Death After Death PLUS 282-284

Ch. 282 - Stepping Stones

That morning, Simon was offered a feast, but he forced himself to eat sparingly. He’d starved before, and the body did not like to switch from famine to feast too quickly. Still, he felt bad for leaving so much of his tiny banquet untouched. He was given a sweet porridge with dates and plums, nut-encrusted honey breads, and every other treat that seemed appropriate for breakfast. 

He was given watered wine, too, which was something he hadn’t been given before now. Even a few sips of that were hard on his young body, though, and he was halfway to drunk by the time they gave him a tour of this side of the compound. It wasn’t so much of a plaza as the other side had been. It was more like a series of stone footpaths between oases of flowers and trees. 

Whereas the other side of the pyramid had been dominated by initiates and acolytes, as well as the tightly packed buildings that supported them, this side was closer to a garden. It wasn’t claustrophobic, but the area was still ringed with two- and three-story buildings and the wall was still behind them. 

The pyramid still dominated the skyline, of course, but it was like the other side of the compound was a no-frills military school, and this one was a luxurious college campus, even if they both shared the same design cues. One thing they didn’t share, though, was the people. There were no brown-robed students anywhere, and precious few black or gray robes to be seen either. 

This was a place of color and very nearly the sole domain of the Magi, which made Simon that much more interested in it. He wasn’t sure if this tour was supposed to be a carrot or if he’d be taking the next step of his training here, but either way, this felt like progress, and it mollified him slightly. 

As they crossed the grounds, his minder told him what most of the buildings did, but he was tipsy enough that it was hard to give her his entire attention, but he got the gist of it. This was a research facility, that one was a temple, and those two buildings were libraries for the initiated. Even though he didn’t ask, she also explained that the Magi didn’t live in the district the same way that the acolytes did. They owned homes in the Noble Quarter or other fashionable parts of the city. 

Simon didn’t need her to tell him that, of course. He’d already figured that out through his own research efforts when he was still a merchant. Still, even if that was something a street rat like Nijam might have known, Simon didn’t interrupt her. He was eager to learn all he could before they reached their destination, and she didn’t disappoint. 

She was trying to make him feel special, and along the way, she explained many things, like the way he should address those Magi he happened to cross paths with and the fact that acolytes were forbidden from most of those buildings, except for those who had reached the apprenticeship stage of their journey and were running errands for their masters. That was interesting, but Simon doubted he’d be getting a master for a good long time.

At this rate, I’ll be an adult again, he thought petulantly. 

Simon was escorted for several minutes until they finally walked into a large yellow building. There, he was handed off to another minder after a brief conversation where they spoke in a tongue he wasn’t supposed to understand. 

“This one can only barely read. He’s not the fastest learner, but not the slowest either,” the woman who had been escorting him explained as they talked about him like he wasn’t there. “I don’t think he’ll give you any trouble, but I don’t think he’s one you’ll be able to trade for any favors either.”

“Pity,” the man said, regarding Simon with a jaundiced eye, “there’s many a Magi looking to claim the rights to a talented apprentice, but there are so few to go around.”

“Well, I understand this one was raised on the street, but he’s learning to read and write as quickly as the rest,” she answered with a shrug. “Maybe you can speed his progress.”

“Well, if he’s any slower than the last one you brought me, I’ll beat him until he has to be healed again,” the man in gray said with a laugh. 

That was a bad sign, but Simon focused on the bookshelves and the writing desks of this place. It wasn’t quite a classroom or a library. It was more like a scriptorium. The Unspoken had a whole wing of their library just set up to copy a few of the more important books, so the existence of one here didn’t surprise him. 

Still, he didn’t think he’d be allowed to read and copy anything interesting. He didn’t really even understand why this was the next link in the chain of becoming a Magi. Fortunately, the new minder didn’t leave him in suspense long. 

“Do you know why you’re here?” the man asked almost as soon as his previous minder departed. 

