Vincalis the Agitator

by Holly Lisle

  Wraith would have protested that he was fine, but he discovered that he didn’t even have the energy to lie. He let the men who’d run to help him haul him back to his cot, then lay where they put him and watched Jess as she shooed them out and told them that he was not to be bothered under any circumstances.

  When they were gone, Jess turned to him, frowning. “Are you crazy? How could you even think about getting out of bed? You almost died last week!”

  “I did?” He lay there feeling that he might die at any moment. He didn’t disbelieve her; he simply didn’t remember.

  “You did. You’ve been seeing ghosts and talking to yourself and you’ve had a terrible fever that neither wizards nor herbalists could break. Patr was ready several times to take you the nearest city, but I wouldn’t let him. He wanted to say you were someone else and have a specialist look at you—but we didn’t dare let you go. From everything we’ve heard, all of us are to be killed on sight. The Dragons have declared all-out war, with executions of anyone even suspected of harboring us or other rebels. The cities are nailed down tight, the Dragons have cut off all travel magic, cities have brought their airibles out of storage and are using them for essential shipping of food and other supplies. We’ve heard of food riots, of people fleeing cities in search of safer places … terrible things. If we’d taken you into a city and someone had recognized you, that would have been the end of you.”

  Wraith said, “They’re insane, making a war of it. What can we hope to do to them?”

  Jess gave him a funny look. “The books you wrote detailed everything that we could do to them—and everything that we would.”

  “I don’t remember writing them,” Wraith said. “Well, I remember sitting over there with the notebooks you brought me—but I can’t remember a single word I wrote.”

  Jess came over and perched on the edge of the cot. “How can that be? You told the wizards how to make the best use of Solander’s magic to overcome the poisons the Warreners have been given, and how to pool their magic to make shields to protect them while we find places for them. You told the initiates of the Order of Resonance how to use their art to prepare for the invasion of the cities, and the Kaan how to build the aircars that would get us there.”

  Wraith closed his eyes, trying to bring any of that back. “I didn’t,” he said at last.

  “I watched you writing, Wraith. You did.”

  He looked at her, a little frightened. “It might have been my hand holding the pen, but it wasn’t me writing the words.”

  “Who, then?”

  Vincalis, he thought. Vincalis had made himself so real that he could control Wraith’s writing. Perhaps Vincalis really had written the plays that bore his name. Perhaps Wraith had only been the medium through which they had been created.

  Except he remembered writing the plays. Sweating over them. The words in the plays were his words. And the words in the notebook? Were any of those words his? Did he remember any of that ordeal?

  “Falcons,” he said suddenly.

  Jess looked at him curiously. “Falcons? You want to talk to them?”

  Wraith’s eyes opened. “Them? Them who?”

  “The Falcons. Do you want to talk with them?”

  Wraith sighed. “I don’t know. Do I? Who are the Falcons?”

  “The new order of wizards who take the Oath of Falcons, and who live by the words of Solander.”

  “Oh, gods. I don’t want to know about this, do I? What in the hells did I do?”

  “In the books, you had Vincalis claiming to be talking directly to the spirit of Solander, who told him what would happen in the future, and …” Jess, watching his eyes as she spoke, stopped speaking and stared at him, realization dawning on her face. “When you say you don’t remember this, you aren’t just exaggerating for effect, are you? You truly don’t remember what you wrote. You really could have been channeling the spirit of Solander, which would explain how you could write one whole book a night, every night for a month.”

  “I did what?”

  “You filled all the notebooks. Thirty-four of them—one a night— every page, every line, both sides, in tiny little handwriting.” She considered that for a moment. “The handwriting wasn’t anything like your regular writing,” she said, “but it wasn’t anything like Solander’s, either. I thought you were just being careful.”

  Wraith cautiously told her his theory that Vincalis might be a real person, or perhaps might be becoming one, which he found even more frightening a concept.

