Ch. 438 - Secrets Don’t Stay Buried

Simon stayed there until most of the candles he’d found had burned almost to nothing, learning all he could. Then, in the wee hours of the morning, with a few new books in his sack, he closed the place up tight and left through the second-floor window, avoiding anywhere where guards might have been hiding, and staying in the shadows as much as he could. 

I stayed too late for shadows tonight, Simon told himself as he made his way back to the inn. False dawn was coloring the horizon now, and the wide streets of the trade city were empty enough that it would have been easy to pick him out. He made it back to the inn, but that was due to luck more than skill. No one had been looking for him. If they had, they would have found him. 

When he got back to his room, he’d intended to sleep before he started reading, but since sunrise gave him just enough light to read, he decided to start reading the first volume. That was a mistake. He told himself he would just skim it, but it was only hours later, when he was more than halfway through the thick volume titled Verses of the Soulstealer, that he realized it was getting close to lunchtime.

Simon went to bed, but his mind spun with all of the new information, and his dreams were flooded with what he’d read. He dreamed of a darker, more evil version of the city, where manual labor was done by the dead, the common people were fed a meager diet, and their bodies were consigned to the deep mausoleums that powered everything from the skeletons in the field to the hot water in the nobles' houses. Only the rich and powerful escaped this fate and were allowed to be buried in private tombs. Everyone else’s soul was devoured and shredded to power the madness. There would be no reincarnation for any of them. 

“Not so different from the Pit,” Simon whispered as he woke with a start. At least, the way that Helades had explained it. He didn’t really buy that at this point, though he couldn’t explain why that was the case. There was a greater mystery here than turning a doomed world into a wastebasket. If the whole universe really were powered by suffering, she could always just send everyone to hell. 

Well, that’s probably against the rules somehow, he decided as he got up and got dressed, but even so, using a world for this is overkill. 

Such a thought wasn’t worth wasting his next question on, but it did take up more and more of his headspace as time went on. Still, for now, he only allowed himself to brood on it as long as it took to go downstairs and eat a quick lunch. After that, his mind was monopolized once more by his pilfered books. 

If the Murani were ruled by a Godking, then the necromancer who killed the other night had considered himself the secret king of this city. He had hexes cast in brass that, by his own admission, he barely understood on the homes of the most important citizens. So, he could get any favor he wanted, and he had enough wealth for lifetimes squirreled away in various caches.

Only some of these were documented and written down in any way that Simon could decipher. Still, he took the time to take pictures of those with a mirror and mark them on his map as best he could in case he ever needed the money.

While Mr. Blackton didn’t exactly lay out his life story, one of the books he’d taken was a journal that documented some of the man’s experiments for several years from a decade back. It was hardly conclusive, but it gave Simon enough information to be certain that this man had been at his grisly work for decades, at least. It also made him even more certain that the reason he hadn’t met him before was because of the Blackheart. 

This mage’s efforts almost certainly predated that device. So, one day, he’d probably just gone into one of his tunnels and never returned. No one would have been the wiser for a long time. Simon certainly hadn’t been, and apparently, neither had any brothers who had come through this city. 

“The Unspoken don’t have a lot of presence outside of Brin, but they do have temples here, at least,” he muttered to himself. “I wonder how many lost their lives trying to bring the necromancer down.”

It was an unanswerable question. Over the years, Simon had copied a lot of information into his mirror about who went missing where, or had been confirmed dead. None of the names they knew with certainty had died to the living dead, but several men had gone missing here. 

I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a presence here because they knew there was an evil they couldn’t locate, Simon contemplated as he rubbed his eyes.

The Whitecloaks had done that a lot, flocking to different areas, in search of evils hidden beneath the surface. Just because Brin was relatively safe from monsters these days compared to the surrounding lands, didn’t mean that it had always been the case; the oldest records that the Unspoken had painted a completely different picture of the region. 

Why didn’t Helades start the Pit back then? He thought idly as he wondered again how all of this fit together. 