“To be a Magi?” Simon ventured in an unsure voice. 

“Broadly correct, but still useless as an answer,” the man sneered. “You have learned the basics of reading and writing, and now you are here to practice both until you are no longer a danger to yourself or to those around you.”

“Why would reading or writing be dangerous to—” Simon’s question was cut short as he was cuffed across the face. He’d known it to be a stupid question, but he hadn’t quite expected the slap. 

This is probably how some of the acolytes die, he told himself as he stood there trying to act unsure. They piss off assholes like this. 

“Magic is as powerful as it is fickle,” the man said with exaggerated slowness as if Simon was hard of hearing. “One wrong syllable, one wrong gesture, or one incorrect line, and it might well be the end of you, do you understand?”

Simon nodded hastily, but only because he wanted to keep the joy from his voice. Gesture-based magic was something he definitely wanted to learn. He hadn’t been completely sure that the Murani even knew it since it was something he’d only seen a few Magi use, but if that was something he could finally unlock the secrets of here, well, then this guy could go right on treating him like dirt for as long as he wanted. 

Even as Simon tried not to beam, the man proceeded to explain just how important precision was. Simon didn’t fault him for that. That was something he’d learned well during his time in the Whitecloak’s black forge. “We won’t even be learning with true words of power!” the man insisted as if Simon had asked a question. “If I gave you a single word to transcribe, you might well blow yourself to pieces!”

Simon let the man rant as long as he wanted, adding in a yes sir and a no sir where it made sense to do so as he spelled out the details. He’d had his moment in the sun, and now he was stuck here along with the other two dozen students that were already here, and his job was simple: to learn to write with precision and read with clarity. 

The bruises on some of the other students told Simon everything he needed to know. Either they were getting violent with each other, or Master Dollen, as he insisted Simon call him, was every bit as short-tempered as he seemed to be. 

Simon was set up on his own writing desk, and another student showed him how to sharpen a quill. Then, he was left with paper, ink, and his own devices. It seemed a poor set-up for learning anything, and judging by peeks at the students nearest to him, it was, but Simon was sure there was a reason for that, too.

Do they want us to feel inadequate? He wondered, or let the cream rise to the top. 

Simon wasn’t sure. Judging by the unfamiliar faces, some of the people in this stage of the education process had been here for some time. While Simon recognized a few of the people as he should, there were many that he did not. Mentally, he tried to calculate how long Ajeem had been here and decided that it was probably a month or a month and a half. 

So, some of these people have been here longer than that, Simon decided. That made sense, he supposed. It wasn’t like the Magi were running an IQ test to select candidates for their bizarre little cult. They were choosing bad eggs with every reason to be loyal to the God-King. 

It was the opposite of how any decent army or university would be recruiting. So, it wasn’t surprising at all that there were some incompatible candidates that got stuck at various stages. Simon didn’t even want to think about what would happen to them eventually. It was an ugly thought, and he couldn’t imagine it would end well for people who disappointed the Magi for too long.

That left Simon with a conundrum. Should he try to push through this quickly and risk getting the wrong sort of attention? Or should he blend in and take a few beatings for failing to derperform as he pretended not to know what he was doing. Truthfully, he would love nothing more than to spend a month practicing fine Murani calligraphy. They had such a lovely, flowing style to their letters compared to the languages of the south. He would love to practice it, but that would definitely blow his cover. 

That first day, all he did was scribble a bit and make a few half-hearted attempts at the letters that were displayed on the far wall. He was too busy looking at everything else to make much progress. No one seemed to expect too much of him that day, and that night, there wasn’t much in the way of bullying even, which surprised him. He remembered why very quickly as he lay there listening to crying children and the sound of other people’s nightmares. 

That’s right, he reminded himself. Everyone here thinks they’ve just died recently. No wonder they have no fight in them. 

