Death After Death PLUS 263-266

So, you may have noticed that this week there are four chapters, not three. This is because I screwed up the chapter numbering of DaD (somehow there were 2 chapter 262s), So briefly last week I posted 4 chapters to the DaD PLUS tier. That has been fixed, but i don't want to shortchange them with only 2 new chapters this week, so, everyone gets a bonus chapter (including RR/SH this coming weekend) and we all move slightly closer to the end of the story.

If you read both Chapter 262's last week then chapter 263 will look familiar (I have renumbered it.) So, it's not just DeJa'Vu. Sorry for the mix up!

Ch. 263 - The Crown of the World

Zurari didn’t disappoint, even in those first few minutes. The outermost portion of the city he’d already passed through, even before Simon had reached the main gate, was completely different than the world beyond the fifty-foot-high walls. It had been full of dusty streets along with two and three-story buildings. 

Inside the city proper, the place was cleaner, and the buildings were taller. They were more colorful, too. Every shop and home seemed to be a different hue. As he went along, asking after a good inn near the closest bazaar, there seemed to be some patterns. 

This street favored blues, and that one greens, certain shops like herbalists were usually green, but barbers and doctors tended to prefer red. Only the truly wealthy preferred a more muted palette. Goldsmiths had simple, white-washed homes, and the wealthy, who often dwelt on the top floors of the urban canyons he walked through, did likewise. 

Still, despite those patterns, it was a dizzying experience, and it didn’t get any easier once Simon found a free spot in the yard at the Golden Ass, a small caravansary that hugged the wall near the edge of the gate district. It wasn’t the cheapest place around, but it did have guards patrolling the yard day and night, which made the half a silver a night worthwhile. 

Simon didn’t try to lowball the owner. Instead, he offered a bulk deal and traded a gold coin from his stash for a two-month stay at a discounted rate. This marked him as a man with some wealth, but that still wasn’t enough to make him stand out among this crowd. Even the poorest merchants in this city seemed to be enough to justify two or three bodyguards. 

While pickpockets were a danger, Simon wasn’t afraid, and the first thing he did was go to a bathhouse for a soak and a shave. Once he was clean, he arranged for a small stall in one of the lower traffic areas of one of the lesser bazaars and then set about exploring the area. 

He didn’t even try to enter the inner city walls that marked the line between the common and the powerful. The old city could wait until he’d sold off his inventory and reinvented himself a time or two. His first thought was to fall back on his map-making, but he realized, only belatedly, that he didn’t have enough information about the north to make that feasible. 

The Murani don’t care much about the world beyond their borders, he reminded himself. I’d have to buy maps of my own before I could make something they’d want to buy. 

It was frustrating to think of so many of his usual skills as regional. Many of the herbs he would have used as a healer simply didn’t grow in the area, and none of the surroundings were places he’d ever explored before. Even his swordsmanship wasn’t what it should be, thanks to the unfamiliar shape of his new sword. 

Still, Simon didn’t let any of that bring him down, and from his third day in Zurari, he was hawking his wares by day and listening to strangers trade gossip in tea houses and gambling dens by night. After a few weeks, Simon even found which parlors were the most rigged and often used those to his advantage to make almost as much money as he made selling off his stock on a given day.

It was easy. You just waited for certain pits to let a winner run up, and then when everyone was on his coattails, you switched sides. Simon never won big enough for establishments like the Three-Tailed Cat or Gods’ Grace to single him out for any rough treatment. It was the other men who lost when he won that were most unhappy with him. 

“You’ve stolen our luck!” more than one drunkard declared on nights when they were wiped out while he walked away a little richer. To Simon, the rules of the dice games were complicated, but he wasn’t really playing the game; he was playing the other players, and that was easy enough, given their boisterous culture. 

Turning on the group when the good times were rolling seemed to be unthinkable for them. So, his behavior earned him a couple fistfights when it came time to go home for the night, but fortunately, a good left hook worked the same in Zurari as it did anywhere else he’d lived. 

On quieter nights when he wasn’t feeling up to gambling or he was trying to make himself forgettable after a decent win, he spent his time in tea houses or hookah shops more than bars. In this city, bars seemed to almost always be associated with prostitution, and though he had no interest in the trade normally, the idea that the owner of the establishment owned a number of beautiful slave girls who could be rented out for the right price sickened him and made it impossible to stay for any length of time. 

