The First Confessor

  “She told me that it might be my chance to make a difference for the future of the living. I told her that I would have to think on it.

  “Then we got the reports that the soldiers who had gone back with me to Grandengart and then gone south after General Kuno’s forces had been slaughtered.”

  Magda gasped at the news. “Slaughtered? All of them?”

  Isidore nodded. “It had been a trap. Sophia thought that the bodies the enemy took had been the bait for the trap. Two men had escaped to tell what they saw.”

  “More likely Kuno let them escape to spread fear.”

  “I think you’re probably right. The men said that they were charging south and thought they were getting close when they were ambushed. All of our men, other than the two who had escaped, were killed or gravely injured.

  “After the battle, Kuno’s men tied all of our fallen soldiers together into bundles of a dozen or so, tied them by their wrists, and then fastened groups of them to the wagons of the dead from Grandengart. One of the two men said that it reminded him of stringers of dead fish. Kuno’s army dragged all the dead and dying soldiers away with them, some of them still alive and screaming in pain, or moaning in mortal agony.”

  Magda was incredulous. “I’ve never heard of an army hauling away the soldiers they’d killed.”

  “They harvested the dead,” Isidore confirmed, “as I have since heard they have done in other places as well. At the time, I thought that maybe it was yet more bait to entice others to chase after them. In a way, I was right.

  “After hearing about them taking the dead soldiers, I knew that I had to get Sophia to help. Something was going on that no one understood but we all feared. I thought that the spiritist might be the way to discover the truth.

  “Sophia told me then that if I agreed to learn the craft, then I would be able to draw more from the experience than simply having her report on what she saw. She said I would be able to see the truth I needed to know for myself, the truth that only I could grasp, the truth that only I could understand.

  “Though the idea frightened me, I could no longer shy away from what I needed to do, so I agreed.

  “Sophia then told me that the spirits had surely sent me to her for a reason, that there was a purpose, that I was meant for something.

  “She began teaching me that very night.”

  Chapter 29

  “How long did these lessons take?” Magda asked.

  “Less time than I had thought they would. Being the daughter of a sorceress and a wizard, I had a good start on what I needed to know. My father, in particular, had a lifelong fascination with the underworld. He had learned a lot in his ‘adventuring,’ as he called it, adventures dealing in where we all eventually had to end up, he would say.

  “My mother would say that adventure was just another name for trouble. Some people whispered that my father had a death wish. I knew that wasn’t true, but I was fascinated by the fearless way he liked to challenge death. At the same time, I shared my mother’s worry about it being trouble.

  “His adventures were mostly experiments with spell-forms, learning how the interplay with Additive and Subtractive Magic worked. That was how he had learned so much. It was how he learned to balance on the cusp between worlds. That, and racing horses on overland courses through dangerous countryside.”

  “I see what you mean about him liking to challenge death,” Magda said.

  Isidore confirmed it with a nod and a sigh.

  “He even taught other wizards about the things he had discovered. From a young age, much to the discomfort of my mother, he told me stories of his exploits with experimental magic and the enthralling things he’d uncovered in how the interaction between worlds worked. I would sit wide-eyed as he spun tales of riding the rim, as he called it. He said that he believed that life and death were connected in much the same way as Additive and Subtractive Magic depended upon each other to define their nature.

  “He saw that connection in everything, even in something as elemental as light and dark. Consequently, he also saw such interdependence in simple things as well.”

  “Simple things?” Magda asked. “Like what?”

  Isidore lifted one shoulder in a matter-of-fact shrug. “Where I saw a shadow cast across the ground, he saw the shadow, but also what he called the negative shape created by the shadow. He said they were inextricably linked, locked together, the positive shape and the negative shape, each depending on the other to exist. He said that to truly appreciate one, you had to at least recognize the contribution of the other.

  “Thus, he would tell me, you need the dark to show light, so you shouldn’t curse the darkness. You needed death to define life.

  “Hence, the delight he found in his ‘adventuring’ into areas others found terrifying. I guess you could say that his quest for understanding of the world of the dead contributed to a greater appreciation for life. My mother would roll her eyes when he would tell me about such things, but sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I would see her flash him a private smile.

  “So, perhaps more than most, I already had a pretty good working knowledge of the Grace, how it is drawn and how it functions, how magic itself is connected to Creation and death through Additive and Subtractive Magic, and how spell-forms can draw on these elements for power. My father did not view different aspects of the world, such as life and the underworld beyond the veil of life, as independent things, but rather as interdependent elements that were all part of a great, unified whole. In that way, he said, we were all part of all things.

  “Sophia said that such an upbringing, learning, and understanding put me years ahead of most in becoming as a spiritist. She said that I had come to it as if it were my destiny, although she said that she didn’t believe in fate.

  “The hardest part of Sophia’s lessons was that from my father’s teachings I was accustomed to thinking in terms of the whole, so learning not to see this world, but rather to exclude it from that whole, was difficult for me.”

  Magda frowned. “What do you mean, learning to exclude this world?”

