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 before 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?”
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.