Vincalis the Agitator (51 page)

Wraith and Solander moved through empty corridors, and at each intersection Solander had to force open locks by magic. Each
time, Wraith expected someone to come after them, yet each time, Solander eventually succeeded with the lock, and they moved
forward.

“They’ve thrown everything they have at these locks,” he muttered once. “That’s the reason they don’t have anyone guarding
the corridors— not even the Master of the Dragons could hope to get through all of these locks without a massive pipeline
into the Warrens, and they’ve somehow blocked magic access to everyone but themselves. If I wasn’t drawing on my own forces,
we’d never have a chance.”

“They’ve got to know we’re out,” Wraith said. “How could they not? I haven’t shown up wherever they were going to take me.
The guards are welded into your cell—the Masters are going to miss them soon enough.”

“We’re not leaving any tracks. The shield I have around us will keep us from setting off any alarms, and as long as you stay
close to me, neither of us will even be visible.”

“You hope.”

“Could you see me when I shielded?”

“No.”

“Then it’s more than a hope.”

“We’re really going to just walk out of here?”

They moved around a corner and three routes confronted them. Solander swore. “Assuming we don’t get lost, yes.”

Wraith spent so much of his time anymore away from magic, he sometimes forgot just how much it could accomplish. “This place
is a maze—designed to confuse. I’ve read the histories of it. Do you have any way of using magic to find a safe way out?”

“Doing it now,” Solander said. His face was pale, his forehead gleaming with sweat. “Don’t … talk. I need my focus. I can’t
guarantee anything, but …” He shrugged.

Wraith nodded and, silent, stayed as close to his friend as he could. They made little sound, walking through long corridors
past closed doors, the near-darkness broken only by the infrequent green glow of wizard globes along the walls. This part
of the Gold Building had the feel of the abandoned, the forgotten. It gave Wraith the shudders; he could imagine himself or
someone else languishing behind one of those locked and barred doors, starving into oblivion, misplaced by everyone. Did the
Inquest—this startling group of madmen and fiends that lived and thrived under the noses of the Dragons, almost as a second
government—rid itself of its most troublesome targets in such a callous, simple manner?

Solander only spoke once more during their traverse of the corridors. “Every one of these locks is different,” he whispered.
“Every one takes some special combination of tricks to break through. I’m not sure how many more of these I have the energy
to open.”

“How can I help?”

Solander laughed softly and shook his head. “You can carry me if we make it outside.”

“That’s it?”

Solander nodded.

Long corridors, and twists left and right, and the intermittent splashes of green. Then a change. Darker walls, an unexpected
older part of the building not built of the mages’ whitestone, but of actual stone— of cut and fitted blocks. Wraith had never
seen anything outside of the Kaan enclaves even remotely like it. Solander and Wraith stopped, looked at each other.

“Close?” Wraith whispered.

Solander nodded, pointed them onward.

No more gates now. They walked faster, Solander leaning on Wraith and breathing hard. And finally the last door lay ahead.
Solid metal, barred. Solander leaned against it, concentrated as he had with the other gates, and finally sagged to the floor.
“I can’t touch this one.”

Wraith looked at him. “The spell too strong?”

“I don’t know. I can’t get close enough to the lock to see the spell. Something is keeping me back.”

Wraith studied the door and the mechanism of the lock with a desperation approaching panic. On the other side lay freedom.
He could feel it. But he had no tools with which to manipulate the lock’s tumblers, nothing with which to cut through the
metal, no way to break down this one last door.

He didn’t understand this setback. He could have understood if the door had no magic to it—though in the Gold Building, he
would imagine no such door existed. But that Solander could not manipulate it by magic—that he did not understand. Had the
Dragons found the secret that would explain what made Wraith the way he was? Had they discovered how to make things oblivious
to magic?

A voice behind him said, “Final spell, you see. A magic repeller.”

Wraith and Solander turned. They faced what looked like the whole of the Silent Inquest: the three men he recognized as the
Masters, with Master Noano Omwi at their head; behind him a dozen or more keppins—middle-aged men who took orders directly
from the Masters; the keppins’ assembled solitars—young men coming up in the organization; and the solitars’ many investigators,
watchers, and drones. The mass of black and green robes, of hooded and shadowed faces, of fanatical eyes, caused Wraith’s
stomach to clench so violently that he had to fight back simultaneous desperate urges to puke and shit himself.

Omwi said, “Not expecting us? Ah, but we’ve been expecting the two of you. We created a test for you, and you did beautifully.
We couldn’t see you, we couldn’t hear you, we couldn’t track you except that each time you passed through a door, our watching
spells could see the door open. Had it not been for that, we’d have lost you almost immediately. Lucky for us that doors are
such physical things.”

And Faregan, to Omwi’s right, smiled and asked, “So were you impressed with this last gate? It’s something new that we’ve
just tried out— and well that we did, too, though the cost of using the spell with any sort of regularity would bankrupt the
Empire’s magic reserves in no time.”

“But it won’t be necessary. We needed it for these two, but the secret of this new magic dies with them, for the good of the
Empire.” Omwi chuckled. “Quite a little discovery you seem to have made, Solander. You and Gellas both—to all appearances
impervious to magical questioning, and shielded from magical manipulation thanks to this new magical system of yours. To have
gotten through every other barrier we placed before you—and to do it without setting off a single alarm, or tapping into the
Warrens’ energy pools—you’ve had to pull from yourself as much power as we’ve drawn from at least a dozen souls. And while
we’ve had to expend effort and power in diverting the
rewhah,
you seem to have no
rewhah
issues at all. It’s been a breathtaking demonstration.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “But now, unless I miss my guess,
the two of you are at last reserves. Just as well. We didn’t want to have to hurt you before we took you to the interrogation
rooms. We want you to be healthy and … and, well, cooperative for questioning. After all, we’re going to have to have your
secret. What would be a disaster in the hands of the citizenry will to us be … valuable.”

