“I was stunned. It was brilliant. I hadn’t thought it through, thought about how I would actually search, but Merritt had. He had considered the entirety of the problem and he’d come up with a way for me not only to see spirits, but to draw the dead to me.”

Magda glanced around the circular room, imagining what was out beyond, remembering the way she had come in through the maze to find Isidore’s place.

“You mean to say that Merritt designed this maze down here? That maze out there, that confusing place with all the dead ends, all the twists and turns, all the confusing passageways, all the hanging cloth, and the empty rooms?”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t understand. How can it help you? Why the passageways to nowhere that dead-end? The hanging panels of cloth? The empty rooms? What’s the purpose?”

“To make them feel safe,” Isidore said.

Magda blinked in surprise. “To make the . . . spirits feel safe?”

“That’s right. The dead ends make them feel a sense of safety, feel that others can’t sneak up on them. The cloth gives them the comforting sense of being shrouded. Did you notice that the cloth panels have protection spells either painted on them or woven into the fabric? Most of it is very faint, but spirits can see them, or maybe they are aware of the spells in their own way.”

“I guess I hadn’t noticed,” Magda said.

“Some of those spells on the hanging fabric are my own creation, born of my work as a spiritist. They’re powerful and significant.” Isidore leaned toward Magda a bit. “The dead must heed them.”

“And the empty rooms?”

“The rooms are refuges that give the dead a sense of place. It has to be hard for them, not knowing where they belong. The rooms are empty so that the spirits don’t feel like they are intruding into someone else’s place. You see, the whole maze is a sanctuary for the spirits who find themselves trapped in this world.

“That day in my room, standing over the papers, Merritt said that he knew the right place to build such a sanctuary. He said that it would be down in the lower reaches of the Keep, below the crypts, where there were countless dead laid to rest. The crypts, he said, were a place of such specific energy that spirits trapped in this world would already tend to haunt that area. He said that the refuge he would build below would then draw them in to me.

“He said, then, that he would personally oversee the construction.” Isidore swallowed. “I knew what he meant. He meant that it was time for him to first take my sight.”

“I don’t see how you could allow a wizard to alter you in such a way,” Magda said, unable to contain her emotion any longer.