Death After Death

Chapter 403 - Fresh Eyes

They didn’t get stopped when they reached Ionia, but only because Simon took off his cloak and lied about their purpose in fluent Ionian. That surprised Varten and made the guards skeptical, but they let Simon and his squire pass. He didn’t do it because he wanted his squire to see the sea, although that’s what Simon told him. He did it because he wanted to see the place he’d spent so much time through fresh eyes.

And I want a little more time away from the Broken Tower before I return lest someone scent the magic on me, he added silently. It was a real possibility, but he had no idea of the likelihood. Still, it was better to be safe than sorry.

During his time in Ionar, he’d viewed the city through the eyes of a healer, an artist, and a teacher. He’d never seen it through the eyes of a witch-hunter, though, and after his most recent encounter, he desperately wanted to know if evil had been lurking beneath the surface throughout his stay. He definitely hadn’t gotten the whole story on the queen’s vizier, or her prophecy, and he was convinced there had to be some kind of magic in the region he simply wasn’t privy to.

If I hadn’t spent a life in Charia with Kayla and Eddek and found a witch that marked the flesh of their victims, I would never have even expected someone could mark their soul directly. That realization stopped Simon in his tracks. He’d just taken it for granted that a witch could do that, but most witches probably couldn’t even see the souls of their victims, let alone mark them.

The leap of logic stunned him. He’d simply accepted that it was possible, and while of course it had proved to be, the answer was how? If he spoke the words to do it, he’d lose his sight immediately.

The fae didn’t speak of it, but if it really thought it could judge the truth of a statement, there was probably a related power going on there, he decided.

Could demons do the same thing then? Did they do the same thing? He had no idea. He could very easily imagine a demonic pact marking a soul, and he didn’t like that idea since he would come back to life again and again with the same mark. Something told him that at least with demons, though, such a thing would be voluntary, unlike the faerie that took whatever amused it.

Why would it have to be a contract, though? He wondered in the quiet moments where they traveled. Demons are evil, selfish monsters. It can’t be a sense of honor or fair play that holds them back. They were good questions, but he had no answers to go with them.

He didn’t find any great new evil that he imagined either. If it was there, he didn’t find it on this trip. Oh, there were a few people with auras dark enough that they had to be murderers or worse. With his recently blurred vision, Simon couldn’t say for sure what all their crimes were, but he wasn’t here to enforce the law, and if he tried, he doubted that the Queen’s soldiers would see things his way.

Instead of righting wrongs, they stayed just long enough for Varten to see the waves and taste the local cuisine, but that was all. He didn’t think anything he did here would ripple, given how little interaction he’d had with this part of the world ever since he’d erased the whole timeline involving his son, but he wasn’t about to chance things.

“How do you know so much about this place if you’ve never been here?” Varten asked him one day as Simon was explaining the meaning of a mosaic on the temple of the sea, and got lost in a whole tangent about the cost of blue pigments.

“They’re called books,” he lied, “And one day you’ll see they’re even more important than a sword in what we do.”

“Is that how you learned to speak their tongue, too?” his squire asked skeptically. “From books?”

Actually, that was a magic potion given to me by a goddess, Simon thought before answering, “I know you can’t understand what they’re saying, but every merchant I talk to complains about my accent. I know the basics, but not the rhythm, and that as much as the way we’re dressed marks us as foreigners.”

He used that point to launch into a whole tirade about recognizing foreigners as prime candidates for heretics and warlocks. While he didn't want to make Varten too xenophobic, he did want the boy to have a sharp eye for what didn't belong. That was usually the first and only warning you'd get before whatever was wrong killed you. After that, they didn’t return to the topic of why Simon knew so much about a place he’d never been, but it was a good reminder that he needed to be more careful with what he showed off.

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In this life, he was a witchhunter, not an artist or any of the other dozen jobs he’d had before. They didn’t linger long after that anyway. As soon as Simon’s vision started to sharpen, they were off again, back toward home. In total, they’d still be gone for a couple of months, but their trip to Ionia itself, and Ionar proper, would be less than two weeks.

