Death After Death PLUS 354-356

Ch. 354 - Stirrings of the Soul

Simon relayed the men’s order to his cook, then took the backstairs up to his room to retrieve a few things. If they’re going to track her, then I need to mark her and give them an alternate target, he reasoned. In this case, the target is my horse. Let them chase it around for a few days, and maybe hope she got eaten by a bear. 

As a plan, it wasn’t complicated. The hardest part would be convincing Aranna to cooperate. She clearly knew something about magic if she was in this position. Simon had no way of knowing if they were hunting her because they thought she was a witch, or because they wanted to make her a silent sister, and he wasn’t likely to find out until all this was over, either. 

That’s another concern, he sighed internally as he raced down the stairs. If she’s a witch, what might she have done to any of us already? It was a fair question, and while he wanted to believe the best about someone he’d spent so much time with, it gnawed at him as he re-entered the common room. 

“The food will be out soon,” he explained before telling the men that he wanted to fetch his best wine for such honored guests. 

No one showed any sign of suspicion at that. Why would they? The Unspoken were used to having their asses kissed, and he entered the basement without any issues and approached his barmaid's hiding place.

When he opened the small hidden door, she looked like she’d seen a ghost and immediately demanded to know what was going on in hushed tones. Simon ignored that and said, “Later. For now, we have to keep them from finding you.”

“But—” she protested before he interrupted her again. 

“Just trust me,” Simon said, watching her eyes widen as he pushed her down into the nook. “They’re using magic to trace you so—”

“So you’ll use it to hide me?” she hissed, obviously terrified by the idea. “Are you mad? If they find me like this, they’ll think I’m a witch for sure.”

“Better they don’t find you at all then,” he said, pulling down the shoulder strap of her dress on one arm and moving aside her hair to expose her tan, coppery flesh. “I have Leon going north. I’m throwing away my best horse to provide you a good alibi, so don’t waste it.”

In truth, Simon didn’t know if this would work, but the only alternative was bloodshed. He might be able to kill every one of the white cloaks upstairs, but even if he succeeded, it would be as good as burning this life down, and he had no wish to do that just yet. Aranna, Bessa, and Leon weren’t family, but they were close enough, and he felt like he was finally starting to approach the breakthrough he’d been waiting for.

It was unfortunate that he was doing so in the very shadow of the Unspoke he wished to join, but he had no control over that timing. Right now, the only thing he had control over was the small brushstrokes he was making. 

The brush he had in hand was made for watercolors, not ink, but it worked well enough, and it only took a few quick motions to mark his barmaid with the words of lesser null. He added the word lesser because he didn’t want to drain too much of her life. Depending on how their search went, the White Cloaks could be here for days or even weeks on and off, and he didn’t want to burn any more of the woman’s time than he had to. 

Even when he finished putting away the tools, she looked at the mark like it was a bug, or perhaps a spider ready to bite her. “Don’t touch it,” he said. “Certainly not when it's wet, and even after. If you smear it, it will stop working.”

“What’s it do?” she asked with a voice filled with dread. “Did you just… Is my sou—”

“If I wanted to steal your soul, don’t you think I would have done so the last time you got drunk?” he laughed, but she didn’t think the joke was very funny. “Anyway, all it does is shield you from magic. You’ve never been safer from magic than you are right now. I…”

He started to stand as he heard the sound of someone coming down the stairs, and whispered, “I’ll bring you food later. Just wait, and don’t touch the mark.” Then, Simon moved the shelf back into place and pulled two bottles of wine free just in time for the Unspoken to approach him. 

“You were taking so long that we thought perhaps you might be up to something…” the man said. His tone said he was joking, but his eyes said he wasn’t. 

Simon opted to go with the former and answered, “Just looking for the perfect wine for dinner. You’re welcome to search down here if you don’t believe me, but I’m not going to make your commander wait any longer than I already have.”

With that, Simon turned around like a man with nothing to hide while his heart hammered in his chest, and a few seconds later, the other man followed him. That was a victory, but he didn’t breathe a sigh of relief just yet. He had a long night ahead of him with all of this. 

