Vincalis the Agitator (36 page)

He saw a cluster of well-dressed women standing in front of a large building talking, and pulled the aircar to the curb. “Do
any of you know where the playhouse is? The one where Gellas Tomersin presents the plays of Vincalis?”

Several of them giggled, and one walked to the aircar. “I’ll take you and your friend there … for a price,” she said. She
gave him a sultry smile, and Solander realized that he had chosen just the wrong group of women to query. “And I can give
you two a wonderful experience on the way.”

Borlen flushed pink all the way to the tips of his ears. Solander felt the collar of his tunic constricting around his neck.
“I’ll … um, pay for the directions,” he said, “but I don’t … ah … we aren’t …”

She laughed. “You really aren’t, are you? I thought you boys had come up with an interesting new line.”

Solander shook his head, for the moment speechless.

“You don’t need to pay me.” She smiled again, and this time it was a real smile, and rather pleasant. “Straight down this
road, cross two intersections, turn left, it’s on the left. Easy to find.” She shrugged. “But the play they’re doing right
now isn’t one of his best. It’s the new one.
Girl of the Winter City.
It felt kind of … I don’t know. Cynical. I think he’s sort of lost the heart that made his early work so good.”

Solander thanked her and drove off, bemused. Whores as theater critics. He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. Wraith had
been writing for everyone, and it seemed everyone had seen something of his at one time or another. His popularity was the
reason the city could support three theaters that rotated his plays through them at regular intervals.

Luercas returned home late, and found the servants scurrying around like panicked ants in an anthill just stirred by a stick.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“We can’t find the stolta,” one of the servants said. “She left this morning—she told the cook she would be gone briefly and
gave a list of the meal items for the day. She did not tell Dorsea where she planned to go. And then she did not come back.
The Payswi two-seater is missing. But none of her things are gone. We’ve heard nothing from her all day. And we have been
scouring the house for a note, or a message, or anything that might tell us what happened to her. We fear she might have been
… injured.” He averted his eyes from Luercas at that last word, and Luercas understood. The servants feared that
he
had somehow done away with his wife.

Luercas nodded. He did not let his fury show; no matter what they might be thinking of him or what they might believe he was
capable of, good servants were hard to come by, and some of these had been with his family for most of their lives. He valued
them. He said, “Do not worry about her. She is thoughtless and erratic, but I am sure she has come to no harm. She does things
without considering the consequences or who she might inconvenience. She didn’t mention any plans to me today, but then, she
rarely does what she should.” He waved a hand in dismissal. “Call off your search. I’ll take care of this personally. And
… thank you, Otryn. I will not hold any of the staff responsible for my vowmate’s thoughtless behavior. Please pass that on
to them for me.”

Otryn nodded and faded out of the way.

Luercas considered the beating he’d given her the night before. He’d outdone himself, really. He usually tried to keep most
of the marks from showing—inflicting deep and lasting pain, but making sure she could not gain sympathy for it by showing
her injuries, had a better effect than leaving cuts and bruises that might encourage the staff to pity or support her—but
she had utterly incensed him and he had let his anger loose. He’d wanted to crush her.

He stared down at the floor. Actually, most of the time he was beating her, he had wanted to kill her. And last night he’d
come close to doing it. He took a slow breath and stared at his hands—at the scrapes on his knuckles that he’d left in place
to remind himself of how close he’d come to doing something he wouldn’t be able to take back.

He hated Velyn. He hated her tawdriness, her dreadful, embarrassing past, her fascination with the lower classes. How she,
who had been born to the highest and the best that life had to offer, could have ever bedded the long list of chadri, mufere,
and parvoi ground-grubbers— not to mention her horrifying tendency to take up with family members—was a source of both bewilderment
and irritation to him. The only acceptable man he’d ever been able to find among her long list of conquests was Gellas Tomersin;
and Luercas hated Gellas more than he hated the nonstolti.

But for all Luercas’s hatred of her, he could not lay blame for his violence entirely on her.

In the past years, he had been subject to terrible rages; he had allowed himself to be violent with Velyn, but he had felt
an equal fury for the wizards with whom he worked, for the councilors on the Dragon Council who cowered in fear of taking
progressive action, for complete strangers who inconvenienced him or did things he did not like.

Luercas did not think that the rages came from him. While he had always had a short temper, he had never been subject to violent
and even murderous impulses until he acquired the stolen body. Only a few days after he had finally been released from the
horrible travesty of a body in which the accident had trapped him, he had fallen into a fit of blinding rage and broken the
neck of one of the inept, stupid servants in the house of the healer whose guest he had been. That had been an unpleasant
and expensive fiasco. And since then, those rages had only gotten worse and more frequent.

Luercas believed his true body was trying to get him back into it, and that the lovely body he had stolen wanted to creep
back to its rightful soul, and he lived in fear. He felt the tug of his true flesh pulling him toward the Warrens—toward the
place where he had hidden the scarred monstrosity he had cast aside, and the soul he had wrongfully trapped in the prison
he had escaped.

At night sometimes he woke to find that he had sleepwalked toward the door, toward the Warrens. He dreaded the time when someone
should come upon him and catch him at this sleepwalking, and wonder what demons might possess his soul that could drive him
to such disturbed behavior. He promised himself that he would never inhabit another body that did not truly belong to him.
He could not think of any manner in which he might acquire a body that could truly belong to his soul—he would never take
back that scaly, horned nightmare in which he had been encased for so long. But …

But he frightened himself. He seemed less and less in control of himself. The body wanted to murder, strangle, torture, destroy.
The body. He was its victim, he decided. And it used him, and would continue to use him, until he got rid of it. That was
it. He had acquired an evil body. He needed to find a way to get one that had no taint of evil in it.

