Vincalis the Agitator (26 page)

So she made her way through the black passage all the way to the back, and cautiously opened the door farthest from the stage,
and took a ground-floor seat at the very back of the theater in almost complete darkness. The stage glowed, however; the lightmaster
had illuminated it so perfectly that the scene seemed real to her. A group of men dressed as trees stood to the left, singing,
and at center stage but well to the back, two trees danced. Jess knew Wraith was not permitting any magic on the stage, and
yet she found that hard to imagine, for when the trees danced, they managed to hang in the air as if some carefully wrought
spell suspended them, spinning or leaping so high she felt herself breathless for them.

Then, from the right, a man burst onto the stage as if pursued by horrors from his nightmares and roared, “No peace shall
I find this night; no peace shall I find ever,” and threw himself prostrate at the roots of the singing trees.

They stopped their singing.

“What will you have of me?” the wizard pleaded. “Would you have my flesh to feed your roots? If you want my heart itself,
here, take it—it’s yours.” He ripped his shirt open and bared his chest to the forest, and the lead tree bent forward and
touched him over his heart with one branch.

“Of our fruit you will eat, before you find surcease,” the tree said in a voice as hollow as death itself. Jess shivered,
delighted by the effect, and wondering how Wraith had managed to create it.

“Give, then, your poison; I taste willingly of my own death.”

“If there is poison, it exists already within you,” the tree intoned. “We will free you from it.” And he dipped another branch
into the raised hands of the wizard, who plucked the fruit offered to him.

The wizard took a bite of the fruit, and then another, and then a third. With each bite he took, the stage grew darker, and
with the fourth bite it went black.

The whole of the theater sat in utter darkness then, and Jess listened to the trees telling the wizard to dream well—to dream
himself to the truth. She also heard shuffling noises, and thumps, and something rolling, and the odd sounds thrilled her—they
held out a promise of excitement and mystery to come.

Then a single red light illuminated the wizard, lying on the stage, and when the light touched him he opened his eyes and
rubbed them and stood. Facing the stage, he said, as if speaking confidentially to a friend, “I feared that I would dream
a hell, dream a nightmare, that my sins would catch me up and devour me, but look—I am awake again, rested and unscathed.”

The red light spread, and now Jess could see the shapes of horrors behind him, reaching for him with hands twisted into claws.
And as he stood with his back to them, gloating in his escape from nightmare, these tangible nightmares came forward and surrounded
him. He turned to walk away, and saw them, and tried to find a direction in which to flee, but they blocked his every opportunity
to escape.

Jess sat transfixed as they identified themselves as the ghosts of the innocent dead and accused him of their deaths. She
shivered deliciously as they forced him to watch the way that they had died, and as they forced him to watch, also, the use
to which he had put their spent lives—as an ugly old woman drank the potion he had created and stepped forward, young and
beautiful, able to spin and saunter across the stage for a moment before she grew old again and needed another draught of
the potion. A parade followed, of the old who became young, and then old again, and of the dead whose numbers grew until they
crowded on the stage so tightly that the wizard in the center could not see a single space that did not hold the souls of
the dead he had hurt.

Jess sat through the whole rehearsal, and when it was finished, she quietly picked up her jacket, put it on, and slipped away
before anyone could see her.

She understood now why Wraith was doing this thing. He had created something amazing—something unlike anything that she had
ever seen or, for that matter, that anyone had ever seen. He had brought a story to life without magic—and it was more magical
than the best theater productions that had every possible spell and every imaginable device to create their effects. People
would come to see this, and they would go away changed. They would … She fought for the right definition as she trudged to
her aircar. They would
believe.
They would see in magic a danger that they had never let themselves see, and it would nag at them as they returned to their
houses built on air, as they rode through the sky in their magical cars, as they vacationed beneath the sea or went to a wizard
to have their bodies resculpted in younger and more beautiful forms. That parade of souls crying out for repayment for the
sins done to them would haunt them.

And some of them would begin to ask questions—the right questions—the ones they should have been asking all along.

Jess had intended to beg Wraith to at least come back to the house, to spend time with her and his other friends, to become
a part of his old life again. But he had moved beyond that. He had found a direction—a wondrous, amazing, beautiful direction.

And it was time she did the same.

She drove herself home—or rather, she drove herself to the place she had allowed herself to think of as home since she had
escaped the Warrens—and on the way, she considered her life. She was pretending, and doing it on a lot of different levels.
At base, she was pretending to be someone she was not; she did it for her own survival, but that did not make the lie better.
Further, she was pretending that she and Solander might have a future together, and letting him believe this for her own comfort
and convenience. She knew that by staying with Solander, she was wasting his time and keeping him from finding the woman who
would love him the way he deserved to be loved.

