Before she could yank it free, another man charged her, his sword flashing through the night air. She knew instinctively that she wouldn’t be able to get out of the way fast enough.
At the last instant, just before his blade made it to her, Merritt crashed into him from the side, knocking him off balance. The big soldier stumbled from the impact and fell to a knee. Before he could get up, Magda brought the sword down from above, splitting him all the way from the top of his head to the center of his chest.
The man toppled, hitting the ground with a wet thwack that spilled organs out the gaping split and across the ground.
The night was suddenly still. There were no more men coming at her.
Chapter 86
Magda, on her knees, sword gripped in both hands, eyes wide, ready to defend herself, gasped for breath. The night was silent. There were no men screaming battle cries. There were no more blades coming at her.
Her head swiveled, looking everywhere, scanning for threats. She was surrounded by bodies. Blood and gore and unrecognizable bits of flesh lay scattered all around her.
There were no men left standing to come at her.
Not far away, Merritt, in the iron collar and hand restraints, struggled to get to his feet. Once up, he rushed to stand over her, a small, proud smile lighting his face.
With the threat ended, the Sword of Truth dropped from her hands.
And then, searing torment started like a spark deep inside, quickly expanding into an inferno of pain, burning through every part of her. Magda doubled over. She cried out as she collapsed onto her side, arms crossed over her middle, trying to quell the torture that felt like it was consuming her. She desperately needed air, but try as she might, she couldn’t draw a breath. The weight of suffering pressing in on her wouldn’t allow it.
Merritt knelt beside her, but with his wrists shackled into the device locked around his neck he couldn’t reach out to her. He was helpless to do anything, but it was a relief to simply not be alone with the terror of the suffering.
As quickly as it came, the pain released her.
As the agony lifted its grip, Magda flopped over onto her back. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she gasped, getting her breath. She looked up at the concern on Merritt’s face.
“I don’t know what’s wrong,” she finally said between panting breaths.
“It’s the sword’s magic,” he said. “It extracts a price when you kill with it. The first time is by far the worst. You’re fortunate. The sword’s power was derived from your life force, so it was already somewhat familiar with you.”
Magda rolled onto her side and pushed herself up off the ground to sit back on her heels. “I’d hate to experience worse.”
“Anger is a shield for the power of the sword’s magic, so that helped, too.”
“Then I was well protected.” She reached out and turned his head to see the wound. “This doesn’t look so good.”
“I’m all right now. I’ll be better when I get this thing off from around my neck.”
“Can you use your gift to break it?”
“No,” he said. “It’s shielded to prevent a gifted person from using magic to escape.”
“Shielded,” she said. She remembered the shielded shackles on Naja. “I think I might have a key that would work on it.”
She retrieved the sword and worked the blade under one of the iron cuffs. She turned her face away. With a mighty pull the iron exploded in a shower of pieces. Merritt held the bar to stabilize it for her to break the collar. In short order she had the rest of the immobilizing apparatus off him.
Once he was free, she threw her arms around him. “I was so afraid. I thought you were lost. I was so afraid that they would kill you.”
He pushed her away for a moment. “‘You are surrounded. Do as I say or you will all die.’ That was your plan? Are you out of your mind?”
Magda winced self-consciously. “It was the best I could come up with on the spot.” She frowned. “And it turned out to be true, didn’t it?”
“It certainly did,” he said with a smile as he pulled her back to hold her tight in a grateful hug. “Thank you, Magda. I have to tell you, that was quite something to behold.”
She felt shaky in the wake of the fear from the fight, but it felt good to have his arms around her. “It was the sword,” she said. “Your creation is magnificent.”
“The sword is just a tool. The one wielding it has to be the right person. That’s what matters most.”
She cast him a skeptical look as he stood. “If you say so.”
The clouds were beginning to break up and the moon had emerged to cast light over the landscape.
“We need to get rid of these bodies,” Merritt said as he surveyed the area. “If they’re found it will bring the whole army looking for who was responsible. They’ll look for the missing men soon enough as it is.”
