Vincalis the Agitator

by Holly Lisle

Genres: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology

Synopsis

A thrilling adventure from Lisle is set in the same fantasy world as the popular Secret Texts trilogy--a world where a sorcery called Dragon Magic draws its powers from the agony of slaves who are killed for sorcerous fuel until three heroes challenge this inhuman cruelty.

Release date: March 1, 2002

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 400

Sample

Down below, in the cages where they’d been born, Wraith’s only two friends in the world starved and waited. So the boy crouched
in the shadows, heart racing in his throat. Without food, he couldn’t go home. Without food soon, he would have no reason
to go home. The strangeness of this place frightened him, and he yearned for the familiar back ways he’d left behind. But
some instinct had drawn him to this rich and impossible place, and he promised himself he would not leave empty-handed.


This city in the sky terrified him, though. To his right, a fountain erupted from nothing, spraying streams of crystalline
liquid and gemlike shards of red and blue and green into the air. No solid structure supported this delicate miracle, but
the many people who strolled past seemed not to even notice it. All around Wraith, buildings spun of smoke and light rose
from foundations equally ephemeral, yet within them people moved easily from floor to floor, visible through lovely archways
and on broad balconies. Below his feet, through roads like ribbons of stained glass, lay the other, lesser city—his city—so
far away that streets looked like silken threads and buildings like beads sewn on fine cloth.


Wraith did not belong in these fine streets, in this city above the city, in this realm of men who would be gods. But because
he could come here—because the city itself let him enter—no one looked at him with suspicion or with doubt. No one questioned the
shabby nature of his clothes, the rough cut of his hair, his shoeless feet, or his gaunt child’s body. If he was here, they
seemed to think, then it could only be because he belonged here—for magic barred those who did not belong from the secrets
of Oel Artis Travia—the Aboves.


And here, where he knew he had no business, he found the thing he had so desperately sought. In the Belows, no one would think
of displaying food in the open air, where anyone might walk up to it, touch it—steal it. But here it lay, in vast and wondrous
quantities and unimaginable varieties. Wraith routinely stole thrown-away food from the containers behind stores and homes
in the Belows, but this was new food, right where he could get it.


His stomach rumbled; the fruits and vegetables, breads and cheeses, pastries and beverages spread like a banquet before him,
and he wanted so much to eat something. Anything. He had eaten scraps of bread soaked in some sort of gravy the previous day,
picking tiny maggots off before taking bites. Aside from water, he’d had nothing else.


Any bite of food at all would have been wonderful—but none of the other people wandering through the aisles ate anything while
they walked. He’d watched carefully; after years of scavenging, the knowledge that calling attention to himself would cause
him trouble had become so deeply ingrained he didn’t even need to think about it. The shoppers all around him carried baskets
that they picked up from one corner of this odd open-air market, and they wandered through the aisles, sorting through the
offered produce and putting their chosen items into their baskets. When they finished, they simply took the baskets with them
and left. They never paid, as people in the Belows paid. Wraith had seen money many times, and understood that it could be
traded for food; what he had never been able to discover was where he might get money of his own.


Here, however, no money appeared to be necessary.

So he took a basket, and like the other people, he began putting food into it. In one basket, he would have enough food for
Jess and Smoke and himself to live on for several days—and to live well. He mainly chose breads, dried meats, and pastries,
because these, from his experience, would last longest. However, he couldn’t resist just a few of the beautiful, brightly
colored fruits and vegetables. He could imagine the expressions on the faces of his friends when he returned with such a bounty.


When he finished collecting the food he wanted—not letting himself be as greedy as he desperately wished to be, but still
with a nice haul— he headed for the exit, following the precise route those before him had followed. But whereas no one paid
any attention when those others left, when he left someone said, “Hey, that boy didn’t pay!”


And then someone else said, “But he didn’t set off the alarm.”

And a woman shouted, “Master! A thief!”

