Just as Isidore had said, Magda, too, could see both sincerity and competence in Merritt’s eyes.
Yet unlike Isidore, Magda could also see the gift.
In Merritt’s eyes, the gift was different from anything she had seen in her life. It was a look that was at once breathtaking and dangerous, but at the same time softened with an undertone of warmth. Under his intent gaze, she had to remind herself to let her breath out.
On second consideration, she decided he did indeed look to her very much like a wizard.
“What news have you of Isidore?”
His voice matched the look of him perfectly. It almost felt as if her whole being vibrated in harmony with the deep, clear tone of it. Magda swallowed and forced herself to speak.
“Before I can say anything else, I must ask you to swear an oath.”
His brow drew down. “An oath?”
“That’s right. I need you to first swear an oath of loyalty to Lord Rahl, which will protect your mind from dream walkers. Only in that way can I know that we are talking in confidence.”
He did the oddest thing, then.
He smiled.
It was an easy, warm smile that betrayed a shade of private amusement.
“A bold, if not highly strange request from such a lovely stranger at my door. We haven’t even been properly introduced.”
Magda pushed the cowl back off her head. “I am Magda Searus.”
The smile vanished in a heartbeat. “Magda Searus?” His face turned red. “Wife of First Wizard Baraccus? That Magda Searus?”
“Yes.”
The frown revisited his expression. “I was there, among all the people at the ceremony the day your husband’s remains were purified in the funeral pyre. I saw you there that day, in the distance. You had long hair.”
“Well, with Baraccus dead, the council wanted it cut off. They were quite insistent about letting the world know that without Baraccus I am a nobody. Elder Cadell, personally, saw to cutting it.”
He dipped his head respectfully. “I’m sorry about the loss of your husband, Lady Searus. Baraccus was a truly great man.”
“Thank you.”
He stared into her eyes a long moment, head still bowed, then remembered himself and straightened. “Please,” he said as his face reddened again, “wait there a moment, will you?”
He abruptly shut the door.
Magda realized, then, what else was different about him from most men. The entire time he had been in the doorway, he had looked into her eyes, his gaze wandering no farther than to her hair. The gazes of most men invariably wandered elsewhere. Merritt hadn’t done that, even though the black dress she was wearing under her light cloak did tend to reveal her shape to advantage.
Magda heard him stumble over something inside that then rolled across the floorboards. There was a thud as something heavy hit the floor. Then, it sounded like a chair fell over. A few more things clattered when they fell. It went silent inside the house for a time.
Magda glanced up and down the street to see if anyone else was hearing all the noise or paying attention to the visitor at his door. She saw a woman across the narrow street and up a ways come out and shake a rug. She folded it over and arm and went back in without noticing Magda in the shadows of the porch. Through small gaps in a screening lilac bush, Magda could see a few people in the distance talking, but they were too far away to be able to see her standing behind the greenery.
The door finally opened wide. Merritt was still tucking in a dark shirt. The long, wavy locks of his light brown hair had been hastily brushed back, revealing that his face had been hurriedly wiped clean.
“Sorry to make you stand out there, Lady Searus.” His face flushed again. “I’m afraid that I was out back working on a few things and—” He paused, apparently afraid that he was beginning to ramble. He made himself start over as he lifted a hand out in invitation. “Please, won’t you come in?”
As Magda stepped through the doorway, she could see an overturned chair and a small statue lying on its side. The place was small, with the strangest things stacked everywhere. Strange metal objects, not unlike the things she had seen Baraccus make, sat all around the room, making it difficult to tell what she had heard fall to the floor and what had already been there.
As odd as everything was, there was a strange kind of order to it all. Books stood in tall columns in places at the side of the room. A wicker couch also held books, but they were lying open and piled one atop another, as if to keep a place marked. A variety of small tables held mounds of scrolls between candles, bottles, boxes, and bones.
A small, tightly rolled scroll sticking out of a shelf had a variety of small clay figures collected all around the end of it. As far as she could tell, they were all floating around the end of the scroll with nothing holding them up. It was an inexplicable and disorienting sight.
There were also profoundly beautiful statues standing in random places around the room, not as if they had been placed to be admired, but simply, it appeared, put wherever there had been an empty spot at the time. There was a soldier about to unsheathe a sword carved from a gray stone, there were several smaller statues of men in robes carved from pale butternut wood, and, carved from pure white marble, there were several statues of the most graceful women Magda had ever seen.
Draped over the table beyond the overturned chair was a large square of red velvet. The tabletop was the only place in the entire room that wasn’t cluttered. A single gleaming sword sat in the middle on a raised portion of the red velvet.
Magda noticed an ornate gold and silver scabbard attached to a baldric lying on the floor. The scabbard was so striking that it could only belong with the sword.
Merritt righted the chair, then hung the baldric and its scabbard over the back before he hurriedly removed books from the wicker couch. “Sorry for the mess. I don’t ordinarily live in such clutter. It’s just that this place isn’t as roomy as my place at the Keep. Please, Lady Searus, won’t you have a seat?” He looked around. “Tea. I should make tea.”
