Vincalis the Agitator (52 page)

“I love you,” he said. “I’ve been falling in love with you since the day Master Faregan assigned me to you.”

“Master Faregan is a member of the Inquest?”

“Yes. He’s one of the Triad, the three most powerful Inquestors in all Matrin. He sits second, after only Master Omwi.”

“He was briefly a member of a music covil with me,” Jess said softly. “He asked me to go home with him to listen to some music
from his collection—he said he could guarantee I’d never heard anything like it before. But I didn’t like the way he looked
at me. At other times, he asked me to go places with him.”

Patr said, “He collects young women. No one knows what he does with them—though I spent a great deal of time and effort once
trying to find out—but most of the Inquestors know he finds strays and takes them home. I think you were to have been part
of his collection. I realized early on that I wasn’t going to be able to turn you in to him if that ever became an issue,
but I also realized early on that you weren’t involved in any conspiracies against the Empire. I could have—I
should
have—cleared you with them after the first six months. If your innocence would have mattered to anyone, that is.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because then perhaps Faregan would have taken me away from you, and set me to watching someone else. And I didn’t want to
watch anyone else. I wanted to be with you—to have an excuse to be with you every day, and to have the approval of my superiors
to be with you. It made me happy.”

“And it left me under suspicion.”

“I told them that you didn’t know anything, but that you had friends who might be using you as an unsuspecting contact point,
and that if I stayed with you, I might find out something useful. From time to time, I fed them pieces of information that
weren’t completely true, but that weren’t completely lies, either—just enough to keep them on the hook.”

Jess stared at him, shocked. “You sound like you’re proud of this— like you expect me to be flattered that you left me under
suspicion so that you could be with me. You actually think what you did was … good?”

He looked at her and shrugged, and she saw in his face and movements a hardness she had never seen there before. “You want
me to say I did all this for you? That would be a lie. I did all of this for me. I wanted to be with you, I made it happen.”
He leaned forward and looked into her eyes. “I never said—I never
implied
—that I was a good man. I’m not. I’ve killed people, I’ve had people killed. The people I usually deal with are like me—people
who will smile at a friend and kill him on orders from above, and then go out and have a big meal with a couple of other friends
and their favorite whores.” He looked away from her then, and his voice softened. “In you, though, I see another life. Another
world. You’re pure. Good. You’ve never hurt anyone, never allowed yourself to take an easy road. Your people—the Artises …
bad people. I’ve worked with them; I know them. Through the Inquest, they’ve had me do a few things for them. They’re as deep
into the mire as anyone, grabbing for the same few fistfuls of power just as hard as they can and sinking anyone they can
sink just to improve their own footing. You came out of that family, out of that world, and it’s like none of it ever touched
you. You just walked away from it all—you and Wraith both. It’s almost as if the two of you grew up in a completely different
world from the rest of your family.”

He laughed a little, and looked at her again, and she hoped he couldn’t see any of the dismay in her eyes at how close he
had come to her real secret. He said, “And, I have to admit, you’re beautiful, and you’re smart and kind, and you’re soft,
and you smell good … and I hoped if I hung around long enough, I’d get you into bed.”

“I’m grateful to be alive,” she said, “but from what you tell me, I wouldn’t even have been in danger had it not been for
you. How are you hoping that I’ll react to what you’re telling me? That I’ll … what? Fall in love with you because you saved
my life?”

“First,” he said, “Faregan had me watching you because he wanted you. He wasn’t looking for your innocence. He didn’t care
if you were innocent; he simply wanted you. And sooner or later he would have either found or manufactured what he needed
to have you brought in and put into his power. I stood between you and him. If I’d failed outright or tried to claim your
innocence, he would have put someone else with you, and chances are that other Inquestor would have found a way to give you
to him. So you would have been in danger. You simply wouldn’t have been with someone who cared what happened to you.”

“That’s horrible,” Jess said. “You’re horrible.”

He watched her without expression, and for a long time said nothing. Finally, he shook his head. “Would you rather I’d lied
to you? It would have been easy enough to hide my associations with the Silent Inquest, to simply let you think a friend tipped
me off that you were in trouble, and that we were lucky to get away when we did. I could have made myself your hero easily
enough; probably could have gotten you into bed the same way without too much trouble. I’m not looking to be some false hero
in your eyes—not looking to lie to you about who I am or what I am. I helped you because I could. I love you because I do.
I stayed with you because I wanted to. What you do about it—what you
think
about it—is up to you.”

He looked out the window at the bleak, hot expanse beyond, and said, “We’ll have furniture here soon: beds, food, clothing
appropriate for the area, a good supply of water. When it gets here, you direct the people to put things where you want them.
Make this your home.”

Jess almost laughed then. “You’re not with the Inquest anymore, are you? I mean, they’d drag you in as fast as they would
me right now, wouldn’t they?”

“They’d kill me on sight. There’s no ‘dragging in’ about it. Why? Thinking about selling me to them for your own safety? Don’t.
They’ll double-cross you as fast as you apparently would me.”

“It hadn’t even crossed my mind. I was just thinking … if you don’t have the Inquest behind you anymore, what makes you think
the man who took our aircar away from here will ever come back with anything? If he doesn’t, what are you going to do about
it?”

Now Patr smiled. “I’d like to see him try that.” He leaned against a wall at a right angle to her and said, “Jess, I didn’t
turn into a bad, hard man because I joined the Inquest. The Inquest recruited me because I was already a bad, hard man. If
my … friend … doesn’t come back here with the things I paid him for, I’ll make sure it’s the last mistake he ever makes.”

The words, and the pleasant smile he wore while he said them, sent a chill through Jess’s veins. No matter what else she did,
she decided she would not cross Patr.