The fact that at least one part of his life was going to be easier should have made Simon’s life that much easier. Instead, it made him want to leave even more. It was just too depressing, and thinking about all the trauma they’d inflicted on all these kids with a lie just made him want to blow up this whole deranged system that much more. 

Simon didn’t sneak out of the place where they slept that night, but he did on almost all the nights that followed. He told himself it was a bad idea, but the combination of temptation and outrage proved far too potent for him. What was he supposed to do if they didn’t even bother to lock the door?

At first, Simon thought that part was a trap, but given that they slept in the attic and the privy was on the first floor, any of them had a perfectly reasonable explanation to leave the room at night. Simon was careful those first few nights, but the longer he stayed in this new place, the more he lingered at night in places he shouldn’t. 

Soon, he was going to sleep right away, then waking up during the night and spending hours downstairs looking through books by city lights that came in through the windows. Master Dollen’s room was on the second floor, and most nights, that’s where he was, snoring away, but sometimes, when he was out, Simon would sneak in and dig through his things as well. 

This made Simon very drowsy during the day and earned him a sound trashing when he fell asleep sitting up once, but mostly, this new minder left Simon alone because he was making better progress than anyone else under his tutelage. His letters were improving, but he could read whole sentences whenever he was prompted to do so without a little bit of carefully added stammers and pauses. “The Gohhd-King w-w-watches ov-ver us e-even when we slum… slum-ber, so long as we p-pray to him al-ways…” Simon sounded out one day, not even earning a smile from the dour gray-robed man. 

“Better,” was all he barked before moving on. 

Ch. 283 - Stepping Stones (part 2)

Part of Simon wanted to explain that hoping that students would get better because they feared another beating was about the worst teaching method imaginable. If he’d taught his own son like this…. Seyom. Simon clamped down on that thought before it could blossom. He didn’t think about Freya at all anymore and Elthna only rarely. Neither woman caused him much heartache, but the idea that he’d saved his son without even getting to spend more time with him still hurt enough that he avoided the memory. 

He was scarcely older now than the boy had been at the end. It didn’t matter. Memories of people that didn’t exist weren’t any more important than learning to write words, which he already knew exactly how to draw with perfect form. What mattered was what he did with his evenings. 

Though there weren’t a lot of words of power hidden amongst the documents he’d searched so far, they were there. They were always written in the same strange way, though, so that someone wouldn’t accidentally cast a spell or something. Zyvon was not written as Zyvon. It was written as Zy/von. In the same way, Barom was written as Ba/rom, and Hyakk was written as Hy/akk. 

These were training texts, so there were only a few of the most basic words. He found no new words of power or new meanings for the ones he had, at least no useful ones. 

Someone very smart Magi, at some point in the past, had come up with a clever idea to solve one of Simon's biggest problems with the idea of teaching people magic, and that was to make the minor word mandatory to every spell. 

In the primer that was apparently meant to teach acolytes their first spells, Auf/varum wasn’t listed as minor or disperse. It was listed as ‘By order of the God-King I invoke.’ His fellow students were basically being taught that they couldn’t cast a spell without using that word, which was clever in a way. Simon actually respected that. That one little change probably saved a lot of lives. 

That wasn’t the part of the book that interested him, though. That was the section on hand motions. 

Simon didn’t know how much longer it would be until he learned from this book as a student in some official capacity. He was tempted to start casting spells the very night he found it. Instead, he waited because he wasn’t sure they had some way to detect if he was doing magic. 

It had not been such a long time since they had hunted him throughout the city for his divination efforts, and he still wasn’t sure what had triggered that. I soon might, though, he thought, hopefully. For all their awfulness, the Magi knew many things that he didn’t, and he would put up with a great deal to pry those secrets free. 

Still, just because he couldn’t try to cast the spells he’d discovered in that thin blue volume labeled The Basic Techniques for Calling Down the God-King’s Blessings didn’t mean he couldn’t read about them. That he did from the very first moment, devouring page after page of fairly biased theory. 

