Death After Death-Chapter 330 - Witch Hunter

Simon cast a hundred spells that month, before he returned to Adonan and saw Eddek’s serious face again. It might have been more than that; he didn’t exactly keep track after the first few clanholds; he was too distracted by how much hidden evil had been under his nose the whole time.

If I’d had my sight, I would have seen all of this at a glance, he thought regretfully. He’d been so sure the problems of this area were geographic and cultural that he hadn’t even considered larger issues. Suddenly, he regretted not learning more from future-Kayla about the problems that she and Eddek had faced.

In some of his early lives, he would have thought nothing of casting so many spells, but now, even if he hadn't used a single major word, it felt excessive. It was more than he’d cast in the decade he’d spent living this life up until now. It might have been more than the last few lives put together, and it irritated him, on some level, that he had to do it. It felt like a step back, but it was the only way to handle the new situation without becoming a full-blown witch hunter, which was more or less what he was, though he hated to think of it like that.

He’d spent lives regretting that people didn’t devote themselves to studying magic more. He’d fervently believed that the problem was ignorance and that the White Cloaks did much more harm than good. He was less sure of that now that he’d watched a few beautiful women age into oblivion from across a market square while he sipped a beer.

The scale of the problem stunned him, making him feel slightly more sympathetic to the Unspoken in the process. They were heavy-handed bastards, of course, but if Brin had once had a witch problem like this, suddenly their beliefs made more sense. They got lots of other things wrong, too, of course, like the belief that only those with the sight could cast spells.

It might be half right, he acknowledged grudgingly.

The power of both magic and vision seemed to be linked to a certain level of spiritual development. That would explain a few things, like why his spells had been so hit or miss early on, but for now, it was just a theory.

What wasn’t guesswork was that his long trek home had aged him, but only a little. Thanks to the number of spells he’d cast and the limited number of monsters he’d battled in the interim, he’d come back a decade older. That wasn’t quite enough to look middle-aged, but both Eddek and Kayla commented on it the first time they saw him.

Eddek seemed to think it was just because Simon was tired-looking and unshaven. “Keep it up and soon no one will even know you’re an outsider,” he said with a laugh.

It was true that Simon neglected hygiene a bit when he was in the wild. While one of the first things he’d done on his return was to get a hot bath and launder his clothes, he’d chosen not to shave. At the time, he’d been thinking of the coming winter, but he quickly agreed with the boy’s assessment; there was something to be said for blending in and he decided on the spot that he’d see if he could grow out a thick, full beard for the first time in many lives.

If you wore a toga in Ionia, you can wear a beard here, he chastised himself for not thinking about it sooner. He’d been too busy playing the part of Brinnish mercenary to think about how he might better blend in with the clannish locals.

“You seem… different,” the serving girl had told him, making him laugh. He was different. He had entirely different priorities than when he’d left on a whim. He’d been planning to leave the mountainous kingdom just before winter and get on with his goal of clearing floors, but now that he was in the witch-hunting business, he’d decided to stick around for another year or two.

That was obviously the best answer given how far off his plan he was at this point. He’d planned to help the kids lock in a better future, not uncover a secret cult that riddled the area.

I’ve solved this level, he consoled himself. So next time, all of those witches will still be removed from the board, and I can pursue whatever it is I want in future years.

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It was a fine plan, but it took more work than that once he returned to the densely populated capital. There, crowds were big enough that he couldn’t simply pick everyone out at a glance, and though divining worked, it was hard to figure out who was the guilty party when it pointed to a hall full of residents and serving girls.

He needed a way to detect them, too, of course. He had a few ideas for that, but such detailed crafting projects could wait for winter. Instead of trying to dig too deeply into that, he secured the raw materials, made a few sketches, and then spent the rest of the year’s good weather amassing funds and traveling as widely as he could to various clan holds.

He went to Brulen’s Vale, Harlsvar, and Krusigin, looking for gold and iron. At least that’s what he told the head men and anyone else who asked, and all of that was true enough. He never left those places without locating a few veins to sell back to their Karl’s on generous terms, but none of those were the reasons for his visits. He was there to purge evil where he found it.

Each time he did things in the same way. He came into town acting as if he only cared about money. He drank with the men and ignored the women. At night, though, after everyone had gone to bed, he searched the community with magic and found those at the center of the spider web. Then, on one of the days he was away from the clanhold to prospect he would sneak back to the outpost and cut every last witch on his hit list off from their connection to magic with the same mark, so that by the time he returned hours later, whatever chaos that moment caused had blown over.

As plans went, it was a good one. The only things it denied him were any grimoire and secrets the covens might have had, and the credit for doing the deed. While the former was a regrettable lapse, the latter didn’t matter to him at all.

He didn’t need the credit. In a perfect world, no one would even remember him in a few years. Given how often his name popped up, he wanted nothing more than to be a link in the chain of human events, and with the possible exception of the most junior witches that survived his guerrilla war against their kind, he was pretty sure no one would remember his name. He wouldn’t even matter to the men that would one day mine the ore veins he located.

Originally, the scattered, isolated nature of these communities worked against Simon; they hid the rot in a place he’d never have a reason to look. Now he was able to purge a community of their evil grip without anyone realizing it was him by using those prospecting searches as pretexts to tackle the witch problems in every small community he stopped at along the way.

Ironic, really, he thought the morning after he purged the nine witches that made up the coven in Krusigin. They shun outsiders, but shunning me would have saved their miserable lives.

While he was sure that some might have their suspicions that he was involved, given the timing, no one said anything to him, and even those who survived the purge did nothing more than give him hard looks that were equal parts fear and distrust. They didn’t even know how he’d done it, so they could hardly say who had done it to them.

Simon kept these tasks up until the weather started to turn chill. Then he stopped as much for reasons related to convenience as because he didn’t want to get trapped in a clanhold by a freak snowstorm after he’d just purged a coven; that might have ugly consequences.

It didn’t matter; his efforts for the year had been richly rewarded, and he now had enough friends and fortune that he’d never have to leave the city again if he didn’t want to. Five percent of the revenues of more than two dozen mines that would come online over the next half decade would be enough to make him one of the richest men in the city, though he didn’t really care what happened to that money on some level, on another he knew he had to make some sort of legal preparations for it. Someday, he would die on this level, but that money, and whatever purpose he put it to, would ripple out into the future in a way that made the future better or worse.

It wasn’t a dimension he’d consider until this life. Even his time in Ionar had focused on leaving the world better than he’d found it, only on a personal level. The orphanage in Darndelle is probably the closest I’d ever come to that before, he decided one day. Even then, though, that had been entirely different. He’d given the money away, but other men had made plans. Still, important as it was, Simon deferred it.

He had little interest in the business side of things and instead focused on a number of creative projects. Foremost among those was his plan to locate witches in Adonan, but he had other ideas in mind as well.

In the waning days of autumn, he started making a fine map on paper for once. It was intended to be a Yule gift for clan Eddek, in an effort to help win his way back into their Karl’s good graces. On the surface, that was true, but it was a checklist for Simon as well, and every clanhold he’d purged made it onto the delicately lettered piece of parchment.

In total, he’d purged nearly a quarter of the settlements worth the name in the region, and though he was sure eventually they’d catch on, there seemed to be no coordination between the groups. So, for now, he’d been able to do as much damage as he’d done without spilling a single drop of blood.