The First Confessor: The Legend of Magda Searus

Chapter 76

Merritt folded his arms across his chest. “How much, exactly, do you really know about all of this? How complete is your understanding of it?”

“I told you, I was Emperor Sulachan’s spiritist.” Naja heaved an impatient sigh. “Must we discuss this now? Can we please go and talk about it later?”

“We need to know some things, first,” Merritt said.

Naja gestured toward the door. “What you need to know is that any one of those dead could be a servant of the emperor. You wouldn’t know it until one of them sat up, grabbed you by your throat, and ripped your arms off. If the emperor or his minions knew we were in here, they could set one or a dozen of the dead on us to tear us apart.”

“She’s right,” Magda said, recalling the horror of what had happened with Isidore. “We should get out of here.”

“How could he get any of those dead people down here to do his bidding?” Merritt asked, not ready to leave before he had a better grasp of it all and exactly what they faced. “He may be powerful, but he’s all the way down in the Old World. How could he do a thing like that from such a great distance?”

“Easy. One of those loyal to him prepares a dead body, here, at the Keep or in Aydindril, and then has it laid to rest out there in your catacombs among the other dead people. How would you know? How would you know that the body that was being laid to rest down here wasn’t one of the ones that had been prepared to serve Sulachan’s purpose? Any of his people hidden here as spies or traitors at the Keep could then bring the dead out of their death sleep”—she snapped her fingers—“as quickly as that.”

Magda had to remind herself to breathe. “Dear spirits, I never thought of that.”

“I hadn’t either,” Merritt admitted. “Is there a way to check the dead, to know which have been prepared in this way?”

“Before they are called into service, they are nothing more than a corpse. There is no way to tell, unless you were to find a way to contact their spirit in the underworld. As a spiritist I can tell you that would not be an easy task. I could probably venture into the spirit world to probe for the spirit of a dead body, but that could take days of searching, and that’s for one dead body. You have thousands out there. Do you have thousands of spiritists who could be assigned such a monumental task?”

“We might have a handful of such gifted,” Magda said, “but I’m afraid that the only one that I actually know of was killed by one of the emperor’s dead servants.”

“Then you have no way to test a corpse being laid to rest even if you wanted to. Worse, though, those seeking to use the dead wouldn’t even have to go to that much trouble. Do you have guards who check the people who come and go from the catacombs? Escort them to see what they might be doing?”

Merritt arched an eyebrow as he grasped her meaning. “No. There are wizards who work down here on countermeasures to Sulachan’s weapons. They come and go all the time.”

“Exactly,” she said. “Any of those wizards could be a spy, secretly working for Emperor Sulachan’s cause. They would have their pick from thousands of dead. They merely find a suitable corpse and prepare it to be awakened from death. The spells have already been well developed by Sulachan’s makers to use on the dead. Such spies would also be able to identify important targets among the gifted and set the dead upon them to cripple your efforts.”

Merritt wiped a hand back across his face in exasperation. “Naja, this is all pretty hard to take in. I need to have an idea of what, exactly, it is that we’re up against—the larger picture. Not just about some traitors assassinating people here, but how it all fits together in Sulachan’s larger purpose. It’s important for me to be able to grasp the totality of it.”

Naja took a deep breath as she nodded. “I understand. It must be difficult to hear this all for the first time.”

“It certainly is,” Merritt said.

“Well, you see, Emperor Sulachan is old and sickly,” Naja said. “He fears that he will not live to see the Old World unite all people into his vision of a just world. He calls that vision the People’s Alliance. He wants all people ruled under that alliance.

“Emperor Sulachan sees this as a just cause that transcends his life, as a larger cause for the good of all existence—the world of life and the world of the dead as one interconnected entity, one whole, just as the Grace is one whole, interconnected concept. To that end, he believes that all people must have common rule for that greater good of all, both the living and the dead.”

Merritt looked incredulous. “The living and the dead?”

“That’s right,” the sorceress said.

“Setting aside for the moment the issue of thinking he can rule the spirit world,” Merritt said, “how does he think it’s going to be possible for him to accomplish this merely with the world of life if he’s dying? He won’t be around to carry out his plans.”

“He seeks to continue to exist and function without life in the conventional sense, so you can’t separate the issue of ruling the spirit world. They’re interconnected. You said that you wanted the larger picture. The larger picture is that he seeks an alternate form of existence, you might say, so you have to understand it in those terms.

“What he seeks is a way to remain connected after his death to a functioning form in this world, in the world of life, so that he can rule it all. He believes that if he rules the spirit world, he can not only rule through his spirit in that world, but rule this world as well through his spirit’s connection to his reanimated body. In that way he unites it all.”