Increasingly, that was the answer that Simon was leaning toward. A good slave uprising might do wonders toward hobbling the Murani for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, they were a broken group, and he hadn’t figured out how best to put them to use. 

Still, even if he didn’t learn how to unleash the spirit of revolt amongst the servants of the God King, he always seemed to find out something interesting. He almost spit out his drink when someone tried to convince him that there were still giants that lived high in the mountains to the north. 

“I swear on the throne of the God-King himself,” the man insisted, continuing to tell the story of an ill-fated prospecting trip that was almost the end for his cousin’s cousin. 

Simon had chatted with a dragon, so really, he shouldn’t have doubted that such a thing was possible. Still, for some reason, he did. The idea of twenty-foot-tall men living in the mountains struck him as very strange. 

They weren’t the only mythological creatures that were in the north, though. There were the goblins and the orcs he was used to, but there were other strange elemental spirits and even jinn, though fewer people were willing to say that those really existed. Some claimed they were merely devils in disguise. 

Still, the whole thing made for an interesting backdrop, and Simon couldn’t help but plan out expeditions in his head to journey to some of the places that the travelers had discussed, even if he had no plans to go anywhere but south once he figured out how to foment a slave rebellion. 

Simon’s strange little life was comfortable and, indeed, almost unremarkable. He appreciated the pageantry of city life and did his best to ignore the ugliest bits, except for when he was trying to figure out how to exploit them for his own benefit. 

Even when he finally journeyed into the inner city a few times, it didn’t make any waves. There, the bustle of city life was replaced with ritual and opulence. The decor was more somber, and the guards were more numerous. The biggest difference, though, was that there were magi. 

Nobles and the other rich people of the city could be seen throughout the city, especially at night. They were his most frequent customers at the bazaar as his inventory slowly waned. The magi, though, were another story. He never saw them outside the inner city unless they were with a unit of the army. Aside from that, they kept to themselves like they were a religious order more than they were mages. 

The magi were a hard thing to bring up in casual conversation, and people almost always steered away from the topic. Still, he did learn a few things. He learned that they were said to get their power from the blessing of the God King and other things, which he knew not to be true. People also seemed to have some idea of blood magic.

They never said that in so many words, of course. There were euphemisms. “The inner city’s appetite for slaves is bottomless,” a dealer of flesh once told him. “Even the ugly or the infirm are in demand. The Pyramid of Lesser Miracles will give you a decent price for almost anyone as long as they aren’t old.”

Simon had to suppress the urge to shake his head at that. The people of Zurari believed that magic cost nothing. It was used to exercise the God-King’s will. They used magic to build monuments and fight wars. They healed the sick and kept evil at bay. No one knew the terrible cost of all that, and increasingly, Simon felt like that might be the wedge he needed to shatter the unity of the Murani. 

The capital ruled over the hordes with magic, and the people tolerated it because they knew that the Magi were a source for good. If they knew that all of those little miracles were powered by the lives of the disposable, Simon thought the relative harmony of the metropolis might change a bit. 

I haven’t even been mugged since I’ve been here, part of his mind tried to argue, looking for some upside to a society powered by slaughter. 

Still, before he could decide on the best way to do all of that, he saw his first selection. He didn’t know what it was at the time; he had to ask a few of the regulars about it afterward, but no one else was surprised by it and studied the strange procession of masked figures as they whispered to any children they happened to come across like some demented circus. 

“There’s a few of them a year,” Ihmal answered. He was a greengrocer, two decades Simon’s senior. He was a bit dull, but he knew everything about the city, which made it worth Simon’s time to listen to the man complain all and sundry half the time. “Nothing special about that. Maybe they’ll find someone special, maybe they won’t.”

“But how?” Simon asked. “What are they looking for? Are they selecting future Magi, or…”

“My friend, you definitely aren’t from around here,” the older man laughed. “The magi select their own, but talent is not hereditary. They seek it out where they can find it.”

“How?” Simon asked again.

“No one knows,” the man said with a shake of his head before he took another drink of his tea. “They ask young people questions… if they get them right, their families are paid handsomely, and they’re taken away into the old city, and if they are wrong, well… they use magic so you forget what you were even asked in the first place.”

Another secret fucking society, Simon told himself as he fumed silently. Despite the fact that the Magi were pretty much the polar opposite of the Unspoken, somehow, he couldn’t get it out of his head that they were the same thing but inverted and more evil. The magi hid the true nature of magic just like the white cloaks did, they just did it in plain sight. 

