Death After Death 195-197

Ch. 195 - Time Flies

The years slipped by in the service to the Alexins faster than he would have thought as Simon lost himself in the pursuits of art, teaching art, and just plain teaching. It was a mixture of experiences, and all of it happened in the beautiful city of Coramin in what felt like the blink of an eye. 

At the start, Simon had spent most of his time with Bertrand, but once the older boy found his rhythm in his practice assignments, Simon spent more and more time teaching the younger children to write. Though that started out more tedious than he would have thought, in time, he found it even more enjoyable than art. Over the next few years, he watched them transition from precocious brats to thoughtful adolescents who asked interesting questions about the world around them. 

Unfortunately, Simon didn’t know enough about physics to explain why the sky was blue and things like that. He could explain simple things like the evaporation cycle of the ocean and why the rain fell, but for other things and more complex questions, he eventually fell on the idea of answering their questions with questions. This didn’t necessarily produce answers in most cases. It was better than lies, though, and what few books and scrolls he had to teach them with were full of those. 

Almost everything was explained away by the gods, and while there were at least little grains of truth sprinkled in some of those myths, by and large, it was just nonsense. Well, at least he thought it was nonsense. He still wasn’t exactly a master of magic yet, and he had no explanation whatsoever for the oracle he’d met so recently, but on the whole, he still tended to think that things worked because of cause and effect and the causes of most things were almost certainly not divine intervention.

If there were Gods floating around this world, wouldn’t I have seen them by now? He wondered one day, after a particularly heated debate about which god made the volcanos erupt with young Theo and his sister Sophia. That was a stupid question, of course, since he’d literally met a Goddess on more than one occasion. In fact, if he got to level forty, he’d be able to meet her again. 

That’s different, though, he argued in his head. Helades is not a Goddess that anyone in this world worships, and I’ve never seen any evidence that the Gods they do worship really exist. 

It was a conundrum, but not a particularly important one. People on Earth could make microchips and launch rockets, but they still worshiped gods who didn’t exist. Things didn’t have to make sense to be passed through the ages. Hell, art didn’t make sense, but he’d spent almost a decade now slowly improving at it step by step. 

Honestly, until a recent breakthrough, Simon had been starting to sour on it. Not painting and drawing, of course. He still loved that, but having Bertrand tagging along had really been dragging him down. As the years had gone on, Simon had become more and more sure that the young man lacked the talent to really pursue this field. 

No, talent is the wrong word, he corrected himself. Drive is more like it. 

Bertrand was a child of wealth. He wanted for nothing, yet each day, he only completed the bare minimum of the assignments that Simon gave him. It hadn’t been like that at first, of course. In those first few months, Simon would come down from his scaffolds to find the boy had sketched a dozen strangers. None of those sketches had been any good, but they had shown small, consistent improvements, and that was all that mattered. 

Somewhere between here and there, though, Bertrand had grown disillusioned. “I’ll never be as good as you!” he complained bitterly in private when Simon talked to him about it. Bertrand’s younger siblings were still too young for this sort of angst. Instead, they were lost exploring all the new doors that their newfound literacy had opened for him in their father’s libraries. Bertrand, though, already nearly twenty, was starting to grow jaded. 

“You’re much better than I was at your age,” Simon answered truthfully. “Skill, real skill takes a lifetime, and even then—”

“Oh, enough of that!” Bertrand cried out in frustration. “I’ll never be ready to showcase my talents in public at this rate. My hands just won’t cooperate with what I see in my mind. That’s the real problem. How do I fix that?”

Simon nodded sagely. He was getting better and better at that little gesture, thanks to both practice and the small changes he was slowly making to his appearance as time went on. He’d given himself a deeper tan, like the Ionians, and his hair was almost entirely gray now. He even had a few unnaturally added wrinkles to go with it. The result made him look much wiser than he was, so he tried to act that way whenever possible around his students.

“Perhaps the problem is not in the artist but in the medium,” Simon said cryptically. He refused to elaborate further, but that night, he went to Bertrand’s father and explained the issue briefly. 

