Death After Death PLUS 327-329

Ch. 327 - Doing Business

When the time came, he invited a delegate from every clan that might have a claim, but only half of them came. He supposed he didn’t blame them. Though he’d gotten clan Aldor to back his play, his vague wording about proposals of mutual interest largely fell on deaf ears; that might have happened even if he hadn’t been an outlander, though. 

It was fine. Simon wasn’t looking to make a fortune here. He was looking for people he could work with, and to do that, he needed to find people who could make smart decisions when it came to money. 

“As some of you know, I recently got back from dealing with a little ogre problem for clan Aldor,” Simon said when he addressed the six clan delegates. “It was supposed to take a week, but it turned into more like a month because—”

“Because outlanders shouldn’t be trusted with such tasks?” one man called out. 

“Hells, I’m surprised he survived at all,” another man with a bushy beard exclaimed. 

Simon let them get it out of their system. He was used to it and above such taunts. He let the mountain men have their fun for a minute, then when the conversation died down, he said, “The delay was due to prospecting. There’s a lot of wilderness between here and Baleger Pass and a lot of wealth that’s going to waste.”

Everyone disputed this, but once he put the gold nugget he’d found on the table, most of them relented and listened while he laid out the rest. “I’d found both copper and tin, several iron deposits, and, of course, a gold-rich river, but the real treasure, I think, are the coal seams.”

“Bah, coal!” the bearded man countered. “I’d rather burn cow dung. Smells cleaner, too!”

There was some agreement with that, but not as much as before. Instead, there was interest. Everyone wanted to know where these veins were and which ones were on their land. 

“All in good time,” Simon assured them. “We haven’t gotten to my cut.”

Everyone bellyached about a finder’s fee, then, but Simon made it very clear he wasn’t in this to get rich. “My terms are simple,” he told them. “I get five percent of the profit, and you get eighty.”

“What about the other fifteen percent?” the oldest man in their gathering asked. “Where’s that go? The high Karl?”

“While the high Karl will certainly get his cut, I don’t count that as profit,” Simon answered. “That’s the cost of doing business. No, I have bigger plans for that money.”

“Bigger plans,” another man laughed. “Here we go.”

“The rest of that money isn’t for me,” Simon calmly insisted. “It’s for you, in a roundabout way.”

The skepticism only increased then, but he ignored it and went on a long and winding description about the dangers he’d braved on the road. It wasn’t just monsters that were nearby or goblin dens that should have been dealt with long ago. It was the roads themselves. 

“A few bridges could cut travel time in half,” he explained. “And a tunnel or two could shave days off such a trip.”

“Yeah, well, those things cost money,” the delegate from clan Aldor piped up. “Why should we pay for a road or a bridge that anyone can use if they aren’t going to contribute.” His name was Aldor Maller, Simon was pretty sure, but that didn’t matter. What did, though, was that he’d missed the point entirely.

Because if you do, they’ll eventually do the same, was what Simon wanted to say, but that would go exactly nowhere with this crowd. Instead, he offered a more direct reason. 

“I know,” he nodded. “That’s what I’m spending the other fifteen percent on. Five percent for monster bounties and ten percent for road improvements. Those are all costs you’d have to pay for anyway, so it's not really costing you a thing.”

“So instead of us offering twenty percent for this information, you’re offering us five, as long as we clean up the roads? Why?” Only one man asked the question, but Simon could see that everyone shared it. 

He wanted to explain. He wanted to talk about how this was to force them to work together, but he knew that would make them more suspicious of him. They obviously suspected him of having ulterior motives already. So, instead, he offered them a little white lie that might one day become true. 

“Right now, tough as I am, I can’t journey more than half a day from a clanhold before I have to turn around and return before dark,” Simon said. “It’s a disgrace. Think of all the sights unseen and treasures waiting to be found. I’m asking you to spend that money for very selfish reasons: because once things are a little safer, I can find even more rich deposits and charge double.”

