Death After Death 163-164

Ch. 163 - Whispered Words

There was confusion at first as the survivors tried to figure out what had happened. That gave Simon’s group an early lead of a dozen yards. However, after the survivors watched their brothers die around them, a cry of anger rang out, and soon the survivors were giving chase. 

Four horses chased after two as Simon, Aaric, and Carelyn blazed out into the night. Simon didn’t know where they were going, and he wasn’t entirely sure that Aaric did, either, but he followed the young man just the same. While they rode, Simon cursed his unwillingness to aim the spell a little lower and kill all the horses that the white cloaks were riding while he was at it. 

In the moment, it wasn’t that he’d worried it might have blunted the spell’s effect. It might have, of course, but he was far more concerned with Still, there was nothing he could do now. His magic had winded him, and though he could certainly spare another word or power of two so long as they weren’t major ones, he was unwilling to unless it was absolutely necessary. 

In the Pit, Simon had died a lot of times. So many that he’d lost count. He didn’t think about mortality often. Even now, he wasn’t worried about dying. He was shepherding his remaining years more like a mana bar in a video game. The way things were going, he might have twenty or thirty years left, but he wasn’t sure all of those years were created equal, and he doubted that Helades quick sketch of how cosmic powers worked was the whole story. So, he was leaning toward the lower end of that scale. 

It might even be less than that, he thought as the horse's hooves pounded away at the muddy road. At this point, every major word burned five percent of his power, every word burned almost half a percent, and every minor word was about a tenth of a percent. None of those were big numbers, but he could see that he was approaching the bottom of the barrel, and it made him think about the big picture more.

He had his bow on him. Unfortunately, he’d barely practiced archery from horseback, and unlike the centaurs he’d fought for so long, he doubted that skill would ever come naturally to him. Regardless, four pursuers became three pretty quickly as one peeled away because of their wounds. 

After that, he didn’t have to let off too many shots before the other three pulled up short to avoid becoming another casualty. Just because he was very nearly firing at random didn’t mean that they knew that. In the dark, they could only hear the whistle of the arrow as it flew somewhere nearby in the darkness. 

It seemed too easy, and Simon’s first instinct was that it was a trap. It didn’t seem to be, though. As they dropped further and further behind the group, he expected some large spell to ring out and kill them all. He had the word for barrier and protection on his lips, but he never needed to speak them. 

Maybe they don’t know any magic, he thought to himself. He was incredulous, but he had to admit that it was true. They knew at least one word of power, but it was possible that they did not know the rest. 

That was just one more question he added to the pile for Aaric. It would have to wait, though. They needed to put more distance between themselves and these people. By morning, there would likely be a whole mob riled up and coming for them.

Simon thought about what that might mean for his armor, but he just shrugged at the thought. He could always make a new set if he needed to. It had served its part, and though the idea of using such a time-consuming piece of gear to try to solve two levels appealed to him, he’d figure something out. Compared to the value of the answers these two could provide him, it was only so much rusting junk.

He considered these thoughts while the three of them rode until sunrise. When they finally stopped, it was at a small, half-toppled farmhouse well off the main road that Aaric must have known about because he rode straight there. 

“This was our stop last night,” he explained as they tethered their horses around back. “We’d planned to go on further, to the south, so that we could lose ourselves in the vastness of Abrese, but…”

His words trailed off before Simon finished, “But then your friends found you sooner than you were expecting.”

“Exactly,” Aaric agreed. “We were—”

“Aaric,” Carelyn hissed. “Why are you telling this… this warlock our plans? We should be away from him. Now.”

“You don’t understand,” Aaric answered with a shake of his head. “This isn’t the first time that Simon has saved my life. It’s the second, and… no, I know what you were thinking, but I had no idea he knew magic or that he’d even be here. I swear I didn’t. You and I, we were going to—”

What followed was a lover’s quarrel in hushed tones. Simon couldn’t make everything out, but it was clear that while neither of them was happy to be in the same room with a warlock, Carelyn was not willing to give him even the smallest benefit of the doubt despite the fact that he’d just saved her life. 

The two of them stepped outside, where they continued their argument for quite a while. By the time they returned, Simon had started a small fire in the fireplace. He had nothing to cook over it, but it chased away the night’s chill at least. 

“I’m sorry about that,” Aaric said as he returned to the room alone. “She doesn’t—”

“She doesn’t have the least idea who I am,” Simon nodded. “Nor do you. Not really.”

“I know you wouldn’t hurt us,” Aaric agreed. “I know that much.”

“Are you so certain,” Simon asked with a flat expression as he stared into the fire. “I killed a dozen people earlier tonight.”

