Death After Death PLUS 330-332

Ch. 330 - Witch Hunter

Simon cast a hundred spells that month, before he returned to Adonan and saw Eddek’s serious face again. It might have been more than that; he didn’t exactly keep track after the first few clanholds; he was too distracted by how much hidden evil had been under his nose the whole time.

If I’d had my sight, I would have seen all of this at a glance, he thought regretfully. He’d been so sure the problems of this area were geographic and cultural that he hadn’t even considered larger issues. Suddenly, he regretted not learning more from future-Kayla about the problems that she and Eddek had faced.

In some of his early lives, he would have thought nothing of casting so many spells, but now, even if he hadn't used a single major word, it felt excessive. It was more than he’d cast in the decade he’d spent living this life up until now. It might have been more than the last few lives put together, and it irritated him, on some level, that he had to do it. It felt like a step back, but it was the only way to handle the new situation without becoming a full-blown witch hunter, which was more or less what he was, though he hated to think of it like that.

He’d spent lives regretting that people didn’t devote themselves to studying magic more. He’d fervently believed that the problem was ignorance and that the White Cloaks did much more harm than good. He was less sure of that now that he’d watched a few beautiful women age into oblivion from across a market square while he sipped a beer. 

The scale of the problem stunned him, making him feel slightly more sympathetic to the Unspoken in the process. They were heavy-handed bastards, of course, but if Brin had once had a witch problem like this, suddenly their beliefs made more sense. They got lots of other things wrong, too, of course, like the belief that only those with the sight could cast spells.

It might be half right, he acknowledged grudgingly. 

The power of both magic and vision seemed to be linked to a certain level of spiritual development. That would explain a few things, like why his spells had been so hit or miss early on, but for now, it was just a theory.

What wasn’t guesswork was that his long trek home had aged him, but only a little. Thanks to the number of spells he’d cast and the limited number of monsters he’d battled in the interim, he’d come back a decade older. That wasn’t quite enough to look middle-aged, but both Eddek and Kayla commented on it the first time they saw him.

Eddek seemed to think it was just because Simon was tired-looking and unshaven. “Keep it up and soon no one will even know you’re an outsider,” he said with a laugh. 

It was true that Simon neglected hygiene a bit when he was in the wild. While one of the first things he’d done on his return was to get a hot bath and launder his clothes, he’d chosen not to shave. At the time, he’d been thinking of the coming winter, but he quickly agreed with the boy’s assessment; there was something to be said for blending in and he decided on the spot that he’d see if he could grow out a thick, full beard for the first time in many lives.

 If you wore a toga in Ionia, you can wear a beard here, he chastised himself for not thinking about it sooner. He’d been too busy playing the part of Brinnish mercenary to think about how he might better blend in with the clannish locals. 

“You seem… different,” the serving girl had told him, making him laugh. He was different. He had entirely different priorities than when he’d left on a whim. He’d been planning to leave the mountainous kingdom just before winter and get on with his goal of clearing floors, but now that he was in the witch-hunting business, he’d decided to stick around for another year or two.  

That was obviously the best answer given how far off his plan he was at this point. He’d planned to help the kids lock in a better future, not uncover a secret cult that riddled the area. 

I’ve solved this level, he consoled himself. So next time, all of those witches will still be removed from the board, and I can pursue whatever it is I want in future years. 

It was a fine plan, but it took more work than that once he returned to the densely populated capital. There, crowds were big enough that he couldn’t simply pick everyone out at a glance, and though divining worked, it was hard to figure out who was the guilty party when it pointed to a hall full of residents and serving girls. 

He needed a way to detect them, too, of course. He had a few ideas for that, but such detailed crafting projects could wait for winter. Instead of trying to dig too deeply into that, he secured the raw materials, made a few sketches, and then spent the rest of the year’s good weather amassing funds and traveling as widely as he could to various clan holds. 

