Death After Death

It hurt like hell, but that didn’t stop Simon from doing it. Even the idea that he’d be cutting himself off from his most powerful abilities for the rest of this run wasn’t enough to change his mind, as his mouth filled with blood.

The white cloak that sat across from him was nonplussed when Simon spit out the piece of ragged meat that had once been his tongue. He just smiled and then shoved a leather-wrapped stick as far back between Simon’s teeth as he could to hold his mouth open before cauterizing the wound.

It was a painful experience, and Simon groaned, but even as terrible as the pain was, it wasn’t nearly as bad as some of the deaths he’d had up to this point. So, he endured it with as much dignity as he could muster. Even when he smelled his own burning flesh, he didn’t scream or try to turn away.

“Excellent,” the man said, “I knew you were sterner stuff. If the infection doesn’t claim you, we’ll have someone take you to the Broken Tower, where I think you’ll find answers to questions you didn’t even know you had. The truth of the world awaits you, son.”

Simon nodded, but even as the pain assaulted him, all he wanted to do was lie down. It had been a rough day on top of an exhausting week.

Yeah, I’m sure I’ll be asking lots of questions from now on, Simon thought as another white robbed brother was called.

The younger man took Simon away and brought him to a smaller room somewhere deeper in the maze of claustrophobic hallways. When they reached their destination, it was a small, windowless room with a straw palette and a keg of sour beer.

“This is for the pain,” the man explained. “That, and it will be a week at least before you can handle solid food again.”

Simon nodded, both in understanding and gratitude, but didn’t get drunk. That could wait until later. For now, the shock was holding the worst of the pain at bay, and his body was crying out desperately for sleep, so that’s what he gave it.

The days that followed that awful experience passed by in a blur. The fact that in all that time Simon never saw the sun, just made it all that much more confusing, but he endured. I’ve been in worse situations before, he told himself. It was true. He’d been much worse off than this. At least here, he could drink away the pain, and people checked on him somewhat regularly. Still, it was at least a week before he was eating soup and, eventually, real food.

When he was alone, he tried forming words sometimes to see just how badly he’d mutilated himself, but after a few attempts, it became clear that though he might be able to make himself understood to a determined listener, he’d never again speak the words of power.

That’s okay, though, he told himself. This will be worth the tradeoff.

Whether that optimism would be rewarded or not, though, was an open question. After the first week, boredom became a bigger problem for him than pain. Despite that, It was almost two weeks before Simon saw the outside world again. Even that time consisted of short errands to put the rest of his affairs in order so there would be no loose ends. His minder watched closely as he sent off letters to those who mattered, informing them that he was returning to his liege’s lands without the hoped-for breakthrough. Then, he burned most of his papers without any apparent concern. It was easy for him to do that, though, when he’d already scanned everything that mattered into the mirror.

It was only when all of that was done, and another group needed to go to the Broken Tower four weeks later, that he was allowed to depart. They sent him off with several other riders to the north-east. The ride there was short, but it didn’t go exactly as Simon expected. He thought they were riding toward some hidden valley in the distant mountains to the north-east. They were the main geological feature of the area and marked the boundary between the Kingdom of Montain, where he was now, and the mysterious Kingdom of Chiara, which he never quite got around to exploring.

They never reached there, though. Instead, they stopped at the ruins of an old castle in the foothills. A small village clung to the ancient, falling down place like barnacles, but otherwise, it was unremarkable; it didn’t even have a tower left standing. Then, they dismounted before walking their mounts through the half-fallen-down gate.

It didn’t seem very impressive to Simon, and he thought that this might be another test of sorts. That opinion only held until he was escorted inside one of the buildings and found a hive of activity. To anyone passing by, the place appeared to be utterly unimportant, and now he could see how calculated that was.

Simon was introduced to the Abbott, who handled the day-to-day operations, as “Ennis, an archivist in training, with great potential.”

“We’ll see about that,” the senior man said sourly. “I recall you promising that about the last one you sent me, but he can only read three languages!”

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Simon obviously had no chance to defend himself in the conversation that followed, but he cared little about what this man thought of him, and the longer he was in this place, the less he cared. He hadn’t thought much of the common hall where the brothers and sisters had their meals. Likewise, the politics of the place, as they explained who was beneath the Grandmaster and how Simon should address them, mattered little to him. Not when there were other wonders to see.

There was apparently a convent where they trained whisperers further on, along with vaults for the more dangerous and less well-understood artifacts they’d found over the years. None of that mattered, though, compared to the library. Once he was shown that, he had very little interest in anything else. The place wasn’t beautiful or even frightening, but with row upon row of books and scrolls on shelves labeled things like demon summoning, secret histories, and spell books, he was instantly in love.

