Death After Death-Chapter 335 - A Mouthful of Ashes

Despite Simon’s worries that the clans would give him further problems over the book he was writing, and his other efforts to unite the mountainous kingdom into a single, coherent whole, it was the religion he’d boosted so much in the last year or two that increasingly became his biggest concern. He’d originally chosen it for his efforts because it was such a small and relatively powerless deity among the polytheistic pantheon that Charia worshiped. There were other, better-loved healing gods, and all of them combined weren’t as worshiped as the God of War or the Lady of Winter.

Still, with a confirmed miracle to spread the word and the ability to frequently handle otherwise incurable cases, they grew prodigiously after the end of his most recent expedition. By the time winter ended and spring arrived, their services had already outgrown their tiny shrine, and soon they held their regular sunrise services in the nearest market square as they gathered donations for a larger temple.

All of that was fine; it was the infighting and the pecking order that concerned him. The supposedly devoted pacifists practically took up arms against one another in their efforts to worm their way closer to their living saint, Jarin.

Simon politely asked a few of the acolytes that he knew best, and even the priestess Vendin Darala, who had accompanied him on his trip so recently, to dial it back a little. Once upon a time, that would have been enough, but at this point, he might have succeeded in painting himself out of their story a little too well, and they asked him to mind his own business; while they were grateful enough to him most of the time, at least some of the opportunistic faithful had decided it was time for Simon to be pushed aside.

The boy, for his part, took it well. Every time Simon interacted with him in the months that followed, he seemed more confused than drunk on power.

He even once confessed to Simon in private, “How can I be chosen by

a Goddess if she’s never spoken with me?”

That was a very fair concern, and Simon was still working on a way to address it on the morning he attended the Feast of Ascension. It was held on the morning of the vernal equinox, and despite the chill, it was supposed to signify the end of winter. As a feast, it was a meager one because it was meant to break the fast of the faithful.

Regardless of that, it was still a good time, at least until disaster struck. One minute they were making toasts and offerings as the most important priests discussed their plans for the coming year, and the next, Jarin turned deathly pale as he sat at the head of the table, then fell from his chair as he began to seize.

Simon was up in a flash and moved toward the boy, but then, so too did everyone who sat between them. At least until several other people around the table began to show similar symptoms. “What is going on?” Simon asked as he looked around.

None of those people had looked the least bit sick to him when the early meal had started, but something about sunrise had caused all of them to freak out. If it had been just one, he might have suspected anaphylactic shock from a food allergy, or perhaps even some sort of epilepsy; he knew little about it beyond the fact that it existed, but whatever this was, it wasn’t that.

It’s magic, he decided. Witchcraft, probably.

He would have checked that, but he’d left his glasses in his room; he didn’t think he’d need them at such an occasion, not when he’d never seen a witch within the city.

Rather than fight his way to the center of attention, Simon paused and stooped, tending to the closest acolyte. The way that he shivered and shook made it hard for him to feel for an accurate pulse, but there definitely was a heartbeat. Be that as it may, though, he doubted it would keep beating for much longer, because the man wasn’t breathing.

“Hyakk,” Simon whispered, trying to return the acolyte to health with a word. Healing magic didn’t work well if you didn’t know what the problem was. He knew that, but he had little choice. This wasn’t a plague or a fever; it was a nervous condition, a poisoning, or maybe even something worse.

Despite doing his best to picture the young man as the picture of health he’d been a few minutes before, his magic did nothing, and the word of curing, as well as the word of greater healing that followed, did little more. Still, as Simon’s mouth filled with sulfur and his throat burned, the dying man took his first breath in almost a minute, which was better than nothing.

Simon quickly moved to Jarin and repeated the same spell as surreptitiously as he could, and was happy to let those who prayed around him take credit for that turn of events. He was even able to save another woman. After that, not only was his throat shot, but there was no one left with a heartbeat to save.

Simon looked and felt tired as what should have been a celebration ended in tragedy. His attitude only worsened when he started putting together names, and he realized that everyone who’d been affected shared one thing in common besides their devotion to their Goddess: every single one of them had gone on his trip with him.

In fact, as he started to frantically search first the scene, then the city for anyone that might disprove that rule, he found something even stranger. Everyone who had gone on his second witch purging expedition that had any association with the Goddess had been murdered this morning, but everyone else had been spared. The other Aldor boys, the teamsters, and even their cook had not been struck down. Stranger still, Simon himself had been spared.

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Well, at least I convinced everyone that I had nothing to do with the miracles, he thought glumly as he returned to the temple to share what he’d learned and see if either of the survivors had recovered.

Even as he explained what he’d learned to the surviving priests, he was nearly overwhelmed with guilt at his own survival. A dozen people had just been struck down for something that he’d done, and he’d see them avenged.

“This is most troubling news, Simon,” the head priest said when he was finished. “Do you believe it was witchcraft then? And that they were afflicted back in Keldonsland?”

