Vincalis the Agitator

by Holly Lisle

  “We could just have her removed.”

  “She’s stolti. High stolti. You aren’t going to be able to send her anywhere.”

  Wraith nodded, went to the finance room, and returned with his witnesses. He hoped that the woman would be a stranger; he feared that she would not.

  The poor, battered creature curled in the corner shocked him, though. This was no one he had ever seen before. Half starved, bruised, cut, with dried and crusted blood caked on her arms and legs, she lifted a swollen face to look at him, and stared at him out of the single eye that would open. She had glossy copper hair, beautifully cut, perfectly groomed, and the finest of clothes; on her, they were a travesty, a horror.

  He stared at her for a long moment, trying to see past unimaginable damage to the woman she must once have been, and as he did, she pushed to her feet and stood there, weaving and shaking. And he recognized her necklace.

  Gods in hell, he recognized her by her necklace, and if she had not been wearing it, he would never have known her at all. And he had loved her for years, and some part of him loved her still.

  “Velyn?” he whispered.

  She tried to smile—her cracked lips made the expression dreadful. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

  “Gods above, Velyn—I can’t pretend to polite conversation while you stand there looking like death. What happened to you? Who did this to you?”

  “My vow-lock was … not the best decision I ever made,” she whispered. She laughed just a little.

  Wraith clenched his fists. “Luercas did this?”

  “Luercas has been doing this since we got together. It has always been bad. But last night he tried to kill me. I … I didn’t really have anyplace else to go. I need help.”

  And what was he supposed to say to that? That she hadn’t wanted him all those years earlier? That she had chosen the life she ended up with? She hadn’t chosen this—to be beaten and starved and … How in the names of every deity had Luercas been able to do this to her without anyone knowing? Without anyone stepping in and helping her?

  He took a deep breath and looked to his associates. Loour had gone to Velyn’s side, had offered her a light blanket to wrap around herself, had brought her a good hot mug of tea. Dan and Murin were consulting over against the west wall, their backs to Wraith and Velyn, their bodies stiff and tight and radiating shock and fury. Wraith understood. Looking at Velyn, he wanted to go out the door right then, find Luercas, and murder him.

  “I don’t know how to help you,” he said softly. “But I’ll find a way, Velyn. I’ll find someone for you to stay with while I talk to my legal people to see if they can offer any suggestions on how to proceed.” He lost the cool, professional demeanor he’d been fighting to maintain and said, “How could he do this to you? How could you stay and let him?”

  “I have not lived a respectable life, Wraith,” she said. “I’ve made errors. A lot of them. And he is the sort of man who is willing to use every mistake I ever made against me. I would cost my family everything they owned if I left him without providing the two children called for in our contract. And he has made sure that I will never be able to bear those two children, and that I will remain forever his … his whipping post.” She stared down at her hands; Wraith could see that some of her fingers had been broken before and had healed badly. He tried to understand how Velyn—who had never admitted to flaws or weaknesses, and whose defining characteristic had been her absolute certainty that she was right—came to be so meek. So shattered. He’d realized when she told him she would not take vows with him that he did not know her and had never known her, but now he was looking at a woman so different from that Velyn that he was having a hard time seeing them as the same person.

  Time changed people—he knew that. But it never changed them as completely as they wanted to believe; core parts of them remained. He found himself staring at her, trying to find anything about her that survived of the woman he had once loved to distraction.

  She started sobbing, her face buried in her battered, twisted hands, and he looked helplessly at Loour. Loour frowned, then nodded and crouched beside Velyn. “Come on. Let’s get you out of here. I have a good friend who does healing magic; we’ll take you to him and get you taken care of. And while we’re doing that, Gellas can see about finding you a place to stay until you get everything worked out.” She gave Velyn a little tug to help her to her feet and started steering her toward the door. “In fact, I’ll get my healer friend to take a look at you and then come with us before the Board of Contract Review. He can testify to the damage that has been done to you. If Luercas tried to kill you, you cannot be held to the conditions of your contract. I’m certain of that. And I would guess that, because he treated you like this, the contract could be voided, or even terminated in your favor….”

