Death After Death

Simon had not noticed Aaric’s arrival, but after he saw the girl, he started to look for the young man. It only took a few dinners to find that he had become a squire in the service of an older brother. That allowed him to line up his timeline between the levels a little better, but it also helped him regain interest in what was going on in the outside world.

Though he’d occasionally gotten involved in some of the minor mysteries and petty power struggles that typified this strange place, he’d mostly lost interest in the outside world as he’d focused on ever more detailed handiwork and learned more complicated metalworking techniques. Never in his life did Simon think that he would learn about the ins and outs of various forms of annealing and quenching to get just the right properties from metal, but here he was. Worse, knowing what he knew now, he could see just how much there was to learn. It was a humbling thing for him to realize that one could spend a lifetime learning a skill and still not know all there was to know about it.

Life is basically the opposite of a video game in that sense, he decided, which was funny because crafting, as it turned out, was addictive. It was even more addictive than learning, and it was as close to playing a good game as he’d found so far in the pit, and he lost years of his life exploring those delicate techniques.

Familiar faces, though, that was new, and for the first time in a long time, it was enough to make him set down his hammers, files, and his ever-expanding sheaf of notes and poke around a bit in the outside world. As it turned out, very little had changed except for the women he saw at the evening meal.

Sisters were not often seen for long because, as he’d noted previously, whisperers were used up rather quickly by the needs of the Unspoken. One could see them around the compound, it was just hard to see the same one for more than a few months or years. It took only a few missions to turn a sweet young girl into a crone because they bled out their entire life just to stop a hedge wizard or two. That was a high price to pay to stop a man who was experimenting with things that the unspoken didn’t want anyone to know.

He’d seen the two of them talking in the courtyard on more than one occasion. While romance was forbidden by the Whitecloaks, it sometimes happened among the junior members of the order. Simon had never seen any harm in it, though he had seen members of both sexes punished very publicly on more than one occasion. He was sure that the two of them would get together and escape soon enough.

However, Simon eventually decided to intervene anyway. It was just his nature at this point. He couldn’t simply trust that they would get away as they always had before; he might have already screwed that up in some small way. One day, when no one was looking, he placed a short tract on the nature of the whisperer problem in young Aaric’s cell so that the boy could become better acquainted with the costs of the cult he’d joined.

The document was something that Simon had read years before, and technically, it was secret from junior members of the order, but he didn’t care. He supposed that it wouldn’t be too hard to trace it back to him, but that didn’t bother him too much, either.

He’d long since prepared a self-destruct switch in the form of a sharp-edged amulet that he wore. He hadn’t shared the design with any of his peers, and no runes were visible on its polished brass surface, but the thing would be more than sufficient to blow his head off with a word of fire if he cut himself on it and bled a bit.

He expected that to be almost as effective as the words he’d left for the young devotee to read. ‘The nature of magic is caustic to the soul,’ it read. ‘And the words of a whisperer are still magic, even though we might wish that they weren’t. They are a rare and powerful weapon Necessary to beat our foes, and it is through their sacrifice that the many will be saved by our foe and the damnable words of power they use for such ill purpose.’

He ended the note by including the name of the man who’d written it, but Simon very much doubted that Aaric would know or care who Master Arvand Broodmark was, even if he was a storied leader of the order only fifty years ago. Still, he didn’t have a choice; after working in the library for so long, it was almost a compulsion.

He obviously never asked Aaric if he’d read the thing, but the inquisitors never came looking for Simon, and the young man’s gaze had only become more furtive after that, which told Simon everything they needed to know.

Less than two weeks later, the two of them tried to make their escape. Simon had taken to sitting in the afternoon light to warm his aging bones for the last few years when the weather was warm, and he worked on new ideas for spells and weapons. He’d been at the Broken Tower long enough that no one doubted him or often even noted his presence anymore. He wasn’t just a ghost to the broader world now; he was in this secret world as well.

Some days, he would sit just outside the walls or in a grove slightly beyond that, and other times, he would sit atop the ruined keep not so far away from where the sentry kept watch over the surrounding area. On the day that Aaric and Carelyn started to ride away just before sunset, while everyone else was at dinner, Simon was sitting up there as he had been every night for the last week.

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The guard had acknowledged him when he’d arrived but tuned him out the rest of the time because, these days, Simon made for a remarkably poor conversationalist. When he saw the two riding away on one horse, though, he asked Simon, “Do you think I should sound the alarm?”

