The First Confessor (6 page)

His cutting gaze remained fixed on her eyes. “Baraccus was more than merely a good man. He is the one man here at the Keep that I trusted. I am deeply grieved to hear that we’ve lost him.”

“Not as grieved as I am.”

His lips pressed tightly together with what looked to be heartfelt sorrow as he nodded again and then gestured to her door, off behind him.

“Would it be possible to speak with you privately?”

Magda glanced toward her door as the wall of men parted to provide a corridor lined with muscle and chain mail.

Magda dipped her head. “Of course, Lord Rahl.”

While she had never met the man before, Baraccus had spoken of him from time to time. From what she had gathered from the things Baraccus had told others, this was not a man to be trifled with. He looked the part of the stories she’d heard of him. She knew from comments made by members of the council that many didn’t think much of Alric Rahl, but Baraccus had. He had told her that, despite his audacity, he was a man to be trusted.

As Magda made her way toward the doors to her room, the grim soldiers spread out to take up stations up and down the hall.

She glanced back over her shoulder. “Are you expecting trouble, here, in the Keep, Lord Rahl?”

“From what I’ve seen,” he said cryptically, “the Keep is no safer than anywhere else these days.”

Magda frowned. “And what have you seen, if I may ask?”

“Three of my men have died since we recently arrived.”

Magda halted and turned back to take in his grim expression. “Died? Here in the Keep? How?”

He hooked a thumb behind his weapons belt. “One was found in a corridor, dead from over a hundred stab wounds. Another died in his sleep for no reason we could find. The third suffered a mysterious fall from a high wall.”

Magda had almost had such a fall. She still felt strangely disoriented, as if she were only now escaping the grip of a terrifying, otherworldly nightmare, rather than simply a grief-stricken moment of weakness.

“Perhaps the man who was stabbed had gotten into a fight with the wrong people over something?” she suggested.

“All three can be explained away if you try hard enough,” he said, making it obvious that he didn’t buy the easy explanations.

Magda worked to gather her composure as she started out once more, making her way past the looming, silent soldiers watching her. She didn’t like to think of the Keep as a place where danger lurked. Yet Baraccus, too, had been troubled by what he had thought to be suspicious deaths at the Keep.

Besides that, the Keep was, after all, the place where her husband had died as well. The silent Keep had almost watched her follow him to a grisly death on the rocks below.

She was beginning to grasp that there was more to her husband’s death than it had at first appeared. It no longer seemed a simple suicide. The note in her pocket, his last message to her, certainly made it clear enough that there was something more going on beneath the surface.

With all the people living and working at the Keep, and with the war going on, to say nothing of the gifted working with profoundly dangerous magic in an effort to create weapons they could use to turn back the horde from the Old World, it wasn’t exactly surprising that people at the Keep would die. Lord Rahl’s three men were not the only unexplained deaths she’d heard about. But still, even healthy infants died unexpectedly from time to time.

Such deaths didn’t prove that something evil was going on within the walls of the Keep, though she knew that there were those who believed as much. Death, though, was a part of life. There could not be life without death always shadowing it.

Magda unlocked the heavy doors and spread them wide in invitation as she entered. The two big guards followed Lord Rahl into the room, then closed the doors and took up stations to either side, feet spread, hands clasped behind their backs.

Magda gestured toward the two men. “I thought you said that you wanted to speak privately.”

Alric Rahl glanced back at the men and caught her meaning. “We are speaking privately. These are my personal bodyguards.”

“A wizard who needs muscle?”

“Magic does not ensure safety, Lady Searus. Surely your husband must have told you as much.”

“What do you mean?”

“In a land of blind men, sight is an advantage. But when everyone can see, your eyesight offers no special benefit. Among the gifted, the ability to bend magic to your will is not a weapon that makes you exceptional, much less invincible. Magic can be countered by the magic others possess, so having the gift does not in itself make one all-powerful, or necessarily safe.”

Alric Rahl turned and cast a hand out, bringing flame to the wicks of several lamps on nearby tables and half a dozen candles in an iron stand. “Not to say that it doesn’t have its uses.”

With the added light to aid him, he strolled deeper into the quiet room, scanning the collection of books in carved walnut bookcases standing against the wall to the right. He rested his palm on the silver handle of a knife at his belt as he moved down the line of shelves, pausing to gaze in at volumes behind glass doors. He squinted a bit as he read the titles.

“What’s more,” he added as he finally straightened his broad shoulders, “we are all flesh and blood, and a simple knife will cut my throat the same as it would cut yours, and it takes no magic at all to do that.”

“I see your point. Baraccus never put it in exactly those terms, but I have heard him say similar things. He once told me that the gift was coveted by those who didn’t have it because they wrongly believed that it would protect them, or that with it they could win in battle, but what they didn’t realize was that it offered only a fluid, ever-escalating form of checkmate. I guess I never realized his full meaning until I heard you explain it.”

Alric Rahl nodded, still looking at the books. “That is the whole issue in a nutshell: the balance of power. Even as we speak, wizards of great skill here and in the Old World work to come up with new forms of magic that will offer an advantage in the war. Both sides seek ever more deadly weapons crafted by the gift, hoping to find one that will have no counter from the other side.

“If we succeed, we will turn the tide of war and survive. If they succeed, we will be enslaved if not annihilated.”

A vague sense of apprehension settling into her, Magda gazed off at her empty quarters. “Being the wife of the First Wizard, I have often heard such worries.”

Finished perusing the books, Lord Rahl returned to stand before her.

“That’s why I’m here. That balance of power has shifted. We now stand at the brink of annihilation.”

