Vincalis the Agitator (64 page)

Just his luck, then. “Well, if he’s alive and awake … that’s
good
news, Jess. So why are you crying? I’d think you would be happy.”

She closed her eyes, took a long, shaky breath, and blotted her face on her sleeve. “I’m scared,” she said. “Wraith can’t
remember writing anything from all of those notebooks. He can’t remember a single thing from the time he started writing them
until he woke up today. He asked me if maybe he wasn’t sick—even delusional—when he wrote them. He’d just lost his best friend,
Patr. And the woman he loved since the day he first went to the Aboves. Maybe he was out of his mind with grief.”

Patr snorted. “Nonsense.” He held her shoulders, turned her until she was facing him, and waited until she looked into his
eyes. “Think about this for a moment. He worked all day that whole month. And he wrote all night. He slept a little around
dawn—but he never took a rest, he never quit. Remember?”

“Of course I remember.”

“He wore himself out. And the ordeal has blotted itself from his memory. The same thing happened to Inquestors who worked
with me. They’d take a tough assignment, and they would get no sleep and little food for days on end, and when they finally
had a chance to catch up, their bodies would nearly shut down. Just like Wraith’s did. And when they woke up, they never knew
what had happened.”

“Really?”

“Really. It happened to so many people we had a name for it. We said they’d gone losters.”

“Did it ever happen to you?”

“No. But I had a friend in an upper level of the organization, and he kept me away from the worst assignments.”

“So you don’t think Wraith was out of his mind when he wrote the words upon which everyone is basing their lives?”

Patr sighed. “I wish I could say I thought he was. It would mean you and I could walk away from all of this; that we had no
reason to stay and involve ourselves with the Falcons or Vodor Imrish or all of these plans against the Empire. We could go
to Strithia or Ynjarval or Manarkas and find a place to hide from the Inquest, and maybe we could live long lives. Together.
I’d love to have the chance to be happy with just you someplace far from here.” He brushed a stray tear from her cheek with
his thumb and smiled sadly. “I’ve read what he wrote. I don’t understand any of the things in the books of prophecy, but I
understood his battle plan well enough. It’s solid. It’s the only way I could imagine that the smallest of small forces could
have a chance against the massed might of the most powerful organization of wizards in the world. In fact, I could never have
imagined it. The wizards who came with us and the Gyrunalle wizards have both said the spells he wrote out not only work,
but work precisely within the guidelines of Solander’s magic—the Falcon magic. According to everyone who knows about those
things, the work is simply brilliant.”

Jess nodded. “I’ve looked over the spells. I don’t have the training the wizards here have, but I’ve had enough theory to
understand the basics of what Solander designed, and to understand that the way Wraith worked with Solander’s limitations
was … amazing.”

“Then why are you doubting?”

Her trembling smile made him want to cry. Why couldn’t he have that smile turned on him, meant for him? “Because he was afraid
… and his fear frightened me.”

“What’s he doing now?”

“Waiting for the two of us to get back. Probably dreading having consigned everyone to death with the things he wrote.”

“Then let’s go back and tell him he’s fine. And that he didn’t do anything terrible.”

“You’ll tell him about the … losters?”

“I’ll tell him.”

He wondered how long he could simultaneously admire Wraith and hope for his death—or even for his public removal from the
world by the hand of the god Vodor Imrish—without the duality driving him mad.

“There’s a problem,” a Research underling said to the associate in charge of his section. “When we implement the liquefaction
spell, the damage radius limitation spell, the stop switch, the timing spell, and the guidance spell in one spell-set,
rewhah
-handling goes haywire. We can do any four and keep the
rewhah
under control, but in every instance the fifth spell sinks us like a reefed ship.”

The associate read over the spell specifications the underling handed him and began marking out the equations, seeing what
might cancel and balance, what might amplify, and what might simply set the whole thing wrong.

He worked for a steady two hours, with an increasing itch between his shoulder blades and sweat trickling down his back. The
spell-set was tricky. He found factors in the liquefaction spell that amplified factors in the guidance spell, that canceled
portions of the damage radius spell, that wrecked the timing spell, and that caused the stop-switch spell to reverse. In each
instance, talented members of his crew had gone in and done very resourceful fixes. But the fixes clashed with each other,
too. The problem was the liquefaction spell. It was the nastiest, dirtiest piece of work he’d ever touched, and
rewhah
-handling for it alone was going to be a nightmare. Yet it was the one portion of the whole mess that couldn’t be altered
or removed entirely for cause. It had to stay.

He found that if he removed the guidance spell, the other four spells and their fixes stayed stable. The equations meshed
beautifully. In many cases, the birds could be hand-delivered if necessary, he thought. He would have to present that option
to the Master of Research. In the rest of the cases, the alternatives that would still leave a working spell were removal
of the damage radius control—and he wouldn’t even consider suggesting that one—or the stop switch.

It made sense, he thought, that if the spell-birds were going to deliver themselves to Warrens in the remoter parts of the
Empire, they wouldn’t have much need for stop switches. By the time they arrived at their destination and the liquefaction
spell triggered, everyone would be quite certain that they fully intended to go through with the procedure.