He went to Brulen’s Vale, Harlsvar, and Krusigin, looking for gold and iron. At least that’s what he told the head men and anyone else who asked, and all of that was true enough. He never left those places without locating a few veins to sell back to their Karl’s on generous terms, but none of those were the reasons for his visits. He was there to purge evil where he found it. 

Each time he did things in the same way. He came into town acting as if he only cared about money. He drank with the men and ignored the women. At night, though, after everyone had gone to bed, he searched the community with magic and found those at the center of the spider web. Then, on one of the days he was away from the clanhold to prospect he would sneak back to the outpost and cut every last witch on his hit list off from their connection to magic with the same mark, so that by the time he returned hours later, whatever chaos that moment caused had blown over. 

As plans went, it was a good one. The only things it denied him were any grimoire and secrets the covens might have had, and the credit for doing the deed. While the former was a regrettable lapse, the latter didn’t matter to him at all. 

He didn’t need the credit. In a perfect world, no one would even remember him in a few years. Given how often his name popped up, he wanted nothing more than to be a link in the chain of human events, and with the possible exception of the most junior witches that survived his guerrilla war against their kind, he was pretty sure no one would remember his name. He wouldn’t even matter to the men that would one day mine the ore veins he located. 

Originally, the scattered, isolated nature of these communities worked against Simon; they hid the rot in a place he’d never have a reason to look. Now he was able to purge a community of their evil grip without anyone realizing it was him by using those prospecting searches as pretexts to tackle the witch problems in every small community he stopped at along the way.  

Ironic, really, he thought the morning after he purged the nine witches that made up the coven in Krusigin. They shun outsiders, but shunning me would have saved their miserable lives. 

While he was sure that some might have their suspicions that he was involved, given the timing, no one said anything to him, and even those who survived the purge did nothing more than give him hard looks that were equal parts fear and distrust. They didn’t even know how he’d done it, so they could hardly say who had done it to them. 

Simon kept these tasks up until the weather started to turn chill. Then he stopped as much for reasons related to convenience as because he didn’t want to get trapped in a clanhold by a freak snowstorm after he’d just purged a coven; that might have ugly consequences. 

It didn’t matter; his efforts for the year had been richly rewarded, and he now had enough friends and fortune that he’d never have to leave the city again if he didn’t want to. Five percent of the revenues of more than two dozen mines that would come online over the next half decade would be enough to make him one of the richest men in the city, though he didn’t really care what happened to that money on some level, on another he knew he had to make some sort of legal preparations for it. Someday, he would die on this level, but that money, and whatever purpose he put it to, would ripple out into the future in a way that made the future better or worse. 

It wasn’t a dimension he’d consider until this life. Even his time in Ionar had focused on leaving the world better than he’d found it, only on a personal level. The orphanage in Darndelle is probably the closest I’d ever come to that before, he decided one day. Even then, though, that had been entirely different. He’d given the money away, but other men had made plans. Still, important as it was, Simon deferred it. 

He had little interest in the business side of things and instead focused on a number of creative projects. Foremost among those was his plan to locate witches in Adonan, but he had other ideas in mind as well. 

In the waning days of autumn, he started making a fine map on paper for once. It was intended to be a Yule gift for clan Eddek, in an effort to help win his way back into their Karl’s good graces. On the surface, that was true, but it was a checklist for Simon as well, and every clanhold he’d purged made it onto the delicately lettered piece of parchment. 

In total, he’d purged nearly a quarter of the settlements worth the name in the region, and though he was sure eventually they’d catch on, there seemed to be no coordination between the groups. So, for now, he’d been able to do as much damage as he’d done without spilling a single drop of blood. 

Ch. 331 - Seeing Things Differently

Simon spent the bulk of the winter working with engraving tools and grinding lenses. It was tedious work, and eventually, despite his best efforts, he was forced to use a word of metal shaping to do part of the work, which disappointed him because he’d been trying very hard to avoid it. Still, it couldn’t be avoided, and in the end, thanks to that little compromise, he was able to make the spectacles he’d been musing about for months.

