Vincalis the Agitator (7 page)

She nodded. “Yes. Yes.” She closed her eyes, rubbed her temples, frowned. “I could get an aircar with a universal pass from
one of Keer Perald’s subalterns, perhaps, or one of your father’s—but for that I’d have to get into the restricted lot, and
I’d owe …” Her voice faded, and Solander saw her lower her lashes and angle her glance toward Wraith for just an instant.
She glanced away so quickly Solander could almost have thought he imagined the look; he did think he imagined the context
of it. Could his wild, rebellious cousin be looking at Wraith, at that scrawny Warrener
boy,
with interest? Attraction? Surely not.

And Velyn straightened, and rubbed her hands together, and said, “Yes. I can, I think, get the necessary aircar after all.
And we can get the papers, but you’re going to have to have someplace down in the Belows to hide the two of them for a few
days while all the papers are made. I know absolutely that they’re going to have to be present before any of the real work
is done. They’ll have to give some of their blood, and have their images spelled into the disks, and there’s no way to do
that in advance.”

Solander glanced at Wraith. “We can wait a few days to get you up here.”

“We can,” Wraith agreed. “But we can’t wait at all to get Jess out of the Warrens. The guards could inspect the basement where
we hide at any time—or just do a house-to-house sweep and take people away, and get her when they get the Sleepers.”

“A house-to-house sweep?” Solander felt a little sick to his stomach. “What are you talking about?”

“A couple of times a month, the guards bring a truck, go into one of the buildings, and take away most of the people who live
there.” Wraith shrugged. “Then, a few days later, they bring in people who aren’t Sleepers, and lock them in the house until
the Way-fare has had time to work.”

Solander could not believe Wraith was describing reality when he spoke of this; in no way could taking people from their homes
be something that happened under the watchful eyes of the Dragons, in the benevolent world to which the Hars Ticlarim had
given birth. Wraith’s friend had seen something that he hadn’t understood, or …

Solander shuddered. The little hairs on the back of his neck kept trying to stand up, and his belly tightened of its own accord,
as if he were facing an examination from his father for which he had neither read his texts nor studied his practicals. Wraith
couldn’t be right. But if for some reason there was some truth in what he was saying, then Solander could lose the one person
whose very existence flew in the face of everything he’d learned about the workings and applications of magic; the one person
who promised a look into a universe with a different set of rules, or into facets of his own universe which no one before
him had ever suspected.

He turned to Velyn and said, “Could you get that aircar today?”

Velyn bit her lip and avoided looking at Wraith at all. “If I’m to be the one to drive it, I’m going to have to do a great
deal of convincing. But I know a subaltern I think might be … willing to be convinced.” Her voice dropped to almost a whisper
for those last few words. She turned away from both of them. “I’ll go now. If I have any luck, I’ll be back with you as soon
as I can. Wait here, though—I don’t want to have to do anything to find you that might call attention to any of us.”

Both boys nodded their agreement, and Velyn vanished down the hall.

Solander sat on one of his chairs and watched Wraith, who had gone to the door and was staring after her.

“What’s she like?” Wraith said, his back still to Solander.

Solander tried to figure out what to tell this strange boy. “She likes men,” he said after long thought. “I’ve never seen
her show any interest in boys. She’s very smart, and talented in her own way, but a lot of her talent seems to be in getting
herself into trouble and then evading the consequences of it—at least that’s what my father told my mother. Her own parents
have considered sending her to Berolis Undersea—that’s a finishing school for young stolti women—for a year or two to calm
her down. Her mother and my mother are from the same great house and are either second or third cousins—I can never quite
keep it straight— but they’re also very good friends.”

Wraith seemed uninterested in any of that. “What does she like to do?”

Solander thought about the only things he had any real proof that she liked to do—one of which she was probably on her way
to do again in order to secure Wraith’s friend an aircar—and decided that he had better stick to the less inflammatory facts,
and leave the more hurtful ones for Wraith to discover on his own once his puppyish adoration had found the time to dim. “She
likes to gamble. She likes to discuss philosophy. She likes to read and to dance. And she’s very fond of running, for some
reason—I cannot imagine why, but she asked that a track be laid for her through the stargarden, and every morning she goes
out there and races around it in circles as if she were being pursued by the Lost Gods.”

“She runs….” Wraith smiled when he said it.

“You sound like you think that’s a good thing.”

Wraith finally turned away from the door and looked at him. “
I
run.”

Solander laughed a little. “Don’t get your heart set on her. I like her—she’s a friend, and a good person, I think. At least
mostly. But …” He stood up and headed back to his still-in-pieces distance viewer. “Just don’t get your heart set on her.
She’s going to end up taking oaths with a Dragon, I’d wager.”

Wraith said nothing, but in his eyes Solander could see the stirrings of defiance.

Velyn came back a very long time later—the sun had moved to the middle of the sky, Solander had completed his kit, and both
boys had eaten a large meal brought to them by Enry.

She erupted through the door and wasted no time on pleasantries. “Now, if you want to go—both of you after me, and try to
keep up. We have almost no time, and I swear it’s our heads—mine as well as both of yours—if we get caught.”

Velyn bolted back out and took off at a run down one corridor and then another. Wraith kept pace with her without any trouble,
but poor Solander kept getting left behind.

“Keep up,” she called back, and the red-faced, gasping Solander would lift his hands from his knees, straighten out, and start
after them again.

