Vincalis the Agitator (16 page)

Wraith found himself standing naked in his room, with Velyn running her hands all over him, and the lump in his throat almost
kept him from breathing, much less from speaking. “Ah,” he said. That didn’t seem like the right thing to say, but he couldn’t
think of anything better.

Velyn decided that sufficed, though, because she started kissing him again, and taking off her clothes at the same time.

He reached for her arms, slid his hands to her wrists, and stopped her from removing anything else. Finally, finally, he found
coherent words.

“Let me,” he said, and led her over to his bed.

He moved the blind over his window into the side wall so that he and Velyn could see the glorious festival lights. The lights
served a second purpose, too—they illuminated the soft curves and long, smooth lines of Velyn’s body, one bit at a time, as
he undressed her.

“Beautiful,” he whispered.

She shivered at his touch and said, “You, too.”

And when they were both undressed, she said, “I wanted this to happen a long time ago. But now … now … now I don’t have any
reason why I shouldn’t be here, and I want you. I love you. I’ve wanted to touch you, to feel you and taste you and hold you,
for the longest time.”

Her hands never stopped moving, and Wraith lay back on his bed and watched as she moved above him, outlined now in silhouette.
She touched his face, his shoulders, and then put her hands to either side of him and shifted until she held her body along
his length but just above him, so that he could feel the heat of her skin but no touch except for the points of her breasts
brushing against his chest.

“I …” he started, then stopped. He tried again—and tried not to get so lost in the sensation of that twin-pointed touch that
he forgot what he wanted to say. “I fell in love with you the first time I saw you—when you came into Solander’s room that
first day. But you never gave any sign that you … that you considered me anything special.”

“I did. I always have—but women who take advantage of boys don’t fare well in Oel Artis. Same goes for men who set their sights
on girls. Instead, we have the festival—and anyone old enough to go to the festival is old enough to be acceptable, and anyone
younger than that will get the adult sent to the mines for a few years. I had no wish to be a miner, Wraith. I had to wait.
For you, for me—for any chance of a future for the two of us, if even you wanted one, I had to wait.”

Wraith wrapped his arms and legs around her and pulled her tight against him. “You don’t have to wait anymore,” he said.

“No. I don’t.” She moved just a bit, and without warning he was inside of her—and equally without warning, he lost control,
and everything exploded in a thundering rush in his ears and a warmth that rushed from his loins outward and left him limp
and panting and sweating beneath her.

“Oh, god,” he whispered. “It wasn’t supposed to go like that, was it? I’m … I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she said, and nipped lightly along his neck. “We’re just getting started.”

The second time went better. The third time went better still—and by the time they got to the fifth time, after some hours,
one shower, and having to have food brought to the room once, Wraith no longer felt embarrassed about that first time.

“We should probably sleep,” Velyn said at last.

“We should. But Solander and Jess will no doubt be showing up at the door soon. Far too soon.”

“We could pack a bag and go to my suite for a few hours—and just sleep, I promise. No one will look for you there, and I have
a feeling that one of your friends won’t be too happy to find me here with you.”

Wraith frowned at her. “Who wouldn’t want me to be happy?”

“I think Solander and Jess both want you to be happy. I just suspect that Jess would rather you weren’t happy with
me
.” When he gave her a puzzled look, she said, “I think she would take my place here with you if you asked her.”

Wraith sighed. “Jess is … Jess. She’ll get over it when she grows up and finds the right man. I’ve known her since the moment
she first woke up. She and I have always been good friends; when she sees how right you and I are for each other, she won’t
resent my happiness.” But as the words were coming out of his mouth, he really thought about them. Thought about Jess watching
him out of the corner of her eye, of the way she would bring things to him that she thought he would like, of the special
smile that she reserved for just him. In fact, Jess probably would resent Velyn.

Well, she would just have to, then—because Wraith had decided that if Velyn was willing to be seen with him, he would not
hide his feelings for her, nor would he hide the relationship they shared. He wanted everyone to know that he was in love
with her, and that she was his.

Velyn. Beautiful, mysterious Velyn.

He desperately needed to get some sleep before he got back to work on trying to understand the soul-fuel equations and how
they might be countered. He wanted to be with Velyn, too—to go to sleep with her at his side, and to wake with her in his
arms. Solander and Jess would be able to work for a few hours without any help from him. He decided going with Velyn to her
suite would be his best course of action.

“We’d best hurry, then,” she said. “You won’t need much—just a change of clothes for when we wake up—maybe two, just in case—and
your personal kit. I probably have everything else, and if I don’t, we’ll just send one of the servants to get it for us.”

Wraith kissed her, and ran the palm of his hand down the long curve of her spine. “We ought to get dressed.” But he knew what
he was doing wouldn’t lead to getting dressed.

She stood up and turned around and said, “We
will
get dressed. You haven’t seen my bed yet, and you should.”

She started pulling on clothes.

Intrigued, he followed her.

Rone had spent the whole of the night and most of the morning prepping the spells that would bring the new soul-energy on-line.
He’d developed a massive buffering system that split the
rewhah
into two streams—one that poured back into the Oel Maritias Warrens, and one that drained straight into the sea. He was a
bit concerned about the effect that the
rewhah
would have on undersea life—the ecology of the shelf was delicate, and he and other Dragons had spent a great deal of time
making sure that the presence of the city of Oel Maritias wouldn’t disrupt it. But if he had to choose between fish with two
heads and wings or the implosion of the city, he wouldn’t have to think twice.