  Then they were through the door, and Wraith couldn’t hear any more of what Loour said.

  He leaned against the wall and forced himself to breathe slowly.

  Dan walked over to him. “I would guess that the man who treated her that way is on his way to being sent to the mines.”

  Wraith shook his head. “He won’t be punished. He probably won’t even be fined. Loour wants to think that he’ll be made to pay for what he did, but he’s a Master on the Council of Dragons, the head of the Department of Magical Research for the entire city of Oel Artis, and if he was secure enough to do this to her, he has some sort of information about her that she can’t let get out.” Wraith sighed. “Loour can take her before the Board of Contract Review, but at most they’ll request Luercas to be present so that he can offer his side of the story—and then whatever he has been using against her will come out.”

  “That isn’t right.”

  “It isn’t. But if you think the most powerful people in the Hars play by the same rules as the rest of us, you’re dreaming. And you aren’t going to be happy when you wake up.” He turned to look out the window— he had a good view of the street, and his timing offered him one quick glimpse of Loour and Velyn getting into an airtaxi that had pulled to the curb.

  Wraith got a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. It wasn’t just the pain he felt at seeing Velyn so badly treated—it was almost a premonition; he wished that she had not come to him for help, he didn’t want to involve himself in her problems, and yet he could not see any way to be the man he was and still turn her away.

  He leaned his forehead against the cool window and briefly closed his eyes.

  She would not be able to go home. And when she had been to the healer, and had gone before the Contract Review Board, she would most likely need a place to hide. A new name. A new face.

  He knew how to arrange such things; he’d built quite a respectable underground in the last four years. He would be able to move her away from the city, turn her into someone completely new, and—so long as she listened to the rules and followed them—protect her from Luercas.

  He wondered how well she would do with being told where she could go, who she could associate with, and how she could behave. Had she been the old Velyn, he would have considered her hopeless. He couldn’t begin to guess what he might expect from the new Velyn.

  Wraith straightened and turned to Murin. “I need you to cover my morning appointments,” he said. “I’m going to need to make sure that Velyn is adequately represented, and I’m going to have to see if I can find a good guest house for her to stay in until this whole thing is worked out. I have a busy schedule today, but …” He shrugged. “For reasons I can’t even explain to myself, I think I need to take care of Velyn and her problem first.”

  Murin nodded. He could cover for Wraith without too much difficulty—he had done so on a number of occasions before.

  “The big thing on the schedule today is the meeting to arrange a troupe tour of parts of Benedicta. Try to get them to agree to Fourth Troupe—Fourth has been short on engagements since they got back from the Manarkan Coast tour. And see if you can get a commitment for the full
repertoire—I especially want them to get another run through Prime and Nocturne and The Fall of the First Sun. I know they’re going to want the comedies, but Fourth needs to be ready to take over for Third Troupe here when they finish the tour. Third needs a break. And I don’t want them rusty on the tragedies.”

  Murin nodded. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Get us a good price, too.”

  He left, regretting lying to Murin about what he would be doing— he would find representation for Velyn if she didn’t have someone from the Artis family who would take care of her. And he would find her a good guest house. But it would be a guest house from which she would be kidnapped once he and his people were out of the picture, on a night when all of them had good alibis.

  He would let Vincalis arrange her kidnapping; have Vincalis’s underground arrange a safe house for her; pick the team that would pose as the kidnappers; decide which of his underground contacts to endanger with her presence. Which wizard to send her to for a new face, a repaired body. Which town to hide her in.

  And before, posing as Vincalis, he did any of this—before he let his heart and some emotion from his past make his decisions in the present—he would have to find out how much he could trust her, because the second she moved into his underground, she was in a position to betray him and everything he had worked for since he escaped from the Warrens.

