The First Confessor (62 page)

Elder Cadell collapsed dead across the council desk, a smoking corpse.

Grim-faced Councilmen Clay and Hambrook both watched as soldiers wrestled Weston and Guymer under control and dragged them away.

“I’m ashamed at how easily we were deceived by Elder Cadell, Weston, and Guymer,” Councilman Hambrook said, “to say nothing of Prosecutor Lothain.”

“How do we know that you two weren’t part of it?” General Grundwall asked as he suspiciously eyed the two remaining councilmen. “Lothain is dead. He can’t tell us if you were in on it, too.”

Clay gestured at Magda. “From what I know of this Confessor power from when Merritt came before us before, there is no limit to it. She can use this power to get Councilmen Weston and Guymer to confess all that they know, just as Lothain was in the process of doing. Under the touch of a Confessor they will reveal the truth and the rest of the story. That will confirm that I wasn’t a traitor.”

“Nor I,” Hambrook said.

“Councilman Clay is right,” Merritt said. “We will not only be able to confirm if there are any more traitors among us, but also who is innocent.

“That’s the beauty of having a Confessor working with us. She will be able to burn through the deception and lies.

“As a Confessor, Magda will for the first time reveal for us the truth.”

Councilman Clay watched as the two treasonous councilmen were led away. “At least Magda can use her power on them and discover if anyone else is involved.”

“We’ll have to move quickly,” General Grundwall said, “before any of them can cause trouble before they are caught.”

“How did this nest of traitors come about?” Councilman Clay asked. “How were they able to work so effectively right under our noses?”

Magda stepped away from what was left of the smoldering remains of Lothain. She had never trusted Lothain, but she had believed in Elder Cadell. She was angry that he had fooled her for so long, and that he had betrayed them all.

“Naja was forced to help Emperor Sulachan with his twisted objectives,” Magda said. “I don’t think that any of us could have imagined what was going on down in the Old World while we were going about our lives. Everyone needs to know the truth about what they have been doing.”

Magda drew Naja closer. “Please explain it. Give these people a picture of the true horror that the enemy has in store for us. Tell them how Sulachan uses the dead, and how his wizards rip the souls from the living.”

Naja looked out at the faces watching her. “If there is a tyranny of magic, it is what Emperor Sulachan and those who rule with him would impose on all of you.”

Everyone quieted to listen to her story.

“Hold on a moment,” Merritt said as he caught Magda under her arm as her knees started to buckle.

Magda was beginning to realize how seriously exhausted she was from using her new Confessor power. The sword had given her the strength she had needed the night before, but the use of her Confessor power had drained that strength.

Magda gestured. “I need to sit down.”

Merritt guided her around the desk. He seized the robes at Elder Cadell’s back and heaved the corpse aside. He gave quick orders. Soldiers rushed up and dragged the body away.

Merritt held out the tall chair for Magda. When she sat, he stood behind her, resting a hand on the carved top of the chair.

“The council has lost members. We need a council,” Magda said from behind the chair in the center of the council table. “As a start, I hereby reinstate Councilman Sadler.”

No one objected. When Magda gestured to him, Councilman Sadler smiled and took a seat to her left. Clay and Hambrook sat on her right again, at their traditional places.

Magda nodded for Naja to go on, then sat quietly listening to what she already knew as the sorceress revealed those terrors being hatched by the rulers in the Old World.

Wide-eyed people listened as Naja explained what they had never heard before, and told them what they really faced.

When Naja finished her brief summation, Magda, having regained a bit of strength, stood.

“When you hear the words ‘the tyranny of magic,’ as we heard from Elder Cadell, you will know that it is the calling card of killers. Don’t be fooled by their platitudes that it is for the common good. Their real purpose is to strip us of our abilities so that they may more easily conquer and rule us.

“If we are to survive, we need magic now more than ever to defend ourselves from those in the Old World. We need to learn, discover, create. We need to use our reasoning minds and truth.