Fortunately, he was not expected to provide many answers. He was, after all, an innkeeper, not a suspect, and he knew from experiments with the mirror that his aura was a perfectly acceptable pale white. Dangerous as they were, these witchhunters had no quarrel with him. So, he spent the night playing obsequious host and listening in where he could. Still, what he learned was not definitive either way, between bites of food and calls for more ale. 

She was a runaway. He’d guessed that correctly, but from another woman who these men had accused of witchcraft. A few lifetimes ago, he would have dismissed that as pure ignorance, but now he had no way of knowing without examining the evidence closer, and that wasn’t available. 

It wasn’t until the meal was finished, and half the men were close to drunk, that they finally went upstairs to the room that Simon assured them belonged to her and tried their blessed artifact, which was nothing more than a disguised version of Simon’s dousing rods. The incident didn’t make him think of his dousing rod, though. It made him think of the healing relics he’d been using for the last couple of lives. 

While they didn’t use any artifact for that exact purpose, he’d probably gotten the idea from them on some level. He certainly used the better version of the magical swords they used most of the time. Still, it was interesting to watch them try to divine the location of someone with magic. 

For all the time I spent with them, I barely know how they work at all, do I? He asked himself as they repeated the ritual again and again without result, as their frustration mounted. 

“Does that mean she’s dead?” he asked finally. 

“Death is one possibility," one of the warriors admitted before his commander added, “But magical trickery is far more likely. Come, if we cannot find her, we will find the horse she rode off on. Show us to the stables.”

Simon hid his smile as he took them outside and showed them the stall his horse was usually in. He complained bitterly about the loss, but really, he was elated that he’d anticipated their moves so easily. That’s what happens when you spend a decade studying divination magic, he gloated silently. 

All of the men took off within the hour, but by morning, they’d returned. They returned Simon’s horse, for which he thanked them with a fresh keg of beer, but they found nothing else to show where Aranna might have gone. 

They weren’t satisfied with just that, though, and came back time and again searching for more clues. Each time they did, though, they found the same dead ends. The rumors said she’d left, and the magic they unwittingly used said that she couldn’t be found, and all the while Simon polished tankards and offered to help wherever he could, the one they looked for hid safely in the basement below. 

He wasn’t able to get down to visit her for almost two full days that first time. He felt bad about that and was sure the poor woman was starving, but there was nothing he could do when he was being watched so closely. 

Simon wasn’t able to get answers out of her on that short break, nor on any of those that followed for the next week or so. As tense as his time was dealing with the men, he had to remind himself that her time was worse. I’m not the one hiding down in the dark like a rat, he told himself whenever he grew annoyed with the charade. 

He reapplied the mark of nullification twice, just to make sure that it was still clear and readable despite how dirty his barmaid was getting, but she was never as fearful as that first time. She didn’t ask how it was he knew magic either, or if he was going to sell her out again. She obviously understood that if he was going to sell her out, he would have done it that first night.

So, no matter how many times he came down to bring her food and water and take away the bucket that served as her chamber pot, she endured, first with a sort of silent exhaustion, and later with something more akin to a bored stoicism. He waited until the Whitecloaks had been gone for three days before he told her it was safe to come out, but even then, it was in the middle of the night, and there was no way she was returning to work any time soon. 

“I should flee south again, while I still can,” she insisted as she stood there wobbly, but Simon forbade it. 

“Nonsense,” he told her. “We’re going to do two things. First, we’ll sneak you up to my room for the next month or two, until we’re sure they’re totally gone, and while you’re there, you can tell me why they wanted you so bad and who Esmella is, or at least was, and what she’s got to do with you.”

Aranna seemed startled that he knew that name, but she didn’t say anything. Instead, she merely nodded and took his hand as she left the basement for the first time in a week. 

Ch. 355 - Backstory

The common room wasn’t empty when Simon and Aranna slunk through it toward the stairs, but none of the snoring men would ever remember their passing. He’d handed out a few rounds of free drinks to celebrate the Whitecloak’s departure to make sure of that. The free men and women of the world might respect them, or even fear them, but they had little more love for the Witchhunters than they did for witches because of how heavy-handed they could be. 

None of that mattered now. All that mattered was this time, at least they’d been foiled. 

