Death After Death

Chapter 396 - Going Through the Motions

The weather cooled as he made his way north, though that was more because of the changing of the seasons than any slight gain in elevation. The number of trees slowly increased, too, and by the time he was a day away from Warburg, Simon would have been hard pressed to say that he was in the same country, let alone the same county. Still, he had what might be the best map on the entire continent, and with the help of a stagnant pool of water and a few whispered words, it was easy to make sure he was going exactly where he thought he was.

Despite all of that hard work, there were blank spots. Simon had to take an extra day to go around a bog he hadn’t marked, and when he saw what looked suspiciously like lizardman tracks, he gave it even wider berth.

“Not this life,” he told himself. “I’ll take care of you next time.”

They probably weren’t the same tribe of lizardman, of course, but that didn't matter. With the dropping temperatures, he had no desire to spend the next few days caked in mud; even if the weather slowed them down a bit, it still wouldn’t be a decent trade-off.

Despite the detours, though, he made progress, and finally, one afternoon, he spotted the Gwenmollen Shrine. At this point, it was little more than a single pillar entwined with flower-strewn ivy, but those bright colors were enough to make the place stand out against the yellow grass and trees that were starting to lose their leaves.

Until he got close, Simon had wondered what his orders for a haunting near the shrine meant. As he rode up to the nearest village, Talrinth, and finally saw the thing, though, it snapped into focus. The shrine was little more than a half-erased ruin of an older temple. From a distance, it was nothing special. While he still planned on investigating it in greater detail, something much closer caught his eye.

The sky was overcast, and the wind blew lightly on his face, making the slender smoke trails from the chimneys drift slightly. Well, all but one of them.

That detail nibbled at him until it clicked. That thread of smoke that seemed to move against the wind wasn’t smoke at all, it was a stain on the fabric of the place, and as his eyes traced it back to the two-story home, he was certain something bad had happened there.

Simon didn’t proceed there immediately. Instead, unable to find an inn, he went to the local tavern to see if he could find a place in their common room for the night. Simon’s mere presence, or more specifically the clothes he wore, silenced most of the conversation immediately. Which was a shame, because the little hole in the wall had a nice vibe to it.

The owner was happy to put Simon up for the night, but even a round of drinks at the bar and assurances that he was passing through did little to renew the cheer that he’d accidentally trampled with his arrival.

That reaction felt odd to him because that should have been exactly what these people wanted from him: to leave, as soon as possible, taking no note of their business. His mere presence seemed to make them uncomfortable. That was par for the course he supposed, but it bothered Simon, and when the tavern owner let him sleep on the common room floor after the place closed, Simon barred the door and shuttered the windows just in case.

No one tried to kill him that night but, when he slept restlessly and woke to the sound of the innkeeper starting the morning fires, it was with the feeling he was being watched.

This isn’t ghosts, he told himself feeling unsettled. This is witches. It has to be.

If it were witches, though, where were their marks? Where were the dark auras? He pondered that while he got up and saddled his horse. He planned to stay for at least a sausage and a warm beer, but he also wanted to make it clear that he was leaving soon to put at ease whoever might care while he tried to figure out what was going on.

Things didn’t get any better when he finally did leave. Of course, he didn’t leave the village right away. There were only a few streets of houses, so it was easy enough to go by the one he cared about.

From the outside, the building looked unremarkable. If it was leaking evil from its chimney, he expected the entire structure to have some kind of taint, but that wasn’t the case. In fact, it took some asking around to find out that it was the home of an old widow. People almost seemed predisposed to forget about it unless he asked very directly.

That puzzled Simon, and he immediately thought of witchcraft; only the lack of witchmarks argued against that. In my last life, I couldn’t see such things if they were hidden well, but I can see everything now, he thought as he concentrated.

Still, he couldn’t quite see through buildings with X-ray vision, and he was unwilling to simply hammer down the door and go in unannounced, so he went to the headman to ask about her. That was less helpful than he expected it would be.

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“Miss Odell?” he asked. “Why would a man of your stature want to know about a woman like that?”

“My investigation is not your concern,” he said, pulling the power card he used so rarely. In this case, he felt like he needed to. Something was wrong here, and it was more than just a little wisp coming from a chimney, and he needed the sledgehammer of the Unspoken’s reputation to try to break through the fog.

His harshness succeeded, at least for a moment, and he said, “Now that you mention it, I can’t remember the last time I saw the widow Odell. I wonder if she’s doing okay?”

