Death After Death 173-174

One small announcement. I have made a new tier for DaD, as I said I was going to, so for those of you that would like another 10 chapters of Simon for $2, that's on the table. This brings the Devoted Reader tier back up to 50 chapters ahead, across all stories, which is where it's meant to be.

Ch. 173 - Found Out

Simon’s first instinct was to cast a spell and murder all three of them, but he held back. That wasn’t because he thought he could learn something or even because it would screw up the future. It was because everything in their body language told him they didn’t consider him to be the least threat. 

That made sense. While Simon was still a little softer than he would have liked because he’d spent more time reading than fighting in this life, he’d still lost a ton of weight. As a result, he must have looked like a scrawny scribe or courtier to these men. He didn’t even carry more than a knife these days, further reinforcing the image.

“Is there a problem?” he asked with more indignation than might have been appropriate for the situation. 

He quickly caught himself and continued. This time, he tried to add a touch of fear to his surprise, “I mean… what are you doing in my room. This is—”

“This is a long time coming,” the seated man said. “You’ve been flitting around the court for a while with a little storm cloud over your head. That’s not so much for the circles you run in, but it’s long past time we do something about it.”

“Circles? Stormcloud?” Simon asked, only partially pretending to be lost by the strange turns in conversation. “Will someone tell me what this is about?”

One of the standing men had moved behind him and, very gently but firmly, guided Simon to the nearest chair at his small table before pushing him down into it. He didn’t resist, even though it was a terrible tactical position to be in, but only because he didn’t want to arouse their suspicions. 

“Oh, with the works you’ve been reading in the library, I don’t think I need to spell that out. Not for you. You may not know exactly who we are, but after reading…” the man pulled out a list, “The Histories of Sanit Modraine, the Chronicles of Ionia’s first Kings, At the Crossroads, Travelers Tales of Darkness, The Wars Against Witchcraft… you get the idea. This is not a normal list of scrolls and tomes. It goes on at length.”

“I-I was searching for a way to purge the spirits from Darndelle’s graveyard. I read about the Blackheart and thought—”

“Aye, you did that too, but to what end?” the man asked, leaking forward far enough that Simon could see most of his face along with a cruel, thin-lipped smile. “The Baron you claim to work for might be a country lord, but he’s no monster slayer. He hasn’t even heard of a Nimos before.”

That took Simon by surprise by a little, but only a little. A good man with a strong horse could cross the deserts and reach Corwin lands in two or perhaps three weeks. They weren’t so far from the main trade roads, but the idea that they would look into him so thoroughly spoke volumes. 

“For a while, we thought you were simply a social climber who’d padded your resume with the names of strangers for pure clout,” the hooded man said with a shrug, “But given your reading list and the gray haze that clings to you at your age… well, we were more concerned that your master might be the true source of evil. He might still be, too.”

“I thought you just said that the Baron didn’t know me?” Simon answered, actually confused now. “How can he be my master if I don’t—”

His words were cut off as one of the men beside him unsheathed a dagger and slammed it deep into the wood of the table between his spread hands. It was obviously meant to be an intimidation gesture, but it worked. 

“Your true master,” the man growled, “We know you have alternative purposes. Tell us the who and why of it willingly, though, and this will hurt less.”

Simon paused, considering his options, before saying, “I may not know your names or what you’re after, but I know you’re the ones purging the books I read in my search for answers.”

“Are we now?” the man across from him leaned forward, steepling his fingers and revealing enough of his face that Simon was sure he’d seen him at one or two of the parties in the last year. “And why would we do that?”

“To eliminate witches and keep more people from becoming them, of course,” Simon said confidently. “I think it's a wise and noble idea, but can’t you see that it's harming people’s ability to solve other problems, like the one right here in—”

“Problems made by witchcraft cannot be solved by witchcraft,” the third hooded figure said, sitting down at the table to join Simon and the first man. “And giving men the tools of warlocks will not reduce the number of warlocks in this world, young man.”