Simon smuggled her up to the third floor, where his rooms were laid out, and then, when they were inside, he locked the door. He didn’t think anyone was spying on him, but he opted not to light any lanterns, just to be sure. 

“First, you have to understand—” she started to say, but Simon stopped her. 

“I want answers more than you know. I have my own very personal reason to hate witches, but that can wait,” he told her as he gestured to a now slightly cold meal he’d prepared for her a little while ago. “Right now, we need to get you fed and bathed. Then when you’re clean, I’ll… well, I’ve got something to replace that mark of yours. So you can put that on and then get some sleep. Your story can wait for the morning.”

She didn’t even try to argue with Simon, though whether that was because of hunger or her reluctance to tell him the truth, he couldn’t say. While she ate, he fetched two pails of water and some clean clothes from her room. She had to make do with cold water this time, but that was what it was. 

While she bathed, he snagged some spare bedding, and when she was decent, he helped her put on a small choker. It was nothing but a simple bronze disk on a long leather thong, but it had a good mark of lesser nullification carved on one side of it, and it would keep the vultures at bay for now. He still didn’t like the idea of long-term exposure like this. Depending on how finely the runes were carved, she might still lose half a year of her life every decade, but for at least another week or two, it made sense. 

Once she had that on, and he’d explained it to her, he started to make a bed on the floor. Aranna helped him, but when she tried to get into it, he shook his head. “Nonsense. You've slept in a closet for over a week. You’re taking the big bed, at least for tonight.”

She tried to argue, but Simon wouldn’t hear of it, and in the end, all she could do was thank him before she was out like a light. Simon stayed up longer, not because he feared her or because the floor was uncomfortable; he’d spent decades sleeping on rocky ground at this point. It was because deep down he worried that the Unspoken would be back. 

Eventually, he fell asleep, and in the morning, he woke up to the smells of breakfast, not burning buildings, so he decided they were good. Aranna made noises about going down to help, but Simon shut that right down. “In a month, if we’ve heard nothing, we can think about it,” he said, “but even then we’ll have to make you some kind of disguise. I don’t think you’ll be safe here for a long time.” 

“Then maybe I should just go,” she protested. 

“If I thought you’d be safer out there than in here with me, I’d send you off right now with a fresh horse and a sack of silver,” Simon explained, “But here I can… Let’s say I’m very resourceful.”

“I’m beginning to see that,” she agreed glumly. 

Simon locked his door behind him when he left. He rarely did that, but right now it paid to be safe rather than sorry, and though he didn’t have any regulars likely to be spies, the thought wouldn’t leave him. Eventually, sometime after lunch, he wondered if the tricky bastards might have left some kind of spy device behind. He thought it might just be his paranoia getting to him, but he still had Leon sweep and clean every room in the place and keep an eye out for anything unusual, whatever that meant. 

They wouldn’t think of it as a magical scrying device, though, would they? He thought, annoyed by the hypocrisy of the organization. They didn’t use magic, only they did, denibly. 

He spent the afternoon on autopilot, tending bar and taking care of patrons while he ignored Bessa’s worried looks and contemplated whether or not the best way to take down the white cloaks was just to tell them they were all using magic, just in ways that didn’t screw up their sight. 

The evening, when he left the common room in Bessa’s capable hands, he went back upstairs with an extra bowl of stew, and after she wolfed it down, the story started to come out, but at least until she finished the bread he’d brought up with him, it came out in pieces smaller than the mouthfuls she was taking. 

“I don’t come from Abresse,” she explained, “But then you already knew that.”

Simon nodded slowly as her tale came together. She was from a small country across the Strait. She wasn’t exactly sure which one, either Enoral or Bhenland. They were next to each other and their people, and even their languages were similar, so it was hard to say. What she could say was that she’d been sold into slavery with the rest of her family in the markets of Abresse, but they’d been parceled out to different owners before she was old enough to remember more than her mother's eyes. 

Once upon a time, that would have broken Simon’s heart. Now it merely saddened him, which was proof that he’d become too jaded if anything. He wanted his heart to break in moments like this, but he’d lived too long for that. Now he merely thought about how to solve the problem, and how they might use divination to track down her parents if they still lived. 