Unfortunately, his heart was broken not long after that when the head librarian explained his new duties to him. Those words took longer than he would have expected because the white-haired man couldn’t speak any more than Simon could, so the conversation was in writing. Still, it was clear almost from the beginning that he wouldn’t get to peruse the shelves at random.

‘Your task is to take one of the books that are brought here, review it, and decide which section it belongs in,’ the old man explained, one sentence at a time. ‘The minder of that section will then review the book and decide whether it can be revised and released, and if not, whether it should be stored or destroyed.’

Simon nodded, but it was hard not to be disappointed; the older man somehow detected that immediately, and rather than getting angry about it, he sympathized. ‘I get it,’ he continued unexpectedly. ‘Thirty-four years ago, I stood where you stand now. In time, if you do a good job, you’ll be promoted to a section minder, and perhaps one day, if you serve the Unspoken well, you will have my job. None of us were ever meant to know all of these secrets, but I’ve learned more here than I ever would have out there.’

Simon was somewhat mollified by that display of concern. Unfortunately, he didn’t get to read anything that day. Eventually, he was shown to dinner and his new room. On the following day, though, he was finally allowed to see what it was he’d done all of this for.

On the shelf, labeled Unknown, were more than two dozen books, and every one of them was a chance to learn something he didn’t know before. There was one other man working on this task.

That’s probably the one that the Abbott complained about, Simon thought, evaluating the man before walking over to introduce himself with a brief written note. The other man was a little older and a little balder than Simon, but he seemed to have little interest in being sociable. Instead, he waved him off as he continued to peruse the scroll that was open before him.

Simon didn’t fault him for that. He’d much rather read as well. So, he picked up the first book on the stack and got to work. That was the point where hours blurred into days, and days blurred into weeks fairly quickly as Simon lost himself in the forbidden knowledge that was on offer here. Nôv(el)B\\jnn

The first book was largely a bust. It was a heretical treatise of medicine that had some correct ideas about nutrition and disease but no witchcraft or words of power. He rated it as Naturalism, which was the closest category they had on the subject, and then moved on.

The next book offered him no forbidden secrets either, though it was an unredacted copy of a chronicle he’d read before. This one, though, rather than attributing the victory to “A miracle brought about by holy champions on wings of light,” told the story about a warlock who had animated the corpses of an entire graveyard with “a baleful sign carved into the earth,” and used his impromptu army to turn the tide against the rampaging beast men that would have otherwise sacked the city.

Even though Simon had to remove those pages and add in false ones afterward, taking up days of precious time that he could have spent reading, he still found the account insightful. The chronicle didn’t mention what words the mage had used, and Simon didn’t think he had everything he’d need to do the same feat, but the execution was interesting and made him think about what he’d done to heal Freya’s dying body a few lifetimes back.

In time, these things became almost mundane. The books here might make for more interesting reading than the ones he browsed at random in Darndelle, but at the end of the day, he was still just going through the motions. By day, he would read, then join the others for a communal meal. After that, he would sleep until he did it all again. It got to be a deadly dull routine.

I don’t have to make money here, at least, he told himself. But I can’t use my mirror anymore, either.

It wasn’t something he bargained on when he’d made this decision, but he wasn’t here long before he’d figured it out. As soon as he saw an interesting map, he wanted to make sure he didn’t forget before he incorporated it into his main map; he realized that, for now, that ability was lost to him.

No time for second thoughts now, he told himself.

Eventually, he started sparring with the Brothers in the side courtyard just to have something to do. That was apparently something that wasn’t done often, but there were no rules against it. For the first months, they wiped the floor with him, further demonstrating how soft and out of shape he’d grown as he spent all of his time in Libraries.

Truthfully, Simon was starting to have second thoughts. The books that he was going through were not what he’d hoped to find. They were heretical, not diabolic. At least, that was the case until he hit pay dirt on his eighth volume, halfway through his second month in the Broken Tower. Unlike all the other heretical tomes he’d read so far, it was an actual spell book.

He didn’t realize it at first, though. Not until he figured out that the letters were written in a sort of code that wasn’t much more complicated than pig Latin. After that, it all fell into place fairly quickly. This tome had apparently been sitting on the shelf for quite some time, and the Librarian tasked Simon with cracking it specifically because no one else had.

The fact that he did so in less than forty-eight hours would have been a cause worth celebrating, too, but Simon didn’t want to tip his hand too quickly. Not when there was so much here to learn.