The First Confessor (20 page)

Isidore’s hands opened a little in a vague, noncommittal gesture.

Magda could only imagine the grisly state the bodies would have been in. Collecting hundreds and hundreds of days-dead corpses and taking them away in wagons would have been a sickening task. No one would have done such a thing without a powerful reason.

Isidore offered no immediate insight into the mystery of what that reason might be. Magda thought that maybe it was simply such an outrage that the woman didn’t want to think about it, much less discuss it. By Isidore’s guarded response, though, Magda suspected that she knew more than she was revealing.

Rather than press, Magda thought it best to try to soothe the woman’s terrible memories and let her tell the story at her own pace.

“That certainly is gruesome. I can see what you mean about the nightmare just beginning.”

Isidore’s head was hanging. She didn’t lift it.

“No. That is not what I meant when I spoke before of the nightmare only beginning.”

Surprised, Magda stared at the woman for a moment. “Then what exactly did you mean?”

Isidore finally lifted her head. “Well, after that, the troops went south after Kuno’s army to make sure that they weren’t going to turn back and head north again into the New World by a different route. But also, the commander thought that, burdened as Kuno’s forces were with so many wagons, there was a good chance that if they rode hard he could catch them. He was confident that he had a large enough force to fully extract vengeance when he did.

“I didn’t know what to do at that point. With the commander and his troops gone, I was again alone. Most of my people from Grandengart were dead with the remainder captives, and my friend Joel dead and buried. I had no one.

“I decided to go back to Whitney.”

Magda thought that made some sense—there was nothing left of Grandengart and Whitney was the closest town. Yet, there seemed better options, such as going to Aydindril, where she could have given what information she had to the council at the Keep, and to the army. After all, this was an enormously significant event. It was the first attack in a war that many had long feared would eventually erupt and had now begun.

Magda suspected that there was more to Isidore’s decision. “Other than Joel being buried there, did you have some reason for choosing to go back to Whitney?”

Isidore rubbed a thumb back and forth on the side of her knee for a time before answering. “Yes. I went back because I knew that there was a spiritist there.”

“A spiritist?” Magda’s brow tightened. “Why did you want to see a spiritist?”

“I was so distraught by everything that had happened, and by the final injustice of the bodies being taken, that I wanted to consult the woman. I guess I wanted what most anyone else who goes to a spiritist wants. I wanted to know that Joel was safely in the fold of the good spirits. I wanted to keep my promise to him.”

Magda at last resumed stroking the cat. “I guess I can understand how you felt. So, did this spiritist help put your mind at ease?”

Magda watched as Isidore’s thumb continued to rub back and forth on her knee. She spoke without lifting her head.

“Sophia was much older, and quite experienced, although she told me that in recent years she had not practiced her craft. She said that while she was proud of the work she had done, she had spent a lifetime at it and was finished with the whole business of dealing with the spirit world. She said that she wanted only to live the remainder of her life in peace. She refused to help me.

“I persisted. I told her that it was important, that I had made promises. Promises not only as a friend, but as a sorceress. She angrily waved away the request and said that my promises were not hers. I asked if she couldn’t see her way to helping out of compassion for all those innocent people, so that I would know they were now at peace. She said that even if she wanted to, which she didn’t, she couldn’t help because my loss was too fresh for me and that I was too distraught.

“I asked if I could return later, after I had gained a bit of perspective. She told me that delving into the spirit world wasn’t what most people thought it was, that her craft wasn’t intended as a means to commune with the dead to find comfort for the living. She said that there were dangers involved that I couldn’t begin to understand. Sophia again, and very emphatically, refused to help me.”

Isidore smiled. “I guess I learned from Sophia much of my reluctance to see people who want to consult with the spirits. She advised me, as one sorceress to another, to forget the whole thing.” The smile ghosted away. “As it turned out, it was very wise advice. Perhaps I should have listened.”

Magda didn’t say anything, instead waiting for Isidore to go on at her own pace. The frail young woman brushed the back of a slender hand against the opposite cheek, as if wiping away an invisible tear, before she finally did.

“Much like you, though, I had no intentions of taking no for an answer.” Isidore’s head turned up. “As it turns out, that persistence is a requirement.”

Magda’s brow lifted in surprise. “A requirement to having a spiritist help you?”

Isidore nodded. “I waited a few days, got some rest and spent some time thinking, then I went back. Sophia still refused to consult the spirits on my behalf. I couldn’t understand why not. I decided to stay in Whitney and try again later.

“Since I’m a sorceress, I made myself useful by helping some of the people in Whitney with ailments and such. I made a pest of myself with Sophia, asking to help around her home, until she started giving me little things to do to help her. I asked roundabout questions as I cooked her meals, brought her firewood, banked her hearth, fetched her water, always trying to sound innocently curious—you know, conversational. I listened carefully to anything she would tell me. I was doing my best to get lessons out of her in any way I could.

“I figured that if she wouldn’t give me the help I needed, then maybe I could learn enough to do it on my own. I’m a sorceress, after all, so I’m not without abilities. Although the methods involved were a mystery to me, I thought that maybe it wouldn’t be so complicated to learn just enough to check on the souls lost to me and find out if they were at peace. I guess I felt guilty for failing to be there for the people of Grandengart when Kuno had shown up and wanted to make up for it.

“The old woman, of course, knew what I was up to. She finally asked what it was I hoped to accomplish by contacting the spirit world so directly. I explained my promise to Joel to help make sure that he and all of the people of Grandengart had made it safely into the embracing shelter of the good spirits.

“She chuckled and asked what I thought one of the living could do to influence events in the spirit world. How did I think I could help souls gone to the underworld? Did I think I could take them by the hand and lead them into the glory of the light of the Creator? Did I really think that the souls in the underworld would never be able to find peace until I found it for them? Of course I had no answers.

“So I told her, then, of how the bodies of those killed in Grandengart had been harvested and taken away. I told her that I was greatly worried about what the gifted down in the Old World were doing with the dead people of Grandengart. I told her that I had a terrible feeling that the souls of those people were not at all safe.

“That gave her pause.

“Sophia became darkly moody and said again that such things were not the responsibility of the living, and besides, no matter what we might wish we could do to help, we had no say in the spirit world. But the worry about why the corpses had been taken nagged at her. I could see her demeanor change with the mystery surrounding the harvesting of the dead.

“One evening, she finally said that she would help me see that the people of Grandengart were at peace, but on a condition.

“Because I was a sorceress, and not the typical person who came to her for consultation, she wanted me, in exchange for her help, to first learn from her to be a spiritist. She explained that it was an old and honorable craft, but with an unfortunate stigma attached to it. She said that she was nearing the end of her life and wanted to pass her lifetime of knowledge on to someone of a new generation. She wanted the skills to live on.

“I told her that I had no desire to become a spiritist. Sophia smiled and said it didn’t matter to her if I wanted to or not, only that I did. She said that it was a dying art and she had never found anyone willing to learn the old craft. She said that young sorceresses nowadays don’t really want to have anything to do with the world of the dead. They figured that they would have an eternity of being dead and so they would rather spend their time living.

“Sophia said that it was understandable for people to feel that way, but she believed in the value of what she did and didn’t want to see the old ways die out. I certainly believed in the value of what she did. In fact, it seemed the only thing of real importance to me at the time.

“Still, as much as I wanted her help, I admit that I was repulsed by the idea of taking up such a profession myself. She reminded me of how much I’d wanted the help of a spiritist, and said that there would be others in the future who would also need such help. Sophia said that without younger people like me learning the old ways, they would vanish forever and that help would be lost to them.

“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.”

“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.