Death After Death-Chapter 336 - Countermeasures

The journey to return the corpses and lay them to rest took only a couple of weeks, but Simon didn’t come back until the end of summer, after the harvest, when the weather had started to turn stormy and tempestuous. Instead, after he gave his condolences and told the deceased’s loved ones about how a sudden illness had struck them down, he said his goodbyes.

He didn’t give them the details, more than anything, because he almost wished he hadn’t known them himself. Who would want to find out that someone you loved had died like that? I’m sorry, your son had a terrible curse placed on him by a witch, and it lingered there for months before it activated, destroying his soul, he thought morosely, replaying those terrible ideas for the hundredth time. That’s right, and even though I consider myself to be a talented mage, I didn’t notice or do anything about it.

It was depressing, but really, what was he supposed to do? Divination was inconclusive, and his glasses would barely see the marks that witches left on the skin beneath a layer or two of clothing, let alone inside their bodies. Truthfully he hadn’t even realized that layering magic inside the body by carving it into his very bones was even possible, and while he realized there might be some advantage to enchanting himself with resistance to fire or lesser strength in such a way, but he was much too focused on his current problems to experiment.

Do I need to invent a magical X-ray to figure this out? He wondered as he considered what words might allow for that. It was troubling.

Simon didn’t stay anywhere where anyone might expect him, not when there was someone out there who was capable of such things. Now both the capital and the places he’d already purged of witches felt dangerous. Just because he couldn’t see them didn’t mean there weren’t more of them out there.

Instead, he stopped at the fortified mining camp that had been built near a vein he’d found in Dunwhal the previous year. He just showed up one day and started helping them with their work, and they had no reason not to be grateful rather than suspicious. The mine supervisor knew his name after all, and they were woefully behind on several tasks. Assuming he'd shown up to help rather than disappear was almost reasonable.

“We’ll never get the bridge started on time next year if we don’t start shipping ingots this year,” the man complained. “And with all the goblin raids, we’ve had a hell of a time getting the smelter finished.”

The smelter, of course, was supposed to be built in such a way that its furnaces warmed the surrounding buildings during the harsh winter, but the chaos of actual operations made that plan difficult to manage. Apparently, it had been worse in the spring when everything had turned to mud, but even now, ore was stacking up, with little melt to actually turn it into metal.

So, Simon spent a week slaughtering greenskins by night so that everyone else could work in peace. He had to do it in borrowed leather armor because he hadn’t brought his full kit with him, but it still worked well enough. Every night he set off relatively clean, and every morning he returned, drenched in blood and a few years younger than when he’d left. He’d been using so much magic lately that it had aged him, and he needed to fix that, at least a little, before the years started to become debilitating.

Each time he returned to camp, he left a few unhealed wounds that he had bandaged where people could see to avoid any questions, but Simon wasn’t overly bothered by the fighting or the bleeding, no matter who was doing it. Rooting goblins out of their lairs had long ago become easy for him. Even the shaman he found that wielded a word of force to fling rocks at him like hail of bullets hadn’t required him to use a word of power of his own.

More than anything, the activity had become meditative for him. The oracle would probably have preferred that he meditate while farming or painting, but he found the ebb and flow of battle with such a familiar foe to be nearly as relaxing, or at least stress relieving.

There was a certain tempo to it. Goblins were simple creatures with no more than half a dozen attacks and strategy, and moving among them, he often knew what they were going to do before they did. So, rather than worry about how many more goblin lairs there were, he focused on his problem.

He wasn’t here to fight goblins; he was here to hide from his unknown enemy until he had some kind of solution, and that solution was slow in coming, even if it boiled down to asking himself the same few questions over and over again. Who did this? What are they after? How do I stop them before I’m next?

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They were simple questions, but no matter how much he played with pendulums or scribbled new rune combinations on his mirror in an effort to use magic to figure it out, he couldn’t figure it out. How does someone hide from magic? He wondered. That’s the better question.

