The First Confessor (24 page)

Isidore gave Magda’s arm a sympathetic squeeze. “We will find your answers, Magda. You’ve found your way to the right person, a person with the right kind of vision.”

Magda put thoughts of Baraccus out of her mind as she returned to the matter at hand.

She couldn’t bring herself to ask Isidore if Merritt had been the one to take her eyes. She skirted the subject and asked something else instead to steer the conversation back to the subject at hand.

“So what about you? What happened with Merritt? Was he able to help you with your efforts to find the lost souls of Grandengart?”

“Well, when I finally found his place”—she pointed a finger toward the ceiling—“up under the southern rampart, of all places, Merritt seemed to be distracted by his own problems, but he was kind enough to allow me in and at least listen to my story. He listened as you have, and far more seriously than the council had. I guess people closer to your own age are more inclined to take you seriously.

“He didn’t say much as I told him what had happened. He stared down at that beautiful sword of his, lying on a table, as he listened. He asked a few questions, though, and I got the sense from those questions that, perhaps even more than me, he considered the implications of bodies being taken, and worse, their spirits missing from the underworld, to be quite ominous. In a way, his concern made me worry even more and served to reinforce my conviction in what I knew I had to do.

“When I finished with my story he asked what it was I thought he could do to help. I told him that I believed that there was a threat that everyone was ignoring. He didn’t argue the point. I told him that because of my abilities as a sorceress and a spiritist I thought I had a unique understanding of the problem, an understanding that the council was not taking seriously. He seemed in harmony with that as well.

“I told him that while I believed the enemy was somehow meddling with the world of the dead, I at first had not been able to come up with any solution to finding the truth until I finally began to consider how I could use my ability to do what had never needed doing before. I told him how I had eventually come to understand that I needed to search the world of life for the dead, and for that I needed a new way to use my abilities, a way that had never been conceived of before.

“Up until that moment, he had listened with great interest to the things I was telling him, but now he was even more intently focused.”

Magda had no doubt of that.

Isidore smiled self-consciously. “I guess that I was trying to appeal to his nature as a maker, trying to talk to him in a language he would understand and appreciate. It seemed to be working, as he was acutely interested in what I was telling him.

“Finally, I told him that I had come at last to understand what was needed. I told him that I needed to have a new way to see, a way to see what no other could, and to do that I needed to have my vision of this world removed. To see, I had to first be blinded. I said that I wanted him to do it.

“Merritt was shocked and angered by my unexpected request. He refused to listen to anything else I had to say. He ushered me to the door and sent me away.”

Magda for the first time thought better of Merritt.

“Over the course of time, I had gradually become used to the idea of trading one kind of sight for another and had accepted its necessity. I was used to the idea. But I realized that it was a shocking request to make of Merritt, so for a while I left him alone to think about the things I had told him. I knew that he needed time to absorb it all.

“After a while, I went back to see him. I would have liked to have given him more time to consider the situation, but I knew that time was working against me—against all of us.

“Before he could say anything or send me away, I asked him to first tell me one thing. He folded his arms and looked down at me, waiting for me to pose the question. He’s a tall man—you are more his size than me. For a moment I had trouble summoning my voice under the scrutiny of his hazel eyes. I finally did, of course, and asked him to tell me why General Kuno’s forces would take the corpses of our people. He stared down at me for a long time.

“Finally he told me, in a quiet voice, that he feared to imagine. I told him that I did as well and asked him to allow me to explain.

“He at last stepped aside from his doorway and allowed me in. I again told him that I needed to be blind. Anticipating what he might say and before he had a chance, I told him that I needed to be really blind, not blindfolded, in order to see what I needed to discover. I explained that I was searching for the answers to real problems, and I couldn’t use pretend methods.

“Merritt told me that if I wanted to be blind so bad, all I had to do was stab out my own eyes. I remember him pacing around his room, gesturing with his arms as he told me that he would be cursed with a lifetime of nightmares if he were to do such a dreadful thing. He said that it was a cruel request for me to make of someone.

“He grew more and more angry as he paced. He finally told me again to leave and said that if I decided to stab my eyes out for such a crazy cause I would be doing him a great favor if I made sure that he never learned of it.

“As he held my arm and led me to his door, I told him that if he cared about all the people who had been slaughtered, and all those I feared would be slaughtered, he needed to listen to me. I insisted that he wasn’t understanding what I was saying or what I was asking for.

“He finally calmed down and let go of my arm. He leaned back against a table covered in swords all neatly laid out on a red velvet cloth. He picked out one particularly stunning sword from a raised place at the center and held the wire-wound hilt tightly in both fists as he rested the sword’s point firmly on the floor. He then looked up at me and said he was listening. It was a warning that it was my last chance.

“I told him that it was not actually blindness that I sought. I was actually seeking vision.

“When he frowned, I went on and told him that of course I could blind myself, but I could not give myself the sight I needed, so it would be pointless to do so. Even more curious, he leaned toward me a bit and asked what I meant.

“I told him that being blind to this world was only half of it—the easy half. I said that what I really needed was a wizard with enough of an imagination and ability to be able to create a new kind of vision.

“I told him that I needed to be invested with a singular ability, the ability to see what no one else could.”

Magda arched an eyebrow. “I would imagine that by then, with him being a maker, you had his full attention.”

“I did indeed,” Isidore confirmed. “He began to realize that I was not asking him to blind me so much as I was asking him to take my vision so that he could replace it with a new kind of sight, a better kind of sight. The kind of sight that no one had ever conceived of before.

“I told him that in my mind, my vision had already been taken by the enemy. They had blinded me to spirits so that I could not fight against them.

