Vincalis the Agitator (13 page)

“It’s customary to spend time with the people you talk to.”

“I did spend time with you,” she said. “But my friends will be waiting on me.”

“I don’t know how they could be, since you had not even the beginning of an idea of how to find them when you came here.”

“No doubt they will be looking for me, too—and this isn’t their first year. But”—she bowed with polite and distant formality—“as
I have already made plans for this festival, I will thank you for your time and let you be getting on to yours.” She turned
her back on him and walked resolutely away, holding her breath the whole time and praying that he would not follow.

She moved at a fast pace, in and out of the little side lanes, through big pavilions, and across artificial glades that would
have been quite lovely if they had not also been filled with squirming, moaning, gasping humans engaged in activities she
did not wish to see.

Finally, near a busy food court, she stopped and caught her breath. That pervert had given her a scare. She realized she was
not protected by being a child, because here she had disguised herself as an adult, and she carried identification that proclaimed
her an adult. Things she did not want could happen to her here, and she would have no one to whom to run for help. Wraith
didn’t know she was here. Solander didn’t know she was here. No one would be looking for her, and even if someone did look
for her, she couldn’t be found because her identification proclaimed that she was someone other than who she said she was.

But if this was no place for her, it was no place for Wraith, either. He didn’t belong here. She didn’t want him going off
with some masked woman to do …

Her mind balked at the images it conjured, and in desperation she turned to her bracelet. “Help me find Wraith,” she said.

The bracelet did nothing.

She frowned. “Help me find Gellas Tomersin,” she whispered to it, thinking perhaps it could not understand what she wanted
and had to go strictly by what she said. Wraith always went by the name Gellas with anyone who didn’t know who he really was.
So perhaps the bracelet had been spelled to recognize just his name.

But it still did nothing.

“Help me find Solander Artis.”

Again, nothing. Maybe, she thought, the bracelet would only work for its rightful owner. Or maybe he had already found a woman,
or several, and had requested privacy. Her stomach churned at the thought.

She turned in a single slow circle, looking at the massed humanity all around her—humanity still pouring in through the gates
all around the center in steady streams—and her eyes filled with tears. How could she ever hope to find Wraith in the middle
of all of this without any help? She would never approach someone, never make herself beholden for a favor, never voluntarily
speak to anyone in this place again. The lesson taught to her by the predatory stranger had not been wasted.

She closed her eyes, took one deep, steadying breath, and chose a direction at random. She might not find him. But she didn’t
intend to just give up and go home without a fight.

“He told my mother he only had one thing to finish and then the two of them would be on their way,” Solander said.

He and Wraith had found the library—unoccupied by anyone because the festival was in progress—to be a perfect spot for keeping
watch on Rone Artis’s workroom door. He was still in there—they couldn’t hear anything, but no one ever could. They had, however,
seen him go in, and they had not yet seen him come out, and they had sworn they would not move until he was gone and they
had taken their chance to look at what he had in there.

“How long have we been sitting here?” Solander said after a while.

Wraith pulled out his little pocket clock, a gift from Jess some months earlier, and said, “Four hours, twenty-three minutes.
Some odd seconds. The time is naught-twenty by Work.”

“That all? It feels later.”

“I wish we’d brought food with us.”

“Yes. Or at least we could have eaten something before we hid in here. Who knew he was going to camp in his workroom today
of all days?” Solander leaned heavily against the wall and rubbed his eyes. “We’re missing the festival for this. I’m dying
to know what goes on at one.”

“Your parents haven’t told you anything?”

“Of course they told me something. They told me the same damned thing every adult tells every child who asks. ‘The joy of
festival is discovering each one on your own. I wouldn’t think of taking that joy away from you.’” He sighed. “We could do
this tomorrow, Wraith. Go to the the festival now, leave when we’re sure both my parents are there, and come back here to
do this.”

Wraith just looked at him.

“No, eh?”

“No. We were
going
to go to the festival first, but you suggested that we take care of this instead, so that it wouldn’t be hanging over our
heads during the festival. You didn’t want to worry about it. So I’ll find out whatever I can, and then we’ll go have some
fun.”

“I was afraid you were going to—” Solander froze, shoved a finger to his lips in warning, and flattened himself back from
the fractionally opened door. Wraith, watching him, froze, too. He could hear a voice murmuring something, and then a door
opening, and then the door closing. A long pause. More murmuring. And then footsteps striking the floor briskly, sharply,
moving away toward the living quarters of the house.

Solander held his frozen pose even after neither of them could hear the footsteps anymore.

Wraith, in fact, was the first to move. He took a step toward the door, and Solander winced.

Wraith shrugged in question.

“I don’t want to go through with this,” Solander whispered.

“All you have to do is stand in front of the door and tap on it if you hear anyone coming.”

“I know—but we could get in such trouble….”

“I have to know.”

Solander looked almost defeated. “Fine,” he said at last. “You’re determined to do this. I think there may be other ways …
but it’s your skin if you get caught.”

“I know that.”

They crossed the hall. Wraith would never admit to Solander how scared he was. He knew—or at least was almost certain—that
whatever magic Rone Artis had left in place would have no effect on him. But he couldn’t be sure that it would fail entirely.
What if a spell were set not just to destroy anyone who tried to enter uninvited, but also to let Rone know who the unauthorized
intruder had been? He might go in, find whatever he needed, and come out to discover Wraith’s father and a whole crew of guards
standing over him in the middle of the night, ready to ship him off to work in the mines for the rest of his natural existence.
He dreaded getting caught—but he had to understand where he came from. He had to understand the meaning of the Warrens, for
he was sure they had a meaning, and he was equally sure it was not trivial.