  “To see into the spirit world, Sophia told me that I had to be able to look beyond what was around us in order to see into that other realm. She said that, while she didn’t herself know if it was true or not, some people believed that the underworld was all around us in the same place we existed, but at the same time it was separate and so we couldn’t see it. I can understand that now that I am blind; I can hear things I never before knew were there, but always were.

  “She blindfolded me for all our lessons. She said that it would help me to learn more quickly. It was a few weeks after starting that she told me that it was time to venture on my first journey to look into that other place.

  “By then, of course, after all I had learned—the warnings, the cautions about the smallest mistakes, the grim stories of small things gone horrifically wrong—I was properly terrified.

  “Sophia believed in safety through preparation. We drank teas in the morning to cleanse our auras lest they snag on the veil and trap us. We took powerful herbs in the afternoon to dull our senses to the world around us so we would not fail to see the dangers lurking in the dark world. In the evening we began the soft chanting to condition our minds to open. The whole day, of course, in addition to the tea and herbs, we had been laying out spells and conjuring various forms of wards and protections. As the sun went down, we banked the fire. She said that flame was an anchor to this world and that if anything went wrong it could light our way back through the eternal night.”

  Isidore lifted an arm, gesturing around the room. “This is the reason, even though I am blind, that there are candles lit in here.” She smiled just a bit. “That, and of course so that others don’t stumble and fall on me.”

  Magda wasn’t able to appreciate the humor. “So once you were ready, then what?”

  “Sophia had me cut my finger and use blood to draw a Grace around where we were to sit on the floor befor
e the hearth.”

  Though Magda was not gifted, she had certainly spent a lot of time around the gifted. She had also been married to the First Wizard. She knew full well the significance of drawing a Grace in blood. A Grace connected Creation, the world of life, and the world of the dead via pathways of magic.

  “I remember that it was an overcast, windy night, and dark as pitch,” Isidore said in a tone half to herself, as if drifting back to that night. “The black world outside the two tiny windows of Sophia’s home seemed foreboding and oppressive.”

  Isidore looked to be trying to return from her haunting memory. She paused to wave a dismissive hand. “None of the details would matter to you. Not being gifted, you likely wouldn’t understand most of it anyway. The important thing is that we had to invoke the darkest forms of magic to summon up the darkness of the underworld. Then we drew spells with Subtractive threads that brought about the parting.”

  “The parting?”

  “In the veil to the underworld,” she managed with difficulty.

  Magda thought that Isidore looked at the edge of composure. She covered her mouth with a hand, as if in her mind’s eye seeing again the horror of what she had seen that night. Her brow wrinkled into tight furrows. Her chest heaved with each ragged breath. Magda realized that Isidore was sobbing in the only way she could even though she had no tears.

  Feeling a sudden pang of sorrow for the woman, for her terrible loss and crushing loneliness, Magda lifted the cat and scooted around to sit close beside Isidore. Magda set the cat down to the side, where she stretched from her long nap. Magda put a comforting arm around the frail young woman. Isidore melted into the embrace, burying her face against Magda’s shoulder.

  Magda held Isidore’s head against her shoulder. “I’m sorry for asking you to recount such terrible memories.”

  Isidore pushed away, swallowing back her emotion. “No, I wanted to tell you. I’ve never had anyone to tell, except, of course, for the one who took my eyes from me. I wanted you to know, much like I had to know, what it means to be a spiritist, to practice such a sorrowful skill that puts you there in the midst of death.”

  “I understand,” Magda said.

  “I’m afraid that you really don’t.” It wasn’t said in a cruel or condescending way, merely as Isidore’s expression of the simple reality. “I didn’t understand myself until we actually pulled the veil of life aside and faced the unimaginable.”

  Magda listened to the silence for a while, then finally had to ask, “What did you see beyond that veil?”

  Isidore stared off blindly into the memory.

  “I saw a place of darkness beyond dark,” she finally said in a haunted voice. “An endless place of souls that would take forever to see, and yet I glimpsed it all in an instant.

  “In that instant I saw what I had come to see, learned the truth I had come to learn . . . and I was horrified.”

  “Horrified by seeing the world of the dead?”

  “No,” Isidore said. “Horrified by the truth.”

  Chapter 30

  “I don’t understand,” Magda said. “What truth did you see?”

  For a time, the only sound was the sputtering of a few of the candles glowing around the room. The cat sat silently on her haunches, as if waiting to hear what Isidore would say.

  “I saw Joel there,” Isidore finally said. “His spirit, anyway. That much of it was a comfort—seeing the light of his soul there at peace.”

  Magda, her arm around the woman, squeezed Isidore’s opposite shoulder. She didn’t want to sound suspicious, or disbelieving, but she found it hard to imagine.

  “How is it possible, Isidore, considering how many millions upon millions upon millions of souls there are in the underworld—the souls of everyone who has ever lived and are all now there in the world of the dead—for you to be able to immediately see the one you were looking for out of the multitude?”