Ch. 264 - Heart of the Serpent

Simon spent the next few weeks nibbling around the edges of his discovery, which explained the Murani’s bottomless appetite for slaves in an effort to learn more. It was hard to get a glimpse of anything but the propaganda, and so his efforts to replace his suspicions with facts were slow. 

He tried efforts that were straightforward, as well as those that were more speculative and even magical. At first, he would simply wander around the inner two rings of Zurari, keeping his ears open and, whenever possible, his mouth closed. As that made less and less progress, though, he turned to magical tools at his disposal. 

Some nights, he would meditate, willing his soul to become calm so that he could try to get a sense for the powers that flowed through the city like currents through the water. Those efforts never revealed much insight. That was both because it was hard to find any real stillness in a city this large and because he was also experimenting with magic in an effort to create his own divination spells, and as the oracle had taught him, using magic to change the world made it that much harder to see the world. 

Still, like teleportation, scrying was a sort of magic he definitely needed to invent. At first, he tried using lesser words of distant illusion to try to show him things from other nearby buildings, but the results of those experiments were erratic and inconclusive. After that, he tried using lesser words of connection plan to make a pendulum swing back and forth as he asked it questions. 

If the answer was yes, it would swing forward and back; if it was no, it would swing left and right, and if it was uncertain or maybe, it would swing in circles. Sometimes, that seemed to work extremely well, but other times, it was nearly as inconclusive as his illusion efforts had been. Still, if the question was definite and unambiguous, he would get clear answers. Though each use of the spell was only good for a handful of questions, he learned much in this way. 

“Are the Magi sacrificing slaves on an industrial scale to use them for blood magic?” Yes. 

“Are they using those rituals to keep themselves young?” Yes.

“Are they summoning demons regularly?” Uncertain.

“Have the God King’s Magi summoned at least ten different demons in the last year?” Yes. 

“Have they summoned fifty demons in the last year?” No.

Question by question, answers started to take shape. As a technique, it wasn’t always exact, and sometimes, he tested it with more mundane questions he could verify. He determined that the market he was in would have poor business the following week and that the place he’d been staying wouldn’t be serving roasts next week. 

Both of those turned out to be true, though in neither case did he find out why until it actually happened. The first case was caused by an unseasonable rainstorm, which kept most potential customers in their homes, while the second incident was caused by a kitchen fire that had almost burned the place down one night. Both of those circumstances would have been nice to know, but then, Simon didn’t plan on playing twenty questions with the universe at the cost of blowing several weeks of his life. 

He tried the same techniques on questions with a wider scope, but there, the answers were much more mixed. Anything that had to do with Helades ended up with a maybe for an answer, which was frustrating. 

Questions like “Is Helades telling me the truth about the Pit?” or “Does she want the Murani to conquer the world?” never showed clear, repeatable answers, no matter how hard he focused. Other topics, such as the Pit, provided certain answers, but sometimes they would change from a yes to a no when he repeated them days or weeks later. 

Simon kept notes on all of those things, but as interesting as the technique was, it was the next one he discovered almost by accident that was most promising. One evening, while he was scribbling away and trying to discover why the Magi seemed to like the pyramidal shape so much, he said to the silver mirror he had propped up on his desk, “Show me the Pyramid of Lesser Miracles.”

Simon had meant to say, ‘Show me my notes on the Pyramid of Lesser Miracles,’ but he didn’t, and that slip of the tongue showed him something entirely unexpected. As he looked up, expecting to see the text he’d made about the thing, along with the sketches he’d produced circumspectly from the west plaza, he was surprised to see a fuzzy, distorted image of the massive structure itself. 

For a moment, Simon thought he’d taken a picture of the thing using a mirror. That was certainly something he was capable of doing, but he was fairly sure he hadn’t. He’d been very careful not to use any magic inside the inner city. He had no idea what countermeasures might exist for that. The most he would do was jot down a few quick notes or a sketch while he was pretending to admire the wares in someone’s stand or shop. 

His confusion only deepened when he realized the picture in front of him was moving.  “Wait, what in the hell…” Simon asked as he watched a couple stroll across the picture. “I… Mirror, how are you doing this?”

‘I do not understand the question,’ the mirror answered in glowing blue text across the image in a way that was mostly expected.

“You’re showing me a live image of somewhere,” Simon repeated. “How are you doing that?”