“I do not think your son will be a painter,” Simon said simply.

“If that is the case, then the fault certainly lies with his teacher, does it not?” the man asked. Simon had known that Lord Alexin would go there immediately. He was a cutthroat man to the very core. 

“I did not say that he would not be an artist,” Simon countered. “In that regard, he’s coming along well. I just think a slight change of plan might be in order.”

“What do you propose?” the older man asked. 

“A field trip,” Simon said with a nod. “A very expensive field trip. If all goes according to plan, young Bertrand will not be coming home for a while.” The Lord didn’t so much as blink at that word, but then Simon knew that he wouldn’t. However, when Simon proposed his plan in more detail, the man flashed him a fierce smile before granting his approval. 

The following morning, Simon said goodbye to his young pupils and promised them he’d be back in a few weeks, packed a few tools and supplies in his trusty mule cart, and then set off with Bertrand. 

“Where are we going?” the young noble asked. 

“Shopping,” Simon answered cryptically, offering no details, as the two of them made their way to Coramin’s upper market. 

The city itself was built to emulate Ionar in the south. That was plain to him. The only problem was that its cliffs weren’t nearly so grand, and its beach was much too inviting. So, instead of there being hundreds of feet between the upper and lower markets, there were only a couple dozen. Still, Simon appreciated the attempt. He came here often to paint the sea, but today, that was not the mission. In fact, he’d left the voluminous bundle of papers he usually traveled with at home because they wouldn’t need them. 

Instead, he set about ordering sand and lime, and then, when all the basic supplies were purchased, he took his student to the most expensive potter in the city. “Tell me, Bertrand,” Simon said, beginning one of his lessons in a style that his student had long since grown used to. “What is Beauty?”

“It is that which is pleasing to the eye,” his student said, offering a familiar answer. 

“Then which of these is the most pleasing to the eye?” Simon asked, gesturing widely around the yard filled with decorated vases in a hundred styles. 

“Its… That would be impossible to say,” Bertrand said after a moment. “The answer to that question is different for every man who has eyes to see.”  

“Then show me which is most beautiful to you through your eyes,” Simon insisted. “Help me understand that.”

The boy was obviously uncomfortable, even though the request was simple enough. Simon didn’t blame him. Who was the student to lecture the master about beauty?

Still, after a few minutes, they fell into a steady rhythm. Bertrand would walk slowly down a row, admiring several, before he would stop to explain why one in particular stood out to him. “It’s just the way the leaves on these flowers curl so precisely,” he would explain, or “The deep blue on this one is remarkable. You almost never see a blue this deep in ceramics.”

Each time he selected one, Simon had one of the merchant’s helpers set it aside, and by the end they had nearly a cartload of pottery waiting for them. Despite the fact that they took half the day doing so, no one rushed them. He was a renowned artist, and his pupil was the son of one of the richest men in the city. Men were eager to bow and scrape for the master artist Enniss now, no matter how distasteful he found it. 

”You’re not really going to buy all of those, are you?” the boy asked when they were nearly done. 

“Why shouldn’t I?” Simon asked. “You said that they were the most beautiful, did you not? Surely, all of them are worth purchasing.”

“But that would cost a fortune,” Bertrand protested.

“That it would,” Simon agreed, “Fortunately, your father has several to spare.”

Despite Simon’s words, he negotiated a hefty bulk discount. Haggling was one of the most valuable skills he’d learned during his time in Coramin. So, the lesson was only going to cost half of what he’d told Lord Alexin it would. 

The servants packed the myriad of vases that they’d purchased in the back of Simon’s cart with wood and straw so they would not be harmed during transit, and then Simon started going north out of town. 

“Aren’t we taking these home?” Bertrand asked, suddenly confused. 

“Why would we do that?” Simon asked. “They were chosen by you, and so they will not be the most beautiful vases to your father or your mother.”

“Well then, what about my townhouse?” the boy asked. 