A man of young middle age rose from the edge of the market, where he had been sitting, apparently doing nothing more important
than watching the water falling in the fountain. He turned, and stared at Wraith with eyes as cold as death, and pointed a
finger. “You. Stop.”


His voice had an odd echo to it. Wraith didn’t waste time contemplating what that echo might mean; he simply clutched the
basket of food to his belly and fled.


The man, strangely, laughed. In the next instant, blinding white light surrounded Wraith, making the air around him crackle
and sing, and scaring him so badly that he dropped the food. He didn’t dare stop to pick it up; the man hadn’t hurt him, but
the wizard’s next attack might be more than fancy lights and noises.


Racing for the nearest of the little side streets that fed the square, Wraith ventured a glance over his shoulder, and got
a bad shock. The square had been full of people. In just an instant, impossibly, they were gone, and only five remained: the
man, the woman who had called out that he was a thief, and three gray-suited guards. The wizard’s oily voice carried clearly
as Wraith darted down his chosen street. “That’s the one. When you catch him … bring him to me. I want to take him apart and
see what he’s made of.”


Something in the wizard’s voice told Wraith that if the wizard caught Wraith, he would kill him. But over a basketful of food?
In this place of such plenty, where people chose what they wanted and took it freely?


“We will, Master,” one of the guards said in a voice that sounded as frightened as Wraith suddenly felt.

He heard the hiss and whisper of the guards’ skimmers behind him, and he looked for cover. They could fly faster than he could
ever hope to run, and with three of them after him, he probably didn’t have much chance.


His feet pounded over the translucent pavement, and he did not let himself look down to the ground far below. They could throw
him off the road and he would die of terror long before he smashed into the pavement in the Belows.


He wished as he ran that he had not dared to chance the gate that led upward on the spiraling, spun-glass road. He wished
he had stayed firmly on the ground where he belonged. There, at least, he might have found food that would keep Jess and Smoke
alive a little longer. He would have managed, somehow, to provide for his friends the things they could not provide for themselves.
But if he died here, the two of them would be lost; they would either starve to death or return to the hell of Sleep, from
which he would never dare awaken them again.


He had to live. He had to.

The street down which he ran was a neighborhood thoroughfare. Behind the glass wall that edged the thoroughfare, houses built
on clouds stood inside secondary walls blocked off by high, gracefully deadly gates. The translucent white walls of the houses
gleamed with inset stones and metals, and the light that shone through them made them look as evanescent as soap bubbles,
and as lovely. The inhabitants had spun their gardens of diamonds and stars that glittered and gleamed in stunning configurations.
And singing fountains and streams that ran burbling and chuckling between invisible banks served as destinations for the gossamer
paths that led from the gates to the houses.


Wraith thought it all very lovely, and all horrifying. He saw no place to hide, for even if he could climb a wall, he could
not hide in a yard made of air and decorated by floating lights. He would be visible from any of the paths. And he didn’t
see an alley, an open gate, something that would let him escape from that whine that came closer and closer to him.


Tears clogged his throat, and the air that fought its way through the narrowed passage burned in his lungs. He thought his
heart might stop on its own before the guards behind him could touch him. Everything was closed. Locked. Impenetrable. And
the next intersection was so far away, it might as well have been on the moon.


Then, as he bolted toward one great house, he saw that its owners had not worried about a physical gate with bars and spikes.
Instead, the archway lay open. No doubt the invisible gate would be as formidable to most people as one of the tangible ones—but
not to Wraith. He put on a burst of speed and threw himself through the opening. Cool fires of a hundred hues played across
him, as they had earlier when he’d entered the gate that led to the Aboves—but those fires did nothing to him.


A boy of about his own age—stocky, blond, elaborately dressed— had been entertaining himself in that yard, sitting in a comfortable
chair with his feet propped up, making three gold balls and a bit of rope spin through the air. The boy jumped at the flashing
lights, and stared as Wraith lunged at him and said, “Hide me.”