  Jess waved it off. “This isn’t about Vincalis. This is about you, and Solander, and … maybe Vodor Imrish. Perhaps the god himself moved your hand.”

  “And told me to write about invading a city? That’s madness.”

  “Told you how to invade all of them, Wraith. Our people are going in to protect and free all of the Warreners simultaneously, so the Dragons won’t be able to discover what we’ve done at one Warren and block us from the rest. We’re going to save all of them, and with the help of Vodor Imrish, we’re going to bring down the Dragons.”

  Wraith buried his head in the thin pillow, closed his eyes tightly, and groaned. “All I can say is, I hope what I wrote was dictated by Vodor Imrish. Because if it was the fever talking, we’re all going to die.”

  “You weren’t sick when you wrote those books.”

  “Wasn’t I? Did you check?”

  Jess grew very quiet.

  “Well? Did you? Because I’ve lost a month of my life—I don’t remember anything that happened from the time I sat down to write that first paragraph until I woke up today. So … did you check to see if I was sick while I was writing? Because the results could certainly affect the outcome we hope to achieve.”

  “No. I didn’t check.” Jess stood and looked down at him. “Don’t go anywhere; don’t talk to anyone; if anyone comes in here, pretend you’re asleep. I’m going to go get Patr, and I’ll be right back.” She looked ill. “It never occurred to me that you might not have been … well, in your right mind when you wrote the Secret Texts. I thought you were making things up in them to give everyone hope, but I didn’t think you were …” She frowned. “I didn’t think you were delusional.”

  Before Wraith could protest that the last person he wanted to see, except perhaps an active Inquisitor, was Patr, she’d fled.

  Which left him alone with his own thoughts, and with the pathetic certainty that no matter what he did now, he’d already caused more trouble than he could imagine.

  Addis Woodsing, Master of Energy, looked at the miniature device brought to him by the junior-level associate from Research. “This is a limited working model,” the associate said. “We can test it inside a shield here if you have a prisoner. It’s fully automated. A wizard will speak the launching words and then set a timer that will replay the launching words into the device at the right time. We have it set so that it will liquefy everything—flesh, bone, stone, earth, masonry, plant and animal matter—within the confines of a shield. It won’t touch air, of course; that might have unfortunate consequences, lowering pressure within the shield to the point where some portions of the shield would implode. We were quite careful not to permit that. This spell-set will run until everything within that shield is liquid fuel; it only takes a bit of initial energy to run, too. We’ve set it to use a very small amount of the soul matter within its reach once it gets going, so that it will feed itself until it’s finished.”

  Addis took the device in his hand, both compelled and appalled. “It flies?”

  “Oh, yes. Beautifully.”

  “Do the full-sized ones look like birds as well?”

  “Yes. We’ve given them feathers and beaks and eyes—they’re absolutely lovely. And the movements of the full-scale models are indistinguishable from real birds. We’ll have to reactivate the transport-magic spells to send these to each of the Warrens in the Empire, but the spell systems will be self-delivering. And they’re quite fast. Much faster than real birds.”
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  “How accurately can you place them?”

  “On the blade of grass of your choice, Master.”

  Addis, who still wore the mantle of absolute Master of the department with a great deal of discomfort, nodded. “That seems accurate enough, in theory.” He turned the device in his hand. “So …why do they look like birds? Aside from artistic considerations, of course.”

  “Yes. We thought that by making them look like birds, their arrival would cause no alarm for resident populations.”

  “The resident populations of the Warrens wouldn’t notice them if they were the size of sailing ships and if they dropped directly onto their heads, young man.”

  “No, Master. But the people who live in the cities surrounding each Warren might. We were under the impression that nothing should be noticed about these devices until they went off.”

  Addis nodded thoughtfully. “Quite so. Now … tell me what will happen if we have a breach in one of our shields.”

  The associate shook his head firmly. “Master, we cannot permit breaches. We must be quite certain that the shields are impregnable. Should the spell get out, it would turn the whole of the planet and everything on it to liquid, and bind all our souls into the mix for eternity.”

