Ch. 388 - A Speedy Trial
Simon dressed the boy in his worst clothes and smuggled him to the stables of the closest inn, where he’d already stashed his horse and his armor. That brought a barrage of angry questions from the young Baron, who clearly didn't want to be left alone, but Simon didn't have the time to answer all of them.
"First, I must investigate your fake death," he said, trying not to scold the boy. "Then we will escape before someone can make it a real one. You'll have the answers to all of your questions after that."
Then, after ordering him not to wander off, he returned to the keep and had the gate guard shut and bar the main door, ordering them, “Someone assassinated your young Baron. A warlock, and this door does not open until we have found everyone involved. Do you understand?”
Ashen-faced, they agreed, swearing they had nothing to do with it. Simon knew that already, though, even before they verified it with words that rang of truth. There were still a few decent men on the Baron’s payroll, but they were badly outnumbered by scum.
Fortunately, most of the scum did battle with words and quills, and not with weapons, which was a real advantage for Simon once he sounded the alarm and woke the keep. There was chaos and fear at first, and Simon did nothing to calm it. Instead, he had everyone exit the keep into the small courtyard, penning them in away from whatever preparations any other mages might have made. Then he delivered a short, sharp speech from a balcony on the second floor, shouting, to make sure everyone could hear him.
“This evening I have done battle with a man wielding lightning and consorting with demons,” he announced, letting a gasp ripple through the crowd before he continued. “He is dead, but so too is your Baron, and no one is leaving this place until I have found and hung all of his co-conspirators. Come forward, tell me what you know, and claim a quick death. That will be the extent of my mercy.”
No one clamored for that sort of reward, but then, no one tried to argue that he didn’t have the right, either. He studied the swirling fear that rippled through the crowd, and then he went back into the keep to sweep the place, floor by floor. As he went, he found a few people. There was a maid and a footman making out on the third floor, an old butler cowering in fear on the second, and a fat cook gorging herself on a leftover pie in the larder that hadn’t chosen to respond to his call.
He kicked all of those people out, and then, after poking at the remains of what might have been a summoning circle in the wine cellar, he selected a guard with a bright aura and had him identify the body and lead Simon to the warlock’s room. “That’s Jorgen Belhin,” the young guard confirmed. “One of the Baron’s… the previous Baron’s most important advisors.”
The young man couldn’t tell Simon much about him, but then it was obvious that even for a small town like Crowvar, the two moved in different circles. Simon searched his room, annoyed for the hundredth time that he couldn’t simply detect evil from an object in most cases. Places where demons had been summoned contained a whiff of pure evil, but beyond that, it bordered on the impossible. Even the most heinous murder weapons didn’t turn evil when they were soaked in enough blood.
So, Simon slogged through the man’s bookshelf, one tome at a time. “Aren’t you going to interview the killer’s coconspirators?” the guard hesitantly asked Simon after nearly an hour had passed.
“Letting them stew will make them more likely to turn on each other,” he lied, not bothering to meet the man’s eyes. While he was sure there were people out there who stood to benefit from the crime, Simon was fairly sure that the warlock had acted alone. They tended to do that when the alternative was being burned at the stake.
Now that Varten was safe, Simon was more interested in hints about where this man had gotten his powers and what words of power he knew than anything. While it took a while, his search finally paid off when he found a tome labeled, “Heraldry and Patents for Wellborn Families of Southern Brin.”
While he might have expected such a dull tome to have illustrations of crests and banners, the drawings in this book were considerably more profane and contained the names and drawings of several demons. Simon knew immediately that he’d found the man’s grimoire, and after leafing through it, he closed the evil tome.
He didn’t see anything particularly advanced in it, and he could always study the thing at his leisure when they were out of the city. It would make a nice trophy to bring home to the Unspoken, too; they’d probably ask him if he’d read it, but he’d of course find a way to weasel out of that without outright lying.
When that was done, he went to the Baron’s entrance hall and had the guards start sending him the men and women from the courtyard one at a time. For those who struck him as genuinely good people, he didn’t even bother to ask any questions. For everyone else, he had the same set of questions.
“How do you feel about the death of the Raithewait family?”
“Were you in league with Jorgen?”
“Who do you think will become the new Baron now that Varten is dead?”