Unanswerable questions plagued his investigations at every turn, but he did the best he could. How long Mr. Blackton had been doing this, and how many he’d killed, were just the tip of the iceberg as far as Simon was concerned. The real question that he had in mind as he read more and returned to the scene of the crime was why the skeletons weren’t still running. 

The necromancer had set up an almost automatic system. He had souls of craftsmen chained to skeletal servants. He had laborers forever digging, working, carving, and hoarding. Each of them had their instructions stamped into tin plates that they wore around their necks or embedded in their sternums. It was an elaborate system to ensure he needed no living soul who might betray him, and Simon crushed every last skull just in case someone might still be trapped in one of them. 

Simon spent weeks down there, on and off. Some nights were more productive than others, and some he couldn’t visit at all because there were guards, or lights in the windows. While he never found an underground exit that would make for a good alternative entrance, he eventually figured out how the plug had gotten pulled.

They’d stopped functioning because of the man’s own paranoia. He’d rigged his whole organization like a set of dominoes. While the energy from the graveyard was limitless, the throttle used a charged gem that was changed out periodically by the man himself. Were it not for that, the skeletons would still be marching around under order, and he would have no doubt had to fight his way in on the first visit.

No, fighting would be the worst of it, he realized, if someone set up something like this and no off switch, it might easily outlive the man who made it and eat the world.

 For a moment, Simon wondered what that would look like. Despite the similarities with the zombie plague, it somehow horrified him more. Zombies were just driven by their hunger, but this would be like an assembly line of death.

Before he could get too far down that grisly road, he forced himself to focus on the actual object before him. He was here to learn, not dread, and if he started spiraling, well, this whole place was a horror show, and he was well beyond that.

It functioned like a fuse, maybe. Simon wasn’t sure. He couldn’t quite remember what a fuse was, but he assumed it fused two electrical lines together, which is what this did with essence. 

It was the first time he’d seen anyone wire magic together like this, but at least, according to the necromancer, the design was not his own. He complained endlessly at times about why certain runes should work certain ways, when his own designs failed, which made Simon chuckle. He understood that pain to some extent. Every time he looked at a complex Murani design like the Dreaming Orb, he felt useless.

“I guess it’s nice to know I’m not the only one,” Simon said with a smile. 

As he went through each book, he tossed it in the inn’s fire late at night, or if there were too many people around, their latrine. He saved what information he thought was important, but he threw away the rest as a good knight would do. At least that’s what he told himself. 

Still, the question always repeated: where did goblins learn magic? Where did humans learn complex rune structures? Mr. Blackton talked about copying designs from ruins in the desert, but Simon doubted he meant the basilisk’s level. It was curious. 

Simon had planned to go through this level in an evening, but for obvious reasons, he ended up staying for weeks, documenting and destroying. He gained no new words; indeed, he had far more than the necromancer. But there were interesting designs to study, and of course, the hope that he would hit the jackpot. 

One detail that stuck out to him after a few weeks was that runes, as written or carved, could be used by someone who didn’t understand their meaning. He hadn’t known that, but he supposed that made sense. After all, the Magi were regularly lied to about what their runes meant and what they could do, but they were still bound by the amulets they wore. The same was true of the Unspoken’s amulets. They weren’t even aware that they were magic. 

How does that even work? He asked himself as he stopped what he was doing and shut the tome he’d been standing there perusing. No, better question, how did it take me so long to ask this question?

For a very long time, Simon had understood that intent powered magic. He'd assumed that was universal, but now that he thought about it, there were certainly instances where the user’s intent didn’t matter at all. That thought allowed him a brief moment of insight, as he considered how items impacted the aura less. A dozen other related topics and ideas synergized inside his mind.

Someone could act with intent, using the correct words, and the universe would obey. But if an object was marked appropriately, then the magic happened outside the person and in a vessel. He could almost hear the Oracle whispering something about clarity and vessels, then.

“Let me guess,” he said with a low chuckle. “It’s because the universe understands itself, even if the people in it rarely do.” It was funny to Simon because obviously, a stick didn’t understand anything at all, but it was the only way the logic made sense. 