“It’s quite a drop over there,” Magda said, gesturing. “We can roll them over the edge. No one is likely to spot them, at least not for a time. That should buy us a day or two at least.”
In short order, with the aid of Merritt’s gift, they had all the bodies in green tunics and their body parts moved to the side. Arms and legs flailing, the big men rolled and tumbled and bounced down the steep drop, vanishing into the dense underbrush. No one would be able to see anything from the road, and unless they noticed a lot of scavengers no one was likely to climb down looking for the men. Merritt then used his gift to eliminate any trace of blood from the fight. With his foot, he smoothed the gouges in the ground. In the moonlight, the road again looked completely normal.
“We have to get off the road,” he said. “There could be more of Lothain’s soldiers about. With the moon out, we could easily be spotted out in the open like this.”
Magda looked around in the moonlight, getting her bearings. She pointed, then, to the dark wall of trees on the opposite side.
“There’s a trail over there coming up the mountainside. It passes by near the road not far off through there. It’s steeper and tougher going in places than taking the road, but it’s also shorter. No one is likely to be traveling the trail at night. The forest is pretty dense, so we can use the lantern in places if we have to. If a patrol passes, they won’t be able to see us from the road.”
Merritt nodded, and after a check of the surrounding area one last time to make sure they weren’t missing anything, they quickly headed off the road, through the dense undergrowth, and in a short while found the trail. The ground was covered in a layer of pine needles, so it made for silent passage. With the moon out, enough light made it through the trees to the forest floor and the trail so that they could see to make their way.
“Now,” he said after they had moved deeper into the protection of the trees, “not that I’m unappreciative, but what are you doing here? I told you that you must rest. I’m surprised that you have enough strength to stand up, and after that battle you’re lucky you can still breathe on your own. You’re in more trouble than you realize, Magda. You—”
“And we’re in more trouble than you realize. Lothain is being installed as First Wizard tomorrow afternoon. He forced me to agree to marry him at the ceremony.”
“What!”
Magda didn’t let him launch into a rant. “Listen to me. I had no choice. He said that he would start killing everyone I know if I didn’t agree. He had Tilly and had done terrible things to her just to show me that he was serious. Had I said no he would have killed her on the spot. As it was, she was in a bad way. She was just the first of many he would start in on if I didn’t agree. I couldn’t allow that.”
“Dear spirits,” he said under his breath.
“Here,” Magda said as she pulled the baldric off over her head and handed him his sword back. “I have a plan, though. I’ve figured it out. I know what we have to do.”
After Merritt had put the sword on, he gripped her arm. “You may have a plan, but I can clearly see in your eyes that you’re at the end of your endurance. That battle and running around out here is only making you worse. I can’t heal you further. You must rest to complete what I’ve done.”
“This wasn’t my choice, Merritt,” she said impatiently.
He sighed. “I suppose not. But I’d better get you back to the Keep. We can talk about your plan after you rest.”
“We don’t have time for that,” Magda insisted as she pulled her arm away from his grasp. “We have something much more important to do and it has to be done right now. I know that I need rest. Do you think I don’t know how weak I am? But we don’t have any choice. This can’t wait.”
He appraised the resolve in her eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“Merritt, we’re in a lot of trouble. Lothain obviously intended to get rid of you so he must suspect that you’re working to find the truth of what’s going on. You were surely being taken back to be tried and executed, and you can bet that they would have tortured a confession out of you, first.
“Lothain needs to end the doubts about himself and subvert any opposition as a last step to seize rule at the Keep. He’s consolidating his power. He was able to dismiss Councilman Sadler so that he can more easily control the council. He already has his own private army.
“By marrying me he gains the confidence of the Home Guard and a number of key officials, as well as a lot of wizards who believed in Baraccus. Were I to refuse, he would then need to discredit me. He’d simply throw me in the dungeon, torture a confession out of me, and have me executed for treason. It isn’t all that hard to get people under torture to confess.