So he could easily leave the stop switches off of them.

And of course the spell-birds that Dragons could hand-deliver would not need the guidance spells. So he could, with some relief,
implement stop switches on those and leave the guidance spells off.

He wondered how the Masters of the Dragon Council would feel about canceling the whole project, though. He’d never had a worse
feeling about anything he’d worked on than he had looking at that horrid liquefaction spell. It was such an ugly piece of
work, he felt guilty even belonging to the department where it had been created.

He considered writing an anonymous message to the Council, telling them what he thought about the project. And then he came
to his senses. People had disappeared for much less. He would keep his mouth shut, do his work, and pray that his requested
transfer to the Research Department in his tiny hometown of Balgine came through soon.

He took both the problem and his solution to
his
supervisor, two steps below the Master of the Department, who told him grimly that he could do whatever he had to do to make
the damned things work, but that the Dragons were ready for their spell-birds immediately, and that he and his people were
on notice until they were done—and that everyone could sleep in shifts on cots.

The associate went back to tell his team, knowing the response he was going to get, and swore that when this crisis was past,
he was going back to Balgine for good, whether he went there with a job or not.

The Falcons presented their spell-set to Wraith on the same day that the Kaan and the yru-nalles finished the last of the
aircar shells. At first, Wraith didn’t believe them when they told him they’d found a way to eliminate the addictive and deadly
toxins from the Warreners’ bodies and package that spell with a buffer that would permit the Warreners to eat the Way-fare
without it drugging them mindless. It wouldn’t be healthy food; it would still keep them immensely fat, because that was a
physical, not magical, component of Way-fare. But until the Falcons found a way to get them safely through the gates and into
the real world—and found a place to put them and a way to feed and clothe them once they were there—it would serve.

The third and final spell in the spell-set was the one that was going to cause problems.

Wraith looked it over and said, “I can see what you’ve done here, and why. The shield spell will block the Dragons from using
any more energy of any sort from the Warrens, which will protect the Warreners’ lives and souls. But the second we put this
into place anywhere in the Empire, the Dragons are going to descend on us like the last demons of Green Hell. If we save one
Warren, we lose the rest, and probably all of ourselves in the process.”

“The aircar shells are ready,” one of the Falcons said. “We’re planning to go to the Warrens individually and place the spell-sets,
then travel straight to Oel Artis to disable the Dragons’ largest energy facility. Once that is done, we’ll be able to start
getting the Warreners out of the Warrens.” He shrugged, as if the plan he described represented neither any great danger nor
unreasonable risk. “With fortune and the hand of Vodor Imrish behind us, we’ll be able to dismantle the worst of the Empire’s
evils in a day. And the rest will surely follow.”

Wraith stared at them.

“When you cut the power that fuels the Empire, have you considered what will happen?”

The Falcons all looked at each other. “Of course. Energy in the Empire will stop flowing. Or else the Dragons’ spells will
automatically divert to accessible power sources—which will default to the citizens of the Hars. But they’ll have to cut that
fast enough—they wouldn’t dare run their cities on the blood and souls of their own people.”

Wraith, still weak and sick, leaned against a wall and shook his head vehemently. He wished the room would stop spinning,
and he wished that he had the compelling presence in person that he had in his writing. “That isn’t all that’s going to happen,”
he said softly. “The floating cities are going to fall to the ground, killing everyone in them and everyone beneath them.
The aircars will crash to the ground; the cities beneath the sea will either flood or the weight of the ocean will crush them
the instant the magic dies.”

“But no.” The young wizard Mesinna spoke up. She had been a colleague and sometime research partner of Solander’s, and had
thrown in her lot with the Falcons after the Dragons chose her at random in their final collection of “traitors against the
Empire.” She’d lost her taste for Dragon magic and Dragon ethics—such as they were—on the killing field, with her hands clamped
to a post. “We won’t let harm come to the innocents. Didn’t you see the power-down parameter we included in each of the spells?”

Wraith had not. “Show me.”

“Right here. Wait …” She thumbed through the sheaf of papers that represented the equations and spell-chants for the complete
spell-set, and finally pointed to a cluster of lines on one of the many pages Wraith had skimmed. “You see—this part of the
power-down increases the strength of our shield slowly from zero up to absolute. The Dragons will experience a gradual energy
loss over a period of about a month. It will eventually become absolute, but in that length of time we will have been able
to warn everyone of what is happening, and people will have time to evacuate from danger areas.”

“Some of them won’t go,” Wraith said.

She nodded. “Some people refuse to leave homes on the sides of volcanoes when lava starts erupting, too. And some won’t leave
homes at the edge of the sea with a hurricane coming straight at them. We cannot save the stupid. We can tell them what is
happening; with the information we give them, they’ll have to take responsibility for their own lives.”

Wraith felt a little sick. The death toll from this was going to be bad, no matter how well the Falcons and their comrades
got the message across. People wouldn’t believe until the last minute that the Dragons were not going to be able to save their
homes. In the final stampedes, innocent idiots would die in droves. And truly stubborn fools who refused to believe would
die in their homes—badly.