Death After Death

Chapter 404 - You Can Get Used to Anything

The inquisition he expected when he reported the fae never materialized; in fact, the only part of his story that got any scrutiny at all was when he finally had to reveal the witchmark-like symbols he’d seen on their souls.

He left those out of the initial report for obvious reasons. However, when Master Harrin asked a series of questions about how he’d found the fae in the first place, Simon was forced to bring them up. That got some scrutiny, and he was asked to draw them. He was also given penance for failing to include them in his initial report, and spent three days on only bread and water contemplating the meaning of truth as he drew them.

That was fine. While his stomach rumbled, Simon worked very hard on those sketches. Still, despite that effort to be as faithful as possible, he made sure that none of them looked quite like words of power. Instead, he made them take on little animalistic shapes and argued that they were foul vermin sent from the vengeful forest. This one was a fish, with a large tail, and that one was a twisted serpent tightening around the neck of an old woman.

The Unspoken Master seemed happy enough with that explanation, and barely commented when Simon explained that he broke the circle with cold iron and was able to escape its tricks. This was hardly the first run-in with the fae that someone in the order had experienced, and when Simon asked, he was given several more tomes that dealt with the subjects to read.

According to those anecdotes, he really was lucky. Being trapped in an eerie ring for years or decades had actually happened, and on several occasions, knights had returned to the Broken Tower long after they’d been given up for dead without having aged a day.

Might be a useful trick if I could figure out how it was done, Simon noted.

While it would be a horrible fate for anyone with a family or a life worth living, if he wanted to jump into the far future and see how his choices really affected things, it was a lot more appealing than being turned into a vampire and stuffed in a wall for the best part of a century.

Until now, Simon had treated the existence of faerie folk as myths and legends, but after his brush with them, he treated the topic more seriously. So, while he trained Varten and waited for his next assignment, he covered a lot of that ground. Mostly, it looked like the Unspoken dealt with the fickle creatures with a little prayer and a lot of fire. Using Whisperers was considered to be a waste because “A woman could whisper her whole life away with no idea if the evil spirit was actually purged, or if it just slipped away.”

Simon could believe that. He’d used the word of nullification at point-blank range, but if he’d just wandered the woods hoping to get lucky, it would have been less effective than firing his bow into the underbrush and hoping to bag dinner.

In fact, in at least two stories, Sisters were seen to scare the fae away even without speaking a word, if only temporarily. The books suggested that both of the women in question were virgins and such spirits could not vex those who were pure in body and soul, but Simon doubted that. It was far more likely that some trace of magic clung to those women, and anyone else who used magic, and the faeries could sense it somehow.

That was entirely theoretical, because he’d never detected any sort of residue, but then, he’d never been looking for it. Surely if there is, then the Unspoken could see it on me, couldn’t they?

That was a stupid point to make, at least right now, and he shrugged it off. He hadn’t spoken a word of power in a lifetime. It had been nearly a decade. Still, he wasn’t happy with that answer, and eventually decided there had to be more to it for the fae than the lingering smell of magic. It had also claimed to know the truth of everything he said, but it hadn’t even been right about everything it had labeled a truth or a falsehood.

Eventually, he put the experience down into the same nebulous region as Icefang. The dragon hadn’t been right about everything either, but it had shown off some bizarre powers Simon would love to copy. If one had the mastery of time that the fae had, and the mastery of space and dimension that dragons had, then how would one not be a god?

Except for the fact that he could still bleed out like anyone else, Simon probably was a god now. Most of his constraints were of his own making, and he was bound by duty far more than the impossible now. Still, that didn’t stop him from fasting, training, or doing all the other chores that kept people from looking at him like he was the chosen one.

That rumor was definitely going around more after his latest run-in with the fae. Simon still wasn’t sure what he was foretold to do, but he was sure that he wasn’t the guy, and if he wasn't, he wasn’t doing it. Still, he wasn’t accomplishing his main goal of learning about witches, either. If anything, he was teaching the Unspoken about them and any number of other hazards as he came across them.

I’d definitely check out if not for Varten, he thought now and then when the topic resurfaced.

While he hadn’t yet figured out a way to defend his soul until he learned more about Helade's reality knot, he had decided that the way to ensure the most protection was with a tattoo or amulet that would kill him the moment someone tried to touch his soul. That would be good enough for now, but he couldn’t exactly run off on his squire.

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He no longer thought of the boy as an estranged enemy, and he’d never think of him as a son like he had with some of his other students, but he was at very least a pet, and Simon had an obligation to take care of him and make him a better man. In that much at least, he was succeeding.

