Ch. 397 - Soulbound Wretch
Simon took one of the ugly, burnt-out glass jars in hand and took it outside so he could examine it in the light without harming any of the other artifacts with light. Soul magic. He’d only brushed up against it a couple of other times, and it was not a pleasant experience on any occasion. He would have much preferred a nice haunting like he’d been promised, or another true anomaly like he’d found in the desert.
As he stepped over the body of his captured warlock, though, Simon wasn’t so wrapped up in the cursed, ward covered jar that he failed to notice the small crowd gathering outside; some of the men even had tools and farming implements they were holding as weapons, though they didn’t seem to know who it is they were supposed to be fighting.
“A monster in human skin has killed the widow that lived here and taken her place with vile magics,” Simon told them, choosing to prey on their emotions immediately before someone else did. He held the strange-looking jar up, making those closest move back. “Can you not feel it? The harm they’ve done in the months and years they’ve been burrowing away at the very heart of Talrinth.”
There were questions then. Who had done this? Where had the real widow Odell gone? Should they be afraid?
Simon had few answers. He didn’t even try to quell their fear; instead, he tried to use it. “Come to the tavern tonight, and I will share my findings. Think well on the last year, and try to think of anything unusual that might come to mind, for once I question our warlock, I will have questions and answers both, in great supply.”
He stayed in the street long enough to study the jar and issue a few more commands. Mostly, he demanded candles, so that he could study the place in darkness, along with a sturdy table and chair for questioning his captured mage; this could well devolve into torture, and though Simon didn’t like the thought, he couldn’t think of a better candidate in recent memory.
Maybe I should just carve the word of nullification into his flesh and be done with it, Simon thought. It was unspeakably cruel, but it would be the most effective way to interrogate him. Unless he has a self-destruct switch or countermeasure of his own, he considered.
That was entirely possible, of course. This mage knew some advanced words, and the jar in his hand was roughly blown glass, which was too thick in places. That made it a custom job, but the black lines that had been scribed into it told him everything he needed to know about its function. It was a soul battery. Well, it was two things. It was a circuit that captured and bound a soul, and another that used that soul as a power source. It was an ugly thing that was nearly as bad as a witch mark, and when all of Simon’s demands were met, and his prisoner had been searched thoroughly for ornaments and tattoos, he was lashed to an oaken table and chair so that Simon could finally confront him directly.
“This, I believe, is your handiwork,” he told the man, setting the jar down in front of him. His arms were tied to the table so tightly that he couldn’t have knocked it to the floor if he wanted to. When the man showed no reaction, Simon continued. “You think I cannot read this foul script? That I have no eyes to see? You are binding the souls of the living and using them to power your abominable experiments!”
That got the warlock’s attention. He clearly didn’t expect Simon to know anything, so surprise was the first reaction he showed rather than fear. Still, he didn’t nod or smile around the gag. He did nothing to confirm Simon’s statement.
“I’m certain I can find your grimoire, and it, along with your little experiments, will tell me everything I need to know,” Simon said. “Normally, that would be enough, but you are obviously a very advanced, malignant case. So, there are a few blanks I want you to fill in.”
This made the man smirk, and even when Simon took out his dagger and slammed it into the table between them, and gave him a short speech about how they could do this “the easy way or the hard way,” that detached smugness never really wavered.
“There are worse things than death for a man like you, you know,” Simon said, willing himself not to seem frustrated by the warlock’s resolute nature. “Torture is an easy one, but I wonder how you’d feel if I stole your magic from you forever?”
That intensified his sneer, but brought fear to his eyes. “Do you know this symbol?” Simon asked, tracing the symbol of nullification broadly on the table. There wasn’t enough dust to leave an actual mark that might activate, but the motions were enough to make his captured warlock nod for the first time. “And what do you suppose the effect would be if I carved that mark into the flesh of your back, or branded you with it?”
That made the mage flinch for the first time, as the dawning horror made him realize what Simon could very easily do to him. This was no longer about death, but something more. Does that mean he has a way of escaping death? Simon wondered, or is that just the natural revulsion of losing something he’s sacrificed so much for?
It didn’t matter for the moment, and Simon filed that idea away. For now, since the man had decided to cooperate, he asked questions about the jars, using head nods and shakes to answer increasingly specific yes or no questions.
“Were these souls used to power your spells?” Yes.