Words and gestures required understanding because they were intentional acts of intelligence, but markings were more like a circuit. That somehow implied that intelligence got in the way of magic, and he didn’t quite know what to make of that. Still, before he could give it much thought, he realized he had company. 

He heard one of the steps on the stairs behind him creak softly a half a second before his uninvited guest spoke, but even then he didn’t whirl around immediately. Whether it was a guard or an apprentice, any sudden moves might cause them to skip the talking part and leap straight to violence, so he only turned around slowly as what turned out to be a woman started speaking. 

Ch. 439 - Caught in the Act

She was a stranger to Simon. He’d never seen her before in this or any life, but he could see that she was a servant of the King by her badge, and the fact that her armor differed so wildly from the rest of the guardsmen he’d seen indicated she was something special. 

A spy, maybe? He wondered, as he considered his options. I could run deeper into the dark, but I’m as likely to get lost as to escape that way.

“Archiman always said that there’s never just one viper in the nest,” she growled at him as she leveled her blade. 

That name sounded familiar to Simon, but he couldn’t recall if it belonged to the king, the former king, or one of his servants. It was definitely someone he’d dealt with while researching the Blackheart. So, for all Simon knew, it might have been the head librarian, but right now it didn’t matter. What mattered was that he’d pressed his luck too far and he’d been found out. 

“I’m not who you think I am,” Simon answered politely, raising his empty hand to show he was unarmed while he continued to hold the tome he’d been perusing in his left. 

“You’re not an acolyte to a secret diabolist?” she answered in a mocking tone. “You don’t raise the dead, you only loiter in the secret basements of those that do? Tell me another one.”

Simon nodded. She had every right to be skeptical, but then, if he’d been what she thought he was, she’d already be dead. Mages were notoriously hard to take alive.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t his unwillingness to cast a spell that tied his hands, or even the weapon that the woman in tight leather armor brandished. It was her bright aura that tied his hands. He could see at a glance that she was a good person, and that the world would be poorer without her, just because of how brightly she shone, which meant that if it came down to killing or dying, he’d probably die here. Still, he wasn’t done with this run, and he had no desire to lie down and end it right here, so he considered his options. 

“Brave of you to come down here alone if I really am what you think I am,” he said. “Foolhardiness and heroism straddle a line so narrow only the saints might tell them apart.”

It was one of the many passphrases of the Unspoken, but she gave no sign of acknowledgment of its meaning. She wouldn’t have been a knight, of course, and she was too youthful to be a whisperer, but if she really was some kind of medieval secret agent, he thought she might know enough about them for him to bluff his way free. After all, he had once been recruited from this city. He knew that they had a presence here.

“I bear blessed tokens of protection from the gods themselves,” she smiled coldly. “That is why your charms and evil magics have not already worked their evil on me. Once the fighting starts, you can bet my men will come running to aid me. Now will you come along quietly so we can punish you properly, or will I cut you down here like a dog?”

So she’s not alone, or she’s bluffing, he considered. He’d been planning to take more books with him. Obviously, that was out now. The new question was how to get away without hurting her too badly. 

Simon was fairly certain her backup was either a bluff or a poor setup. If her men were close enough to help her, he would have heard their boots on the floor above him. The woman had snuck in only because she was light on her feet and he’d been distracted. If there was a whole squad up there, he would have known. 

Still, he played along. “The punishment I deserve is probably worse than simply being stabbed to death here and now, isn’t that right?” he asked. “Much, much worse, I expect. In fact, I’ll bet you think that Mr. Blackton got off far too easy, don’t you?”

She swallowed hard, showing how right he was, but eventually answered.  “Go on, confess. You obviously want to. You knew the man, you knew what happened to him, and you even knew where he hid his blackest deeds. What else do you know?”

“I know that you’ve never met a real warlock,” Simon said, pacing slowly toward her. “I know that if you had, you would have shot me with a crossbow the moment you saw me. I also know that you’re a—”

“You know nothing about me,” she hissed. “Get back, or I’ll cut you down myself.”