Of the three, his words carried by far the most weight, and Simon instantly understood he was the boss. No, it was more than that. Simon realized. He’s the boss, and he’s been using these other two here to play good cop, bad cop with me so that he can get a read on how I react. 

Simon sat there quietly while he waited for the next shoe to drop, but in his mind, his heart was already racing, looking for a story to tell these people. He wasn’t sure what story they wanted to hear yet, but he knew that they wanted to hear one.

So, even as he listened to the ominous man start to lecture about responsibilities and the subtle nature of evil, his mind was already stitching the pieces together. He needed an origin that couldn’t be corroborated, and he did his best to craft that from the pieces of the world he’d most experienced around the Kingdom of Brin. 

His first instinct was to give them the Schwarzenbruck sob story. He would have, too, if he hadn’t figured out that those events hadn’t happened yet or were happening right about now. So, instead, he decided to go with Maritin. That was the tiny village he’d rescued from starvation with a load of basement vegetables. 

It probably still lived but wasn’t the sort of place for keeping records, and he knew just enough names to make it plausible. Plus, it was only a few days from Lord Corwin’s lands, so it spliced nicely into what he’d already told them. 

When the man was tired of the sound of his own voice and asked Simon who he really was, he was ready. “Nimos is a false name,” he admitted, “And I’m not a scholar, and I grew up poor, but I just learned to read and write during my time in Leipzen and found out that fancy names can open the doors to lots of places that mine can’t.”

They stayed quiet, so Simon explained his life. This time, he gave his name as Ennis. It was the name of a couple people he’d met and a common enough name for the region. Anywhere he was asked about would remember an Ennis or three, and if he was lucky, one of them would be from a family who’d been wiped out during a plague. He definitely needed a plague, too, along with as much suffering as he could heap on his fictional self. These men were under the false impression the dark auras came from magic use, but thanks to his conversations with Aaric, Simon knew that it was just the visible representation of what the mirror called experience. While it was nice to know that his aura had gone from swirling black to merely a steel-gray color, he needed an explanation for how his aura could have gotten so polluted at such a young age. 

So, he lied his ass off. First, in broad strokes, and then, when he was asked about details, he filled those in with more tragedies. Parents dead to disease and starving in the streets of the capital, he gave the saddest version of the old story about a kid that pulled himself up by his bootstraps he’d ever heard. Beaten and bullied, he rose up to become a messenger. The man who took him in and taught him his letters. He turned out to be a molester as well as young Ennis’s first murder victim. 

By the time he was done, he’d painted himself as an awful person who had come to Darndelle to start over, who’d developed a love of reading rather than a warlock in hiding or anything like that, and after making him go through the story twice more, backward and forwards, it looked to him like they bought it. The hardest part of the whole thing wasn’t even keeping everything straight at this point; it was remembering that he couldn’t call these guys the Unspoken because they hadn’t mentioned it yet. 

“You can’t see them, though, can you?” the white cloak leader finally asked him toward the end. “The auras. The dark residue that the use of magic leaves behind.”

“What auras?” Simon asked, feigning confusion. “I mean, I can pick a bad guy out of the crowd, but it's the look in his eyes, not the—”

“That’s not what we mean,” he said, interrupting Simon as he pulled a card out of his pocket and slid it face down across the table to him. “I want you to read the word on this card, and as you do, I want you to imagine it bursting into flames.”

“Imagine it? Why?” Simon said as he picked up the card and looked at it. It said, ‘Meiren,’ in neat handwriting. “What’s this for?”

They're testing me, he realized instantly. He willed himself not to go pale as he shrugged at the supposedly inscrutable word. 

“This is the time to do what you are told, not ask questions,” the man said. “As to what it’s for… well if you can do it, I can promise that you’ll get one hell of a reward…”

“Reward, huh?” Simon asked with a nervous smile, willing himself to believe the lie. “Count me in.”