‘I have merely obtained its reflection for you, as requested,’ it typed. 

“I…” Simon’s brain hurt. Did this fucking thing really have this power all along? He asked himself. He supposed he should have guessed, at least after the Oracle used it to show him his own aura. It could obviously display things beyond writing, but a distant location?

“Why is the image blurry?” Simon asked this time. 

‘The reflection is from the large fountain near the structure,’ it answered. ‘The water is quite turbulent, which makes image quality unavoidably poor.’

“S-show me another view,” Simon almost trembling with excitement. “Show me the view from the northern reflecting pool I was at yesterday.”

The image faded away, and almost instantly, a new one appeared. This one was from a different angle, and though it was clearer, it was more fisheye because the mirror was further from the source. 

“Have you always been able to do this?” Simon asked the plain silver mirror incredulously. Realizing the thing would just give him an ‘I don’t know what you mean answer again,’ he quickly followed up with, “Have you always been able to display distant locations? What about other levels? Can you show me those, too?”

‘Without being able to look for you in reflections, how would I ever be able to find you?’ the mirror asked. ‘Other levels, though… even accessible ones, that would be more complicated. I am bound to your location and can only move forward in time when I cannot locate you.’

“I see…” Simon said. To him, that sounded like a lot of words to say no, which meant the answer wasn’t exactly no. It wasn’t a yes, either, though. Still, for now, he didn’t need to see the future. He hadn’t fully explored his present with this new ability, stating that night, though, that was pretty much all he did as he struggled to learn the limits of a tool that had been under his nose this whole time. 

Though Simon still went out every day and pretended to be a merchant, he dropped all of his other lines of research in favor of this one. Each night when he came home, he gave it targets to explore, and he studied them. The first limitation he found was that if it wasn’t a place that he had been near recently, the mirror had a hard time finding it. It could not, for example, show him the south side of the old city or the inside of any of the pyramids because he hadn’t been to any of those places and could not adequately explain their location. 

He could sometimes make it go somewhere it had never gone by jumping from reflection to reflection. That was how he got into his neighbor’s room while he was using the chamber pot. Simon had canceled that view immediately, but still, the man didn’t seem to notice. There were no obvious giveaways that he could see that anything was amiss. 

The next big problem was range. Even if Simon knew exactly where something was and had been there many times before, if it was too far away, the mirror couldn’t find it. While testing showed that it could reach anywhere in the city, he could explain and describe somewhere past that it couldn’t reach anymore. It also couldn’t give him anything approaching an estimate for distance. As dumb as the mirror was, it genuinely didn’t seem to understand distance, which puzzled Simon. Directions like “50 feet from your location” seldom worked, but others like “the carpet monger’s shop with the vibrant red I visited three days ago” did.

The one thing he did figure out was that the quality of the image was entirely dependent on the quality of the reflection. 

Simon was not yet sure how he could use this new ability to his advantage. His first thought had been to spy on rooms he could never enter. He wouldn’t be able to hear anything the people inside might say, of course, but the fact that going somewhere he’d never been was difficult made that unlikely. Likewise, if he could see between levels… even the same spot between two levels, that might help him make a lot of decisions, but that didn’t seem to be possible. 

The only thing he could really say for sure was that image quality was all about the material that he borrowed the reflection of. Water was a poor choice, and moving water was even worse. Silvered mirrors were best, followed by polished metal and pretty much anything else in between after that. 

For weeks of work, it wasn’t exactly a lot of progress. Still, he would have counted it a success if he hadn’t managed to attract the wrong sort of attention. 

At first, no one noticed Simon’s investigations. He was just a merchant selling out the last of his wares and looking to buy new stock. He made sure to play that up quite a bit. He used the mirror to keep tabs on his karma, and he was back in the negative hundred thousand range. That was still a lot, but it was in a normal range, at least as far as Simon could tell.

Now that he was using his mirror more, he tried to use it to check out the auras of other people in the common room and the market squares, and a light glow to a light darkness was pretty typical. He had no way to put an actual number on anyone, but he would bet that most people were slightly positive, in the quarter million range, especially if they were young. Older people were almost always brighter.  

There weren’t a lot of saints or monsters. Well, not at first. He realized that he was being watched when he started to see more and more night black auras in his immediate vicinity. The first one surprised him, the second one concerned him, and the third one, well, by the time he saw the third one, he was fairly sure they were watching him, not the other way around. 

