Death After Death PLUS 333-335

Ch. 333 - Further Expeditions

During Simon’s third year in Charia, the first of the mines he’d argued for and sold the rights to began serious operations, increasing the wealth at his disposal dramatically. Most of this went to pay for the papermill he was constructing, though, so it changed little about his life. Rather than make single pages in artisanal batches as merchants did now, he planned to make them in huge sheets that would then be cut and dried into the pages he needed. 

He’d originally wanted to go a step further and make huge rolls of the stuff that could be cut to size. Unfortunately, both his knowledge and the tools available proved inadequate to the task. 

Next time, he told himself. Another life or two and I’ll figure out the secrets to such things.

Of course, the process, every step of the way, was complicated, which is why he made copious notes in his mirror. He might get everything he wanted done in this life, but he’d be able to recreate all of it in the right future life that much faster. 

Still, as the winter passed, those things became less important. After he saw that his now witch-free clanholds weathered a winter just fine with a little magic of their own, he set to work on exploring the rest of the country. Ostensibly, this was done both as a missionary for a goddess he didn’t really believe in and to stake more mining claims he could sell to one clan or another. By this point, most clans that weren’t allied with the Himar were actively inviting him to visit them. They saw the riches their neighbors were reaping thanks to his previous efforts and wanted wealth of their own. 

Simon didn’t care much about any of that at this point, though. He had more money than he could spend in one life, and several ongoing business ventures; he barely had time to work on the historical epic that he hoped to bring the nation together with, because he was consumed by any number of other important tasks. 

Above all of those, his most important task was ending the scourge of witchcraft and breaking the kingdom free of its grip, one clanhold at a time. So, on his second trip, he didn’t go alone. He did it with a small group of devotees and assistants who could offer up his bona fides to the locals without forcing him to brag, which Simon hated to do.

These trips were entirely different in character than any of the ones he'd previously taken, because he rarely traveled in large groups like this. He found he enjoyed it more than he thought he would. He even learned to play the lute. He didn’t do it well, but as his group moved from Burrum’s Gap to the Dark Wood clanholds, and finally, over the spine of the range through the Shattered Pass, he improved. 

Some part of him had expected it to be harder for him to purge witches on this second go around. Especially given the fact that there’d been a year in between, he expected the word to get out somehow, but that didn’t seem to be the case. If anything, they might be even more disconnected than wider Charian society. Each little cult ruled over its own tiny kingdom, treating the humans there as their own private herd of livestock. 

That’s even more true now that I know they take care of them too, in their own way, he thought wryly as he watched the women that he’d already picked out as the core of the problem in Horngeld Clanhold. He didn’t even look for unnatural beauty or youth as a sign now, especially in the smaller communities. There was a certain sense of entitlement that women of the coven displayed that rivaled even the most arrogant headman, warrior, or landowner. 

While it was easy to see why such men might become drunk on power, it was harder to understand why those same men were deferential to milkmaids and herbalists, making those not-so-humble women stick out like a sore thumb. 

None of them cared for the inroads that Simon was making in their community with religion. However, rather than open hostility, they treated him and the men and women that accompanied him with veiled contempt, even when the rituals they pedaled actually cured the sick.

That was fine. Simon endured mostly by pretending not to notice it, which wasn’t hard considering that he spent most of his time in the wilds outside of each place exploring and marking locations. Normally, everything went just according to plan, and his last act, on the morning of his caravan’s departure, would be to mark those same haughty women with words of nullity, locking their magic away for all time. He did that last, just as they were leaving, because he didn’t want those with whom he was traveling to notice the pattern. It would have been pretty hard to explain why a woman or two aged into dust in almost every town they visited. 

The only time they deviated from this was when one of his errand boys came up with a witch’s mark on the second day of their visit to Keldonsland. The idea that someone would lay a hand on someone who was with him angered Simon greatly. 

