The First Confessor (Sword of Truth 0)

Isidore stared off blindly into the memory.

“I saw a place of darkness beyond dark,” she finally said in a haunted voice. “An endless place of souls that would take forever to see, and yet I glimpsed it all in an instant.

“In that instant I saw what I had come to see, learned the truth I had come to learn . . . and I was horrified.”

“Horrified by seeing the world of the dead?”

“No,” Isidore said. “Horrified by the truth.”

Chapter 30

“I don’t understand,” Magda said. “What truth did you see?”

For a time, the only sound was the sputtering of a few of the candles glowing around the room. The cat sat silently on her haunches, as if waiting to hear what Isidore would say.

“I saw Joel there,” Isidore finally said. “His spirit, anyway. That much of it was a comfort—seeing the light of his soul there at peace.”

Magda, her arm around the woman, squeezed Isidore’s opposite shoulder. She didn’t want to sound suspicious, or disbelieving, but she found it hard to imagine.

“How is it possible, Isidore, considering how many millions upon millions upon millions of souls there are in the underworld—the souls of everyone who has ever lived and are all now there in the world of the dead—for you to be able to immediately see the one you were looking for out of the multitude?”

“Well, it’s rather hard to explain.” Isidore considered the question briefly. She frowned as she tilted her head up in thought. “You know the way you could walk into a vast gathering in the Keep, and despite how many hundreds and hundreds of people are there, you could always spot Baraccus immediately, pick him right out of all those people?”

Magda smiled sadly at the memory. “Yes, as a matter of fact I do recall such events.”

“It’s something like that,” Isidore said. “It’s not the same, but that’s the only example that I can think of that you might be able to grasp. Things don’t work the same way in the underworld as they do here. Time, distance, numbers, things like that are all different there. It’s like the same rules you are used to don’t work that way there.”

“Baraccus traveled the underworld,” Magda said, her mind wandering, “just before he killed himself.”

She wondered what it had been like for him, what he had seen, and how it must have affected him.

“It’s not the same for a spiritist.” Isidore squeezed Magda’s hand in sympathy. “Baraccus was a profoundly powerful wizard who journeyed through the world of the dead. We don’t have that kind of power and are not venturing into the underworld. A spiritist is only parting the veil just enough to look beyond for an instant.

“Rather than going into that place, as Baraccus did, a spiritist is a sorceress invoking her gift in a unique way. We are calling together a number of forces through spell-forms, along with both Additive and Subtractive Magic conjured to a very specific task.

“He was in that place. We are only looking in through a window.”

“I see,” Magda said. “So when you looked through that window, what did you see?”

“In that cauldron of magic, at the center of a storm of power, it all happens in an instant, yet that instant seems to last an eternity.

“In that terrible spark of time, I saw the truth.”

“And what was the truth that so horrified you?”

Isidore bit her bottom lip as she gathered her courage. “The truth that the others, the people of Grandengart who had died, were not there.”

Magda frowned and leaned in close to the woman. She was unsure exactly what Isidore had meant.

“You mean you couldn’t find them? You couldn’t tell in the vastness of the underworld that they were safe and at peace like you could with Joel?”

Isidore shook her head emphatically. “No. I mean they were not there.”

“I still don’t understand. They’re dead. Of course they’re there. Maybe you were only able to find Joel there, that way I could spot my husband across a room of people, because you cared deeply about him, but you couldn’t do the same with the others.”

“No,” Isidore said with forceful certainty. “That is the truth that I saw in that instant. I saw that their souls were not in the eternal world of the dead. Their souls, their spirits, whatever you want to call them, were not in the underworld.”

“Then where are they?”

“I don’t know,” Isidore said. “I’ve been looking for them ever since that day and I have not yet found them. All I know is that the spirits of the people of Grandengart, the people whose bodies were harvested, are not in the world of the dead. And neither are the souls of the other bodies that have been harvested.”

The silence felt suffocating. Magda had to remind herself to take a breath.

“How can the dead,” she finally asked, “not be in the world of the dead? How is that possible?”

Chapter 31

“That was the very thing I wanted to know,” Isidore said. “I knew, as soon as I grasped the truth of it, that I had to find the answer.”

“But how?” Magda swiped her hair back off her face. “You said that you only hold the veil open for an instant.”

“Yes, but in that moment where all that magic, all that power, comes together, that spark of time seems to last an eternity. In a way, it isn’t an instant at all. In a way, it is an infinitely large piece of forever.”

Magda felt as if she were getting lost.

“How can that be?”

“The reason, as I had learned from my father, is that there is no time in the eternity of death. Because there is no beginning, no end, there is no way to measure how long you’re there.”

“But there has to be a way to measure how long an event lasts. Time still exists. A day is still a day.”

“Here, but not in the underworld. Here time is finite. Days start and end. There it’s eternal night.”

“I still don’t understand,” Magda said.

“Imagine encountering a rope stretched across your path. There is no beginning to your left, and no end to your right. The rope is infinitely long. It started forever ago and runs on forever. How could you take a measured portion of it? A portion of infinity is a contradiction. How could you, for example, measure out a fourth of forever? If you tried to cut a section out of such an eternal rope, it too would be eternal because the rope has no ends, so you cannot create them in something that does not have them as part of its nature. Just because you want a beginning and an end for your convenience, that does not mean that they exist. While they certainly exist here, in the underworld, those beginnings and ends do not exist.

“In the center of that vortex of power, time itself does not exist. A minute, a day, a year, they are all the same.

“So, in that eternity of time, that instant I was there in eternity, I had all the time I needed to search. In a way, I had forever. I searched forever.

“I tried to ask Joel’s spirit where they were, but before I even began to form the question, he told me that they were not there.

“I saw people I knew from Grandengart, people who had died in the past, before that terrible day Kuno’s army arrived, people who had been old, or sick, even a boy I had tried to help but who had died of fever. None of them knew where the rest of the people were, the people of Grandengart who had died out on the road that day.

“Everyone I knew could only tell me that the others were not there. They were not in the underworld.”