Simon made plans to leave the city the very night he saw two of them together. They might not look like Magi, but he was almost certain that they were. 

Ch. 265 - Wanted

Simon didn’t waste any time once he decided that someone was definitely onto him. These mages had captured Freya, and Simon knew exactly how powerful she’d been. The words from his doppelgänger came back to him immediately in that moment. 

“They won’t let her die for a long time.” his evil twin had whispered.  “Not until they learn her secrets. In that way, she ended up rather like you did, though her cage is a bit nicer than a rotting, bricked-in casket.”

Simon had only recently gotten over that terrible, claustrophobic experience, and he had no desire to repeat it as a lab rat instead of a prisoner. He only even went back to the inn because it would have been stranger for him not to. The truth was that his most important notes were already in the mirror, and while he didn’t want anyone to go through his log books, they were unlikely to find anything of value in his cryptic notes. 

He’d planned to wait for the city to go to sleep, then sneak out and hop the wall to the outer city by dark. From there, he’d steal a horse and then start south before they even realized he wasn’t even sleeping in. That wasn’t the way it turned out, though. In the end, they didn’t even give him an hour. Before, guards swarmed the wagon yard outside and the common room below. He heard the commotion before he’d even finished packing. 

That was enough to make him move to the window of his room and peer out from between the shutters. What he saw annoyed him, but it also gave him hope. He was up against a canny enemy, but not a perfect one. They’d already placed guards on the surrounding rooftops, but those men weren’t even all looking in the right spot.

Whoever had planned this noose had thought ahead, but they were fallible, too. Or at least that’s what they want you to think, Simon told himself before he cast a word of illusion on himself to create the appearance of a heat-shimmered outline. It wasn’t quite enough to make him invisible, but for the next few minutes, it would make it much more difficult to target him and much easier for him to blend in with walls and rooftops, especially if he stood still. 

There wasn’t going to be a lot of standing still, though. Not when he heard the sound of heavy boots thundering up the stairs toward his room. Then he threw open the shutters and used a word of force to propel him out of the window, over a dozen or so men with swords in their hands, and onto the first building on the far side of the caravan yard.

The man he landed close to looked at him in confusion, then raised his bow. Simon didn’t bother to draw his weapon. He couldn’t cover the gap in time. Instead, he used a word of lesser light on the man’s eyes, willing all of the light to be repeled by them, plunging him instantly into a blindness that was as complete as it was temporary. He’d recovered in a few minutes, but by then, Simon would be long gone. 

The man dropped his weapon and clutched his face as he screamed, “My eyes! I’ve been blinded by a Magi! My eyes!”

Simon had been feeling rather good about his decision to spare the man, but he regretted it immediately as he felt dozens of pairs of eyes turn toward him. He didn’t wait for any shouted commands; he just darted across the roof to the other side and used a word of lesser force to cushion his fall when he jumped over the busy street on the far side and landed in an alley. 

At that exact moment, Simon would have given several years of his life to know exactly how they had found him. The Unspoken had sprung the word of nullification on him when he wasn’t ready, and he had no doubt that these pricks had a trick or two up their sleeves that he hadn’t seen before either.

They probably can’t read my mind, he decided as he ran down the alley like a phantom. If they could, they would have known what I was about to do. So either I asked someone the wrong question or one of the spells I used gave me away. Is there a way to detect magic?

Simon didn’t know, but he kind of worried that there was, which meant he should try to use less of it as soon as he shook his tail. He was pretty sure if he’d merely asked the wrong question, he would have been arrested by a guard or two. Mages and a small army meant they were expecting trouble. 

He darted down the long dark alley between buildings and outran the sound of the chaos he left in his wake. Still, eventually, after he made a left and leaped over a beggar, he could hear distant gongs. Someone had sounded the alarm, and the gates were closing. That was a shame because he was so close to one of them, but he was never going to outrun everyone on the ground. 

Instead of trying, he made his way toward the nearest guard tower and ran inside. That was the last place anyone would expect a fugitive to run, but even if he was going to have to fight his way out, it was the only place with easily accessible stairs, and he wasn’t about to try to Superman it over the top of the wall with a word of greater force. It might be fun, but he’d rather save the big guns in case he needed them later. 

Simon unsheathed his vampiric blade even as he started running up the eight-story spiral staircase. He had his scimitar, but he didn’t trust himself with it nearly as much as he did his short, straight blade. 

