Vincalis the Agitator (63 page)

“No, Master. But the people who live in the cities surrounding each Warren might. We were under the impression that nothing
should be noticed about these devices until they went off.”

Addis nodded thoughtfully. “Quite so. Now … tell me what will happen if we have a breach in one of our shields.”

The associate shook his head firmly. “Master, we cannot permit breaches. We must be quite certain that the shields are impregnable.
Should the spell get out, it would turn the whole of the planet and everything on it to liquid, and bind all our souls into
the mix for eternity.”

Addis put the little bird on a table and said, “Son, one thing I have learned in forty years of practicing magic is that you
never—and I mean
never
—develop a system based on the assumption that any other system will be functioning at the time. We cannot guarantee that
all of our shields will hold. What if the god who destroyed our shield during the execution, and who is responsible for the
deaths of most of the Inquestors and a goodly portion of your colleagues, decides to breach one of the shields we cast around
some remote Warren?”

“That would be …” The young associate began, then paused and considered. “But what god would aid in the destruction of the
souls of potential worshipers? That simply wouldn’t make sense.”

“You plan not for what the enemy might do, but for what he can. Take your test device back to Research. Before I will clear
it to go to the Council, and before I will sanction a demonstration, it will have a self-limiting spell attached. It will
abide by the following limits: It will cast itself only upon humans; no animals, no plants. It will have an energy-use cap;
that is, no matter how much energy is available to it, it will use only a specific amount to run itself—let’s say … ah, a
thousand luns— that will be controllable by the area Dragons if it gets out of bounds. And each device will have a defined
damage radius no greater than the radius of the largest Warren in the Empire. That way, if we have a shield go down on us
somewhere, we won’t lose an entire city, or even much past the outer edge of our target.” He templed his fingers in front
of him, thinking. “No, better yet … let each device have a damage area no greater than the diameter of its own target Warren.
It may take a bit longer to design individual spells—but if you have a good artificer working on the final spell-birds, he
could add a spell rheostat to each that would permit us to set the radius before we launch.”

Lost in his own thoughts, Addis did not see the expression that flitted across the face of the young associate as he listed
his requirements for the final spell-birds. He should have.

“That will be all, then,” he said after a final moment of contemplation. “You have my requirements firmly in memory?”

“I wear the badge of Mnemonimancy,” the associate said coldly.

“You do,” Addis agreed. “I should have spent some time at that degree myself—I wouldn’t trust my own memory to get me out
my door in the morning without a good minder on my wrist, chirping the directions to get me there.”

The associate turned away. Addis would have been disturbed by the young man’s expression of fury, more so by the nature of
his thoughts.

K
irbin Rost, promising full associate in the Department of Energy, held not only a badge of Mnemonimancy, but also the ear
of the new Master of Research, Zider Rost. Zider happened to be his favorite aunt. Kirbin sat across the desk from his freshly
promoted relative—the rupture of the shield the day of the executions had been unlucky for some, but certainly not for all—and
placed the spell-bird on the smooth jade surface.

“The Master of Energy was pleased?” Rost the elder asked.

“The Master of Energy is a senile dolt; did you know that?”

“We’ve met.” Zider smiled slowly. “So … he had problems. Didn’t like the color of the birds, eh? Thought we should model them
after wrens, perhaps? Or ravens?”

“Nothing so simple.” Kirbin carefully repeated, word for word, his conversation with Master Addis Woodsing—but as he repeated
the conversation, he took some liberties with tone. He knew he should not do such a thing, but the Master of Energy had been
condescending. Rude. Ignorant and stodgy and unimpressed with the marvelous work the men and women in the Department of Research
had done. So Kirbin slightly increased the edge of the conversation—made the condescending responses a bit more snide, made
the doltish ones just slightly more nasal and dull. One of his Masters would have caught him, but Zider, like most wizards,
had never bothered to obtain the difficult but low-stature badge of Mnemonimancy. If she had listened to both conversations
side by side, she would have declared them identical.

And they were, except that Kirbin’s version had been designed to increase the chance that Zider would feel the way Kirbin
felt about the stupid old man in Energy.

When he finished his recitation, he summoned the Mnemon.

“My words I present,

At forfeit of my life.

Each and all accounted,

None added, none taken away,

By oath of the Mnemon,

That which remembers.”

Around him the air shimmered, and the Mnemon spoke from a space above Kirbin’s head: “A true accounting. The teller may live.”

So he hadn’t cut his emotional shadings too fine. One day, he thought, he might do just that—but not today.

His aunt said, “A thousands luns. The moron wants each spell-set to run on just a thousand luns. And a rheostat to adjust
the damage circle, when we’ll have perfectly good shields all about to keep the damage where it’s supposed to be. He’d add
another half year to the design work with that damned rheostat spell, by the time we made sure it didn’t interfere with the
workings of any of the rest of the spells in the spell-set. People see a nice bit of work at a trade show, where someone demonstrates
using a rheostat or something similar to control spell workings, and suddenly every apprentice and his half-wit brother wants
a rheostat on everything from the toilet pull to the doorbell. As if the damned device will be the answer to all their needs.”

“We aren’t going to do the rheostats, then?”

His aunt smiled at him. “Of course we’ll do rheostats. And we’ll do a nice display that permits the user to specify the damage
radius. And that’s all it will be—a nice display. I’m not limiting the spell-sets to any thousand luns of energy usage, either.
That’s ludicrous. It would take a week—maybe even more—to liquefy a small Warren.” She frowned and began scratching figures
on a notepad. “Almost a month for the total liquefaction of the Oel Artis Warren. We’re supposed to turn those energy units
into liquid fuel over the period of almost a month? That’s … inhumane. I don’t care what they know or what they feel—I wouldn’t
sleep nights if I did a thing like that. Better it’s quick.”