“You did. They weren’t even bad people, mostly. Not really,” Aaric said. “But back in Screeton… you saved everyone, and you didn’t have to. If you’d just saved yourself, no one would have known.”

That outpouring of gratitude made Simon a little uncomfortable, and he switched topics immediately, even as he pondered how much that one event had changed this boy's life. If Simon had never existed, then Aaric and his whole family would be dead, of course. Still, the last time Simon had seen him as an adult, he was a zealot, almost certainly because he thought his family had been killed by a warlock. This time, without any of that angst, he’d come out somewhat more normal, and though it might not change all of history, it certainly changed Carelyn’s life. 

Simon didn’t say any of that, though. Instead, he said, “Tell me about these unspoken. Is it a religion? A cult? In all my travels, I’ve never heard of them.”

Aaric didn’t seem surprised to hear that. The Unspoken, as it turned out, was something closer to a secret society than a cult. People knew that they existed in this part of the world, but almost no one who wasn’t initiated in their secrets knew what they were about beyond witch-hunting. 

The truth was deeper than that, though. It turned out that they were the answer to one question that he’d had for a very long time: why didn’t he see more mages floating around the world because Aaric’s white-cloaked friends were killing them wherever they found them? It didn't sound like they were particularly common in the first place, of course, but at last, things started to click into place a little. 

“You know that with practice, anyone could use a word of power,” Simon explained, but Aaric denied it. 

“That’s simply not so,” he disagreed. “Women like Carelyn, and men like you… you’re special. If you weren’t, then magic would be everywhere.”

“Yeah, maybe for a generation,” Simon answered with a shrug. “After that, well, I think it would snuff itself out pretty quick.”

He explained what a toll magic took on the body, but he also told Aaric the story about the thugs he’d fought in the castle basement once upon a time and the way that they’d all cast fire spells at him, no matter how inexpertly as evidence for his assertion that anyone could do it. 

“That’s not what we’re taught at all,” the younger man answered uncertainly. “For the initiated, it's more like… either we find those with talent before they turn to evil, or we strike them down before they can drag others down with them.”

Most of the answers to Simon’s questions turned out to be ‘I don’t know,’ or ‘I’m not sure.’ That changed a little when Carelyn came back inside and grudgingly started to answer some of Simon’s that Aaric couldn’t. It turned out she’d been with the Unspoken for much longer than her boyfriend had before she ran away. 

While she was light on details about why exactly they decided to run, Simon decided they probably didn’t treat her the best, based on some old scars around her wrists and ankles that indicated manacles were involved. On the way whisperers worked, though, she was more forthcoming. 

“That’s what I was supposed to be one day,” Carelyn confessed. “That’s all women with the gift are to the Unspoken. Whispers or witches. There’s no in-between if you have the sight.”

Her story made it clear why she’d escaped, even if he was sure she left out some of the worst parts. He learned the word that the Whisperers spoke, though the girl could not speak it. She was capable of tracing it into the dirt on the ground by the hearth, though, and Simon was immediately able to sound that out as Ovelum. 

The word translated roughly to stop or null, and it had a strong meaning of finality. It wasn’t until he spoke it out loud as a minor word, though, that he realized it was actually Uuvellum, a word that he already knew. He’d thought it was strictly for boundary, and he’d mostly found it in summoning circles, like the gateway to hell. This cast it in a new light, and he would have to think more on that when he had the time.  

Apparently, the women who spoke this word would start to chant it quietly under their breath every few seconds once the warlock approached, and they would keep doing so until he was slain or they passed out from the strain. Simon was appalled by this. He knew how draining magic was more than anyone, but to have random women spend their lives until their throats bled with no real understanding of what they were doing? It was hideously cruel. 

“You should never do such a thing,” he cautioned Carelyn. 

She agreed wholeheartedly, of course, and swore up and down that she didn’t want to damage her eternal soul. It was during that discussion about souls that it became clear that this cult only recruited people who could see auras could speak the words of power. 

That was false, of course. Simon knew that because he could speak them, but he couldn’t see the miasma that he’d heard described before around anyone. Even if it wasn’t true, though, they believed it. 

That revealed that Aaric could see them too, of course, but when Simon asked him about it, he said, “I didn’t start seeing the halos until the year after your visit.”

Still, talking with both of them, he learned that the shadows that surrounded him had dimmed quite a bit, but were no longer obvious. Simon made a note to check the mirror later to find out what his experience was currently at. He didn’t want to freak them out any more than they already were with new tricks. 

Instead, he steered the conversation toward safer waters and asked them about their obvious romance and what they hoped to do once they were free of all this.