“I’m in a box. The way it is right now, no matter whether I go along with him or not, I can’t change what is going to happen. It still all ends the same way. My word alone against Lothain’s won’t sway enough people. He will be First Wizard. He will rule the Midlands.
“By agreeing to marry him during the ceremony tomorrow when he is named First Wizard, that at least keeps people from dying tonight. But that’s all the time it buys. If I refuse, a lot of innocent people are going to die immediately, but I hold no illusions; once he uses me to win the popular support in the Keep and has an iron grip on rule, he will purge the army and the officials of anyone who doesn’t fully support him and then I will encounter an unfortunate end. I am only an expedient means to his ends, and my value to him is very short-lived.
“If we don’t do something, and do it now while I’m still useful to him, then we and a lot of our people are going to die. I now know the truth about him, but half the Keep doesn’t.
“Many people believe that Lothain is fighting for the good of mankind by prosecuting those he says are traitors. They think he is our savior. If I tell them otherwise, that he is often prosecuting people who can reveal his true intent, like Naja, most people won’t believe it. They will believe the lies Lothain tells them.
“People aren’t going to believe me if I try to tell them what is really going on. They believe the word of Lothain, an important man, the head prosecutor. When Lothain makes the accusation that Baraccus conspired with those in the Old World to defeat us, they believe him. No matter what I say, they would think I am the real traitor for siding with Baraccus.
“People need the truth. I’m the only one who can deliver truth. But I’d be dead before I could finish making the accusation.
“The way things stand, I don’t have any way to stop him.”
Merritt eyed her suspiciously. “But you said that you have a plan.”
“Yes, I have a plan. It’s true that I’m so exhausted I can hardly stand. I understand that. But we have only one chance. We have to take it. I came looking for you for a reason.”
Merritt’s expression turned unreadable. “What reason?”
Magda gathered her resolve.
“I want you to use me to create a Confessor.”
Chapter 87
Merritt tilted his head toward her as his eyes narrowed. “You want me to alter you into a Confessor?”
“Yes,” she said. “We don’t have a lot of time. We need to hurry.”
Merritt walked off a distance to stand beneath one of the enormous limbs spreading from an ancient oak. With his back to her, the moon cast cold light over his broad shoulders.
Looking grim, he finally turned back.
“Please don’t ask that of me, Magda.”
She stepped closer under the massive limbs of the oak. “I had always thought that changing a person’s nature with magic was a cold, calculating, callous thing to do for the sake of creating a weapon. I could never understand how people could allow wizards to alter them. I thought that it was a perversion of our existence.
“Isidore taught me that it isn’t always the case. She taught me that if it’s done for the right reasons it can actually be a chance to make the best of ourselves. Done in the right way, it is adding to who and what we already are and what we already believe. In that way it’s not altering a person’s nature, but adding to it. Such a purpose can be the moral thing to do.
“Even more, though, you’re not only a wizard. You’re Merritt. You may not see the difference in that, but I do. Though we haven’t known each other for long, it has been long enough for me to know you, to know your heart.”
“That’s reassuring to hear, but knowing me isn’t enough.”
“I realize that, but I’ve thought this through. You may not believe that, but I have. It’s not just that this is the only way, it’s that it’s the right thing. While creating weapons out of people can be a terrible deed, done in the right way by the right person and for the right reasons, it can be a wondrous thing.
“You envisioned the idea of a Confessor for the right reasons. Life is truth. Truth is life. You wanted a way to seek truth. Such a cause, in the promotion of life, is noble.
“Killing is a terrible thing, too. I hate killing. But killing isn’t necessarily wrong.” She gestured back down the trail. “Killing those men tonight was the right thing to do, for the right reasons. It was done for good. It was done to preserve innocent life. In this instance, not killing would have been immoral.
“You intend the Confessors to stop evil, just as my killing those men stopped them from doing evil. That makes both the right thing to do.