They were simple enough questions, and direct enough that he’d see a lie immediately. Only a few tripped up his first question, even fewer his second, and almost no one agreed on the third, which was fine, because he was mostly making a list of people that shouldn’t get power next in his head.
It was sunrise before he finished interviewing all seventy-eight people who had been in the keep that night. Only one of the guards, and a retainer for a man by the name of Belquat, was implicated in the crime, but Simon also had three more with the worst souls sent to the gallows as well. They hadn’t done anything wrong tonight, but between them, they’d done plenty worth dying for.
He might have condemned a few more, but he was running out of time. Crowvar would be waking up soon, and the faster he absconded with their still living lord, the better. Simon sent the city watch to round up Belquat as well. The man’s servant gave him up almost as soon as Simon had him arrested. “I didn’t hurt anyone,” the man said, pleading for his life. “I just delivered a message.”
“And if you hadn’t, then no one would have been trying to murder my charge, now would they?” Simon asked as the other man was dragged away.
The plan seemed pretty straightforward; one powerful man had sensed weakness after the demise of another and sought to increase his station. If he’d waited a week instead of a day, then he would have been successful, too. Simon would have come back years from now to find Baron Belquat ruling over this shithole instead of Baron Raithwaite.
“What an awful name,” he sighed to himself as he made his way back to the inn.
The guard captain had all but begged Simon to stay, but Simon shook his head, sure they could handle justice on their own. Once he’d decided the guilty, and the cock had started to crow, the only thing important enough for him to linger was to choose a protector for the barony to hold it in trust until such time as the King of Brin selected a replacement.
For that duty, Simon chose Marken, the city’s magistrate. The man was a milquetoast background character of no importance, which was obviously the reason that Lord Raithewait had appointed him in the first place, but no one had thought him likely to be involved, didn’t seem to have any obvious enemies, and he had a good soul. These days, that was really all Simon looked for. A good, capable person was enough to fix most problems.
After that, he left the town with Varten in tow before anyone thought to ask where the Baron’s body had ended up. It was a gap in his story, but Simon wasn’t about to go and murder a stableboy to solve it.
Still, when the town disappeared over the horizon, and no one came riding after them, Simon breathed easier. Then, he had both of them dismount from the horse they’d been sharing to give the poor thing a break. The complaints started almost immediately, but they were not enough to make Simon regret his decision.
“Where are we going?”
“When will we stop for lunch?”
“My feet are tired.”
“Why can’t we ride again?”
The boy’s whining was a steady metronome that kept the pace of their slow journey almost as well as a marching song might have for the first hour. Truthfully, Simon had planned to let the boy ride after letting the horse rest for twenty minutes; he was more than happy to walk alongside, and the boy was still injured. Unfortunately, the more the boy complained, the more Simon knew he couldn’t reward bad behavior.
He hadn’t been a teacher in lifetimes, but he knew that much. “Walking will make you strong,” Simon answered when the boy complained one too many times, but that earned only a defiant look from Varten.
“How will walking for mile after mile help me kill my enemies?” the boy asked, a few seconds later, still uncowed. “It has nothing to do with swordplay!”
“In battle, endurance is everything,” Simon answered, letting the boy’s antagonistic nature drift by him. “When you feel better, I will make you run beside the horse for mile after mile so you can build endurance that much faster.”
“I… What?!” Varten cried out in shock. “I’ll do no such thing!”
“And when that is easy, you can do so while carrying a backpack full of stones,” Simon continued. “Maybe I’ll add one stone for each time you tell me no.”
“But? Why?” Varten demanded, obviously too afraid to tell Simon no so quickly after a threat like that. “What, uhmm… what purpose would that serve, besides cruelty? Walking, I suppose I understand, but stones?”
Simon suppressed the smile that sprang to his lips as he watched young Varten backpedal hard. What had been pointless drudgery a minute before was now reasonable; that would have been enough to make him laugh out loud if it wouldn’t have ruined the moment. Instead, he very blandly stated, “How else will you learn to walk and fight under the weight of armor?”
Ch. 389 - A Strange Pair
True to his word, Simon stopped early that day, as much to let his new squire rest as to answer all of his questions. They were equal parts reasonable, but he always returned to fighting. When would he get a sword? When would Simon train him to kill monsters? When would he slay his first goblin?
