Death After Death

Chapter 399 - More To Tell

Simon should have been in a hurry to make his way back to the Broken Tower after his third week away. He should have been in a hurry to find out Varten’s fate. When he left, that had certainly been the plan, but his discovery distracted him entirely. Not only was he trying to understand all of this new material, but he was using some of it as a Rosetta Stone to try to better understand older material that he’d never fully solved, and as soon as he returned, he’d have to give that up for a long time.

Oh, there was a chance they’d send him back out without an apprentice, but he thought it far more likely he’d be without privacy for a good long time. Which is probably half the point of having squires, he thought with a sigh. Everyone has to watch each other at all times.

Still, by the time he returned, he’d gotten it mostly out of his system. He’d stashed the copper scroll, the book that explained its workings, and the bone fragment of the warlock who made it in a small chest, and buried that chest near a very rural crossroads so he could retrieve it in his next life, and he was returning to the whitecloaks with the less dangerous documents they likely already had access to.

Just because he was abandoning those things didn’t mean he was done researching, though; everything had gone into his mirror, along with a few crude designs and ideas of his own. Discovering magic of such complexity always woke up something inside of Simon. It grabbed him by the chestplate and screamed, “Drop everything else you’re doing and work on this instead!”

He was tempted too. Despite everything he’d done to worm his way into the order, all he wanted to do was run off into the hills, find a small community to help, and dig deeper into the mystery. Instead of doing that, though, he chastised himself for the urge.

“You’re here to learn everything the order has to teach, better prepare yourself to fight the witch hunters that might come for you in the future,” he reminded himself. “Plus, if you do it right, you won’t have to do it again.”

That was a strong motivator too, and kept him from straying. He managed to return to the Broken Tower before the month had fully passed, and after handing a short and highly edited summary of what he’d done to the man on watch in a sealed scroll, he bathed himself with cold water and harsh soap, and then knelt in prayer until someone came for him.

This time, he wasn’t forced to wait overnight. Sometime, just before dinner, a young messenger came for him. For a moment, Simon thought it might be Varten, but it was just another boy his age. That’s the role he’ll probably be relegated to, if he’s deemed unworthy, Simon thought, as he was led toward whatever room it was that held Master Harrin today.

This time, he was taken to the second door on the left, and while Simon hadn’t expected their talk to be about Varten, he also hadn’t expected it to be this short either. However, after verifying a few particulars, like the lack of ghosts, the state of the shrine, and the fact that Simon was sure the problem was taken care of, he was summarily dismissed without talking about any of the details in his report.

“Aren’t we going to talk about the warlock?” Simon asked.

“We are not,” Master Harrin corrected him. “That is a conversation for you and the Grand Master of our order.”

“What? Why?” Simon countered, adding a note of panic that wasn’t entirely faked to his voice. “What did I do wrong?”

“Wrong? Nothing, as I can see. You found and eliminated an unholy parasite preying on the weak. You are to be commended for that,” the gruff master said, “But your scroll contained an item of… interest for our lord, and he wishes to discuss it with you privately. It’s the name you mentioned you see. I will not repeat such a foul word, but it is older than you know.”

Jranesh Karell. That took him by surprise.

“Older than I know?” Simon asked, hoping for more.

“I’ll let him explain that to you,” the master answered with a dismissive gesture. “The acolyte will show you to his hall.”

Simon tried to stay calm at that, but behind his genuine expression of slight bewilderment, his mind was racing. That last time he’d interacted with the Grandmaster of the Unspoken, he’d tried to kill him. More importantly, he’d failed to kill him because the man had used words of power to heal himself.

That contradiction had lain at the back of his mind this whole time, but he’d always thought it had been better to avoid it. Before he’d known about the sight, the contradiction hadn’t mattered. It might have just been an act of desperation by a man who knew things he shouldn’t know, he told himself as he walked behind the acolyte to his next stop, but that didn’t ring true with Simon. His intuition told him that the man in charge of the witch hunters was a mage himself.

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Why did he think about that? More than anything, it was the man’s interest in the warlock he’d just slain. Something made him feel like the two men were connected. He couldn’t know that, of course, but the strangeness of the warlock living in other people’s bodies haunted him still.

For most of the trip, there Simon sweated bullets, wondering if he should find some excuse to bail. The Grandmaster could ask any number of questions and strip away his well-made disguise. He could literally see right through him.