To some extent, it reminded him of some of the demonic tomes he’d read so early in his adventures. Rather than thanking this demon or that one and invoking them in the rituals they listed, though, this was all about the state religion. Indeed, in most cases, there was a long litany of phrases that one had to recite before they were supposed to speak the words of power, which served no purpose at all. 

It’s still pretty common with warlocks, though, Simon reminded himself as he mentally reviewed many of the texts he’d read over his many lives. If a word contains power, then more words must contain more power. 

While he understood the flawed logic, the only benefit it might provide was in the way it strengthened the caster’s belief and imagination in what was about to happen. As Simon read the book, he ignored most of the pages, but he took the time to use a mirror to commit the most important pages to his library in case he died before he had the chance to try them for himself. 

Really, the thing seemed pretty straightforward; he only had a couple of concerns about the new concept of gesture-based magic. The first was that the information was woefully incomplete. The book contained gestures for only the words of light and fire, but the second one was the product of pure paranoia as much as anything else. The book showed a series of complicated hand gestures that were no doubt slower than speaking the words. 

Each gesture required only a single hand, so Simon supposed it might be possible to trace the modifier and the actual word of power simultaneously, but he wasn’t completely sure on that front. It would require experimentation. 

All of this will, he reminded himself with a shake of his head. He wasn’t even sure how the words and gestures would interact together. What he was sure of, though, was that the information was incomplete, at the bare minimum.

If they lie to the students about what Aufvarum means, then what else are they lying about? He wondered. 

It wasn’t like he only had one night to figure all of this out, though. While all of the other acolytes were eager to steal as much sleep as they could every night, Simon had weeks to think about these things on his nighttime adventures. 

By day, he would scribble on sheets of paper as he tried to make his handwriting look as awkward and juvenile as possible, and by night, he would creep around looking for any scrap that he could find in the slumbering building. His minder didn’t seem to have any fear of what the acolytes in his charge might find because they were a long way from possessing real reading skills, and that gave Simon any number of opportunities. 

Students cycled in and out of this place, the same as they had when he was an initiate. Here, though, there was no order to it. It wasn’t just taking those who had been here the longest every few days. Here, those were almost always skipped, and it was those who were closest to writing in a clean hand that vanished one day without notice or explanation. 

When those who might never master reading or writing vanished, they usually did so in groups, and Simon was quite sure they did not share his eventual fate. Something terrible happened to them, and as much as he wanted to investigate that, for now, it remained a mystery. 

In all of his late-night adventures in those first few weeks, he was only almost caught on a single occasion. That time, their minder came back to the building well after midnight. The man was completely drunk, and the female Magi with him seemed halfway there herself, but even the unwelcome surprise of listening to the two of them fumbling in the doorway didn’t make him panic. 

Simon had planned for a moment like this from the very first night, which was why he read so near the large table at one end of the room where lunch was typically laid out. His plan had been to roll beneath it and hide there until the danger had passed. However, when he realized the two of them probably intended to fuck on that very spot or somewhere close by, he decided to dash out of the room toward the privy and then returned blearily as he pretended to rub the sleep from his eyes. 

Ruining the minder’s moment earned him a sound thrashing, but it was better than the alternative. “If I catch you sssleeping, I’ll lock you in the basssement for a week!” the man threatened him with slurred words. Simon believed him, but as it happened, in the morning, the man didn’t seem to remember exactly who it was he was annoyed with because he took his ill mood out on everyone who even looked a little tired instead. 

Still, Simon endured it. That turned out to be one of his last forays into the dark, too. It wasn’t because he feared getting caught, either. It was because he stumbled into an even better way to disappear and explore things he shouldn’t. 

Minder Dollen had no problem sending his students off to perform his personal errands. This was something Simon had learned in his first few days in the scriptorium. Sometimes, he even sent them to help other Magi with tasks in an attempt to curry favor with them. He chose the dullards of the group, but since that was exactly what Simon was pretending to some degree, he eventually found himself being sent off to do errands almost as often as he was scribbling. 