T
he Masters of the Inquest made Wraith an involuntary witness to the interrogations, and then to the trials. Bound to a chair
at the back of the amphitheater that served as courtroom for the whole hellish charade, silenced by a gag, he sat through
hour upon hour of watching while friends and colleagues underwent beatings and horrible tortures; he listened helplessly as
they confessed to things they had done, and to things they had never done. He wept, and each night when the ordeal was over,
he begged to be taken before the Inquest to offer his own testimony. Endlessly he confessed to being Vincalis, whom the interrogators
claimed to be seeking.

No one listened. No one cared what he said.

He watched the Kaan broken one by one. Beneath the hands of the interrogators, “Vincalis the Agitator” came to life in shadowy,
strange detail; the Silent Inquest’s victims first said nothing, and then said anything when the humiliation, the brutality,
and the anguish became too much for them to bear. Vincalis took shape beneath these forced confessions as a powerful member
of the stolti class and a wizard of some repute, a man so powerful he managed to remain hidden, so well connected that he
controlled vast secret armies with a single word. He was varyingly tall and short, gaunt and fat, pale and dark—and even occasionally
female, though usually the interrogation victims said he was male.

The initiates of the Order of Resonance came next into the dark room to bleed, and from them the interrogators extracted the
details of plans to free the Warreners, and copious information about their search for an antidote to the addictive poisons
in Way-fare, and the ways that they subverted art to bring others around to their cause. And they, too, described Vincalis
the Agitator—half man and half god, a shadowy over-lord so hidden none of them had ever seen his face, though many had spoken
to his associates and all knew of him.

And finally they brought in Velyn. And Wraith nearly lost his mind, watching her sit calmly before them and tell them everything
about him and Jess and Solander, about how she’d had a part in rescuing Jess from the Warrens, about how Wraith had come from
there, too, about how Wraith and Solander had planned all along to use Solander’s magic and Wraith’s knowledge of the Warrens
to destroy the magic of the Empire and free the human animals the Empire used as fuel. She told them that Wraith, who was
Gellas, was also Vincalis. She told them that Solander planned to overthrow the magic of the Empire with his new form of magic.
She gave them everything, and embellished what she gave them with things designed to make her look better and them look worse.
She just handed it to the Inquestors, without a sign of remorse, without a single threat or struggle. And when she was finished,
they tortured her as completely and as brutally as they tortured everyone else—and she told them more or less the same thing.

Wraith wanted to die. He loved her and knew he was a fool for it. And she seemed determined to prove him a fool—and to throw
his every attempt at helping her back in his face.

The man who sat next to him, who had commented with amused and loving detail on each of the tortures inflicted on Velyn, looked
at Wraith with some interest and said, “She hates you, man. If we gave you to her and handed her a knife, I’m betting she
wouldn’t have the kindness to kill you quickly.” He shook his head and laughed. “I’d love to hear what you did to her.”

Wraith would have told him. He would have told him about Velyn, about his own role in everything; he would have taken on the
weight of every sin committed by every one of the people who had trusted him, as well as the things he had done himself, if
only someone would have listened to him. But he remained bound and gagged, given sips of water at intervals, beaten when he
attempted to speak.

He had to face a dark, horrible fact. The Inquest didn’t want the truth. The Masters of the Silent Inquest could have had
the truth in a heartbeat, from anyone brought before them except for Solander or him, for nothing more than the expenditure
of a small amount of magic. The truth would have lain bare before them, unembellished, unadorned, un-twisted, for them to
do with what they chose.

After they got the truth by magic, the Inquestors tortured their prisoners until they forced lies from them—and it was the
lies they seemed to most want. But why? What purpose did these lies serve that the truth did not? Wraith worried it around
in his thoughts, but could not think of anything that would explain the actions of the Inquestors.

Then one of the guards brought a viewscreen into his cell the evening of the day that the Inquest interrogated Velyn and said,
“You’re to watch this. It has to do with you.”

On the viewscreen, he saw the nightlies. Not the usual discussion of art and literature, or of public meetings for the benefit
of one community or another. This was a spectacle, with dramatic music and well-dressed commentators discussing the discovery
of a plot against the Empire of the Hars Ticlarim, and scenes straight from the interrogation room, of person after person
confessing to crimes against the Empire, and reference after reference to the mysterious Vincalis, mastermind of the entire
attempted destruction of civilization. No mention of the Warrens in connection to Vincalis, of course, or of the source of
the Empire’s magic. No mention of the burning of souls to keep houses afloat in the air, or aircars soaring on their merry
way. No. That would never reach the screens.

But the indictment of art made its way into the commentators’ discussions clearly enough. They branded art and artists as
subversives. They declared that the Empire had only managed to bring in a small fraction of the evildoers connected with this
potentially world-shattering plot. They suggested that good citizens of the Empire would search out and bring forward all
subversives who had so far eluded their net. And they added the final bit of fear-mongering to their report: Vincalis the
Agitator had so far escaped capture, and was thought to be very much active in attempting to carry out his plot against the
Empire. No less than the Landimyn of the Hars had offered a massive reward for Vincalis’s capture, including money, a grand
home in the Aboves of Oel Artis, and a raise of status to stolti for the informant—and all of his family—whose information
led to the capture and conviction of the dangerous fugitive.

“I’m Vincalis!” Wraith screamed out the door to the guards. “Didn’t you hear Velyn? She
told
you I’m Vincalis. I wrote every one of the plays, I’m the one who plotted to free the Warreners,
I’m the man you’re looking for
!”

He beat his fists on the door of his cell, but no one came. No one wanted to hear the truth. Lies suited the needs of the
Empire so much better.