Vincalis the Agitator (50 page)

The last curve of light slid away from the broken roof. She shuddered. Should she cast a light spell? Or would that summon
the jungle hunters? Would she perhaps be better off working her way to a corner and hiding, still and silent, until dawn?
Or should she seek better shelter?

And then a cheery voice from the arch at the back of the chapel: “Well, you’re awake just in time. I have the aircar packed
with all my things, and I thought for sure I was going to have to carry you out.” He snapped his fingers, and a handful of
little lights spun to life around his head. He grinned at her and said, “I swear, I’d have another go at you if we had the
time.”

“You could take the damned bindings off first,” she said, and then she noticed that he had changed. He no longer wore the
khebarr of an island villager. Now he wore green and black—and something about the formality of the robes, and the way he
wore them, chilled her blood more than any thought of being abandoned alone in the jungle ever could have.

Velyn had thought herself terrified at the thought of a night alone in the jungle. Now the jungle seemed friendly by comparison.
“You bastard.”

He laughed. “We could have just gone straight back to the city. But I thought that would be such a waste; I’d heard rumors
of what a talent you were, and when the Inquest is finished with you … ah, never mind. You’ll get the bad news soon enough,
and why ruin a lovely day by thinking about it now? And all I can say is, the rumors don’t begin to do justice to the truth.
I’d keep you if I could—really. If the Inquest didn’t already know I’d found you, I’d have you tucked away in a private little
love nest somewhere.” He shrugged. “But they know I have you, so …” He sauntered over to her and she took a swing at him.
This time he had a mission, and she didn’t catch him off guard as she had during their sex play. With an efficiency that shocked
her, he caught the binding that held her arms and whipped a second binding around her waist and attached it. As quickly as
that, she couldn’t move her arms at all.

He smiled at her—a cold, calculating smile—and said, “If you want to walk out to the aircar under your own power, behave right
now. If you force me to carry you out, I’m sure I’ll find your soft, naked body too much to resist, and I’ll simply have to
act out my worst and most aggressive lusts on you.”

She swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry as sun-broiled sand. She nodded acquiescence. When he pointed toward the door, she walked.
When he gestured at the backseat of the aircar, she got in without fight or question. She might find an opportunity to escape
from him. If she was lucky, she’d make an opportunity to kill him. When she sat, he threw a blanket over her. She used the
cover to begin working at her restraints; she felt certain she could find some way to win her freedom.

As a last resort, perhaps she could buy it.

W
raith woke to a soft click at his cell door. He sat up, expecting to see Solander, but it was too early. Stotts now sang his
maddening babble—three notes, all off-key, all grating. Two guards waited for him, with the cell door open. One of them smiled
at him, amused. “You could sleep through that, Gellas? Very, very impressive.”

“I spend days and nights listening to actors practicing their lines, all at the same time, over and over and over,” Wraith
said. “What’s one more babbling idiot to me?”

The other guard studied him, eyes curious. “You didn’t find him wearing?”

Wraith shrugged. “I find them all wearing. I’ve learned over the years not to hear them.”

“Well, you would have had a—ha, a bit of a reprieve anyway,” the first guard said. “You’re to be moved.”

“Moved?” That wasn’t in the plan. Wraith glanced at Solander, who sat in opposite cell, as still as if he’d been frozen, his
eyes closed, his hands folded on his lap. “So soon?”

“The Masters have had a breakthrough in finding Vincalis. Some confessions, apparently. We’re to have public executions, from
what we hear, and the guilty are being separated from the innocent.”

Wraith studied him. “Oh? You’re separating the innocent, but not freeing them? That’s an interesting way to treat innocent
people.”

“Orders.” Both guards shrugged.

They had their attention on Wraith. Behind them, Solander stood silently, and opened his eyes, and clasped his hands together
tightly. Light began to curl away from his skin, almost like the fog that curled across the surfaces of warm lakes on cool
mornings.

Wraith stood with his head just a little down while the guards stepped into his cell and reached for his hands and bound them
in heavy metal manacles. Which, he supposed, answered any question he might care to ask about whether he was presumed to be
innocent or guilty. With his head angled down, though, he could see what Solander was doing—and as long as he kept his body
angled as it was, both guards kept their backs to Solander.

“… leaf bread … bones meat … stick … hot-bang-god … dog train … flee … big
fly
fall
spot
spank. Leaf bread. Bones meat. Stick hot. Bang. God dog train flee. Fly. Fall—”

“
Shut up,
will you!” the younger guard bellowed. “At least for a few minutes!”

“Spot,” Stotts whispered. “Spank leaf bread. Bones. Meat-stick. Hot bang.”

The whispering, Wraith thought, was actually worse. Except, of course, that it created one final distraction that Solander
could use.

The light grew very bright for just an instant—bright enough that both guards turned. Solander glowed like a small sun in
the center of his cell, illuminated both from the outside and from within—he was, in that single instant, beautiful beyond
anything that Wraith had ever seen. Then he vanished, and the light with him, and for a moment Wraith could see nothing but
the blazing light that had burned its shape into his eyes. When his vision cleared, the guards were both racing for Solander’s
cell. Wraith waited where he was—as long as he stayed still, he could hope that he would not draw either of them back to himself.

