Vincalis the Agitator (8 page)

Velyn said, “Shit,” under her breath, and pulled the car up onto the walkway, angling it so that it blocked access to the
basement door from the street.

“Get her fast,” she said. “The second a monitor comes up to this aircar and wants to see my identification or to know what
I’m doing here, I’m leaving. And if you’re not in the car, I’ll leave without you. Either one of you, or both of you. Your
father, Solander, will just have to guess what happened to you.”

“You can’t leave me,” Solander said.

“I’m not going to spend time in Refinement for you,” she said, eyes locked straight forward, resolutely not looking at either
Solander or Wraith. “So get this person and let’s get out of here.”

Wraith took a deep breath and opened the door nearest the basement.

S
olander had no difficulty imagining a disastrous outcome for this whole exercise. He wanted to stay in the aircar. Hells,
he wanted to tell Velyn to forget the whole thing, leave Wraith with Jess, and get out of the Warrens before something horrible
happened. But he wasn’t going to find another Wraith out there somewhere, just waiting to make him famous. Wraith was a miracle,
and Solander knew it—and above all, he had to protect him, as he would protect any other investment in his future.

So—unasked—he followed.

Across the narrow strip of walk at a crouch, down the stairs, through the already opened door into—

Gloom. A stink that rolled over him with horrific potency; filth and sweat and food gone bad, things he couldn’t pin down
and didn’t want to. His eyes adjusted, and he saw a pile of dirty blankets, and a stick-thin person in white rags gathering
up blankets and little boxes and turning to look in terror at him. He flattened himself against the wall, thinking with horror,
That stinking stick is going to sit its filthy body in my father’s state aircar?

And then Wraith was dragging the girl and her things and the box of food he’d given them the day before up the stairs, and
grabbing Solander by the shirt and dragging him along behind, and Solander, finding himself flung back into the aircar, could
only think, Wraith didn’t need me along after all.

“Go,” he heard Wraith tell Velyn, and he sat up in time to see guards moving toward the car from two different directions,
their stop-sticks drawn and suspicious expressions on their faces. Did they not see the insignia on the sides of the car?
This aircar couldn’t be stopped; Solander knew neither he nor Velyn could offer adequate registration for the state carriage
they were in—and they certainly couldn’t provide documentation for the two scruffy children hiding in the back.

“I’m going,” Velyn said. She veered the vehicle out onto the street and accelerated it almost straight up. In the backseat,
Jess screamed.

“Rooming house first,” Velyn said, looking back at Solander. “We’ll drop her and Wraith off to let them shower, and then I
will get rid of this aircar, and then you and I will go out and buy them some clothing. Something loose and casual and expensive—maybe
a little out of fashion. After all, they are supposed to be from the backwaters. You have your cards with you, don’t you?”

Solander nodded. He was going to buy both of them expensive clothing? Well … yes, he was. The price of fame, he told himself.
The price of immortality, of making his mark in the science of magic, of changing the way the masters in the field understood
the workings of their universe. Stolti clothing for two Warreners versus the whole of a world in his hand, to create and reshape
in his vision … yes. He would buy them clothes. Rent them a couple of rooms for a few days. Pay for their false documents.
His parents gave him a generous allowance, and he never really spent it on much except for research books and gadgets. He
had money saved away that he would never miss.

Velyn took them not through but over the gate—they went sailing through an arc shield that sputtered and played light across
the surface of the aircar as they blasted through it—but the car did have clearances for every place in the city. It passed
through without damage, and Velyn headed them directly for a good neighborhood in the Belows.

“Rainsbury Park has some excellent little rooming houses,” she told Solander. “I’ve been to a few of them.”

Solander noticed that the back of her neck turned bright pink when she said that, and he wondered if Wraith had noticed.

She brought the aircar to a stop at the side of an attractive house artistically hidden beneath a canopy of ancient oaks.
“Wait here, all of you,” she said, and then glared when Solander didn’t move. “Not you. You have to go in and pay.”

The manager of the house, a bored young man with his attention focused on a triphase display of the ongoing Oel Artis/Chamilleri
phaeton races, barely even looked at either of them as they took keys and signed in for two rooms at the back of the house.

“He gets paid extra not to pay too much attention,” Velyn told Solander as they hurried to the aircar.

They moved Wraith and Jess into their rooms, made sure the dividing door between the two rooms was working, then they took
the aircar straight back to the house car pool. Velyn hurried over to a young man in uniform, who gave her a smarmy smile
that Solander didn’t like.

Velyn, in a foul mood, came back and led Solander to another vehicle—a little red all-terrain sportster with water wings and
a bubble hood. “Let’s go,” she said, and refused to speak to him for most of the rest of the trip.

The pounding water of the shower soothed Jess. Apartments in the Warrens had showers, but none with warm or hot water, none
with any real water pressure, none with the glorious array of perfumes and soaps that sprayed from the nozzle when different
buttons on the console were pushed. Jess had a hard time forcing herself out from beneath the clean-scented spray, and only
Wraith’s worried voice finally moved her to try one of the thick towels. When she was done, she wrapped the towel around herself
and headed out to the main room; she couldn’t bear to put on the stinking Warrener rags.