  Addis put the little bird on a table and said, “Son, one thing I have learned in forty years of practicing magic is that you never—and I mean never—develop a system based on the assumption that any other system will be functioning at the time. We cannot guarantee that all of our shields will hold. What if the god who destroyed our shield during the execution, and who is responsible for the deaths of most of the Inquestors and a goodly portion of your colleagues, decides to breach one of the shields we cast around some remote Warren?”

  “That would be …” The young associate began, then paused and considered. “But what god would aid in the destruction of the souls of potential worshipers? That simply wouldn’t make sense.”

  “You plan not for what the enemy might do, but for what he can. Take your test device back to Research. Before I will clear it to go to the Council, and before I will sanction a demonstration, it will have a self-limiting spell attached. It will abide by the following limits: It will cast itself only upon humans; no animals, no plants. It will have an energy-use cap; that is, no matter how much energy is available to it, it will use only a specific amount to run itself—let’s say … ah, a thousand luns— that will be controllable by the area Dragons if it gets out of bounds. And each device will have a defined damage radius no greater than the radius of the largest Warren in the Empire. That way, if we have a shield go down on us somewhere, we won’t lose an entire city, or even much past the outer edge of our target.” He templed his fingers in front of him, thinking. “No, better yet … let each device have a damage area no greater than the diameter of its own target Warren. It may take a bit longer to design individual spells—but if you have a good artificer working on the final spell-birds, he could add a spell rheostat to each that would permit us to set the radius before we launch.”

  Lost in his own thoughts, Addis did not see the expression that flitted across the face of the young associate as he listed his requirements for the final spell-birds. He should have.

  “That will be all, then,” he said after a final moment of contemplation. “You have my requirements firmly in memory?”

  “I wear the badge of Mnemonimancy,” the associate said coldly.

  “You do,” Addis agreed. “I should have spent some time at that degree myself—I wouldn’t trust my own memory to get me out my door in the morning without a good minder on my wrist, chirping the directions to get me there.”

  The associate turned away. Addis would have been disturbed by the young man’s expression of fury, more so by the nature of his thoughts.

  Chapter 24

  Kirbin Rost, promising full associate in the Department of Energy, held not only a badge of Mnemonimancy, but also the ear of the new Master of Research, Zider Rost. Zider happened to be his favorite aunt. Kirbin sat across the desk from his freshly promoted relative—the rupture of the shield the day of the executions had been unlucky for some, but certainly not for all—and placed the spell-bird on the smooth jade surface.

  “The Master of Energy was pleased?” Rost the elder asked.

  “The Master of Energy is a senile dolt; did you know that?”

  “We’ve met.” Zider smiled slowly. “So … he had problems. Didn’t like the color of the birds, eh? Thought we should model them after wrens, perhaps? Or ravens?”

  “Nothing so simple.” Kirbin carefully repeated, word for word, his conversation with Master Addis Woodsing—but as he repeated the conversation, he took some liberties with tone. He knew he should not do such a thing, but the Master of Energy had been condescending. Rude. Ignorant and stodgy and unimpressed with the marvelous work the men and women in the Department of Research had done. So Kirbin slightly increased the edge of the conversation—made the condescending responses a bit more snide, made the doltish ones just slightly more nasal and dull. One of his Masters would have caught him, but Zider, like most wizards, had never bothered to obtain the difficult but low-stature badge of Mnemonimancy. If she had listened to both conversations side by side, she would have declared them identical.

  And they were, except that Kirbin’s version had been designed to increase the chance that Zider would feel the way Kirbin felt about the stupid old man in Energy.

  When he finished his recitation, he summoned the Mnemon.

  “My words I present,

  At forfeit of my life.

  Each and all accounted,

  None added, none taken away,

  By oath of the Mnemon,

  That which remembers.”