His hand hovered over the door’s handle, and Solander whispered, “Still not too late to change your mind.”

Wraith grasped the handle firmly and opened the door. He could see, in the dimly lit interior, one long table covered with
an unimaginable tangle of books and papers and magical paraphernalia, a couple of chairs scattered around, a desk, and shelves
that lined the room from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall, all so full of books and manuscripts that they sagged in
the middle like swaybacked horses. In spite of the size of the room—and it was quite large—it managed to give the impression
of being cluttered and overcrowded and tended by frenzied rats.

From all the way across the hall, Solander said, “That is the messiest place I have ever seen in my life.” Wraith could tell
that was as close as Solander was going to go, too, by the way he stood—as if at any second he might simply turn and flee.

“Finding anything in there is going to be a real trick.” Wraith didn’t wait for Solander to suggest yet again that they just
go on to the festival and skip this spying attempt; instead he clenched his hands into fists, straightened his back, and stepped
into the workroom.

Lights came on all around him—but this was nothing he had not expected. Lights came on by themselves everywhere in the city
of Oel Maritias. And they went out on their own the instant the last person had left a room. Rone had once described this
bit of spellwork to Solander and him as a neat bit of energy conservation. He was always suggesting that Solander do his research
for his Academy entrance presentation in spell-casting energy conservation. He seemed to think that was the most important
issue in magic.

But then, he was Master of Energy.

Wraith looked around. How, in this vast, muddled rat’s nest of a workroom, was he supposed to find what he was looking for?
Should he look at the books? The papers? Read correspondence on the desk? Try to figure out what the multitude of apparatuses
scattered around were meant to do?

Well … people kept their most pertinent projects on their desks, didn’t they? If Rone Artis followed any form of organizational
scheme at all—and Wraith, looking around the workroom thought this might be hoping for too much—current things should be on
the top layers of stuff. Older things would be deeper in the piles. Maybe books might be filed by topic, or alphabetically.

Maybe. But maybe not.

“How could he find anything in this mess?” Wraith muttered.

“The Master uses my locator-spell function to rapidly acquire necessary background research. By simply asking for the data
he wishes to acquire, he summons this portion of me, and I, in turn, illuminate all relevant materials.”

Wraith went flat to the floor, his heart pounding at his ribs like it was trying to dig its way to safer quarters.

Nothing happened. No follow-up comments from the mysterious voice, no queries, no alarms. After several minutes of lying on
the floor feeling increasingly silly, Wraith cautiously sat up. “Who are you?”

“I am not a who. I am a what. I am the workroom ward—a nonsentient collection of spells created and collated to provide protection,
filing, and organizing capabilities to this room, while logging all movement within the room.”

That didn’t sound good. “Well, then … who am I?”

“You do not exist.”

Wraith considered that for a moment. “I’m talking to you, therefore I must exist.”

“Speech is immaterial. You do not present a profile within the parameters given me for those things which exist. Therefore,
you do not exist.”

Good enough. His inexplicable invisibility to magic continued to stand him in good stead. “I want information on the Warrens.”

“Do you wish to have it presented in order of most recent date, volume of research done, subject of research, or other?”

“What is the date of the most recent research on the Warrens?”

“Today.”

Wraith shivered. “Give me the most recent research. If that doesn’t tell me what I need to know, we’ll try something else.”

Around the room, various papers and objects began to glow. Some were much brighter than others, a few so brilliant he had
to squint to look at them. He guessed that the brightest objects were those most recently used, and went to the very brightest
he could see. It was a sheaf of paper as thick as his thumb, fastened into a binder. The second he touched it, the light died
away so that he could look at it without difficulty.

The binder title was imposing.

Methodology for Extracting Energy from Human Souls,
With Comparisons to Current Energy Extraction Methods
With Suggested Applications
Plus All Cost-to-Benefit Rations and Energy-to-Rewhah Data

Wraith frowned and opened the binder. Pages and pages of spell-equations, comments in margins, notations on possible refinements
written all over facing pages, lists of figures and graphs with curves drawn in various colors that overlapped, crossed, and
crawled across the pages like nests of snakes.

And stuck in between those, a neatly written section labeled
Suggested Applications
that noted that by using this new series of spells, the amount of energy harvested from each unit in the Warrens would more
than cover the needs of the Empire, not just for the next decade, but well into the next century, without a necessary increase
in unit numbers.

It took Wraith a few minutes of scanning to realize that the units the paper kept referring to were people.

When he realized that, everything else fell into place. He wanted to throw up.

But Solander would never believe him if he claimed the Dragons were using Warreners to fuel the Empire. Never. He had to get
this through the door—but he was willing to bet that, even though the warding spell didn’t recognize him as a threat, it would
notice secret papers leaving the security of the workroom, apparently unaccompanied. Much of the purpose of the warding spell
would be to make sure that things didn’t walk out on their own—and in a city where those who might have an interest in the
subject matter of a wizard’s private workroom would also have the talent to give wings to inanimate boxes or build cities
in the sky, papers suddenly getting up and walking out on their own would be a real threat.