For a few days, Simon ignored his previous effort and just used magic on known targets. He could use his dowsing rod to point to Eddek from here, and even Queen Elthena, and she was half a world away. He couldn’t find the Oracle, though, or others like Helades or even his Doppelganger. Likewise, he could point to Freya, who was still safe and sound in Schwarzenbruck, but not to the evil vampire version of her that didn’t actually exist.

What did all of that tell him? Not a lot, but it did show him that he could only find things that existed, but sometimes not even then. Helades clearly exists, but maybe not in this world, and maybe not all the time, and evil me? He sighed. Simon wasn’t even sure that his evil twin was evil anymore, and even if he was, there was no way of telling where he was. If Simon didn’t necessarily exist during every year in the world, there was no way of guaranteeing that other version of him did, too.

“So does that mean I’m looking for the wrong thing?” he asked himself one morning after he’d finished purging a small warren of greenskins. “What if it’s not a witch at all?”

Simon wasn’t sure if that sort of distinction actually mattered. Not when he was looking for ‘the one who cursed and murdered my friends.’ Still, he kept doing experiments. He made simple sigils of warding and attached them to other men in the camp, just to see if such baubles prevented him from detecting them, and they did, mostly.

It actually surprised him how easily it was to hide someone from magic. Both Dnarth Karesh and Uuvellum Karesh seemed to work, but in slightly different ways. The former were the words of hide location, so the miner he’d attached them to disappeared entirely from Simon’s spells unless he used a major word to circumvent the simple charm. The latter were the words of anti-location; they didn’t hide the mason that Simon put them on. They gave him false information. The former made the man almost invisible, and the latter was more of a signal jammer.

Although they were both interesting, neither of them seemed to be what was happening here, because even major words didn’t reveal his hidden enemy. What if they’re a god or a demon? He wondered. What if they aren’t a witch, but something the witches worship? That thought disturbed him, and he spent several more days thinking about it.

More than anything, he wished he could talk to someone about all of this. He tried having whispered conversations with the mirror a few times, but it made no effort to defend or attack any of Simon’s precepts or ideas. The most it would do was agree or disagree with information he’d previously logged inside of it already, which meant that he was still just arguing with himself, with extra steps. 𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶

He cast a number of spells trying to determine how involved demons were with witches, with mixed results. He’d seen it with his own eyes, of course, but that was only on a single occasion.

In the end, when he was out of goblins to kill, he took a bit of the newly mined tin and mixed it with a few copper coins he had on him to create a little bronze. Then he hammered and polished part of that into a ring. He told the mining camp’s smith that it was just something to practice on, but that was just an excuse to get him a few pointers, and help he didn’t really need instead of the wrong sort of interest.

“A ring’s not such a simple project,” the gruff old man told him. “Better to start with shoes or nails. They’re much more forgiving.”

When all of that was done, he scribed a rune of nullification into its inner surface. While Simon experimented with lesser countermeasures around the word of location, neither of them seemed good enough for the risk he faced. I still might have a ticking time bomb inside me already, he thought nearly every night before bed. That, more than anything else, made the decisions easy for him.

He couldn’t find his enemy, but he could make their job as hard as possible, especially when words like soul destruction were being evoked. Unfortunately, while a word of nullification placed him beyond the reach of divination magic, it also put him beyond the reach of the rest of magic as well. He could not heal himself or strike down others. He couldn’t pry into the truth of their words or even use the powers embedded into his blade without taking it off first. As long as he wore it, he was just another man.

I wonder if I can even pass through one of Healdes’ portals with this on? He asked himself as he looked at his hand while he rode down the trail toward Adonan. It would certainly pass through if he took it off and it was unpowered, but he didn’t know if her magic worked on the same principles or not; he didn’t know enough to say either way, but now that he’d thought of it, he looked forward to finding out.

While he didn’t think that the ring would save him from fire or lightning that had been generated by magic and then flung at him, he was sure that it would keep someone from setting him on fire or being marked by a witch. More importantly, though, it should keep any marks that might already be hidden inside of him from activating, no matter what their conditions were.