He met the first guard on the third floor, coming out of a door that led into a tunnel in the wall. He didn’t even bother to stab him. He just grabbed the armored man by the gorget and yanked him down the narrow, winding stairs. While that wasn’t sure to break his neck, the odds were good. They were even better when the guard barely even cried out. 

Simon looked down at his hands and noted that he was still largely swirling and translucent. Up close, he probably looked more like a ghost than anything else. 

That works for me, he decided, slowing down a touch rather than taking a break. Fear is a great edge for moments like this. 

When he reached the top of the wall, he expected another fight, but instead, he found this section of the wall clear. “Aufvarum Barom,” Simon whispered to himself, using a word of minor illusion to reshape his lingering heat shimmer into the plain uniform of the guard he’d just tossed down the stairs. Surely that would be enough to…

Simon's thoughts trailed off as a Magi flicked into existence not thirty feet from him. They can detect magic! His mind screamed. They can teleport, too! Like that asshole doppelganger!

Both of those surprised him, but not so much that he let the other mage beat him to the punch. Even as the other man opened his mouth to cast whatever it was he was going to cast, Simon had already finished speaking, “Vrazig.”

The words for fire and lightning were both two syllables, but fire traveled at the speed of a flamethrower, whereas lightning moved at almost three hundred thousand miles an hour. That was fast. It was certainly fast enough to be an advantage in a tense moment like this. A word of death might move faster, but Simon hadn’t used Gelthic like that before, and he wasn’t about to risk it. Instead, he stopped the other man’s heart and seized his throat even as he leaped over the far side of the wall. 

Simon knew exactly what was going to happen seconds after the other man died, and he didn’t want to be anywhere near that fireball. It detonated on the wall behind him, even as Simon had already fallen four stories toward the street on the far side. 

The eight-story fall would have almost certainly been fatal, except that he used a word of force when he was ten feet above the ground to arrest his momentum, letting him land smooth and almost untroubled. A few people stared at him, but more were still staring up at the wall where the mage had just exploded. From their reaction, Simon could tell that they knew what that meant but not how they felt about it. 

Before anyone could link him to it, though, he was gone. He moved almost at random between streets. His scimitar was out now, and he was doing his best to look menacing. 

His armor would be fading away in the next few minutes, but for as long as it was still convincing, Simon yelled at anyone who walked too near him. “Which way did he go!” 

No one had any idea, of course. They’d heard the explosion, and everyone could see the wall on fire, but none of them had any idea what it was about. “The foreigner!” Simon shouted again. “Which way did he go!”

Simon got a dozen different answers to that, but he ignored them all. Instead, he headed toward the nearest caravanasery and hid out in their stables for a few minutes so that his illusion would wear away entirely; normally, he would have spoken the words of lesser nullification, but this time, that would give away his position all over again, so he had to take it slow despite the urgency of the moment. Then he stole a stranger’s horse and rode out of there like he owned the place. 

The city was an angry beehive now. Men were everywhere, exchanging rumors or searching for the foreigner mage, as many were calling him. Simon didn’t interact with any of them. He just rode directly east as quickly as he could without drawing attention. 

He didn’t really have supplies for a long expedition, which meant he needed to visit a town or a nomad camp first to resupply. That wouldn’t be a problem, of course; he had all the money in the world right now. From where he was right now, he could ride a day or two out, but a week's worth of food, and be back in the desert before the commotion had died down.

Still, something made him hesitate. He was tempted to say that he hadn’t accomplished his aim. If anything, he might have made things slightly worse. If the Magi believed that a foreign mage had moved against them, they were more likely to attack the South sooner rather than later. 

That wasn’t it either, though. It was that all of this had raised more questions than answers. The magi of Zurari could do things he couldn’t begin to understand. They could teleport. They could detect magic. He’d seen them do some interesting things when he’d waged a private war with them for a few months as a vampire, but apparently, demonology was only the tip of the iceberg. 

“I need to know,” he told himself. “There’s too much here to just give up on.” The same was true in Hepollyon, of course, but somehow, learning reasons not to use magic wasn’t nearly as interesting to him as learning more ways to use it, and surprisingly, Simon was okay with that.

Ch. 266 - Cat and Mouse

That Simon got out of the city without another confrontation was a minor miracle in itself. That wasn’t the end of his pursuit, though. Even after he crested the low hills around the city and retreated toward one of the smaller satellite towns that dotted the horizon, he still had to deal with more pursuers. 

