A girl came into Wraith’s office without knocking at seven-and-forty by Dark, and said, “Ah. I thought this was the jakes.
I must have taken a wrong turn out in the corridors.” She turned and left without another word, and Wraith looked after her
for a moment, bemused. He had never seen her before, yet at some level she worked for him. She had given him the code phrase
that stated that Velyn had been successfully kidnapped away from her boardinghouse and hidden with members of Wraith’s anti-magic
underground. She had to be a member of that underground, and the fact that he had never seen her before and might never see
her again vaguely disturbed him. It had grown past him— more people belonged now than he could know. They’d spread beyond
Oel Artis to other Harsian cities, and no one person knew who they all were or where they all were. Not even him, though at
the beginning he could have said with confidence that he knew every single person who had joined him, by name and face and
even history.
Perhaps this meant that the movement was a success, even though not a single Warrener had yet been freed. Undergrounders sabotaged
magic-channeling installations; inserted messages and dimensionals that showed life in the Warrens and the horrible conditions
of the captive sacrifices held prisoner there into public broadcasts; ran businesses that didn’t use magic or trade with people
who did; and a hundred other things that were slowly, slowly reshaping little pieces of the Empire.
Perhaps freedom for the Warreners would not happen in his lifetime, Wraith thought. Perhaps he had to resign himself to the
fact that what he was doing was working, but with glacial slowness—and that maybe that was the best he could hope for.
Souls were dying, though—being erased as completely as if they had never been, and not just from one lifetime, but from the
whole span of eternity. That knowledge kept prodding him to find a way to do more, to bring the situation to a head. The Empire
had to stop using human beings as fuel. He alone could move anywhere without fear of magical reprisal; that made him not just
the best choice but the only choice to bring about change. When he grew too old, or when he died, who could carry on what
he left undone?
No one. No one else like him existed.
So he could not let himself find comfort in the fact that people were becoming more aware. He only had one lifetime to accomplish
his work, and far too much remained undone.
He rested his head on his desk, using his forearms as a pillow.
Why couldn’t he be ten men, or a thousand? Why did the weight of uncounted hundreds of thousands of souls rest on his shoulders
alone? Why had the gods singled him out?
His eyes drifted closed, and his last conscious thought was that if the gods wanted everything done immediately, they should
have made more of him, or made him impervious to exhaustion.
V
elyn paced from one side of her tiny room to the other. Healed, fed, bathed, and wearing bizarre new clothes and with newly
colored and cut hair, she didn’t look like the same woman who had gone to Wraith for help. She didn’t feel like the same woman,
either. She’d thought he would help her—give her shelter in his home, protect her from Luercas, fight for her. Instead, he
had passed her off to strangers, and those strangers had passed her off to other strangers who had pretended to kidnap her
in order to remove any taint of liability for her vanishing from Wraith’s famous and oh-so-pure hands.
He’d dumped her without even asking her how she felt about being dumped. Oh, he’d asked her how she felt about the Warreners,
about the Empire’s use of magic, about Luercas and all he stood for, about her own patterns of magic use, about whether any
of the things she’d professed to care about back when they had been together had truly mattered to her.
She’d told him what he wanted to hear, because she’d thought all those questions meant he wanted to take her back. That he
wanted
her
.
She was a fool.
But she was a fool with eyes and ears and a sharp mind, and she could see what she’d fallen into. This was some portion of
Wraith’s underground; the movement he had dreamed about creating only those few years ago was now a reality, and one unsuspected
by the Masters of the Hars. Or, if it was suspected, at least its presence remained unproved.
“Are you ready, Sister?” A young man had entered the door behind her without her noticing him. He stood there now, looking
eager and trusting and full of idealism.
She put a smile on her face and said, “I am. Where are we to go, and what are we to do?”
“You’ll talk with the head Brother. He’ll tell you what you need to know to help you build a new life for yourself. You need
never return to the people who hurt you, or to the ones who allowed you to be hurt.” He smiled broadly at her. “This is a
good place, Sister. You’ll find much of comfort here.”