He hoped that Solander had a plan that included both of them. He hoped. He trusted. And he waited, because if he ran, one
of them would be sure to run after him, and …

They unlocked Solander’s cell. Threw open the cell door and raced in. The door closed behind them with a clang, and a blue
fire exploded along the edges, fusing it into an inescapable mass of molten whitestone.

As quickly as that, Solander reappeared. “Let’s go. This isn’t ideal, but we’re out of options.”

Velyn fought Farsee and the handful of other Masters who dragged her into the Gold Building; on the way back, Farsee had regaled
her with tales of the multitudes who had vanished inside against their will and never came back out.

But, determined though she was, she couldn’t hope to win a fight in which she was both bound and hopelessly outnumbered. She
satisfied herself that she managed to hurt a few of them, and that if nothing else they would have bruises to show for their
meeting with her.

They dragged her into a room where banks of chairs rose up to a high ceiling, and a brilliant—even painful—light blazed down
on a clear half circle of floor to the front; and they hauled her into the light and strapped her—still bound, naked, and
chilled—into a chair. On the way in, she’d been able to see that the room was mostly empty, but now, caught in that merciless
light, her eyes could make out nothing but blackness beyond.

In the darkness before her, silence. They would say something soon, she thought. Ask her questions. Demand whatever truths
she might know. She wouldn’t answer; she’d already decided that. When they spelled her—and they would—she would tell them
what they wanted to know. But she wouldn’t volunteer anything. She wouldn’t betray herself by choice.

But they didn’t ask her anything. She knew they were there. She could feel them staring at her. She could sense them all around
her, even though she couldn’t see them. She might as well have been alone in that huge room, though. Alone beneath that merciless
light. Her heart raced madly, and her mouth went dry. The silence stretched.

Maybe, once they brought her into the room and tied her to the chair, they’d left. Maybe she was simply imagining them sitting
above her, staring down at her. Maybe they intended to leave her here. She fought against her bonds, but they’d been applied
by someone who knew what he was doing, and who didn’t intend to have any mistakes. She couldn’t even loosen the straps a little.

Alone? Or silently observed?

They were going to torture her, weren’t they? This wasn’t just them waiting for her to talk. They could have the answers they
wanted from her at any time; so why make her wait here, humiliated and powerless, unless they had a reason to want her scared?
This was ugly.

Silence, and the infinite blackness beyond the bleeding white light. She shivered, having a hard time catching her breath.
She wanted to go home. She wanted to be with her parents. She wanted to be back with Wraith. She wanted to be anywhere but
where she was.

Silence.

And then a single soft voice that signaled the end of silence.

“You’ve been found guilty of treason, and you’re to be executed in three days, along with the rest of the conspirators against
the Empire.”

And that was all he said.

The silence descended again, and into it she said, “Wait. I haven’t done anything against the Empire. I’m no traitor. Look—I
don’t deserve to die. I’m a stolti, damnall. The most you can do to me is sentence me to Refinement! You can’t execute me!”

The silence continued, like a blanket over her.

Her voice, thin and quavering, rose as she tried to push it out through the lights, into the impenetrable darkness beyond,
to the ears and hearts of those who had already judged her.

“I’m innocent. But I can tell you who isn’t.”

Silence, like shuttered windows. And then a laugh. And the silence again.

“Please,” she said. And, “Please,” she whispered.

Strangers came, unbound her from the chair, untied her, threw a blanket around her, and led her—nearly blind, mad with fear—away
from the bright light, into the hellish darkness.

“But I can help you,” she shouted. “I can
help
you.”

Faregan paced in the corridor. “All of them but her,” he said. “I put my most loyal man on her with orders to bring her in
to me when this all came together, and the bastard vanishes, and her with him.” He punched his fist into the open palm of
his other hand. “I was going to offer her the choice between survival with me and death with the traitors. She would have
been mine. Mine. So where is she? Where is Jethis?”

He walked faster, up and down the empty hall—a dozen steps, turn, a dozen more, turn. Rage ate into his gut like poison—twisting,
hurting. Cheated. He’d been cheated of his prize, his due reward. He’d waited, he’d been patient, he’d taken her refusals
and her rudenesses, and each time he’d simply put them aside, for that was what men did. They were patient, they made plans,
and when the time was right, they made offers that could not be refused.

“Jethis was a double agent,” Faregan said suddenly, stopping in mid-stride. He stared up at the ceiling. “A double agent.
One of them. He’s taken her to whatever place these traitors had set aside as a bolt-hole.”

Everything was all right, then. Faregan would still find Jess CovitachArtis; when all the traitors’ stories under mage-interrogation
and torture started coming in, the locations of the few holdouts would come to light. Then loyal Inquestors could go and retrieve
Jess. And Jethis.

After Jess was safely in his possession—the toy he’d waited so long to acquire, the finest of his collection—he thought he
would participate personally in the torture of Jethis. The double-dealing bastard would have a long, long time to wish he
was dead.