That, at least, they bought, and though everyone promised to take the offers back to their Karls, as the weeks passed, he only ever heard from three, including clan Aldor. That was fine. It was a start. They would grow rich, and then, hopefully, he could get other factions on board with his policy of spending money to make even more money. 

After that, he gave a few other locations to Eddek to use as bargaining chips. “None of these are on your land, so your father can’t mine them,” Lucas explained. “But the information is still valuable, and if you need to negotiate concessions from anyone or just want to build wealth for your family, these will help.”

Eddek thanked him, but only after he finished peppering him with questions. Are you sure these are there, or merely guessing? How big are they? How much work would it take to exploit them? Why aren’t you selling them directly?

Simon was pleased that the questions were good ones more than anything. That alone told him that the boy would grow into a fine young man. Neither he nor Kayla seemed unhappy, which told his time on this floor had been well spent. 

“You said so yourself,” Simon quipped. “I’m not like any other sellsword you’ve ever known. Besides, it’s not like I won’t find more. There’s endless wealth hidden in the world around us if you just know where to look.”

That wasn’t all he did that spring, of course. As the days slowly faded into summer, he took trips to several nearby villages. One was suffering from famine because of a hard winter. He arranged to buy a few bushels of wheat to see them through until harvest, for which they were grateful but not so grateful that they took his suggestions about terraced farming seriously.

The problem was not that Charia didn’t have enough land. They had more land than they knew what to do with, but very little of it was flat, which limited their farming and made them more vulnerable than they should be to attacks on their herds. 

Simon also took up wood carving and cheese making for a time. Not because they were part of some grander scheme but just for something to do. In fact, he was visiting the clanhold of Stoneslopes, which belonged to one of the lesser branches of Clan Aldor, to learn how to make good, long-lasting goat cheese when he found a reason to focus on something that wasn’t self-indulgent. 

He’d been there for a week and was trying to decide between two different journeys to embark on. He was either going back to fight the troll in the fall or taking a longer trip to the heart of clan Eddek’s territory and staying the winter in the hopes of helping them with their problems and surveying a better way through the mountains when something happened that derailed all his plans: witchcraft. Though he lacked the sight to see who was behind it, he knew magic was afoot almost instantly when one of the women of the clan became deathly ill without warning.

Aldor Elgah wasn’t particularly fond of Simon. She was a thick, no-nonsense woman who bristled against being made to help an outlander, but she still did it just the same. 

One day, she’d been helping him milk the goats, and she was as healthy as a horse and complained loudly about every mistake Simon made. The next, she was deathly pale and running a high fever. Simon’s first instinct was that she was just sick, and he cured that easily enough with his holy symbol and a little faux-prayer. 

Sickness wouldn’t have come back, though, at least not so strongly. So, when he searched her room after the second bout a few days later, he found a strange symbol on her back. It looked like a birthmark, but then, a real birthmark wouldn’t have been made to look like words of power. 

Farzehl Vrazig Zyvon, the words of manipulation, ruination, and transfer. He knew them both, as well as the name of the victim, but some of the other words that apparently powered the symbol eluded him. He struck them out immediately after copying them down. What they were wasn’t as important a question as why they were, though, and for that, he didn’t necessarily have an answer. His amulet wouldn’t heal it away, so he was forced to whisper the words of lesser flesh manipulation, erasing it and setting his sight back who knew how long. 

They seem to transfer someone else’s misfortune to Elgah, he thought as he examined the image in his mirror that night. But who did she piss off? Is my presence to blame for this?

In the morning, when she was feeling better, Simon questioned Elgah, but she had no answers as to who would want to harm her. When he explained the mark he found, she paled visibly but would not elaborate. In fact, after that she refused to speak with him again, and no one would either, but he saw the clanhold’s headman. He didn’t tell Simon much either, but what he said was enough. 

“You have to understand magic here in the mountains… it’s women's work,” the old man explained. “Even if a man could use it, none would. There’s no honor in it, and even bad men crave honor.”