“No, none for me, thank you,” she said as she made her way to the wicker couch.
He looked relieved. Magda wondered why he no longer lived at the Keep, but didn’t ask; she had more important matters to get to first. She waited until he turned around to her again.
“I need to talk with you, Wizard Merritt.”
“So talk.” He gestured to the couch. “What about Isidore?”
Magda wasn’t ready to sit. “What about the oath?”
He put both hands in his back pocket as his posture relaxed a little. He grinned boyishly. “You mean the devotion to the Lord Rahl? Master Rahl guide us. Master Rahl teach us. Master Rahl protect us. That oath?”
“Yes. You’re familiar with its purpose, then?”
He was smiling as if it was a private joke. Magda didn’t think it was funny. She could feel her own face heating to red.
“Actually, you see, Alric is an acquaintance of mine.”
“You know, then, that he’s a good man, and that he means the devotion to protect us from dream walkers?”
He still had a hint of a crooked smile as he kept her locked in his gaze. “Yes. Their side creates a weapon, we have to work to counter it. That’s why I helped him in creating the power contained within its bond.”
Magda blinked in surprise. “Are you saying that you helped him create the magic that protects people from the dream walkers? That power? You helped him with that?”
Merritt nodded. “To a certain small extent. I don’t know exactly how he crafted magic that could do such a thing, but I do know that he’s as smart as he is determined. He was stuck at a point that was keeping the bond from taking hold and igniting in others, at their end. It worked for him, but he wanted it to work to protect other people as well, and it wouldn’t go to root in them, I guess you could say. He knew that I happen to be familiar with unusual calculations for spell couplings, so he asked for my help.”
Magda
tilted her head toward him. “You helped Alric Rahl create the magic of the bond.”
He nodded again, looking quite earnest. “I provided the authentication routines for the verification web, from inside of it, in order to complete the validation process. That was what initiated the unification of the spell components he was trying to combine so that the bond would activate in the proper sequence.
“Once it ignited, locking down the series reductions, I was the first one to speak the devotion. When I did, I did it from inside the completed web. I wanted to test it first to ensure that it wouldn’t inadvertently harm people when they gave the devotion to invoke the bond.”
Magda couldn’t help staring openly at him. She touched her fingers to her forehead, trying to take it all in. “You mean that you were the one who made it work?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “No, not really. Alric did most of the work. He came to me because he knew that I would be able to understand what he was trying to do. There aren’t many people who understand such complex combination routines well enough to discuss it with him. He thought I might be able to see why the verification web wasn’t functioning exactly the way he intended and hoped that I would know what was needed.”
“So it wouldn’t have worked without what you did,” she said.
“Alric Rahl created something masterful. I guess you could say that I just added a little seasoning to his stew.”
“Then you are bonded to him?” Magda asked. “You are protected from the dream walkers?”
His smiled vanished. “Oh yes, I am protected. He tested me with the dream walker he held captive. That’s how Alric knew that the bond he created finally worked in others. I was the first one protected by the bond. So, you see, there is no chance that a dream walker is hiding in the shadows of my mind, listening and watching, if that’s what you’re worried about.
“Now, what is it you wanted to tell me about my friend Isidore?”
Magda’s heart sank.
“I’m afraid that I got Isidore killed.”
Chapter 45
Merritt’s face took on the look of chiseled stone, much like his statues. The aspect of the gift she saw in his eyes had a decidedly dangerous cast to it.
“What do you mean, you got Isidore killed?”
In that calm yet emotionally charged question, she could see that this was a man with more than a simple temper. It was a refined sort of bottled fury that had the potential to be devastatingly violent, and yet at the same time he was also a man able to control it.
That meant that he could focus it.
“It takes a bit of explanation.”
While at first a bit shy, once the subject became somber he turned all business.
“So explain.”
Magda rearranged the bundle under her arm as she finally sat on the wicker couch. It gave her the excuse to look away from his intense expression.
“I was at first in shock over my husband’s death,” she began. “I couldn’t understand why he would take his own life, couldn’t understand why he would leave me like that, leave all of us. People said that his journey to the Temple of the Winds in the world of the dead must have crushed his spirit and sapped his will to live.
“Everyone accepted that story. They believed it was a straightforward suicide. And while it may have made grim sense to them, it didn’t make sense to me. As I thought about it, I kept coming back to the core truth that Baraccus was not the kind of man to be so despondent that he would kill himself.
“Besides, I was there when he came back from the Temple of the Winds, and while there was no doubt that he was troubled and distracted, I wouldn’t characterize him as depressed.
“He had too much to live for, too many things that mattered to him, too many people he cared about, too much important work yet unfinished. He wouldn’t kill himself to end any kind of personal despair. He cared about us all too much to do such a thing. With all of the New World in danger he had every reason to want to fight for us.”