Simon nodded vigorously as he pointed at the couple, but as soon as the sentry reached for the horn, Simon pushed the man over the wall. He sent him thirty feet to the ground without the slightest bit of guilt, and the man barely had time to scream before he hit the ground with a dull, wet thud. Even as so many other parts of Simon’s mind and skills had strengthened on this trip, he’d fallen entirely out of practice with weapons, and his combat reflexes had been hopelessly dulled.

So, while the sentry breathed his last in the dirt, Simon gathered his things. Then, he went to dinner and sat among the same people he always did while waiting for someone to sound the alarm. That didn’t happen until shift change almost an hour later.

Though the young lovers would doubtlessly be blamed for the death, he didn’t think they’d mind. It was possible that the unspoken would never even find them again with their current headstart.

That’s pretty much the best case, even if I have to solve that level again, he told himself while the rest of the compound scrambled like an agitated ant hill.

It was only a few days after that event, when everything started to get back to normal that he decided he was pretty much done with this life. n/ô/vel/b//in dot c//om

He hadn’t meant to stay here long enough to see things come full circle, but now that he had, it was something of a wake-up call for him. He’d stayed here for an entire life and soaked up more knowledge about the Unspoken as well as the history of the world that they were “protecting” than he ever thought he would.

He learned almost as much about how magic worked in this life as he had in all of his others combined, and he’d learned more about how the events of history fit together than he would have thought possible before this life. Well, the events of history in a very small portion of the world, he reminded himself.

The white cloaks were a cancer, but they were not yet a cancer that had consumed the world, and even if this life was not going to stick because he didn’t solve the level, he still didn’t plan on letting them continue to grow.

He didn’t hate them precisely. Hate was too weak a word. Had the order merely been what it claimed to be on its face, then he would have hated them, but now that he knew that those at the top of the pyramid hoarded power and used magic with impunity even as they tried to deny that same knowledge to the rest of the world, he loathed them.

He only had firm evidence that anyone of any power used enchanted swords and amulets, but he suspected it was more than that. He’d seen gray-haired men look more youthful when they returned from a mission than they had when they went out, and he was quite certain that they weren’t above using the very spells they sought to suppress. After all, even though their entire order could see the auras, very few knew what they really signified.

At this point, Simon was quite certain that Jack the Ripper might not be the darkest aura in a room. After all, if you did what you loved, it blunted the impact of even the worst behaviors as far as he’d seen.

The only question was what to do about it. Simon spent weeks on that question while he worked on other projects and started getting his affairs in order. What’s the most awful, painful way I can hurt these bastards? He pondered to himself for hour after hour and day after day whenever he wasn’t too busy.

For a while, he considered trying to open a giant portal into hell to swallow the entire base whole. It was perfectly possible in a theoretical sense. In the end, it wasn’t even the fear of the havoc it might wreck on the wider world that stopped him; it was the logistical issues. The amount of work he’d have to do in public spaces would almost certainly get him caught.

No, it needs to be something stealthier than that, he decided. It needs to be something small that doesn't require so much preparation.

He gave a lot of thought to how he could kill the most people with the least effort before he finally decided on the Feast of the Ascendance. Dropping the roof on the assembled grandees during the evening, when most or all of the most important people would be in attendance.

It wouldn’t be hard. He still had a few months, and he was sure he could create more than a few force wards on the main supports. If he still had a tongue, he could have severed all three with a greater word, but even runes of gold didn’t care for greater words, so he would have to make the magics a bit more compact.

Despite his creative plan, it didn’t seem to be enough to pay them back for all of the horrors they’d unleashed on the world. Still, enough or not, that was what Simon did. He told his supervisor he was working on a shield that might deflect arrows over large stretches, protecting whole cadres from archers during battle, but really, he was creating shaped demolition charges.

That wasn’t the hard part, though. The hard part was finding a way to activate all three of them at once. That took a little creativity. In the end, he was forced to create a firebomb between all three charges. It would detonate first, immolating everyone, including Simon. Then the heat of that fire would melt the lead in the force runes he’d designed, triggering them. It was an ugly piece of work, but at least it would be dramatic.

Well, I got more than I wanted from this life, he decided as he made his final preparations and reviewed his notes again so that he could try to remember as much as he could when his next life started.

He had no regrets. Well, he had very few regrets, at least. The only thing he hadn’t gotten to do in this life was see Elthena, and the frequency with which he drew her face in his sketchbooks was steadily increasing. It was as clear an indicator as any that it was time to start over.