Ch. 407 - Missing

Simon found the merchant that had started all of this trouble just where he’d left him in the market shortly after midday. This time, he showed up in his full armor, presenting a much more imposing sight, but somehow, Mr. Dekarlo recognized him almost immediately. 

“You were here the other day, with a boy, right?” he said with a brittle smile. “What can I do for a knight like you?”

That surprised Simon. The man clearly had an incredible memory, and the false bravado was more than most managed around the Unspoken, and when Simon told him he’d like to speak with the man in private, that cracked completely, and he was already offering apologies before he even knew what he was guilty of. 

“What is it you think I want to speak with you about?” Simon asked with a stony expression.

“When it comes to those who wear the white, who can say?” the man said. “Once you’ve found the heretic, you’ll look into his soul and find the crime. Isn’t that what they say about you?”

Simon flinched. It was something they said about the Unspoken, but never to their face, and he found he didn’t care for it. Still, he took the offered moment to peer deeply into the merchant’s soul. He stared long and deep, past the curtain of fear that tinged everything yellow, but he didn’t find too much. The man drank too much and appeared to have a girl in every city he traded between. Neither of those were capital crimes. 

Simon didn’t see any blood on his hands, though, or even any evidence that he cheated at dice, reinforcing the impression he’d gotten after meeting with the count. He didn’t bring any of that up. Instead, he said, “The powers that be said that you’ve been swindling their peasants. They consider the behavior so widespread that, as far as they’re concerned, some kind of wicked charm is the only answer.”

“I… My lord, I promise you this, I have no tuck with devilry of any kind. I run an honest business and—” he started, truly scrambling for the first time as his faltering confidence finally broke. 

“Honest?” Simon asked. “How so? Square that circle for me.”

“I… I’ll try,” the merchant agreed, “But first I must fetch some documents.”

He did that, and didn’t even try to run, as Simon thought he might. When he returned, he didn’t show Simon the same sales logs he’d already gotten from the count. Instead, he showed him the sales pitch he’d laid before the farmers. The scroll was a banner with almost no words. It was sensible, since most people who toiled in the fields couldn’t read, but it was still clear. 

“I didn’t cheat anyone,” the merchant explained. “I just tried to explain to them that if they had a good year, and their neighbors did, then the rest of the kingdom probably did too, which meant that there would be far more supply than demand.”

“These are optimistic figures,” Simon responded, smiling at the way it was all handwritten. What sort of trouble will the world be in when this kind of thinking gets involved with my printing press? He wondered. 

“Optimistic but reasonable,” Mr. Dekarlo insisted.

“Reasonably below the price you’re selling what you bought at,” Simon scowled as he did the math in his head. 

“That is true,” the merchant agreed. “I’m earning a great deal from this season’s bounty, but that’s all to the good. The king will get his fair share. I would never try to cheat the tax man.”

“Just the farmers, then?” Simon challenged the man. He didn’t like what he’d done, but manipulation wasn’t a crime, and it certainly wasn’t magic. Somehow disappointed by the simplicity of the scheme. 

He’d expected that the man had cheated the farmers with a sophisticated math trick or figured out some kind of futures pricing mechanism and roped fools into it, but instead, he’d simply made a rational economic case. If everyone grew more grain, then there would be a glut on the market, and it would be worth less than before. While that was true in a broad sense, using that information to drive down the prices was new to him; he hadn’t seen that before. 

Mr. Dekarlo continued to plead his innocence, but eventually Simon came out with the real complaint. “Lord Trantis feels as though he’s been robbed by you. I’m sure other lords have made similar complaints. None of your fancy arguments will help you escape from their dungeons or knife men unless you find a way to salve their wounded egos.”

The merchant started to agree that he’d do just that, and began to thank Simon, but Simon quickly interrupted them. “As for my part, I don’t care who you upset as long as you use no magic to do it, but if I see you chisel the common man like this in future years, I’ll treat you as I’d treat a brigand. There’s a fine line between commerce and robbery, and you crossed it.”

Mr. Dekarlo’s smile soured immediately, but he swore to stay on the straight and narrow going forward. Simon was unconvinced, but he left anyway. He’d wasted enough time on this fool’s errand.