  If she could not follow instructions, if she would not hide, change who she was, or break all ties with her past, she would destroy his work. His real work.

  “Master Faregan, our first break in a long time.” The voice on the secret channel was soft, as if the speaker called from a place where she might be discovered.

  Faregan recognized the voice. “What break, Loour?”

  “His old lover, now vowmate to none other than Luercas tal Jernas, came to Gellas for help today. Luercas had beaten her, tried to kill her, by her account. And Gellas is going to help her.”

  “Good. Watch him. See who he contacts. See if this stirs anything up.” Faregan sighed. “If anything interesting happens, let me know in time for me to get everyone over there. We’ve been waiting a very long time for someone to make a mistake.”

  Solander ran his final set of numbers on the test and leaned against the console. “Impossible,” he whispered.

  His partner and fellow wizard, Borlen Haiff, glanced over from his own worktable, caught a glimpse of Solander’s expression, and put his work down. “What happened?”

  “It worked,” Solander said. “I just cast a four-input spell, and did not draw a single bit of magic from the grid. And you want to guess my rebound level?”

  “Standard four-input? Flesh, blood, bone, and life force?”

  “Right.”

  “Well … give me your energy input readings.”

  “Three-twenty, three-eighty, forty, and two.”

  Borlen hunched over his magic pad, scratching away with his stylus. “Duration?”

  “Two minutes, no error.”

  “Standard, then.” He scratched some more. “Using Devian’s Formula, you should have experienced rewhah at one-twenty-five RU, plus or minus ten. But from the look on your face, I’m guessing that your results were better than expected.”

  “Somewhat.”

  “How much better?”

  “Try zero.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “Zero rewhah with a four-input spell. That can’t be. The input-output formulas don’t offer any parameters that would let you get results like that. Maybe the guards froze or something and gave you errant results.”

  Solander was grinning so hard he thought his face would split. “I just isolated the new law. I have it—this is the thing that brings my entire new system of magic together.”

  “What—you mean that fantasy theory of yours that magic can be done for free, without any rewhah? You’ve been working on that for longer than I’ve known you and haven’t gotten anywhere. If I were you, I wouldn’t put too much hope into this single result; I’d be looking for the error in my instruments. Something shut down, something …”

  Solander was shaking his head. “I’m telling you, this is it. I’m sure of it. There are things that you just know in your gut—you can feel them fall into place, you can tell when you finally get it right.” He wanted to jump up and down and shout and throw things around the workroom, and go out and race up and down the corridors of the Research Center screaming, I did it! I did it! I did it! He felt like he could fly. Actually, if this newest approach to the formula were correct, he might be able to fly. Damn.

  Borlen sighed. “You’re obviously not going to listen to reason on this.”

  “Reasonable men never changed the world. I’m going to.”

  Borlen grinned at him just a little. “And that is why I work with you. Your modesty always leaves me in awe.”

  “Shut up and let me show you what I have here.”

  Solander spread out his sheets of equations on the main worktable along with his theory write-up and his ideas for applications, and started walking Borlen through the points.

  About halfway through, Borlen suddenly caught on. “My gods, Solander. I think I see what you’ve done here. You’ve used yourself as the sacrifice, but you have eliminated any harm or offensive positions from the spells. Completely. You’ve developed an entirely defensive system of magic. And you can generate additional power …” He was running his finger across the lines of figures, squinting a little at Solander’s tiny numbers. “Yes. By banding together groups of wizards who each volunteer their own power into a common pool for a common goal.” He lifted his head, stared off into the distance with an odd expression on his face, and seemed to Solander to go off into his own world.

  After a moment, Solander said, “What is it?”

  Borlen raised a finger, a “wait a minute” sign. His eyebrows furrowed and a tiny vertical crease appeared between them. “Mmmm. If the numbers are right …”

  “What?”