“Maybe we should go check,” Simon said helpfully.

“Maybe we should,” the headman agreed. Even with that agreement, he tried to delay and suggested adding the priest or a couple of other citizens of importance to their group, but Simon wouldn’t have it. Delay would only complicate things. He could feel it. Something ugly was here just beneath the surface, and it drove him forward with urgency.

So, minutes later, they were walking back to the home that leaked evil. When they got there, Simon knocked and then stood just to one side of the door, making it all but impossible to see him if anyone cracked the door to see who was calling.

“Yes? Who is it?” a voice came from inside. It wasn’t particularly feminine, but voices seldom were past a certain age. That didn’t concern Simon, and he let the headman handle the pleasantries. Still, when the door opened, he saw a dark aura waft out immediately. It was pure evil, black on black, and it stunned him.

There’s no way that can be coming from one person, he thought, momentarily stunned as the widow came outside.

It wasn’t a woman who answered the door, though. The headman seemed to think so by the way he was talking to her. However, when Simon looked past the miasma that surrounded her and the faint haze around them, he felt sure he was looking at a man, and not a woman.

The confusion lasted for only a moment. Simon saw a flash of recognition in his eyes as he looked to Simon’s cloak, and Simon lashed out with a fist, punching the man disguised as a widow right in the teeth before he could get out whatever word of power he planned to speak.

“Geh—” was all he managed, thankfully.

Gelthic? Gervuul? Simon wondered as he pressed forward, wrapping his hands around the throat of the stranger before he could even think about closing the door in their face.

Even as he did so, though, the warlock reached behind the door frame and pulled out a wand. That was bad news, and Simon slammed him hard against the frame, breaking the flimsy piece of wood in his hand.

“What are you doing?!” the headman yelled, but Simon ignored him and focused on the warlock. That’s what he was. That’s why none of this had made sense.

Simon had come for a ghost; he’d suspected witches, but it was a warlock he had in his grasp. The dividing line between the two was somewhat hazy there, but it was entirely likely that he was a single word away from killing them both, so Simon held on for dear life.

When the headman tried to pull him off the warlock, Simon shouted, “Stop! Back! A single word and we’re all dead!” It wasn’t words, either. Simon had seen the man trace part of a word in the air at one point in their struggle. Truthfully, it was a miracle they weren’t both blown to pieces already.

The struggle that followed was brief and violent. The warlock managed to bite Simon’s hand and even stab him once with a fork rather than something deadly, but eventually he subdued the man and left him bound and gagged on the floor. Only then did he turn to the horrified headman and explain what had happened.

The man didn’t believe Simon at first. It was only as the strangeness of the home they were in became clear, and the word of lesser illusion started to fail, that he believed anything but what his eyes had told him: that Simon had beaten a harmless old woman in a shawl into submission.

“But… What happened to Miss Odell then?” he asked.

Simon shook his head. “No idea, but this villain might have been here posing as her to hide for a good long time. I’ll find out when I interrogate him.”

“Interrogate him?” the headman asked in alarm. “But you said he could kill us all with a single word!”

“He can,” Simon agreed, “But we won’t be letting him say anything. I’ll learn what I can with a few nods. Nothing more.”

That wasn’t entirely true. Simon might risk a few written responses, too. This man had information, and it was rare that he captured a mage of any kind alive. That thought intensified, though, when he started to look around the place. The small dirt-floored home had no basement. The bedroom had been converted into a small laboratory. While the windows were blacked out, it was hard to make anything of the papers on the walls or the desk, but on one wall, there were several small jars that glowed slightly.

Simon paused and studied those, and the headman made a warding gesture with his hand and moved to open the window. In those few seconds, Simon glimpsed something he’d seen before. The jars weren’t filled with light; they were filled with souls. They were restless and squirming things, but there was enough to make out a few details. If he’d known these people, he might have been able to recognize them.

Some were in worse shape than others, like they were older, or half consumed; however, before he could study the murky cyan swirls more closely, the window started to open. “Close that,” Simon shouted, not sure what effect the light of day would have on such abominations.

The headman did as instructed, but even that flash of light was too much. Several of the containers that were closest to the windows arced and popped as their fragile spells failed, and when the window was closed again, less than half of the souls that had been there still lingered.

“Ah, well,” Simon said to himself, “I was going to free them anyway, I just wanted to study them a bit more first.”