“Was one soul worth a hundred greater words?” No.
“Fifty?” No.
“Ten?” Yes.
“Did you kill those involved?” No. That one was a surprise. It took a dozen questions before Simon worked out the technique. The warlock tried to keep as low a profile as possible, so he set what amounted to spirit traps, so that when people in the village died, he claimed their souls for his own.
That was interesting, but it only led to more questions. “You’ve lived here for a long time, haven’t you?” Simon asked. Yes.
“Years?” Yes.
He couldn’t answer why, not without undoing the gag and at the very least carving a mark of greater nullification into the table, but if Simon did that, and he was questioned by his superiors, he’d have an awfully hard time explaining that away. So, for now, he stuck to simpler topics.
The warlock revealed the hiding spot where he kept his tome, underneath a bookshelf. He also admitted to using words of command and alteration to change the minds of the visitors. That’s what Simon had detected in their confusion and hesitation. Whenever he had to go outside, he wore the disguise of a familiar, harmless woman, and whenever he got caught in that lie, he made them forget.
He claimed not to have been scrying on Simon, though, which made him wonder. Still, it wasn’t a main concern. Instead, Simon pursued the most important thread.
“You’re much too young to have used so much magic,” he said. It was his first statement in a white that wasn’t a question. “I’ll bet there’s an interesting story behind that.”
That was enough to make the warlock freeze with fear, unsure of what to do. He couldn’t tell Simon his story, of course, but he was obviously getting close to something.
“You’re using magic to make yourself young,” Simon said. When he didn’t nod or shake his head, Simon changed his mind. “No, that would be too simple. This isn’t your first body, is it?”
That made the warlock pale. For the first time in over an hour, he struggled against his bonds and gag, trying to speak, but Simon ignored that and leafed through their grimoire.
“It’s the only answer that makes sense,” he said finally. “You’re a necromancer, but a different sort than what I’m used to. You burn other people’s souls for power, and you send your soul to fresh bodies when you wear yours out.”
The warlock didn’t confirm any of that, but then, he didn’t need to. Simon could read it in the fear that flickered across his face and the surface of his murky aura. So far, studying the warlock’s aura hadn’t been much help because the colors were all dimmed by the darkness. As the fear blossomed more though, those colors became much easier to read. Simon found that he could use it almost like a lie detector when certain words in his sentences made those yellows flare to violent li fe, and he could read them like a pulse.
Slowly, one insight at a time, Simon realized that the man who sat before him had been learning and practicing his dark arts for decades. He lived in such a small out-of-the-way place specifically to avoid people like Simon. That was enough to make him glad he hadn’t poked around anymore already. While the warlock denied it, Simon could see the lie in his aura; there were traps here.
Eventually, that was what decided it for Simon, and he started carving a rune of greater nullification into the table between them. That made his captive take notice, and he started to struggle like his life depended on it. The warlock raged against his bonds, but Simon didn’t let that distract him.
“Listen,” he said as he very carefully continued to carve away at the flowing symbol. “I need answers that you can’t give me without speaking, so for now we’re going to try things the easy way, and put the mark on the table. You keep it up, and I’ll carve it into your flesh instead.”
That did no good, but Simon supposed he couldn’t blame the guy completely. What Simon was doing would ripple out for dozens of feet. If there were any sensitive experiments, he would be shutting them all down. He might be pulling the plug on years of research. While those were probably interesting, they weren’t as interesting as getting some words out of this prick. He’d lived for nearly a century, across a dozen bodies. There were any number of things Simon could learn from him, and he was burning with questions.
How did you learn all this? Where did you start? Was it the demons? As he got closer and closer to activating the rune, the man practically foamed at the mouth. There was something important that Simon was about to break, and Simon paused before activating it with life force to ask, “If I fetch ink and quill, would you explain why you’re about to have a seizure?”
The warlock only glared at Simon, so he activated the magic. He was hesitant, but he’d promised the villagers a meeting, and there was no way he was leaving this man alone with magic, even if he was restrained.
Instantly, the man went limp. That made him chuckle, but even as he undid the gag, the joke was wearing thin. It was no joke, though, even after Simon slapped him around a bit and pricked him with the tip of his dagger, he was completely insensible. He still had a pulse, but effectively he was in a coma.
“Well, isn’t that just fucking great,” he growled, annoyed he hadn’t seen this coming. If the man could jump between bodies, then that was powered by magic.