“No, not there either, I’m afraid,” Simon said. “With all those hangers-on you have, the distractions are infinite. Art is a solitary endeavor, not a social one.”

“But people always watch you work, and you paint in public, Master Enniss,” his student insisted. 

“I paint where the canvas is,” Simon corrected him, “But when I paint, I am alone, and even if the whole world watched me, I would not notice.” That wasn’t true, of course. He actually took no small amount of delight in the audiences he drew, but it was beside the point in this lesson. 

Their conversation continued like that for some time as Simon led his mule out of town and into the foothills to a particular canyon he had in mind. The boy periodically asked where they were going but got no answers. Instead, they just trekked further and further away until they were completely alone in some fairly rugged foothills. 

When Simon finally reached the promontory overlooking his destination, he looked down at the flat basalt flow and said, “Behold our campsite.”

“Campsite?” the young man asked, suddenly nervous. “But why would we—”

“The answers will come tomorrow,” Simon explained, cutting him off. “For now, all we can do is prepare.”

They left the mule there to graze on the scrubby grass and took the things that Simon had packed earlier down one load at a time. It was nearly dark by the time they had the tarp up, the bed rolls laid out, and the cookfire going, but Simon didn’t mind. He had a few years left to wait and was in no hurry. 

When Bertrand tried to ask what they were doing again, Simon’s only explanation was, “I have a … longer-term project in mind for you. We’ll start it in the morning. There’s no rush.”

“But you didn’t bring enough supplies for anything long-term,” the boy complained. “Just a little bread and endless pottery. What are we to eat?”

“It is enough,” Simon repeated. “You will create, I will hunt, and together, we will focus on what is truly important.”

Ch. 196 - Making A Mess

The first thing they did that morning was sweep with the straw brooms that had been brought for just this purpose. Bertrand had balked at that, but Simon had insisted it was a vital part of the process. It wasn’t, truthfully, but it would make what was coming next easier. 

Next, they went back up to the clifftop, and in the full light of day, Simon bid his student study the dark canyon floor below. “Tell me, Bertrand, do you see the canvas we have prepared?”

“I do,” he agreed, “But it is too dark for charcoal. Are we going to use chalk to draw this time?”

“Draw?” Simon asked. “You said that your hand would not obey your mind. I think we will cease with the drawing and try something else.”

“Oh?” the young man expressed surprise. “What did you have in…”

Bertrand’s words trailed off as Simon moved to the wagon, picked up the closest vase, and then, without a word of explanation, threw it over the cliff, where it shattered into a million pieces on the ground below.

The boy only looked on in shock as Simon reached for the next one. “Well, what are you waiting for?” Simon asked. “Help me get these down there so we can get started.”

“Get started? What? Master, stop!” Bertrand cried out as Simon through the second vase down to join the first. “What are you… why are you destroying such beautiful…”

Simon stopped the boy’s speech by thrusting the third one into his hands. “You said that your art was getting nowhere because your hands would not produce the beauty you could imagine, so we are going to try something else,” Simon said closely, forcing Bertrand to meet his eye. “I have found you the most beautiful ceramics in all of northern Ionia. You could ask for no finer materials, and together, you and I will try our hands at mosaics instead.”

“Mosaics?” the young man asked. 

“Yes, mosaics,” Simon nodded. “Now, get the rest of our tiles together while I take the cement and the grout down.”

Simon left him standing there holding that vase. The boy didn’t say a word, but then he didn’t need to. The look on his face made it clear that he thought Simon had gone completely mad, and Simon was inclined to let him. 

It took him another five minutes to throw the next vase down, and it was more than half an hour before the cart was emptied. They spent much of that second day sweeping a second time. The first time, it had been to remove the rocks and sad, and the second time, it was to gather the thousands of shards they’d created into one giant, glittering, multicolored pile. 

The experience was hard on Bertrand, but Simon ignored that. Instead, after they had dinner, he started to pick out the pieces of plain white and build a giant border on the floor of the canyon. The work would take days to complete, but in his mind, it was an important part of the process. 

