“On the other hand, the person chosen to be a Confessor and invested with such power would have to be the right person, a rational person, a rare person who could be entrusted with such responsibility, as would the person entrusted to possess the key to the repositories of power. For the right person, either would be a tool. For the wrong person, either could be a weapon of evil. It is the mind behind that tool that matters.”
She was beginning to understand why the council had originally refused his request. “I heard that the attempt to create this Confessor is dangerous and that it could even be fatal. You could very possibly kill a good person in the attempt to create a Confessor out of them.”
He didn’t look in the least bit daunted by the charge. If anything, he looked resolute.
“Yes, that’s true. It’s profoundly dangerous magic we’re talking about here. I believe I can do it, but I can’t be absolutely positive it will all work the way I think it will. Such a thing has never been attempted before. Dear spirits, as far as I know, such a thing has never been envisioned before. If I don’t have every last little bit of it right, it could all go terribly wrong in a heartbeat and the person could be killed. There is that risk.”
He leaned toward her again, searching her eyes. “But what is the danger of not trying? Despite all the efforts of our forces, towns and cities everywhere are being overrun. We are losing men by the thousands in battles. Yet the horde from the South continues to pour north, coming to destroy us all.
“You yourself said that there is something going on in the Keep, that you are searching for answers, that we are all in danger, that traitors are among us and very possibly plotting our destruction. We need to find those responsible. Do you think that the death of all our people is preferable to the risk to the person chosen to become a Confessor?”
Magda searched the depths of his hazel eyes, looking for some indication that he was misguided, or deluded, or even mad. She saw none.
She glanced to the graceful women he had carved from white marble. This was not a man who did anything without fully appreciating every angle of it.
“I admit that you may have a point,” she finally said.
Magda had never liked the idea of magic altering a person. This was no different. It sounded horrific.
She changed the subject back to what she had wanted to know in the beginning.
“What about the other wizards who have died? The ones people say died because of you. You haven’t finished that part of the story.”
The impassioned animation that had been so evident in his eyes when he had been talking about the key and the Confessor extinguished like a campfire in a downpour. He looked miserable to have to return to the subject.
Magda felt bad for bringing him back to something that was so obviously painful for him.
But all their lives were at stake. She needed to be able to find the truth.
Chapter 51
“Well, the thing is, as I’ve explained and as I hope you can appreciate, without the required formulas that are locked away in the Temple of the Winds, trying to make this kind of magic function for even the simplest form of the key, much less to create a Confessor, is impossible. More than that, though, we’re talking about very dangerous things, here, things that are not to be taken lightly. Without the needed components, the attempt is guaranteed to fail and very well might be fatal.”
“I can grasp why it wouldn’t work without all the parts you say it needs, but why is even trying to make the key so risky?”
With a grim expression, Merritt lifted his fist so that she could see the signet ring he wore.
On its raised center was a Grace.
The design of the Grace was deeply engraved into the ring so that it could be used to make an impression in sealing wax. Magda remembered seeing that particular design of the Grace left in the sealing wax of documents Baraccus had received.
“Even as an ungifted person, you must be aware of the power involved in the Grace when it is used by the gifted.”
She was. The Grace represented the world of life, the world of the dead, and the way magic and Creation linked them.
The outer circle of the design represented the beginning of the infinite world of the dead. Inside that outer circle was a square, its points just touching the outer circle. Inside the square was another circle, just touching the insides of the square. The area between those two circles with the square represented the world of life. The inside circle was life’s beginning while the outer circle its end where souls crossed through the veil into the eternity of the underworld.
An eight-pointed star inside the smaller circle was the Light of Creation. Lines from that star’s points radiated out across the inner circle, the square, and across the outer circle that also symbolized the veil to the world of the dead. The lines radiating outward from the Light represented the spark of the gift that journeyed with everyone from birth, through life, and on into death.
Magda imagined that those rays, those conduits of the gift, were what enabled Isidore, the living, gifted spiritist, to be able to connect with the spirit world beyond the veil.
The gifted drew the Grace when conjuring powerful spells in order to invoke specific forces. It added elements that nothing else could, but at the same time it was a dangerous tool and had to be treated with great respect.
A Grace was properly drawn from the outside toward the center—circle, square, circle, star—and then the rays back out across those elements. Everything inward and then back out. Drawing it improperly or in an improper sequence, when it counted, could cause magic to fail or even go terribly wrong.
Drawn in blood, a Grace could invoke alchemy of consequence.
It was said that a person with enough knowledge and power could alter the Grace and thus alter elements of it.
Though a Grace was a commonly used tool of the gifted, Baraccus had often said that, despite its seeming simplicity, it was rarely mastered.
Not many people would dare to wear a Grace. That alone said something important about his abilities.
Merritt stared down at his ring, burnishing the design of the Grace with the thumb of his other hand. He seemed lost in thought.
Magda touched his wrist, making him look up.
“You were saying?”
His eyes focused again on her face. “I was saying that the spell-forms in play to create a key are dangerously unstable in such combinations without the links from the rift calculations. You need those links to make the structure rigid. Only in that way can the various parts then fuse in the proper sequence. The council wanted us to try anyway. They wanted the key completed.”
“What happens if you don’t have those elements? What happens if you try it without them?”
“Without those rift and breach connectors you can’t stabilize the verification web and hold the spell-form together. Without them, there is nothing to brace the various elements against, and those particular elements happen to involve both Additive and Subtractive Magic. As you can imagine, letting the two touch in the wrong way, much less combine, is highly reactive.
“Almost as soon as you bring the structure up in a verification web, with those opposing elements both so openly contained within the formation, and before you can begin to activate the generation process, it begins to collapse in on itself. The Additive and Subtractive components attract each other as it implodes, accelerating the reaction. Anyone nearby trying to hold it together in order to bind and fuse the components into the key would be seriously injured or killed.
“It doesn’t matter how you try to construct the web, or what different routines or sequence you use. Without all the parts needed to complete it, there is no chance that it might work. None. As far as I’m concerned, it’s insanity for anyone to think that you can put those particular Additive and the Subtractive components together in that way without the necessary bridging elements and expect them to coexist. The attempt is not merely pointless, it’s suicide.”