Simon disagreed with very nearly all of what the headman said. Still, he didn’t give up the point. “Even if it is witchcraft, I—” he started to say. 

“Please do not use that word in my presence,” the headman interrupted. “It’s very sound is cursed.”

Simon cursed his superstitiousness but did not chastise him for it. Instead, he very calmly repeated himself. “All enemies can be found and fought. Aren’t you the least bit concerned that whoever did this had access to your very clanhold? They could still be inside for all you know.”

“The women… uhm, whoever it is that might have done this…” the headman said, repeated very slowly, as if Simon had a learning disability. “They are best left alone. They will receive their punishment in the next life, but they will only curse those who pursue them, and I have no wish to be on that list.”

After that, the man strongly implied that Simon had stayed long enough and should be on his way. He agreed and told the headman he’d leave tomorrow, but of course, Simon had no intention of letting this go; there was something larger at work here, and even if it wasn’t a chance to learn more magic, it was a chance to explore another aspect of this world that he hadn’t previously suspected the existence of. 

Besides, he had no reason to let this go. He had the powers of divination; if he could find a werewolf, he could find a witch, no problem.

Ch. 328 - The Stink of Sulfur

If Simon still had his sight, he was sure that he would have been able to see the problem here from the first moment. As it was, he was only able to glimpse it in pieces as he was getting ready by positioning a mirror strategically so that it reflected everyone who walked by it while he pretended to pack. 

Most people looked just like he expected them to. Just because they were unfriendly to outsiders didn’t make them bad people. The town was typified by the white auras of people with good karma, even if there were a few bad apples that were a much darker gray. All of these were women, and mostly, he’d picked them out with his dowsing rod the night before. They weren’t just any women, either. By and large, they were the most important wives and matrons of the clanhold. 

How deep does this rabbit hole go, I wonder? Simon thought. Though he could hardly walk away from this strange discovery, he hadn’t planned to seek out a new cult, and he’d left many items back in the capital that might have been useful to him to this moment. Still, he was conflicted about what he was going to do about it, at least until the headman’s wife insisted on hugging him goodbye as he went to walk through the gate. 

"Thank you so much for your help," she said with a poisonous smile. "Know that you are welcome to return any time."

Though Simon didn’t feel anything. The way her jaw had moved as she held him tightly for a moment made him quite sure she’d done something to him, and as soon as he was out of sight from the town, he quickly peeled off his shirt, and for once he used the silver mirror he carried for its intended purpose. He found the mark she’d left on him almost instantly, and as he translated it, he realized how much worse it was than the mark that someone had left on Elgah, and he removed it immediately with another lesser word of flesh manipulation. 

Hers had been made to sap her lifeforce and transform the misfortunes of others to herself, which had made her very sick, hinting at the sort of misfortunes it had alleviated from someone else. Simon’s curse, though, or whatever it was, eliminated the middleman; she’d just given him the equivalent of magical cancer. The purpose of the mark was to directly siphon his life force and use it to directly harm his health, making it doubly toxic. 

The thing used minor words, so it was designed to work slowly, but he doubted he would have made it another month before he’d had a stroke or organ failure or something had he not noticed what the woman had done. That angered Simon. He’d been on the fence before about what exactly he was supposed to do in this situation, but now it was personal. He’d stumbled on a nest of witches, and he was going to deal with it. 

However, before he could deal with anything, he had to find a safe place to sleep at night outside of the clanhold. It was summer now, and the nights were restless. So, he searched until he found a large boulder that had been cleft in two long ago by glacial action. It wasn’t much, but if he heaped large stones on one side and built a large fire at the mouth of it, then it would be impossible for anything to sneak up on him. 

He wasted his first day setting up his fortified camp and didn’t start to skulk around to investigate things further until the following day. Those next two days were fruitless, and though he saw many people going about a wide variety of errands, there was nothing sinister about that. A town of hundreds of people had a million things to do. There were herds to shepherd, animals to slaughter, firewood to chop, and water to fetch. The Stoneslopes Clanhold was a hive of activity. It wasn’t until his third day watching that he saw something strange. 