He’d discovered witchmarks more than once on himself at this point, and he checked himself whenever a witch touched him out of force of habit. These were always on his back, though, and easily removed. The idea they’d thought to touch people under his protection, though, well… he sought to make an example out of all of them in what someone, somewhere, would probably write about as a miracle.

“What is this!?” he demanded, bringing the boy before the headman when breakfast was scarcely finished, and crowds still lingered in around the main hall. “What vile warlocks do you harbor among your kin?”

The headman was stricken, then torn between powerful women in the shadows of his clanhold and the offense incurred by an honored guest. It was an unenviable position, but it was a chance to put some of the heat that his latest adventure was no doubt incurring on someone else, and he took it. 

Jarin wasn’t a zealot. He wasn’t even religious, so far as Simon knew. He was just one of the errand boys that had come to him from Aldor, that had been foisted on him in the hopes of learning Simon’s incredible knack for finding riches hidden in the wild. In that regard, at least, he and the other men that Aldor had loaned to him would learn nothing, though he did try to teach them about the wildplaces and swordplay in an effort to make the trip worth their time. 

Today, he wasn’t a student or a burden, though. He wasn’t even a victim; he was a tool that he could use to make some examples with. Simon could have resolved all of this quietly, like he had in every clan hold to date, but the idea that these witches just siphoned off of whoever they found convenient had finally become too much for him.

Even as the headman tried to suggest they handle this privately, Simon refused to be persuaded. As the priestess and acolytes who had joined him on this trip exchanged worried looks, Simon called them over and had them begin to pray. There was no bonfire burning within range, so that wouldn’t be enough. Simon didn’t care about that, though. Instead, he challenged the crowd and said, “Whoever has done this to my charge has brought their own doom down on themselves!”

Then, before he even used a word of lesser flesh to remove the mark, he whispered the words of lesser light to make the boy glow. There were collective gasps at that, but he kept his eyes closed and his mouth covered with his clasped hands as he pretended to pray. Then, one witch at a time, he began to give them their own marks right there in the midst of everyone. 

Nothing spectacular happened to most of them, but a few began to waste away almost instantly. Simon waited until that moment before he removed the boy's mark. By then, no one was looking at Simon. Indeed, some people were screaming in horror, and some men had drawn weapons. Simon had seen those sorts of reactions before, but he’d rarely stuck around to watch the fallout. This was just the first time he allowed his actions to be more than just a coincidence. 

When the show was over and the boy's light faded, Simon insisted he had nothing to do with it. “It’s the boy’s noble soul that allowed for this miracle to occur,” he told the assembled group. When pressed further, he let the priestess speak for the group instead of him, seeking to avoid as much of the spotlight as he could. “For caravan logistics, I’m in charge, but for all things spiritual, I bow to Sophana.”

There were many conversations that day, including the boy who would almost certainly grow up to be a priest himself after this. Simon felt a little bad about lying to everyone, but that guilt was easily outweighed by the good he was doing. With every coven he purged, he was creating a world where people lived longer, fuller lives, and no one lost years to feed someone else's existence in the most perverse form of taxation imaginable. 

The acolytes began to tell that story everywhere they traveled in the weeks and months that followed; while Simon hadn’t counted on that, he wasn’t too bothered by it. He just told a version that gave him less and less of a role in the miraculous events.

Even with those stories, things continued on as they had before, and it was only in the fall, when they finally turned around after visiting nearly every clanhold in eastern Charia, that the members of his caravan finally discovered the truth. The events that they had started calling the Light of Keldonsland were not unique. Witches had been decaying before the light of Dionia throughout the trip. 

Simon supposed that everyone had to find that out eventually, but he was glad that when they did he’d been out in the woods looking for something to that he could drain. Casting dozens of spells a month was taking a toll on him. 

Though everyone thanked him for causing such miracles, they meant more for organizing the mission than for causing all of this. Once Simon understood that, he just smiled and nodded. He was happy to be thought of as the financier for miracles rather than a miracle worker himself. 