If my sight worked, I’d know already, he told himself as he focused on his tavern maid’s words, not mystical solutions. 

The sad story didn’t end there. Those opening chapters were just the beginning. Aranna was given a hard life that grew only harder as she grew into a beautiful woman. She tried to run away more than once, but she was always dragged back. 

Another reason not to let divination become more common, Simon noted. 

It was only when she found the witch Esmella that that particular horrible chapter in her life ended and a new one started. “You have to understand,” she explained. “She was an ugly old crone, and she made me act as bait for the men that… Well, the men she sacrificed to power her spells. That was the worst part. Not the luring them, that felt bad, but she made me watch the way she drained them, and told me… Well, if I brought her enough men, she promised to free me and help me find my family, but if I failed… Then I’d replace them.”

“You must think I’m awful, don’t you?” she asked. “You must wish you’d turned me over to the witch hunters now.”

The only response Simon could muster to that horrid tale was to hug the barmaid, which completely took her off guard. “You’ve done terrible things,” he agreed after she relaxed in his arms. That wasn’t to rub salt in her wounds, though. He just needed to start off with what she expected to hear. “But you took no pleasure in it, and you only did what you had to do to survive. I can’t change any of that, but I… No, we can focus on making sure you have a better future.”

She started to cry then. First, she merely wept, but after a few seconds, the sobs racked her body. Simon gave it a few minutes to let those bottled-up emotions out. Then he got her a handkerchief so she could clean up. Only then did he start in on questions in earnest. 

It wasn’t quite an interrogation, but it was close. He bombarded her with questions, follow-ups, and clarifications, making her repeat her answers several times. He felt sure that she must have thought she was lying to him, but it wasn’t that at all; he was just trying to see the big picture through the ideas of someone who didn’t know what was important. 

First, he asked about the way she managed to escape without being cursed or killed in the process, but that was the topic he was least interested in. She slipped away the night that the whitecloaks attacked her former mistress. She didn’t see anything that happened after that. 

“I lived in fear for weeks that she’d escaped justice and would rip out my soul like she did with the men she entertained,” Aranna confessed. “I still dream about it sometimes.”

Since Simon had heard more about the event from the white cloaks in his common room, he switched the topics to what really mattered to him. How did she cast her spells? What were her rituals like? Do you bear a witch’s mark?

As it turned out, she didn’t. She even offered to let him search her body when he was skeptical, but he knew that those could be internal as well as on the skin, so he demurred for now at least, preferring to focus on the dark and loathsome rituals that the witch conducted. 

She performed her evils in the outskirts of Abresse, where Esmella worked under the guise of a madam. She had a few other women as guests who might have been a part of her coven, Aranna wasn’t sure. What she was sure of was that most of the women who worked for her were actual prostitutes, and only a few girls like her lured sacrificial victims. It was an ugly story. 

“She said we had dark souls,” Aranna said at one point, “But she never explained it. Do you know what that means? Am I born to be an evil person?”

“You aren’t,” Simon assured her as he took a moment to process some of the details from the ritual sacrifice of the witch’s victims. It was nothing at all like the witches of Charia. They sipped at the soul for months or years, but Esmella? She devoured the lives of men whole in minutes in a ritual that was as gratuitous as it was perverse. 

He shook his head to clear it as his mind lingered on some of the darker details his barmaid had shared. “You weren’t born to evil,” he assured her. “Everything I’ve seen in you tells me you’re a good woman, but the color of your soul.. Well, that’s mostly the quality of your life, and it sounds like you had a pretty awful childhood.”

The two of them talked late into the night, and on many of the nights that followed. While those discussions started as one-way interrogations, they eventually became two-way discussions. After he had her draw all of the magic symbols she could remember, she started to press him on certain topics as well. How did he know magic? Was he a warlock? Did he consort with warlocks? Simon told her the truth, but not all of it. He trusted her that much; for better or worse, their fates were bound together on this run.

No one could handle the truth of his existence anymore. He barely could at this point. He already had too many lives he remembered only by reading about them in his own hand, so he’d be hard pressed to expect anyone else to keep everything straight. For now, it was enough that he knew a fair bit of magic, and that he wanted to help her, and everyone else if he could. 