Fetching firewood was a common enough task, but it was usually brought inside the town. However, that evening, he saw a number of girls taking split wood out into the forest, which was the opposite of how this was supposed to work. Simon followed them from a safe distance, and it was there he found a sort of earthen lodge. It was hardly a glamorous building, with rough timber walls and a sod roof. The clanhold was certainly prettier, but the fact that the building was this far out into the wilderness at all made him raise an eyebrow. 

When the servant girls had delivered their cargo, Simon crept inside and examined it briefly. If magic had a smell, the place would have reeked, but even without that, he was sure he detected the faint odor of sulfur, which is strongly associated with demons. He’d detected it in his basement after a few of his experiments in that vein. 

Simon quickly made his exit before anyone else arrived, but he used the vorpal setting on his sword to cut a small hole in the roof, and then, when it got dark, and he saw smoke rising from the chimney, he returned to see what it was these women were up to. 

Things started slow, and if he didn’t know better, he would have assumed this was a social club, not a coven. However, once the door was barred and the meeting came to order, the dozen began to discuss a series of issues one at a time. 

At first, Simon lacked the context to figure out who it was they were talking about, but when they reached Elgah, a blonde woman spoke out. “I reapplied her mark. She is a part of our web once more, and things are as they should be,” she assured the gathering. 

“What of the man that purged it?” a brunette asked. “I’m shocked that you allowed him to live.” 

That final accusation seemed to be addressed to the headman’s wife, who was looking more and more like the woman in charge of this strange circle of witchery. “Killing him after what he’d found would only cause news. He’s a valued servant of the clan. It might have created too many questions.”

“Questions?” another woman with heavy braids said like a challenge. “Don’t you think it will raise questions if he gets to the city and—”

“He will not reach the capital,” the headman’s wife reiterated in a way that made it clear that she would brook no further argument. “I placed a wasting mark on him. If he’s not dead already, he’s certainly hobbled. He’ll only have a few days left before he wastes away to nothing, and when he does, it won’t be anywhere near here, and no one will think to suspect us blameless.”

Someone else challenged her, earning a serious glare. “But he was able to remove Elgah’s mark, surely he can—”

“He was no warlock,” the headwoman snapped. “Breany told me he had only a faint white glow and nothing more. He showed none of the signs, and when our servants snooped through his things, they found only healing herbs and that medallion of his. He’s just a holy man who got lucky. That’s all.”

There were murmurs then about how the gods usually didn’t answer prayers, but the woman in charge ignored that and moved on to the next topic, which apparently involved a thick, goat-skin grimoire that Simon would dearly love to get his hands on.

Meanwhile, as he watched them read and recite certain ritual lines that seemed to have no real magical content, Simon silently fumed at the idea that they’d gone through his things. While he was pleased that lifetimes of paranoia and fear of being identified as a warlock had paid off, the fact that he hadn’t even noticed haunted him. 

If I’d missed that, then what else am I missing, he wondered as he refocused on what was happening below him, which was apparently that they planned to summona demon. Why? He wasn’t sure. He’d missed that part. Something about a rivalry with another clan. Something about ‘ensuring our prosperity,’ which could only mean more petty vengeance. He was tempted to sigh at that, but he stayed perfectly silent and still instead. No one would know he was here until he made a move. 

As to how they planned to do this, well, that was what he was about to see unless he stopped them. Why is magic so different in every culture? Simon wondered as he watched two of the women start to draw a circle around the firepit. They did it with leaking sacks of flour, leaving a broad, white line of powder on the dark earth. That gave him plenty of time to process all of the awful things he’d just heard. 

He supposed that the whole process was related to secrecy and isolation, but even before they finished setting up the ritual, he had questions. Why would you draw a circle in something so fragile? Why aren’t they inscribing the demon's name and the binding wards? Those were all good questions, but he got the answer as soon as the headwoman said, “Dannitha will lead this summoning unless anyone has any objections.”