Her sword was sharp, and Simon believed her, but he wasn’t worried. She might be skilled, but she was a head shorter than him and only a little more than half his weight. She was very little threat to him unless she had some cards to play that he didn’t see. 

“I don’t know your name,” he agreed, “But I can see you’re a good woman. I can see…” It was here that he regretted the blurriness of his vision. There were times when it would have been child’s play for him to pick out her hopes and deeds, but now he could only guess. “I can see there are people who would be heartbroken if you died. A little girl who—”

Simon was certainly trying to provoke her, and that was the moment he succeeded. She let loose a warning slash that he ignored as it went inches in front of his eyes. He side-stepped the first feint, too. It was only when she lashed out to truly impale him that he finally reacted, and obviously not in the way she expected.

Instead of trying to dodge, Simon held his tome like a shield, letting her impale it. Then, when he had control of her blade, it twisted it sideways, hard, putting all the force on her wrist because of the way it held her weapon. 

She was smart. She didn’t try to get her sword back. Instead, she released it and reached for her dagger, but Simon had been expecting that, and used the spine of the leather tome as a cudgel, slamming it into her chest and sending her down to the steps of the stairs. He then gripped her trapped sword’s handle, aiming it like he was about to impale her.

The woman rolled free, off to the far side of the basement, circling to use the stairs defensively, and forcing Simon to suppress a smile. He’d been hoping she’d make the smart move, and with one more feint to put her on her toes, he dropped the book, and charged up the stairs with her sword.

While he could have tried to escape into one of the many side passages that was a terrible idea for many reasons. Mostly, it was because he was sure he’d get lost. He’d found exits, and even made a small map, but he doubted that this woman was going to give him time find his bearings. 

She followed, of course, but a few steps behind as she adjusted to the changing situation. “There’s no escape!” she yelled. “My men are right outside!” but by the time she reached the top of the stairs he slammed the secret door shut, sealing her inside until she figured out how to open it. While he was confident she’d figure it out, just to be sure, he stabbed her blade into the floor in front of the hidden switch, so someone would find her, if worst came to worst.

He wasn’t going to risk burying her alive just to make sure the necromancer’s library stayed unread. He just hoped that he’d found all of those damn seals. He would hate to see a new form of magical slavery spread throughout the land.  

When Simon exited the basement, he did indeed find that there were guards just outside the front and the back door. They stood in small knots waiting for a signal that wasn’t coming. So, he avoided both of them by going up to the second floor and leaving by the same window he entered. He almost got away clean, too. Only an observant guard prevented that.

He was hopping down the last few feet off the brickwork he’d used to climb up in the first place, and it was then that he heard the shout of alarm. Unfortunately for them, they were wearing armor, and he wasn’t, so even in the mediocre shape that Simon was in, he still managed to get away. At least he did from the first group. 

The real power of a coordinated city guard was that wherever you went, there were more of them, and every time he thought he got away, he stumbled into a new group. Still, he ran his pursuers on a merry chase until the sun peeked up over the horizon. He went over walls, onto rooftops, and through back alleys more than once in his bid to escape without killing any of these people. 

What he really wanted to do was collapse the caverns below and bury the blasphemous research he’d found, but he wasn’t willing to kill that woman. So he decided to get while the getting was good, and eventually made his way back to his room. Once there, he was desperate to change clothes, but he didn't have a second set; that was just one more thing he hadn't gotten around to yet in this life. When he went outside to toss his ill-gotten necromantic tomes in the latrine, he snagged an old brown cloak from the stables that was as filthy as it was ugly. That was the best he could do. 

They were looking for him, and they’d find him if he wasn’t careful. So, instead of trying to learn anything else, he made straight for the graveyard.

That gate was guarded, so he started to loop around the far side. Unfortunately, that’s when he ran out of luck. He was trying to mind his own business when he noticed one guard pointing him out to his partner. After a short discussion, they both started to approach him, so he did the most logical thing in the world: he hopped the fence. 

“Hey!” one of them yelled as he grabbed the top rail and started to vault the thing. “Stop in the name of the king!”

