The First Confessor (2 page)

Tilly took a moment in answering. “People are cruel, Mistress. Especially to one not born noble. As the beautiful wife of the First Wizard, you are widely respected, despite being so much younger than him.” Tilly touched her own short hair, then gestured at Magda. “Your long hair is a mark of your standing. You have used your position of power to speak before the council for those in the Midlands who have no voice. You alone give them voice. You are widely known and respected for that, not just because you were the wife of the First Wizard.

“But with Master Baraccus gone you have no one to protect you, to give you standing before the council or anywhere else for that matter. You may find that the world is an unfriendly place to a widow of a powerful man who herself is not gifted and was not born noble.”

Magda had already considered all of that, but it was not going to be a problem she would live to face.

“Perhaps the spiritist could bring you valuable advice from beyond the grave. Perhaps your departed husband could at least explain his reasons and ease your pain as well.”

Magda nodded. “Thank you, Tilly. I will think on it.”

Her gaze again sank to the silver box of memories. She couldn’t imagine why Baraccus had done what he had done, or that he would be able to explain it from beyond the grave. If he had wanted to explain his reasons, he’d had ample opportunities to do so. He would have at least left a letter waiting for her upon her return.

She knew, too, that there was nothing Baraccus could do from beyond the grave to protect her standing. But that didn’t really matter.

A faint glow of candlelight fell across the floor as Tilly opened the door on the far side of the room.

“Mistress.”

Magda looked back over her shoulder to see Tilly standing at the open door, lever in hand.

Men, their faces in shadow, their hands clasped, stood out in the hallway.

“There are . . . visitors come to see you, Mistress.”

Magda turned back to the table and carefully closed the silver box of treasured memories. “Please let them in, Tilly.”

Magda had known that sooner or later they would come. It appeared that it was to be sooner rather than later. She had planned to be finished with it all before they had a chance to show up. That, too, it seemed, was not to be.

Her spirits would have sunk lower, but they could go no lower. What did it matter anymore? What did any of it matter? It would soon enough be ended.

“Would you like me to stay, Mistress?”

Magda touched her fingers to the long, thick, freshly brushed hair lying over the front of her shoulder.

She had to be strong. Baraccus would want her to be strong.

“No, Tilly,” she said after getting a firm command of her voice, “it’s all right. Please let them in and then you may go on to your work.”

Tilly bowed deeply from the waist and backed away a little as she held the door open wider for the men to enter. As soon as all seven of them had glided into the room, Tilly hurried away, closing the door behind her.

Magda slid the ornately engraved silver box to the side of the table, placing it beside a well-used collection of exquisite metalsmithing tools, semiprecious stones in divided trays, and small books filled with notes that had belonged to her husband. She let her hand rest for a moment on the table where his hands had been when he had sometimes worked at the table, late into the quiet of the night, crafting items like the extraordinary amulet he’d made when the war had begun.

When she had asked its purpose, he had said that it was an ever-present reminder of his calling come to pass, his talent, his duty, and his reason for being. He said that it represented a war wizard’s prime directive: to cut the attacker down, to cut them down to their very soul. The ruby red stone in the center of the intricate lines represented the blood of the enemy.

He said that the amulet represented the dance with death.

He had worn it every day since he’d made it, but left it in the First Wizard’s enclave, along with his singular black and gold outfit, a war wizard’s outfit, a war wizard’s battle armor, before he had stepped off the side of the Wizard’s Keep and dropped several thousand feet to his death.

Magda lifted her long brown hair back over her shoulder as she turned to the seven men crossing the room. She recognized the familiar faces of six members of the council. Each face was fixed with a stony expression. She suspected that the expressions were a mask for a bit of shame they likely felt at what they had come to see done.

She had known they would come, of course, but not this soon. She had thought that they would have paid her the grace of a bit more time.

There was another man with them, his face shadowed by the hood of his loose brown habit. As they came closer, into the weak light leaking in around the closed shutters, the seventh man pushed the cowl back to rest on his rounded shoulders.

The man’s black eyes were fixed on her, the way a vulture’s steady gaze fixed on a suffering animal. Men often stared at her, but not in this way.

He had a short, wide, bull neck. The top of his head was covered in closely cropped, wiry black hair. Stubble darkened the lower half of his face. A high hairline made his forehead and the top of his skull look even larger. The lines and folds of his face for the most part tended to all draw in toward the center, giving his expression a pinched, pushed-in look. All his coarse features looked firm and densely packed, as if every part of the man was as hard as his reputation.

He wasn’t ugly, really, merely unusual-looking. In a way, his striking visage gave him an intense, commanding air of authority.

There was no mistaking that it was the head prosecutor himself, Lothain, a man of far-reaching authority and the renown to match it. His singular features, punctuated by those black eyes, made him impossible to forget. Magda didn’t know what such a man was doing with the council, carrying out the formality of a miserable little task. It seemed beneath his time.

Lothain’s grim expression, fixed with weathered creases lining his leathery face, did not look as if it might be covering the slightest bit of pity, as did the expressions of the others. Magda didn’t think the man was capable of uneasiness, much less shame, and certainly not pity. The hard lines of his face bore testimony to the fact that this was a man who went about his work with relentless, iron determination.

Not a full moon before, everyone had been stunned when Lothain had brought charges of treason against the entire Temple team, the men who had, at the direction of the Central Council, gathered dangerous items of magic together into the Temple of the Winds and then sent it all into the underworld for safekeeping until after the war. The trial had been a sensation. In it, Lothain had revealed that the men had gone far beyond their mission and not only locked away more than they were supposed to, but made it all but impossible to recover.

