by Holly Lisle
Velyn at last looked away from Wraith. “What sort of story do you want to provide with the papers?”
“Both of them sent over here by their parents from Glismirg or the Cath Colony in Ynjarval or someplace in Tartura or Benedicta. They’re on hardship grants because of their families, and they’re to take general training and make contacts to better their family lines, and then move to advanced training in whatever they show aptitude for.”
“Cadet branches all right with you?”
“Better than first lines, I would think,” Solander said. “After all, Uncle Non is more likely to check their papers if they’re first lines—try to keep in touch with their parents, make sure they’re getting all the attention they need. If they’re cadet branches, he’ll just check to make sure their parents actually exist.”
“They won’t get top-tier rooms.”
“We want them to be as close to invisible as we can make them while still giving them the privileges of the place. If they were top tier, too many people would want to know them.”
Velyn nodded. She didn’t ask Solander why he’d chosen her for this enormous favor—she already knew that. She did not question his reasons for wanting to do this thing; she seemed completely incurious about his reasons, in fact, whereas had he been asked a similar favor, he would have been dying to know the story behind it. She simply leaned against the doorframe, stared off at nothing, and gnawed on the middle knuckle of her index finger. “I don’t know anyone right off who does false papers,” she said, “but I know a few people who probably do know the right people. I’ll need a day or two, probably—and this will be expensive.”
“I’ll pay. I haven’t spent any of my last few months’ allotment.”
“Good.” She frowned. “As for transport, where do I have to get his friend from?”
Solander hesitated for a moment. If she was going to refuse him, it would be over this. Then he shrugged. He could only ask. “The Warrens.”
She laughed. “Right. Seriously, where? I’ll need to get an aircar with the right clearances, so I’ll have to know in advance.”
“The Warrens,” Solander repeated.
“I can’t get a car that will go into the Warrens. That’s absolutely off limits. That would be like trying to fly into the Dragons’ Experimental Station airspace. You simply cannot go there.”
“That’s where we have to go.”
“You’re mad. Even if we could get there, we’d be killed. They have riots, murders, mobs in the streets, people who rip the arms and legs off of anyone who isn’t from there, criminal squads, every imaginable form of vice….”
“I watch the nightlies,” Solander said. “But that’s where we have to go.”
He glanced over at Wraith, who looked bewildered. “Mobs in the streets? Riots? What are you talking about?”
“The Warrens,” Solander said. “All the killings, the rapes, the … Why are you shaking your head like that?”
“The only people who walk on the streets are the guards—and children who are going to or from lessons. Killings? Rapes? Riots? The Warrens are so quiet, if you stood at one wall and shouted, you could be heard by someone standing down the same road at the other wall. Sometimes people from outside sneak in, but then they can’t get back out, and they end up eating the Way-fare and watching the daily prayers and lessons, and they turn into Sleepers, too.”
Velyn smiled at him—the smile of an older person to a younger one who is sadly misinformed about something of common knowledge. “I cannot imagine where you got such silly information—” she started to say, but Solander cut her off.
“He’s from the Warrens.”
“He can’t be. Warreners would never be allowed up here. He’d be stopped by the gates.”
“The gates don’t work on him,” Solander admitted, and Velyn now stared as if told that the world around here was all merely a figment of her imagination.
“What are you talking about?”
“He can walk right through them. They go off, but the wards don’t touch him.”
“Does your father know? Do any of the Dragons know?”
“No,” Solander said, “and I don’t want them to. Wraith is going to let me try to figure out how he does what he does, which is going to get me into the Academy in a top slot. In exchange, he and his friend are going to live here. But you have to help me.” Solander leaned forward and stared into her eyes, willing her to realize how desperately he needed her help. “This is important, Velyn. Maybe the most important thing I’ll ever have a chance to do in my life.”
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 co
uld 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.”
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.”