“Then why would he do it?” Merritt asked as he went to the table to gaze down at the sword.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. Baraccus knew that I wouldn’t believe that he had simply wanted to end his life. He was counting on me to realize that something about it didn’t make sense.
“He knew that I would recognize that he would only have done such a thing if it was to somehow protect all of us. That’s the way he was. That was his mission in life. That was why he was First Wizard. He was a war wizard, after all. He took that mission very seriously.
“War wizards don’t give up. They find a way around any obstacle, even if that way results in their own death. He called the way of a war wizard the dance with death.
“Shortly after his death, I found a note he’d left for me, telling me to seek truth. Somehow, for some reason, he couldn’t do that himself. Baraccus, not merely as my husband, but as First Wizard, charged me with finding truth.
“This is about something bigger than Baraccus. It involves all our lives. Even before I found the note, I knew that I had to find answers, not only for Baraccus, not only for myself, but because all our lives are at stake. For reasons I can’t yet fathom, he left the task to me.
“His note said, ‘Your destiny is to find truth.’”
Merritt, standing over the table, looking down at the sword as he listened, turned with a frown. “You mean the note said, ‘Your destiny is to find the truth.’”
Magda’s brow furrowed as she tried to recollect the exact words. She didn’t have the note with her. She had hidden it back at the Keep in a secret compartment in his workbench.
She didn’t know why the exact wording mattered to Merritt. It seemed an insignificant point. She knew, though, that wizards saw the world differently. Things that might seem insignificant to anyone else were often centrally important to them.
“Now that you mention it, I guess I can’t recall, exactly. I suppose that what you say makes more sense. Find the truth.”
Merritt nodded as he turned his broad back to her once more. “What happened then?”
“Not long after I found that note, the same day in fact, Lord Rahl was waiting to see me. As I talked to him, a dream walker that had apparently been hiding in my mind all along nearly killed me before I could start looking for answers. In a way, that was the beginning of an answer.
“I was able to give the devotion to Lord Rahl in time to protect myself. But why would a dream walker be hiding in my mind in the first place? I’m not even gifted.”
“You just said that you believe Baraccus left an important mission to you,” Merritt said, “a mission that is somehow critical to all our survival.”
“That’s true,” Magda said, “but the thing is, how would a dream walker have known that in the first place? Why would he have been hiding in my mind to begin with?”
“I see your point,” he said as he clasped his hands behind his back while pacing off a few steps as he thought about it. “Maybe with Baraccus dead, the dream walker was simply trying to find out what you may have known about the First Wizard’s business, his plans for fighting the war, weapons we’re developing, things of that sort.”
“I guess it makes sense,” Magda said. “I don’t know how it could be possible for me to be important to the future of our people, but Baraccus believed it. The dream walkers obviously had to have thought I was important enough to be worth watching in the first place, and then certainly after I found that note. Once I saw what it said, they would have seen it, too.
“But before that, why would they care about the thoughts of a nobody?”
“You aren’t a nobody,” Merritt said in a surprisingly compassionate voice as he looked over at her. “They may have cut your hair after Baraccus’s death, but that doesn’t change you into a nobody. You are still Magda Searus, the same as before, with the same abilities, the same potential, the same mind, the same capacity to think for yourself.”
“I wasn’t born noble or gifted.
That makes me a nobody in the minds of most people in the Midlands.”
Merritt stopped before the table and again stood gazing down at the gleaming sword lying on red velvet. “As long as their cutting your hair doesn’t make you a nobody in your own mind then it doesn’t make any difference what others think, now does it?”
Magda had to smile. “That’s always been my attitude. It frequently gets me into trouble, though. Before I met Baraccus, people often told me that I didn’t know my place. I’ve never much cared what most people thought about me, or what they thought my place should be. I always believed that I should think for myself and act accordingly. My status sometimes hinders me, but I don’t ever let it guide me.”
“Good.” He turned away from the sword and folded his arms as he leaned back against the table to face her. “So what did you do next?”
“I talked to a number of the people who had been closest to Baraccus, trying to find clues. That got me nowhere.
“So I went to the spiritist hoping that her unique abilities could help. Isidore told me that she was only the spiritist’s assistant and that the spiritist couldn’t see me.
“I was desperate, so I told her that I believed Baraccus had sacrificed his life in order to protect all of us and I was hoping that the spiritist could reach out to him for answers. I told her that I thought something important had happened when Baraccus had gone to the Temple of the Winds in the world of the dead. I needed her to contact him there, in the underworld, since this time he wasn’t coming back.
“I told her that all is not right in the Wizard’s Keep, and that I believe the enemy is already here, among us. After all, how would a dream walker know about me from all the way down in the Old World? I told her that the council wouldn’t believe me. I told her that if I was right, then the enemy would likely direct the dream walkers to the spiritist to prevent her from assisting the wizards in developing defenses.
The First Confessor (The Legend of Magda Searus) Page 23