Simon was trying to walk the tightrope of just enough progress to be worth continued effort, but not so much that he was in danger of graduating to whatever the next level was. He didn’t relish his time spent copying tracts from one of the many books of psalms that praised the God-King, of course, but his explorations had been very enlightening, even if they mostly revealed more about the nature of the venal Magi to him. 

It wasn’t until he was sent with a note to fetch a few books from one of the libraries though, that everything changed. Simon had started that trip worried that he should really get his ass in gear so that he didn’t end up wherever it was that Minder Dollen sent the rejects, but as soon as he saw how easily the librarian accepted his presence, he changed his mind entirely. 

It might be worth it to milk this for as long as possible, even if they do sacrifice me, he told himself as the librarian helped him to fetch several volumes.

He strolled the isles with the man, committing the names of a few of the more interesting volumes to memory should he ever find his way into this place again without an escort. When it was done, the man wrapped each volume in a ribbon and sealed that ribbon with wax and the library’s seal so that “No one would be tempted to read things they shouldn’t.” Simon assured the man that he could barely read, but it was through gritted teeth. He’d been so close to finding a new way to steal knowledge he wasn’t supposed to have. That frustration faded on his way back to deliver the books to the scriptorium as he figured out exactly how he could get around all of these measures and read whatever he wanted. 

Slowly, a wicked plan was coming together in Simon’s mind, and though it took him a week to put all the pieces together, he enjoyed every minute of his scheming. The first and hardest part of the whole thing was to find a place he could read without being discovered. As an acolyte, he couldn’t just sit around. Unless he was walking very purposefully from one point to another, he was bound to get stopped by one or more Magi. 

Punishment for shirking was bad enough. Those boys and girls were often publicly shamed and beaten. Simon was sure that the penalty for reading things the one wasn’t allowed to read would be much worse than that, though, which was why he needed to find a spider hole. While knowledge was plentiful here, if one knew where to look for it, privacy was normally only found while everyone else slept. 

That was solved when he was sent one day to help remove furniture from a building that was going to be renovated. From the blood spatter on the walls, anyone could see that someone had died in it, but that didn’t bother Simon. He just wanted to know if it was a murder or a magical experiment that hadn’t gone so well for whoever had lived there before. It was an ugly end, but for Simon, it was an opportunity.

Ch. 284 - Stepping Stones (part 3)

For his plan to work, Simon needed only four things, and he already had two of them. The first was a place to read, and the second was the names of a few books that he wanted to read. Now, all he had to do was forge a permission slip and then get an opportunity. That last one would be easy, at least for now. Minder Dollen sent Simon out frequently enough now that he was in real danger of finding out what happened to those who were deemed irredeemable, and Simon vowed to make sure that didn’t happen. 

Still, he didn’t rush things so much that he would miss this opportunity. Instead, he spent a whole morning diligently forging a library request from Magi Hajalna. He’d helped her to lug heavy boxes related to some experiment she was working on, so he knew her signature. Today, whether she knew it or not, she was asking to borrow The Motions of Magecraft and A Lexicon on Subtle Meanings. 

Simon had picked out both of the books based on their titles on his last trip to the library, and though he knew nothing about what they actually contained, their names seemed clear enough. While he was there, he would pick out a couple more names in the same way in case he had the chance to do this again, but truthfully, he already felt like he was pushing his luck with this stunt. 

Every time you do this is a time you risk getting caught, he reminded himself as his minder sent him off on an errand that amounted to little more than hauling and sweating for a Magi he didn’t recognize. That was fine. Suffering was the lot in life for an acolyte, and that didn't bother him. He only feared that one of these days, one of these preening mages was going to try to perv on him at some point. Then he was going to have to blow his cover by transforming them from a human to a fine paste. 

