The First Confessor (49 page)

Naja bent and yanked the knife from the man’s chest. She carefully wiped it clean on his pant leg. She flipped the knife and caught it by the point, then offered Magda the hilt. “I apologize for borrowing your weapon without permission. Had my gift worked down here, I would have handled it without needing to use your knife.”

“I don’t blame you. The men got what they deserved,” Magda said as she replaced the knife in its sheath under the slit in her dress at the small of her back. She headed for the iron stairs. “Now let’s get out of here.”

Naja smiled and followed her up.

Magda carefully slid the flimsy door aside just enough to peek through the small opening. At the moment she didn’t see anyone out in the passageway through the catacombs, but a few minutes earlier she had seen two wizards, deep in conversation, hurry by. Across the way she could see one of the nearly countless chambers filled with the dead. At least this upper area didn’t smell as bad as the lower levels.

She didn’t know how long Merritt was going to take with Naja, but Magda hated to have to spend any time in the small catacombs library near where wizards worked, because it was not all that far from the dungeon. The library was utilitarian, little more than a small space hollowed from the soft rock. It was only large enough for three short rows of simple plank shelves for books. Between two of the shelves sat a simple bench. There was not even any room for a table.

Naja lay on the bench, Merritt kneeling beside her, working as quickly as he could to heal the wounds that required the most urgent attention. He had said that the library was seldom used, but Magda worried that this night someone might come looking for a rare volume and happen upon the three of them. She couldn’t think of a plausible story as to why they were there, who Naja was, and what had happened to her.

They’d had to stop somewhere, though. Merritt wouldn’t have been able to carry Naja far before someone saw them and started asking questions. The small library was the first place they could find that Merritt thought would be somewhat safe for a brief time.

Naja had a number of injuries, including torn muscles in her legs, a few broken bones in her feet, and most concerning, a serious abdominal wound that threatened her life. Killing the two guards might have been satisfying retribution, but it had ruptured her abdominal wound and it needed to be closed.

Before they’d done anything else, though, even before healing her or addressing any of their other problems, as soon as they’d gotten out from the influence of the shields down in the dungeon, Naja had gone to her knees and given the devotion to Lord Rahl. She was so eager to be protected from the dream walkers that she ignored the pain long enough to say the devotion three times and gain the protection of the bond. Magda ached to have the woman healed, but more than anything she had wanted to know that they would be safe from the view of dream walkers.

When they had finished with the devotion, they had immediately turned to the problem of finding a place to tend to her injuries. Merritt had said that healing the sorceress was going to take some time, hours at least, possibly all night. Since they knew that they couldn’t risk staying in the catacombs library that long, he had decided to use the place just long enough to get her out of imminent danger of dying and able to walk on her own so they could get her to a safer place.

Once they were able to move from the little library to a safe place, Merritt would then be able to take the time to heal the rest of her serious injuries without the risk of being interrupted at a critical moment. In the meantime, he would do what he could as quickly as he could.

Magda was nervous, though, about getting caught in the catacomb library. She knew that if someone went down to the dungeons and found the two dead guards, they would raise an alarm and the whole place would soon be crawling with soldiers. They would look in every corner. Magda didn’t know if they would know who Naja was, or be aware that she had been in the dungeon and had escaped, but if Merritt and Magda were discovered in the library healing an injured woman, the soldiers would certainly ask a lot of questions and they would expect answers.

Merritt had worked down in the area on occasion, so he was familiar with this part of the catacombs. He had known of a storage cabinet where wizards and sorceresses kept supplies. There, he’d found a spare sorceress’s robe and some clean rags. The flaxen robes were decorated at the neck with red and yellow beads sewn in the ancient symbols of the profession.

Merritt had then taken them to the little library and stood watch at the door while Magda cleaned Naja up enough so that she wouldn’t draw suspicion if anyone saw her. After using a damp rag to gently wash some of the blood off the face of an only half-conscious Naja, Magda had managed to get the robe onto her. While only partially responsive, Naja had been aware enough to be grateful to have the robe to wear.