“It’s madness.” Magda shook her head as she let out a deep sigh. “We stand at the twilight of everything we hold dear, not only our liberty, but our very existence.”

Merritt looked stymied by a thousand questions he wanted to ask all at once, so Magda asked a question instead. “How do the dead fit into this plan of his?”

“As I said, he uses them for assassins and is preparing to use them as warriors. They are mindless at that task, once set to it. They are very difficult to stop. If you cut them, they don’t bleed. If you chop off an arm, they don’t feel it and will attack with the one they have left. If you cut off their legs they will use their arms to continue to pull themselves after you. They don’t rest. They are tireless, bloodless, relentless, remorseless killers. More corpses can be animated as needed. The dead are plentiful.”

“They just keep going forever?” Magda asked.

“Well, no, not forever, I don’t suppose. The dead rot away, but the magic that possesses them forestalls that process as part of its function, but the magic that has been invested in the dead is not a perfect solution. It has limits. It decays with time, much the same as a corpse would decompose. As the magic breaks down, so does the effectiveness, and so do the dead it possesses.”

“Well there is that,” Merritt said. “Maybe there is a way we can attack this magic.” He rolled his hand for her to continue.

“The army intends to start using them at the front line as they advance in battle. Arrows and spears are of little use against the dead. Stabbing them over and over is futile. They can’t really be killed because they are already dead. The soldiers on your side will waste their energy trying to kill them, trying to hack them apart, trying to stop their advance. The dead will keep coming, wearing them out.

“Sulachan intends his forces to sweep in after the waves of the dead have exhausted your soldiers and cut them down. Their corpses will be recovered and end up serving Sulachan’s side in his lifeless army.

“When the dead are no longer needed, no longer have a use at the time, Sulachan’s forces simply sever the links of magic and leave them as they would any of the dead. They are thus returned to what they were: corpses. They are of little value, individually. They are just a supply to be used. If he needs more, his gifted can provide them.”

Deep in thought as he listened, Merritt pinched the bridge of his nose. “How can they be stopped?”

“I am not really all that familiar with their use in warfare. I didn’t deal with the army officers, command structure, or strategists. I dealt with the gifted who created things, not the people who used those things.

“But I can tell you from my general knowledge and familiarity that there are only a couple of ways to stop them that I know of, other than cutting off the magic that drives them. One way is to rip them to pieces. Not as easy as it sounds, because the magic also hardens them to an extent. It’s not intended to create a better weapon out of the dead person. Its purpose is rather straightforward. It’s meant to counter the decomposition of the body that would otherwise allow tissues to break down.

“Even then, if a disembodied arm is close, it will try to grab you, try to attach itself to your leg to slow you down, or if it managed to use the fingers to pull itself across the ground into camp at night, it might clamp on to a sleeping soldier’s throat to choke them to death. But as you might expect, body pieces don’t have much of an ability to come after a person, so they aren’t nearly so serious a threat.

“Your forces will try to use shields, but I can tell you from experience that shields don’t work. Shields key off life. They have nothing to latch on to with the dead.”

“That’s true enough,” Merritt said, still deep in thought as he listened. “Keying a shield to things that aren’t alive would paralyze the shield because it would try to ward the world around it.” He looked up. “What about fire. That would have to work.”

Naja nodded. “That’s the second way to stop them. Fire, any kind of fire, is effective because it can reduce the dead to ashes. That certainly would be one sure way to stop them.

“Wizard’s fire would obviously work because it would stick to them and keep burning, but as you can imagine, the effectiveness of using it would degrade over time because Sulachan’s gifted can send endless ranks of the dead into the face of the wizard’s fire.

“I can also tell you that his gifted are working on ways to shield the dead they send in from wizard’s fire. I don’t know if they have perfected that sort of shield, or if they ever will, but you need to be aware that they are trying. Even if they don’t come up with a counter to such conjured fire, it’s not a significant setback because they don’t care about losses.

“Eventually, the wizards summoning such fire would begin to tire. It takes effort to keep up such conjuring. That is the advantage of using the dead. As I said before, they don’t tire. Enough of the dead would eventually make it through.

“Through the process that animates them, some of the dead will be dedicated to the task of going after specific targets, such as your gifted. If it takes a hundred, or a thousand dead to take out one wizard on the battlefield, what does Sulachan care? If it takes ten thousand he wouldn’t care.”

Magda thought that Merritt was looking numbed by such horrifying accounts. It was overwhelming and she could see the despair in his eyes.

“What about these others,” Magda asked when Merritt fell silent. “The half people?”

Naja ran her fingers back through her black hair, clearly unsettled by the mention of the half people.

“The half people are worse. Far worse.”