They were simple things, made to look like reading glasses, which was exactly what he’d say they were to anyone who asked about them, but people never did. In a sense, he supposed that was true. They were reading glasses, but they read people and magic, not books. Their slender frames prevent him from powering them externally or making them multifunctional, so each lens looked at something different. When worn, the left lens would show a hazy outline of people’s aura. The effect wasn’t nearly as clear as his own sight had been until the owlbears, but it was something. 

Better to walk with crutches than not at all, he told himself the first time he tried it out, and tried not to be too disappointed in the final product. 

Simon tempered his expectations, reminding himself that because of the very slender runes he’d been forced to use only minor words. 

The other lens was more promising, if only because it gave him an ability he’d never possessed in any life. He could see magic now, if only a little. When he looked at one of his devices operating, it wasn’t too dramatic of an effect. They weren’t glowing, but the lines that dictated their effects were. Likewise, when he cast a spell, there was no glow, but there was a sort of distortion that swirled, that reminded him a bit of how those fate lines twisted around him for a couple of years in Ordanvale.

Under most conditions, the effect was probably too weak to be useful, but it did let him spot one thing he hadn’t been able to before. He could see who the witches had marked, and though they were very much a minority of the people in the capital, they were certainly present. 

Perhaps only one person in a hundred bore such marks, but that was enough to make him concerned, even if he did see any obvious witches or warlocks lurking about during his trips through the frigid, snow-filled streets. There were other patterns, too. Some clans bore more marks than others, and old people bore them more than the young. At least people who looked older, Simon reminded himself. If they were being drained of their vitality, then it was only natural they’d age faster than they should. 

His experiments were brief by necessity, especially since he didn’t plan to go out and harvest life force from any monsters any time soon, and he hadn’t built his backup plan to account for the loss of his own life force yet. A few hours of wearing his glasses not only gave him a headache, but they also robbed him of a day of his own life, which wasn’t much, but it was a leak that would definitely add up over time if he wasn’t mindful of it; while looking a little older in the long run wasn’t a bad thing, if it happened too quickly people would talk.

People already talked about Simon, of course, for both his positive dealings with clans Aldor and Eddek, and his humiliation of clan Himar. More than that, though, they spoke of his adventures. He wasn’t just a champion or a sellsword now. He wasn’t even a monster slayer to most people, despite slaying an ogre recently. He was a businessman. It was a strange reputation for him to have, but when he knocked on doors now with a new business proposal, people listened.

Simon took advantage of that and began proposing other projects with clans who had the power to make things happen. In fact, as the winter progressed and his witch hunt stalled, that became his primary occupation. He proposed big ideas to the men he was helping to make rich, and sometimes, they even agreed with him. 

Though his idea of making a large-scale smelter to deal with the influx of metals he expected the city to face in a few years was deemed too unprofitable, after a particularly long night of drinking, the Karl of clan Volten agreed to his idea about building a new mint, using Simon’s designs. 

“The only thing more profitable than owning a gold mine isss making the coinsss that come out of it,” he boasted, slurring his words only slightly. 

Of course, Simon knew what he meant. He was talking about adulterating the metal and turning ten ounces of gold into twelve by adding copper for hardness and silver for luster. Simon didn’t really care; that was an issue between Karl Volten and the High Karl. Simon just wanted to get better coinage into the system. The ones that the Charians used now had been clipped halfway to uselessness, and were weighed more often than they were counted. 

That, along with some sewers, and maybe some joint projects to bring clans closer together, would go a long way to fixing Charian society. As long as I keep purging the witches, that is, Simon reminded himself. That was still the main reason he was sticking around here, even if he spent some time with Eddek and Kayla, and more time than ever wheeling and dealing. It didn’t feel as rewarding as slaying monsters, but he knew it was every bit as important. A century from now, it wouldn’t matter who killed a specific troll, but if he could solve blood feuds and build roads that tied the nation together, then everyone would be better off for it. 

