Death After Death

Chapter 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.

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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.