  Borlen went scurrying for another sheet of paper, spread it out beside Solander’s work, and said, “Application. Idea. Just a moment.” He started scrawling numbers and symbols across the page, checking his work, erasing, writing more—faster than Solander had ever seen him do anything. Borlen was steady, but until that moment Solander would have said he was not built for speed. And all the while he muttered. “No … that wouldn’t work, but maybe … Right. And … No. Damn! Need three times more power, but …” And then he grew very still, and very quiet, and for a moment his eyes closed. Solander watched him, fascinated. Seeing Borlen work hard was such a miracle he almost thought he ought to call a few of his fellow researchers in just to witness it, in case it never happened again. Then the eyes opened, and the hand started moving again, and in complete silence Borlen sprawled an equation across the page that showed such brilliance in concept that Solander felt a stab of envy.

  “Shield,” Borlen said.

  Solander went over the equations. “Yes. Almost. You have the right idea, but you’ve missed critical inputs here … and here….” He shook his head, amazed. “Still, for just roughing it from a raw start, you’ve done a real piece of work here. There’s something missing….” He went over Borlen’s formula again. Some part of the application of the magic didn’t quite fit with the system Solander had developed—it felt like a reuse of the Dragon-style magic. But Solander would find that and fix it. It was the concept of the thing that was so beautiful.

  Borlen hadn’t designed a shield that would merely buffer—the sort of shield that wizards always used to try to keep down the rewhah damage to themselves. If Solander could figure out the off bit of it, the damned thing would be impermeable to any attack, sending one hundred percent of the rewhah plus one hundred percent of the spell itself in a tightly focused beam straight back to the attacker: purely defensive magic with a brutally offensive kick. No doubt an attacker would be able to bleed off some of his rebounded rewhah onto available sacrifices, b
ut that rewhah would be hunting for him specifically, and the harder he’d tried to hit the shielded parties, the harder he was going to get slammed in return. And if he hadn’t calculated getting hit with his own spell … “The poor bastard would fry himself,” Solander muttered. No normal shield had ever been able to send the attack back alongside the rewhah. That was simply beyond the known laws of magic. Until now.

  “What poor bastard?”

  “The attacker who came at this thing thinking he was attacking a normal spellshield.”

  “That’s sort of the idea. You have a defensive magic here that actually eliminates the need for offensive magic. You’re attacked, you simply send the attack back to the attacker. You huddle under your little shield and the harder they hit you, the more they hurt themselves. And you expend almost no energy.” He paused. “Assuming you actually got your base theory numbers right and your new form of magic works. I mean … we still haven’t done tests to make sure that you weren’t just getting error readings on the instruments.”

  Solander was staring at the formula for that shield. A single person could hold off the attacks of an army of wizards and send the weight of their attacks straight back at them—and they would know nothing but that they were attacking a fierce and determined enemy. They wouldn’t know that they were getting hit by their own fire.

  His skin started to crawl. He tried to imagine what the Dragons would say about his self-powered spells, about his magic that did not permit attacks but only defense, that did not permit the caster to cause any harm in order to work without rewhah, and that required the caster to take on the rewhah for any harm he caused himself. And he had an unpleasant moment of clarity.

  The Hars Ticlarim was an empire built on the suffering of others. It was built that way because the builders wanted it that way. They didn’t want to take responsibility for their own spells. They didn’t want to limit what they could do to defense, to passive positions, to things that would cause no harm. By such limitation, they would no longer be able to use magic to expand the Empire, or to keep the parts of it already acquired in line. Magic would cease to have an element of fear about it—for what wizard would use magic as a form of public punishment and torture for wrongdoers if he had to take the cost of the spell from his own flesh and blood and bones and life? What wizard would pay that price, and then take all of the rewhah from the spell he had cast onto his own body? Why would he do that, when he could channel both the power to fuel his spell and the rebound from it into caged creatures that he had convinced himself were not truly human, that he had convinced himself were mindless and of no other value to anyone—even themselves?