She flexed her fingers, reveling in being able to move them completely and without pain for the first time in at least a year.
“Comfort. Yes. I could do with comfort.”
She stepped out of her cool, tiny room into a broad corridor lined on both sides with doors to dozens of identical rooms.
The boy led her past people dressed in clothing of the same cut as hers—loose tunic with draped hood, fitted leggings, soft,
ankle-high boots—but where her clothes were of palest green, theirs ranged from deep, vibrant ruby reds to earthy browns to
jewel-tone blues to the green of the finest emeralds. All the clothes had the same cut, the same graceful draping—but she
noticed that the colors tended to cluster together, with little knots of reds standing and talking in whispers, and deep greens
dragging something down the hall together, and blues walking silently in the same direction, hoods up and heads lowered.
The boy, dressed in the same pale green that she wore, moved out of the way of each of the others with a quick, deferential
nod of his head. Velyn did not. Whatever these people were, they were not stolti—and stolti neither moved for nor bowed to
anyone.
Some of them looked at her in surprise—and each time the boy whispered, “Master Gellas’s friend.”
And at that, comprehension flickered in their eyes and they gave her polite little smiles and went on their way. Almost as
if they were humoring her.
Beneath the fixed smile on her face, she seethed.
At the end of the long corridor, they went left. Straight ahead lay a garden with stone fountains and fixed sources of water,
little paths carved through the deep shade of ancient trees, straight-backed wooden benches. Velyn thought it austere. To
the right, another corridor. The path they took led them to an office, and a man dressed as Velyn and the boy were, but in
gray.
“Welcome,” he said, not rising from his seat. “Please, make yourself comfortable.” He glanced at the boy. “Joshen, you may
go now. Be back by third bell, please—I’ll need your assistance.” The boy nodded, smiled, and scurried out the door, closing
it behind him.
All the chairs in the room were straight-backed, uncushioned, hardly created with comfort in mind. Velyn took the one farthest
from the door, turned it slightly so that she could face both the desk and the door, and settled cautiously into it.
The man said, “I am Brother Atric. That is not, of course, my real name. None among the Order of Resonance keep their names;
we give them up when we join, and burn our pasts.”
“Hardly legal,” Velyn said.
“If one does not avail oneself of the services of the Empire, it is entirely legal. We are an independent order of artists,
musicians, writers, philosophers, builders, creators—some of the finest minds and greatest talents in all of Matrin reside
within our walls. We offer shelter and privacy for those who create to do so free from the Empire’s tendency to dictate content,
form, and presentation.”
“How long have you existed?” Velyn asked.
“I’ll assume you mean the Order, and not me personally.” He smiled a little at his joke, but did not seem in the least disconcerted
when Velyn did not smile back. “The Order of Resonance has held lands in the Hars Ticlarim for over two thousand years. In
Manarkas and Ynjarval, we have been around for even longer.”
Velyn tried to keep her surprise from showing on her face, but knew she’d failed. She’d been sure Wraith had abducted her
into the underground about which he had once spun such enthusiastic plans. Instead, he seemed to have dumped her into a well-known
artists’ colony.
Gods-all. He didn’t even trust her enough to put her someplace where she might learn something she could use.
“How did I come to be here?” she asked. “I was in a boardinghouse, awaiting the resolution of legal actions that I took against
my vowmate. Several men dressed in black kicked in my door, blindfolded me, bound my hands, and held something over my nose
that smelled atrocious and I have to assume made me sleep, for my next memory is of waking in the room here, with a bath drawn
for me, clothes waiting, and my hair already cut and colored pale.” She sighed. “Actually, I have a good idea of
how
I came to be here. What I don’t understand is why.”
“You needed a place to stay, where you could be protected adequately from the considerable power and fury of your ex-vowmate.
Gellas sent a messenger to me telling me that you would be arriving, and that we were to give you shelter and treat you as
one of our own until he could be certain that you were no longer in danger.”