“You have now heard the confession of the traitor Lothain and how he subverted the Keep. You have heard from Naja what Sulachan has planned. We now know the real nature of the war that is upon us.

“If we lose this war, we lose more than our lives, we lose more than the future for our people. We will lose our connection to all that is good.” Magda lifted her hand, showing them the ring with the Grace on it. “We will lose our connection to the very nature of creation, life, and our souls.

“We did not choose this war, but if we don’t defeat Sulachan’s forces, these thieves of souls, then we and future generations will live in a half world of the half people and the enslaved dead, disconnected from the Grace forever. We will be ruled by Sulachan, who will be nothing more than the embodiment of the Keeper of the underworld.”

Her gaze carefully moved across everyone in the room. Every eye was on her. People listened in rapt attention. Every face was serious. Everyone knew that they were hearing the truth.

“To win, we must have the truth,” Magda said. “Today, the true war for our survival begins. I intend to help see to it that we win this war, that our people not only survive, but thrive. The Midlands is my home. I promise you all that I will not abandon you, our cause, the Midlands, or truth.”

As she looked out from her seat at the tall, center chair, the crowd erupted in cheers.

“The first thing we need to do,” Magda said when the crowd had finally quieted, “is to seal the catacombs.”

Councilman Sadler frowned. “Seal the catacombs? But wizards work down there.”

“The dead also work from down there,” she said. “The dead hide in their resting place, only to come up in the darkness and murder us. We don’t know how many of those dead down there have been prepared by the enemy to be able to be awakened. We don’t know how many of the dead that have been laid to rest there were really being placed by spies.

“We have no way of knowing which corpses might sit up and strangle us. How would we find them? The wizards will have to be moved to other work areas.”

“But seal the catacombs?” Councilman Hambrook sounded incredulous. “That’s sacred ground. The people of the Keep have been laying loved ones to rest there for centuries. Visiting ancestors is a deeply valued tradition. Are you sure there isn’t another way? Maybe it isn’t necessary. Maybe our gifted could find a way to reveal the dangerous bodies and remove only those so that we wouldn’t have to take such a drastic step.”

Magda looked out at all the faces watching. “Do any of you feel comfortable risking having the dead walk the halls of the Keep at night, looking for more victims to rip limb from limb? I know that I certainly don’t.”

The crowd assured her they did not like that idea one bit.

She looked back at Hambrook. “I understand your concerns. But we are fighting for the survival of the living, not the dead. They are gone. We have to let go of those who have died and move on to devote ourselves to the living.”

Magda’s own words abruptly hit a painful place deep within her. She still could not let go of Baraccus. As much as she knew that he was gone, and as much as she realized that she had to move on with her life, she couldn’t seem to let him go.

“Magda is right,” Merritt said. “Even if we thought that we had come up with a way to detect the dangerous dead from all the rest, how would we ever know for sure that we were right? A day could come when we tragically learned that we had only been fooling ourselves. Aren’t the living what really matter? Would any of us want to lose the life of a loved one on such a risk? Would anyone here want to lose a mother? A father? A child?”

None in the onlookers indicated that they would.

Councilman Hambrook sighed in resignation. “I have to admit, that makes sense. I wouldn’t want to risk loved ones.”

“Nor would I,” Councilman Clay added.

Councilman Sadler nodded. “We have a responsibility to life. The living should be our only concern.”

“Then seal the catacombs,” Magda said with finality.

“We will need to use magic to be sure,” Merritt cautioned. “We’ll need some of those keeper spells that Isidore developed. They will ensure that none of the dead can escape to hunt us.”

“Please advise our wizards what they will need to do,” Councilman Sadler said. “General, please assemble a team as swiftly as possible.”

General Grundwall clapped a fist to his heart in salute. “At once.”

“And let it be done before Lady Searus’s nightmare comes to life,” Sadler added.

“Confessor Searus,” Merritt corrected under his breath.

Councilman Sadler lifted a finger and addressed the onlookers. “I meant to say, ‘Confessor Searus.’”

The crowd seemed to like the title.