Simon proposed many bridges that winter, most were metaphorical, but a couple were very literal. There were a few places in Charia where a good bridge, even one made of wood and rope, would make all the difference in the world, saving traders days of time. Sadly, there were no takers.

“But if we let them cross through our land more quickly, we won’t get our cut of the profits,” Aldor Jaken complained. 

It didn’t matter how many times Simon told men like him that they could simply charge a fee to cross that would make up any difference; the man insisted it was too little. Simon was so annoyed by that that he chose not to remove the cursed mark that someone had put on the man’s lower back. It wouldn’t have taken more than a brush of his hand and a minor word of flesh shaping, but Simon didn’t feel like spending a week of his life on someone who wouldn’t see reason. 

Instead, he went to clan Eddek’s tiny hall, drank more, and complained, “Short-sightedness! It will be the end of Charia, mark my words. You’ll need to stand as one, or you’ll fall one by one.”

Eddek responded merely by shaking his head. “I know you mean well, Simon,” he answered ruefully, setting down the scroll he’d been reading. “And maybe these things are more common where you come from, but… Well, these traditions and alliances are very old. You can’t just expect everything to change in a year or two, even if it's the right thing to do.”

Simon nodded at that. For a young man, they were wise words. The boy went on at length about how much the academy he was attending was helping to mend such relationships, at the highest levels of the clans, and that much of the rivalry he saw today was just for show, but Simon dismissed that. 

“If I offer you a deal that is in your interest, and you reject it because it's in your rival’s interest as well, that’s not just for show,” he said after he downed the last of his beer. 

“That’s a fair point,” Eddek agreed, “But even so, by learning to emulate the great heroes of the past, I believe the scions of all the clans grow closer together.”

Well, maybe I just need to get everyone to read more, he thought as an idea started to percolate in his inebriated skull as he listened to Eddek talk about the virtues of learning at the academy, and how much it had helped him.   

“It’s not possible for everyone to have that sort of wisdom,” Eddek complained, “But if they did—”

“Why is it impossible?” Simon asked. “I taught Kayla to read. It’s not as if servants can’t do such things.”

“True,” the young man agrees. “But even if we had a thousand monks copying all the scrolls in the city, it’s not as if they have the time. Noble birth grants one the luxury of leisure. Misused that becomes sloth and decadence as the scrolls say, but if everyone simply… left the kitchens, the laundries, and the fields to read, we would all soon starve to death.”

While Simon admitted the boy had a point, he ignored it. Instead, he decided on a course of action. He’d finally figured out what he was going to spend some of his growing wealth on: he was going to build a printing press with movable type. 

Well, not build it; he’d pay other people to do that. He was going to design one, though, even if he didn’t quite know how just yet. He was fairly certain the Magi had some books written that way, too, so it wasn’t like he’d be inventing the thing. Still, he was going to design one, and he was going to pay artisans to construct it, and then he would print books for the masses. 

Such seeds of knowledge would find little purchase in the minds of most, but he was certain the effect would be far grander, and reach much further afield than even his most ambitious bridge project. 

What he would print with the thing, he wasn’t sure. He’d figure that out later, but he’d print something that would help bring the people of this region together, or go broke trying. It wasn’t even a question. 

Who says I have to limit myself to Charia? he asked himself as he spent the rest of the night obsessing over the idea. I could send books south and west, too. I could alter events in Brin. Maybe it’s too late to stop the war of accession over there, but it's not too late to stop the next one. 

His conversation with Eddek unresolved, Simon fell asleep that night thinking about what he could print to move society forward a notch. On Earth, they’d printed a bible first; he was almost as sure of that as the fact that he'd never actually read a bible. Unfortunately, though, there was no such unifying scripture here. He was excited by the idea, though some small part of his mind whispered a single persistent doubt. 

What if you make this thing, and someone uses it to mass produce copies of dangerous, forbidden knowledge? He wouldn’t let that happen, of course, but someday he would die, and when he did… Well, if something bad happened in the future, he could always spend another life fixing it. 