That didn’t happen today, though, thankfully. Instead, after he was dismissed, instead of going back to the scriptorium, he went to the library, and then when the librarian gave him the books he requested without batting an eye, he quickly retreated to the bloodstained room on the second floor of the now vacant building on the south side of the Pyramid of Lesser Miracles that would probably give anyone else nightmares. 

I wonder if they ever accidentally make things like the demon seed or the frost orb here? He wondered as he took the stairs two at a time once he was off the street. 

Simon didn’t care about old violence. He was barely afraid of new violence, but it did make him curious. His hands were shaking with excitement, not fear when he sat down beneath the window where the light was good, but no one would be able to see him, so he popped the seal off of the first book. 

Even though he knew nothing would happen, part of him feared that some alarm would sound at that, like a shopper who hadn’t paid for their order. His mind couldn’t help but imagine what it would look like for someone to shout a word of greater nullification over a bullhorn as a medieval swat team broke down the door to arrest him. 

That was enough to make Simon smile as he started to leaf through the new book, but he suppressed the laugh. He’d chosen the lexicon first because he could really only do this for an hour or two, and he believed that it was likely to have less interesting information than the guide to gestural magic. Simon was completely wrong on that front. 

The thing contained the better part of a chapter on most of the words he knew, discussing a variety of meanings. Most of those he knew, but some of them he didn’t. A quick look revealed that the only words he knew that it had omitted were the words for greater and the words for soul. That seemed to be a somewhat intentional oversight to him. 

I wonder how many of the books here are censored here? He asked himself. Is there anything that the unspoken do that these guys don’t?

He frequently compared the two, but that was because they were the only two organizations in this world that had this much overlap. The same was probably true of corporations or government agencies back on Earth, but Simon hadn’t known much about either of those things in his life, and even the memories that he thought he remembered secondhand from movies were more than a little blurry now. 

That wasn’t important, though. What was important was that he’d finally found new words! Over Simon’s fortyish lives, he’d found only sixteen words of power. He’d found a couple scattered here and there, a couple in evil grimoires, and most of the rest during his time with the White Cloaks. He hadn’t expected to find many more after that, but in this book, there were two more for him to feast his eyes upon. 

The first was Farzhel. It was a word to alter other words only if this text was to be believed. It wasn’t meant to be used when casting a spell but in response to a spell or an ongoing effect. Simon saw the uses even before the book had finished explaining them to him.  

It’s not a spell to change what I’m casting, he thought, stunned. Almost all words do that already. It's a spell to alter spells that are already in existence. In his mind, he envisioned it as a sort of counterspell, able to redirect lightning or fire. I might even be able to siphon off someone's spell back to pure life energy, he realized. 

Such a word would take a lot of careful experimentation and practice, of course, but it seemed very versatile. The other one seemed almost as flexible but a bit more evil, given how he knew it was probably meant to be used. 

Weylera was the second word he found that he hadn’t heard before, and from the moment he whispered it aloud, he felt it burn into his soul with all of the others. This one seemed less useful than many others he knew, but Simon was experienced enough to understand why it was referred to as the ‘word of the God-King.’

“They just can’t help themselves, can they?” he asked himself, his voice dripping with derision. 

The lexicon defined it as ‘by his permission,’ or ‘at his will,’ but Simon knew that wasn’t quite right. The word was conditional. If this happened. Then that would happen. His doppelgänger had done something similar by making an earth effect powered by life force in the barrow mounds, but the trap would have been far more elegant with this. 

The Librium Malifica would have definitely benefited from it, he realized almost immediately. If it hadn’t been forced to use tiny contact points, then the whole gilded edge would have been dangerous to touch instead of single random spots. 

Maybe that was the point, though, he reflected as he thought about how close he’d come to getting sucked into hell by that evil book. Maybe the whole point was to choose which awful monster got to chew on your soul for the rest of eternity with a roll of the dice.