Though the boy’s questions were occasionally awkward for Simon and his magical studies, Simon much preferred that to the blind ignorance that so many other Whitecloaks displayed. He’d much prefer the questions and the occasional arguments, even if that ended up with Simon being burned at the stake at some point in the future. He could live with that future, and for some reason, he just couldn’t shake the feeling that the boy would be the death of him.

Maybe I’ll just never see the good in him, Simon wondered as the days passed.

They were back at the Broken Tower for several months before they were sent out again. This time, they were sent south to Montain, with no specific guidance beyond the usual: do good, and root out evil wherever you find it.

Up until now, Simon had devoted a lot of time to trying to decide how it was these directions were chosen. This trip was enough for him to decide it was totally random. While the masters occasionally sent him somewhere with a specific destination or complaint, mostly knights just wandered around until they tripped over a situation that needed to be dealt with.

It felt very primitive to him, and he spent a lot of time in those fruitless weeks in the plains and deserts that separated the two nations, pondering how much more useful it would be if the Grandmaster used some flavor of divination to send his men to the most likely spots.

Then they wouldn’t be the Whitecloaks anymore, he reminded himself. They’d be some other organization.

Though he could readily admit that the idea was colored by his view of the Pit thanks to Helades, it wasn’t a bad one. Maybe he’d try that in some life. He could spend years focused on divination, figuring out what was where, and who was going to do what until he charted his own path through the Goddess’s maze.

While their current assignment involved endless wandering and gave Simon plenty of time to examine the idea from every angle, he couldn’t share any of these ideas with his squire. Still, during their hours in the saddle, he often posed similar ideas as philosophical quandaries to explore them more fully.

“What would you do if a god granted you the ability to know exactly what outcomes your action would have?” he asked Varten one windy day. “If he were an evil man, but you knew for a fact that it would make the world worse when he died, what would you do?”

Varten had trouble even following the premise. Which was fair, since it was fairly convoluted and his mind had never been exposed to any of these ideas. “Isn’t that what your sight does?” he asked when he finally felt he understood enough to comment.

“Not exactly,” Simon commented. Before he could get into a more elaborate explanation of what he meant by that, his squire continued.

“Well, I’d just kill everyone that looked evil, and then everyone who was good would be safe,” Varten said, seemingly very pleased with his answer.

“Ah, but what if the evil man was the strongest warrior in the village?” Simon interjected.

“I’m stronger than that,” the squire boasted. “I’d—”

“You could kill him, but suppose that if you did, the goblins that live in the nearby forest would eat the villagers once you were gone,” Simon pressed him, trying to make him see the real question.

Varten tried to explain that he’d simply kill the goblins too, but Simon disallowed that as an answer, even though that was hypocritical since that had been exactly his own answer to his doppelganger.

“So I have to let bad people live if they’re strong so they can protect weaker good people?” the boy asked, confused.

Simon shook his head. “I’m just asking which is truly the greater good, killing him, and thus everyone else, or letting him live and know that he will kill at least some of those he protects from other evils?”

The question and others like it led them in circles for days, but then that was the point. It let him see how childish his main position was, but it also let him see how cynical Helades was, and he was sure there was a better way.

Their mission did too, but in a more literal sense. He and Varten spent three weeks in the field, and the most they did was stumble across an innkeeper who had been stealing from his guests. Simon didn’t string him up for that since he hadn’t actually killed anyone, but he did turn the man in, along with the pile of other people’s possessions he’d stolen. It was too mundane for him to handle, despite how much free time he had, but the world would be better off without a man like that plying strangers with drinks and lightening their pockets.

It wasn’t the only trip that wasted his time, either. The next two were little better. Simon found no witches or warlocks. He didn’t even find the hint of the fae. He did fight a man, but he was a drunk, not a bandit, and Simon put him on his back with a closed fist instead of a naked blade. They almost fought a band of centaurs, but Varten’s pony hadn’t been able to keep up long enough to close the gap, and the cowards had fled.

They did eventually encounter a ghost, or something like it, on the way back from their third fruitless mission. Simon saw a spirit flickering at the edge of the woods, and when he followed it, it led him to a burned-out homestead that was long overgrown, with a body in the front yard that had been reduced to skeletal remains.

Nothing actually tried to attack him, and when he buried it, the spirit faded away. It lacked the details for him to say anything about it, but from the shape of the pelvis, Simon felt pretty certain it was a man.

Varten saw nothing, but he tried to. He claimed to sometimes see glimpses of something more, but ghosts, it would seem, were still well beyond him. “If I have to bury the guy, at least he should let me see him,” the boy grumbled as he took up the shovel and filled in the pit that Simon had dug.

He didn’t have much to say on the encounter, but he wrote it down anyway when they returned. Master Harrin didn’t even ask Simon about it, leaving him to wonder if the Unspoken even cared about magic, or just when magic got people killed. That was a fine line, of course, just not the one that Simon would have chosen.