In that time, he was preoccupied with thoughts of the soul, and while he never uttered a word to Varten about fae and devils and the fingerprints that both left on the souls of men, it was never far from his mind. Neither was the fact that he’d finally used magic in a new way. It was clumsy and strange, but it was a thrill nonetheless, and he looked forward to a life where he could spend months and years just exploring the new techniques.

The Oracle had said that using magic in that way dulled the clarity of a person’s soul. She’d been right, too. Speaking a word of power was like filling a pond with silt and waiting for years for the flow of events to carry it away. Making a gesture, though, was like splashing the waters of the soul. You stirred things up, but in months it was all back to normal.

In reality, it probably didn’t matter how much it blinded him. In lives where he needed his sight, he would use almost no magic, and in lives where he was focused on magic, he would use it freely. If anything, he’d use it more than ever. He wasn’t a hundred percent sure, but he strongly believed that he could use one word verbally while gesturing another simultaneously. The pattern would take time to understand, and he’d essentially have to make his own spellbook, but he was fairly certain that he’d figure it out.

Such activities would open up a whole world of magical effects. Even before he’d seen his doppelganger string long strings of words of power together, he’d understood you could get more complicated and powerful effects with such techniques. The problem was that in the moment, when every syllable counted, barking a word or a greater word was always a safer choice.

Not everyone can spend their lives so freely, though, Simon reminded himself. Not everyone can choose power over flexibility.

Those weren’t thoughts for this lifetime, but they interested him almost as much as the existence of the fae did. If he used the words of distant shaping as he spoke the words of lesser fire, he could probably mimic the effects of a pure word of fire, or even a greater word of fire, but over a much smaller area.

Did he need to fill a whole room with flames, though? Would it be just as effective to fill an opponent's lungs with them? Force and Lightning offered even more opportunities. He knew how little it would take to disrupt the human heart or mind. With a little practice, he felt confident he could drop someone without leaving a mark on them.

That was a hell of a power, but he’d certainly miss being able to see what a person was guilty of, or where they were about to swing their blade before they did. While magic was powerful, he felt certain that being able to see as deeply as possible into the world around him would help him on more levels.

It won’t help me bring down the basilisk before that bastard turns me to stone, his mind volunteered. That was true. There was no way he was taking chances there or with anything else with something as flimsy as a magic sword ever again. A wand of greater lightning probably wasn’t even enough to safely deal with that monster, and no wand he knew of was powerful enough to channel a greater word.

Those worries, at least, were safely in his future, and Simon didn’t let them burden him too much. Instead, he enjoyed his time on the road with his squire as they made the long trip back to the Broken Tower.

Along the way, they encountered no more goblins, but they did have to make one detour because a bridge they’d used on the way here had been swept away in a flood. That made the two of them stop in a village that was dangerously close to Ordenvale to arbitrate a local mystery where the peasants were convinced that one of their number was poisoning the sheep of their neighbors.

Simon’s vision might not have been crystal clear yet, but he could see that it wasn’t the case, and he spent a few days there, asking questions and poking around. The answer turned out to be accidental. The innkeeper had a fairly complicated still set up in the woods where he was making spirits to evade the taxes of the local lord, and when he dumped his used-up mash, the grazing animals sometimes found it and sickened.

It was accidental, and while the families that had been affected were angry at first, the brewer agreed to pay restitution in hard liquor. It wasn’t an ideal solution, but everyone seemed happy with it. The innkeeper tried to pay Simon the same way, to silence him, but that was unnecessary.

“I’m just glad we solved the mystery before someone did something drastic,” he told the man. “Not every curse means a witch is hiding in the hedges.”

He might be a lawman in a strange way, but he didn’t see taxes as something that he needed to enforce. If it wasn’t something he felt the need to hang the perpetrator for, it wasn’t his problem. Varten at least didn't complain about that. He seemed almost annoyed that Simon stopped to help every person in need.

"That's the job," he explained. "We strike down the rotten souls to save the rest. Always remember, boy, that turning a blind eye to such people is nothing but cruelty to everyone else."