Simon ignored them and hit the ground running. Getting over the top of the fence was strenuous for him. He still wasn’t as strong as he was used to being, but they were wearing 40 pounds of chainmail apiece. That would have served them well in a fight, but in a footrace, it might as well have been an anchor. 

Their cries spread quickly, including to the guards still at the site of the murder, but it wouldn’t be enough. The guards would hold all the exits, and in a sane world, they’d snag him, because there would be nowhere for him to escape to. It wasn’t a sane world, though; it was the Pit.

“He’s heading toward the temple!” someone shouted in the distance. 

Simon ignored that and pumped his legs that much harder. He had to break down one door, and he was free. Let them fill up the temple with guards. Let them release the hounds if they wanted, he’d still get away clean. 

Simon hit the door with his shoulder, almost hard enough to dislocate it. Fortunately, it gave, just like it had the other times he’d been desperately running from the fog, and he fell through it to the next level in an invisible flash of twisted magical colors. This time it wasn’t a masquerade ball in Charia he was interrupting, though; it was just a dusty plain a couple of hundred miles from where he’d been standing.

Ch. 440 - Treading Old Ground

A moment ago, Simon had been in Montain, but now he was back in Brin, not that the spots looked all that dissimilar from here. As he stood up and dusted himself off, he looked around. Behind him, the portal was fading, revealing just a little more carnage. 

Simon was surrounded by a smoldering village that had recently been burned to the ground by one of the rampaging centaur clans. That much hadn’t changed at least. As he turned in a circle and noted that it looked exactly as he’d remembered it, and that there was no threat here. 

While he turned, he tried to recall where the portal to the next level was, which took a moment. He actually had to walk over to the well and draw a bucket of water to ask the mirror. When he found the doorway, he started looking at the bodies between here and there. 

When he’d first come to this level with the werewolf, he hadn’t considered that the location of the exit told him a great deal about what he was supposed to be doing. “Merlin? Murphy?” Simon muttered, trying to remember the hairy man’s name. He hadn’t thought of him in years, but being back in this charred village brought back the vivid image of trying to find the naked man some clothes after he’d transformed into a human once more. 

He searched every corpse between the entrance and exit for any signs of life. He didn’t need to finish this level. He’d left level 9 open for a reason, and that was that it was a little over a decade from level zero. This was level 27, and it was half a century from the beginning. Leaving it open just in case was a fine strategy. 

Before he could make that call, though, he needed to figure out who he was supposed to save. He’d been willing to let that poor messenger take one for the team again. Simon had saved him many times before, but never whoever he was supposed to save here. He was sure of that much; he just wasn’t sure who the person was supposed to be, which was a problem since this was the site of a massacre. 

After a couple of minutes of checking corpses for signs of life, he stooped over a dark puddle of shiny blood and asked the mirror if he’d made any notes on the subject. ‘One journal entry suggests a family, in a house,’ the mirror answered in blurred blue letters. That wasn’t a lot of information, but it was enough. There were many fewer houses between here and there worthy of the name. 

Simon went from one to the next, and in a few minutes, he found what he was looking for. There, he found the charred corpse of a father wrapped around the bled out corpse of a woman who was cradling a small child. Of the three of them, only the little girl still had a pulse. She also had an arrow wound in her abdomen that wasn’t yet showing signs of infection. 

“Yeah, this can’t wait,” he sighed as he set down his bag and pulled out his wand.

The right thing to do would be to fetch water, boil it, find herbs, and do a little surgery. In a less dire situation, he might have. He could use some healer practice after a few lives, but in this case, he’d sacrifice a few days of life and a few more of blurry vision for a kid.

He picked up her featherlight form and moved her over to the shadow of the well, then he made a small incision to pull the arrow free. Simon had seen the barbed, red fletched arrows in a dozen lives and knew they were nasty business. So, he didn’t try to pull it out or push it through. 

Even unconscious, his patient moved and groaned, trying to escape the pain he was inflicting on her. That made Simon flinch, but it didn’t make him stop. She was a fragile thing, and any amount of blood was a lot for her to lose.