He tried to stay sounding nonchalant, but inside, his heart was hammering. He could practically feel the garrote that the man behind him undoubtedly had, ready to murder him if he screwed this up. 

For a moment, Simon thought about murdering all three of them. It would have been easy. A simple word of force radiating out would kill all of them before they had the chance to speak. Then, he could flee the inn, journey north, and try this whole scam in reverse in Leipzen. 

This is an opportunity, though, his mind insisted, warring with itself for a moment. If they kill me, I just reset, but if they don’t, I might finally get a line in on these guys. 

In the end, if the choice was knowledge or death, it wasn’t really a choice at all. So, he looked at the card again, pretended to concentrate, and then said the word. He intentionally mispronounced it slightly, giving the second e a hard sound rather than a soft one, but there was no way they were going to let that slide. 

“Try it again,” the boss insisted after a short conversation on pronunciation. The other man didn’t say the whole word at once. Instead, he pronounced only a single syllable at a time. 

“Meiren,” Simon said, pronouncing it correctly this time. He tasted sulfur and knew he’d said it correctly, but nothing happened. At least, nothing appeared to. 

If he’d done as they asked, the whole area would have lit up in flames, but that was the worst outcome. So, since he couldn’t fool them one way, he fooled them another. Instead of manifesting the energy in the room with them, he manifested it in the common room chimney that ran up one wall. He imagined a thousand tiny cinders rather than a single explosive flame because he didn’t want to make a sound, but just the same, he dumped all the heat into the appropriate vessel. 

If there were men watching them outside, then he supposed they might have seen a burst of flu gas catch fire, but Simon wasn’t super concerned about that. He was fairly sure that these three people were all there were. 

When none of them moved, he did it a second time in his bid to look sincere. He was only slightly annoyed that he was throwing away months of his life for no reason at all, but after the second time, the man reached across the table and took the slip of paper back.

“Was that it?” he asked. “I didn’t pass, did I?”

The leader of the three white cloaks shook his head as he stood. “No, I’m afraid you failed.”

“Can’t I try again?” Simon asked, trying to be as convincing as possible. 

“No, failure is good in this case; it means you get to keep your life,” The other men were moving toward the door now. 

“My life?” Simon asked, pretending to take that in slowly. “But I thought you were here to… I don’t know, recruit me, not kill me.”

“Our little… organization typically only accepts those who can see what is unseen,” the man said after studying Simon for a moment. “Still, there are some uses for the blind like you when you are willing to get your hands dirty. We’ve hidden a few needles in your chosen haystack,” the mystery man said with a smile. “If you find one of them, well… You’ll know what to do then, won’t you, and if not… I don’t think we’ll need to bother you again.” 

Simon waited until all three of them were gone before he moved a muscle. It was only when he could hear their footsteps down the stairs that he finally removed the carefully crafted mask that he’d spent the evening building, and he slumped in his chair, completely exhausted by the hours of questioning he’d just endured.

Ch. 174 - Haystacks and Needles

After that encounter, Simon waited for the other shoe to drop for weeks. Even as he did, he still went through the motions, and carried on with business as usual. Well, he did his best to, at least. For a while, he was still jumping at his own shadows whenever a scroll fell off a shelf or a beggar he hadn’t noticed accosted him on the street for a few coppers. 

That’s probably a good thing, though, he tried to convince himself. If I’m being watched, this is the sort of behavior that they’d want to see. It would take a much harder man than Ennis to shake off that kind of unexpected visit.

Even after the fear began fading, though, the confusion and curiosity lingered. He took measures to protect himself anyway. He’d been staying at the inn for too long. He’d grown used to its easy meals and the habit of coming home to a place that was already warm. 

If people were watching him, though, and he was supposed to be afraid, or worse, hiding something, he should be making it harder for them. So, he used some of his growing savings to rent a small place that was closer to the library on the rickety third floor of an old building, and he made a point to be seen carrying notes home almost every night. 