The boy gave one startled glance at the gate. But then he nodded and pointed Wraith to a tiny house with its own cloud-spun
path that hung in the air almost against the wall.


Wraith didn’t ask questions. He didn’t let himself look down. He just ran.

The little house had, thank all the gods, a real floor. It held a table and four chairs, shelves full of books and jars and
paraphernalia that Wraith couldn’t begin to identify, and on the floor dozens of dolls and brightly colored blocks and wheels
and balls. It consisted of one room, a door, and four small round windows set a little lower than Wraith’s eye level. He crouched,
and through the window that faced back the way he had come, he watched the boy, pointedly not looking at the little house,
return to his activity of making all three balls hover in the air while the string braided itself between them.


The guards stopped outside the gate. Two of them stared at the little house. The third glowered at Wraith’s unexpected ally.
“Where is the little bastard?” the head guard asked.


The boy rose, not yet acknowledging any of the guards, and pointed to the translucent yard. All three balls spun neatly downward
and settled into a line there. When he had summoned the rope to himself and it had wound itself around his arm as if it were
a living thing, he turned and slowly walked to the gate. “Perfann, do you know to whom you are speaking?”


The guard ignored the question. “Master Faregan told me to catch that little thief and—”

“My name is Solander Artis,” the boy interrupted. “Son of Rone Artis. Artis, perfann—which should have some meaning even to one of Faregan’s men. And this is Artis House. So … now that you know to whom you are speaking, would you like to reconsider your … presence?”


The guard’s ruddy face bleached the color of bone. He said, “My apologies. I would not bother you. But a thief escaped from
the market, and Master Faregan has demanded that we …” He paused, considering his words. “That we capture him and remand him
over to Master Faregan for questioning.”


“A worthy thing, no doubt,” the boy Solander said. “And had he come into my yard, I would without hesitation turn him over
to you. But no one has come through the gate. It’s armed, and since I did not wish to be disturbed at my studies, I did not
unarm it. Did you notice anyone trying to cross an armed gate? That’s a fairly obvious thing.”


“Well, we saw the gate light up … but we saw the boy on the other side.”

“You saw the gate light up.” The boy smiled coldly. “And the gate is armed, and there is no boy. I can only reach one conclusion
from that, perfann. I suggest you tell Master Faregan that the thief died trying to escape; in a fashion, perhaps justice
has been served.”


The three guards stared from the little house in which Wraith hid to the boy who faced them at the gate, then back to the
little house.


“I saw the gate light up,” one of them said.

The other two both nodded and agreed.

“So he couldn’t be alive.”

“But I swear I saw him running on the other side.”

The one in charge shook his head. “Can’t have. He cooked in the gate.”

The three of them stood there staring at each other, and Wraith sensed that they had come to an agreement before the other
two spoke. When at last they said, “Yes,” and “There’s no other possibility,” it was merely formality. The head guard nodded
to the boy Solander and said, “Then we thank you for your time, and we apologize for the disturbance. We will be on our way.”


And they left. Solander stood at the gate for a moment, watching them get on their skimmers and leave. Then, a thoughtful
expression on his face, he turned and strolled down the path to the playhouse.


He came in and sat down, and for a moment said nothing.

“Thank you,” Wraith said. “You saved my life. Those three had orders to give me to the market wizard—he said he wanted to
take me apart to see what I was made of.”


“Really?”

Wraith nodded.

“What did you do?”

“I’m not sure. I went through the market like the other people in the square, and put food into a basket, and left out the
same gate through which they all left, but when I left, someone shouted that I was stealing food.”


“Did you lose your credit amulet?”

“My what?”

The boy reached into his shirt and from beneath it pulled out a small white disk on a gold chain. “This. What happened to
yours?”


“I don’t have one of those. What does it do?”