Those were all brave enough, but the boy still cried himself to sleep that night, and Simon held him, reassured by that fact. Varten grew up into a bad man in the lives he’d known him, but there was nothing that said that had to be the case. Freya only became a monster in a single life; in the rest, she seemed happy enough. If only the same could be true for him, Simon told himself, offering a silent prayer to no one in particular for there to be a reason for all of this suffering.
The next day Varten rode the horse for most of the day, while Simon walked, and kept an eye on the horizon. The further they got from any city proper, the more likely they were to run into a herd of horselords. That evening, they made camp between a pair of large boulders, and Simon started to whittle a wooden sword.
“A wooden blade?” Varten complained. “Those are for babies! I want steel!”
“Oh, this is for me, so when I hit you, it hurts less,” Simon explained. “I’d hate to maim you during one of your first lessons. You can wield my blade if you like.”
A few days later, they actually practiced like that, which amused Simon to no end. Varten could lift Simon’s blade. He could even swing it, but the long sword weighed a fifth of the child, and the momentum put him on his ass more than once. True to Simon’s word, he wielded the wooden blade and used it to poke and prod his squire, showing him how little he knew.
It only took one lesson like that for the boy to accept the much lighter blade for practicing his sword drills, and Simon set about making a second wooden weapon so they could spar properly. Of course, most nights did not involve sword fighting, even when they were alone in the wilderness. That was the reward, and Simon made Varten work for it.
Before that, he had to attend to chores, which were a foreign concept to him, as he’d grown up in a life of privilege. “Why can’t we bring along a few servants to fetch our wood and cook our meals?” the boy asked. “That would be much more reasonable.”
“There’s nothing reasonable about asking another man to work for you instead of living their own life,” Simon responded.
“But isn’t that what you’re doing?” Varten countered. “Making me work for you? It's not fair.”
“And if you were a man, I’d agree,” Simon answered. “But you are a boy, and when I was a boy, I was in the same place. Now go fetch more wood before I make you gut this rabbit instead while I get firewood.”
Varten didn’t respond, but he made such a face that this time Simon did laugh, long and loud once his charge had moved off to pick at deadwood in a nearby wash. He tried to maintain perfect stoicism and equanimity as a teacher, but it was hard in the face of such accidental humor.
It would be a lie to say that he didn’t enjoy humbling the arrogant young boy on a regular basis. Really, he didn’t have to do all that much work, though. Life did that easily enough for him. In the wastes, forcing him to gather dried dung to make a fire damaged the boy’s dignity, and in the towns they passed through, being forced to eat whatever was warm in the common room was a far cry from the sweets he was used to eating.
Slowly, though, the boy grew, and week by week he became a little less insufferable. Some nights, he didn’t even pester Simon as he pored over Jorgen’s grimoire in search of clues. The man knew half a dozen words, but none of them were particularly rare or powerful.
The most dangerous were Dnarth and Farzeh. Command and manipulation were as dangerous as they were hard to detect, and the man had doubtlessly wormed his way into the Baron’s confidence. That was enough to make Simon wonder if he might have misjudged the family. The tree might have been poisoned instead of rotten. It didn’t change anything, but the context was interesting.
What was also interesting was that it was clear the man hadn’t tried to summon demons. The book contained three different summoning circles, and two out of three of them were trapped so that the devils they summoned could devour their summoner and then retreat to hell once more. Simon found that interesting and wondered if such things were the products of mistakes, demonic subterfuge, or simply mages seeking to sabotage one another by trading poisoned information. Regardless, Simon made sure that the names for all three demons ended up in his mirror along with any other passages that seemed important.
With a squire in tow, he didn’t have the chance to research from his archives very often. However, that didn’t mean that he couldn’t add to it, between adventures, while Varten was sleeping. His presence required a lot of little changes to Simon’s routine, but Simon didn’t resent it; he just kept moving forward and looking for new communities to help and creatures to vanquish.
When Simon went out alone to deal with an orc that had become separated from his tribe, the boy demanded to fight at his side and was sullen when Simon forbade it. However, none of that resentment was in evidence when he returned splashed with green blood. Then Varten was nothing but enthusiastic, and peppered Simon with questions until he made the boy clean his armor with sand.
“Killing is bloody business,” Simon said, “And if you don’t clean your equipment regularly, it will turn to rust, and fail you at the worst possible time.”