But the spell wasn’t ready yet. The little setup he’d linked from his workroom kept a thin but steady trickle of the new energy
pouring into the city’s magic grid, but that trickle only buffered the little bit of energy that had been short over the past
months. It helped, but it didn’t cover new expenditures—and someone had badly misfigured the energy consumption of the festival.
He could see the power usage patterns on the flowsheet that shimmered in the air in front of him—and Polyphony Center had
dipped out of clear, reassuring purple and started fading toward white.

Too many people in there, too much magic being used—and he had no doubt figuring what some of that magic was, either. Trivia.
Gods’-damned trivia. Sex spells, seduction spells, compulsion spells, perverse glamours—all utterly unnecessary in the grand
scheme, but within the tiny lives of the fools casting them, essential. Add to that the planned magic—the vision centers with
their spells that would put a couple or a group into the heart of a shared and jointly concocted illusion, and the multiple
float bases for dance floors and beds, and the magic necessary to sustain the bracelets and the privacy spells and the contact
tracing, and beyond that, the lights, the water, the air purification, the pressure control—and it wouldn’t be long until
the whole Center dropped straight through the white zone and into the red.

And Polyphony Center already had some of the worst damage of any building in the city.

He rubbed his temples and frowned. Should he cancel the festival and evacuate everyone? As Grand Master of the Dragon Council
of the sister cities, he had the power to do it—but it would cost him tremendous goodwill. And not just among the citizens,
but also among the Council and his staff. He could afford to have some people angry with him, but he could not afford to have
everyone
angry with him. No leader whose power often depended upon consensus could.

Rone wished he could pass this all off on the new Master of Energy, but he had yet to appoint one—he had to admit that he
hated the feeling of giving up control of the office. Energy ran everything directly— and though he was now Grand Master of
the Council and in theory had control over every aspect of the cities, he discovered in fact that he would be at one remove
from the thing he knew best and cared most about.

He did not want to put the design of the new buffers or the new spellchannels in the hands of any of his assistants, either.
Talented though they were—and there were some among them who had created some amazing practical applications for the Department
of Energy—he could not think of one who would be able to handle the delicate mechanisms of buffering as well as he could.
He
did
wish that a few of his closest assistants had decided not to go to the festival—he would have been happy to have the extra
hands. But again, he stood to lose more than he gained by recalling them from their all-too-brief holiday.

He looked around the Department of Energy. The skeleton crew running things were almost all low-level employees of the department:
simple spell-readers, gauge-watchers, knob-turners. He checked the sign-in board and saw two on the list who might be of some
use to him: Maidan Quay, who stood for a promotion to associate spellcaster in the next few months if she passed her final
Level Fours in the Academy, and Luercas tal Jernas, a genuine young star of the department, though with some negative marks
on his citizen record that were standing in the way of his achieving his full potential. The rest were worthless.

He called Maidan and Luercas in.

“We have a problem,” he said. “Polyphony Center is draining us.” He pointed to the flowsheet and watched both of them pale.

“I’ll go switch down the nonessential areas of the city to minimum power,” Maidan said.

“Do that,” Rone told her, “and then come back. We have another alternative that we’re going to take. We can’t leave any part
of the city underpowered for long.” Maidan nodded and ran off. Rone turned to Luercas. “You’ve finished your Level Fives already,
haven’t you? Got your security clearances?”

Luercas, his eyes still on the pale cycle bars on the flowsheet, just nodded.

“And your security level is … ?”

“Nine.”

Nine was good enough. Rone said, “There’s more to the problem than I told Maidan. She can’t know how serious this is, but
we have pressure damage in some of the buildings of the periphery. The worst-damaged of the buildings in the entire city is
the Polyphony Center.”

“Damage
and
low energy?” Luercas finally looked directly at Rone. “Then why do we have people in there at all?”

“Because we cannot cancel the festival without serious repercussions to the government. And we cannot move the festival, because
there’s no place else to put it.”

“Then we need to move more units into the Warrens.”

“We don’t have more units, but we have a new energy source we can draw on to make the best possible use of the ones we have.”
He spread the sheets of spell schematics out in front of the young man and watched, pleased, as Luercas traced along the lines
and figured out what the spell was and how it worked.

“But this is excellent. If the output figures on this are correct, we won’t ever have to worry about energy underruns again.”

“They’re correct. Our problem is buffering.”

Luercas had reached that part of the diagram, and he winced. “We’ve never tried working with anything this dangerous.”

“No. We haven’t. And we have to put it together today. Now.”

“We, Master Rone?”

“We. Me … you … Maidan. She has minimal clearances—she cannot know the source we’re tapping, nor can she know the reason why
we’re doing it today. The citizens’ confidence in the safety of the city has to be absolute.”

Luercas looked like he might question that, but then he just nodded. “There are things they don’t need to know.”

“A lot of them.”

“Of course. And what shall I do to assist you?”

Rone liked the young man. He got straight to action.

“We’re going to set up a triad spell with buffer channels starting straight into the sea, and then switching slowly to our
Warrens once we have the flow stabilized. I’m going to be the apex of the triad—the lead caster. I’ve already done some work
with this kind of energy, and I’ve gotten a bit of a feel for it. It’s … well, it’s pretty unpleasant. You’re going to need
to brace yourself for that part of it. You’re going to be buffer control; you’ll direct the energy of the
rewhah
into the sea until the backflow settles down. I had a nasty fifty percent over the anticipated burst with the small spell
I started last night. If we get a simple one-for-one increase in energy-to-
rewhah,
you’re going to be dealing with a blast of …” He took a pen and scribbled figures. “About five hundred thousand luns.”