By the time they returned to Adonan, the size of their caravan had more than doubled. These were converts from various clanholds that had seen the metaphorical light and were ready to worship the Goddess of Dawn. Simon’s guilt about misleading them so pointlessly intensified then, but he made the best use of them that he could by teaching as many as he could the basics of herbalism, wound cleaning, and bandaging whenever he could. 

If they’re going to be healers, they should do so with more than magic, he told himself. Because one day they’re going to try those prayers with a holy symbol made by someone else and they aren’t going to do shit. 

Ch. 334 - Inspiration

The months that followed Simon’s return were productive ones, and he took full advantage of them before the snows were so deep that even moving around the city was impossible. The first thing he noted was that his reserves of paper were steadily climbing. So much so that the men he’d hired to man his printing press thought he should be selling it. 

“We have nothing to print,” his foreman insisted. “This will rot if we just keep stacking it to no end!”

Simon shook his head as he felt the smooth, cream colored pages. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good. It was probably the best paper he’d seen this far north. “Soon the mill will shut down for the winter as the river freezes solid,” he explained. “And in the spring, we will start going through it faster than we can make it. I think then we’ll be glad for the overstock.”

“On what?” the foreman asked, slightly exasperated. He was a good worker and an excellent woodcarver from the clan of Borimvar, but he had no imagination. “Even if we start a new book and print a page a month, we’ll—”

“A page a week, to start,” Simon corrected him. “A thousand copies of each page. Then, after a few weeks, I’d like to get that down to every five days. Maybe eventually every three.”

“Five? Three?” the man looked at him with skepticism. “That’s not possible. Not even if we hire more men and work nights.”

“It will be fine,” Simon assured him, placing his hand on the man's shoulder. “The pace will be the easiest part. It will be the pictures that are harder.”

The idea of printing pictures on Simon’s machine made the man pale, but when Simon explained how he planned to do it, that part, at least, he accepted. Anything that involved finely carved wood, at least, was achievable to the man… everything else would take time. 

Such a schedule didn’t give Simon much time, though. While he’d given a great deal of thought to what he wanted to print on the way back, and he’d been inspired by people’s reaction to the Light of Keldonsland, he still hadn’t actually put pen to paper. That was what he spent the rest of the week doing, as he cranked out page after page of his synthetic epic. 

It started simply enough with a praise to the High Karl, and the network of clans that made Charia strong. Then it praised lands that they ruled in flowery language that felt over the top to him, but was consistent with the way storytellers told such tales to their countrymen. He didn’t call them mountains. Instead, they were impregnable walls. Likewise, goblins and ogres became the armies of the night, and the clanholds became beacons or fiery hearths. 

It was more important that it spoke to its audience in the manner that they expected than that Simon loved it. He didn’t care about the medium as much as the message, which was that the clans needed to work together. It didn’t matter what he was talking about on any given page. That idea was always present. 

The section following his broad appeal was easy. It was an ABC, but each one was a clan. A is for Aldor, B is for Borimvar, etc. Each clan got a few paragraphs on their history, and what they were known for, along with their heraldry. Simon sketched those out on blocks of wood and left them to his woodcarvers to cut and sand so that those blocks would fit in with the rest of their letters. 

“Isn’t it a waste to make these if you’re just going to use them once?” Simon was asked as they printed the first picture of Aldor’s banner on the 19th page. 

“Art is never wasted,” he countered. 

Despite their haystack-sized stockpile, they ran out of blank paper just before Yule. That didn’t stop Simon from writing, though. Once he got through all the letters, he started adapting the tales of the region to his themes. He interlaced those with lessons, rather like the fables he’d been taught when he was young. Simon couldn’t remember any specifics of those, of course, but the format was enough, and between Ionia and Charia, there was fertile ground, and he had plenty of stories to improvise. 