Simon expected the boy to complain about servants again, but he stayed silent this time, so Simon rewarded him by telling the story of his duel with the orc. He skipped over some of the more esoteric bits, about using his sight to see the monster’s movements a moment before they became visible, but he did confess that a single misstep almost got him killed when he nearly tripped while moving backward.
“You think the sword is the most important part of the battle,” Simon said when the story was done, “But in some ways it's the least. Knowing your own abilities, and the strengths and weaknesses of your foe… knowing the ground you walk on… all of those things are more important than where or how you stab them in most cases.”
The next few encounters were largely the same. Simon let the boy watch from a distance when the hazard was known and contained, like in a gnoll den, a few weeks later, but if there was any risk to Varten, he made his squire wait at the inn they were staying at, or their campsite.
He didn’t like that, but as the weeks passed, he learned to complain less, at least to Simon. He would still bicker with local boys, or men whom he didn’t see as his betters, but even after a month, he’d matured noticeably. There was no real kindness or joy to go with that newfound maturity yet, but then, murdering monsters and learning how to do it better didn’t generally inspire such positive feelings.
That maturity and obedience didn’t extend to fighting either. When they broke out the wooden swords at the end of a long day, Varten became a little monster. By the tenth or twelfth time of being put on his ass, he was so angry that he made every mistake there was to make. Simon had to use his sight just to make sure he didn’t accidentally hurt the kid during those times because his movements were so erratic. He never complained about losing, though. He only vowed to get better.
There was a tremendous anger in the child that, while understandable, made it impossible to say whether or not he had any real gifts. Simon tried to get him to work on that too; he had to. In nine months, he’d bring Varten back to the Broken Tower, and he had no wish to see the boy killed for failing some part of the order’s tests.
Varten showed little interest in things related to morality or philosophy, though. He would listen to Simon and repeat it back to him, but there was no introspection. That’s probably normal for a ten-year-old, Simon told himself, even a bright one.
When they reached another town of reasonable size, Simon lingered to have a new outfit tailored for Varten that was more appropriate. Though Simon rarely encountered problems from anyone in this neck of the woods, especially after word had gotten around about his deeds, Varten looked more like an orphan than a squire, which often led to misunderstandings.
So Simon had three grey outfits crafted for him, and a proper leather jerkin, though that was to make him feel more like a warrior than any actual protection. He didn’t expect Varten would need to protect against any blows that he didn’t deliver himself for a long time.
“Why don’t I get a breast place like you?” the boy demanded.
“Breastplates are for knights,” Simon responded. Varten countered again, trying to get chainmail at least, but Simon explained that there was little point in paying so much for armor that he’d outgrow in a few years.
Years, Simon reflected. On a long enough timeline, what’s the point in anything? He’d chosen this life to learn more about hunting witches, and so far, he’d barely made any progress in that regard. Of all the nations Simon had traveled through, Brin had the least.
Perhaps I should just go to Montain and ask a coven to teach me their ways, Simon considered. He’d never do that, of course. To start with, they seemed to only allow women in their little clubs, and as fun as it had been to spend a year or two as a child, he had no wish to see how the other half lived.
He’d figure it out. While he walked the long roads between one village and the next with Varten, he contemplated it often, and eventually decided that what he needed was a tattoo he could draw on himself without magic, that would simply kill him if someone tried to use soul magic against him.
He couldn’t nullify it outright until he knew more about Helades' soul knot, but he could make it so that as soon as someone tried to touch him like that, the level was over. He could probably expand that further so that if he crossed the boundary of a magic circle that would lead to hell, he could automatically off himself.
Simon lay awake for several nights while Varten slept by his side, trying to imagine how those would tie together. While the former was simple enough, he wasn’t sure he had the right words for the latter. The real problem, though, would be the tattoo itself. With magic, he could easily imprint the thing with melanin under his hair; it would be like strapping a shotgun straight to his brain.
Unfortunately, if he wanted to keep his sight intact, he’d have to either pay someone else to tattoo the thing on his brainstem or brand himself above his heart. None of those options were great, and destroying his heart wouldn’t be fast enough. So, Simon resolved to make some kind of tool to address the problem, even if that wouldn’t resolve his underlying questions about soul magic interactions.
Maybe that will be my question when I reach level 40, he decided. I could learn a lot from seeing the magic that powers all of this, assuming it's even comprehensible to me.