“Takes money from your family account to pay for whatever you purchase. The shields around each business are spelled to read
your amulet and …” He shook his head. “You should know this. Why don’t you?”


Wraith shrugged. “We have no credit amulets in the Warrens. No open markets. And what are shields?”

The boy sat down and rested his elbows on the table and his chin on his fists. “Why would you have been in the Warrens? No
one goes there.”


“I live there.”

“With the riots and the murders and the mind-drugs and the crime lords and the prostitutes and … I’ve seen the nightlies.
None but criminals live there.”


Wraith tried to figure out what Solander was talking about. “You must have heard of a different place. That’s nothing like
where I live— the Warrens are the quietest place in the city.”


“If you lived in the Warrens, you wouldn’t be here,” the boy said. “Because the Warrens are gated to keep the criminals in;
you couldn’t have gotten out. And you certainly couldn’t have come to Oel Artis Travia.”


“I just walked here. Walked out of the Warrens, too.”

“How?”

“The same way I ran into your yard.”

“The gates in the Warrens are malfunctioning, too? My father will have a fit. He’s going to be upset enough that something’s
wrong with our gate. Lucky for you those guards didn’t try it.”


“The Warren gate worked the same way all gates work for me. I can walk through any of them that don’t have real locks on them.”

The boy shook his head. “Nonsense. I saw you go through the gate. It lit up, but it didn’t do it right.”

“They always look like that when I go through them.”

Solander thought about this for a moment, staring down at the floor and frowning. “You mean our gate might be working? If
I’d told the guard the gate was malfunctioning and he’d tried to cross, he might have been killed? Oh, hells, I would have
gotten into trouble for that.” The boy gave Wraith a speculative look, and then a tentative smile. “My name is Solander Artis,”
he said.


“I know. I heard you tell the guards.”

“Now you’re supposed to tell me your name.”

“It’s Wraith.”

“Wraith what?”

“Just Wraith.”

“That’s a funny sort of name.”

Wraith shrugged. “I liked it. That’s why I picked it.”

“You picked your own name?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s different. Wraith, I want you to show me how you got through our gate.”

“All right.” The two of them rose, walked out into the yard together, and after Solander checked to see that no one who mattered
was looking, Wraith walked through the gate. The lights played over him—and then he was on the other side. So he turned around
and walked back.


The boy frowned. “That can’t be. It looks like it’s working, but … Wait right here. I have to go get something. Don’t go anywhere,” he said, and raced to the big house.


Wraith waited, and waited, and at long last the boy came racing back, carrying a small bag full of greenish lumpy balls.

“You took long enough.”

“It’s a big house,” the boy said, “and I had to get the testers out from under the watchman’s nose without him catching me.”

“Testers?”

“Gates only attack living human beings. Otherwise, they would have to be constantly raised and lowered for deliveries of supplies
and other things that come via mage-carts. Pets and birds and other wildlife wouldn’t be able to pass through them, either,
and the families do love their deer and peacocks and griffonelles. They’d be most upset to find their expensive pets roasted
by a gate. So it used to be that the only way to test a gate was to shove a prisoner through it. Only now prisoners are used
in work gangs, and they’re too valuable to just roast; so the wizards had to develop gate testers. You throw one through,
and the gate thinks it’s a person who isn’t supposed to be there, and …” He pulled one out of the bag. “Here. I’ll show you.”


He tossed the ball through the gate. The lights erupted again, but this time, along with the light, Wraith heard an eerie
hum, and the ball stopped dead in midair, turned a brilliant glowing red, and exploded into dust with a crack so loud and
sudden and emphatic it made both boys jump.


Wraith closed his eyes. He’d seen the gates work on something other than testers before, and all because of his stupidity
in thinking that if he could walk through them, anyone could.


“It’s working,” the boy whispered.

Wraith nodded. “They always are, I think. Gates just don’t work on me. The man in the market who sent his guards after me pointed his finger at me first, and the same sort of light came out of
it. But that didn’t do anything, either, though I’m pretty sure he expected it to.”