“That is frightening news.” Disheartened, Magda slowly shook her head. “But I’m afraid that there’s not much I can do to help you. I’m not gifted.”

Alric Rahl paced off a few strides, seeming to consider how to proceed. “Baraccus and I were working on something together,” he finally said. “I’ve been dealing with my part of it while he was working on a separate issue. I need to know if he was able to accomplish his objective, but I didn’t get here in time to speak with him.” He turned back. “Absent Baraccus, I’m hoping you can help me with what needs to be done, now.”

Magda reflexively reached to pull her hair back over her shoulder, but her hair barely brushed her shoulders, now, so there was nothing to pull back. She let the hand drop.

“I’m sorry, Lord Rahl, but with Baraccus lost to us I don’t know what help I can be.”

“You know people in the inner circles of power here at the Keep. You know who would listen. You can talk to the council. You could help convince them to take seriously my warnings. That would be a good start.”

“Talk to the council? The council won’t listen to me.”

“Of course they will. You’re the closest thing they have to the word of Baraccus himself.”

“The word of Baraccus?” Magda shook her head. “I am no longer the wife of the First Wizard, so I no longer have standing with the council, or anywhere else for that matter.” She held out a short strand of hair for him to see. “The men of the council are the ones who cut my hair to make that clearly evident to everyone.”

“Who cares about your hair? Baraccus may be dead, but you’re still the wife to the First Wizard. His passing does not change the fact that you knew him better than anyone, or that you were the one he trusted. He confided in you, I know he did—he told me so himself. He said that because you weren’t gifted you were often the best sounding board he had.”

“Baraccus is dead.” Magda looked away from the man’s blue eyes. “The council will soon replace him. Without Baraccus alive, I no longer have any status. That’s why they cut my hair.

“It’s an age-old custom among the people of the Midlands. The length of a woman’s hair shows the world her standing. It matters for everything here in the Midlands and especially in the Keep. This is the seat of power for the Midlands, so such issues of rank, influence, and power always matter.”

He gestured impatiently. “I know about the custom. It’s absurd. I can understand petty people paying attention to such trivialities when deciding the seating arrangement at a banquet, but beyond that it ceases to be useful. This is a serious issue. What does the length of your hair have to do with matters of life and death?”

“It has everything to do with it, here in the Midlands. I’m no longer worthy of recognition because I was not born noble and my husband, who when he was alive gave me standing, is dead. That means that I’m back to where I was before I was married to him. This isn’t by my choice, it’s just the way it is.”

Lord Rahl closed the distance back to her. “How do you think you came to be the wife of First Wizard Baraccus? Do you think that Baraccus sought out a weak, unimportant wife?”

“Well, I—”

“You became wife to First Wizard Baraccus because you were the only woman who was worthy of being his wife. Are you suggesting that Baraccus, the First Wizard, a war wizard, would want to marry a woman who was weak? He married you because you were a woman of strength.”

“That’s very flattering, Lord Rahl, but I’m afraid that it’s simply not true. I was a nobody when he met me, and with him gone I am once again a nobody.”

He looked genuinely disappointed by her words. The fire seemed to go out of his eyes. His expression sagged.

“You were his wife, so I guess you would know him better than anyone.” He shook his head with great sadness. “I admit to finding myself disillusioned to learn that Baraccus was not the man I had thought him to be, that he was instead nothing more than a rather common fool, like so many other ordinary men.”

“A common fool? What are you talking about?”

He lifted an arm and then let it drop to his side. “He had the wool pulled over my eyes all along. You’ve made me see the unpleasant truth. I always thought him intelligent and strong, but it turns out that Baraccus was simply an ordinary, weak-minded man who like so many would marry even a lowly woman of no standing and no worth simply because she batted her eyes at him.

“You apparently came along in one of his weak moments, stroked his male pride with a bit of feminine flattery, and just that easy, you had yourself a man of standing. It’s clear now that he must have been too insecure to think that a woman of standing would be interested in him, so he was willing to trade the standing you lacked in return for your affections. I guess he wasn’t the man of character I thought he was.

“I can see now that by marrying you he was hiding his lack of confidence with women. It’s clear now that he was ready to settle on the first shapely woman, no matter her standing, who swayed her becoming ass before his weak-minded gaze.”

In a blink, Magda had the point of her knife poised motionless a hairsbreadth from his throat.

“I will not stand here and listen to you insult a righteous man who is not here to defend himself,” she growled.

“Apparently, my old friend Baraccus taught his nobody wife a thing or two about using a weapon.”

“A thing or two,” she confirmed. “Tell those two that if they take another step you will be breathing through something other than that foul mouth of yours.”

She in fact knew far more than a thing or two about using weapons. Baraccus had actually used his gift to aid in teaching her a great deal about weapons. He said that as wife to the First Wizard, she would always be a target. He wanted her to be able to protect herself when he wasn’t around.

“I can’t believe that he ever considered you a friend. I think it’s high time that you were on your way back to your D’Haran Lands. I want you and your little army gone first thing in the morning. Do you understand me?”

A sly smile overcame the man at the point of her knife as he signaled the two men near the doors to stand down. Magda was surprised by his smile, but her anger kept her focused, and kept her knife where it was.

“What’s this? A nobody, a woman not born noble, a woman with short hair, a woman of no standing, who has the nerve to tell me, the Lord Rahl, what I will and will not do? What gives you the right to speak this way to the leader of D’Hara, a man who commands the army outside your room, and guards inside it? How dare you think that you can speak to me in such a manner? Where do you, a woman of no status, a nobody, get the gall to think you have such a right?”