She was wasting her own life, too; holding herself in a relationship she did not truly want because as long as she had Solander
she did not have to face the truth that she really had nothing, and because she felt guilty about the pain she would cause
him when she left. Well, she’d earned her guilt, hadn’t she? She deserved to feel guilty. But she could not stay and still
be the woman she needed to be. She’d pretended her way through friendships, through her education, through the tedious covil
meetings and their stultifying bureaucracy of the bored and the pretentious; had accepted money to which she’d had no right
in order to keep her cover as one of the overseas family; and she found, facing herself in the quiet and being brutally honest
with herself for the first time in a long time, that she did not like the woman she had become.

So she had to make changes.

Leave Solander. Get a place of her own, and pay for it on her own. Gently break her ties with the Artis family and the Artis
name. Figure out what her life meant—what she was supposed to be about.

She had a place to start, anyway. While, as a stolti, she could not hold a job in someone else’s employ, she could create
a business and have that business pay her. She had learned from sitting around the long table at dinnertime how such businesses
might be created, how the money from them might be invested, and how the money, once invested, might be made to work for her.

And from the covil she knew a stolti woman of about her own age who might be persuaded to join her in an interesting venture—a
little business in which the two of them might screen, train if necessary, and employ musicians and send them around to perform
at the parties of the stolti. She considered the idea and discovered she liked it. Live art—a thing like that which Wraith
was creating in the theater. Perhaps the two of them could rent Wraith’s theater in the hours when no play was being performed
and offer concerts of their best musicians for the people of the Belows. The people of the Belows had their own entertainment
after a fashion—but she thought something live might work well. She had not really considered the idea to have real merit
until she saw what Wraith had done. If his work had imperfections, it also … well, it breathed.

She determined that, on her way home, she would drop by Caywerrin House to see if Jyn wanted to sign on as her partner.

Once she had a partner and a start on giving herself an income that she had created, she could find a place to live. And after
that, she could tell Solander that the two of them were through. She dreaded that. Above everything else, she dreaded that—partly
because when Wraith made his break from them and especially from Velyn, she had seen the panic in the back of Solander’s eyes.
She had felt his anxiety when he mentioned Wraith; he would be bracing himself for her to leave him for Wraith— but he would
never think that she would simply leave him, without anyone to go to, because that seemed completely outside of her nature.

She closed her eyes, dreading the days and weeks that were going to follow this day, and let the aircar take her home.

Velyn looked over the final contracts her parents had forwarded to her, checking off each clause she had requested and looking
for loop-holes in wording that either they or their advocates might have missed or thought unimportant to a woman in her position.
When she finished, she calmly signed her name to a document that, in essence, merged two fortunes and two families. Luercas
tal Jernas would be returning from an extended overseas stay, where according to his family he had finally found a medical
wizard who had been able to return him to perfect health and perfect form.

She had managed to talk with him once by long-distance viewer two days previously, and she thought the medical wizard had
been far kinder than nature. He had never been particularly handsome before his accident; now, however, she thought his beauty
a perfect counterpart to her own. They would have attractive children, and they would live well. That they did not love each
other—that they did not truly know each other—mattered little to either of them. The contracts offered significant room for
outside interests once they had their two legitimate children to carry on the family fortunes and family businesses.

Luercas held a good place in the Council, as the head of Research. He had a reputation for brilliance, and for the sort of
ruthlessness that created wealth and that would secure his own position and the positions of those who dared follow him at
the expense of the timorous. He advocated increased magical use but also increased magical efficiency; he wanted the expansion
of the Empire into areas currently held by other powers: Strithia, the Western Manarkan Dominance, the resource-rich Protectorate
of the Ring of Fire. He had real goals, real plans, and real ambition. He wasn’t trying to save fat, insensate fodder as his
life’s work.

Perhaps burning souls for fuel was wrong in the grand scheme of things, but it created and held together an empire, and the
more she thought about it, the more Velyn thought the magnificence of the Hars Ticlarim and all it stood for rose above petty
concerns about the sources of the Empire’s magic, or magic’s cost. Without magic, the Empire would not exist—and that would
be the greater tragedy.

The last of the snows had passed, and around the New Brinch Theater the wondrous aroma of blooming kettlebushes and sweetbriars
promised the advent of spring. Light began reclaiming its territory from dark, and the streets filled with people out for
the sweetness of the air and the gentleness of the breezes. They wandered to the New Brinch, drawn by the exotic scents on
the breeze and by the sounds of music and laughter, and they discovered outside the theater a free street show— men and women
dressed entirely in either red or gold who acted out little tle pantomimes with delightful accuracy and clever wit. These
actors directed the bystanders to the entry of the New Brinch, where tickets for the upcoming shows had gone on sale.

The prices for the cheap seats were quite low, and the bystanders, fascinated by the mysterious entry to the theater with
its beautiful paintings and hanging ornaments, and wanting to see more, paid their pittance and took home their tickets for
any of three day shows or three evening shows.