Ch. 164 - A Slight Detour

That night, Simon lay awake for hours. It wasn’t his fear that one of the two people he was sleeping beside might off him in his sleep that kept him up, even though they might. It wasn’t even the nagging worry that they were sleeping in the same place that Aaric and Carelyn had stayed the night before and that their pursuers might have that information. 

Simon didn’t let that bother him, either. If there was going to be a fight, then there was going to be a fight. Instead, he thought about everything he’d spent the last few hours learning from the conversation before everyone was tired enough to go to bed. Now, his mind was spinning with the implications of it all. 

Nothing anyone had said had offered a hint about evil Simon, of course, but he’d solved a couple other mysteries that put a number of events in a new light. First was the word of power, of course, but more than that was the whole aura thing. 

Thinking about it while he lay here, he realized he couldn’t actually prove that this cult was wrong, of course, at least on this issue. He’d already tried to explain to both of his companions that the other white cloaks had been wearing items inscribed with words of power to protect them from his magic, though they insisted those were simply ceremonial items. 

That was ridiculous, but it was possible that only those that only he and those who had the ability to see things could cast magic. He wasn’t a part of this world, so the rules might not apply to him, but he wouldn’t know, one way or another, until he did some experimentation. 

Another thing, though, was why there were so few mages. To date, the only one that Simon was sure he’d seen in the wild besides the ones he’d killed was the one that had killed him as a zombie. He hadn’t even seen a dozen of them yet. Not in the whole world, across all his lives. He’d always assumed that they kept themselves to themselves, and there was some secret wizard school or guild, and he just hadn’t discovered them. 

That wasn’t the case, though. They were being picked off pretty methodically, and if you could pick them out of a crowd, though, then things became more complicated. Not just in general, either, but for him specifically. Until he got his experience a little more under control, he was going to have to keep an eye out for them. 

That thought was enough to make him wonder if he might have died to any of these assholes in the past without knowing it. It was impossible to say, though. 

When they talked about the nature of looking at people’s auras, both of them pointed out that even non-warlocks could swirl with shadows if they’d done enough bad things in their lives. Aaric actually argued that it wasn’t even the magic that tainted the aura but the terrible things they did with it that probably caused the problems, but Carelyn disagreed and argued that every use of magic tainted the soul; she argued that was the only way to argue what happened with the Whisperers, but she did not elaborate. 

Both of them explained that Simon looked like a run-of-the-mill criminal or lifelong soldier rather than a warlock of tremendous power. That was cold comfort to him, of course, but the young man delivered that information like it was supposed to be good news. He, however, was not about to celebrate the idea that he looked like a guy who’d only done bad things, not unspeakable things. 

Simon’s thoughts continued to war and swirl until sleep finally took him. In the morning, he was pleased to find that he was neither dead nor bound and gagged. Instead, the two lovebirds were trying to decide where to go to next. Simon volunteered to stay with them a while longer. Truthfully, he was willing to stay with them all the way to Abrese if they wanted, but he could see in Aaric’s strained smile that he would be grateful if Simon didn’t outstay his welcome.

That was fine. None of them had any food, so they got on the road quickly and stayed there until they’d taken a wide path around the village of Esmiran. They didn’t stop until almost dinner when they found a large farmstead down the road that was willing to share their table with some strangers for a few coppers.

That song and dance was repeated for a couple nights, and it wasn’t until they reached a village even smaller than Esmiran that they were able to resupply properly. Simon bought everything he thought the two would need that was actually available and even traced them a small map from his mirror so they would have the best chance at reaching their destination. Abrese wasn’t the worst choice, and he didn’t try to talk them out of it. 

The closest he came to that was pointing out that two star-crossed lovers might not be able to blend into the crowds as much as they would like if the Unspoken could just pick them out at random. They were smart kids but apparently hadn’t thought of that. So, he gave them enough silver to book passage from there to somewhere even farther away if it came to it. 

“Thank you for everything. I mean it.” Aaric said on their last night together. “We wouldn’t be standing here today if not for you.”

Simon just nodded as he looked up and studied the two of them. “You’re a good kid. You’ll do fine. You both will.”

He looked like he was about to say something when Carelyn spoke over him. “Why haven’t you stolen out souls yet? Why? Is this some sick game to you?”

“Carelyn,” Aaric sighed. “With everything else they lied about, don’t you think that—”

“No,” she shouted over him as the three of them sat around that campfire. “I have seen it before. My own uncle had his soul stolen. You know this! They found his body shriveled and…”

She trailed off as the emotion swelled within her, and Simon gave her a moment before he answered. “I know the spell you speak of,” he said. “It’s a hideous thing. Perhaps even the most hideous thing I know how to do, but it’s definitely real. It doesn’t steal your soul, though, just your life.”