“Let them worry about what I might have found,” he told himself the next time he thought he was being followed. 

Simon was sure that the more interesting he made himself to the white coats, the more likely he was to get a second visit from them. However, as the weeks passed and his cryptic notes swelled, that certainty began to wane. 

He’d started doing all sorts of paranoid things like leaving small stones by the doors and shutters as well as leaving papers in very specific orders. Despite all of those efforts, he’d never once come back to find that any of those things had been disturbed. 

While he was initially annoyed that they’d intruded on his life on that first visit, slowly but surely, he grew more annoyed that they didn’t seem to be watching him after that. If I can’t cast spells, then there's no need to keep tabs on me, huh? He thought to himself as he continued his research. In that area, at least, he was making progress. 

The haystacks were fairly obvious, at least. They were the city library that he’d spent so much time in over the last year, along with a few of the private collections he’d gained access to over that time. 

The needles he was supposed to be seeking out, though. That was harder. They were clues of some sort, probably, but clues about what? Where were they hiding, and how would he know when he’d found them?

Simon asked himself that question with every new book he read. He looked for hidden meanings in the words and the symbols, checked the illuminated portions of the text for coded messages, and looked in the illustrations for details that most might miss. He was always searching for more. What that more was, he wasn’t exactly sure. 

When he’d originally decided what he was going to do with this life, he’d always hoped that he’d stumbled upon a few words of power that he didn’t already know. The white cloaks had obviously thought of that, though. Given how easy it was for witches and warlocks to pass their powers to each other, they’d obviously gone to great lengths to make sure that didn’t happen. 

Months passed like that, and though he still sold maps when he needed to and attended banquets when the opportunity would come up, there was no joy in it. Where once he’d enjoyed the fancy food and the chance to listen to the rumors of the day with those of importance in the city, he now only wondered who might be watching him at the dinner tables.

That was just as well because the longer he stayed in this city, the less of an oddity he became. Eventually, the invitations he received to be shown off as one slowly trickled to a halt. Should his mythical patron arrive in town to slay the ghosts that haunted the graveyard at Darndelle’s center, he was sure that trend would quickly reverse, but that was never actually going to happen. 

Eventually, he even grew tired of trying to track down the identities of the men who had waylaid him. He’d only seen one of their faces clearly enough to recognize through the shadows of their cloak, but he was confident that he could recognize their voices if heard them again. 

What was he supposed to do with that information, though? Kidnap them and torture the truth out of them? It was a fun idea, but it was hardly his style. Even his least favorite, Raithwaite, barely conjured up that level of bloodlust at this point. 

The last thing that Simon ever wanted to be was a vampire. However, right now, he had to admit that the strange compulsion power he’d endured would come in handy at times like this. 

Still, eventually, he lost interest in even those pursuits as he pursued his blind treasure hunt with more and more intensity. There are clues in these books, and I’m going to find them, he told himself. Eventually, it was all he lived for. Days could pass by in the blink of an eye as he pored through tomes, cross-referencing them against each other in a search for some hidden meaning beyond what they actually said. 

Not even actual references to men who claimed to have experienced doppelgangers, as was discussed in the Temptation of Saint Karell, would get as much interest as a line like, ‘a secret that cannot be spoken,’ or ‘victory was born on white wings that day.’ It got to the point where he started to feel like a conspiracy theorist.

Though he doubted that every one of those references was part of a secret society, the longer he studied the history of the region, the more he could see fingerprints left by some hidden hand. Sloppy record-keeping was one thing, but when nine out of ten books left out a name or two, and only one included them, that just meant it hadn’t been purged yet. 

During the winter, his favorite clue was when the handwriting that a book was copied in suddenly changed. That was doubly true when it changed back to the original a page or two later. It was a clear indicator that something had been removed, but often, it was impossible to say what that something had been. 

