Vincalis the Agitator (62 page)

“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 and 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.”

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.”

“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.”