by Holly Lisle
Wraith tried to give them stirring words, yet to them he was only Master Gellas, a stolti one step up from a covil-osset, a decent theater manager, perhaps, and the man who had once been the intermediary between the secretive Vincalis and the masses who followed him—but not a visionary leader.
To Jess, after another discussion with dissatisfied, worried men and women, he muttered, “What we need is Vincalis.”
Jess looked at him and said, “Then get him.”
Wraith said, “I am him, Jess.”
“I know.”
“Then you know why I can’t get him. All of these people know me. I can’t stand up now and say, ‘Well, yes, I’m Master Gellas, but I’m Vincalis, too, and now I’m going to … what? Lead you to the Good Ground?’” He shook his head. “They have the spells. The ones who will have anything to do with magic are learning them. The rest are building shelters. But we have to go back, Jess. We have to go to the cities and free the Warreners. We have to use Solander’s magic to release them from the poisons of the Way-fare and their years of mindlessness. We have to save them from the Dragons’ spells. If Solander were here, he could convince everyone to look to that. If Vincalis were real, he could convince everyone to move forward. But all we have left is me.”
“Then you’re going to have to do it.” Jess rested a hand on his shoulder, turned him to face her, and said, “Wraith, you know I never wanted you to get involved in this, and I avoided it as much as I could—but I was wrong. I was wrong to try to abandon who I am and where I came from, and I was wrong to try to get you to do that. Do what you have to do. I’m right with you, and I’ll do everything in my power to help you. But I have the feeling that we don’t have much time. Something bad is going to happen. The Dragons aren’t going to just let us get away without coming after us. We have to be ready. Use Vincalis if you have to. Write his words, claim that he is in touch with the soul of Solander … pretend you’re writing another of his plays. Work at night. Patr and I will figure out ways to cover for you during the day. When you have what you need, just …” She shrugged. “Just say that Vincalis sent the messages to you in the dead of night. You could convince them of that. You convinced them that Vincalis was a real person for all those years.”
Wraith stared at her. “Lie to them?”
“Well … yes.”
“About the will of a god, about the words of someone who doesn’t even exist and never did? Lie about something that should be … sacred?”
Jess hooked her thumbs into the belt of her tunic and shook her head slowly. “When you created Vincalis, why did you do it?”
“So that I wouldn’t be the one guilty of writing treasonous material.”
“That’s all?”
Wraith considered for a moment. “Well, no. I suppose I created him, too, because if no one knew him, he would start with a fresh slate. With the chance for complete credibility—the sort of credibility with the stolti I could never have with people who had known me from the time I was a child, and who would always see me as the young idiot I started out being. And the sort of credibility that I as a stolti could never have with the people of the Belows. The stolti were always sure he was one of them, but in the Belows, people thought that he was really one of them, and that was why he hid his identity.”
“You gave him credibility. Tremendous credibility, which he still has among everyone who ever loved his work or listened to his words and took them to heart. When people say the name Vincalis, they say it with a little awe, don’t they?”
“Yes.”
“Then don’t be an idiot, Wraith. Use that. You’ve created him. You created him to reach people you would never be able to reach otherwise—and you reached them. Now it’s time to make everything you ever dreamed of a reality, but to do that, you’re going to have to use a fiction. A lie. Do you think the god Vodor Imrish didn’t know about Vincalis? That you managed to keep your secret safe from even him?”
Wraith felt a bit stupid. “No. Of course not.”
“Vodor Imrish needs you to free the souls of the Warreners. This is the task for which you were born. Do you think Vodor Imrish doesn’t want you to use your very best tool to accomplish this task?”
Wraith looked out at the palm trees rattling just beyond his window. Vincalis didn’t seem like him. Vincalis seemed like the interloper who walked off with all his good lines, got all the admirers he deserved, won praise and glory and never shared any of it with Wraith. And Wraith was jealous of Vincalis; even though he had created him, even though Vincalis truly was him, still Wraith held a small, tight kernel of hatred in his heart for this creation who had eclipsed him in a brilliant light that did not even belong to Vincalis, but that shone from him nonetheless.
Once upon a time, Wraith had longed for the day when he could stand up at the end of a play, bow before the assembled audience, and say, And now, the revelation you’ve been waiting for all these many years—I, Gellas Tomersin, Wraith the Warrener, am in fact Vincalis the Agitator.
In his mind’s eye, the people leaped to their feet, cheering and shouting, and heaped bouquets of roses and fantams upon him, and lifted him up on their shoulders and carried him through the street, shouting, Behold Vincalis revealed—behold Wraith.
When he fled Oel Artis and his old life, he was glad to leave Vincalis behind. But now Vincalis stood beside him, grown yet again in stature, and this time with the promise of a permanence that Wraith knew he wasn’t going to be able to shake. If he resurrected Vincalis this time, it would be until both of them died—because he would never, never be able to say, Oh, incidentally—all those things I told you Vincalis said… well, I was really the one who said them.