The first signs of that were a small group of riders that continued to follow him even after darkness fell. It was like they had a compass that pointed unerringly toward him. He noticed them after he’d resupplied a bit, and though they kept an appropriate distance, it was clear to him that he was being hunted. Even when he set an ambush and made camp in a box canyon, with his stolen horse and a small fire next to a wadded-up cloak that had been made to look like a bedroll, they still rode toward where he was hiding in the nearby brush instead. 

If cleverness won’t work, then it’s time to use brute force instead, Simon decided. 

Simon responded by using a word of greater force to take off the legs of the men charging toward him, as well as their mounts. It was an ugly scene, and the screams of men and horses rang out into the night as bodies were separated from limbs and everyone was maimed. 

Killing them would have been easier, but he wanted answers, and hopefully, this way, he’d be able to leave someone alive to do it. Not even that mayhem stopped whatever mage was in that group from striking back at him. A pillar of fire slammed into the ground a little bit past Simon, followed immediately by a bolt of lightning that arced wildly around him and came even closer to ending him. 

The flames had landed close enough that he’d felt their heat through his clothes, and he smelled the scent of burning hair that was almost, but not completely, masked by the smell of ozone around him. Simon stayed still then to see if they’d follow up or think him dead. He didn’t have to wait long. Though no further spells were tossed toward him, the magi that had lashed out at him perished and then immolated most of the remaining survivors. 

It was quieter after that, but not silent, which meant people yet lived and suffered. I suppose I could have just killed them and then interrogated their spirits, Simon realized belatedly as he tried to decide his next steps. 

He felt stupid for doing that at first, but then he cut himself a little bit of slack. The idea of torturing someone’s soul to force them to answer your questions still freaked him out a bit. As he cautiously approached the carnage, though, he didn’t find any threats. 

When he didn’t find any, he started putting the dying horses out of their misery that hadn’t been killed by the blast. That had to be first because he couldn’t stand the terrible, pathetic sounds they were making. As he went, he noticed that a few of the guards were still alive and thrashing in pain, but only one looked to be unburned, even if his legs were both cut off near the ankle. 

“Tell me how the Magi tracked me, and I will let you live,” Simon promised the other man.

He looked at Simon skeptically and seemed determined to say nothing. So, Simon dragged one of the other dying guards in front of him and then plunged his dagger into the man’s heart, killing him almost immediately as another burst of life energy coursed through Simon. 

Simon made the whole act look like a threat, but really, it was just a mercy killing. He didn’t want to kill, but if he did have to, then he certainly wanted to do it cleanly. For a while, he’d tried to be mindful of the Oracle’s teaching and avoid violence and magic, but there was no place for such a mindset when dealing with the Murani.

The guard didn’t talk. Not after the second or even the third member of his group was reduced to a corpse. When Simon slit the fourth dying man’s throat and flung him at the feet of the tight-lipped man, he finally said, “You won’t spare me.”

“I will,” Simon said, “I’ll even reattach your feet if you like. You have information I need, and I’m willing to trade for it.”

While Simon had no idea if a couple words of healing would be enough to ever let the man walk again, he was certainly willing to give it a shot. That turned out to be enough to make the man speak. 

“Heal my legs, and I will tell you all I know,” he said finally.

Simon spent a few minutes doing just that. First, he cast a lesser light spell so he could see what he was doing. Then, with great care, he lined up the separated limbs and spoke a word to join them once more. 

When he cast the spells, he took great care to line up the bones, arteries, and veins. In his imagination, he also tied the muscles and nerves together as clearly as he could possibly visualize them as well. However, given his limited knowledge of anatomy, he had no way of knowing if that would be enough. It wasn’t until he saw the man actually wiggle his toes that he pronounced his first magical limb surgery to be successful. 

“Alright,” he said finally as he backed away from the guard. “Tell me how you’re following me.”

The man’s scale mail had been sliced away like he was wearing a pair of high water pants now, but there was every chance he might actually walk again. That, and the fact that he hadn’t reached for his sword once during all of this, were positive signs to Simon. 

“The Magi’s talisman,” the man answered. “It is in his left hand, I think, or on the ground nearby. It glows when it points toward you.”

“Will other groups have them?” Simon asked. “How do they work?”

“I know not the secrets of magecraft,” the warrior answered as he got shakily to his feet. “But I do know that every group they send to hunt you down will have something similar, and when they find you, they will make you pay for every magi you murdered.”