Ch. 332 - On the Importance of Witches

That winter was a hard one for Charia, though Simon didn’t know it until the spring, because communication between the clanholds fell almost to zero when the roads were more ice than soil. He didn’t blame them for that, not after he’d gone out in it last year. The lives of the messengers were almost certainly more important than whatever news they might bring. 

For him, at least, his second winter in Adonan was quite a bit more comfortable than his first had been. Not only did he not risk life and limb to hike down the mountain, but after spending a year getting to know people through the course of his business dealings, people were much more receptive to his presence, and he was a frequent guest at various clanhalls for reasons that were often related to pleasure as much as business. Even when he wasn’t being asked about some new venture, or helping someone with a particularly bad case of white fever. 

Though he wasn’t allowed to attend the clan moot this year for obvious reasons, he heard much of the goings-on from Eddek and was invited to plenty of other celebrations after the fact. Several clans tried to get their hooks into him with arranged marriages and other trysts, but Simon declined all of those awkward moments as politely as he could. Winter was the season for celebrations, since there was little to do besides drink and tell stories to pass the time on those short, bleak days, but he had his projects to work on.

Still, he did get some things done. He designed some mirrors that one could theoretically use to communicate with at any distance, so long as that communication was done in writing and pictures. He hadn’t yet figured out a way to make a speaker or a microphone, though he was sure it was possible. 

He also found a couple of woodworkers skilled enough to start working on his printing press. Though they didn’t understand why he would want to build such a system, they were happy to work on the pieces and carve the letters as long as they were being paid to do so.

“Wouldn’t it be easier to just hire a scribe to copy the book you want?” one of them asked when they initially discussed the project. 

“Sure,” Simon agreed. “If I just  wanted one copy, or maybe even five copies, but what about the tenth copy or the hundredth?”

Simon thought for sure that would clarify things, but instead the woodcarver looked at him like he was stupid and asked, “What would you need a hundred copies of the same book for?” 

Simon hadn’t bothered to explain any further after that. He’d just focused on the specifications, like how tight the tolerances needed to be and how many copies of each letter he wanted. It was a process that would take at least half a year, and given how extortionately expensive paper was in the mountain lands, he was probably going to have to build a paper mill before he started printing as well.

He was in no hurry, though, and instead found ever more ways to fill the time. He’d only had to think about printing books for a few days before he figured out how easily he could print spells as well. The person who cast such a thing wouldn’t even need to read it. They’d just need to hold it right, or perhaps bleed on it. 

The idea was frightening enough that, for a time, he questioned whether embarking on this road was really a good idea; he’d definitely found Pandora’s Box, but he hadn’t yet opened it. For now, that distinction was enough for him to keep going, though as soon as spring started, he was distracted by new developments. 

A clanhold or two was lost almost every winter. It was a tough time in the mountains, and a hungry ice troll or worse could decimate a community. That was normal enough. This year, though, as news began to trickle in from travelers it became clear that more than half a dozen communities had been crippled or killed by causes that ranged from violence to disease. 

As place names trickled in one at a time, though, it became clear that he was in part to blame. Of the nine clanholds that had not survived the winter, he’d visited eight of them and purged them of their witches, which was concerning.

Despite the fact that he bought enough drinks in the weeks that followed to make sure that he heard every version of every story, things didn’t entirely add up. None of them seemed to devolve into terrible cycles of vengeance against suspected enemies or resurgences of angry cults. Most of them simply fell to unchecked disease or a series of unfortunate events rather than monsters, even.

It took him a long time, perhaps too long, to fit those pieces together and come up with what he felt was the most likely solution. The witches were a parasite most of the time, but in hard times, a little magic goes a long way, he decided. 

They might not use fire and lightning to strike down monsters as he would, but after this, it was obvious they played some vital role. He couldn’t ask them, of course, but based on the stories he heard, he guessed that it mostly involved tending to sickness and both men and animals, keeping the worst of famine and disease at bay. 

