose, so that he would at least be absolved of responsibility … and guilt.

But Vodor Imrish remained silent, and the future—the future of the Empire of the Hars Ticlarim on one side, and the future
of an unending stream of nameless, dreamless, hopeless Warreners on the other side— lay for that one moment within the grasp
of his two hands. He had lived in both worlds, and he had known the hell of one and the heaven of the other, and as much as
he had hated the one, he had loved the other. But he could not change one without irrevocably changing both.

Tears rolled down his cheeks. He clenched his hands into fists and wept silently—wept for people he could never know, and
for people he did know and would not be able to help. And then he stepped out of the tiny one-room cottage where he had written
the
Secret Texts,
and with full understanding of the consequences others would have to pay for his choice, he roused the Falcons and their
support team, and told them that they had to get to the aircars quickly—that the time had come to fight.

He was grateful for the darkness that hid his tear-stained face. He did not wish to share his doubts with anyone else. Ever.
If they had their own, he sympathized—but he would not try to escape the weight of his own burden. He’d earned his guilt,
and for the rest of his life, he knew he would live with the consequences of this choice, whatever those consequences might
be.

Jess sat beside him, and Patr across from him. None of them said anything. The three of them would not assist the Falcons
in the placing of spells; their job would come when they reached Oel Artis and the Falcons breached the security that guarded
transmission of the nightlies. Until then, they would follow, or simply wait, at the whim of the god.

In the dark, Wraith felt a small, strong, callused hand slide into his. Jess scooted closer. Wraith held her hand with gratitude
and waited. Finally, when the last of the aircars held all its passengers, a faint gold-tinged spiral of wind swept around
all of them, glowing only enough that they could tell it had arrived. Soundlessly, smoothly, the aircars lifted into the air,
and then moved through something that felt to Wraith like chilled silk, like a spider’s web hung with cold, cold, bone-chillingly
cold dew. True silence descended; not the silence of the world, but the silence of a place beyond the world. All light fell
away. All sensation ceased. Wraith knew that he had been sitting, but he could not tell if he sat any longer; his body was
gone. He had no arms, no legs, no eyes, no ears. He tried to speak, but no mouth moved, no words formed, no sounds came out.
He tried to feel Jess’s hand, or even to sense her presence, but for all that his senses told him, he could have been the
lone sentient thought in the center of an infinite expanse of nothing.

He should be afraid, but he was not. Blind, deaf, mute, bodiless, lost, he found in the emptiness the presence of Vodor Imrish.
He received no words of comfort, no reassurances, no promises that everything would be all right. But he knew Vodor Imrish
traveled with him through this place, and with that knowledge, he found contentment.

The state of bodilessness lasted only an instant, and then he and Jess and Patr and the aircar fell through the brush of colder-than-death
cobwebs again, and he looked out to see Oel Artis below. And all the other aircars full of Falcons and their assistants flew
with him.

“Something has gone wrong,” he whispered. “We shouldn’t be here yet. Or, even if we were supposed to be here, everyone else
should still be at the Warrens.”

Jess gripped his hand tighter, her fingers interlocked with his so fiercely that he doubted he could free himself if he chose
to. She said nothing, and he realized that she was scared. He hadn’t sensed any fear in her the whole time they’d been preparing
for this moment, and as she’d been helping organize the teams that went into each aircar, she’d sounded as calm as if she
had been giving people instructions on finding the playhouse where one of her groups was playing. He looked at her, wishing
that he could see better in darkness. From her profile, sharply outlined against the sea of stars that was Oel Artis below,
he could tell that her lips were pressed tightly together, and that she’d squeezed her eyes closed.

“We’ll be fine,” he whispered in her ear. He didn’t know if it was true, but he hoped it was.

“I’m not worried about us,” she whispered back. “I’m worried about what will happen to the Empire when we do this.
If
we do this. All these people … where will they go? How will they eat? How will they survive?” She turned her face toward
him. Now he could see nothing but the silhouette of her hair. “Can we do this, Wraith? Even being who we are, even coming
from where we come from … can we do this? Is it the right thing to do?”

Wraith squeezed her hand. In that moment, fully and completely, he realized at last that he loved her. She understood a thing
he’d thought no one could understand: how he of all people could be ambivalent about what was to come. She understood—but
more, she shared his ambivalence. His fear. He’d been silent about his anguish most of all on her account, for he could not
help but remember that she—of all the people working toward the freeing of the Warreners—had the most right to hate the Empire
that burned Warreners like cordwood, body and soul, for its convenience. To her he could never have expressed his doubts,
for it seemed that by doing so, he would be questioning her worth. Her right to live. She had been one of the Warreners in
a way he never had—she had been just a unit of energy to be counted and converted. She had earned the right to hate. But she
did not hate—or, at least, she could still see parts of the Empire that had value, and she could still understand that innocents
stood on both sides of the dilemma, waiting to suffer.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I have to believe we’re doing the right thing—that the destruction of souls must stop, no matter
what the cost may be in bodies. I know there’s no good solution. I don’t know if this is truly the best solution. But it’s
the best solution we could devise.”

“Of course it is,” Patr cut in. “The Empire is evil—built on evil, full of evil. It has to end. How could you question that,
either of you?”

Jess and Wraith looked at each other, and Jess said, “How could we not?”

Wraith caught a flash of light behind Jess and said, “We’re landing already.”

Jess’s fingers felt like iron as they clung to his. “We could still turn back,” she said. “No one has had any time to do anything—we
could still turn back.”

The aircar thumped lightly on the ground—a mildly imperfect landing for a god, Wraith thought. And Patr charged out of their
aircar first, running toward the one that had landed beside them.

“I know where we are,” Wraith whispered to Jess. “This is the transmitting center for the nightlies. At this hour, everyone
but the technicians who keep the transmission going should be at home.”

“We’re where we are supposed to be, then,” Jess whispered back.

“Yes—but not when.” He rose. He needed to go see if any of the Falcons had been able to figure out why Vodor Imrish brought
them all here instead of taking them to the Warrens first. “Do you want to stay here?”

“No.” Jess sounded emphatic about that. Well, he couldn’t blame her. He wouldn’t want to be the one sitting in the dark waiting
for an explanation, either. They both got out. The aircars had all come down on one of the side landing roofs. Wraith saw
that one of the Falcons had already tried the door and found it open. “Bad security,” someone said behind him.

“Or the work of Vodor Imrish,” another said.

They were all moving toward the opened door—the Falcons, their handpicked assistants, Patr. Wraith grabbed one of the Falcons
by an arm and said, “Why is everyone going in already? You have to set the protective spells around all the Warrens first.”

The Falcon turned to him. “We’ve done it. We’ve been working for hours, Master Gellas. It took my team far longer than we’d
anticipated because something about the spell the Dragons had around the Warren in West Shadowfall interfered with our spell
initially. It finally gave, and we were able to place ours, but—”

“Hours?” Wraith couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Hours? That meant they had irrevocably cast the die. The Warrens were
shielded, the magic was going to start failing all over the Empire, and all that remained was for Wraith to tell people to
get out of the way, and then to follow his own advice.

No turning back. No turning back. The impact hit him hard—all at once and all over his body. He looked desperately for a rest
room as his bowels knotted and he clenched and fought a simultaneous urge to vomit.