“Merritt, I want that person, that Confessor that you create, to be me. I understand the nobility of purpose in the creation of a Confessor. I know precisely what to do with that opportunity. Please, give me the chance to do what only I can do. Give me the means to help stop evil and preserve life. Don’t let me fail to do what only I can do.
“It’s my life. I want it to have this purpose.”
“There’s more to it, Magda. We need time to consider all the implications.”
“Ordinarily, that would be the right thing, but we have no time. It has to be now. It has to be tonight. I have to use that Confessor power to expose the truth. I wish it could wait, but it can’t. This is our only chance.
“Baraccus told me that my destiny is to find truth—”
Merritt threw an arm up, gesturing angrily. “Life is not about fulfilling a destiny. Your life has no destiny but what you make of it.”
“And this is what I want to make of it. Baraccus also told me to live the life that only I can live. He told me to have the courage to take up that calling. He was asking me to choose my destiny. Prophecy is not only about destiny, but the balance—free will. Becoming a Confessor is my calling. But it’s not preordained. It’s a chance, a fork in the road of my life. I have to have the courage to take it on of my own free will. In that way, the balance of prophecy and free will is the magic of the future.”
He looked to have calmed down considerably. “I have to admit, you have that much of it right.”
“Merritt, this is the life that only I can live. I’ve always been the person trying to uncover the truth of things.
“I found you for a reason. Destiny brought me to you so that the choice could be laid before me to make. I rejected any such choice for my life until I came to know you and to understand the real nature of what such a choice means. I found you because I need to make that choice for my life. Since then I’ve come to understand that I need this mission for my life.
“I am that person, Merritt. I’ve made the choice.
“I am your Confessor.”
Merritt looked down and turned away.
After a moment he cleared his throat. “Magda, you don’t know all that is involved, all that it means. You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“Then tell me, and tell me now, because we are rapidly running out of time.”
He turned to look her in the eye. “This would alter the nature of who you are. The Confessor power would become part of you, much as eyesight and hearing are part of your nature. You would be a Confessor in much the way I am a wizard.
“That means that just as any child you have would carry other traits from you, such as sight and hearing, they would also carry this trait. Any child you bear would be a Confessor. Their children would inherit the same power, and theirs, and so on. Once created, the power is part of you, it is you.”
Magda paced off a short distance, chewing a thumbnail, thinking. “It would be part of them by birth?”
“Yes. You would be deciding not only for you, but for them as well. In a way, you would be creating their destiny.”
She turned back. “No more than giving them the destiny of eyesight. I would be giving them a different kind of vision.”
“But if—”
“Merritt, if we don’t do this, I will have no chance to have any offspring because I will be dead. If I live, I will only be able to bring a child into a tortured existence of half people crafted to fit Emperor Sulachan’s deluded notions for the world of life. I may even be changed into one of those half people, giving birth to a soulless offspring. Is that better?
“Don’t you see? I’m not deciding their destiny, I am giving them the possibility of a life, a life worth living.”
Merritt squeezed his temples between the thumb and fingers of one hand. “Look, Magda, even if I wanted to do this, I can’t.”
Running out of patience, she folded her arms. “Why not?”
He took a deep breath before explaining. “The process is similar to what we did to invest power in the sword. The difference is that the sword has no life force of its own, so it needed to borrow a life force to help in its creation. You provided that with the Grace drawn in your blood.
“Creating the Confessor power is similar in purpose and in many ways in the methods involved, but there is a crucial difference. You have your own life force. You can’t be given someone else’s life force to turn you into a Confessor the way we turned the sword into the key. You need to use your own.”
Magda shrugged. “All right. I can draw another Grace with my own blood.”
He was shaking his head. “Ordinarily that would be the first step. But you have already given your strength to the sword. I don’t think that you understand the true depth of what you so willingly gave over to create the sword. Right now you don’t have enough strength to be able to do it for yourself.”
“I think I do. We can try. We have to try.”
“Do you think I’m guessing about this?” Merritt stepped close and leaned toward her in an effort to make sure she grasped his point. “It’s not simply that it wouldn’t work, Magda. It’s that the attempt would kill you.”