Solander had sacrificed his life to save the people who now needed Wraith. Wraith was going to have to sacrifice, too. He was going to sacrifice the part of himself that he most respected, the part he most valued. He was going to have to give that part of himself to his creation, and pretend for the rest of his life that he was nothing more than a messenger carrying his creation’s words. If ever what he had done became a part of history, it would wear this false creature’s name in his stead. He would die unknown, and the rival he had created would live on in his rightful place.
But his friend Solander had given his life to save these people. Wraith could sacrifice the dubious possibility of his own literary immortality, couldn’t he?
Couldn’t he?
Or was he so selfish that he would rather have everything he had ever fought for come to naught than let his work bear another’s name? He was envious. He was selfish. But was he that selfish?
“It’s just writing,” Jess said. “You can do it, Wraith. You do it all the time. I know you can do it.”
She misunderstood his reluctance. But, he thought, would he rather have her think he doubted his own talent in this situation, or that he had complete faith in his talent but merely resented his creation?
He sighed and turned to her. “There’s still a problem. I came here, and all of these people came here … but where is Vincalis? Why wouldn’t he still be back in Oel Artis?”
“Maybe he is. Why wouldn’t he have some special way of communicating with you? After all, you’ve been receiving work from him—and communications—for years.”
“Yes. Of course. I never had to worry about how we supposedly communicated when I was there.”
“Don’t worry about it now. You hear from Vincalis. You always have. People will believe. In the meantime …” She frowned thoughtfully. “In the meantime, I’ll see if Patr can find something impressive for you to write in. Something that will look like it’s meant to convey the plans of a god and the words of a great man.”
“Thank you,” he said, hoping he sounded sincere. “I’ll do my best not to let the great man down.”
Wraith sat before a small lamp that night, and in a fine lined-and-bound notebook, wrote the first words of the lie that would, he suspected, define his life.
“I, Vincalis, torn from the wo
rld and the life that I love, now in hiding for my life, in a dream that was not a dream talked to the spirit of our lost friend Solander. And he has given me the future of the brotherhood of rebels who will from this day forward be known as …”
Wraith pondered this for a while. Vodor Imrish’s band of would-be heroes needed a noble name. The name should invoke flight—should summon images of creatures who were strong and swift, but nimble and pure. Predators and fighters, but not monsters of immense, terrifying power. They would symbolize the magic that Solander had worked out—magic based on self-reliance, on individual responsibility, on self-sacrifice, on honor. Doves? Willow-brush hawks? Eaglets?
Wraith remembered the bird that symbolized freedom to him when he still huddled in the Warrens with his friends—the bird that came to him in nightmares and woke him to the horrors hidden behind the Warren walls.
“… Falcons,” he wrote in.
Then he wrote of his hopes for the Falcons, and the history of the Empire and the Dragons that they would have to fight. He wrote of the Warreners, too, and of the politics of rich men, and the price of magic.
If sometimes it seemed another force moved his hand, he ignored that. He was a writer and had been for many years; he was used to the power that words had as they gathered their own momentum. He wrote a fiction, as he had written so many fictions before it, and while he put as much of the truth in as would conveniently fit, he did not let himself be hampered by a strict interpretation of fact. He wanted something that would inspire. Lead. Offer hope in these dark days, and in the dark days that were sure to come.
He wrote through the night, one page after another, not counting them, not stopping to consider words, not stopping, in fact, for anything. When the dawn came, with his hand cramped and his body aching, he fell into his cot and slept. He had filled the first of the stack of notebooks Jess had acquired for him, but did not know it. He had never written so much in a single sitting in his entire life, but he did not know that, either.
In the nights that followed, Wraith filled the rest of the notebooks, one each night, a hundred pages at a sitting. He did not read what he had written—he simply poured the words on the page, stopping to consider what he wrote only rarely, occasionally feeling some pride in the deft turn of a phrase or the apt use of a metaphor. But in the month that he wrote, when he filled thirty-four such books, he never once questioned where the words came from, or that they never faltered.
By day, bleary and disheartened, he and the others who were willing to touch magic went over the papers that Solander had left behind, looking for the keys that would free the Warreners from the prisons of the Warrens that confined them, and from the Way-fare that condemned them to death beyond their cages. Wraith could not cast spells, nor could he offer his energy—he was as immune from the magic Solander had devised as from any other, and as blind to it. But he understood the formulas, knew the principles of the spells Solander had devised, and from years of regular contact had a better feel for the philosophy of the system than any of the magic-talented who had never been exposed to Solander’s work before.
So his presence during the day was essential.
In the first month after Solander’s death, his usually thin frame became almost skeletal, and his eyes burned with an almost hypnotic intensity that came, perhaps, from lack of sleep and too much pain, but that had about it the fervor associated with the god-touched; the people who cared about him fretted that he mourned those he had lost, and that he would die before he could find some peace and accommodation with all that had happened, and urged him to eat more, to sleep more, to join one or the other of them in their beds for a bit of comfort.
Wraith lived the life of a monk, working by day, working by night, and sleeping only in the few hours on either side of dawn.