Does that mean that there’s some artifact hidden here that powered his body snatching? Simon wondered. He didn’t know, but he was going to tear this place apart until he found it.
Ch. 398 - Darker Research
That evening, Simon spent more than an hour in the packed pub telling everyone enough to provide some calm, but in place of answers, he offered mostly platitudes. Yes, the warlock who had done this grievous thing had been caught. Yes, he would be burned at the stake as an example to others. No, no one else was in any danger.
The trouble was that his warlock was already halfway to being a corpse. He’d cut off the man’s access to magic, and his body had simply lost the will to live. Would that come back when the greater word faded? Simon hoped so; he had more questions for him, but no way to get answers safely besides letting the man write and watching him like a hawk.
It wasn’t exactly safe, but Simon never got the chance to ask him a question, because his consciousness never returned. Simon kept him bound and gagged in case he was just playing possum, but by the following morning, it was clear that he was gone. However he’d powered the transference of his soul, it had been permanently disrupted by Simon’s greater word of nullification.
He was up all night going through the man’s things. He even started making a dowsing rod to locate more. What he’d found already was a treasure trove of magical knowledge by any measure, and more new information than Simon had found in a long time, which only raised further questions about who this man had been.
He didn’t have time to pore through those documents yet, though. First, he had to sleep, and he couldn’t do that until the warlock had been disposed of. That happened early the next morning, and with a canvas sack over his head, few seemed to notice that the condemned wasn’t screaming as the flames licked higher. It was barbaric, but expected, and even if the villagers hadn’t needed the ugly ceremony for their reassurance, the Unspoken certainly would expect to hear that he’d done exactly this when he returned.
Simon even threw an empty phylactery and a few dark leather volumes into the fire as he gave a rousing speech, condemning all who consort with evil, but they weren’t anything of importance. They were just notes and diaries of the previous resident. It was only when all that was done, and the town square smelled of smoke and roasted meat, that the real work began.
Rather than take anyone up on their offered hospitality, he slept in the widow's home. He told everyone that was so he could make sure it was completely purged, but really, he didn’t want any important artifacts or books wandering off while he grabbed a few hours of shut-eye.
After that, he ate cold food sparingly and alternated between reading the man's books and searching the house for more hidden treasure. On the second day, he finished his dowsing rod and used that too, without much success. He searched for talismans, amulets, and phylacteries, but didn’t locate anything of note. ‘Items carved with words of power’ didn’t turn up much either, though Simon suspected that was because the wooden implement kept trying to point toward itself.
It was only when he looked for the materials that such things might be made out of that he found pay dirt. Gold showed him nothing but his own coin pouch, and silver pointed to a small tea set and a few other odds and ends, but bronze revealed a… Well, he would have called it a scroll if it had been made of paper, but since it was made of metal and sealed and lead, he could only think of it as a scepter, or perhaps an idol.
Simon was convinced that the item was key, but he didn’t try to pry it open just yet; instead, he went through the books, copying important pages into a mirror and leafing through the rest as he took inventory. The Grimoire was the most useful of the tomes, from a magic theory perspective. It contained no new words, but several new meanings for existing words, most of which struck him as obvious in hindsight.
Still, even those paled in comparison to the pages on the gestures. The tome contained instructions on the gestures necessary to use eight words of power, which meant he’d have the way to cast almost half of all his spells without saying a word once he figured them out. It took all of his willpower not to try to use them right away. He wanted to, but he didn’t dare risk it. His sight was much more important to him.
“The Oracle used such magic, but even she said it blurred her gaze a bit,” Simon reminded himself as he set that bounty aside to focus on the rest.
He leafed through a dozen other books, convinced that he still hadn’t found his warlock’s main source of knowledge. He wouldn’t have given that up so easily. Nothing on the soul transference process seemed to be in anything he’d written down. He looked on the back of paintings and the bottom of furniture without result. It was only when he’d all but given up that he thought to use his dowsing rod to search for leather. That was when he found a book hidden in the thatch of the roof, wrapped in oilcloth.
Jackpot, he thought, holding the slender tome in his hands.
Where the other books had prayers to demonic entities, or scribbled notes in the margin with strange theories, this one was closer to a magical schematic than anything Simon had seen in a long time. It was page after page of detailed runic interconnections. The first section explained how to make a phylactery jar and use it to capture the souls of the dying. The second part was much longer, and while Simon would have to read through it, he was pretty sure that when he opened the thing up, he knew what he’d find.
