The First Confessor (15 page)

Reddish light from the fires of a forge deep in one of the dimly lit rooms revealed feverish activity that drew Magda and Tilly’s attention. Men yelled instructions as they urgently worked to contain the damage from what appeared to be a serious accident.

Through the broad opening Magda could see that the room was a shambles. The forge had been partially torn open. Broken brick and burning embers lay scattered across the floor. The metal hood that belonged over the forge, along with its chimney, was nowhere in sight. Acrid-smelling smoke and glowing ash still rising from the remnants of the fire rolled across the ceiling and out the open doors. Iron bars set into the brick around the forge were twisted and bent outward, as if there had been a violent explosion.

Ominous flashes of lightning still flickered around the damaged forge, sparked through the dimly lit room, and arced off through the smoke hugging the ceiling. The twisting strands of lightning crackling through the room all seemed anchored at the forge, evidence of the magic that had been involved in the labor, and probably the source of the catastrophe.

The shuddering lightning lit the lines of men in spasms of bluish light as they rushed in carrying buckets, heaving water on the fire. Hot coals hissed and steamed. Other men rushed in with glowing spheres to provide more light.

Magda spotted the body of a man slumped on the floor against a far wall and another sprawled nearby. Both men were torn and bloody. It was obvious they were dead. One of the men’s blackened robes still smoldered.

A long, gleaming section from a shattered sword was embedded in his chest. Magda could see that he was missing an arm at his shoulder. She could see by how still the piece of blade jutting from his chest was that he wasn’t breathing. Coals still glowing red lay strewn among the abandoned bodies, along with polished fragments of the broken blade. One piece stuck in a far wall shined out from the shadows.

A small clutch of people surrounded an injured man on the floor. The circle of kneeling men, all seeming to be working together, were clustered together, bent over the moaning man, tending to his injuries. One of the man’s legs bent at the knee, then straightened, then the other, back and forth as if he were in great agony. Some of the men held him down while others appeared to be using their gift to try to help him.

Magda knew that this had to be the source of the screams she had heard. She felt an urge to go help the man, but the gifted were already doing that.

From what the three men they had met in the corridors had said, none of it would have happened if the wizard Merritt hadn’t abandoned these men. She couldn’t imagine why he would leave people who needed his help. Now men were dead because of it.

She also couldn’t imagine how a sword could have exploded to do so much damage.

Magda and Tilly kept moving through the busy room. There was nothing they could do to help.

Other rooms, dark but for the intense glow from forges and furnaces, were beehives of activity. Despite the accident that had happened close by, work continued unabated. Furnaces and molten metal could not be left untended. Teams of men lifted heavy containers and pushed them into furnaces with the aid of long poles. In other areas, men lugged blazing crucibles from the furnaces to pour luminescent, liquid metal into molds.

In other rooms, men rushed with glowing steel from the forges to massive anvils where other men with hammers waited. As the hot metal was held in place, the hammers worked in unison. The steady beat of cold steel against hot metal at various stations rang through the large chamber as the men shaped the malleable metal. The ringing of hammers mixed with the roar of fires being fed by bellows, shouting, conversation, and the dull background rasp of files.

Magda could smell molten metal, smoke from fires, and steam from salt water and oil used to quench the glowing steel. The haze of smoke and steam that hung motionless the length of the enormous room was in places tinted yellowish orange by the blush of light from forges and furnaces off under archways and rooms to the side.

Despite the accident, work looked to have hardly paused. The war raged on. Every day the enemy drew closer. These people knew that they could not slow their efforts.

The threat overhanging them all was almost palpable.

When they reached the far side of the long chamber, Magda glanced around, checking to make sure that the people were going about their own business and not paying any attention to her. Satisfied, she and Tilly slipped into a sheltering entryway.

Though its style mimicked many of the grand places in the Keep, the recessed entry was, in contrast to most other areas, rather small and intimate. Fluted limestone columns lined either side of the gloomy alcove. The small pillars, not much taller than Magda, were topped with long entablatures that provided support for arches elaborately decorated with complex, carved stone moldings framing tiles laid out in dark, geometric patterns. Benches to each side had been intricately embellished to match the forbidding architectural details of the rest of the entry.

The benches seemed to suggest that visitors sit and reconsider before going any farther. Or maybe that they pause in their weary grief and rest to steady themselves before continuing on.

Surrounding the pitch black opening at the rear, larger-than-life stone figures in grim, contorted, distraught poses clearly conveyed a sense of desolation and tragedy for what lay beyond.

For good reason. The brooding figures surrounding the doorway were meant to tell all that this was not a region to be entered lightly.

This was the threshold to the place of the dead.

Without pausing to reconsider or to rest, Tilly vanished into the dark maw. Magda followed swiftly behind. Their lanterns, along with more hung at intervals, revealed stone steps descending down into blackness. The stairs were wide enough that the two of them could walk side by side.

“Do you come down here often?” Magda asked.

“No, Mistress. Only when a wizard or sorceress asks that I come down to clean a specific area for them. Some like their rooms kept tidy. Most don’t like anyone coming into the places where they do their work. Other members of the staff are assigned to the common areas down here, the same as up above.”

Magda glanced at the meticulously maintained and polished stone balustrade. She supposed that it was a sign of respect for the dead that the place be kept presentable for visitors.

In contrast to the marble staircase that gave the descent a sense of grandeur, the walls and ceiling were nothing more than a broad shaft hollowed out of rock. Flight after flight of stairs, each ending at a landing from which the next run turned, were all part of a massive staircase that spiraled ever downward. There were no rooms or side corridors along the way, nor areas set aside to sit and rest.