So he wrote a story about the bear and the well, the pine that grew too tall, and the winter that never ended. He also mixed in tales that were supposedly true, like Char the Axeman, from whom the country derived its name. He was someone whom all clans claimed as their own, and when Simon drew up a great tree that showed how all the clans were related and separated over the generations, it was he who was the roots of that tree. 

Simon didn’t show what he was working on to almost anyone outside of his workshop until the spring, not even Eddek, because he wasn’t very good at keeping secrets. The only exception was Kayla, because he was still teaching her to read when he had the time. She received the ABC section as soon as it was finished as a late Yule present, and though she couldn’t read through the whole thing unassisted, she still flung her arms around his neck and thanked him just the same. 

“You made this?” she asked with a tone of amazement as she leafed through the pages. “The pictures and everything? And you made more just like it?”

“A lot of people made this,” Simon answered, enjoying her reaction. “It takes a lot of people to make anything important.”

“That’s so amazing,” she sighed. “And to think I once thought you were just a swordsman.”

As she complimented him, it was clear to him that she was flirting with him. It was clear she’d never quite gotten over her crush, but he fended it off as gently as he could. She was 18 or 19 now, but the last thing she needed in her life was a thirty-something who was really more like 300 and something, and as pretty and sweet as she was, he didn’t need one more woman to feel guilty about. 

She wasn’t the only one vying for his attention these days anyway. Thanks to his increasing wealth, he’d been forced to start lying about his status just to keep fathers trying to marry off their daughters to him away. He’d invented a whole arranged marriage and a fictional fiancée that he claimed he’d have to return to in the next year or two. Even that wasn’t enough to stop all offers, though. 

“Binding yourself to Clan Hrothmar with blood would be far more advantageous than any Brinnish marriage!” one particularly drunk Karl insisted after Simon politely but firmly rejected his generous offer of any of the man’s eligible daughters along with a fine dowry of horses and cattle.

These offers only intensified after Simon was invited to court one cold day near the end of winter to present one of the books he’d been constructing to the High Karl and his advisor. Simon had known that he wouldn’t be able to keep such a thing secret forever. Still, he’d hoped that he’d have more time. While there was nothing illegal about what he was doing, that could easily change if it rubbed someone the wrong way. 

He’d hoped to have a few more sections done, including the carving of Char, their mythical ancestor, to show, but resisting the summon would look like he had something to hide. So, instead of trying to delay, all he could do was make a quick copy with a sewn binding and dress in his finest clothes to put his best foot forward. 

As the bells tolled the hour the following day, Simon was escorted into the receiving hall of the High Karl. It was crowded, but quiet, and he was walked by dozens of men and a few women who stood near the door and against the walls until he was a dozen paces in front of the old man who ruled over all the other clans of Charia. There, he knelt until he was given the command to rise. 

As a subject of another nation, there was no law that required him to bow to the country’s ruler, but exercising that unique Outlander privilege would be disrespectful, and almost certainly make everything that followed worse. Instead, he displayed the utmost courtesy, and when he was addressed and allowed to rise, he answered all questions that were addressed to him. 

What was it he was writing? Was it true that he’d built a magical contraption that allowed him to copy whole books as many times as he wanted? Where was all the money he’d made from the good clans of Adonan really going?

The High Karl himself asked fairly simple questions. It was his advisors who answered the more complicated and paranoid ones. 

Simon had largely expected suspicion; that came naturally with envy. He fended those off by citing the amount of taxes he’d paid last year and the number of good works he was currently pursuing. Not only had he paid hundreds of silver pengs last year, which was an amount more suitable to an entire clan than to a single man. In addition, no matter how much some might want to deny it, his work with the sick had paid real dividends, making it very hard for anyone to doubt his contributions to the city. 

As the advisors saw the book, and passed it between them, they started to nitpick any details they could find, but when the High Karl saw it, he was silent, instead, while everyone talked around him, he flipped through, one page at a time, which Simon took as a good sign. 