Simon nodded, letting the other man lead the conversation. He doubted very much that what he'd said was the case, but he didn’t have a better theory just now. The idea that months-old latent witchcraft became even less likely when he helped change Jarin into clean clothes that evening. He even used his spectacles to search for magic, but found no strange marks that might have been put there by a witch on his skin.

Simon would have waited there by his bedside for a month for him to recover, but he didn’t have to. Even though he sat there all night and tried a few more smaller healing spells and attempts to disrupt curses, the body still died before sunrise the following day. By the end, Simon had even placed a word of nullification, but it seemed to do nothing at all, further indicating that this wasn’t witchcraft.

The following day, he set all of his current activities aside. His book and all of his myriad business adventures would have to wait. Instead, he took several of the bodies that had been wrapped in funeral shrouds as well as a mule team, and promised to return them to their clanholds. He’d do that, too, but before he did, he’d conduct a full autopsy, somewhere isolated between here and there.

He chose his paper mill for that. He simply shut it down for a few days, gave the workers time off with pay, and locked the doors. Despite its proximity to the city, it was the one place he was sure he wouldn’t be disturbed by men or monsters.

Disturbed by monsters? If I start hacking people to pieces, then I’ll be the monster myself, won’t I? He asked himself as he laid an oilcloth tarp down to keep things from getting messy.

When he was done, he’d boil the flesh off the bones and tell anyone who asked it was necessary because of the transit. What was really necessary, though, was learning how these men died. If there was poison, he would find it.

Simon spent an entire afternoon gutting the first acolyte and sifting through his slowly decaying innards looking for a clue. He even shaved their head looking for a hidden mark, but didn’t find one until he cut back the scalp in preparation for removing the brain. That was when he found a shockingly advanced sigil imprinted into the bone of the skull itself.

While its mere presence horrified Simon, when he started to sort it out and translate it, he became even more concerned. This was not a run-of-the-mill witch’s mark that transferred the life of the victim back to the caster. It wasn’t even like the one that had been cast on him the year before that, which used his own life to fuel a spell that would make him sicken and die.

That would have been straightforward. Instead, he found a complex working of magic that made him think about the Magi or some of the volumes in the Black Library more than any witch he’d faced, and as he took all of that in and unraveled the meaning of the symbols, he felt a wave of fear pass through him.

Weylera Delzam Aufvarum Eszloum Vrazig. A mark of timed, slow soul ruination. Someone hadn’t just killed the men and women he’d ridden beside for months. They'd intentionally twisted the knife slowly and ripped their soul out. That was the reason that none of his healing magic had done much. He’d saved the bodies of a few people, but the person meant to inhabit that body was long gone.

Anger mixed with fear, then. This was new, and worse, it was something that could destroy him as easily as it had anyone else. He might live a thousand lives, but he kept the same soul each time, and if someone destroyed that, well… he’d just be an empty corpse lying there in a cabin over and over again.

Even as his fear kindled into a terror that matched what it would be like to fight Freya or the Basilisk again, he moved to the next corpse and sliced open the scalp to search for the same mark. It was there, too. The only difference was the timing. That shocked him, too.

He expected the marks to be identical, but they weren't, and as he did the math of the number of days they’d been set to go off after, he realized they were nearly a week apart. Worse, he realized that they hadn’t been set when they were anywhere near Keldonsland. He’d have to look at a calendar and count backwards, but he was ninety percent sure that the marks had been added to the acolytes shortly after they’d returned to the capital.

“The witch I can’t find…” Simon murmured to himself as he looked from one bloody bone mark to the other and back again. “I didn’t find her, but she found me.”

That thought lingered as he suddenly imagined the city as a vast web, with a dark, poisonous spider at the center of it. As Simon reeled from this information, part of him had an urge to kill himself on the spot. Retreat from such a scenario would be a logical move. I’ve done enough good, he assured himself. There’s no need to damn myself by digging deeper.

He did dig deeper, though. Even afraid as he was, he still took the time to look at the third corpse. There he found the mark not on the skull, but on the breastbone, with a date between the other two. It was frightening that such a thing might be anywhere, but before he reacted rashly, he needed to think. Still, he took the time to cast two healing spells, one targeted at each area on the body where whatever this was had appeared on the dead men. He didn’t think he’d been marked. If he had, he’d be as dead as they were, but still, he wouldn’t be able to sleep that night without doing something about it.

After photographing the strange bone cravings with his mirror, Simon spent the rest of the evening boiling corpses to collect the bones, and as he did so, he toyed with the golden necklace around his throat. He’d worn some version of this since before he’d been turned into a vampire. It hadn’t worked then, but it would work now. The links of the chain were inert unless he ripped it from his throat, but if that ever happened, well, it was one hell of a rip cord.

Is that enough, though? He wondered if this had happened to me, could I have pulled it in time?