It didn’t matter. What mattered was what this word could do. It was a switch, and if he was reading right, then it was capable of multiple outputs based on the way the spell was written. If a hand gripped the hilt of a sword that was ensorcelled with this spell, then it might be able to do a lot of different things. A wand might be a better example, though. As he imagined it, it was almost like a flute or some other simple instrument.

However, in this case, you didn’t blow into it, and sound came out. You poured life force into it, and then, depending on which holes you covered, different effects came out. Simon had seen a few of the magi carrying wands and staves, and while he couldn’t be sure this was how they were designed without examining them, he was pretty sure that they would be something like this. Because unless they knew something he didn’t about the words of power, they didn’t exactly require any implements to make them work.

Simon burned through his remaining time reviewing this book as he looked for more useful details, and his mind raced. He didn’t even get to the book he’d expected to spend most of his time with. It turned out that the idea of learning new words was more intriguing than the possibility of casting old words in new ways. 

He removed the seals and hid the books underneath some building materials, where they were unlikely to be found before he had another chance to do some reading. Then Simon rushed back to the scriptorium, where he hastily scribbled and sat ready with several good excuses in case his minder quizzed him. 

Fortunately, the man barely seemed to notice he was gone. Unfortunately, because Simon spent the next couple of days trying to show the man that he wasn’t completely worthless, he wasn’t sent out as temporary slave labor for almost a week. 

On the one hand, that was okay because his new words had given Simon a lot to think about, and his mind was already racing with ideas. On the other side, though, that was long enough that he was almost afraid to fetch his stolen books for fear that someone might have laid a trap. He struggled with what he should do for part of the day as he helped Magi Josphen gather and organize herbs for some healing experiment he was planning to perform. It was easy enough work. The hardest part was listening to the Magi expound on his medical theories; they were crazy enough that it made some of the backward healers he’d worked with over the years sound like well-informed masters of the craft. 

When Simon was finally released and his moment of truth came, he wanted to believe that it was his heightened intuition that told him to risk it. The truth was simpler, though. He’d liberated the information, and he needed to learn as much of it as he could. In that sense, his paranoia was no match for his curiosity, and he found his stolen knowledge right where he left it. 

Simon scooped it up immediately and started reading, giving himself three hours to absorb as much as possible. Of course, learning complex gestures for every word in such a short period of time was impossible, but he still wanted to know what he could. 

In the end, it took less than an hour to grow disappointed with the tome. Whereas the first book had been surprisingly interesting, this one was like a badly written instruction manual for learning the waltz or a series of secret handshakes, and even before his allotted time had expired, he found himself disinterested enough to return to the lexicon he’d already read almost cover to cover in an attempt to gain more knowledge. 

That didn’t last very long, though. The sound of two people talking as they entered the building on the floor below him and started up the stairs put the fear of God in him. This would be a bad place to get caught, and though he was never going to reunite with Zoa at this rate, he definitely didn’t want to end this life here.

Simon was up in a flash. He hid both books under a tarp so they wouldn’t be found immediately, and then, with only a quick glance to make sure the alley that the window overlooked was clear, he jumped the twelve feet down to the ground. From there, he immediately started walking purposefully back to the scriptorium, and when he arrived, he got immediately ready to work as he tried to look focused instead of worried.

He spent all of that day and most of the night waiting for the other shoe to drop, and when he was sent out on another errand the following day, he didn’t even attempt to go back to see if the books had been found. He had no evidence that anyone had even noticed them, of course, but he had no proof they didn’t either, and something about the current situation told him that he was inches from having to fight his way out of something ugly. 

As the days passed, Simon told himself he’d find somewhere new to read. He promised himself he’d get some new books, even. Unfortunately, as much as Simon would have liked to linger and abduct more books to read, he didn’t get the chance. A few days later, he was woken up in the middle of the night by a stranger in black robes and told, “Follow close behind, but say nothing.”