Death After Death

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I-I was searching for all the monsters of the region so that I might present my Lord with—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simon paused, considering his options, before saying, “I may not know your names or what you’re after, but I know you’re the ones purging the books I’ve been searching through.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They stayed quiet, so Simon explained his life. This time, he gave his name as Ennis. It was the name of a couple people he’d met and a common enough name for the region. Anywhere he was asked about would remember an Ennis or three, and if he was lucky, one of them would be from a family who’d been wiped out during a plague. He definitely needed a plague, too, along with as much suffering as he could heap on his fictional self.

These men were under the false impression the dark auras came from magic use, but thanks to his conversations with Aaric, Simon knew that it was just the visible representation of what the mirror called experience. While it was nice to know that his aura had gone from swirling black to merely a steel-gray color, he needed an explanation for how his aura could have gotten so polluted at such a young age.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the end, if the choice was knowledge or death, it wasn’t really a choice at all. So, he looked at the card again, pretended to concentrate, and then at the last minute, he realized his mistake, and said “I’m sorry, I can’t read it. What’s it supposed to say exactly?”

One of the men sighed, and then very slowly, a syllable at a time, he sounded it out for Simon. Simon listened, then repeated the word, mispronouncing slightly on purpose by giving the second ‘e’ a hard sound rather than a soft one, but there was no way they were going to let that slide.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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