He was in the midst of defending the changes he’d made to the local tale of the bear and the well as a regional variant when the High Karl finally spoke up. “There is no treason here, not any ill intent that I can see,” he declared. “And the art is truly lovely. I cannot believe that you plan to make many copies of this and not just the one? How long will it take to work such a miracle?”

“I expect to have a few dozen copies next year,” Simon answered, trying not to smile too broadly. “That will, of course, depend on some of the more complicated woodcuts, and the binding process, but I—”

“A few dozen copies? Before the end of next year?” the man roared with laughter. “I think that you boast too much, but I’ll humor you. Bring me all you have, then, and I’ll buy them for double the price you plan on selling them. They’ll make wonderful Yule gifts for my grandchildren.”

“I’ll do just that,” Simon promised. “Though, I should let you know that double zero will still be free.”

“Free?” the High Karl asked, as a hush fell over the room. “Why would you give such things away. They must cost a fortune to produce!”

“Only a small one. Fortunately, I have one to spare,” Simon admitted, before he went on to explain exactly how he planned to give them away to the poor of the city and even the communities beyond it. Had the conversation not been going well, he would have held this part of his plan back until he was already distributing books.

He knew this could harm him; trying to bring power to the people in any society was a dangerous gamble, but in this case, he did his best to couch it in terms of distance, not class. He also welcomed any additions that the High Karl or his advisors might have. 

“It’s my dream that everyone from every clan works together on the big issues, no matter how much they might quarrel on the smaller ones,” Simon added at the end. He knew the High Karl would like that line, since he’d been the one to say it in his closing speech at the Moot Simon had attended two years before.

The High Karl smiled at that and blessed the endeavor, which was worth more than any other largess that the man might have offered. Simon entered the court that day with a few bound chapters and a pocket full of worries, but he left with a clear path forward. Barring fire, war, or any other major disaster, this was something he’d be able to accomplish before he finished this level and moved on to other tasks. 

Ch. 335 - A Mouthful of Ashes

Despite Simon’s worries that the clans would give him further problems over the book he was writing, and his other efforts to unite the mountainous kingdom into a single, coherent whole, it was the religion he’d boosted so much in the last year or two that increasingly became his biggest concern. He’d originally chosen it for his efforts because it was such a small and relatively powerless deity among the polytheistic pantheon that Charia worshiped. There were other, better-loved healing gods, and all of them combined weren’t as worshiped as the God of War or the Lady of Winter. 

Still, with a confirmed miracle to spread the word and the ability to frequently handle otherwise incurable cases, they grew prodigiously after the end of his most recent expedition. By the time winter ended and spring arrived, their services had already outgrown their tiny shrine, and soon they held their regular sunrise services in the nearest market square as they gathered donations for a larger temple.

All of that was fine; it was the infighting and the pecking order that concerned him. The supposedly devoted pacifists practically took up arms against one another in their efforts to worm their way closer to their living saint, Jarin. 

Simon politely asked a few of the acolytes that he knew best, and even the priestess Vendin Darala, who had accompanied him on his trip so recently, to dial it back a little. Once upon a time, that would have been enough, but at this point, he might have succeeded in painting himself out of their story a little too well, and they asked him to mind his own business; while they were grateful enough to him most of the time, at least some of the opportunistic faithful had decided it was time for Simon to be pushed aside. 

The boy, for his part, took it well. Every time Simon interacted with him in the months that followed, he seemed more confused than drunk on power. 

He even once confessed to Simon in private, “How can I be chosen by  a Goddess if she’s never spoken with me?”

That was a very fair concern, and Simon was still working on a way to address it on the morning he attended the Feast of Ascension. It was held on the morning of the vernal equinox, and despite the chill, it was supposed to signify the end of winter. As a feast, it was a meager one because it was meant to break the fast of the faithful. 

Regardless of that, it was still a good time, at least until disaster struck. One minute they were making toasts and offerings as the most important priests discussed their plans for the coming year, and the next, Jarin turned deathly pale as he sat at the head of the table, then fell from his chair as he began to seize. 

