The First Confessor: The Legend of Magda Searus

Chapter 70

Magda’s legs ached from the long descent down into the place of the dead. She was so exhausted that at times she thought she might fall over. She knew that what she was feeling was more than normal fatigue. She hated to think about the eventual long climb back up.

Magda knew that Merritt was telling her the truth about needing rest to complete her recovery from the ordeal of creating the key. Healing alone hadn’t been enough. From little things he had done at the time, to hints in the way he had acted, she suspected that the use of her blood and life force in the effort to create the key had come close to costing her her life.

Before she could rest, though, they needed to get down to the dungeon. That was the prime concern. If the sorceress was still alive, they had to talk to her.

The deserted corridor they hurried through, carved from banded, tannish sandstone, created a maze of twisting passageways. None of the walls were square or straight. For the most part, the passageways were little more than a warren of tunnels gouged out through the stone.

She hadn’t been in these particular underground passages the last time she’d come down into the catacombs. This area was considerably deeper beneath the section she’d been in before, where not only were there resting places for the dead, but rooms where wizards also worked. That level was also where Isidore’s place had been.

Over time, as ever more people had died, the available space in the catacombs had been filled to capacity. The living then had to dig even deeper to create more room for the newly deceased. That meant that some of the areas they were entering were not nearly as old as the places above that she had seen before. Up above, some of the tombs were centuries old. Some were said to be thousands of years old. Magda didn’t know if that much was true or not, but it was clear enough that some sections of the catacombs higher up were ancient.

This part, though, was newer. In fact, it was repulsively new. The stagnant stench of death hung in the air down in this place. Even the scent of the stone all around and the smell of burning pitch from the occasional torches stuck in holes drilled in the soft rock of the walls as well as pots of aromatic oils was not enough to mask the smell of death. In spots, some of the rooms they passed with the recently dead reeked so strongly of rotting flesh that it gagged her and spurred her to hurry past.

As they made their way through the tunnels, Magda couldn’t help glancing off into the dark recesses where the dead were laid to rest. The light sphere Merritt carried cast a greenish glow into the hollowed-out chambers. In the tunnels, the light sphere helped fill in shadowy stretches between torches.

In that greenish light, Magda could see countless corpses lying in niches. Some of the dusty finery was filled with bones and nothing more. In other places, the dead were desiccated, with mouths hanging open and eye sockets staring up at nothing. In some of the rooms they passed, the places that smelled the worst, the bodies had grotesquely swollen tongues protruding from gaping mouths and eyes bulging out of sockets. It was a natural process that bodies went through as they rotted, but it was horrifying to see. It was one of the reasons she was glad that they had reduced Baraccus’s remains to ashes.

Magda speculated that the sights they passed were also one of the reasons the dungeons were down below the catacombs. As prisoners were brought down through the place of the dead, the rotting corpses would be a demoralizing spectacle meant to be a disturbing preview to the living being taken to the dungeon of the fate awaiting them if they caused any trouble. Or a reminder to those condemned to death of what they would soon look like.

Magda only hoped that those condemned really were guilty. If they were guilty of murders, then they deserved their fate. But such an end was too horrifying for her to contemplate if the condemned were actually innocent. She knew that guilt was not always clear-cut, and there were instances where people wondered if the true guilty party had avoided paying the price, and an innocent person was instead being put to an unjust death.

It seemed like an endless spectacle of corpses as they made their way down the tunneled hallway. It was numbing to see so many dead people.

Magda missed a step and then jerked to a halt. She stood frozen in place. The realization ran an icy shiver up between her shoulder blades to the nape of her neck. With the sudden comprehension, she could feel her hands begin to tremble. Her heart started beating faster.

Merritt turned, holding the light sphere up to better see her face and to look into her wide eyes.

He leaned down a little. “What’s wrong?”

Magda glanced around at all the niches carved out of the stone, all filled with remains of the dead.

“General Grundwall said they hadn’t found the man who killed Isidore.”

“That’s right,” he said.