Then she waited, sitting on the edge of one of the two enormous, wondrously soft beds in the room. Wraith sat with her. Neither
of them moved; they weren’t sure what they were permitted to touch and what was forbidden. Jess tried to realize that she
was out of the Warrens, that this beautiful room—with so many colors that her eyes had a hard time seeing them all—was her
room alone, not even to be shared with Wraith. But none of it seemed real. The guards loading Warreners by the hundreds into
the back of trucks—yes. That seemed real. But this felt like an impossible dream.

Then Wraith opened a large copper box that sat against one wall of his room and said, “Jess, there’s food in here!”

Jess walked over to take a look. Cold air washed over her, air that smelled deliciously of winter and snow. She saw all sorts
of foods and drinks she didn’t recognize, with perfect fresh fruits, delicious sweets wrapped in lovely colored papers, and
things she couldn’t begin to recognize by their look or their smell.

“Can we eat them?” she asked.

“Just a few bites, perhaps,” Wraith said.

Tentatively, he unwrapped one of the bright papers and took a little bite of the brown sphere inside. “Oh,” he whispered,
and handed the rest to her.

She took a bite, and the flavor hit her like a shock. She closed her eyes and let the sweetness and the richness and the faint
bitterness all melt into her mouth at the same time.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is there more?”

Wraith unwrapped another of the colored papers. “This one looks a little different. You want to try it first?”

She nodded and took a bite. It was different. The same rich brown stuff, but this time with a fruit-flavored filling. “Oh.
Wraith.” She handed him the other half. “We’ve died and gone to the God-home.”

The knock at the door froze them—it wasn’t the right tap. Not two quick, soft knocks and a finger scratched from the left
of the door to the right. Just a flurry of loud raps. They looked at each other, wild-eyed with terror, and Jess grabbed Wraith
and fled for the bathroom in her suite. She’d seen a lock on that door.

But Solander walked into the room carrying a stack of boxes almost as tall as himself. “Wraith? Jess? Where are you?”

“You didn’t use the knock I showed you,” Wraith said. He looked a little pale still.

Solander shrugged. “I forgot. And my hands were full.”

They edged out of the bathroom and looked at Solander and his stack of boxes. Jess’s heart continued to pound in her chest;
this place was too different, too alien for her to feel safe. She wondered if she would ever be able to feel safe.

“We brought clothes and food,” Solander was saying, and behind him, the golden-skinned girl with the copper eyes came through
the door, studied them, and shook her head.

“Oh, gods! They look even thinner wrapped in towels,” she said. “We’ll have to hide them here until they put on a bit of weight.”

Jess looked from that girl’s sleek, rounded body to her own sharp angles, and felt her cheeks go hot with shame. Her thighs
were thinner than her knees, her upper arms thinner than her elbows. She could clearly make out every bone in her own ribcage,
and could clearly see both the bones and the tendons outlined on the backs of her hands. Wraith was the same. But the white
Warrener robes hid a lot of that— not even she had noticed how very thin they were until she compared them to Solander’s cousin
Velyn.

“We got food,” Solander told Velyn. “They’ll look a little better soon.”

“They’ll have to. I don’t think we can pass two starvelings off as the children of colonists—not even colonists from Ynjarval.”

Wraith sighed.

Velyn said, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll manage. In the meantime, Solander and I found the two of you some clothes. These
are guaranteed to fit—they’re spelled, so that no matter which of you wears them, they’ll look like they were tailored just
for you.

“Tomorrow,” she continued, “I’ll come back here and take you to different salons to get your hair cut and styled, your skin
colored, and your hands manicured.” She turned to Solander. “You can find your own way home unless you’re coming with me now.
I have things I have to do.”

Solander and Wraith conferred for a moment, and then, with a slight nod of the head to all of them, Solander and Velyn left.

Jess was relieved when they were gone. She’d liked Solander well enough, but she hadn’t liked Velyn at all. She’d seen the
way Wraith looked at the other girl—with his eyes all wide and wondering. That was the way she wanted him to look at her.
But he didn’t. She was too scrawny, she thought. To skinny, too plain, too young—and he had saved her from the Way-fare twilight,
from being a horrible fat lifeless slug. How could he ever see her as anyone but someone he had rescued?

Velyn would never look like that to him. He would see her perfect, as she was the first time he met her, and not hideous,
helpless, someone who needed to be saved.

Jess, in that moment, decided that she hated Velyn—for everything Velyn was, for everything that Jess could never be.

A week of searching for someone to make papers for them. A month beyond that to learn to speak with a bit of the accent of
the colony from whence they supposedly came—one carefully obscure, with few ties to Oel Artis, a colony clear across the Bregian
Ocean, in the southern hemisphere, on the Strithian continent, in lands only held with difficulty by the Hars. Beyond that,
another two months for the Warreners to fill out to a point that Velyn announced was acceptable.

And then the move; the day Wraith and Jess had come to both yearn for and dread, when, carrying their false Letter of Presentation
sealed with the signet of a real, if very minor, Dragon from the far city of Cachrim, they appeared on the front porch of
the great house in the Aboves at Oel Artis. They brought carefully collected bags filled with clothes meant to look like styles
from a colony behind the times—a bit shabby around the edges but still respectable; and they offered their papers to the Master
of the House, an old patriarch who still maintained his Dragon ties, even though he had for all purposes given over all responsibility
except for the greeting of newcomers to the house and the verification of their status to younger and stronger men.