After that, Magda had let Merritt hurry and get to work healing the woman while Magda stood watch.

Merritt finally stepped up behind Magda. “Anyone out there?”

“No, not for a while.” Magda looked back and saw Naja standing close behind him. “How are you?” she asked the sorceress.

“Merritt helped me enough for now. He is very talented. I think I will be strong enough to walk to a safer place where he can finish.”

“Your house?” Magda asked Merritt.

He pressed his lips tight as he considered it. He glanced back briefly at Naja.

“I wish we could get there. We’d be secluded and alone. But I really think it needs to be someplace closer. She can walk for a short while, but I’m afraid she wouldn’t make it that far and then we’d be in trouble.”

Naja looked past Magda to peer out the crack in the door. She abruptly stepped back in surprise.

“There are dead people out there.”

Merritt nodded. “This is the catacombs, down under the Keep, where the dead are laid to rest. We’re just a ways above the dungeon where we found you.”

Naja was clearly alarmed. “We need to leave, now.”

“They’re dead,” Merritt said. “They can’t hurt you.”

“Yes they can,” Naja said.

Magda slid the door closed and turned to the woman. “What do you mean?”

“Emperor Sulachan uses the dead.”

Both Merritt and Magda stared. Magda, having fought a dead man, was not all that surprised by Naja’s claim.

“Uses them how?” she asked.

“To serve him.”

“How can the dead serve him?” Merritt asked.

“For Emperor Sulachan, the dead can serve him as well as the living. In some cases, better.”

“Better.” Merritt repeated as he stared at her. “They have no heartbeat. They have no life in them. How can they do anything?”

“Chickens can move and flop for hours after their heads are cut off. They have no heartbeat, either,” Naja said, “and that doesn’t even involve any magic.

“The emperor has rare, gifted people called makers,” she said, leaning in, speaking in a quiet, reverent tone. “I never met any myself, but I do know that makers have remarkable powers of originality. They imagine what others never envisioned before, and through that mechanism are somehow able to create what others never could.”

Magda glanced up at Merritt. “We understand. We have makers as well.”

“Then you understand the wide range of the totally new and unexpected creations they can sometimes come up with. Most people’s minds travel along the same road traveled by everyone else, never straying off the route of conventional wisdom. Makers know no such boundaries. They have a rare ability to make their own roads of thought. Their minds venture through the wilderness of all that exists, combining random bits of knowledge in ways that have never been imagined before.”

“We understand that much of it,” Magda said. “What does this have to do with making the dead walk again?”

“The emperor’s makers have created new forms of magic, new spells, that function in part by altering the nature of the grace. Through the new forms of power envisioned by the makers, along with the help of the emperor’s many gifted, they have learned to use magic to control the dead.”

“How do you know all of this?” Merritt asked.

“I know because I was one of the gifted who helped them. Though the manipulation of the spirits of the dead in the underworld, and investing powerful magic into the corpses that those spirits came from, the dead are made to respond. That was the secret that the makers unlocked, using the spirits of the dead from the spirit world, linking them back to corpses they came from, using that connection in the Grace, the spark, that runs through creation, life, and into death, connecting it all. With the new spells designed by our makers, the dead are made to serve the wishes of Emperor Sulachan.”

“Against their will, then?” Magda asked.

Naja shook her head. “They have no will. They are dead. They are like a raw material which, through the methods dreamed up by makers, is crafted to serve as the emperor wants.”

“Serve? How do they serve?” Merritt asked. “What purpose would the dead have that could serve Sulachan better than the living?”

“The dead never get weary, they don’t know hunger, or pain, or pity. They don’t need to eat, or sleep, or rest, or stay warm, so they don’t need any supplies. They have no ambition but the one given to them. They have no capacity for fear so they act without hesitation.”