No objections were made, so a broad-hipped woman who was noticeably pregnant stepped forward. She smiled as she thanked the head woman for the privilege, but it was fear in her eyes, not excitement, and that puzzled Simon. 

Why is a pregnant woman summoning a demon? He asked himself, wondering again if he should stop it; he wanted to, but only the idea that he might have to fight or even kill a room full of women. He’d become numb to violence over the course of many lives, but maybe not that numb. Why is anyone summoning a demon? 

Simon remembered interacting with her once or twice during his stay and seemed to remember her husband being a butcher. None of that prepared him for what happened next, though.

As she spoke, she delivered not another pointless bit of ritual like he’d been expecting but a careful chant of over a dozen words of power linked together with a demon’s name, Bazubratel. As she spoke, her sisters took up the chant in a more muted fashion, adding their voices to hers in a small way.

Whether they actually added to the spell was an open question; he’d never seen a spell cast by more than one person, but whether it was done alone or in concert, it worked. He was still trying to puzzle out the meaning of Zyvon when the ring solidified. 

He’d known the word of transfer for ages, but in this context, it seemed to mean something more like sacrifice. He set those thoughts aside, though, as the room began to swim and blur with her words.

No, it didn’t change at all, Simon realized as he studied the room more closely. It was only becoming more real compared to the small piece of reality that it bounded, making the fragile structure look solid by comparison. The bonfire faded, replaced with hellfire, the scent of sulfur, and a yawning pit that led to the infernal realm. That was something he’d seen before, but when the four-winged, raven-headed demon walked through those fires to stand amidst the circle of chanting women, that got Simon’s attention.

“You have KAlled me, and I have KAme,” the bird demon pronounced, screeching some of the constants quite loudly. “What is your price, and what is the task set before me to accomplish this night.” 

“You have already been given a soul!” Dannitha answered, delivering it like it was part of a careworn ceremony. “Not mine, but my infant child’s who will never be born now. For this, we ask…”

Even though Dannitha’s mouth kept moving, her words faded to silence past the ringing in his ears as he heard that.  

Infant sacrifice? He asked himself, struggling to make sense of the two words he’d placed next to each other. He might have imagined the Magi doing such a thing. Surely, an infant had decades of life in it, just waiting to be consumed. He supposed that any mother could, in theory, use their unborn child as a horrible battery, but could and would were very different things, and this development was entirely beyond the pale. 

Ch. 329 - The Stink of Sulfur (part 2)

For a moment, Simon almost used a greater greater word to smite them all as anger he hadn’t felt in lifetimes boiled up volcanically inside him. He’d already decided that the Whitecloaks definitely needed to set up shop here instead, but after that revelation, he could no longer contain himself. 

Then he did what he should have done from the start and whispered, “Aufvarum Aufvarum.” It felt silly to use the same word twice like that with only slightly changed pronunciations but dispersed air was exactly what he needed in that moment. 

Instantly, a gust of wind roared through the room, fanning the hellfires like a blacksmith’s bellows and sending flour in every direction. That was the obvious effect. What was less obvious was the effect it would have on everyone. As the dust billowed out to fill the room with powder, the fires of hell followed it. Freed of their bounds, they advanced with the circle’s now diffuse border, and as they moved, the floor vanished, and most of the coven fell directly into hell. They didn’t even have time to scream. 

Eventually, only the headwoman and a few of her younger cultists were still there because they’d been standing opposite the direction of the gust. The four of them stood there in shock, but even as they did so, the bird demon turned on them and walked to the very edge of the half-obliterated circle. None of the women had the presence of mind to move. 

“THAnk you for the feEST,” it squealed, “But if my summoner has no TASK for me, I’ll take my LEAVE!”

As the demon reached for her, its arm faded. The coven leader stood her ground, but her remaining acolytes shrank away, fearing they’d be dragged to hell, too. 

