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“She told me that it might be my chance to make a difference for the future of the living. I told her that I would have to think on it.
“Then we got the reports that the soldiers who had gone back with me to Grandengart and then gone south after General Kuno’s forces had been slaughtered.”
Magda gasped at the news. “Slaughtered? All of them?”
Isidore nodded. “It had been a trap. Sophia thought that the bodies the enemy took had been the bait for the trap. Two men had escaped to tell what they saw.”
“More likely Kuno let them escape to spread fear.”
“I think you’re probably right. The men said that they were charging south and thought they were getting close when they were ambushed. All of our men, other than the two who had escaped, were killed or gravely injured.
“After the battle, Kuno’s men tied all of our fallen soldiers together into bundles of a dozen or so, tied them by their wrists, and then fastened groups of them to the wagons of the dead from Grandengart. One of the two men said that it reminded him of stringers of dead fish. Kuno’s army dragged all the dead and dying soldiers away with them, some of them still alive and screaming in pain, or moaning in mortal agony.”
Magda was incredulous. “I’ve never heard of an army hauling away the soldiers they’d killed.”
“They harvested the dead,” Isidore confirmed, “as I have since heard they have done in other places as well. At the time, I thought that maybe it was yet more bait to entice others to chase after them. In a way, I was right.
“After hearing about them taking the dead soldiers, I knew that I had to get Sophia to help. Something was going on that no one understood but we all feared. I thought that the spiritist might be the way to discover the truth.
“Sophia told me then that if I agreed to learn the craft, then I would be able to draw more from the experience than simply having her report on what she saw. She said I would be able to see the truth I needed to know for myself, the truth that only I could grasp, the truth that only I could understand.
“Though the idea frightened me, I could no longer shy away from what I needed to do, so I agreed.
“Sophia then told me that the spirits had surely sent me to her for a reason, that there was a purpose, that I was meant for something.
“She began teaching me that very night.”
Chapter 29
“How long did these lessons take?” Magda asked.
“Less time than I had thought they would. Being the daughter of a sorceress and a wizard, I had a good start on what I needed to know. My father, in particular, had a lifelong fascination with the underworld. He had learned a lot in his ‘adventuring,’ as he called it, adventures dealing in where we all eventually had to end up, he would say.
“My mother would say that adventure was just another name for trouble. Some people whispered that my father had a death wish. I knew that wasn’t true, but I was fascinated by the fearless way he liked to challenge death. At the same time, I shared my mother’s worry about it being trouble.
“His adventures were mostly experiments with spell-forms, learning how the interplay with Additive and Subtractive Magic worked. That was how he had learned so much. It was how he learned to balance on the cusp between worlds. That, and racing horses on overland courses through dangerous countryside.”
“I see what you mean about him liking to challenge death,” Magda said.
Isidore confirmed it with a nod and a sigh.
“He even taught other wizards about the things he had discovered. From a young age, much to the discomfort of my mother, he told me stories of his exploits with experimental magic and the enthralling things he’d uncovered in how the interaction between worlds worked. I would sit wide-eyed as he spun tales of riding the rim, as he called it. He said that he believed that life and death were connected in much the same way as Additive and Subtractive Magic depended upon each other to define their nature.
“He saw that connection in everything, even in something as elemental as light and dark. Consequently, he also saw such interdependence in simple things as well.”
“Simple things?” Magda asked. “Like what?”
Isidore lifted one shoulder in a matter-of-fact shrug. “Where I saw a shadow cast across the ground, he saw the shadow, but also what he called the negative shape created by the shadow. He said they were inextricably linked, locked together, the positive shape and the negative shape, each depending on the other to exist. He said that to truly appreciate one, you had to at least recognize the contribution of the other.
“Thus, he would tell me, you need the dark to show light, so you shouldn’t curse the darkness. You needed death to define life.
“Hence, the delight he found in his ‘adventuring’ into areas others found terrifying. I guess you could say that his quest for understanding of the world of the dead contributed to a greater appreciation for life. My mother would roll her eyes when he would tell me about such things, but sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I would see her flash him a private smile.
“So, perhaps more than most, I already had a pretty good working knowledge of the Grace, how it is drawn and how it functions, how magic itself is connected to Creation and death through Additive and Subtractive Magic, and how spell-forms can draw on these elements for power. My father did not view different aspects of the world, such as life and the underworld beyond the veil of life, as independent things, but rather as interdependent elements that were all part of a great, unified whole. In that way, he said, we were all part of all things.
