The First Confessor (43 page)

Worried about the implications, Magda nonetheless did as Merritt asked, letting the blood drip in a steady line across the sandy ground he had smoothed out. She was careful to go slow enough that the lines of blood were unbroken.

“Good,” he said. “Now draw the beginning of the world of life around it, touching the points of the star.”

Lightning flashing all around, thunder booming, Magda followed his instructions. Wind whipped her hair across her face and she had to pull it back to see what she was doing. What the lightning didn’t light for her, the lantern did. After the circle was completed, he had her draw the square, and then the outer circle, where ordinarily a Grace was begun.

“Now,” he said, “draw the rays. But you need to begin them out beyond the outer circle, in the world of the dead, pulling the lines inward through the whole thing until they touch the points of the star, until they touch creation.”

Magda stared at him. “Merritt, are you sure? I’ve never heard of a Grace being drawn that way. I’ve never heard of anyone daring to draw the rays inward from death toward the Light of Creation. It seems a sacrilege.”

He was nodding. “I know. But that’s what I need you to do. We’re mixing elements, remember? This is what the rift calculations are for. This is why I need the seventh-level breach formulas. Hurry, before you lose too much blood.”

By the time she was finished, she was feeling decidedly light-headed. She tingled all over, except for her fingers. They had gone numb.

Magda realized that the dim world all around her seemed to be tilting at an odd angle. Merritt caught her in his arms before she hit the ground.

He set her down, leaning her against a log off to the side. He placed a hand over the cut. “You did good, Magda.”

She felt the heavy warmth of magic flowing into her arm.

“This will stop the bleeding so that it can start to heal,” he told her. She could hardly hear his voice. “While I’m working, I want you to sit right here and rest. Be strong for me, now. I need you to be strong for the next part.”

Magda nodded, but he was already rushing back to the Grace drawn in blood.

Her blood.

Magda lay back against the log, watching the lightning flicker deep in the clouds overhead, turning them a greenish color deep inside. The lightning danced from place to place, running in jumping, jagged lines as it ripped across the sky, causing a great cracking, booming sound in its wake. She could feel the deep rumble of thunder through the sandy ground.

Something about that greenish color tickled at the back of her mind, but she couldn’t seem to bring it forth.

When Magda realized that not all the lightning, not all the rumbling roar, was coming from the sky, she used her elbows against the log to push herself a little more upright. Standing near the center of the Grace, Merritt was using a finger and thumb to pull a line of light through the air, as if he were pulling yarn from a skein. Before him stood a structure of hundreds of thin lines of light all connected into a complex scaffolding. It was a verification web beyond the complexity of any she had seen.

Lightning crackled around it, jumping around from point to point on the framework or coming down from the darkness above to connect with it, touching here and there, testing, almost as if the threads of lightning were tasting it.

In the center of the armature the Sword of Truth floated in the air, a goodly distance above the ground. It stuck halfway out of the top, turning slowly as if turning on a spit. As it turned, the blade reflected flashes of the colored light from the glowing lines in all directions out across the Grace.

As Merritt added more lines, and yet others spontaneously sprang on their own from various points to establish new junctures, the structure grew ever taller, with the sword continuing to rotate inside. Merritt circled around the outside of the lighted framework, adding bits of lines here and there, pulling some of them in arcs from intersection to intersection, as if reinforcing areas he deemed weak.

As the structure began building more rapidly on its own, Merritt raced to the points of the star of the Grace and began drawing spell-forms in the sandy ground. He used his finger and drew each line with swift precision until the form was complete. He moved from point to point on the star, adding a complex and exacting drawing at each of the points. Each spell-form looked different to her.

When all eight had been completed, he returned to the glowing structure, pushing at it here and there with his palms, testing, then carefully adding a line of light here, another there, to stiffen the whole thing.

Magda’s head felt as if it were in a vise. The pressure was painful. She didn’t know the source of the pain. She wondered whether it was her connection to the Grace and the spells, or simply the loss of blood. She didn’t know what to expect as she watched the framework continue to build on itself, growing ever upward, growing broader at the base. Legs of light grew from the side of the skeleton of lighted lines to anchor themselves at places along the lines of the star drawn with her blood. She saw blood being drawn up along the beams of light.

Merritt put a finger and thumb together at a spot in the structure and as if pinching the air itself pulled a radiant line all the way from the glowing scaffolding out and down across the Grace until he attached it at the end of one of the rays from the star where it crossed the circle representing the world of the dead.

Magda gasped as she flinched. She gritted her teeth against the stabbing pain. It felt like someone had pushed a knitting needle through her left side and taken a big stitch. She struggled to breathe against the pain bearing down on her.

Merritt quickly returned to the opposite side of the structure and pulled another line of light from the scaffolding to the end of a ray on that side, where it crossed over into the underworld.

Magda gasped again as she felt another stitch at her waist, but this time on the right side. When Merritt pulled the next line of light across the Grace, Magda felt yet another stitch of pain sear through her in the small of her back. She put her hands to the pain, urgently wanting to make it stop, but it didn’t.

Overhead dark, cloudy shapes had begun to swirl around the glowing structure of the verification web. Threads of lightning flickered from the framework to the shapes moving in a circle high above it as Magda felt yet more stitches of pain knitting around her waist coinciding with Merritt pulling lines of light out past the veil on the Grace. She felt as if she were being sewn to the ground. She could hardly move, hardly breathe.

Above them, the lightning in the clouds had the whole sky boiling with a writhing greenish light that seemed to be spreading through the firmament.

She saw, then, that the sword had begun to glow with a soft light that pulsed between a warm yellow and a green color not unlike that green light deep within the clouds overhead.