“Mosaics, I understand,” his student complained, “but why out here? Why not in our mountain summer home or with—”

“In the city, you will be distracted by your friends, and in the country, you will be distracted by the serving girls,” Simon answered simply. “Here, there is only me, and I will keep all distractions far away from you until you make progress.”

“What is it I’m supposed to make anyway?” The boy asked, still looking for direction instead of making his own. “I’ve never even thought about—”

“Your subject matter can be whatever you like, so long as it fills the canvas I am making for you,” Simon explained. “But neither of us will leave here until you have something worth showing to your father. He’s invested significant funds into this lesson and will want to see it pay off.”

Bertrand protested that he could leave whenever he wanted, even after Simon explained to him that he would not be welcome at his estates unless he came back with a satisfied teacher, so eventually, Simon’s most powerful rebuttal was to lay down by their fire and go to sleep. 

In the days that followed, the boy sullenly sorted the large pile of shards by color, cutting his fingers a handful of times in the process. He made no further progress, though, content to complain instead of seeking inspiration. 

Simon found it tiresome but ignored it. It seemed like a vital part of the process. Instead, he used his chalk to decorate the walls of the canyon, leaving the illustrations up until the infrequent rains washed them away. Sometimes, he drew people he’d known, like Gregor or Freya, but more often, he grew monsters he’d fought before. Sometimes, it was goblins and other times, it was wyverns or spiders, but all of them were terrifying when drawn as close to life-size as he could manage on the vast dark walls of the canyon.

Simon didn’t do it to inspire his student, though it turned out that’s what he did, eventually. He was just doing it to pass the time between hunting trips. Still, on one occasion, after almost two weeks of waiting, he found Bertrand busily moving pieces around the vast twenty-foot-wide canvas that Simon had framed for him. 

Simon didn’t ask what the boy was up to. Not for a long time. Instead, he waited for him to volunteer that information. It was apparent that he had no plans to do that, though. He obviously wanted Simon to guess, but Simon refused to, so the two shared an amiable sort of silence. They would still talk about other things like the weather or his most recent hunting trip, but those conversations never wandered quite to the subject of the artwork that was slowly but surely taking shape. 

The thing started with a piece of the sea, using elaborate little swirls of light blue on dark to indicate the waves. Simon could see at once that the limitations of the medium were helping his student. He was no longer trying to make things perfect. Instead, he was using the best he had, which was exactly what Simon had hoped for. 

Still, for as long as he thought the boy was making a map of Ionia, he was a little disappointed. That showed a real lack of imagination, even if it was exactly the sort of art his father would have approved of. 

In the third week of the endeavor, though, as the boy started off on a different section, Simon finally understood what it was he was making. Unfortunately, that was also when they were attacked by bandits. 

“What do we have here?” a rough-looking man asked, intruding on them one morning while they were making frybread over an open fire. “All this food, and you didn’t ask us to join you. How shameful.”

Of course, they had very little in the way of food, but men like this didn’t really care. They would take the last crumbs from a starving man if they could. Still, even as the small gang of ruffians approached the fire, Simon did not stand, nor did he draw his sword or his dagger, though he had them both belted on under the robes. He favored these days. 

“You are welcome to warm yourselves by our fire,” Simon said. “Though we have little else to offer you.”

“Two fancy men making art in the middle of nowhere?” the leader laughed as he came to a stop, standing over the two of them.  “You may not have much, but I’ll wager your families would pay a hefty ransom to see you safe again.”

“My father—” Bertrand started, but Simon cut him off. 

“Send ransom letters to whoever you like,” Simon spat. “I’ll help you draft them if you don’t know how to write, but I must insist that you do not interrupt our project. Not when Andus the Undefeatable is so close to taking shape.”

“Oh yeah,” the leader asked, brandishing a knife while his friends chuckled. “What are you going to do if I cut an ear off the boy to include in the letter to his—”

He never had a chance to finish that statement. It was clear he didn’t think much of Simon as an old man, but he wasn’t half so old as he pretended to be, and even as the bandit leader looked away, he grabbed the handle of the cast iron frying pan and sprang to his feet. 