“How could this have happened!?” the woman raged, casting a small light spell as soon as the fire extinguished entirely. “Someone has done this to us. Someone has taken out sisters, and they will pay!”

“Could it have been one of the Delven coven or perhaps another clan? We could—” one of the younger members started to say before she was silenced with a gesture. 

The coven’s leader began to chant another spell then. Simon couldn’t quite make it out because it was half-whispered, but he heard Dnarth and Celdura, which were both words he’d use in a divinatory spell. He had to do something, so he reacted almost without thinking. 

In a moment of inspiration that he wasn’t sure would even work, he spoke the words of distant flesh manipulation. Nothing happened when he did that, at least, not visibly. Still, the headwoman’s eyes widened. 

“It’s gone,” she whispered, suddenly afraid. “I had it… a moment ago, and now…”

Simon could have used those words to seal her lips up or turn her heart into jello. He could have simply used a word of force to strike her head from her shoulders instead, like an invisible guillotine; he didn’t do any of that, though, because deep down, it was still harder for him to kill a woman than a man. 

Instead, he chose a harmless option and gave her one of the same strange birthmarks she enjoyed so much. He didn’t try to give her cancer or rob her of her life’s vitality, though. He just used the technique to write the word of nullification on her back, just where she’s put her curse on him, and the results were instantaneous. Just like that, whatever she’d been casting had failed, and whatever other strange enchantments she operated had left her. 

Simon would have been satisfied with that. While not a fitting punishment, it would have been appropriate, but it just kept going. Robbed of whatever power fed her… robbed of whatever other marks her coven had sprinkled throughout her community, the woman started to age in real-time. 

One moment, she’d been a beautiful thirty-something matron, but within a few seconds, her hair started to gray, and her face began to wrinkle. “What is this madness?” she cursed, reaching out to one of her sisters, who backed away fearfully. “Help me, sisters… we’re under attack by evil magic… We need to… Wait, where are you going?”

When one of the girls shrieked at the site of the withering woman, all three of them spooked and ran. They might be witches, but without the group to back them, they had no spine and vanished into the night. 

“Traitors! Cowards!” the woman screeched, blasting them with insults as her voice failed her. Simon got up then and hopped down off the roof. Now was the time to pay her a visit before whatever was happening reached its crescendo. 

When he walked into the lodge to find the headwoman on her knees, he could have knocked her over with a feather. “You!” she roared with all the volume her failing strength allowed her. She followed that up with a word of lightning, but nothing happened. 

“Me,” Simon agreed, though he only managed to stay calm at first. “Maybe this wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t tried to murder me or, you know, sacrificed unborn babies to demons!” By the end, he was raging, and the urge to strike her head from her shoulders welled up inside him again. 

No, let her go out like this, he told himself, taking a deep breath. It’s crueler to let her die as she lived. 

“How?” she croaked. “You were supposed to be dead, and now you’ve cut me off from the powers of—”

“I know a few tricks,” Simon answered as he walked over to where her half-charred grimoire was lying. “But you’ve taught me a few more, and with any luck, this book will—”

“You shall not have my secrets!” she rasped, clawing forward, trying to drag herself across the hard-packed dirt floor of the lodge. Simon never moved from that spot, but she died before she could reach him. 

“What goes around comes around, I suppose,” he said with a shrug before he walked toward the door. He didn’t even look back as he said a word of lesser fire to spark up the wood pile they had indoors. He just let the lodge catch fire behind him as he walked back to his tiny camp. If there was any justice in the world, that foul place would be nothing but cinders by morning. 

Still, as he walked, he reflected on everything he’d just seen. He thought about the demon and their strange way of summoning it. He thought about the strange way they marked the flesh and wondered why he’d never considered it before. Most of all, he wondered what he’d find in the book he’d taken. 

That would have to wait until morning, though, because it was well past two in the morning, and he was exhausted. When he returned to camp, he had enough time to build his defensive fire and ponder how far back so many spells and murders set back his sight. He even took a moment to check his experience and found that the number had gone up, not down. 