Ch. 356 - A Peaceful Interlude

For the next few days, everyone was on edge. Simon’s maid especially feared that they’d be caught and punished. She argued several nights running, “We could turn ourselves in! If we come clean, I’m sure those witch hunters will go easy on us.”

Only repeatedly reminding her that they’d burn Aranna at the stake, and even then, only after torturing her, kept Bessa calm. Still, after a week, even she started to come down. Leo, to his credit, never flinched; Simon was pretty sure the boy would jump off the cliff and into the Sea if Simon told him it was the right thing to do.

Even after the immediate danger passed, though, Aranna didn’t leave his room for weeks. The only change in their circumstances was that after a week, he stopped sleeping on the floor at her insistence and moved to the bed with Aranna. 

“It will be getting cold, soon, and you can’t sleep on the floor all winter,” she explained, eventually making him relent. Bessa and Leon already thought they were sleeping together despite Simon’s insistence to the contrary, so it didn’t really change anything. 

Even after that change, though, things didn’t lead to sex, which was strange. He wasn’t so old in this body. He wasn’t even forty yet, and his barmaid was more than attractive, but her own dark history had obviously killed whatever sex drive she might have once had, and the only time the two of them so much as flirted was when drinking was involved. 

Still, if he forced the issue, she’d made it clear that she wouldn’t resist him. “I owe you my life,” she said on more than one occasion. “If there’s any way I can repay you… Anything you want, it’s yours for the taking.”

Just hearing those words made Simon feel dirty, but it was also striking that he didn’t act on them. He was no saint. At least, once upon a time, he wasn’t. He’d become attracted to Freya at first almost solely because of their forced closeness; that such a physical relationship had eventually evolved into love was relevant. 

Simon considered the fact that he wasn’t falling into the same pattern here, with a woman that might have been even more beautiful and interesting, and he often lay awake, listening to the sound of his breathing as he thought about it. 

Is this clarity, or maturity, he wondered. It was his most common thought besides the fact that a lot of guys trapped in the Pit probably just had sex with whoever they could, as often as they could. He’d certainly been that guy on some level at the start of this, but when had he changed exactly?

It was hard to say, but if he had to put a specific moment on it, it would have probably been his most recent tryst with Elthena. Previous relationships or not, I shouldn’t have done that, he chastised himself every time it came to mind.

Still, eventually lying in bed every night with a beautiful woman became normal, and in the spring, when they returned to their own rooms, it felt strange to sleep alone. By then, they’d decided that they’d been more than careful enough, and after a month without her pendant, Aranna returned to work. 

However, she did so with a new look. Before she returned to the world of the living, they decided it was best to disguise her, just in case. It would have taken only a word to do so, but Simon resisted the urge. Instead, they cut her hair shorter, and used wood ash lye and tallow to bleach it, and wrapped her breasts to appear slightly less feminine. 

By the time they were done, she was a new woman, and Leon barely recognized her.

Their patrons didn’t seem as taken with Pelona as they had been with Aranna, which was the pseudonym she chose to go by, but Simon promised that she could become the woman she’d been before and show the full flower of her beauty again in a year or two when they were in the clear. 

“I don’t know,” she said with a smile. “Aranna had a hard life; perhaps Pelona will be happier.”

In the year that followed, the Unspoken returned only once, and even then, they were only passing through and didn’t so much as give their surprised barmaid a second glance. They didn’t say what they were in such a hurry for, and when they were well and drunk, they only hinted that their message was an urgent one. 

Secret messages piqued Simon’s curiosity, but aside from alcohol and amiable conversation, he made no attempt to pry the information free from the white cloak. He had other things to do this life.

It wasn’t until that summer, when he almost got heat stroke loading beer barrels into a wagon on one blazing summer's day, that he had his first brush with his visions again. There, under the midday sun, he looked at the small brewery and saw not just the white glow of the brewer and his sons helping him, but the darker glow at the edge of the building. 

Complaining of weakness, he took a break and got some water, and on the way back from the well, he took note of the small family graveyard back there, as well as the two unmarked graves lying next to the gray glowing markers. 