Ch. 390 - Crossroad Tales
After three months on the road, wandering around southern Brin with Varten, and nearly six months in total since he’d left the Broken Tower, Simon still hadn’t run into any grave supernatural mysteries. His warlock count was still one, and he had yet to find a ghost, witch, or demon worth the name.
A few of the places he’d visited had claimed that the supernatural was at work amongst their flocks or their neighbors. He continued to add to all his other running tallies in his little journal. So far, he’d killed eighteen bandits, twenty-two centaurs, eleven orcs, three dozen beastmen, forty-two goblins, and close to fifty gnolls. He’d also purged eight gnoll burrows and one small goblin den. Those were just a list of the monsters he’d killed in battle.
He’d also adjudicated nearly fifty disagreements and hung almost two dozen criminals. He still only had one innocent man he’d saved and one grimoire he’d confiscated, but he was hoping to up those numbers.
Most importantly, he’d finally gotten Varten to say please and thank you in nearly all of his interactions. Even when they celebrated his eleventh birthday the week before, he didn’t lose his temper when the innkeeper informed him that they had no sweet cakes available. Moments like that made it hard to see the man who would have grown up to mark all his guards and servants with scars as a sign of his power over them.
Really, Varten was downright squeamish at times. When Simon had purged the goblin lair, he’d brought out a greenskin corpse with very little damage and proceeded to give the boy an anatomy lesson to appease his constant pestering for where to stab monsters. He even let the boy try stabbing it a few times to get a feel for the force that was necessary.
Before doing it, Simon had worried that his squire might go into another one of his maniacal frenzies like he still sometimes did during practice, but the result was just the opposite. Not only did he almost lose his lunch, but he didn’t ask Simon for any tips on monster slaying for a good long time after that.
For the first couple of weeks, things had been rough, and defiant outbursts were commonplace, but Varten needed no reminders that he had no home to go to anymore, and after a few months he looked and acted so differently that Simon was tempted to bring him back to Crowvar, just to see if anyone recognized him.
He didn’t, of course, because that would have been cruel. Instead, they moved southward, edging into the desert at times. Though this area was technically part of Brin, the desert nomads he encountered had no more respect or fear for the white cloak than they did for the king in Leipzen. Still, other than one oasis trip here, Simon had little experience in this place, and unless he went far enough west to reach the ruined city where the basilisk dwelled, he was unlikely to run into danger more serious than dehydration.
Strangely enough, it was at one of those oases where he ran into another Whitecloak for the first time in months. Simon wasn’t familiar with Sir Celenger or his young squire Robin, but they were friendly enough, and the only barb that the other knight offered Simon when he introduced himself was, “Ah, the prodigy, so we finally meet.”
He studied Simon’s aura with a faraway gaze on and off throughout the night but offered no comment as to what he saw, one way or the other. Instead, they exchanged stories by a campfire somewhat removed from the other nomads for hours after their charges fell asleep.
Simon told him about the death of the Baron, and how he smuggled out the man’s surviving son after a warlock tried to kill him in his sleep, and Sir Celenger told Simon about his encounter with a Jinn. Both found the other’s tale more interesting than their own. For Simon, dealing with Crowvar had gone from painful to nostalgic to dull over the course of many lives, but the other knight seemed impressed by his choice of a squire.
“The Masters will be pleased by such a find,” Sir Celenger assured him. Even after Simon expressed his doubts, the man disagreed. “No one really knows who will grow up to possess the sight. These are intermittent things, and children are always in flux. Even if they decide he’ll never be a knight, they might use him to control the Barony at a later time. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve used a noble heir to be the power behind the throne.”
Simon didn’t like that answer at all, but he would ponder it later. He refused to let the other Whitecloak get out of telling him a story that involved genies.
“There’s not much to tell,” he said. “I came south because travelers reported an evil place where caravans sheltered from time to time, only to find some of their members had gone missing. Not whole caravans, mind you, just one or two people from each one. Apparently, the place is well known among the locals. They just don’t like to speak of it, so it took time for word to reach us.”
“If the place is so evil, then why would anyone visit it at all?” Simon asked, dumfounded.
“The same reason they visit anywhere else in this region,” Sir Celenger answered. “Water and shade.”