He closed his eyes, and leaned against the cool whitestone wall, and listened to the soothing hum of the house, the soft chiming
that all such houses made when the wind played over them. He was stolti. He had power and wealth and freedom; he had his native
intelligence, his fine education; he had the strength of character to control both himself and the people around him. He had
to accept the fact that he could not control Velyn, however. He’d spent the last three years trying to convince himself that
sooner or later she would learn to obey him and would understand that he was in charge. But she did not. She would not.

So he needed to put her aside—but in a fashion that would not jeopardize his fortunes, that would make her clearly the party
at fault. Since he did not wish to murder Velyn—well, since he did not wish to be punished for murdering Velyn, or to have
to pay the massive fines and punitive damages he would have to pay were he to take that rash action—he would decide on some
more palatable method of getting her out of his life.

First thing in the morning, he would speak to an associate who knew useful people. One of those people would certainly be
able to help him.

W
raith wished he could have pawned Velyn off on one of his associates, but this part of his plan for helping her escape from
Luercas he had to carry out himself. He had to be seen as the one who dispassionately brought her before the justice system
of the Hars and asked that she be given justice. Since she had involved him in her unhappy situation, his willingness to follow
legal precedent would be his only alibi when she disappeared. Why would he take her before the justices of the Grand Court
if he intended to help her disappear?

So he walked beside her into the House of the Landimyn’s Justice, and led her through the maze of broad, ornate old corridors
to the Court of the Family. And there he presented her to an old man whom he had known since he was a boy in the Artis household—a
man who now called him from time to time to ask for tickets, better seats, and special favors. Wraith called in the first
of his debts.

“You bring this woman before the court in what capacity?” the old man asked him privately.

Wraith sighed. “She and I were childhood friends, and she was once my lover. I asked her to take vows with me, and she refused
me, so I put her aside. I had not heard from her since, except on the day she took vows with someone else. But today she appeared
in my office, looking like this and begging me to help her. Out of old obligation, I am helping her out.”

“You had no hand in her situation, either as the man who beat her or as the man over whom her vowmate beat her?”

“My conscience is clear, Sveth. Hire whomever you will to search out the secrets of my life; I have not seen her in three
years. Today’s visit has been a disruption and an inconvenience—but I once had feelings for her. I would not see her hurt
like this again.”

The judge nodded. “Very well. I would not have thought otherwise, but I had to ask.”

He sent Wraith back to a seat and called Velyn forward. Wraith could not hear what they said, but he could see Velyn’s shoulders
shaking as she sobbed. Could see her holding out her battered hands, moving aside bits of her clothing to show a cut or a
bruise. He could tell how effective her presentation was because of the increasingly stunned expression on the judge’s face.

Finally the judge asked her to step onto the verifier, a small raised cube with a dais set in front of it. He murmured the
spell that started the verification process. On the dais in front of her physical self, a second Velyn appeared, this time
with Luercas. Luercas’s expression belonged to a madman. Wild-eyed, his face red with fury, his lips curled back from his
teeth, he forced her into a corner. He drew a knife, and with the fingers of his free hand wrapped around her throat, he began
to cut her with the knife—little, shallow cuts on her arms and her neck that bled freely. He cut her shirt away, and began
drawing bloody lines across her breasts and belly. The whole time, he was calling her his beloved, his darling vowmate, the
joy of his life—but in a voice that made Wraith shudder.

“Enough,” the judge said when Luercas jammed the knife into a conveniently close chair back and began to smash his fist into
her face, her chest, and her belly, over and over. The image vanished, and the real Velyn slumped to the floor, burying her
face in her hands and sobbing.

The judge and Wraith exchanged horrified looks. The judge called Wraith forward again and said, “I will issue an edict of
nullification of vows, with a rider of failure to abide by the terms of the contract written against her vowmate. That’s what
I can do, but it won’t be enough. She left without money, and I cannot permit her to return to that house for any reason,
under any circumstances. She’ll need a place to stay, funds, medical assistance—”

“I’ve taken care of that already. My personal healer will attend to her injuries. One of my staff members will take her to
an excellent boardinghouse. Others of my staff will stand guard over her, to make sure that Luercas does not manage to find
a way to finish what he started.”

The judge nodded. “And what of you?”

Wraith glanced over at Velyn and shrugged. “I will make sure she is well taken care of, that she is safe and does not want.
But I have moved on with my life. She will find someone else eventually, or perhaps not. In either instance, I’m out of her
life.”

The judge looked from her to him, back to her, and settled on staring off into the distance between the two of them.

“What would you say, then?” Wraith asked, just as Velyn asked, “Why do you stare that way? It’s … horrible.”

The judge seemed not to hear either him or her—and then suddenly he was back with them again, looking from one to the other.
“Velyn,” he said, “you are not to contact Wraith again. He may seek you out if he has reason to do so, but because of the
danger that association with you may pose to him, you are to remain well away from him at all times.”

Wraith nodded, satisfied. He gave the judge the name and the reservation information for the fine suite in the boardinghouse
he had obtained for her. He informed the judge that he had paid for the first week, and that if she had not come to some accommodation
with her circumstances by the time that week ended, he would be sure she would have another week paid. The judge carefully
wrote out and gave to one of his junior wizards the injunction against Luercas that placed full blame for the incident on
him and dissolved Luercas’s and Velyn’s vows, with severe prejudice against Luercas. And both of them turned to Velyn.