Simon returned to the inn after that, whistling a tune and glad to have resolved the problem. It wasn’t a real fix, but according to his mirror, he hadn’t actually screwed up any other timelines, so he could live with that. He didn’t find Varten in their room, which wasn’t completely unusual. The boy hated to be cooped up all the time. So, Simon went downstairs and asked the innkeeper about his squire, but the man gave him a blank look that made his worry skyrocket. “Your squire? He’s still here?”

“He’s supposed to be,” Simon answered with rising concern.  

“Really?” the man asked in genuine surprise, though not enough surprise that he stopped polishing his glass. “I thought you two was gone for good.” 

The innkeeper’s words made a vein in Simon’s forehead throb. Gone for good. It was all he could do not to rage at the man as he made him repeat himself to make sure he’d heard the innkeeper correctly. He had, but it was only his generally bright aura that kept Simon from yanking him over the bar and beating the truth out of him. His words were truthful, but they were so incongruous that he made the man repeat them just the same. 

After that, he cast a look around the room, looking for any obvious evil doers as his pulse rose, but he found none. The merchant mentioned the boy to me, his mind whispered in a fit of paranoia, Could he…

No, Simon dismissed such bizarre thoughts as he turned and moved back to his room without explanation. He didn’t talk to anyone. He just slammed his door and dug through his pack until he found his dowsing rod. When he had that in hand, he tried and failed to clear his mind, but it still worked well enough to point him east. 

Simon almost bolted then, to follow the invisible line that his magic was drawing, but he stopped himself. “In a city of this size, following a stick?” he asked himself. “No matter how I disguise myself, I’ll be noticed.”

So he paused then, thinking about what he could do that wouldn’t get the watch called on him. Then he used a piece of charcoal to sketch out a quick map of the city on the dusty wooden floor. He included his current location, the river, the docks, the main streets, the walls, the castle, and the gates, and then he used a pendulum to search for the right quarter at least. In the time it took to do all of that, Simon calmed down a little, which made his magic work better. 

Slowly, he filtered down his squire’s location to a place not far from where he was now, near the river docks. Once he had that, he went toward it, unconcerned that the sun had started to set. He’d confirmed that the boy was still alive, but unless he was playing with some of the other children in the area, he had no idea what Varten would be doing. 

What he found wasn’t boys at play, or even getting into trouble, but a deserted street mostly lined with warehouses, and a decaying manor on a hill overlooking the wharf. The building had peaked roofs, and while it had once been nice, it had fallen on times hard enough that no one whitewashed over the graffiti that was daubed on the side facing the street. 

It was old enough to be neighbors on two sides with warehouses. It had certainly been built long before the docks had expanded. In time, he thought that the whole area would be consumed by the infrastructure of commerce. On another day, he might even appreciate that; he never would have believed he’d be interested in how growing cities slowly evolved over decades. It seemed like an artform that existed for his enjoyment alone. Today, all he cared about was locating his squire, and as soon as he stopped in front of the door, he removed his dowsing rod to verify the boy’s location, and sure enough, it pointed ahead and down, toward the building’s basement. 

That was all Simon needed to know. He pounded on the door, and when an aging servant answered, Simon forced his way inside, knocking the man on his ass. 

“Sir, please, this is Lord Marhew’s residence,” the aging footman insisted. “You can’t just—”

He had a darker aura than any old person should have had after a long, full life, but it might have just been misery; Simon’s vision was too blurred by emotion to say for sure what the gray color meant, and he had to find Varten.

“Where is the door to the basement?” he thundered.

Cowed, the butler pointed immediately, and Simon turned from him, drawing his sword. He wouldn’t have given the man a second look, except for what happened next. He took two steps, and then he heard a syllable that was carved into his soul. “Meir–” He’d recognize it anywhere. The word of fire. 

Simon had time to pull down his visor and cover his face with the crook of his arm before the man finished speaking. “-en!”