Kirbin leaned back in his seat and nodded. His aunt was no old dolt. She understood energy, understood the way spells ought
to work. “Then how will we present our handling of the energy cap?”

“We won’t. You’ve given me the information, I have taken that information and made my determinations, based on my expertise—which
in this instance does take precedence, and can override a one-to-one vote from Energy, if necessary. I will add a limit to
prevent a spell from running indefinitely. A shield somewhere could go down, and I don’t want to be eternally liquid, and
I doubt that you do, either.”

Kirbin nodded. “So you think there might be some danger of a shield collapsing.”

Zider smiled. “This is one area where the old fool was correct—and is something our own people need to remember more often.
Plan not for what the enemy might do, but for what he can. The god Vodor Imrish probably won’t interfere with any of the shields.
But he could. So plan for that. The planning costs us nothing, the preparation costs us little, but our failure to take simple
precautions could—unlikely though that might be—cost us our lives and our world.”

Kirbin considered that; even though he worked in the Department of Research, he wasn’t the design and implementation specialist
his aunt was. He’d developed a broad range of skills that had made him invaluable to the department—but he couldn’t claim
the years of intense practical experience in energy handling that his aunt could. If Zider thought a range limit on the spell
was reasonable, he would have to defer.

“He didn’t have a problem with the cutoff switch?”

Kirbin said, “I failed to point it out to him. And he failed to notice it.”

“Ah.” Zider smiled. “It’s silly of me, I’m sure, but I don’t like to build anything that has a start switch but no stop switch.
In case we … ah, have to change our minds at the last minute.”

“Have you ever had to do something like that?”

Zider’s face went bleak as death. “Yes.”

Kirbin considered asking his aunt for details, thought he probably shouldn’t, if the look in her eye was any indication—and
then decided to ask anyway. “When?”

“Just a few years after I first joined the department.” She shrugged. “The Bird City power outage. It was the worst thing
I’ve ever seen.” Her eyes developed a faraway stare, and she shuddered. “You can look it up in the records.”

Which meant that she didn’t intend to talk about it, but Kirbin tried once more. “Worse than the Oel Maritias disaster?” He’d
been in that one. Had been a little boy, and terrified. His mother had been so badly injured in the collapse of one of the
floating platforms in the main festival val chamber that she’d never been the same afterward. Even with magical reconstruction
and a great deal of mind-healing, she still refused to go to underwater cities again for any reason, and eventually left him
and his father and moved away to a ground dwelling. Kirbin hadn’t seen her in years.

But Zider smiled grimly. “That wasn’t a disaster. That was a save. The only long-term repercussions we’ve had from that are
the bad spot in the sea where the city used to be, and having to drag the city itself thirty miles to the south before we
could resink it.”

“A lot of people died.”

“People are the least of your problems when magic goes bad.”

They didn’t talk about Kirbin’s mother, Zider’s sister. She was a save, too, technically. Her strange choices after the accident
had little to do with reality, and much to do with the paranoia that gripped her and refused to let go.

Kirbin realized their discussion was at an end. “Would you have me do anything else, then, Aunt Zider?” he asked.

Zider frowned. “Have someone get me radiuses and total mass data for all of the Warrens. I want to figure energy expenditures.
We’ve configured for the
rewhah
from all of these spells to go through the Oel Artis Processing Center, but I think, as I consider safety, that we might
be better off adding a hand-clasp pass and moving
rewhah
-handling to the area centers. We could have a real mess if we fail to adequately buffer all of the centers.”

Kirbin said, “I’ll have the information to you as soon as someone can figure it. Do you have a tolerance range you’d like
to specify for mass averages?”

“I’d like exact measurements, but if we can’t get those in time, then I want the tightest tolerances possible, and in every
instance we need to round our estimates up, not down.”

“I’ll pass it on.”

Patr kept watching the sky. He tried not to get caught at it, and so far he had managed to deflect the few comments with generalities
about the weather and fear of coming thunderstorms, but with every minute that passed, he knew disaster was racing closer.
He could sense the Inquest searching for him. His betrayal would not go unpunished, and his presence would betray the rest
of these people. When the Inquestors came, they would come in low, he thought—and no one would have time to react. And the
Inquestors would destroy the Gyrunalles and their pretty, painted wagons. All the warriors would die, and the women and the
wild, unfettered children, and the wizards. And with them would die the Kaan, and the outcast citizens of the Empire, and
the brethren of Resonance, and the newly minted Falcons, and that lunatic Wraith, and Patr himself. And Jess.

So when Jess came pounding through the brush with her hair wild and her face pale as death, Patr’s heart jammed into his throat
and he couldn’t breathe and couldn’t think. They’d come, and it was all over, and he hadn’t been able to save her.

But she was babbling something about Wraith.

Wraith.

The din of panic in his ears died down a little, and he said, “Wait. Catch your breath. What about Wraith? Did he die?” That
would only be partly bad news for Patr. He’d come to like Wraith, but the fact remained that Jess carried her unrequited love
for him around her like a wall, and it wouldn’t be until the man was dead that she might see how much Patr loved her.

“He … he … woke up.” She was crying, too, Patr realized. Tears dripped from the corners of her eyes and down the tip of her
nose. Her face crumpled when she cried.