The document described it as a spirit bridge, but to Simon it looked more like an anchor. A little bit of flesh and blood went into each of the participants at both ends, and then, when the thing was powered, their souls switched bodies.
It looked like the thing had to stay powered the whole time. That’s what Simon had broken with his word of nullification; it also explained the phylaceries. The man used a rune of lesser distant transfer on three of those to keep it running, like a set of wireless batteries.
The runes were nearly as complicated as the Dreaming Sphere, which instantly made him think that this device was of Murani origin, but that was a guess. There was no way to know for sure.
“Well, there is one way,” Simon said as his mind not-so helpfully filled in the blank. “I could summon his ghost.”
He didn’t like that idea for many reasons, but it was definitely something that was within his power to do. The man’s bones and ashes had been stored in a clay pot, but they hadn’t yet been buried. It would be the easiest thing in the world for Simon to take one, and he wouldn’t even have to speak a word of power; he could carve it into the circle, power it off a gem, and keep his hands clean.
Well, keep my vision clear, he corrected himself. Summoning souls and playing with demons definitely lowered his experience, which meant they stained his soul to some degree. Would such a stain be enough for one of the guild masters to notice, though, or ask questions?
He didn’t know, but to make sure he had the opportunity later, he stole a charred rib before the remains were interred in an unmarked grave near the village's midden heap. After that was done, the people of the town wanted to burn the widow’s house to the ground to expunge its evil. Simon didn’t try to stop them. He just officiated over the event to give them a sense of finality in case any more surprises were revealed.
Once that was done, he journeyed back the way he came, stopping at the shrine itself only long enough to confirm there was no haunting or any other obvious sort of witchcraft present. All he found there was beauty, and he made a note to paint it when he had the chance.
On his way back, he didn’t take the most direct route, far from it. He’d have to dispose of all the relics he had before he reached the broken tower, or turn them in, and before that happened, he wanted to understand everything about them. So he went slowly, stopping at the closest inn every night.
This gave him hours each day to read and make notes. He even stopped by Warburg a second time to let Count Herschel know about the evil that had been feeding off of his village. Together, the two looked through his tax records and were able to say with some confidence that the warlock had set up shop there some eight or nine years ago. While the village’s receipts hadn’t actually started shrinking until very recently, that’s when they’d stopped growing and started to flatline.
It wasn’t until he was a guest at the man’s home that he had the tools and the privacy to finally open the bridge of mortality, as the documents called it. The thing had been braised shut, but with the help of blacksmith’s tongs and the fireplace in his room, he was eventually able to disconnect the ends and unroll it. It was an ugly thing, but its precision, at least to Simon’s eyes, spoke of its power. Someone had spent a great deal of time in the crafting of this abomination and made sure not to bleed energy anywhere they could avoid it.
The only thing that Simon had ever created on this scale was perhaps his orb of cold and his heat-resistant armor, but it would have had to combine them both to get anywhere near the scale and the complexity of the magic that had been carved into these tarnished copper sheets. It was impressive, and while it didn’t tell Simon how long his warlock had been at this, it did give him a name, as well as the names of eight victims that he’d stolen the bodies of, one after another.
None of them stood out to Simon as important, not even the original name Jranesh Karell, which was not written in a language he recognized, and was clearly foreign, and likely from another continent. That only gave him more questions, though, instead of answers.
It was easy to see how the man had lived his life. He’d used magic to become a sort of spiritual hermit crab, moving from life to life using other people’s bodies as shells. While there were no clues that indicated a timeline, the man he’d just snuffed out by accident might have easily been a century or two old, and with the exception of Simon and perhaps some of the Magi, one of the most knowledgeable magic users in the world.
And I killed him by accident, he reflected. A fate that could very easily befall me if I’m not careful.
It was the wrong lesson for him to take from this. What he should have done was regret all the knowledge he’d lost by not interrogating the man more thoroughly, but while that was true, more than anything, he couldn’t help but imagine someone doing the same thing to him in some unsuspecting moment, and destroying his soul in the process. The thought chilled him and showed him just how carelessly he’d been living his lives.