Solander leaned against a wall and closed his eyes. “Oh, dorfing hell-dogs! Master Faregan took a shot at you and it didn’t
do anything? Drowning dorfing hell-dogs! No wonder he wanted his guards to grab you.” He stared at Wraith, his expression an eloquent testimony
to awe. Without another word, he traced a short series of loops in the air. To Wraith’s amazement, a line of light glowed
in the air in the wake of the boy’s finger. “Cover,” the boy said.


The loops coalesced into a thin, wavering sphere of light that bobbled through the air to Wraith, touched him … and popped
like a soap bubble, disappearing without a trace.


“How did you do that?” Solander asked.


Wraith said, “I didn’t do anything. I don’t do anything when I go through the gates, I didn’t do anything when that man pointed
his finger at me and hit me with light. I don’t ever do anything.”


“Would you walk through it for me one more time? I want you to carry a tester with you and see what happens.”

Wraith nodded. Solander handed him a tester, and Wraith walked through the gate. Lights crackled and hummed around him, the
tester exploded in his hand with a heat and a force that scared the breath out of him, but as before he remained unscathed.
He turned around and stepped back through the gate again.


The boy looked pale. He said, “Let’s go back in the playhouse to talk. I’m not due for lessons for a bit, and none of the
juniors will be out in the yard until after midmeal. Once they get out here, the place will be hell, but for at least a while
we have it to ourselves.”


They both returned to the little house and drew up chairs, and Solander leaned his elbows on the table and said, “I’m the
only child of Rone Artis, who is one of the top Dragons in the world, and Torra Field Artis, who is the daughter of one of
the great wizards of all time. Qater Field—you’ve heard of him?”


“No.”

“Of course not.” Another exasperated sigh. “No matter. According to my parents—hells-all, according to everyone—I’ll become
a powerful wizard when I grow up, because I already show incredible talent and aptitude, and have remarkable visual-spatial
memory, and … I don’t even remember all the things they say. But if they’re right, I have a good chance of ruling Matrin.
I can already build minor gates of my own. But I can’t walk through a gate untouched. Neither can my father. If wizards could cross armed gates, the gates would be worthless.
You have something special going on with you. And I want to find out what it is, because it has to be important.”


Wraith said, “All I want to do is find food for my friends and go back home. They have to be getting scared by now—I couldn’t
return there yesterday.”


Solander considered that in silence for a long while. “Your parents didn’t look for you when you weren’t there?”

“My parents don’t know who I am.”

Solander’s face went blank. “I don’t understand—but you’ll have plenty of time to tell me. If your parents don’t know who
you are, they won’t miss you, right? So just stay here. You can live in my house.”


“I can’t. If I don’t go back, my friends will starve to death.”

“Well, are their parents as terrible as yours?”

Wraith considered that for a moment. “My parents aren’t terrible. They’re just … Sleeping.”

“Doesn’t matter. Are your friends’ parents like yours? They must be, or they’d see to it that all of you had food.”

“They’re all the same.”

“Fine. Then bring your friends with you. More than a thousand family members and friends live in our winterhouse here, and
about twice that many staff. I won’t have any trouble moving you and your friends in and creating a story for you. How many
friends do you have?”


“Two. Jess and Smoke.”

“That’s no problem. We’ll just pretend you’re distant relatives from somewhere, here on the career exchange program. No one
ever checks the paperwork on that very carefully.” Solander shrugged.


Wraith, whose hard life had taught him that the time to be most suspicious was when anything looked too good, asked, “Why
would you have us come here? Why offer rooms or food to people you don’t know?”


“I could use some friends. My cousins are creeps or dullards, and if you can walk through gates, you can do things they could
never do. Your friends will have a good place to live, and you can take classes with me, and I can figure out why gates don’t
work on you. I’m going to specialize in magical research,” he added. “You’d make a perfect case study.”