Simon was up in a flash and moved toward the boy, but then, so too did everyone who sat between them. At least until several other people around the table began to show similar symptoms. “What is going on?” Simon asked as he looked around. 

None of those people had looked the least bit sick to him when the early meal had started, but something about sunrise had caused all of them to freak out. If it had been just one, he might have suspected anaphylactic shock from a food allergy, or perhaps even some sort of epilepsy; he knew little about it beyond the fact that it existed, but whatever this was, it wasn’t that.

It’s magic, he decided. Witchcraft, probably. 

He would have checked that, but he’d left his glasses in his room; he didn’t think he’d need them at such an occasion, not when he’d never seen a witch within the city. 

Rather than fight his way to the center of attention, Simon paused and stooped, tending to the closest acolyte. The way that he shivered and shook made it hard for him to feel for an accurate pulse, but there definitely was a heartbeat. Be that as it may, though, he doubted it would keep beating for much longer, because the man wasn’t breathing. 

“Hyakk,” Simon whispered, trying to return the acolyte to health with a word. Healing magic didn’t work well if you didn’t know what the problem was. He knew that, but he had little choice. This wasn’t a plague or a fever; it was a nervous condition, a poisoning, or maybe even something worse. 

Despite doing his best to picture the young man as the picture of health he’d been a few minutes before, his magic did nothing, and the word of curing, as well as the word of greater healing that followed, did little more. Still, as Simon’s mouth filled with sulfur and his throat burned, the dying man took his first breath in almost a minute, which was better than nothing. 

Simon quickly moved to Jarin and repeated the same spell as surreptitiously as he could, and was happy to let those who prayed around him take credit for that turn of events. He was even able to save another woman. After that, not only was his throat shot, but there was no one left with a heartbeat to save. 

Simon looked and felt tired as what should have been a celebration ended in tragedy. His attitude only worsened when he started putting together names, and he realized that everyone who’d been affected shared one thing in common besides their devotion to their Goddess: every single one of them had gone on his trip with him.

In fact, as he started to frantically search first the scene, then the city for anyone that might disprove that rule, he found something even stranger. Everyone who had gone on his second witch purging expedition that had any association with the Goddess had been murdered this morning, but everyone else had been spared. The other Aldor boys, the teamsters, and even their cook had not been struck down. Stranger still, Simon himself had been spared. 

Well, at least I convinced everyone that I had nothing to do with the miracles, he thought glumly as he returned to the temple to share what he’d learned and see if either of the survivors had recovered.

Even as he explained what he’d learned to the surviving priests, he was nearly overwhelmed with guilt at his own survival. A dozen people had just been struck down for something that he’d done, and he’d see them avenged. 

“This is most troubling news, Simon,” the head priest said when he was finished. “Do you believe it was witchcraft then? And that they were afflicted back in Keldonsland?”

Simon nodded, letting the other man lead the conversation. He doubted very much that what he'd said was the case, but he didn’t have a better theory just now. The idea that months-old latent witchcraft became even less likely when he helped change Jarin into clean clothes that evening. He even used his spectacles to search for magic, but found no strange marks that might have been put there by a witch on his skin. 

Simon would have waited there by his bedside for a month for him to recover, but he didn’t have to. Even though he sat there all night and tried a few more smaller healing spells and attempts to disrupt curses, the body still died before sunrise the following day. By the end, Simon had even placed a word of nullification, but it seemed to do nothing at all, further indicating that this wasn’t witchcraft. 

The following day, he set all of his current activities aside. His book and all of his myriad business adventures would have to wait. Instead, he took several of the bodies that had been wrapped in funeral shrouds as well as a mule team, and promised to return them to their clanholds. He’d do that, too, but before he did, he’d conduct a full autopsy, somewhere isolated between here and there. 