Ch. 399 - More To Tell
Simon should have been in a hurry to make his way back to the Broken Tower after his third week away. He should have been in a hurry to find out Varten’s fate. When he left, that had certainly been the plan, but his discovery distracted him entirely. Not only was he trying to understand all of this new material, but he was using some of it as a Rosetta Stone to try to better understand older material that he’d never fully solved, and as soon as he returned, he’d have to give that up for a long time.
Oh, there was a chance they’d send him back out without an apprentice, but he thought it far more likely he’d be without privacy for a good long time. Which is probably half the point of having squires, he thought with a sigh. Everyone has to watch each other at all times.
Still, by the time he returned, he’d gotten it mostly out of his system. He’d stashed the copper scroll, the book that explained its workings, and the bone fragment of the warlock who made it in a small chest, and buried that chest near a very rural crossroads so he could retrieve it in his next life, and he was returning to the whitecloaks with the less dangerous documents they likely already had access to.
Just because he was abandoning those things didn’t mean he was done researching, though; everything had gone into his mirror, along with a few crude designs and ideas of his own. Discovering magic of such complexity always woke up something inside of Simon. It grabbed him by the chestplate and screamed, “Drop everything else you’re doing and work on this instead!”
He was tempted too. Despite everything he’d done to worm his way into the order, all he wanted to do was run off into the hills, find a small community to help, and dig deeper into the mystery. Instead of doing that, though, he chastised himself for the urge.
“You’re here to learn everything the order has to teach, better prepare yourself to fight the witch hunters that might come for you in the future,” he reminded himself. “Plus, if you do it right, you won’t have to do it again.”
That was a strong motivator too, and kept him from straying. He managed to return to the Broken Tower before the month had fully passed, and after handing a short and highly edited summary of what he’d done to the man on watch in a sealed scroll, he bathed himself with cold water and harsh soap, and then knelt in prayer until someone came for him.
This time, he wasn’t forced to wait overnight. Sometime, just before dinner, a young messenger came for him. For a moment, Simon thought it might be Varten, but it was just another boy his age. That’s the role he’ll probably be relegated to, if he’s deemed unworthy, Simon thought, as he was led toward whatever room it was that held Master Harrin today.
This time, he was taken to the second door on the left, and while Simon hadn’t expected their talk to be about Varten, he also hadn’t expected it to be this short either. However, after verifying a few particulars, like the lack of ghosts, the state of the shrine, and the fact that Simon was sure the problem was taken care of, he was summarily dismissed without talking about any of the details in his report.
“Aren’t we going to talk about the warlock?” Simon asked.
“We are not,” Master Harrin corrected him. “That is a conversation for you and the Grand Master of our order.”
“What? Why?” Simon countered, adding a note of panic that wasn’t entirely faked to his voice. “What did I do wrong?”
“Wrong? Nothing, as I can see. You found and eliminated an unholy parasite preying on the weak. You are to be commended for that,” the gruff master said, “But your scroll contained an item of… interest for our lord, and he wishes to discuss it with you privately. It’s the name you mentioned you see. I will not repeat such a foul word, but it is older than you know.”
Jranesh Karell. That took him by surprise.
“Older than I know?” Simon asked, hoping for more.
“I’ll let him explain that to you,” the master answered with a dismissive gesture. “The acolyte will show you to his hall.”
Simon tried to stay calm at that, but behind his genuine expression of slight bewilderment, his mind was racing. That last time he’d interacted with the Grandmaster of the Unspoken, he’d tried to kill him. More importantly, he’d failed to kill him because the man had used words of power to heal himself.
That contradiction had lain at the back of his mind this whole time, but he’d always thought it had been better to avoid it. Before he’d known about the sight, the contradiction hadn’t mattered. It might have just been an act of desperation by a man who knew things he shouldn’t know, he told himself as he walked behind the acolyte to his next stop, but that didn’t ring true with Simon. His intuition told him that the man in charge of the witch hunters was a mage himself.
Why did he think about that? More than anything, it was the man’s interest in the warlock he’d just slain. Something made him feel like the two men were connected. He couldn’t know that, of course, but the strangeness of the warlock living in other people’s bodies haunted him still.
For most of the trip, there Simon sweated bullets, wondering if he should find some excuse to bail. The Grandmaster could ask any number of questions and strip away his well-made disguise. He could literally see right through him.
Except, he can’t, can he? He realized at the last moment. If his theory was right, if the Grandmaster really was using magic against the rules of the Whitecloaks, he wouldn’t be able to see anything. The Oracle had practically said as much.