She let out a sigh. “Are you so sure, Merritt? I’m pretty strong. You just saw me fight those men.”
“This is a different kind of strength.” He gestured in frustration. “You saw the forces involved when we created the sword. Don’t you recall how violent it was? Don’t you understand how close you came to dying? And you came close to dying when you were well and in perfect shape.
“Trying to unleash such forces on you tonight would kill you. Not maybe. Not possibly. I’m not saying that I’m worried, or fear it might harm you. I know what I’m talking about. I’m telling you without a doubt that it would kill you. You can’t hope to help us if you’re dead.”
“What if we used another person to help, like I did with the sword? What if you were the one to lend me power? Or maybe we could get Quinn. He’d help us. We can trust him.”
Merritt laid a hand on her shoulder. “Unlike the sword, the unique ability of a Confessor’s power requires that the person to become a Confessor must be the one who provides the life force. Another person cannot be a part of that. Another person cannot loan their life to you in such a way. It must be you, and you alone who gives yourself, your life force, into becoming a Confessor. The process would alter you. Another person can’t do it for you.”
Magda walked off a ways, clasping her hands.
She felt her world, everything she cared about, slipping through her fingers. All because she was too weak.
She wanted to tell Merritt that he was wrong, that she was strong enough. But she knew that he was right. She could hardly stand, hardly pull each breath. She remembered how she nearly died in the ordeal to create the sword. At the moment, she had nothing left to give of herself.
Merritt was right. She wouldn’t survive the attempt.
“Isn’t there another way?” she asked without turning back to him.
“The wizards who wanted to create the sword died trying to do it without what was required. The process to create a Confessor requires a prodigious amount of your strength. You don’t have it to give right now. You gave that strength to the sword. Just as those wizards died, you would die trying it without the required strength.”
“I see.”
Magda felt as if her heart was breaking. She’d thought it through and had it all figured out. She’d made the decision. It was already done as far as she’d been concerned. She needed only the formality of the magic to complete it.
In her mind, she’d gone over what she would do once she was a Confessor. She’d gone over it at least a hundred times. She had envisioned every detail until it was almost real.
And now it was ashes.
“I wish there was something I could do, Magda,” he said in quiet sorrow. “If there was one person in the world I could choose to invest with the power of a Confessor, it would be you, I swear.”
Magda nodded, turning away to hide her tears.
“Thank you, Merritt. I know you mean that.”
“I do.”
Not only was her world ending, the world of life was going to end. She had lost her chance. She had no way to fight Lothain and those helping him. He was too powerful.
She had given her strength over to the making of the Sword of Truth.
And now they were all going to die.
Chapter 88
Magda turned back suddenly. “Merritt, when I used the sword, I felt the power of it surging through me. It was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.”
He nodded. “I know. I’m the one who created the thing, remember? It holds immense power, in part because of what you gave it during its creation. As long as you live, you will always share a connection with the sword. I guess you could say that as long as it exists it carries some of you.”
Magda stepped close to him. “So investing my life force into it made its creation possible.”
Merritt shrugged at the obvious connection. “That’s right.”
She watched his face lit by the moonlight. “What if we used the sword, had it loan some of that power back to me, in turn giving me the strength I need to get through the ordeal of becoming a Confessor? It’s my life force, after all. You said that it couldn’t be from someone else. Coming from the sword it wouldn’t be.”
Merritt’s gaze searched her eyes but he didn’t answer.
“I’d just be borrowing some of my own life force,” she added.
He had that odd frown again. “I already thought of that.”
“And?”
“And it’s too dangerous. Creating a Confessor is dangerous enough in and of itself. It’s a process that has never been attempted before and very well could be lethal, and that’s if there weren’t any other complications involved. Trying to do it the way you’re suggesting is theoretically possible, but it would be an order of magnitude more perilous.”
“Are you saying you don’t have the skill, or that it’s dangerous for me.”
“My skill has nothing to do with it. It’s too dangerous for you for a variety—”
“We don’t have a choice. We have to try.”