Flames cascade over him then, and though he felt the heat and smelled the commingled scents of sulfur and burning hair, he didn’t feel any terrible pain. As the fiery wave passed him, he turned. The servant opened his mouth again, but Simon kicked him hard in the jaw and then stabbed him in the chest deeply enough that he had to use his boot to pull his sword free. 

All of this happened in front of the still-open door, and when Simon looked outside, he saw a young man standing there with a look of shock on his face. “Fetch the guards,” Simon ordered. “Inform them I have found a nest of warlocks in their city!”

He nodded wordlessly at that, then ran off. Simon could not say whether he would actually do as he’d been instructed, but it wasn’t as if he could do so himself. Varten was in danger, though the hows and whys eluded him. As he stalked through the household, the serving women scattered and screamed. 

He was a stranger with a bloody sword, so he didn’t blame them. None of them was as dim as the footman had been, but he had to resist the urge to strike all of them down just in case. He stopped resisting when another dark-aurad man came out from one of the parlors. Simon cut him down without thinking twice. In that moment, he was probably as close as he’d ever been to being a proper Whitecloak. Guilt was automatic, and innocence needed to be proven. 

That intensified when he found the door down, too, but he noticed one odd detail as he looked at the dim steps. It was fancier than any other part of the house. While it made sense to Simon that a practitioner of dark arts might have an elaborate ritual space, a mosaic on the stairs struck him as unusual, but something here felt wrong.

First, he noticed the grout was spattered with dark stains. However, his sense of unease was only satisfied when he found the word of force used repeatedly in a pattern between a dozen steps in the middle of the descending stairs. That sent a chill up his spine as he imagined what such magic would have done to him if he'd charged heedlessly. 

He grabbed a small basket of potatoes sitting on a cask near the door and tossed them down the stairs. They tumbled together in a messy wave. For a moment there was a pattern to it, but it because lost after a few steps, when a different picture emerged. With every step they impacted, the potatoes left changed. Some were crushed, and others were sliced. It wasn’t clear to him what was powering the trap, or how it was disabled, but it was clearly an ugly one.

For a moment, all he could think of was the time he'd been paralyzed and devoured an inch at a time by one of the carnivorous plants that covered the ziggurats, but he quickly shook himself free of that mental image. It wasn't what he'd needed right now. Rather than have a panic attack, Simon shattered the first one with a long-handled copper pot that was nearby. That worked okay, even though he came back with only half a pot. He tried his luck with the next one, but it crumpled before he could get close. So, he backtracked. 

He went to the parlor with the dead footman and took an old crossbow from a wall of hunting trophies, along with a dusty quiver of bolts to go with it. Then he returned to the stairs and started to shoot out the key runes one at a time. The quarrels shattered and splintered before they ever touched the wall, but each of those fragments was still moving with enough force to break the decorative tiles, and if anything, turning the crossbow into a shotgun made it more effective. 

He’d long since lost the element of surprise, so when it was done and the way was clear, he proceeded cautiously. He sheathed his sword and grabbed a broom, waving it in front of him as he went, while he held his shield close and high with his other hand. The pain of the burns was starting to trickle in now, but compared to the idea of being shredded by a magical meat grinder, it barely rated as he descended into the darkness.

Ch. 408 - The Face of Evil

The dimly lit basement was hideous for any number of reasons, but as Simon noticed each new horror, it seemed to strike him harder than the last. The manor above him was large, and so was the basement that it crouched upon. First, there were the mixed smells of flesh, death, and sulfur. Then, he saw the cages. Most of them were empty, but a few had small shapes in them. As he reached the bottom of the stairs, he saw the worst sight of all, though. 

It wasn’t the open portal to hell glowing menacingly within a flimsy circle made of bloody lines and chalk-scribed runes on the floor, the old man who stood next to it, or the red-skinned demon that stood within it, either. It was his apprentice, and two other children bound just to one side.

It was obvious to Simon immediately that they were bargaining chips, for the same sort of deal that the demon he’d once summoned had offered him. Simon would never say yes to a horrendous trade, though, just like he’d never summon a demon into the real world with anything less than an engraved metal ring to protect him from their treacherous nature. 