So how does that work? He wondered. How is he in the position he’s in if he can’t see the same truths as everyone else? How can he hide among the faithful with a dark aura?
That last thought was a logical fallacy, brought on by force of habit, and he corrected himself immediately. One could be a magic user without staining one's soul. It was evil deeds that did that, mundane or magical, along with despair.
He entered the Spartan room of the Grandmaster and bowed, completely conflicted about what would happen next. On the one hand, his read on the situation might be completely off. He might be facing someone who’d spent decades clarifying their vision and would be able to see right through him. On the other hand, he might be facing an imposter who was actually a powerful magic wielder who would kill Simon if his secret was revealed.
There was really only one way to know, and that was to test him, so he tried that. It started with introductions when Simon told the master of their order that his name was Enis. He’d lived under that name for this whole life now. He’d spent years and other lifetimes calling himself Enis, but still, it wasn’t quite true.
The man didn’t bat an eye and instead asked, “I came across an old name… a very old name in your report. One that I have trouble believing. No new recruit, no matter how special, could defeat such a foe. Tell me, where did you first hear the name?”
“I’ve never heard it,” Simon answered. “I found it written in his own hand, in the house where I found him.”
The first two parts were true, but the last one was the minorest of falsehoods, one he could easily explain away. Still, it was the first part that the Grandmaster made him explain several times, as if he doubted him. He never once asked Simon for a description of the warlock, which told Simon that the Grandmaster knew he changed bodies. He asked about the fight, though, and about the illusion, and Simon told him the truth in all those things, while he mixed in a few lies throughout, probing for a reaction.
“I broke into the Widower’s house,” he explained, wondering if that misstep would get called out, but again and again, as long as what he said was credible, the Grandmaster didn’t accuse him of lying; he simply didn’t believe that anyone could kill the man.
“I don’t think you understand,” he explained when Simon was done. “The warlock… if such a word can even encompass a demon like Jranesh Karell, doesn’t die when you kill him. He simply leaps to a new body to start the process all over again.”
“I’m not so sure he got away this time,” Simon answered. This time, he explained the phylacteries and the way they glowed, swirling with magic and evil.
“I believe it is those wicked vessels that powered his dark crimes,” Simon said. By this point, the Grandmaster showed no signs that he could actually see the truth, so Simon lied flagrantly, which was good because his prepared story was rather far from what actually happened. “But before I could examine them, while I still struggled with the warlock and his broken wand, the headman opened the windows, flooding the hovel with light and then… well, he went limp all at once, like the spirit had left his body. We still burned him, of course, to be sure, but—”
“Truly?” the old man leaned forward then. “You struck down his apparatus while he still breathed?” He was taken aback by this.
Alright, I don’t know who the Grandmaster really is. He might not have the sight, but he certainly knew who this warlock was. Simon reflected with a neutral expression. What is going on?
“Is it permissible for me to ask why this man was so important to us? To you?” Simon asked.
“He is… was, a dark chapter in our history,” the Grandmaster explained. “He was a devious malefactor of the worst order and responsible for the deaths of numerous brothers over the decades. Terrible foes are not uncommon in our line of work, of course, but rare are those who return to life to cause new problems each time you strike them down.”
The man didn’t tell a single lie in that explanation, or in any of the stories that followed, but he seemed to talk around certain points to avoid lying, which struck Simon as unusual.
Their conversation went on for a while after that, but no new ground was covered. He thanked Simon for his good work and promised to send men to retrieve the ashes of the mage just in case he tried to rise from the dead all over again.
To Simon, that statement reeked of necromantic intent, but he said nothing. There's a reason I didn't mark that grave, he reminded himself. I just hope it's been long enough that no one can find it.
Simon could see the greens of happiness and the blues of satisfaction swirling in the aura of the Grandmaster. Despite his stone-carved face, his emotions were easy to read in his soul, which wasn’t nearly as bright as Simon would have assumed, even though it wasn’t exactly a cause for suspicion here. Many of the Unspoken had stained souls that were outshone by their fine white cloaks.
Still, even as Simon thanked the man for his time and retreated from the hall, a number of things went through his mind. The first was that he needed to do something to shield his soul sooner rather than later, and the second was that he needed to understand the real agenda here. While the footsoldiers might believe that they were here to kill mages of every stripe, the very top of the pyramid clearly believed something else.