Except, he can’t, can he? He realized at the last moment. If his theory was right, if the Grandmaster really was using magic against the rules of the Whitecloaks, he wouldn’t be able to see anything. The Oracle had practically said as much.

So how does that work? He wondered. How is he in the position he’s in if he can’t see the same truths as everyone else? How can he hide among the faithful with a dark aura?

That last thought was a logical fallacy, brought on by force of habit, and he corrected himself immediately. One could be a magic user without staining one's soul. It was evil deeds that did that, mundane or magical, along with despair.

He entered the Spartan room of the Grandmaster and bowed, completely conflicted about what would happen next. On the one hand, his read on the situation might be completely off. He might be facing someone who’d spent decades clarifying their vision and would be able to see right through him. On the other hand, he might be facing an imposter who was actually a powerful magic wielder who would kill Simon if his secret was revealed.

There was really only one way to know, and that was to test him, so he tried that. It started with introductions when Simon told the master of their order that his name was Enis. He’d lived under that name for this whole life now. He’d spent years and other lifetimes calling himself Enis, but still, it wasn’t quite true.

The man didn’t bat an eye and instead asked, “I came across an old name… a very old name in your report. One that I have trouble believing. No new recruit, no matter how special, could defeat such a foe. Tell me, where did you first hear the name?”

“I’ve never heard it,” Simon answered. “I found it written in his own hand, in the house where I found him.”

The first two parts were true, but the last one was the minorest of falsehoods, one he could easily explain away. Still, it was the first part that the Grandmaster made him explain several times, as if he doubted him. He never once asked Simon for a description of the warlock, which told Simon that the Grandmaster knew he changed bodies. He asked about the fight, though, and about the illusion, and Simon told him the truth in all those things, while he mixed in a few lies throughout, probing for a reaction.

“I broke into the Widower’s house,” he explained, wondering if that misstep would get called out, but again and again, as long as what he said was credible, the Grandmaster didn’t accuse him of lying; he simply didn’t believe that anyone could kill the man.

“I don’t think you understand,” he explained when Simon was done. “The warlock… if such a word can even encompass a demon like Jranesh Karell, doesn’t die when you kill him. He simply leaps to a new body to start the process all over again.”

“I’m not so sure he got away this time,” Simon answered. This time, he explained the phylacteries and the way they glowed, swirling with magic and evil.

“I believe it is those wicked vessels that powered his dark crimes,” Simon said. By this point, the Grandmaster showed no signs that he could actually see the truth, so Simon lied flagrantly, which was good because his prepared story was rather far from what actually happened. “But before I could examine them, while I still struggled with the warlock and his broken wand, the headman opened the windows, flooding the hovel with light and then… well, he went limp all at once, like the spirit had left his body. We still burned him, of course, to be sure, but—”

“Truly?” the old man leaned forward then. “You struck down his apparatus while he still breathed?” He was taken aback by this.

Alright, I don’t know who the Grandmaster really is. He might not have the sight, but he certainly knew who this warlock was. Simon reflected with a neutral expression. What is going on?

“Is it permissible for me to ask why this man was so important to us? To you?” Simon asked.

“He is… was, a dark chapter in our history,” the Grandmaster explained. “He was a devious malefactor of the worst order and responsible for the deaths of numerous brothers over the decades. Terrible foes are not uncommon in our line of work, of course, but rare are those who return to life to cause new problems each time you strike them down.”

The man didn’t tell a single lie in that explanation, or in any of the stories that followed, but he seemed to talk around certain points to avoid lying, which struck Simon as unusual.

Their conversation went on for a while after that, but no new ground was covered. He thanked Simon for his good work and promised to send men to retrieve the ashes of the mage just in case he tried to rise from the dead all over again.

To Simon, that statement reeked of necromantic intent, but he said nothing. There's a reason I didn't mark that grave, he reminded himself. I just hope it's been long enough that no one can find it.

Simon could see the greens of happiness and the blues of satisfaction swirling in the aura of the Grandmaster. Despite his stone-carved face, his emotions were easy to read in his soul, which wasn’t nearly as bright as Simon would have assumed, even though it wasn’t exactly a cause for suspicion here. Many of the Unspoken had stained souls that were outshone by their fine white cloaks.

Still, even as Simon thanked the man for his time and retreated from the hall, a number of things went through his mind. The first was that he needed to do something to shield his soul sooner rather than later, and the second was that he needed to understand the real agenda here. While the footsoldiers might believe that they were here to kill mages of every stripe, the very top of the pyramid clearly believed something else.