Vincalis the Agitator (19 page)

He dismissed them and sank into a seat.

The distressed woman led the group toward the Polyphony Center. All the aircar passageways, even the deep transport lines,
were too cluttered by debris to permit aircars. But servants had cleared some of the express paths, and though Wraith never
wanted to use anything tainted with magic again, he kept silent and stepped on the glidewalk with everyone else.

The two days that followed burned themselves into his brain. In the shattered remains of what had once been a grand and wondrous
place lay bodies and bits of bodies, crushed, mangled, torn, and shredded. And alongside them, the weeping, begging living,
crying out for a drop of water, for something to ease their pain, for someone to save them, for someone to give them the mercy
of death. He had spent little time imagining hell before the two days and two nights he spent moving rubble, picking up bodies
in an increasingly hot and unbreathable atmosphere, and carting both living and dead away from the wreckage. He had always
thought that, coming as he did from the Warrens, he had a solid understanding of what hell was really like.

He’d been wrong.

He and Solander worked side by side, moving slabs of a fallen float-platform; they could hear people beneath it sobbing and
clawing at the slick surface, trying to free themselves.

Solander said, “Magic did this.”

Wraith jammed his thighs under one section of a slab and levered it up enough that three other men could get a good grip.
Together, they started dragging the slab to one side. “I know,” he said. “Without magic, there would never have been a city
beneath the sea. No chance of collapse, no floating platforms, no spells gone wrong to destroy everything. Magic should be
outlawed.”

“No,” Solander said. “Magic feeds the masses, keeps them sheltered and safe, carries them from home to work and home again.
Without magic, there could be no Empire. But the sort of magic that draws from other people, that gets its power from destruction,
and that rebounds destruction at the wielders—
that
sort of magic should be outlawed.”

Wraith grunted and, in unison with the other men, released his section of the slab. “That’s the only sort of magic there is.”

“But it doesn’t have to be. It’s the only sort of magic that allows an individual to cast a tremendously powerful spell, but
I’m on to something—one of the spin-offs from working with you, actually. I think I’ve found a way to cast a spell drawn from
my own energy.”

Wraith kept his voice down and made sure that only Solander could hear him. “I’ve seen the math. Hells-all, I’ve
done
the math. The power you can derive from a single human life is negligible. It’s only by having whole masses of people clustered
together that you get enough power to do anything that would interest the Dragons or that would run the city. Besides, they
wouldn’t choose to pay for their spells with their own lives. And if you have any sense, neither will you.”

Solander glanced at the men to either side of them. None were paying them any attention. “The power the Dragons derive from
one human life is negligible because it isn’t volunteered. It’s taken by force and deception. I can’t be sure of the power
ratios yet, but I believe that I can get significantly more power from a self-powered spell than from one fueled by a sacrifice—and
so far, I haven’t had any measurable
rewhah
in my tests. It isn’t the breakthrough that I wanted—it isn’t the answer to what makes you the way you are. But it could
be the answer to the Empire’s energy needs.”

Wraith shook his head. “Have you tried anything big yet?”

“Big? How big? I’m almost certain what I’m doing can work.”

“Big. Have you floated a house? Run an aircar? Routed traffic without a mishap?”

Solander sighed. “One person couldn’t do that alone. It’s too much.”

“So the …” Wraith grunted as the load they were shifting slipped suddenly onto him. For a moment he thought he would collapse.
Then the other men caught their part of it, and Wraith staggered upright and caught his breath. “So the Dragons would not
only have to offer themselves as sacrifices for your magic—with the real and painful costs that would entail—but they’d have
to do it in collaboration with each other.”

“Well, yes. I suppose things like the floating cities and the underwater cities and the aircars would have to go—they’re awfully
wasteful of energy.”

Wraith looked at him sidelong and said nothing.

Solander flushed. “They won’t do it, will they? They won’t give up the things that they love to save the lives—or the souls—of
strangers.”

Wraith slowly shook his head. “Not unless we make them.”

“We? You mean you and me?”

“You, me, Jess, Velyn … and the people we manage to rally to the cause.”

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking of getting the truth out there. Of proving to the citizens of the Hars that the Dragons don’t get the energy
to run the cities from the sun or the earth or the sea. I’m thinking of showing them the insides of the Warrens, letting them
look at the people that are being sacrificed so that they can live in the clouds. I don’t know how we can do it, but we have
to find a way. The Dragons will never walk away from sacrifice-magic on their own—but they can be pushed, I think.”

Solander said nothing through the next two pieces of rubble that they moved. Then he asked, “What if the Dragons push back?”

Luercas, his body crusted and in terrible agony, lay on a stretcher on one of the converted docks among the thousands of surviving
injured.

“Last count is over fifteen hundred stolti dead,” Dafril said. Dafril had been Luercas’s only real friend and greatest admirer
since the two of them were children. He squatted in the blazing sun beside Luercas, dipping a towel into a bucket of fresh
water from time to time and rinsing off the worst of Luercas’s crusts. They were waiting for the rescue ships.

“They’re still pulling bodies out of the rubble,” Luercas said.