He shook his head. “Magda, please don’t ask me to do that. You have no idea at all what you’re asking.”
She leaned toward him in the moonlight. “Merritt, I know exactly what I’m asking. I’m asking for a chance at life. Without trying, I’m going to die, you’re going to die, our people are going to die.
“You heard Naja. Those in power in the Old World seek to end the world of life. Even if their ideas are crazy, even if their plans are completely unworkable and impossible and they fail at accomplishing their ultimate aim, they are still slaughtering our people just the same. They still intend to rule the world of life one way or another. Untold thousands of innocent people will die in their attempts, and even more will die if they succeed in winning the war. If they win, at the very best, the people of the New World will be enslaved.
“And what if they really can succeed at what Sulachan wants to accomplish? What if he has the boxes of Orden and he uses them to end the world of life as we know it?
“The war is going badly. I believe it’s because the Keep is infected with spies and traitors helping the enemy. That’s what Baraccus wanted me to uncover. I now know who is at the center of it, anyway. It’s Lothain. He’s been hiding right under our noses, posing as our champion, prosecuting traitors.
“But if we kill him, his secrets die with him. If we capture him instead and he gives other names under torture, how would we ever know if they are really his accomplices? He might hold back the names of important spies, or accuse innocent people. How could we be sure? With something this important, how could we be sure that we have rooted out the entire nest of traitors and spies?
“If we don’t get all those who are helping him they will still be able to work from inside the Keep to undo our cause, still activate the dead to assassinate key people. If we kill the man at the head of it, we’ll never know who the rest are until it’s too late.
“But if I can get a confession out of Lothain, a true confession, and we can expose the extent of the subversion within our ranks, then we might have real a chance to counter it. We would have a chance to save the Keep.
“Think of what is going to happen to us and our people if we don’t stop the enemy wizards among us. They will breach the Grace. We won’t merely die. Our souls will be kept from crossing over into the underworld.
“We’ll be like those people of Isidore’s town of Grandengart. Our bodies will be used by the wizards from the Old World while our spirits are trapped between worlds. Our spirits will wander, lost, in this world. How many innocent people will be doomed to such a fate?
“So, are you trying to tell me that you think such a grim fate would somehow be better than the danger of trying, even if it means I die in the attempt? How? How is that better?
“Isn’t this the very purpose for which you developed the concept of a Confessor? Isn’t this the reason you believed so strongly in it that you argued before the council to be allowed to create a Confessor? Wasn’t it you who said that the risks were so great that we had to try?”
He stared at her from under a lowered brow without answering.
“Please, Merritt, don’t condemn me to a brief life of watching all that is good end because we lack the courage to try. Please don’t do that to me. Please don’t condemn us and our friends and our people to the horrific fate that Emperor Sulachan has chosen for us all.”
His gaze finally fell away. “Magda, you don’t know what you’re asking me to do. I just can’t.”
Tears trailed down her face. “Then it is you who has chosen our destiny, and that destiny is endless suffering, all because you are afraid of harming me. But the safety you want for me is an illusion. In trying to protect me, you are only bringing me to even greater harm.”
Gritting her teeth, she seized his shirt in her fists. “Well I’d rather die trying for life than endure the destiny you want to condemn me to. If you won’t help me then at least give me the Sword of Truth so that I can kill the bastard. Give me the sword and let me die fighting for what I believe in.”
His big hands closed around her wrists as he looked into her eyes for a long moment.
“All right,” he said at last. “All right, I’ll try. I’d rather die, too, than see you have to be a helpless witness to the end of all we hold dear. I’ll try, Magda.”
She threw her arms around him in gratitude.
After too brief a time, he pushed away, looking into her eyes again. She had never seen him looking so grim.
“Don’t be so eager to thank me. Doing it this way is nothing like the process when we created the sword. What I have to do is something very different from what I would have done to create a Confessor. We can’t do it through that process. You can’t really help me this time. You have to leave it to me to do.”
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