“Sophia said that such an upbringing, learning, and understanding put me years ahead of most in becoming as a spiritist. She said that I had come to it as if it were my destiny, although she said that she didn’t believe in fate.
“The hardest part of Sophia’s lessons was that from my father’s teachings I was accustomed to thinking in terms of the whole, so learning not to see this world, but rather to exclude it from that whole, was difficult for me.”
Magda frowned. “What do you mean, learning to exclude this world?”
“To see into the spirit world, Sophia told me that I had to be able to look beyond what was around us in order to see into that other realm. She said that, while she didn’t herself know if it was true or not, some people believed that the underworld was all around us in the same place we existed, but at the same time it was separate and so we couldn’t see it. I can understand that now that I am blind; I can hear things I never before knew were there, but always were.
“She blindfolded me for all our lessons. She said that it would help me to learn more quickly. It was a few weeks after starting that she told me that it was time to venture on my first journey to look into that other place.
“By then, of course, after all I had learned—the warnings, the cautions about the smallest mistakes, the grim stories of small things gone horrifically wrong—I was properly terrified.
“Sophia believed in safety through preparation. We drank teas in the morning to cleanse our auras lest they snag on the veil and trap us. We took powerful herbs in the afternoon to dull our senses to the world around us so we would not fail to see the dangers lurking in the dark world. In the evening we began the soft chanting to condition our minds to open. The whole day, of course, in addition to the tea and herbs, we had been laying out spells and conjuring various forms of wards and protections. As the sun went down, we banked the fire. She said that flame was an anchor to this world and that if anything went wrong it could light our way back through the eternal night.”
Isidore lifted an arm, gesturing around the room. “This is the reason, even though I am blind, that there are candles lit in here.” She smiled just a bit. “That, and of course so that others don’t stumble and fall on me.”
Magda wasn’t able to appreciate the humor. “So once you were ready, then what?”
“Sophia had me cut my finger and use blood to draw a Grace around where we were to sit on the floor befor
e the hearth.”
Though Magda was not gifted, she had certainly spent a lot of time around the gifted. She had also been married to the First Wizard. She knew full well the significance of drawing a Grace in blood. A Grace connected Creation, the world of life, and the world of the dead via pathways of magic.
“I remember that it was an overcast, windy night, and dark as pitch,” Isidore said in a tone half to herself, as if drifting back to that night. “The black world outside the two tiny windows of Sophia’s home seemed foreboding and oppressive.”
Isidore looked to be trying to return from her haunting memory. She paused to wave a dismissive hand. “None of the details would matter to you. Not being gifted, you likely wouldn’t understand most of it anyway. The important thing is that we had to invoke the darkest forms of magic to summon up the darkness of the underworld. Then we drew spells with Subtractive threads that brought about the parting.”
“The parting?”
“In the veil to the underworld,” she managed with difficulty.
Magda thought that Isidore looked at the edge of composure. She covered her mouth with a hand, as if in her mind’s eye seeing again the horror of what she had seen that night. Her brow wrinkled into tight furrows. Her chest heaved with each ragged breath. Magda realized that Isidore was sobbing in the only way she could even though she had no tears.
Feeling a sudden pang of sorrow for the woman, for her terrible loss and crushing loneliness, Magda lifted the cat and scooted around to sit close beside Isidore. Magda set the cat down to the side, where she stretched from her long nap. Magda put a comforting arm around the frail young woman. Isidore melted into the embrace, burying her face against Magda’s shoulder.
Magda held Isidore’s head against her shoulder. “I’m sorry for asking you to recount such terrible memories.”
Isidore pushed away, swallowing back her emotion. “No, I wanted to tell you. I’ve never had anyone to tell, except, of course, for the one who took my eyes from me. I wanted you to know, much like I had to know, what it means to be a spiritist, to practice such a sorrowful skill that puts you there in the midst of death.”
“I understand,” Magda said.
“I’m afraid that you really don’t.” It wasn’t said in a cruel or condescending way, merely as Isidore’s expression of the simple reality. “I didn’t understand myself until we actually pulled the veil of life aside and faced the unimaginable.”
Magda listened to the silence for a while, then finally had to ask, “What did you see beyond that veil?”