By the time the man had turned back to face Simon, it was just in time to take the hot metal across the face, and his skin sizzled even as his nose was crushed by the force of the blow. The other three men looked confused as their leader crumpled and scampered back, but that only gave Simon the chance to draw his weapons. 

He didn’t give them the same courtesy. Though he very much missed his shield, it wasn’t a good fit for the person he was in this life, so instead, he wielded a dagger in his offhand to parry certain blows. This time, he took the second man in the chest with it and the third man across the throat with his saber before the fourth man had even drawn his blade.  

There were screams and chaos as everyone tried to fight him then, but as far as he was concerned, the fight was already done. One man was dead, one was dying, and though he took a few shallow cuts that proper armor would have prevented, he was soon surrounded by bodies while his student sat there gawking. 

“Master Ennis, you’re bleeding,” Bertrand gasped when it was all done. 

“A little,” Simon agreed, “But not so bad as any of them.”

The truth was that at least one of the stabs was quite deep, and Simon had a hard time disguising his pain while he went to fetch the donkey and use words of lesser healing to mend the worst of it. He made sure not to burden his charge with that, though. He simply sent the boy off to continue with his art, and once Simon was cleaned up, he dumped the bodies far enough away that he wouldn’t have to smell them rot. 

Simon spent much of that day recuperating, and by the evening, he decided he might have to heal himself further. No matter how much he tried to walk it off, he wasn’t as young as he used to be. 

“Where did you learn to fight like that, master Enniss,” Bertrand finally asked softly once the cook fire had all but dimmed later that night.

“I am an old man,” Simon answered with a shrug. “I have done many things in my life. Haven’t you noticed the monsters I draw? Do you think they come solely from my imagination?”

“I mean, you’d mentioned it before, but I always thought such things were just stories,” he added. 

“Even things that are just stories have a measure of truth,” Simon agreed. “I was once a fierce warrior, but I turned to art to find some peace, and as you can see, those men took a few pieces out of me because of that. In my prime… in armor… I would have cut them down like the mangy scavengers they were.”

Bertrand nodded, then said, “I have one other question. When did you know what I was working on? In the mosaic?”

“From the very beginning,” Simon lied. “I could see it in the colors you chose when you laid down the first few pieces.”

Bertrand accepted that answer. Indeed, he treated it almost as a form of praise. 

Simon thought that the act of violence would have disrupted the flow that his student was slowly building, but he only sped up after that. The first part of the large mosaic had taken over a week to lay out, but the second took half that time, and the third was faster still. As the man that had founded the nation finally appeared in the center as Bertrand slowly moved to fill in the last of the space with a flock of harpies descending from the jagged mountains, Simon was reasonably certain that the boy had chosen to make the legendary hero look just a bit like him, and he was touched by the gesture. 

Ch. 197 - Introductions

Of course, even after a month, the work was only halfway done. They still spent days and days cementing the thing in place once Bertrand was happy with the placement of all the pieces. It was only when the entire project was entirely finished, and they’d spent half a day sealing and polishing it with a cake of beeswax that they sat on the canyon rim and admired it from above with a celebratory bottle of wine. 

Simon was pleased. Even if it wasn’t perfect, the giant mosaic below was a much better effort than all of the paintings that Bertrand had made up until now. Once he stopped obsessing over the quality of his lines and his strokes and was forced to use nothing but imperfections, he finally got out of his own way, Simon thought to himself. He said none of that to the boy, though. He was already smiling from ear to ear. Now, all that needed to be done was show his father. 

The two of them returned from the canyon skinner and dirtier from the wear. Simon said nothing about the fight, and Lord Alexin was pleased enough at the mosaic once he’d set eyes on it that he said, “It’s a shame you put it all the way out here where I cannot rub the faces of my rivals in the work of my son.” That was as high a praise as Bertrand was ever likely to receive from the man, but even so, he beamed. 