It surprised Magda how far down they had to go before they finally reached a spacious cavern at the bottom. The chamber had been carved out of the rock, much as the tunneling descent had, with tool marks and drill holes from the excavation still in evidence on the rough stone walls. Only the floor was finished off, in a circular pattern of light and dark stone tiles. A table veneered in burl walnut sitting alone in the center of the room held a simple white vase filled with white lilies.

At intervals around the room, openings cut into the stone led off into darkness. Each looked like a cave. None of the nine passageways were trimmed or decorated, except for a symbol that had been carved into the stone above each opening.

Without delay, Tilly entered the ninth opening, a number that she knew from Baraccus had great meaning in things having to do with magic.

The walls of the passageway were the same roughly hewn stone as the chamber had been. Almost immediately, they started down yet more steps, except that these, rather than being built, were carved directly from the stone itself. The treads were rugged and uneven, so Magda had to be careful lest she fall.

It was another long descent down the twisting tunnel before the stone abruptly changed. As the tunnel leveled out, they found themselves within a vein of softer sandstone. Unlit corridors branched off in every direction but Tilly led them on through the largest, main hallway. Before long, rooms carved out of the sandstone began to appear on both sides.

Almost immediately, Magda began seeing the dead.

As they passed by room after room, their lantern light revealed niches carved right into the stone walls of the rooms. Each cavity looked to hold at least one body; most held more. Some of the hollowed-out chambers seemed to have entire families laid out beside one another.

Magda slowed to take a better look into a larger area off to the right. She saw that in places the resting chambers were half a dozen high, the uppermost niches reachable only with a ladder. Most of the bodies laid to rest in the honeycombs of cavities were wrapped in shrouds that were so old and dirty that they looked to have been carved out of the same tan sandstone as the rooms themselves. A number of the recesses held coffins, all of them stone, most with carved decorations, all of them layered in dust and partially encased within masses of cobwebs.

As they went on, they encountered rooms of niches that held massive numbers of bones. Each recess was filled to the top with neatly stacked bones, sorted by type, covered in dust. Several of the chambers held only skulls. Many of the resting places looked untouched for decades, if not centuries. Very few looked tended.

“These are the oldest tombs,” Tilly said. “As more space was needed, the oldest bones were brought together and stacked here to make room. As time went on, catacombs had to be extended deeper and deeper in order to make new places to bury the recently deceased. The excavation goes on to this day. Many of those living up above will one day end up down here.”

Above many of the hollowed-out resting places could still be seen a family name in faded paint, or a name and a title of the deceased. Some were decorated around the edges with crudely carved decorations, probably done by family members.

Many people preferred to inter their family members so that they could come to visit them. Other people, especially the relatives of more famous people, preferred to let fire consume their loved one, rather than allow their bodies to become an attraction, or provide rivals a corpse to spit upon.

Magda had chosen to have the shell that had contained Baraccus’s spirit to be consumed by fire as that was also said by some to purify the spirit of its worldly trappings for its journey to the underworld. Some couldn’t stand the thought of a loved one being reduced to ashes. Magda didn’t see that empty vessel as her loved one. Her loved one was gone to be among the good spirits. The choice being forced upon her, she chose to have his vessel reduced to ash rather than to rot.

The passageway they hurried down widened out, so that the two of them could again walk comfortably side by side. As they descended level after level, past the dead numbering in the thousands, they eventually came to newer sections of the catacombs. The bodies Magda saw wrapped in white shrouds were not yet layered in centuries of dust.

Torches in rusty iron brackets were lit in these newer sections, providing enough light to see without the need of lanterns. Tilly blew out the flame in hers.

“Besides the dead,” Tilly said, “here, too, be places where some of the gifted choose to work.”

Although her guide didn’t mention it, Magda recalled Tilly telling her that some of the gifted down here worked with the dead. Magda didn’t like to contemplate such a concept, and tried hard not to imagine what such work could entail.

Before long, Magda began to hear the whisper of conversation. They soon encountered people coming out of passageways to the sides. Some hurried past in the opposite direction. Most of them were alone, but she also saw groups of four or five people talking in low voices among themselves, absorbed in debate on formulas or the order of prophecy.

Magda finally saw rooms that were something other than burial chambers. They looked like crude work areas cut out of the sandstone. Some were lit by torches, but a number of the rooms were brightly illuminated by glass spheres.

Inside a few darker rooms Magda saw glowing verification webs surrounded by people studying them, pointing out certain elements to others, or casting in additional branches. Some of the webs hummed. The colors of the webs reflected off faces focused on the work.

There were several large libraries, lined with shelves from floor to ceiling, all filled with books. Magda knew from Baraccus that these would be valuable and profoundly dangerous books that needed to be kept away from more public areas. Some such books had been taken away to the Temple of the Winds.

People sat at tables, quietly studying volumes opened before them, while others stood in the aisles, searching the shelves, apparently looking for particular information. Other rooms had heavy doors. At one door, flashes of light crackled and flickered through the gap at the bottom of the door, as if there were a thunderstorm inside.

Tilly gestured down a passageway to the right. “This way.”

The long corridor was noticeably different from any that had come before. It was wider than the others, with carefully carved straight walls and a flat ceiling. It was also completely deserted and silent in a way that was oppressive.

As they left the occupied areas far behind and made their way down the passageway, something about the place made the fine little hairs on the back of Magda’s neck stiffen.

At the far end they reached a single arched opening, its significance highlighted by the broad corridor that had led up to this lonely archway. A textile with long-faded colors in vertical geometric designs hung over the entryway.

Tilly paused to the side of the covered opening. “Here be where you need to go, Mistress. I can take you no farther.”

“Why not?”

Tilly glanced at the hanging. “The gifted who I sometimes work for, and who have told me about the woman, also say that I am not to go beyond these symbols hung here. They say that it is only for the gifted to go beyond.”