Merritt dropped to his knees, drawing yet more spell-forms at various places in the Grace. Magda couldn’t move and could barely pull each shallow breath through gritted teeth. She felt as if she were being torn in half.

The rotating dark mass over the structure grew in breadth as it revolved until it seemed like the entire sky was moving above her. The farthest-out parts rotated more slowly. The closer in toward the glowing web, the faster they spiraled around. At the center a point of intense greenish light flared.

Magda realized that the green color was not merely in the clouds. It seemed as if the very air itself was becoming the same strange tint of green.

She remembered then what had been at the back of her mind. Baraccus had told her that the veil to the world of the dead had glowed a strange green when he had passed through it. He had told her that when he had gone though that green wall, that was how he knew that he had crossed over into the underworld. He had called it the green meadow of the spirits.

Magda gasped when she thought she saw a face in the rotating clouds over the structure. In the billowing green light, she saw another, and then another. Each had its mouth wide open, releasing a terrible scream. Each face was distorted in pain and terror. The howls filled the air so that they all joined together into the sound of the roaring wind.

Before long, it seemed as if thousands of vague, filmy corpses were fluttering through the spinning air above the glowing structure.

The sound they made was unbearable. It was terror, misery, and pain all melted together into one long, ripping howl. The green air seemed packed full of writhing, diaphanous figures like so many swimming, squirming, twisting souls all fighting for space. None of them seemed real, none of them seemed alive, and yet they moved with frenzied purpose.

Magda wondered if she had died and was being swallowed up into the spirit world, or if she was suspended, barely alive, beyond the veil in the world of the dead. She wondered if this was what it had been like for Baraccus.

The air above the sword ignited with a massive jet of flame that shot upward. Even at the distance she was, the heat of it felt as if it might burn her flesh from her bones.

The sword heated to white hot. It glowed brighter than anything else, even the bolts of lightning. It was so bright it hurt her eyes. Above it the sky burned with reddish orange flame that turned and churned, blackening as it rolled away, replaced by yet more bright orange fire continually boiling forth.

The ground around the glowing verification web seethed with a carpet of bluish flame that flickered and jumped.

In the center of it, Merritt raced through the walls of flame to pull more lines and draw yet more spell-forms. The world seemed an inferno, while forms in the greenish light howled in fury and agony.

Magda could feel waves of heat off the white-hot, glowing sword rolling over her. The blade glowed incandescent.

Magda thought that surely the heat was burning her lungs. The air above them was a rotating, turning, churning ceiling of flame. The noise of it was deafening.

Black lightning, as dark as death itself, crackled through it all as it arced from the fire above to the hilt of the sword. Every time the black lightning touched it, the blade went momentarily just as black. Magda knew that she was seeing Subtractive Magic called to life before her.

Black lightning erupted from points of the Grace outside the outer ring to arc to the pommel of the glowing sword. Every crackling, twisting streak of it felt as if it was born in her very soul.

At the same time, blinding flashes of bright lightning grounded at the pommel of the sword exploded skyward with earsplitting booms. The blade looked as if it might explode from all the heat and the mix of lightning from different worlds.

Merritt stood then and lifted his arms. As he drew his arms upward, over and over, great columns of water erupted from the pond, pouring up and over the sword. As the waves of water broke over the sword and the structure, she could see the glowing sword through the water.

Clouds of steam billowed up as more and more water funneled up from the pond in a twisting column that cascaded over the sword.

The flashes of white-hot and inky black lightning hurt her eyes. The thunderous noise hurt her ears. The sword smoked and steamed with a howling sound that matched that of the spirits twisting through the greenish air.

Magda’s head felt as if it might explode. The stitches of pain in her side hurt so much she couldn’t draw a breath. It felt like a great weight was crushing her chest, preventing her from drawing air into her lungs.

Everything began to dim. Even though she knew that all the sight and sound was still going on, it seemed ever more distant.

And then, the Sword of Truth suddenly plunged straight down toward the ground.

Magda screamed. As the sword fell, it felt as if an iron spike were being driven down through the top of her head, through her insides, and right into the core of her soul.

Like a great iron door slamming closed, the world went from green to black.

Magda was dimly aware that she was lying on something soft. She slitted her eyes, squinting. The light hurt her eyes.

She was shivering all over. She realized that for some reason she was not simply cold but also soaking wet. She remembered, then, that it had started raining fat drops of icy rain when they had been out in the woods. She didn’t think that she was still in the woods, but she was having difficulty, between bouts of shivering, trying to figure out where she was.

She saw the hazy figure of Merritt moving about not far away. It was comforting to see him.

Her vision wouldn’t focus but she could make out a table and a chair. There was a bit of red on the table. She saw statues, stacks of books, scrolls, bones, and all sorts of strange devices sitting everywhere around the floor. There were lit candles around the room, too, some on low tables, some on the tops of short pillars, some on the table.

As the room came more into focus, she realized that she was on the wicker couch in Merritt’s home. She had no recollection of how she had gotten there.

Merritt came closer and quietly bent over her a little, moving his hands in the air above her, sweeping them from her head downward. As his hands moved, she felt her frigid, soaking-wet dress turn dry. By the time he had worked his way down to her feet, she was completely dry. The bone-chilling cold melted away as a calming, radiant warmth seeped back into her bones.

But she still hurt everywhere.

“Am I still alive?” she managed.

Merritt turned to look at her. He smiled.

“Quite alive. We’re at my place, in Aydindril. It was closer than trying to make it to the Keep. I wanted to get you in out of the rain. It was quite the storm. You were in trouble. The reaction of all the elements combining was greater than I had hoped, but not as bad as I had feared. The breach held.”

His fingers touched her shoulder. “You were strong, Magda. You did good. But I was afraid to try to make it to the Keep.”