In their defense, some of them said that they believed in the Old World’s efforts to save mankind from the tyranny of magic.

The convictions had ensured that Lothain’s reputation had an edge to it that was as razor-sharp as the axes that had beheaded the hundred convicted wizards of the Temple team.

In a bold effort to try to undo the damage done by the traitors, Lothain himself had on his own authority then gone beyond the veil, into the underworld itself, to the Temple of the Winds. Everyone feared for him on such a journey. Everyone feared to lose a man of such ability and powers.

To everyone’s relief, Lothain had returned alive, if shaken by the journey. Unfortunately, the damage done by the Temple team had proven to be greater than even he had suspected, and he had not found a way in, so he had returned without being able to repair the damage done by the Temple team he had convicted.

Lothain strolled in closer to Magda and gestured, indicating the formality of his preamble.

“Lady Searus, may I offer my condolences on the unfortunate and untimely death of your husband.”

One of the council members leaned in. “He was a great man.”

Lothain’s sidelong glance moved the man back in line with the others.

“Thank you, Prosecutor Lothain.” She glanced at the councilman who had spoken. “My husband was indeed a great man.”

Lothain lifted a dark eyebrow. “And why do you suppose that such a great man, a man beloved by his people as well as his alluring young wife, would throw himself over the Keep wall to drop several thousand feet down the side of the mountain to meet his death on the rocks below?”

Magda kept her voice steady and spoke the simple truth. “I wouldn’t know, Prosecutor. He sent me away for the day on an errand. When I returned, he was dead.”

“Really,” Lothain said in a drawl as he touched his chin and gazed off in thought. “Are you saying that you suspect that he didn’t wish you to be here, to see the terrible damage a fall from that height to the rocks below would do to him?”

Magda swallowed. She had been unable to prevent herself from imagining it a thousand times in her mind’s eye. By the time she had returned, people had already seen to having him sealed in a stately coffin.

That morning, scant hours after she had learned of his death, the ornately carved maple coffin with her husband’s remains had been placed on a funeral pyre on the rampart outside the First Wizard’s enclave. Because his body had been sealed in the coffin, she wasn’t able to look upon his face one last time. She didn’t ask to have it opened. She knew why the coffin was sealed.

The pyre burned for most of the day as hundreds of solemn people stood silently watching the flames consume their beloved leader, and for many, their last hope.

Instead of answering such a tasteless question, Magda changed the subject. “May I inquire as to your business here, Prosecutor Lothain?”

“If you don’t mind, Lady Searus, I will be the one to ask the questions.”

His tone had an edge to it that took her by surprise.

Seeing the shocked expression on her face, he offered a brief, insincere smile. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your grieving, but you see, with the war threatening our very existence, there are matters of pressing concern to all of us that I’m afraid I must ask about. That’s all I meant.”

Magda was not in the mood to answer questions. She had her own pressing concern. But she knew this man well enough to know that he wouldn’t leave her to her own business until he saw to his.

She saw no choice but to answer his questions.

Magda smoothed the front of her dress as she gathered her composure. “And what pressing concerns would you need to ask me about?”

He flicked a finger out toward the shutters. “Well, there is the matter of the moon turning red.” Lothain strolled off a few paces and then turned back. “After I failed to gain access to the Temple of the Winds, others, presumably with abilities more effective for such a specialized undertaking than I, also made the journey. None of them returned.”

Magda was baffled as to what he was getting at. “They were good men, talented men, valuable men. It was a great loss.”

Lothain strolled back close to her. His black-eyed gaze glided over items on the table, like the eyes of a vulture looking among bones for scraps. He turned a notebook with a finger to see what was written on the spine before addressing her again.

“Your husband selected those men.”

“They were volunteers.”

He smiled politely. “Yes of course. I meant to say that your husband selected the men who were to go to the Temple and ultimately their death from among a group of volunteers.”

“My husband was First Wizard.” Her brow tightened. “Who would you expect to select men for such a dangerous mission? The council? You?”

“No, no, of course not.” He gestured offhandedly. “It was clearly First Wizard Baraccus’s responsibility to select the men who would go.”

“Then what is your point?”

He smiled down at her. That smile might have been on his lips, but it was not in his eyes.

“My point,” Lothain finally said, “is that he selected men who failed.”

Hard as she could, Magda slapped the man across his face. The six council members gasped as they drew back. Her hand probably stung more than Lothain’s solid face, but she didn’t care. The sound of the slap seemed to hang in the air for a moment before fading.

Lothain dismissed the slap with a polite bow of his head. “Please accept my apology if it sounded like I was making an accusation.”

“If it was not an accusation, then what was it?”

“I am simply trying to get to the truth.”

“The truth? The truth is,” she growled, “that while you were in the underworld, attempting to gain entrance into the Temple, the moon each night and each night since turned red in a warning, the most serious warning possible from the Temple, that there is some sort of grave trouble—”

He cut her off, dismissing the issue with a flick of his hand. “The appearance of repeated red moons was probably because of the damage done by the Temple team.”

“And when you returned, after failing in your attempt to undo that damage, the First Wizard had the terrible duty to select a volunteer to answer the Temple’s nightly call of a red moon. And when the first man failed to return, the First Wizard had to send another, more experienced wizard, and when that one failed to return, he had the grim duty to select yet another, even more skilled man, all of them friends and close associates.