“Oh, of course. Will be for days—it’s a nightmare in there. But only the chadri and the mufere are cleaning up the mess now—someone
finally saw reason and released the stolti to go about their lives.”

Luercas glanced at his fellow survivors and made a face. “I can tell right now that the disaster didn’t get the right people.”

Dafril leaned close and grinned at him. “More than you’d think. We’ve found the bodies of some of the ones who you know were
voting to keep you out of the Council. Next time you come up for a position— especially considering what a hero you are for
getting us all out of that mess alive—I’m guessing you’ll get a seat.”

“And if I can sit in it, it will be a miracle.”

“The wizards will get you back to yourself in no time. A good body-mage will be able to fix this.”

“I hope you’re right.”

Luercas heard soft cheers from all around him, and raised his head enough to look out to see. One grand ship, and then another,
and then a third, rose on the horizon.

“Excellent,” Dafril said. “You’ll be out of this heat in no time. The injured are to go in the first ship—the best bodymages
are already aboard to make sure all of you are fit by the time you get to Oel Maritias.”

All three vessels moved forward with incredible speed. And then the first encountered the circle of glowing sea around the
floating remains of Oel Maritias, and the sea formed itself into hands that reached up on powerful arms and gripped the ship’s
bow. In the path of the ship, a mouth opened. The arms pulled the bow downward, beneath the surface of the water—the stern
of the ship lifted into the air and, as it lifted higher and higher, began to collapse backward. The air filled with the sound
of rending metals; the ship ripped in two; bodies with flailing arms and legs flew into the air, crashed into the sea, and
vanished; and in an instant the poisoned, angry water pulled down both halves of the broken ship.

Not a single head bobbed above the glass-smooth, glowing surface when it vanished. Not one survivor swam toward the city or
back toward the two remaining ships.

For an instant, on the deck where so many awaited rescue, silence as deep as the sea itself greeted the shocking finality
of the disappearance of the first rescue ship. Then people began to scream, to shout for someone to come get them, to take
them back into the corridors of Oel Maritias, to save them from the sea.

“The bodymages,” Dafril whispered.

“The
rewhah,
” Luercas said. “Gods-all, what kind of magic could turn the sea into a living, vengeful monster?”

The other two ships managed to turn before they hit the green-gold shimmer that marked the living sea as something other than
mere water. On the deck of one, someone used a voice amplifier and announced, “We’re turning back. We’ve already sent for
help by air. Airibles are being cleared for your use and sent for you now.”

“Bad magic,” Dafril said. “But we aren’t going to worry about that right now.” He helped Luercas to his feet, supported him,
and started moving him toward the port that led inside. “We’re just going back inside until better transport gets here.”

Airibles? Luercas wondered. Huge, gas-filled throwbacks to a more primitive age. Using them did make sense, he supposed. An
airible could anchor to the floating city without landing, and could transport more than a thousand people at once rather
than the several dozen that the largest aircar could hold.

But airibles were slow—and who had any that were ready for use? Poor merchants, perhaps, who couldn’t afford the more expensive
fast-ships or aircars to ship their products. Bulk shippers, maybe.

Help would arrive, if the sea didn’t decide to pull the battered city of Oel Maritias beneath it. And if it came in time,
Luercas decided, he would leave with gratitude and never live beneath the water again. He doubted that he would be the only
one to give up Oel Maritias—or, more realistically, to give up the new city far from this patch of poisoned water that would
become Oel Maritias, as the Dragons carefully rewrote history so that this disaster became something that had never happened.

W
ithin a year, Oel Maritias the broken wallowed at the bottom of its poisoned sea, never mentioned and mostly forgotten, and
Oel Maritias the new and fair lay glittering like a gem tossed by gods, thirty furlongs to the east of its old location and
on a fine solid shelf of rock at the edge of a great drop. Life moved on. Wraith turned down the covils in favor of the study
of literature and history in a fine old school; Solander took his first steps toward the future he yearned for in Research;
Velyn kept company with Wraith when the two of them could find the time; and Jess finished her mandatory classes.

Luercas traveled from bodymage to wizard to healer in search of the reversal of the damage done to his flesh. Dafril buried
himself in the study of old magics and dark paths.

And the Empire grew. And grew. Beautiful, graceful, hungry for energy. The Hars provided for its citizens. None were ever
hungry, none wanted for shelter. At its need and convenience, however, the Empire rewrote its definition of “citizen.” Those
who failed to meet its current preferences paid their taxes in more than money; they paid with their lives, and with their
souls.

Grath Faregan finished the meeting with his keppin—his immediate superior in the Inquest. His keppin was to be raised to Mastery,
and he, Grath Faregan, was to become the new keppin, with a squad of solitars of his own, and access to a vast array of single
agents who would do his bidding without question.

He was on his way up.

Thoughtfully, he returned to his play chambers, hidden in the top floors of his private quarters in Faregan House, where he
kept his collection. He thought he might … But for the first time in ages, his collection left him cold. All of his dolls,
magically frozen in artful poses, waiting for him to choose one and wake her for a bit of play, seemed dull and common to
him. He studied his whips, his prods, his chains and pincers and brands and knives, and all he could think of was the beautiful
young girl from the festival. Jess Covitach-Artis.