“Sometimes art must be done for its own sake,” Simon said, “In this case, the audience was only a single person.” He let that comment hang there, unwilling to specify whether the audience was the father, the teacher, or the artist himself. That was the main lesson he’d got from being a teacher so far. The longer he asked questions of children to get them to think about things, the more he realized there were often many answers to the same question. 

The three of them rode back to the house together after that, and on the way, Bertrand’s father offered him a commission to retile the guest house at their summer estate in similar heroic themes. The price for the task was a little low, but that was the way the man was with his tests, and Simon vowed to help the boy cut some costs with a couple of the suppliers he knew to make the project that much more lucrative for him.

In private, Lord Alexin confessed, “I did not know if your mad plan would work, but now, after thinking on it, I believe that simply tearing that boy away from his friends and the girls might have done as much good as all the broken pottery and high-minded ideals in the world.”

“Hence the guest house,” Simon said, acting perfectly aware of the man’s ulterior motive, even though he hadn’t given the isolation part of the project a lot of thought since those first few days when his pupil had been nothing but complaints. 

“Hence the guest house,” the Lord agreed.

Bertrand never mentioned the way that Simon slew the bandits to anyone, but once he completed his task and redid the floors with brand-new works of art for his father to brag about, he begged Simon to add sword lessons to his curriculum. Simon saw no problem with that. He’d done plenty of art at this point and was spending more and more time teaching Bertrand’s younger siblings, so he had plenty of time. He was running down the clock now. 

He’d already established himself as a man with a reputation up and down the coasts of Ionia, and over the next couple of years, he took it somewhat easier. He still worked on art, of course, but they were small private studies rather than giant public works as he’d done so far. He’d gone as far as he could with honing his skills on the sides of buildings. If he wanted to make further progress, he was going to need a more refined medium. Unfortunately, he had no idea how to make oil paints or even acrylic paints. 

There were clues in the name, he supposed, but it was hardly a common art form in Ionia. He’d seen a few paintings in the houses of the wealthy in Abresse, but the only stretched canvases he’d seen were in Brin and their mountainous neighbor to the east. 

It’s so weird that a few hundred miles make such a difference, he thought to himself. On Earth, I could have gotten all this from one trip to the mall.

That was as true of foods as it was of art supplies, of course, though he wasn’t sure if that was true anymore. He had no idea how much time had passed on Earth now since all of this had started. It might have been centuries. At this point, they were in some weird post-human future where they could replicate anything with machines, or the entire place was a post-apocalyptic wasteland. There was no way to know for sure. 

“It doesn’t matter,” he sighed to himself contentedly. “Either way, I’m still out here trying to invent paint.”

Sometimes, he thought about what he could have done with his life if he’d been like this from the start, but it was always an irrelevant question. He never could have been this person from the start. It had taken an awfully long time to hike this far on the road of life, and he felt like he was still nowhere near the peak of the mountain. 

In Simon’s last few years before he turned south again, he only engaged in one complex project, and that was the vampiric knife he’d been designing and daydreaming about for some time. It wasn’t like it was even hard at this point. He had a small private forge he used to make his tools on the Alexin estate already, and even rare materials were easy enough for him to afford. 

Something about the transfer magic just kept him away, and for years, he always found something more important to do. It was only when he felt the beginnings of arthritis after particularly intense sparring sessions that he realized he probably needed something more if he wanted to provide the same sort of instruction to his own son that he’d provided to the Alexin family for the last few years. 

Before he started, though, Simon did some experimentation on small farm animals and noted that lesser life transfer was nearly as powerful but less euphoric than nothing but a pure word of transfer. He was unable to determine if it was more or less powerful, though, because both lesser words killed chickens and goats, and he was unwilling to test if on ne’er do wells, or even his beloved donkey, Daisy the Third. 

Eventually, he was ready. So, using the same techniques he’d learned in the forbidden forges of the Unspoken, he finally got to work. First, he forged three identical daggers, knowing full well that half of all the blades were rejected for quality issues in the second stage. He carefully tempered and sharpened all of them over the course of several weeks before he did anything remotely magical. 