What he didn’t get, though, was any kind of hint as to what the two vile men were discussing, because as soon as he peeked around the corner, the devil smiled at him and said, “Ah, I believe that is your guest now, Sir. It doesn’t seem like fire or force stopped him. I wonder what word you might try next.”

Simon raised his crossbow, but as he did, Lord Marhew turned around, with wand in hand. That spooked Simon enough that his bolt went wide as he pulled back behind the stone arch as quickly as he could. It was good that he did, because what followed was “Vrazig,” and arcing black lightning assaulted the place where he’d just been. 

The word had meant ruin the way he spoke it, but there was clearly more to the spell because ruin alone wouldn’t look like this. Was that the wand? Was it a gesture he made or something else entirely? Simon had no idea. He could only watch in alarm as the lightning hit the near wall he stood behind and the far one opposite the door. Both were limestone, but neither stood up to the magic. 

They didn’t shatter from uneven heating like a real lightning bolt would cause. Instead, they started to corrode like they’d been splashed with acid. It took him a moment to realize his crossbow had been splattered by the magic because the stirrup and the steel limb of the bow were both starting to come undone. He tossed it down and backed away before it affected his armor next. 

Simon drew his sword then, trying to decide how much his steel armor would shelter him from such an attack. Should I use nullification? He asked himself. That was his first instinct, but he realized instantly it would be a mistake. If he used that from here, it would certainly affect at least part of the ring, and if the ring failed only partially, it might unravel explosively. 

Whether that meant part of the basement, or all of the basement and part of the waterfront, would momentarily be consumed by hell, he couldn’t say. What he could say was that it would almost certainly consume the three children that were bound up next to the circle like a sack of potatoes, and he wasn’t prepared to do that. A word of nullification might create a shield and an island of stability around him, but he wasn’t close enough to guarantee they’d be included.

While he hesitated, the warlock laughed. “Pitiful templar, you think you can stop me, or my bound demons? You were lucky to find me, but you will not be lucky enough to escape me. I will feed your soul to him as well as these children.”

“Actually, I recognize this one, Lord Marhew,” the demon said behind him. Simon hadn’t recognized him in the moment, but he did now. The noble was summoning Anthroditen, a demon Simon had crossed paths with more than once. “And his soul, I would reward you handsomely for. There is much I wish to ask of this Enis. He is one of hers.”

“Hers?” the noble asked. “The dark goddess you told me about? He’s one of her timeless ones?”

Simon considered charging in that moment, while the man was distracted, but he held back. He knew how fast magic was. It was like holding a gun, and all he had was a sword. He’d have to cover twenty feet in the time the man could say a single word, but worse, he no longer had a backup plan. His time amidst the Unspoken hadn’t given him the opportunity to craft something subtle enough to end his own life should the need arise, and now that was biting him in the ass. 

“Indeed,” the demon answered. “Bring me his timeless soul, and I shall grant you the miracle of your choosing. Wealth, Youth, Power… anything can be yours for such a trade.”

Simon tried to decide if such an offer hurt him or helped him. It probably helped him, since now the warlock wouldn’t try to kill him outright, but as he considered that, he heard the man mutter the word of force, and a giant hand grabbed the area just in front of him, closing in on empty air just in front of where Simon was standing.

Even with his sight, he only saw the shimmering outline of the simplistic cartoon fist for a moment, and the marks the finger tips left on the stone as they gripped something that wasn’t there and drew it back to their caster. That complicated things. He hadn’t worried about being taken alive for a long time, and this guy had just been promised the moon.

Is Varten even worth risking hell for? Flashed through his mind for a moment. He’d long since run out of hate for the man that his squire would never become, so the impulse was immediately answered. He didn't owe the boy, but he’d still risk it. He wasn’t about to let evil damn three children because it might cost him something. 

What he needed was a distraction, so instead of attacking or retreating, he took a few more steps back and called out, “Is that you, Anthroditen?” with forced mirth. “I haven’t thought of you in an age. Still up to your old tricks of swindling would-be mages, I see.”

His tone and feigned familiarity with a demon was about as un-Unspoken as he could have imagined, and he was sure it took at least the warlock by surprise. Varten looked too out of it to hear him or remember it, but even if he’d been awake, Simon would have still done the same thing. He was fast running out of other options. 