“He was concerned?”
“I got the feeling that he was very concerned.” The man looked at her with eyes as gray as his tunic, eyes that got lost in
the creases around them when he smiled. “He said that you were the woman he had once loved, and that we were to protect you
at all costs.”
“Why would you do this?”
“Protect you?”
“Yes. If Luercas can figure out what happened to me, he could do terrible things to your Order. Why would you put yourselves
in danger on my account?”
“Master Gellas has been tremendously generous to our Order, both in terms of financial donations and in terms of placing our
actors in his plays, and utilizing our musicians and our painters and our builders and even our writers in his ongoing projects.
He is our finest patron.”
“That’s all?”
Brother Atric laughed gently and shook his head. “We have never been a destitute order; we have resources of land, property,
and creativity from which we reap a significant profit. But until Master Gellas came along, we held no center spotlight in
the affairs of the world. Now we do. Now … now our artists and writers and dancers and actors perform before the broad spectrum
of society, both in the Empire and beyond. That’s more than anyone else has been able to do for us in two thousand years.
To me, it seems to be enough.”
“But you aren’t part of Wraith’s underground?”
The blank look on his face might have been feigned, but the timing of it was so perfect, so without pause or break, that she
did not believe it was. Even if Brother Atric were a great actor, she did not think he could have hidden the initial flicker
of awareness that she felt sure would have been there had he been in on the truth.
“Wraith?” he asked. “Underground?”
“Wraith. Master Gellas’s real name. The underground is the group of people he has gathered together to overthrow the magic
system in the Empire and free the Warreners.”
Brother Atric’s expression changed from bewilderment to horror. “You’re suggesting that … that Master Gellas is a traitor?
Do you know this to be true? Can you offer proof of his identity, or his subversive activities? Gods be damned—we cannot permit
ourselves to be associated with someone who is … who is involved in treason.”
“You didn’t know anything about Wraith? About where he was from, or … anything?”
“If what you say is true, we will cut ourselves off from him entirely. We survive at the tolerance of the Empire. We do
not
seek its overthrow. And what do you mean, where he’s from? He’s from the Aboves—from the Artis family.”
“He’s from the Warrens,” Velyn said. “I pulled him out of there myself, when we were both children, more or less. I was less
of a child than he was, but …” She shrugged.
Now he was looking at her with horror. “You’re a traitor, too? You admit to assisting a Warrener in escaping from the Warrens?
Woman, are you mad?” He pressed the palms of his hands to his temples for a moment and closed his eyes tightly, as if his
head pained him. “You know what you did as a child—I would not think to question the truth of what you say. But you cannot
stay here. You …” He sighed and opened his eyes, and the gray of them no longer seemed warm. To Velyn, this man suddenly looked
frightening.
“It was a stupid childhood prank.” She shrugged, making little of it.
“And yet, if it is true, you have kept the fact of it secret as an adult— for many years, in fact. Had you confessed to your
actions as a child, I doubt anyone would have held your actions against you. But by hiding your actions into adulthood, you
have changed a childish prank into treason.”
“Nonsense,” Velyn said. But it wasn’t nonsense. She’d been so sure that Brother Atric was a part of Wraith’s underground that
she had not considered the price she might pay were he not.
“I’ll arrange transport for you,” he said, standing. He pulled a plain black silk cord above his head, and out in the corridor
a bell rang in clusters of four. Clang, clang, clang, clang. Clang, clang, clang, clang.
“Transport where?”
“Out of some misplaced remainder of loyalty to Master Gellas—or … Wraith,” he said with distaste, “I will not turn you in
to the Dragons. I will, instead, send you out with a troupe we have leaving for the Southern Manarkan Chain. You’ll travel
as a prisoner, and my people will leave you on one of the isolated islands. I suggest that you stay there. Should you ever
return here, I will be forced to declare your confession to the Dragons.”
“And your complicity?”