“This was about getting the vision I needed so that I could fight back.

“I told Merritt that I needed him to create in me the ability to be able to hunt spirits in this world.”

Magda watched Isidore silently rubbing a thumb on the side of her knee for a moment, gathering her thoughts before she went on. Magda could not imagine what it must have been like for this woman, all alone, haunted by her calling of working with the spirit world and by the spirits that were missing from it. Despite how thin and frail she looked, this was a woman of enormous determination.

“I remember the last day I had normal sight,” Isidore finally said.

Seeing the woman’s courage flag as her jaw trembled for just a moment, Magda placed a reassuring hand on Isidore’s back, but said nothing.

Isidore spoke softly as she picked up the story. “After giving him the details he would need, all the things I knew as a spiritist that he would likely be unaware of, I’d let Merritt work on the problem. I had told him that it was in his hands and asked him to come to me when he was ready.

“He worked for weeks. Not once did I go to see him. I let him create what he would in his own way.

“Merritt hated the thought of taking my eyes, he truly did, but he understood that I wasn’t really asking to be blind. I was actually asking for something far greater than the sight we are all born with.

“I was asking for wizard-created sight.”

Magda stared at the candle flames wavering slowing as they burned, trying to imagine such a thing, trying to imagine what she would feel like, knowing that she was about to be changed forever by a wizard’s power. She knew from Baraccus that when a wizard changed a person in such a way, there could be no going back. Such changes could not be reversed.

“One day a messenger delivered a note. It was from Merritt, saying that he was ready and would arrive shortly. It asked that I be ready.” Isidore took a deep breath, letting it out with a sigh. “I remember how my heart started hammering when he knocked on my door that day. My heart was pounding against my ribs and I could hear each beat whooshing in my ears. I had to stop for a moment, hold on to the back of a chair, and make myself slow my breathing before I went to the door.

“I had made preparations for the day when he would finally arrive. I had gone over everything countless times as I waited. The waiting had been agony, but I knew that the last thing I wanted was to rush him. I needed him to get it right.

“I remember frantically looking at everything on my way to the door, trying to take it all in, trying to remember what everything looked like. I tried to remember the shape of the pottery bowl on the table, the simple design of the chair, the grain of the wooden table.

“It was a small place, but I had arranged the few pieces of furniture in it so that once I could no longer see I would be able to get around and find things fairly easily. I had tried to anticipate every aspect of being blind, tried to set things out that I would need to find, move things that might trip me, ready everything I could think of.

“Still, despite my preparations, I was terrified.

“I had several scarves laid out in a line on my small sleeping mat. I’d selected them because they were each a different color. For some reason, color seemed more important to me, more dear to me, than anything else.

“I desperately wanted to remember color.

“I had tied knots in the ends of each scarf, a different number of knots for each different color. One knot meant that it was a red scarf, two knots was brown, three green, and so on. I don’t really know why I thought that was so important, considering that it could make no difference if I couldn’t actually see the color, but I remember being panicked that I might forget what color looked like, what flowers looked like, what sunlight looked like, what a child’s smile looked like.

“I guess that those scarves with the knots in the ends were my connection to all those things. They were my talisman to recall what color looked like . . . and so much more.”

Magda felt tears running down her cheeks and dripping off her jaw. She tried to imagine eyes in the sunken hollows Isidore was left with. She must have been a beautiful woman, with big beautiful eyes looking out from a beautiful soul.

“I plucked up those scarves on the way to the door. I held them in a death grip, as if I could somehow hold on to color itself.”

Isidore cocked her head, as if recalling the scene. “When I opened the door, I was surprised to see that Merritt’s eyes were red. To this day, that, and not the scarf with one knot, is my memory of red.

“He told me in a quiet voice that he had figured out how to do what it was I wanted. He asked if I was sure, if I still wanted to go through with it. In answer, I took up his hand, kissed it, and held it to my cheek for a moment as I thanked him for what he was about to do. He nodded without saying anything.

“I was joyous for the lost souls that I hoped to be able to find. Merritt was miserable.

“He had a roll of papers he’d brought along with him. He unfurled them on the table and I saw then that each one had some kind of drawings all over it. He arranged them just so, putting various pieces where they belonged so that together they became parts of a larger drawing. When it was all arranged, I could see that he had drawn what looked to be a complex maze with odd symbols at various places.”

“A maze?” Magda managed to ask without the tears surfacing in her voice.

Isidore nodded. “I asked him what he thought he was doing. I told him that drawings for a maze had nothing to do with the new kind of sight that I needed.

“He straightened then—he is an imposing man—and asked what I thought I was going to do. Walk all over the New World looking for ghosts? Look in dark corners and under beds? He said that it wasn’t enough to be able to see such spirits as I was hunting. He said that I needed something more to help me find them.

“He said that he had not merely thought of a way to create a new kind of sight so that I could see them, but a way that might attract them, draw them to me.

“I was stunned. It was brilliant. I hadn’t thought it through, thought about how I would actually search, but Merritt had. He had considered the entirety of the problem and he’d come up with a way for me not only to see spirits, but to draw the dead to me.”

Magda glanced around the circular room, imagining what was out beyond, remembering the way she had come in through the maze to find Isidore’s place.

“You mean to say that Merritt designed this maze down here? That maze out there, that confusing place with all the dead ends, all the twists and turns, all the confusing passageways, all the hanging cloth, and the empty rooms?”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t understand. How can it help you? Why the passageways to nowhere that dead-end? The hanging panels of cloth? The empty rooms? What’s the purpose?”

“To make them feel safe,” Isidore said.