Velyn took them to a place she referred to as the “private drive deck.” The vehicle waiting for them was huge, and of a black
so dark it seemed to surround itself with a cloak of night in the middle of the day, and marked on each door with a circle
of gold and green. Solander hobbled onto the drive, leaned over and gripped his knees, and stood gasping while Velyn got in
and started the spells that made the aircar float just above the ground. Wraith tried to figure out the mechanism that opened
the back door; Solander saw that he was having trouble and, still gasping, opened it for him. Wraith climbed in, and Solander
flopped onto the seat behind him, clutching his left side and groaning, “I’m dying. I’m dying.”

“You’re not dying,” Velyn snapped. “You’re just lazy.”

Solander managed to sit up straight. “I may be lazy, but you’re simply mad. Do you realize that this is my father’s carriage-of-state?
If we take this and he finds out, he’ll kill us. All of us.”

“Shut up. This cost me more than you can imagine. And this is the
only
one that we can count on to make it into the Warrens no matter what, without us getting stopped or searched or shot down
when we come back out.” She glared at Solander with murderous eyes, and Wraith watched Solander shrink in on himself. The
doors shut, and the windows instantly darkened. Wraith suspected that outside, no one would be able to see anything of the
people inside.

All to the good. He held no illusions about how well two boys and a girl, none of them old enough to be people in positions
of authority, would fare taking a car designed to draw attention to itself into the Warrens, and then back out. Best that
no one could tell who hid inside the vehicle.

Wraith gave Velyn instructions on which roads she should take to get to the Vincalis Gate of the Warrens. He noticed, too,
how tightly her hands gripped the steering posts, how tense she sat, with her back rigid and her jaw clenched, how she would
not speak a word to either of them, except when she needed to know where next she had to turn. Wraith sensed both anger and
fear in her, and he ached that it was for his cause that she should feel either of those things.

The great black aircar cruised up to Vincalis Gate, and the gate peeled back as if afraid. They slipped behind the walls,
and Wraith noticed that now both Velyn and Solander stared around them as if unable to believe their eyes. They had wanted
screaming mobs, painted women, fighting and madness and violence to fulfill their lifetime expectations of the place, and
instead they got empty streets and silence. He was shocked, too, but for a different reason. On every corner two guards stood,
and at every fourth corner a huge windowless ground vehicle sat, back doors flung open so that he could see people—Warreners—already
sitting passively in the back. Accepting their fate, unquestioning because they were unable to question, or to fight.

As he pointed Velyn down a street toward his hideout, two guards came out of a building with an entire family of Warreners
between them— mother, father, and a dozen children from near-adult to passive, blank-eyed infant. Velyn stopped and watched
and waited as the whole troop crossed the street in front of her, and Wraith saw her face lose its color.

“They’re … so fat. So pale. And why are they just … going with those men? They aren’t fighting. They aren’t even arguing….”

Wraith, who had never seen adults from the Warrens outside of their tiny homes, had to agree. The adults and older children,
all dressed in simple, sleeveless white shifts that fell about to their knees, all shoeless and hatless, carried so much fat
on their frames that their feet disappeared beneath rolls of it, so that they looked like they walked on huge, quivering pillars.
Their arms stuck out at near-right angles from their sides, their eyes nearly disappeared in rolls of fat, their heads sat
on massive rounded shoulders, necks reduced to nothing but rolled tubes of fat stacked one on top of another. Outside of the
Warrens, he had never seen anyone who looked even remotely like them.

“Those are the Sleepers. They can’t argue,” Wraith said. “They can’t fight. They don’t really know where they are or what
is happening to them. They spend their lives in a walking Sleep—the food they eat makes them fat, and it keeps them in the
haze they live in. If the daily lessons didn’t tell them to feed their children and wash themselves, or sleep at night and
use the toilet to relieve themselves, they would do nothing but suck Way-fare from their little dishes all day until they
exploded.”

Velyn watched the mother carrying the baby—how she seemed almost unaware of it, and how it seemed uncaring of her oblivion.
“Are they even human?”

“You’ll meet Jess soon,” Wraith said. He was watching for Smoke, praying that Smoke wouldn’t be among those who marched toward
… vanishment. “She was once like those people. I got other food for her, and kept her away from the teaching screens and the
house altars. Eventually, she got better. I freed other friends, too….” His voice trailed off.

Solander said, “Then someone is doing this to them. This isn’t what we see in the nightlies. This isn’t anything like the
Warrens that everyone talks about. This is …” He sat in his seat, transfixed, leaning a little toward the guards and their
captives. “This is worse.”

“It’s the worst place in the world,” Wraith said. “If I could save everyone here, I would.”

“How could we? Cut off the food they eat? Bring in better food?”

Wraith shook his head. “Most of them would die without their Way-fare. I tried to save older people, but they don’t last without
their Way-fare three or four times a day. They start tearing their eyes out and screaming and beating their heads against
the walls, and if you don’t get them back on the Way-fare fast enough, they die. Some children do, too, and there’s really
no way of knowing which ones will, or when it’s safe to try to save them, or when it’s too late.”

He tried not to think about that. Not now. Not with some new horror being unleashed on the people of the Warrens, people who
were being dragged from their homes helpless and uncomprehending and led off to unknown horrors. These were more people he
could not save.

The car started moving forward again as Velyn got her nerve back, and Wraith guided her through the broad, clean white streets
to the place where Jess huddled in near-darkness, waiting.

Guards were working their way down this street, too.

“We should wait,” Velyn said. “Until they’ve moved past. Once they’re past, we can open the doors and get your friend out.”

“We can’t wait,” Wraith said. “The guards are going into basement apartments, too, and they might open the one Jess is hiding
in. And then we’ll sit here and watch as they shoot her with their stop-sticks and drag her into the back of one of their
trucks. And we’ll have to watch as they drive off with her. And we’ll never know where they go, or what has happened to her,
or anything.”