As Magda and Merritt made their way from the walkway around the inside of the great tower and into the stone room with the sliph’s well, Quinn heard their footsteps and looked back over his shoulder. Seeing who it was, he set down his pen and stood. Smiling, eager to see them, he flipped his journal closed and put it back with all the others.

“Magda, how are you feeling?” he asked as he came past the sliph’s well to greet them.

She smiled. “A night’s rest did me wonders.”

She glanced at the well, but the sliph didn’t emerge to take a look at the visitors. Magda couldn’t say that she was unhappy about that. The sliph was probably off traveling.

“How are things going?” Quinn asked.

Merritt rested the palm of his left hand on the hilt of his sword. “I talked to General Grundwall this morning. Overnight the Home Guard captured most of those named by Lothain. They should soon have the rest in hand. Magda will have to use her Confessor power on some of the worst of them in order to get them to confess the details we otherwise would have gotten from Lothain had he not died. That will enable us to be sure we’ve rooted out all of the traitors and collaborators.”

“What about the councilmen, Weston and Guymer?” Quinn lifted a finger toward the sliph’s well. “Lothain told us that they used the sliph to travel to the South to collaborate with Emperor Sulachan and his officers.”

Quinn’s task was to guard the sliph to make sure that the enemy didn’t use her to secretly slip into the Keep to do them harm. It had been Baraccus who had asked Quinn to take up the duty after they’d had some unfortunate penetrations by dangerous people. Now anyone unauthorized and not a friendly force would not live long enough to climb out of the sliph’s well after using it to try to sneak into the Keep.

In the beginning, Quinn had killed a number of the enemy gifted who had thought they could slip into the Keep through the sliph. After a while, they realized it would no longer work and such incursions ended, but Quinn or one of several others always stood guard over the sliph to make certain they didn’t decide to try it again, especially with a weapon created out of a person.

It was a personal outrage for Quinn, who guarded the sliph to prevent the enemy from using her, to know that two of their own people, trusted councilmen, were actually traitors who had used the sliph for a deadly purpose and no one knew it.

Magda leveled a meaningful look at Quinn. “I am looking forward to hearing the truthful confessions of those two. They have caused great harm. A lot of innocent people died because of them. I’m sure they have a lot to tell, and they are going to tell it all.”

Quinn smiled. “Having a Confessor is going to be a tremendous help in our efforts, just as Merritt had always argued before the council. How ironic that the two men who so steadfastly stood against the creation of a Confessor are now going to be confessing the truth about their treason because of that power.” He turned his attention back to Merritt. “What about the dream walkers?”

“The general told me that a few of the men he captured, hoping for leniency, are cooperating and have confessed to directing the dream walkers to key people. The dream walkers had been watching what those people were working on, and in several cases they had exerted their control to force the sabotage of important projects. We’ve been systematically compromised on a massive scale. It’s frightening to grasp the extent of it.”

Merritt smiled at her. “Magda was right from the beginning about there being a great deal wrong in the Keep. Without her determination to discover what was behind it all, we wouldn’t have known about it until it was too late. We all owe her our lives. All of the Midlands owes her a debt of gratitude.”

“There is no doubt of that,” Quinn said, adding his smile.

Magda didn’t really feel that it was necessarily her doing, so much as Baraccus’s. It was because of his death that she suspected something was wrong at the Keep in the first place. It was because of him ending his life the way he did that she began her search for answers. She knew that he had to have had a purpose that was motivated by wanting to save the lives of the rest of his people.

She still wasn’t entirely sure, though, what was behind him ending his life. She was only certain that it had been for a good reason. She still wished she knew what that reason was.

She still couldn’t let him go.

“The Home Guard has gone through the gifted and then the rest of the Keep to make sure that everyone has given the devotion to Lord Rahl,” Merritt was telling Quinn. “In a couple cases, we were too late. Several wizards were found dead, obviously killed by the dream walker they were unwittingly hosting. As I said, the extent of the infiltration is shocking. None of us realized how close we were to losing the Keep. We were only days away from the end.