And then he wrote the last word in the last notebook that Jess had acquired for him, and suddenly he felt that a weight had lifted from his shoulders. He had no more words, and he knew somehow that he needed no more notebooks. With only the vaguest curiosity, he opened one of the books at random, and was surprised to see the tiny, crabbed hand, so different from his usual writing. He noted the way the words crowded one on top of the next on the page. He read a few of the words, and though they were very beautiful, and though they sounded like his words—like the words he had created for Vincalis before—he found that he couldn’t remember having written them, and he couldn’t imagine where they had come from. He’d had that reaction before, after especially intense writing sessions—he would find whole paragraphs that seemed to have been written by a stranger.
But here he found whole books that had been—thirty-four of them, with titles and chapter headings and page after page describing places he had never been, visions he had never imagined, stories that were not his.
In that moment, nervously, he wondered if Vincalis was not just a figment of his imagination, but a real man, one who could take over his body at will. One who might choose to replace him.
Then he laughed. He was tired. He was, in fact, bone-tired. For the first time in a month, he realized that he needed sleep. That he ached. That his skin was feverish, his tongue swollen, his eyeballs compressed by almost unbearable pain.
He got into his cot and covered himself with a thin blanket, and he called for Jess.
“I’m sick,” he whispered, his throat suddenly so sore that he almost couldn’t push the words past it. “And the books are done. All of them.”
Jess stared from him to the notebooks, and back to him, and said, “Oh, gods, no wonder you’re a wreck. I didn’t know how hard you’d been working.” She brought cool compresses and put them on his forehead, and gave him water and cold fruit soups, and took away the notebooks.
He slept eventually, and in his sleep, Velyn chased after him and called to him, begging his forgiveness, telling him she’d been wrong about him, and Solander came and sat by his bed and told him that he had to live—that he had to lead the people to freedom, and that no one in the world could do it but him. He knew he was dreaming, with that vague hazy realization that if he was talking to the dead, he had to be dreaming. But in his sleep he could not decide whether the dreams were true dreams, or whether they were the product of fever, or exhaustion, or simply his own wishes transmuted to dream form.
He awoke a week later, and stepped out into a camp transformed.
“We cannot wait for beautiful numbers to test our results,” Luercas said. “Before the Council is ready to attack the traitors—even before it’s ready to destroy the Warrens, since that might be the trigger that sets off the god and those lunatics—we need to have tried the Mirror of Souls on one of our people, to make sure that we’ll be able to make the transfer, and that the Mirror will then be able to deliver the replacement bodies for us, and that we’ll be able to get into them.”
Dafril sat in a comfortable chair on a balcony overlooking the long hall in the Belows that Luercas had purchased when he decided that his future with the Dragons wouldn’t be as bright as he had always hoped. From Dafril’s vantage point, he could see all the wizards and assistants below him, and by virtue of viewscreens placed at each worktable, he could speak to anyone in the hall at any time, and they could each speak with him. In that manner, he kept everyone pushing forward toward the completion of the working Mirror of Souls.
Luercas found Dafril’s setup efficient enough, but the languorous pace on the floor below him made him uneasy. He needed results. He’d heard from his spy that the Dragons had a bigger team working on their spell-sets, and were close to completion. When they launched their attacks against the traitors and their god, and when the god struck back, merry misery would erupt from one end of the Empire to the other—and it would be clearly attributable to the Dragons. Luercas suspected the citizens would go wild, and that any wizards in their way would be targets for everything from mobbing to torture to murder. He wanted himself as far away from the disaster he saw coming as he could get—and if he had to tolerate Dafril an
d a cluster of hangers-on for a while, he would.
“Ah, Gellas—so good to see you up and around again. We feared you would not recover until this last day or so.” The Kaan, one Wraith didn’t know except by face, patted him on the back and moved on.
Wraith, unsteady on his feet, blinked and squinted against the hard white glare of the sun and tried to make sense of what he saw. Clusters of Kaan men and women sat on the ground, reading passages to each other from a thick book and taking notes. Beyond them, the wizards— who before Wraith’s illness were struggling to understand the spells of Solander—now worked together at a table, writing out a spell of their own.
The surviving members of the Order of Resonance and the Gyrunalles worked side by side with others of the Kaan, building an entire row of little boxes with seats in them—boxes that to Wraith looked a lot like aircars, but without any of the mechanisms that located sources of magic or translated that magic into flight.
This busyness frightened him; he felt that the world and all reason had moved forward while he slept, leaving him alone in a place where nothing made sense, or ever would. His vision fogged around the edges, he lost track of where his head was supposed to be in relation to his feet, and with no more warning than that, the ground rolled up to meet him. The next thing he knew, strong hands had pulled him to his feet and Jess was racing across the clearing toward him, worry written broadly across her face.
“Gellas! Why are you out of bed?”
“I … felt better,” he said, but at that moment he didn’t feel better. He felt bewildered, and unnecessary, and lost.
“Help me get him back to bed,” Jess said. “He shouldn’t be up for another week. We’re lucky to have him still alive.”