Once that was done, he carefully drew the inverse of the symbols on the blade in inert clay. The pattern he’d chosen was complex but not ridiculously slow. It has a trigger point on the tip so that it would activate whenever it stabbed into something living. To that circuit, he added the words of lesser life transfer. 

Then, when it was masked appropriately, he soaked the thing in acid overnight. The next day, he found that his efforts were in vain and that he would have to start again. Though most of the marks were fine, one of the seconds of clay had come loose, marring the lesser word that was now etched on one side of the blade. 

After the failure, he hammered that blade into unrecognizable uselessness, and then he started again. The second result was much better than the first, and Simon spent a few days carefully gilding and polishing it before he started to carve the handle and fit it to a pommel and crossguard. He might have lavished a month on clever designs. The idea certainly appealed to him, but not as much as the idea of keeping a low profile, at least in some regards. 

In the end, his only effort at artistry was to carve a skull into the pommel as a small memento mori. After that, he tested the thing. For this, at least, he went into the mountains until he found evidence of a beastman tribe. Then, he hunted them until he found a group of two of the creatures alone. The first one he slew quickly, only grazing it with his new dagger once for a noticeable jolt of life force. 

The monster’s friend wasn’t so lucky. Once Simon was faced with only a single foe, he took his time, and he used his sword only to parry the creature’s weapon. He wasn’t trying to torture the beast or anything, but he wanted to know just how potent the life-drain effect was. 

This sure would be easier if I could see damage numbers above his head every time I struck him, he sighed as he inflicted a death of a thousand cuts on the monster. In the end, it took six stabs with the knife to drop it to the ground where it lay, bleating weakly. After that, Simon plunged the knife into the thing's back and felt the energy flow through that bloody link for several seconds before the creature finally stilled. 

In the end, there were too many variables for him to know for sure. He wasn’t sure how long beastmen lived and how much of the fatal damage was done by the blade rather than the magic in it, but Simon felt like each stab had gotten several minor words worth of power back from the creature, but not quite a full word.

That means what? Two or three weeks' worth of life per stab? He thought on the way back. Maybe four months altogether?

Simon thought that was very interesting. For two or three hunting trips like this a year, he might never age again. It seemed ridiculous, but he could find no fault in the logic. Well, only one, at least. 

At the moment, he hadn’t noticed the terrible euphoria building one stab at a time. It only wore off while he slept that night, and in the morning, he felt a terrible craving he hadn’t felt in a long time. That both annoyed and disturbed him because he hadn’t felt any similar cravings when he’d been testing the blade on farm animals. That complicated things, and he vowed to leave the blade in its sheath until he determined if it was the dose or the type of victim that caused him to feel like this. 

Simon took that as his cue to leave. He gave his patron little notice. He just packed up his most prized possessions, left a note for Bertrand regarding a few unfinished projects if the boy wanted a challenge, and then approached Lord Alexin for a letter of recommendation. 

“You’re leaving us already, Master Ennis? What have we done to deserve the shoddy treatment?” the man asked. “I’ll double your wages again if that’s what it will take to keep you a good while longer.”

Money, of course, was no object to either of them, but this was all part of the dance when it came to his patrons. They all wanted a famous, talented artist in their pocket that they could show off to their friends and enemies alike. At this point, half of Simon’s job involved attending parties and sounding wise. 

He refused the man, of course, insisting, “I’ve heard that the queen will soon be selecting a tutor for the young prince. I am to shape the future of the nation. Should she reject me, I will return in due time.”

“Oh, well, then we shall just consider this a vacation,” he mused. “A loan to the queen until you come back here to continue your great works.”

Simon laughed at that. Lord Alexin’s youngest children were already almost as old as Bertrand was when Simon started here, and his eldest son was an artist with a growing reputation in his own right. Simon had done everything he needed to here, and he doubted that he’d ever be back.