That same force hand flashed out again, grasping for Simon. This time, it reached far enough back that he had to flatten against the far wall to avoid it. Magic didn’t necessarily need line of sight, but it required intent and imagination, and this guy clearly wasn’t too creative. 

“What will you give me for his soul? Or have you taken it already,” Simon shouted as he crept back toward the doorway as close as he could and waited for the next hint of a spell.

“Insolent whelp!” the warlock grumbled. “This demon is bound by my magic, and he will not do your bidding.”

The demon said nothing, which was unfortunate, because Simon really wanted to distract this guy. He just needed a few seconds. In the grand scheme of things, that wasn't so much to ask for.

“No?” Simon continued, ducking as the grasping limb of force reached out again. This time it went over his head toward where he’d been last time. “Come on, he’s the opener of ways. He can break out of that circle any time he wants. He’s just toying with you. Go on, ask him.”

Simon could practically hear the hesitation in the air as he slowly rose to a crouching position, sword and shield in hand. Still, he waited for the man to say a word, and when that word wasn’t a spell, he charged. 

“Is that true—” was all he had time for. Simon was hardly stealthy in his armor, but he was in good shape and sprinted toward the frail man. The warlock had time to bark the word of fire once more, but that was it. Then, Simon bodyslammed him into the pit that was bounded by the magic circle. 

Even as Simon was consumed by fire, the warlock was too. The only difference was that the spell that flashed over Simon burned only for an instant, but the flames that burned Lord Marhew would burn him forever. 

Somehow, Simon had managed to stop just at the edge of the ring, and when he opened his eyes, he was surprised to see nothing terrible had happened. He’d hit the man high enough above his center of gravity that his feet hadn’t skid across the marks and ruined the summoning circle, and he hadn’t run far enough to step inside it himself. 

As the noble’s distant screams faded, Simon watched his shield fluttering slowly down into the lurid landscape behind him. Blocking his view of anything more than that was the demon Anthroditen. He stood so close to the edge he was practically nose to nose with Simon, letting him see every oiled ringlet on the man’s well-coiffed head. 

“So close, yet so far,” the devil said with a shrug. “One more step and you would have been mine.”

Simon ignored that, countering, “By the time we meet again, I’ll have figured out how to kill you instead of simply sending you back where you belong.”

“Kill?” he laughed. “Last time you summoned me to ask me for favors. We haven’t even discussed the price of my summoner’s soul. Surely you don’t just wish to gift that to me.”

Simon wasted no more time talking to the foul creature. While he couldn’t say for sure that no future life would involve exploring demonology, it seemed very unlikely from where he was standing. He took a step back for his own safety, then wandered around the edge of the circle until he found the right rune before striking it out and making the fiery scene vanish. 

Simon had only just started cutting the boys free by the time the city watch started to flood the building. It was only when they drew weapons on Simon, though, that he realized how he must have looked. That was when the pain started. 

“Where is the warlock, sir, uhhh, your holiness?” their captain asked when he saw the ragged scraps of Simon’s cloak. 

“Hell,” Simon answered bluntly as he cradled Varten’s limp form in his arms. “Arrest everyone in this building until I can adjudicate them, free everyone in these cages who’s still breathing, but don’t let them go, and send me a healer. As soon as my wounds are bandaged, we will have a full accounting of what happened here.”

Ch. 409 - Bandages and Blasphemy

Simon’s wounds were worse than he thought they were, but he didn’t understand that until Varten came to and looked at him with fear and worry in his face. Much of the hair on the front and the right side of Simon’s head had been burned away, and his arms and shoulders had nasty burns at every joint that hadn’t been immediately bathed in fire.

“It’s going to be okay,” he assured the boy, even if he wasn’t sure that was true. “You’re safe now.”

Varten nodded at that, and after a brief hug, he had to be peeled off Simon. Simon wanted nothing more than to reassure the boy and find out his story, but there were more important things than his wounds to consider. 