The keppins and the solitars brought up weapons and aimed them at Wraith and Solander. “No,” Solander said. “We’ll go with
you without a fight.”

“You will,” Omwi said. “But on our terms.” And keppins and solitars fired simultaneously.

Gold and green and red and yellow fires erupted from the weapons and exploded around Solander and Wraith, and Solander collapsed
instantly. Wraith simply stood there while the cold fires splashed against him and swirled around him, crackling and roaring.
He thought perhaps he ought to collapse as Solander had, but he didn’t think it quickly enough. Omwi gave a signal an instant
before he thought to drop, and keppins and solitars switched off their weapons and lowered them.

“No,” Omwi said. “That wasn’t a shield. You weren’t using the sort of magic he was; you weren’t using anything. The spells
went right through you, but they didn’t touch you.” He looked from Wraith to Solander, and back to Wraith. “Him I understand.
I don’t know how his system works yet, but I know he has a system, and I know I can get the details. But you …” He shook his
head. “All the time I’ve been watching you, Gellas, I never noticed anything wrong with you. But you’re quite, quite wrong,
aren’t you? Fascinating.”

Omwi turned his back on Wraith, and to his keppins he said, “Take Solander to interrogation. And when you have what you need
from him, lock him away with the rest of the traitors.” He turned back to Wraith. “You … well, you’ll have a different fate,
I think. We have to find out first what makes you work, don’t we? We can’t waste someone for whom the laws of magic don’t
seem to work. No telling what fascinating things we’ll find out about magic if we study you.”

Wraith closed his eyes. He should have fallen to the ground along with Solander. He should have. Too late to do it now. Now
he could only allow himself to be taken back the way he had come, allow himself to be escorted into a single, lonely cell.
Could only listen to the heavy, physical, real bar on the other side of the door falling into place, and to the physical—not
magical—lock clicking.

One of the lonely cells in one of the labyrinthine corridors, somewhere in the heart of oblivion.

The end of the road, he thought. He’d reached the end of the road, and neither he nor Solander had managed, for all their
idealism, to save anyone.

“Why are we here?” Jess asked Patr.

Patr paid the little man from whom he had ordered an extraordinary amount of supplies, clothing, and foods. He turned to Jess
and pointed to the little house to which he’d brought them.

“Inside first.”

Jess looked over his shoulder and said, “Wait. That man is taking our aircar.”

“That’s part of how we paid for the things we’re getting. Believe me, we don’t want it anywhere around us. My superiors may
have ways of locating us through it.”

“Patr …”

“Inside. I promise, love—this is something that can’t be said in open air.”

Jess stared at him, then turned and walked into the tiny, run-down house. The three rooms were all empty, the adobe walls
cracked, the windows unfettered by any such niceties as mageglass, or simple glass, or even shutters or screens—the wind blew
in as freely as it blew across the plains of this bleak, sun-scorched place, bringing with it bits of dirt and sand, insects,
and the occasional tiny float-lizard.

“Inside doesn’t seem to offer much of an improvement over outside, actually,” she said.

“I know. And I apologize. This is the best I can offer on short notice; once I … well, once things changed, I’d planned something
much better, but I ran out of time.”

Jess found the one wall that looked more or less solid and almost clean, and leaned gingerly against it. It held. She said,
“You’ve talked about things changing, and about running out of time, and about your plans—but you haven’t given me any details.
One last time, then, Patr. Who were in the aircars that surrounded my house? Why did we run, and how did you know to get us
out of there before they arrived? And what are we doing here?”

He took a deep breath. “Easy things first. We’re here because we’re hiding. From the Silent Inquest—a group of evil men, and
a group in which I was once a minor but trusted member. I had this place put aside in case I should ever run afoul of them.
They … ah, they sometimes find the best way to keep a secret is to eliminate everyone who knows it. I’ve had friends who disappeared
right after they worked on something big or sensitive. The Masters of the Inquest and their keppins are vicious; they claim
a code of honor, but rarely find it convenient to follow it. So, when I realized what they were and how they worked, I acquired
this place. Very carefully, through dummy buyers and layers upon layers of protective cover. I’ve never come here before.”
He glanced around at it and wrinkled his nose. “I didn’t get much for my money, but if I got our lives, that will be enough.”

She nodded. “Fine. Then the people who invaded my home just after we left it were … Silent Inquest?”

“Yes.”

“And this is about Wraith?”

“Wraith? You mean Gellas?”

“Yes. Gellas is Wraith.”

“I don’t know if it’s about him. It’s about treason against the Empire, and I have to think your friend Wraith has some part
in that, but I don’t believe he’s the only one the Inquest is after. I know they want Solander. I know they want Vincalis.
And I know they’re after the Kaan; they’ve just been waiting for the Kaan to demonstrate their animosity to the Empire in
a way that can be both proven and punished.”

Jess cringed.

“And they were after me.”

“Yes. Because of your associations with both Gellas—or Wraith, I suppose—and Solander. You had the misfortune to make some,
well … some ill-starred friendships, to say the least.”

Jess smiled a little. Without those two friendships, she would be either mindless magic fodder in the Warrens or already dead.
Facts that Patr, secret soldier of the Inquest, would not get from her.

“I understand why you are here, then,” she said after some thought. “But why am I here? Why not give me to the Inquest and
be a hero, or simply leave me where I was and flee for your life? You would have had a safer and easier trip without me.”