Simon hadn’t felt bad about what he’d done to cripple the covens until now, not even when the oldest of the women had turned into crones before his very eyes and withered into a husk as her borrowed vitality vanished. This was different, though. It was hundreds of lives that had died because he hadn’t adequately considered the consequences of his actions. He’d thought what he was doing was an unmitigated good, but as always, it was more complicated. 

Instead of bemoaning it or mentally flagellating himself, though, he got to work. His penance would be making sure this didn’t happen again. Rather than going out and purging more coven’s as he’d planned, he decided that he first had to mitigate his losses. So, he spent time sand casting bronze copies of his healing medallion. Then, when he had enough copies for every village he’d already scourged of witchcraft, he got to work writing a short treatise on the prayers involved in making them work. 

Those prayers were nonsense, of course, and he felt like a White Cloak for writing them, but they were a necessary disguise. Almost no one would willingly use witchcraft, but almost everyone he’d encountered would use prayer if they were desperate enough. When he was finished, he’d created what would turn out to be the first document his press would copy.

He had to buy a lot of paper, and half of it was spoiled by poor quality prints, but eventually, with enough trial and error they solved all of their issues, and mass produced a thin, twenty page cloth bound hymnal, which, when paired with the amulets he’d made, would become a perfect solution to common diseases in the area. 

It looked authentic, too. Though he didn’t know everything about Dionia, he knew enough about her to make it sound right, and when he showed it to some of her worshipers, they praised him for his genius. 

“Truly, the Goddess has inspired you!” one widow proclaimed. 

Simon smiled, but he didn’t think that was very likely. He was pretty sure that the only Goddess he knew of wouldn’t be very happy with what he was doing. Helades didn’t get a say, though. He was solving levels as he went now, and as far as he was concerned, that was all that he owed her. 

When the time came to deliver this bounty, he didn’t do it himself. Instead, he paid devoted worshipers, as well as survivors who’d been healed previously by his efforts to do that. It was summer by that point; he should have been sending aid the day he heard the news, and some communities probably no longer existed in any meaningful way after the delay. He still financed and sent a caravan to every community he’d visited the previous year. Those who went to the places that had been worst affected took tools, lumber, and medicines, or sometimes even small herds of goat and sheep if they weren’t too far. Other communities that were still doing just fine were given simpler gifts along with the relic. 

It was Simon’s first attempt at releasing magic into the wild, so he tried to keep his name out of it as much as possible, and he framed the whole effort as a missionary effort. I probably won’t even find out if it worked this year in most cases, he told himself as he eagerly awaited news of his efforts, which was glacially slow in coming. 

He was loath to go out and purge new villages of their witches until he’d found a way to mitigate the damage of doing so. He wanted to do good, not just feel good about what he was doing. The result was that instead of adventuring further afield, he spent almost the entire year within the walls of the capital. While Simon wasn’t quite willing to call that time wasted since he accomplished a lot, it certainly felt like it some nights, and he was frustrated that all of his grand plans had been pushed back a year. 

Still, it was nice to spend more time with Eddek and Kayla. Both of them were growing up so fast, and practically on the cusp of adulthood, and Simon no longer feared that some terrible future awaited either of them.

The only other benefit of staying in Adonan so much was that he was able to study the people with his glasses more often. Those efforts combined with a little research on some of those he saw with witchmarks on made him certain that there was a coven somewhere within the city, though so far he’d made no progress in finding them or where they gathered. Somehow, they even managed to avoid his divination magic, and clues were slow in coming. 

You can’t hide forever, he told himself one afternoon when he investigated the ashes of a forest bonfire not far from the city. Although he’d found the location by chance while looking for places along a river to build a waterwheel, nothing remained to tell him what had happened there. Still, the scent of sulfur told him something had. Somehow, no matter how many mysteries he solved and how much he learned about the world, there were always more mysteries waiting to be unraveled.