For starters, he needed to decide who else in this house was culpable for the atrocity he’d witnessed. That was urgent, but perhaps not as important as the fingertips of his left hand. That concerned him the most. 

While the burns he’d suffered would disfigure him to at least some degree, and he might lose his right ear if it got infected, the fingertips on his left hand were black. Not the flesh itself, but the aura. It was black as night, but fading to a dark gray, and its more usual white, just before his palm.

Simon didn’t like the look of that at all, and he was certain it was evidence he’d brushed up against the barrier to hell. More like I slipped inside it for just a second, he reflected as he studied while the healer rubbed the wounds on his scalp with a stinging salve. He didn’t like it, but it wasn’t as pressing a concern as everything else. So, he ignored it for now. 

Instead, freshly bandaged, he returned to the main dining room where the manor’s servants were being held, and got a status report from the guard captain. “The warlock’s valet is missing, and we assume, in league with dark forces as his master. We have men out looking for him, but everyone else is here, as you requested.”

“Commanded,” Simon muttered, making sure to twist the unofficial chain of command a little bit tighter as he took in the room. First, he investigated the other two victims.

Besides being daubed with blasphemous marks, neither of them seemed to be harmed. They were clearly as traumatized as Varten, though; they knew just how closely they’d come to being pulled into the abyss, and he doubted they’d ever sleep well again. Still, their auras were fine, and he let them leave immediately after getting their accounts. 

Everyone else took longer. It could have easily taken a week to squeeze every person in that household for information, but he limited his miniature inquisition to two full days and nights as the number of staff he held prisoner slowly waned. 

Simon questioned every maid, footman, and cook, as well, and while he felt that most of them didn’t have anything to do with the magic themselves, almost all of them were guilty of knowing, or at least suspecting, what was happening. Half of Simon’s goal for this trip had been to avoid killing anyone so that he didn’t upset future timelines, but that couldn't be helped anymore. 

Still, he split the baby as best he could. Everyone who only suspected there might be something more to their employer than was generally known was allowed to walk free, even if they should have done more. Anyone who saw these children, or any other victims, enter the house but never leave it, though, Simon condemned those people to death without the faintest sense of guilt. 

He doubted he’d ever killed 17 people in such a short amount of time before, but to him, that was the line. If you knew people were disappearing, and you thought a roof over your head was more important than notifying the authorities to look into the matter, then you were a waste of air. 

The fact that most of them were women stung him, but only a little. When he’d entered the house, he found it difficult to believe that anyone in the kitchens couldn’t have noticed what a strange cellar the place had, and that instinct had been correct. Anyone who had to descend those steps for wine, flour, or potatoes knew there was something wrong with the place, but all of them had excuses why they hadn’t done anything. 

“I was just doing what I was told!” a scullery maid cried as the guards took her away. “It wasn’t about the money. I just… Listen to me! I didn’t do anything!”

Simon had trouble listening to those excuses after a while, except for those who’d negotiated themselves a raise out of the deal. Those he took some small joy in, as he listened to people try to explain why they could do something to feather their own nest, but nothing for the people who vanished. 

Others explained that there had been staff who’d tried to put a stop to the witchcraft, though none were successful. A footman named Bartholomew, who was skinned alive after a failed attempt to assassinate the master of the house in his sleepyears before, had been the last one in recent memory, but there were apparently a few cooks and maids who’d vanished rather than play ball as well. 

There were a lot of individual details like that which defined the whole situation. For starters, the old man that Simon had pushed into hell had only been forty. He hadn’t quite believed that at first, but everyone agreed to it. Even a few years ago, he’d been a vital young man, but shortly after his father revealed some terrible secrets to him, everything changed. 

The old man didn’t last long after that, and a few years later, the new Lord Marhew was practically his spitting image. The manor had always been a dark place, as the family’s star had fallen a generation ago. Still, even those condemned agreed it was better before the son had taken the reins fully and spent long nights in his father's study poring over old books.

When Simon investigated those books later, he confiscated so many that he’d need a cart to take them back to the Broken Tower. None of them seemed to be especially shocking in their contents. Some, he was pretty sure, had been copied at least in part from volumes he’d already read elsewhere. 