Simon grimaced at that. It was true, but it was still awful. Surely there were other oases in the region. Note to self, he decided then and there, adding one more page to the future tome he would eventually construct. Make a map of oases so people don’t have to kill each other over them.
“So what did you find?” Simon asked, refocusing on the conversation.
“Nothing conclusive. There were strange lights that night, but no real cause that I could see, and when we hunted them back to the source, the sands tried to swallow all of us whole. For a moment, both my squire and I were almost sucked beneath the sands,” the other knight sighed. “We came looking for a trickster spirit, and we lost a Whisperer to the sands. I was able to dig myself free and pull Robin out before he suffocated, but poor Elzbin was lost to the depths.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Simon answered truthfully. It annoyed him that the man hadn’t so much as mentioned the poor woman until the end of the tale. She was an afterthought, even though she was the only reason the man had lived. That attitude made him seethe; the Unspoken treated the Whisperers as if they were halfway to witches, and he hated it.
“Don’t be,” Sir Celenger said, raising Simon’s hackles with his callowness. “She died in the service of the Unspoken, and though she lost her life, she ultimately banished the spirit. Thanks to her sacrifice, it will never harm another soul again.”
“But how can you be sure?” Simon demanded loud enough that he had to lower his voice. “It might have just eaten her and lay in wait until you were gone.”
“Even if that were true, and the foul thing managed to elude my gaze, what evil spirit could hope to stand up to one of the silent sisters?” the other white cloak asked, irritated. “They are anathema to magic. No ghost or demon could survive their presence.”
Unless she had a mouth full of sand and couldn’t speak the words of nullification, Simon thought in irritation. He didn’t ask the location of this place, because he knew the knight was too proud to give it to him. Instead, he switched the topic to something lighter, and then in the morning, when they went their separate ways he asked one of the caravans that lingered to water their horses where he could find it.
“The Tithe Pools?” the man answered suspiciously. “You don’t want to go there. Certainly not by yourself. No one will ever find your body.”
“Well, I’ll be going with my squire, but I’m not afraid,” Simon corrected the man. “I aim to purge the evil there.”
The trader eyed the boy where he stood a hundred yards away, grooming Simon’s horse, then said, “Cruel bait, but I suppose it will work as well as any.” Simon wanted to correct the man and explain that Varten wasn’t bait. Before he could, though, the merchant continued. “You head west for three days, and veer north around the black rocks. There’s an oasis not half a day's ride before that. It’s not the one you’re looking for. The Tithe Pools are past that. You’ll see them when you lose the black rocks behind you. Approach them only by the light of the noonday sun.”
“Is that when it’s safe then?” Simon asked, making mental notes of the man’s directions.
“Safest, but not safe,” the trader corrected him. “Near the water is safe enough all the time, but if you wander into the ruins, or even the empty sands when the sun gets low in the sky, you’re taking your life in your hands, and after dark, well, someone isn’t coming back. You can bet as much as you like on that.”
Simon thanked the man for the time, and once he’d rejoined his protege, they started off in that direction. He was in no hurry, though. He wanted a second and third opinion, and made a point of taking the long way, asking traders that he crossed paths with about the place. No one was eager to talk about it, especially not with someone who wasn’t native to the area. However, after Simon mentioned that he planned to purge the place, they spoke freely enough.
To his ears, most of what they said sounded like ghost stories more than witness accounts, and if he hadn’t heard Sir Celenger’s story, he would have been liable to ignore all of them, but the theme was clear enough. Whether someone told him about the ghost caravan or Canrago, or the crying lady, they all ended the same way: people vanished. Usually, one, in some terribly ironic way. Sometimes more if they tried to save the one that went missing.
Each disappearance happened in the same way, though. In the blink of an eye, someone far from the group was sucked beneath the sand. That was the last anyone ever saw of them. A couple of the first caravans to water there dug for their missing members, but found nothing, even after ten feet.
These days, merchant captains were more pragmatic. If they absolutely needed to go that way, they brought along a cheap slave who was old, sick, or dying and then set them free at sunset. Caravans that acted so cruelly could expect to spend the night entirely unmolested.
To Simon, it was barbaric, but more than that, it was a mystery, and he was eager to solve it. He hadn’t had a truly interesting supernatural encounter in a while, and it was hard to believe that this was anything but. First, though, he’d have to make some preparations.