Magda met his gaze. “That night, when I was lost in the maze outside her quarters, a lot of men—wizards, wizards with gifted abilities to sense the living—came to see what the commotion was all about. They fanned out and searched the maze. They didn’t find anyone. General Grundwall says that they haven’t found those responsible for the murders.”

“I’m listening.”

“How is that possible? I mean, really? How in the world is that possible? How could a killer like that vanish? The Keep is a big place, and there are tunnels everywhere down in the lower reaches as well as down here in the catacombs, but still, they’ve had a lot of soldiers searching day and night. Think about it. How could the killer evade all those searchers? How did the killer manage to vanish so easily each time he struck?”

“Well, I don’t know but even with all the soldiers—”

“What if the killer really was dead?”

Merritt stood staring at her. He glanced to the rooms filled with the dead. “You mean, like these dead, here?” he finally said. “Dead, dead?”

Magda gestured to one of the rooms beside them. There were dozens and dozens of desiccated corpses lying inside in various degrees of decay, some with hands crossed over their chests, others with arms at their sides, all with dead eyes staring at nothing. Some had been reduced to almost nothing but bones. Yet some, dark and dried-out, didn’t look at all unlike the man Magda had seen murder Isidore.

“Yes. What if,” she said, lowering her voice, “what if the killer was one of these dead men. What if, after he killed, he simply went back to his resting place down here and, well, resumed being dead? He would have vanished in our midst. How would anyone find him? How would anyone know who it was?”

“They would have the blood of the victims on them,” Merritt pointed out.

“No one searched all the dead to see if they had fresh blood on them,” Magda scoffed. “No one believed me that it was a dead man who killed Isidore.”

“That’s true. After the murders, the soldiers searched for a killer, but no one checked all the corpses, looking for fresh blood.”

“If it wasn’t discovered soon enough, any evidence of fresh blood would soon deteriorate. In many cases, it might just look like natural decomposition and fluids seeping from the dead. The blood of the victims would become part of the dead.” She gestured to a nearby room. “I mean, look at them. Yes, some are neat and tidy, but with a lot of these bodies looking like they do, it would be hard to spot fresh blood on them. Within a short time, you couldn’t see it even if you were looking for it.”

Merritt slowly shook his head as he peered in rooms. “Dear spirits, Magda, I wish that didn’t make so much sense.”

“You told me that the shields wouldn’t stop your sword because they weren’t made to stop the magic it contained.”

“That’s right.”

“There are shields everywhere in the Keep. Think about it, what are the shields made to stop?”

“The enemy,” he said.

“What enemy?”

Merritt grasped her meaning. “The living enemy. The shields work by detecting life. They can’t detect something that isn’t alive, something dead.”

“With the war going on and the attacks in the Keep, as a safeguard the council ordered new shields placed all over. I’ve had to make detours to get around shielded areas.” Magda lifted a finger. “Yet, it hasn’t halted the murders, has it? Or helped soldiers trap the killer. The shields wouldn’t stop a dead man. The shields wouldn’t even be able to detect one, would they?”

“No, they wouldn’t. Something dead wouldn’t even set off any of the alarms, much less the shields. After all, why would an alarm need to be set off to warn of the dead?”

“What do shields do to intruders?” Magda asked.

“Some of the shields are set to kill any unauthorized person who tries to pass.” He arched an eyebrow. “But you have to be alive to be killed.”

“What is it that Isidore was searching for, looking into? What were the wizards that she was helping trying to do?”

Merritt showed her his ring with the Grace on it. “They are trying to interfere with this. They are altering the natural order of things, the flow of life and magic and death. I haven’t heard a lot of specifics about what they were doing, but I assumed they were looking into what Isidore was so worried about—the dead the enemy took and their missing spirits.”

“From rumors I’ve heard,” Magda said, “wizards down in the lower reaches have been working to try to bring the dead back to life. Or an imitation of life, anyway.

“I wonder if it could be that some of those experiments have gone terribly wrong. I wonder if that is the source of the murders.”

Merritt stared at her for a long, uncomfortable moment before he gestured with the light sphere. “We’d better get down to the dungeon.”