  “Well, it’s rather hard to explain.” Isidore considered the question briefly. She frowned as she tilted her head up in thought. “You know the way you could walk into a vast gathering in the Keep, and despite how many hundreds and hundreds of people are there, you could always spot Baraccus immediately, pick him right out of all those people?”

  Magda smiled sadly at the memory. “Yes, as a matter of fact I do recall such events.”

  “It’s something like that,” Isidore said. “It’s not the same, but that’s the only example that I can think of that you might be able to grasp. Things don’t work the same way in the underworld as they do here. Time, distance, numbers, things like that are all different there. It’s like the same rules you are used to don’t work that way there.”

  “Baraccus traveled the underworld,” Magda said, her mind wandering, “just before he killed himself.”

  She wondered what it had been like for him, what he had seen, and how it must have affected him.

  “It’s not the same for a spiritist.” Isidore squeezed Magda’s hand in sympathy. “Baraccus was a profoundly powerful wizard who journeyed through the world of the dead. We don’t have that kind of power and are not venturing into the underworld. A spiritist is only parting the veil just enough to look beyond for an instant.

  “Rather than going into that place, as Baraccus did, a spiritist is a sorceress invoking her gift in a unique way. We are calling together a number of forces through spell-forms, along with both Additive and Subtractive Magic conjured to a very specific task.

  “He was in that place. We are only looking in through a window.”

  “I see,” Magda said. “So when you looked through that window, what did you see?”

  “In that cauldron of magic, at the center of a storm of power, it all happens in an instant, yet that instant seems to last an eternity.

  “In that terrible spark of time, I saw the truth.”

  “And what was the truth that so horrified you?”

  Isidore bit her bottom lip as she gathered her courage. “The truth that the others, the people of Grandengart who had died, were not there.”

  Magda frowned and leaned in close to the woman. She was unsure exactly what Isidore had meant.

  “You mean you couldn’t find them? You couldn’t tell in the vastness of the underworld that they were safe and at peace like you could with Joel?”

  Isidore shook her head emphatically. “No. I mean they were not there.”

  “I still don’t understand. They’re dead. Of course they’re there. Maybe you were only able to find Joel there, that way I could spot my husband across a room of people, because you cared deeply about him, but you couldn’t do the same with the others.”

  “No,” Isidore said with forceful certainty. “That is the truth that I saw in that instant. I saw that their souls were not in the eternal world of the dead. Their souls, their spirits, whatever you want to call them, were not in the underworld.”

  “Then where are they?”

  “I don’t know,” Isidore said. “I’ve been looking for them ever since that day and I have not yet found them. All I know is that the spirits of the people of Grandengart, the people whose bodies were harvested, are not in the world of the dead. And neither are the souls of the other bodies that have been harvested.”

  The silence felt suffocating. Magda had to remind herself to take a breath.

  “How can the dead,” she finally asked, “not be in the world of the dead? How is that possible?”

  Chapter 31

  “That was the very thing I wanted to know,” Isidore said. “I knew, as soon as I grasped the truth of it, that I had to find the answer.”

  “But how?” Magda swiped her hair back off her face. “You said that you only hold the veil open for an instant.”

  “Yes, but in that moment where all that magic, all that power, comes together, that spark of time seems to last an eternity. In a way, it isn’t an instant at all. In a way, it is an infinitely large piece of forever.”

  Magda felt as if she were getting lost.
“How can that be?”

  “The reason, as I had learned from my father, is that there is no time in the eternity of death. Because there is no beginning, no end, there is no way to measure how long you’re there.”

  “But there has to be a way to measure how long an event lasts. Time still exists. A day is still a day.”

  “Here, but not in the underworld. Here time is finite. Days start and end. There it’s eternal night.”

  “I still don’t understand,” Magda said.

  “Imagine encountering a rope stretched across your path. There is no beginning to your left, and no end to your right. The rope is infinitely long. It started forever ago and runs on forever. How could you take a measured portion of it? A portion of infinity is a contradiction. How could you, for example, measure out a fourth of forever? If you tried to cut a section out of such an eternal rope, it too would be eternal because the rope has no ends, so you cannot create them in something that does not have them as part of its nature. Just because you want a beginning and an end for your convenience, that does not mean that they exist. While they certainly exist here, in the underworld, those beginnings and ends do not exist.

  “In the center of that vortex of power, time itself does not exist. A minute, a day, a year, they are all the same.

  “So, in that eternity of time, that instant I was there in eternity, I had all the time I needed to search. In a way, I had forever. I searched forever.

  “I tried to ask Joel’s spirit where they were, but before I even began to form the question, he told me that they were not there.

  “I saw people I knew from Grandengart, people who had died in the past, before that terrible day Kuno’s army arrived, people who had been old, or sick, even a boy I had tried to help but who had died of fever. None of them knew where the rest of the people were, the people of Grandengart who had died out on the road that day.

  “Everyone I knew could only tell me that the others were not there. They were not in the underworld.”