He chose his paper mill for that. He simply shut it down for a few days, gave the workers time off with pay, and locked the doors. Despite its proximity to the city, it was the one place he was sure he wouldn’t be disturbed by men or monsters. 

Disturbed by monsters? If I start hacking people to pieces, then I’ll be the monster myself, won’t I? He asked himself as he laid an oilcloth tarp down to keep things from getting messy. 

When he was done, he’d boil the flesh off the bones and tell anyone who asked it was necessary because of the transit. What was really necessary, though, was learning how these men died. If there was poison, he would find it.

Simon spent an entire afternoon gutting the first acolyte and sifting through his slowly decaying innards looking for a clue. He even shaved their head looking for a hidden mark, but didn’t find one until he cut back the scalp in preparation for removing the brain. That was when he found a shockingly advanced sigil imprinted into the bone of the skull itself. 

While its mere presence horrified Simon, when he started to sort it out and translate it, he became even more concerned. This was not a run-of-the-mill witch’s mark that transferred the life of the victim back to the caster. It wasn’t even like the one that had been cast on him the year before that, which used his own life to fuel a spell that would make him sicken and die. 

That would have been straightforward. Instead, he found a complex working of magic that made him think about the Magi or some of the volumes in the Black Library more than any witch he’d faced, and as he took all of that in and unraveled the meaning of the symbols, he felt a wave of fear pass through him. 

Weylera Delzam Aufvarum Eszloum Vrazig. A mark of timed, slow soul ruination. Someone hadn’t just killed the men and women he’d ridden beside for months. They'd intentionally twisted the knife slowly and ripped their soul out. That was the reason that none of his healing magic had done much. He’d saved the bodies of a few people, but the person meant to inhabit that body was long gone. 

Anger mixed with fear, then. This was new, and worse, it was something that could destroy him as easily as it had anyone else. He might live a thousand lives, but he kept the same soul each time, and if someone destroyed that, well… he’d just be an empty corpse lying there in a cabin over and over again. 

Even as his fear kindled into a terror that matched what it would be like to fight Freya or the Basilisk again, he moved to the next corpse and sliced open the scalp to search for the same mark. It was there, too. The only difference was the timing. That shocked him, too. 

He expected the marks to be identical, but they weren't, and as he did the math of the number of days they’d been set to go off after, he realized they were nearly a week apart. Worse, he realized that they hadn’t been set when they were anywhere near Keldonsland. He’d have to look at a calendar and count backwards, but he was ninety percent sure that the marks had been added to the acolytes shortly after they’d returned to the capital. 

“The witch I can’t find…” Simon murmured to himself as he looked from one bloody bone mark to the other and back again. “I didn’t find her, but she found me.”

That thought lingered as he suddenly imagined the city as a vast web, with a dark, poisonous spider at the center of it. As Simon reeled from this information, part of him had an urge to kill himself on the spot. Retreat from such a scenario would be a logical move. I’ve done enough good, he assured himself. There’s no need to damn myself by digging deeper. 

He did dig deeper, though. Even afraid as he was, he still took the time to look at the third corpse. There he found the mark not on the skull, but on the breastbone, with a date between the other two. It was frightening that such a thing might be anywhere, but before he reacted rashly, he needed to think. Still, he took the time to cast two healing spells, one targeted at each area on the body where whatever this was had appeared on the dead men. He didn’t think he’d been marked. If he had, he’d be as dead as they were, but still, he wouldn’t be able to sleep that night without doing something about it. 

After photographing the strange bone cravings with his mirror, Simon spent the rest of the evening boiling corpses to collect the bones, and as he did so, he toyed with the golden necklace around his throat. He’d worn some version of this since before he’d been turned into a vampire. It hadn’t worked then, but it would work now. The links of the chain were inert unless he ripped it from his throat, but if that ever happened, well, it was one hell of a rip cord. 

Is that enough, though? He wondered if this had happened to me, could I have pulled it in time?