Free Vincalis the Agitator by Holly Lisle Page A

moment’s thought.
    We shed lives the way snakes shed skins, Wraith thought, remembering the nest of snakes he’d discovered in one of his early
     hiding places. We peel away old people, and emerge with new ones. New names. New faces.
    He stood just inside the door, a heavier boy now, though still thin, with his dark hair neatly cropped and the beginnings
     of a fashionable braid down his back. He had a new name—Gellas Tomersin—a good story about a family far away who cared about
     him, a friend who had been born into freedom and who knew the joys of comfort and the pleasures of wealth and security. He
     had a chance to live a wonderful life.
    Why should we ever go back and pick up those dead skins? he wondered. When we’re free of them, can’t we simply put them behind
     us and forget they ever existed? Can’t we simply be happy and beautiful in our new skins?
    He’d thought he wanted to free the Warreners. But now, standing at the beginning of his new life, he discovered that more
     than anything, he wanted to be sure that he stayed free himself.

    Rone Artis held the paper in front of him and sighed. “Ten years of research, and all we have to show for our work is … well,
     simply more of the same.”
    His assistant shrugged. “Everyone has followed every lead. Just because we can’t find a way to pump enough magic out of the
     sun right now to keep the Empire running doesn’t mean that we’ll never find the key. The same with the sea, and with the world-heart.
     Sometime soon, someone will figure out how to make those power sources work. This is just a temporary measure.”
    Rone laughed. “Do you really believe that?”
    “Of course. The Empire would never accept this as a permanent solution.”
    “Do you know how long this temporary solution has gone on so far?”
    “Not long, certainly. Five years, perhaps. Or maybe … ten?”
    Rone Artis, Master of Energy for the city of Oel Artis, smiled at her slowly. “In its current form, more than a thousand years.”
    She paled and looked sick. “That can’t be.”
    “It is. And before that, we were doing the same thing, but in a less organized fashion.”
    “But … that’s not right.”
    “No,” he agreed, and took out his official pen, and checked the tip on a plain piece of paper to make sure it was working.
     “It isn’t right at all. But what are our options? Let Oel Artis Travia fall into the Belows? Let the citizens starve and live
     without light and heat? Let the seas crush Oel Maritias and the other undersea cities? Give up flight? Give up magic?”
    “Well … no … not that.”
    He nodded. “No. Not that. We maintain a magnificent civilization, but men pay a price for civilization. We do the best we
     can. Sometimes our best is …” He slowly signed his name across the bottom of the paper that permitted the Research Department
     of the Dragons to take an additional five hundred units a month from the Warrens for energy experimentation. “Sometimes our
     best is very, very bad.”

Book Two

    Master Gellas
    I stood with one foot in three worlds—which is one foot too many. The Warreners, the stolti, and the Kaan all owned a piece
     of me: I loved the beauty, the grace, and the luxury of the stolti world, which I knew to be fed by unthinkable evil; I could
     see the impracticality of the Kaan world, which worked well enough for a few people, but which would leave Matrin a stinking
     ruin were it the only option; and my heart cried out for the Warreners, dying body and soul for a life they could never experience,
     while remembering that the price of the Warreners’ freedom would be the lives of innocents.
    I knew the costs and the benefits, had discovered and listed for myself the favorables and the unfavorables. The only thing
     I could not find was an answer.
    V INCALIS THE A GITATOR
T HE S ECRET T EXTS —O F THE F ALCONS

Chapter 4
    I n the last days of spring, when the sun in Oel Artis begins to roll across the land like an