Still, he took his time. He didn’t have a wand with a word of curing carved into it, so if he left anything behind in the wound, the girl would die in weeks instead of days. It was bloody work, but after half a minute, he’d pulled the arrow free, checked for debris, and pinched the wound closed again. 

After that, all he had to do was visualize the delicate organs of her body mending back together, and the skin growing shut. With a minor word, it was a slow process, but within a few minutes, she had an angry red scar where her mortal wound had been, and he was washing off his bloody hands. 

It was only when all of that was done that he asked himself, “The question is, are you important to Helades’ plans, or is it the grandchildren you’d never have if you died here today?” Simon didn’t have an answer to that, and he knew that the girl didn’t either. Still, he made a note that he should probably check up on her in a few years and try to figure that out. 

“I guess that means I have to take her somewhere safe,” he sighed.

He’d planned to tag this level and move right on to the next one, but that would have only been possible with someone who could take care of herself. With a ten-year-old, he was going to need to find someplace safe for her to stay, which meant a lot of walking. His first thought was Darndelle, but only because he didn’t want to go back to Crowvar. It was at least twice as far, though, and he had no supplies. 

“Well, maybe Crowvar will be better off without the Raithwaite clan,” he mused as he drank his fill.

By the time he was done, the little girl still hadn’t awoken, so he found enough canvas rags and two decent poles and crafted a travois he could drag behind him as a stretcher until she woke. He also found a couple of coin purses with some copper and silver in them when he searched for those supplies, which was good, because he didn’t have much of the Necromancer’s funds left. He hadn’t planned to do much besides cut his way deeper into the pit, so he was close to flat broke.

The girl was so light that he probably could have carried her, but a stretcher was probably a better choice in case she had any injuries he missed. They were going nearly fifty miles after all. 

That took longer than he would have thought. Simon expected the girl to wake up by sunset, or at least during the night, but by midday, she was still unconscious. Am I missing something here? He wondered as he hit the trail again and continued on. 

Technically, if he was supposed to save her, and the level’s exit was right there, he was supposed to what, leave her to be rescued? That didn’t sit right with him, plus if he left her there to be found, he had no way of knowing where she’d end up, preventing him from analyzing the impact of his rescue in future runs. 

“Deviate far enough, and you won’t even solve the level,” he reminded himself. That was true, but he didn’t really care if this level was locked in or not; he just wanted to save the girl. He could always do that again if needed.

Partway through the second day, the girl finally stirred, and when she started to moan fitfully and struggle slightly, Simon stopped and smiled down at her. “Well, good morning,” he answered amiably. “Who might you be?”

“I’m…” she paused a moment as if the question confused her. “I’m Nara.” That statement was immediately followed by another demand. This one was more forceful, as she must have realized he wasn’t her dad, or anything else he knew. “Where’s mommy?”

“Well Nara, I’m Simon,” he said, doing his best to be as non-threatening as possible as he laid the handles of his travois around and moved to where she could see him. “And it’s nice to meet you. What’s the last thing you rem—”

“I want my mommy!” the girl interrupted, struggling at the rope that secured her to the make-shift stretcher under her armpits. “Where are you taking me? Where’s mommy, and daddy!”

He didn’t untie her, mostly because she was already a scared rabbit. Instead, he let her fumble with the knot herself. It wasn’t tight. He tried to tell her that her parents were dead. He wanted to, but the best he could manage was, “You got separated in the attack, that’s all. I’m just bringing you to the closest city where they can find you again, that’s all.”

It was a lie he’d have to unravel later, but looking at her tear-filled eyes in that moment hit his heart in just the right spot. 

“You-you promise?” she sniffed. 

Simon nodded. “I promise to get you to Crowvar safe and sound,” he answered, sidestepping her question.

That mollified her, but only a little, and she insisted on walking after that, at least for thirty minutes or so. After that, she was too tired to keep going, but that didn’t bother him. He just ditched his stretcher and gave her a ride on his shoulders until she felt like walking again.