  Around him the air shimmered, and the Mnemon spoke from a space above Kirbin’s head: “A true accounting. The teller may live.”

  So he hadn’t cut his emotional shadings too fine. One day, he thought, he might do just that—but not today.

  His aunt said, “A thousands luns. The moron wants each spell-set to run on just a thousand luns. And a rheostat to adjust the damage circle, when we’ll have perfectly good shields all about to keep the damage where it’s supposed to be. He’d add another half year to the design work with that damned rheostat spell, by the time we made sure it didn’t interfere with the workings of any of the rest of the spells in the spell-set. People see a nice bit of work at a trade show, where someone demonstrates using a rheostat or something similar to control spell workings, and suddenly every apprentice and his half-wit brother wants a rheostat on everything from the toilet pull to the doorbell. As if the damned device will be the answer to all their needs.”

  “We aren’t going to do the rheostats, then?”

  His aunt smiled at him. “Of course we’ll do rheostats. And we’ll do a nice display that permits the user to specify the damage radius. And that’s all it will be—a nice display. I’m not limiting the spell-sets to any thousand luns of energy usage, either. That’s ludicrous. It would take a week—maybe even more—to liquefy a small Warren.” She frowned and began scratching figures on a notepad. “Almost a month for the total liquefaction of the Oel Artis Warren. We’re supposed to turn those energy units into liquid fuel over the period of almost a month? That’s … inhumane. I don’t care what they know or what they feel—I wouldn’t sleep nights if I did a thing like that. Better it’s quick.”

  Kirbin leaned back in his seat and nodded. His aunt was no old dolt. She understood energy, understood the way spells ought to work. “Then how will we present our handling of the energy cap?”

  “We won’t. You’ve given me the information, I have taken that information and made my determinations, based on my expertise—which in this instance does take precedence, and can override a one-to-one vote from Energy, if necessary. I will add a limit to prevent a spell from running indefinitely. A shield somewhere could go down, and I don’t want to be eternally liquid, and I doubt that you do, either.”r />
  Kirbin nodded. “So you think there might be some danger of a shield collapsing.”

  Zider smiled. “This is one area where the old fool was correct—and is something our own people need to remember more often. Plan not for what the enemy might do, but for what he can. The god Vodor Imrish probably won’t interfere with any of the shields. But he could. So plan for that. The planning costs us nothing, the preparation costs us little, but our failure to take simple precautions could—unlikely though that might be—cost us our lives and our world.”

  Kirbin considered that; even though he worked in the Department of Research, he wasn’t the design and implementation specialist his aunt was. He’d developed a broad range of skills that had made him invaluable to the department—but he couldn’t claim the years of intense practical experience in energy handling that his aunt could. If Zider thought a range limit on the spell was reasonable, he would have to defer.

  “He didn’t have a problem with the cutoff switch?”

  Kirbin said, “I failed to point it out to him. And he failed to notice it.”

  “Ah.” Zider smiled. “It’s silly of me, I’m sure, but I don’t like to build anything that has a start switch but no stop switch. In case we … ah, have to change our minds at the last minute.”

  “Have you ever had to do something like that?”

  Zider’s face went bleak as death. “Yes.”

  Kirbin considered asking his aunt for details, thought he probably shouldn’t, if the look in her eye was any indication—and then decided to ask anyway. “When?”

  “Just a few years after I first joined the department.” She shrugged. “The Bird City power outage. It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen.” Her eyes developed a faraway stare, and she shuddered. “You can look it up in the records.”

  Which meant that she didn’t intend to talk about it, but Kirbin tried once more. “Worse than the Oel Maritias disaster?” He’d been in that one. Had been a little boy, and terrified. His mother had been so badly injured in the collapse of one of the floating platforms in the main festival val chamber that she’d never been the same afterward. Even with magical reconstruction and a great deal of mind-healing, she still refused to go to underwater cities again for any reason, and eventually left him and his father and moved away to a ground dwelling. Kirbin hadn’t seen her in years.