I wonder what happened there? Simon asked himself as he sat under a tree. He thought about asking, but based on how nervous the man he had his dealings with got when he lingered in the area, Simon decided against it. It was obviously some skeleton in the closet of this family, but it was just as obvious that Mr. Annken, the brewer, was a good man, and Simon felt no need to pull this particular thread on the sweater of the world. 

It was a fleeting thing that went away as soon as the feeling that he was about to faint did, but it was promising nonetheless. That fall, he fasted several times in an attempt to repeat the experience, but that didn’t happen until the winter.

By then, he'd finished the small outbuilding that he and Leon had been working on, on and off throughout the year. He’d originally intended to make a smokehouse so that he could improve the quality of their menu, but he’d finished it as a sort of sauna instead.

“Next year we’ll see about getting a big tub installed, and maybe even expand it, to make a proper bathhouse,” he told his employees and any guests that cared. Warm baths were hard to find, and it would be a great way for the Wayfairer to make a little money, even if some quick math said it would nearly double the amount of firewood they’d have to chop every winter. 

Still, for now, he didn’t worry about that. For now, Simon focused solely on trying to make the little room so hot he could barely stand it, as he sought the same glimpse of enlightenment he’d felt only a few months before. 

He spent many winter nights alternating between the thick scalding steam and the frozen embrace of a nearby snow bank that winter. Aranna or Bessa joined him rarely, but often as not, Leon accompanied him, but Simon told him they were doing it for health reasons, not anything mystical. 

The closest he came to mysticism with the boy was in getting him to ponder imponderable questions so that Simon could sit there in silence and think. What song does a bird sing when no one is around to hear it? If a witch casts a spell that kills you before you are ever born, would you know? If a priest saves a murderer who goes on to kill more people, did he commit an act of good or evil?

None of the questions was particularly original. Leon didn’t know that, though. He was illiterate, and despite Simon’s efforts to get him interested in learning, he showed no real interest in the subject. He was clever enough. 

He could do simple sums and figure out most tasks without help, but he saw no value in staring at pages full of symbols. So, even though Simon readily admitted to learning most of the things he knew from others, the boy would just respond and say something like, “So do I! I don’t need to learn how to read books when I can just learn everything from you instead.”

That made Simon laugh. The boy would obey him in all things, but he reserved all his curiosity for practical things. It was disappointing in some way, but then it was hardly the first time he’d had children in his life who were reluctant to learn such valuable skills. 

He thought about forcing the issue on more than one occasion, but there really wasn’t a point. Besides the few books that Simon owned, the closest library was in Abresse. The trade city was overflowing with books, but he would probably never be able to afford them. Instead, Simon tried to get the boy to pick a profession so that he could find Leon an apprenticeship before he was too old for one. 

Still, despite those distractions, he made progress. He could feel it, even if he couldn’t see it most nights. On rare occasions, he would see a faint glow around Leon. That was the other reason he let the boy tag along. Because he made the perfect target for observation as Simon’s senses began to sharpen. 

The goodness in the lad shone like a lamp, and the shadows of his traumatic experiences weren’t even visible at first. Still, Simon eventually teased those out as well. The effect wasn’t long-lasting. Most nights, it would disappear as soon as he gave anything deep thought or stepped outside. 

One night, though, when he lay down in a nearby snowbank to cool off, the world around him sharpened to a fine point, and for a moment, he saw everything. He could see the threads that connected him to his inn, and some of the people inside it, and as he looked up, he could see how those threads connected him to the stars themselves. 

Fire and Ice. Maybe there was more to the Oracle’s methods than whim, he thought as he lay there in the snow gazing up at the constellations and the way they connected. In that moment, he would have sworn that the destinies of everyone in the world were inscribed in those slender glowing lines, but whatever insight he attempted to glean from the heavens faded along with the heat of his body. By the time he was shivering, it was just a beautiful night, but that wasn’t so bad either. 

There were worse things than beautiful nights, and with that thought in mind, he went back into his makeshift sauna to extinguish the coals and fetch the lantern. His attempt to restore his sight was a marathon, not a sprint, and every achievement like this deserved to be celebrated with a mug or two of beer in his own common room.