In rare cases, he was able to find two copies of the same book from different libraries with differing page counts. Sometimes, this addressed his concerns. In almost every case, it turned out to be a hero doing some great deed that might have used magic. The text never said, ‘and then he smote the beast with a word of greater fire,’ but the inevitable replacement text usually read something like, ‘Then with white wings and the strength of the divine he slew the beast with his own two hands.’ 

Women seemed to get the worst of this treatment, and almost every heroic woman was carefully removed from the records. Often as not, she was replaced by an effeminate-looking man when the illustrations were altered. 

“Man, these guys really hate witches,” Simon muttered as he made note of Kanara, another woman who no longer existed according to the annals of history. 

Simon sometimes wondered how his efforts would be felt by history, but that interest intensified as he slowly made a list of people who appeared to have been scrubbed out of the official narrative. Not that anyone cared. Almost two years after his arrival, people stopped noticing him. He was no longer a novelty but a fixture. Sometimes, one of the other scribblers in the library might ask him how his research was coming, but Simon had little to tell them beyond, “The problem seems intractable, but in time I’ll figure something out.”

He wasn’t talking about the graveyard anymore, of course, but they didn’t need to know that. Instead, the questions in his mind about the Unspoken multiplied. He could see what they were doing on every level now; he could even guess why. How, though, was more of an open question. 

They didn’t seem to be a religious order in that he found their breadcrumbs related to several gods and goddesses. They didn’t exactly seem to be royalty, though, either.

As near as he could tell, history and scholarship were far less important here than they had been on Earth. He hadn’t even been in this town for two years, and he felt like he’d read half of the libraries he had access to at this point. Well, skimmed, at least, he corrected himself mentally. 

His point still stood, though. Very little of what he read was actual scholarship. Instead, most books were either devoted to glorifying some King or Duke who had no doubt paid for their writing, or they were religious texts that were as much fiction as they were history. 

It was in those religious texts that Simon finally found his first real loose thread. Religion wasn’t something he’d given a lot of thought to since coming to this world. That was largely because he found out that Helades wasn’t worshiped as a Goddess. No one had heard of her, though he supposed that it was possible that if he brought her up to the demon, it might know her name. 

Everyone else, though, mostly worshiped whoever they wanted in their temples and churches, and those names largely varied by region and country. In Ionia, one god was responsible for lightning and thunderstorms, but in Brin, it was an entirely different woman who was the bringer of rains. The former was a war god, while the latter was the goddess of spring. It was conflicting enough that he felt sure in his decision that the mortals without magic had no idea what they were talking about. 

However, since the religions were, by and large, the keepers of history, he still had to read their books. That was why when he was doing a read-through of the saints of Hypaltia, who was the goddess of winter in this region but the goddess of light and further north, he took note that there was no Saint Geregus listed. 

That shouldn’t have been important, but it was because Simon was sure he’d seen references to that saint listed a dozen times in random places. He was sure because the man often went by another name, too: the Silent Saint. 

Sure that such an oversight couldn’t be correct, Simon went through another volume by a different author and another after that. The story repeated itself. Those works were not written by any of the relevant religions, but that only intrigued him more because he could go back through his notes and find many places where victory had been associated with this nonexistent saint.

“This is the hint I’ve been waiting for,” he told himself, smiling as he slammed the book shut and shelved it. 

He didn’t think it likely that the church had edited one of their own heroes out of existence. Instead, after reviewing his notes on the subject, Simon decided that it was far more likely that the saint was yet another stand-in for the white robes. This rabbit hole went deeper than doves, though. On occasion, after great victories, certain rituals would sometimes be discussed, and even what turned out to be a nonexistent feast day was mentioned. 

This, Simon decided at long last, was the way in, at least for him. He was sure that an organization like the Unspoken had many ways to recruit. He was certain that neither Aaric nor Carelyn had been big readers. He wasn’t even sure they were literate at all, beyond the very basics. The day in question was coming up, and he would be ready.