I suppose there’s justice in that, he thought as he curled up in his bedroll. They were awful people, and I don’t feel bad about killing them. 

Simon left the area the following day. He considered hunting down the last two members of the coven he’d dismembered but decided against it. It would be better for everyone if he wasn’t associated with this tragedy at all. Instead, he got an early start and took breaks throughout the day to peruse his new tome. 

While not useless, it was less useful than he’d hoped it would be. Much of it had been damaged by the fire that had whipped through the lodge, and most pages were incomplete. Most of the rest, though, were pointless prayers to the forces of nature that contained only the occasional word of power. Even after several days of study, he didn’t learn any new words from it. What he did learn, though, was what had happened to the headwoman and how the coven operated as a whole, and the marks they put on their fellow men and women were the key to all of that.

“Son of a bitch,” Simon breathed when he finally figured it all out. “Thankfully, the magi never figured this shit out, or we’d all be screwed.”

The marks weren’t a curse like he’d first assumed. They were a web of life force transference. All of the names were listed in the book, and some of them were even legible. The most junior members of the coven only fed on one or two of their fellows, but their leader had more than a dozen marked. They powered her spells that kept her young for over a century. 

One by one, all the pieces clicked into place. Simon had only meant to block her ability to cast more spells, but instead, he’d done so much more. He’d cut her off from her support network, and she’d withered. 

It also explained pieces about human sacrifice, and particularly the ability of pregnant mothers to power large spells with their unborn children. It was absolutely monstrous, but such things were made all the worse by the petty reasons they used their magic. 

While they occasionally struck down monsters, most of their effort seemed to go toward the same petty grudges that Charian politics revolved around. It made Simon sick, and forced him to look for more signs of witchcraft as he made his way back to the capital. 

Unfortunately, it wasn’t the isolated problem he hoped that it would be. Simon took his time on the road to Adonan as much to inspect the clanholds along the way as to explore for minerals and examine roads, and he did not like what he found. The rot had spread deeply, and most communities had at least a few witches living among them. 

In time, he didn’t even need to use his mirror to pick them out. That wasn’t because his ability to see their auras returned to him, though. It was because he noticed an obvious pattern. Almost every witch he discovered was beautiful, and most of them looked younger than they should have. Though neither of those signs was enough to prove anything, the way that other women in the community seemed to obey them without hesitation or flinch at their presence certainly added to the weight of the evidence. 

It’s like the white cloaks, but worse, Simon thought with a sigh, wondering what he was supposed to do about these wretches. He marked them with the words of nullification whenever he found them, neutering them from committing more evil, but that was a temporary measure, and he knew it. All they needed was a single witch to undo that.

That help might not come in time for the oldest ones, fortunately. They seemed to start withering almost immediately as soon as they were cut off from their web of victims and were dead in less than a day. Their younger acolytes, though, had plenty of years left in them and merely became uglier and more careworn as their magic faded, leaving Simon to decide what should be done with them. 

Could I really kill every woman I suspect of being a witch? He asked himself. That would make him no better than the Unspoken, of course, but would it really be kinder to let them live? 

He was deeply conflicted, so for now, he settled for magically lobotomizing them whenever he suspected someone by giving the woman a birthmark of nullification above their hairline where they’d have a hard time finding it. While the woman who had given him his mark had felt the need to touch him, Simon didn’t need to do that. He just needed to be close or add the distant word to his spell.

Why does everyone use magic so differently? He asked himself almost every time he thought about that discrepancy. That isn’t the way this is supposed to work. 

This resulted in a lot of deaths on his way back to the capital, but Simon regretted none of them. If you died after being cut off from your magic, then you were obviously a leach on society and deserved to be put out of your misery. Though he was careful to move on quickly after each event like this, it was only to avoid being fingered as the cause and complicate his stay in the country, and not because he feared retribution from a defanged witch or whichever members of her coven he’d failed to target. He would deal with all of them eventually if he had to.