“Just your life? Just your life?!” she asked with growing outrage. 

Simon let her blow up a little at him before he said, “A poor choice of words. It drains you, never mind how, and uses you to fuel other dark magics. There’s nothing more despicable than that.”

While Simon generally agreed with that, he wouldn’t mind using it himself, in moderation at least. As things stood now, though, until he mitigated that terrible addictive effect, there was no way that moderation would stay moderated for very long. Even if he hadn’t been fairly certain that the trip from well-intentioned hero to maniacal sorcerer king was a short one, the appearance of dark Simon had hammered that point home. 

In the morning, they both went their separate ways. Simon watched them move south as he turned around and headed back the way he came. A day out from Esmiranhe encountered a group of riders, including a few wearing white cloaks, making him swear softly; he thought about turning and running but decided that they might simply ride by him if he stayed calm.

Unfortunately, that was not the case, though, and they pulled up around him. At first, Simon thought he was going to have to fight his way out, but that wasn’t how it played out. Instead, they pulled up short, and everyone’s swords stayed in their sheathes as they started to ask him questions. Who was he? Where was he going? Had he seen a group of either two or three people, including a pretty young woman? 

To the latter, Simon played dumb, and to the former, he pretended to be an out-of-work mercenary since he didn’t have the equipment on him to go with his normal healer act. “Two or three riders headed south? I’ve seen plenty of those,” he answered with a shrug. “Can’t say I remember any of them, though. A pretty young woman, though? Her, I’d remember. I ain’t seen one of those in ages. I’m available to help join the search if you’re payin’, though…”

“We have enough warriors, old man,” the lead rider said as he spurred his horse to move past Simon. “If you see her, remember, we’re paying well for that information.”

“Who’s we?” Simon asked, genuinely curious how they would answer. He didn’t find out, though. Whether they hadn’t heard him or they were being intentionally mysterious, they started riding south once they decided that he couldn’t be of any help to them. 

Simon didn’t see any other riders for the rest of the day or in any of the days that followed before he reached Esmiran. When he arrived in that village, he restocked a few of his supplies but avoided the inn. Instead, he went straight to the blacksmith shop to see what had become of his armor. 

“You’ve got some balls on you to come back after all that,” the Haadon said, looking at Simon scornfully as he entered the wooden shack and closed the door behind him. 

“Well, at least now I know that you didn’t give it to the Unspoken,” Simon said, deciding that acting tough was the right play given the look of fear that the smith was trying hard to hide. 

“Don’t say that name in here; it’s bad luck,” the smith chided him. “Anyway, you don’t know what I did or didn’t do with what. I’d give those men everything I had on you if their gaze turned on me.”

“You would,” Simon agreed, looking around. “But you didn’t because you knew it wouldn’t save you. You know they’d burn you just for consorting with my type, so you hid it.”

“Threw it in the pond is more like,” Haadon said, swallowing hard. “That way, it wouldn’t hurt anyone else.”

“That would have been the smart thing to do,” Simon answered, “But we both know you hid it in here. You had to. You couldn’t take it outside, and you were afraid I’d be angry with you if you tossed it. So you hid it to avoid the white cloaks and placate me in case I came back.”

“You sound awfully sure of that,” the smith answered, trying to sound tough, but the quaver in his voice gave him away. 

“I am sure,” Simon said, noting some freshly compacted earth on the hovel’s dirt floor. “It’s buried right there, and you’re going to have your apprentice dig it up, or there’s going to be hell to pay.”

There was no more talking back after that. The man gave in, and as he and his apprentice dug, Simon noticed that the fragile resistance that the smith had shown before was entirely gone. Simon hadn’t done anything to either of them nor even threatened them, but their fear was plain to see now. He wasn’t sure how he felt about wielding fear so casually, but as his plate mail started to resurface, he decided that it was probably the best he could do in this case.

The armor itself was still a long way from being pretty, but the lava had been removed, and the worst of the dents had been hammered out. The straps had even been replaced, though clumsily so. The only thing that didn’t work was that the runes on the left leg weren’t yet reconnected to the structure due to a badly mangled section. 

That wasn’t going to be enough to stop him, though. Haadon gave his excuses and offered to keep working on it after the white cloaks were gone for good, but Simon decided that he didn’t want to wait that long. Instead, he wore it as it was, and once he verified he could move well, he paid the men the rest of the agreed-upon price before he strolled outside.   

Then, without a word of explanation, and carrying little with him besides his sword, coin purse and water skin, Simon walked over to the well, dressed all in plate mail, and threw himself over the edge into the waters below.