The most surprising part, at least to Simon, was that some of them were Murani works. That was what made him take real interest in them, and he vowed to read every last one of those before he turned them in to the Masters of the order. Even if the help couldn’t have read these works, though, it was clear to Simon that the state of affairs was an open secret for a long time. 

“Why not punish the nobles as well as the kitchen staff!” one of the men cried out as he was taken away. “Everyone knew there was something wrong with this family! Everyone knew, and no one did anything about it!”

It was a fair point, but not one he could deal with now. Simon made a note that he should probably scour all the family trees in the city in a future life. He’d tell the Unspoken, but there were clearly some arrangements there that he didn’t understand, and he suspected that any efforts to expunge evil within the nobility of Brin would be half-hearted and partisan.

 Even I’m to blame in a small way, he realized on the second night. He didn’t blame himself for not taking Varten with him, though, or for the boy wandering off and playing with some of the local kids in the alleys near the wharf. He confessed that much when Simon asked him how all of this had happened. No, he was at fault because when one of the nobles had mentioned people disappearing on the riverfront, he hadn’t looked into it.

It wasn’t that Simon had turned a blind eye, or even that he didn’t believe it, either. It was that he was too focused on his larger mission. 

Simon reflected on that, as much as everything else, as they made plans to leave the city a few days later. Really, he should have stayed longer, but there was a more pressing concern: his hand. He lied and told Varten it was his burns when the boy asked, “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”

The truth was that his burns would have been better served staying put for a few weeks and using the excuse to read the books before he turned them in. Unfortunately, the way the darkness was slowly creeping up his hand made that impossible. It had started as a coal blackness that extended almost the length of his fingers, but now it had spread to his palm and was already halfway down. As it went, it took on a deep, dark gray instead of the tar black it had originally been. 

Even stranger, the affected area went numb at night. The first day, he’d gone to bed early so he hadn’t noticed, and the second, he was halfway to drunk by then for the pain, so he’d assumed it was his imagination. By the third, though, he was sure. By day, the hand was his, but by night it might as well have been meat for a roast.

It didn’t seem to be affecting his experience either, according to the mirror, so he had some hope that whatever it was wasn’t permanent. Still, there was zero chance that the Unspoken hadn’t seen something like this before, and he needed to find out how screwed he was before he suffered some kind of soul damage. He didn’t mind getting his face melted in one life, but getting his hand poisoned in all lives would be a real problem. 

The cart made the journey slower than normal, but aside from painful wounds and his squire’s inexperience in changing them, it wasn’t so bad. Men and women avoided looking at him even more than usual, and he had to announce himself as a knight to innkeepers when he stopped for the night, since his cloak had burned away, but other than that, it was quiet. That was good; Simon wasn’t in the best shape for fighting, especially not when his fever started on the fifth day. 

He wasn’t too worried about that. He needed rest, fluids, and medicine, all of which were a few days away. The problem was that the shadow had crept halfway to his left elbow, and the nightly numbness had followed it. If this kept up, he wouldn’t be able to fight properly once the sunset, which might be considered a career-ending injury for a member of the Unspoken. 

Still, he tried not to worry too much about it until one night he realized he’d lost control of his hand completely. It was a surreal experience, and Simon thought he was dreaming as it happened. One minute, he was reading about cultural prohibitions of golden Magi, and the next, he looked over, and his left hand was writing a message in the margin of the book. 

Simon froze as he read it. “What is this?” he asked, willing his hand to stop. Simon wasn’t ambidextrous. He couldn’t write left-handed, and yet here he was, doing just that. 

He tried to stop himself from writing, but no force of will even caused him to slow. In the end, he was only able to make it cease by rotating his elbow and denying it contact with the page. When he lowered it again, the writing continued immediately. He realized two things immediately. The first was that he could read the words it was writing, and the second was that it was in the same script that all of the demons' names he’d recorded so far were in. Hell hadn’t just touched him; it had infected him, and what it said was chilling. 

‘You escaped your death, and even Anthroditen, but you can’t escape yourself, can you, Simon, no matter where you go or who you pretend to be.’