Wraith stared through the door of the little house up to the big house, and tried to imagine walking through those grand front
doors as if he belonged there. He tried to imagine never going back to the hollow, chilling silence of the Warrens. All of
his life so far had been a dare—a strange, lonely challenge. This next step made an odd sort of sense to him. He’d been leaving
the Warrens a little at a time since he was born.


“We’ll do it,” he said.

“Bring them with you tomorrow, then,” Solander said, but Wraith was already shaking his head in disagreement. “No? You won’t
bring your friends?”


“I can go through the gates. They can’t.”


Solander looked startled. “Oh. I forgot about that.” He frowned thoughtfully and said, “And you and your two friends live
in the Warrens.”


“Yes.”

“Then I have to figure out some way to get an aircar with universal clearance into the Warrens. That might take a day or two.
Going through gates like that—well, that isn’t the sort of thing you want to make a mistake about.”


Solander thought for another minute, then said, “I’ll figure something out. In the meantime, we’re going to steal some food
for you and your friends.”




Wraith and Solander stood in one of the pantries of the house’s enormous kitchen, loading food into a box. Wraith had a hard
time believing his eyes—he could not begin to guess the purpose of all the equipment in the huge outer room, nor what most
of the many people out there were doing. Cooking, obviously—the smells alone whispered every wonderful promise possible about
the food being prepared—but none of them did anything that looked like drawing Way-fare out of the wall-tube. Wraith knew
of no other method of food preparation, so he kept peeking over his shoulder to see just what they did.


That was how Wraith saw a hard-faced older boy coming toward the pantry where he and Solander picked out supplies for him,
Smoke, and Jess. “Solander,” he said, keeping his voice low, “someone’s coming.”


Solander looked toward the door and groaned. “Luercas—he’s a distant cousin.” Solander hid the box in with other boxes on
the floor behind him and turned quickly, several small pies in hand. He passed one to Wraith and started chewing on the other
one. “He’s … awful.”


Wraith said, “Oh,” and then took a bite of the pie. It tasted so impossibly good, tears started in the corners of his eyes—and
at that moment Luercas sauntered into the pantry.


“You,” he said, looking past Wraith to Solander. “What are you doing in here, you little rodent? Your parents should keep
a tighter leash on you.”


“I have as much right to be in the pantry as you do.” He muttered something the tone of which sounded insulting to Wraith,
though he couldn’t make out the words.


Apparently neither could Luercas, because he glared at Solander. “Not if I tell you that you don’t, worm.” Luercas then looked
at Wraith, and his eyes narrowed. “And what in all the hells is this thing?”


“A … distant cousin from … Ynjarval,” Wraith lied. “Here on temporaries.”

“Looks like something you found in the street. You, street-dirt. Disgusting black-haired stick. All by yourself in the real
city, eh? Let me see you bow to your superiors.” He smiled at Wraith, a most unpleasant smile.


Wraith felt sick to his stomach. But he looked Luercas in the eyes and said, “I don’t think so.”

“Don’t you, street-dirt? With Mama and Papa back in Ynjarval, they’re not going to be able to do much to help you. Better
get used to bowing if you’re planning on transferring here.”


“No,” Wraith said, shaking his head. He felt pretty certain if he’d had more than that single bite of pie in his stomach over
the last day, he would have thrown up right there, but he tried not to let it show in his face or in his voice.


Luercas pointed at Wraith, and Wraith heard Solander gasp. “I said bow,” Luercas said, and a pale line of fire sketched itself
from Luercas to Wraith … and promptly died.


Wraith crossed his arms over his chest and tried to look confident. He said nothing. His heart was racing, and his knees were
so weak he could feel them trembling. He leaned back against the shelving for support, but it apparently had the effect of
making him look self-assured.


“I said bow!” Luercas snarled. The second bolt of radiance that leaped