Not every guardsman or every Murani life, but every Magi, Simon thought to himself as he smashed the mage’s charred fist open in search of the talisman. How very telling. 

The talisman that the man mentioned was a vial wrapped in a golden wire and sealed in wax. It appeared to be made to look like a serpent, with the head drowned in wax and the body wrapped around the glass. It was a simple bauble that Simon would have bet money had no magic about it, and yet, when he picked it up, it started to glow faintly. 

Simon turned it in his hand, and as the head of the snake faced away from him, it stopped glowing again. “Interesting,” he said to himself. “But how does it work?”

He would take it apart later, but for now, it was enough to know that whoever was following him truly did have a way to track him. Simon looked up from the thing and back to the guard, who was trying to walk with shaky steps. 

“This can detect me from any distance, then?” Simon asked. “Do they work indefinitely?”

“I told you that I know nothing of magecraft,” the man answered. “You have traded me my feet for that talisman, and now we are done.”

“We’re done when I know everything you know,” Simon countered. “Now tell me, what did the Magi say about this thing? Even if you don’t know how it works, you surely know how the man used it.”

“I…” the guard hesitated as he almost tripped. 

“When we were too far away, he complained that the glow was dim,” the man confessed. “And he always made us hurry. He said that sooner or later, your scent would be lost.”

“Scent?” Simon said to himself as he looked at the vial quizzically. 

He cast a lesser light spell again, but this time, he did it to light up the vial. Inside, he saw a little scrap of cloth. It was brown and unremarkable, but suddenly, everything clicked into place for him. That had to be a piece from one of the garments that he’d left behind. 

“Son of a bitch,” Simon said to himself. “Magical bloodhounds.”

For a moment, his mind raced as he tried to figure out how to handle this, but he forced himself not to worry. Instead of panicking, he shook his head to clear it and then said, “I’m done with you. You are free to go.”

“Go where?” the man laughed, “My feet will not carry me to the next camp or village, and the only horse left alive is your own.”

“Perhaps you will walk better after some rest and a new pair of boots to stiffen your ankles,” Simon suggested as he started to go through the Magi’s smoldering robes and saddlebags in search of anything useful. 

He found what might have been a journal and a few other magic trinkets that had been destroyed by the blast. He left those behind. Instead, he cut off the man’s charred hand and took it with him so that he could have a conversation about tracking magic once he’d shaken his tail. 

That was distasteful, too, but not as distasteful as having to put the horses down. That surprised Simon, and he pondered what that said about him as he walked back toward his camp, leaving the sole survivor behind to question his life choices. 

Simon quickly gathered his things. If these magic trinkets had a range, then he was going to do his best to get outside of it. Then, he could spend a few weeks or a few months lying low and waiting for his pursuit to end. Unfortunately, that meant he couldn’t exactly head straight south, which had been his plan. The last thing he wanted the Magi to do was to reach the conclusion that he really was a foreigner and trigger the very war he sought to avoid by inciting a revolution. 

After Simon finished packing up his camp, he tossed the last of his firewood on the embers, making them flare to life once more. That better revealed the grisly scene he’d caused not so far away, but more importantly, it let him see that the man he’d just waited a few months of his life healing looked to be very seriously considering seppuku.

“Hey,” Simon called out in annoyance as he led his horse in that general direction. “Don’t do that! I just saved you. I didn’t do that so you could kill yourself.”

“What is the point?” the man asked. “When the magi find me, they will find out what I’ve done, and they will kill me.”

“Maybe,” Simon answered, as he paused to pick out a horned shortbow that was still in good shape, and two quivers of arrows from one of the deadmen. “Or maybe you’ll go over there, sit down by that nice warm fire, and think up a good lie to tell them. Paint yourself as a hero. Tell them that your horse crushed your ankles when you fell. Maybe they’ll give you a medal.”

“You do not know the Magi, stranger,” the man said. “Pray that you never do.” The wounded guard still said his sword, but he looked less sure of himself now, which was all Simon could ask for.

Simon smiled at that, then with a shrug, he walked on. He made sure to ride east as he left the light of his fire, should the man or his spirit be questioned in the aftermath of this. Then, when he was far enough away that he doubted even his mount’s hooves could be heard in the grasslands, he turned and started north. According to the stories that Simon had heard, it was the wildest and most untamed part of the territory, which made it the perfect place to lay low.