“Act how?” Magda asked. “What do the emperor’s forces use these dead people for?”

“For all those reasons I mentioned, they make perfect assassins.” She gestured beyond the door. “They can be right there, in your midst, and you never know it. You walk by them and never see them for what they are.

“The dead can be animated as needed. They are then given a single-minded purpose. They never stop trying to carry out that purpose.

“For these reasons, they also make the perfect warriors. The dead have their limits of service, though. There are things for which Emperor Sulachan cannot use them.

“When he needs the same sorts of things done that the dead do well, but with some intelligence behind them, he uses the half people.”

“Half people?” Magda leaned in. “What are half people?”

“Living people he has stripped of their souls.”

Merritt folded his arms across his chest. “How much, exactly, do you really know about all of this? How complete is your understanding of it?”

“I told you, I was Emperor Sulachan’s spiritist.” Naja heaved an impatient sigh. “Must we discuss this now? Can we please go and talk about it later?”

“We need to know some things, first,” Merritt said.

Naja gestured toward the door. “What you need to know is that any one of those dead could be a servant of the emperor. You wouldn’t know it until one of them sat up, grabbed you by your throat, and ripped your arms off. If the emperor or his minions knew we were in here, they could set one or a dozen of the dead on us to tear us apart.”

“She’s right,” Magda said, recalling the horror of what had happened with Isidore. “We should get out of here.”

“How could he get any of those dead people down here to do his bidding?” Merritt asked, not ready to leave before he had a better grasp of it all and exactly what they faced. “He may be powerful, but he’s all the way down in the Old World. How could he do a thing like that from such a great distance?”

“Easy. One of those loyal to him prepares a dead body, here, at the Keep or in Aydindril, and then has it laid to rest out there in your catacombs among the other dead people. How would you know? How would you know that the body that was being laid to rest down here wasn’t one of the ones that had been prepared to serve Sulachan’s purpose? Any of his people hidden here as spies or traitors at the Keep could then bring the dead out of their death sleep”—she snapped her fingers—“as quickly as that.”

Magda had to remind herself to breathe. “Dear spirits, I never thought of that.”

“I hadn’t either,” Merritt admitted. “Is there a way to check the dead, to know which have been prepared in this way?”

“Before they are called into service, they are nothing more than a corpse. There is no way to tell, unless you were to find a way to contact their spirit in the underworld. As a spiritist I can tell you that would not be an easy task. I could probably venture into the spirit world to probe for the spirit of a dead body, but that could take days of searching, and that’s for one dead body. You have thousands out there. Do you have thousands of spiritists who could be assigned such a monumental task?”

“We might have a handful of such gifted,” Magda said, “but I’m afraid that the only one that I actually know of was killed by one of the emperor’s dead servants.”

“Then you have no way to test a corpse being laid to rest even if you wanted to. Worse, though, those seeking to use the dead wouldn’t even have to go to that much trouble. Do you have guards who check the people who come and go from the catacombs? Escort them to see what they might be doing?”

Merritt arched an eyebrow as he grasped her meaning. “No. There are wizards who work down here on countermeasures to Sulachan’s weapons. They come and go all the time.”

“Exactly,” she said. “Any of those wizards could be a spy, secretly working for Emperor Sulachan’s cause. They would have their pick from thousands of dead. They merely find a suitable corpse and prepare it to be awakened from death. The spells have already been well developed by Sulachan’s makers to use on the dead. Such spies would also be able to identify important targets among the gifted and set the dead upon them to cripple your efforts.”

Merritt wiped a hand back across his face in exasperation. “Naja, this is all pretty hard to take in. I need to have an idea of what, exactly, it is that we’re up against—the larger picture. Not just about some traitors assassinating people here, but how it all fits together in Sulachan’s larger purpose. It’s important for me to be able to grasp the totality of it.”

Naja took a deep breath as she nodded. “I understand. It must be difficult to hear this all for the first time.”