Free Web NovelSimon’s wounds were worse than he thought they were, but he didn’t understand that until Varten came to and looked at him with fear and worry in his face. Much of the hair on the front and the right side of Simon’s head had been burned away, and his arms and shoulders had nasty burns at every joint that hadn’t been immediately bathed in fire.
“It’s going to be okay,” he assured the boy, even if he wasn’t sure that was true. “You’re safe now.”
Varten nodded at that, and after a brief hug, he had to be peeled off Simon. Simon wanted nothing more than to reassure the boy and find out his story, but there were more important things than his wounds to consider.
For starters, he needed to decide who else in this house was culpable for the atrocity he’d witnessed. That was urgent, but perhaps not as important as the fingertips of his left hand. That concerned him the most.
While the burns he’d suffered would disfigure him to at least some degree, and he might lose his right ear if it got infected, the fingertips on his left hand were black. Not the flesh itself, but the aura. It was black as night, but fading to a dark gray, and its more usual white, just before his palm.
Simon didn’t like the look of that at all, and he was certain it was evidence he’d brushed up against the barrier to hell. More like I slipped inside it for just a second, he reflected as he studied while the healer rubbed the wounds on his scalp with a stinging salve. He didn’t like it, but it wasn’t as pressing a concern as everything else. So, he ignored it for now.
Instead, freshly bandaged, he returned to the main dining room where the manor’s servants were being held, and got a status report from the guard captain. “The warlock’s valet is missing, and we assume, in league with dark forces as his master. We have men out looking for him, but everyone else is here, as you requested.”
“Commanded,” Simon muttered, making sure to twist the unofficial chain of command a little bit tighter as he took in the room. First, he investigated the other two victims.
Besides being daubed with blasphemous marks, neither of them seemed to be harmed. They were clearly as traumatized as Varten, though; they knew just how closely they’d come to being pulled into the abyss, and he doubted they’d ever sleep well again. Still, their auras were fine, and he let them leave immediately after getting their accounts.
Everyone else took longer. It could have easily taken a week to squeeze every person in that household for information, but he limited his miniature inquisition to two full days and nights as the number of staff he held prisoner slowly waned.
Simon questioned every maid, footman, and cook, as well, and while he felt that most of them didn’t have anything to do with the magic themselves, almost all of them were guilty of knowing, or at least suspecting, what was happening. Half of Simon’s goal for this trip had been to avoid killing anyone so that he didn’t upset future timelines, but that couldn't be helped anymore.
Still, he split the baby as best he could. Everyone who only suspected there might be something more to their employer than was generally known was allowed to walk free, even if they should have done more. Anyone who saw these children, or any other victims, enter the house but never leave it, though, Simon condemned those people to death without the faintest sense of guilt.
He doubted he’d ever killed 17 people in such a short amount of time before, but to him, that was the line. If you knew people were disappearing, and you thought a roof over your head was more important than notifying the authorities to look into the matter, then you were a waste of air.
The fact that most of them were women stung him, but only a little. When he’d entered the house, he found it difficult to believe that anyone in the kitchens couldn’t have noticed what a strange cellar the place had, and that instinct had been correct. Anyone who had to descend those steps for wine, flour, or potatoes knew there was something wrong with the place, but all of them had excuses why they hadn’t done anything.
“I was just doing what I was told!” a scullery maid cried as the guards took her away. “It wasn’t about the money. I just… Listen to me! I didn’t do anything!”
Simon had trouble listening to those excuses after a while, except for those who’d negotiated themselves a raise out of the deal. Those he took some small joy in, as he listened to people try to explain why they could do something to feather their own nest, but nothing for the people who vanished.
Others explained that there had been staff who’d tried to put a stop to the witchcraft, though none were successful. A footman named Bartholomew, who was skinned alive after a failed attempt to assassinate the master of the house in his sleepyears before, had been the last one in recent memory, but there were apparently a few cooks and maids who’d vanished rather than play ball as well.
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There were a lot of individual details like that which defined the whole situation. For starters, the old man that Simon had pushed into hell had only been forty. He hadn’t quite believed that at first, but everyone agreed to it. Even a few years ago, he’d been a vital young man, but shortly after his father revealed some terrible secrets to him, everything changed.
The old man didn’t last long after that, and a few years later, the new Lord Marhew was practically his spitting image. The manor had always been a dark place, as the family’s star had fallen a generation ago. Still, even those condemned agreed it was better before the son had taken the reins fully and spent long nights in his father's study poring over old books.
When Simon investigated those books later, he confiscated so many that he’d need a cart to take them back to the Broken Tower. None of them seemed to be especially shocking in their contents. Some, he was pretty sure, had been copied at least in part from volumes he’d already read elsewhere.
The most surprising part, at least to Simon, was that some of them were Murani works. That was what made him take real interest in them, and he vowed to read every last one of those before he turned them in to the Masters of the order. Even if the help couldn’t have read these works, though, it was clear to Simon that the state of affairs was an open secret for a long time.
“Why not punish the nobles as well as the kitchen staff!” one of the men cried out as he was taken away. “Everyone knew there was something wrong with this family! Everyone knew, and no one did anything about it!”
It was a fair point, but not one he could deal with now. Simon made a note that he should probably scour all the family trees in the city in a future life. He’d tell the Unspoken, but there were clearly some arrangements there that he didn’t understand, and he suspected that any efforts to expunge evil within the nobility of Brin would be half-hearted and partisan. ƒreewebɳovel.com
Even I’m to blame in a small way, he realized on the second night. He didn’t blame himself for not taking Varten with him, though, or for the boy wandering off and playing with some of the local kids in the alleys near the wharf. He confessed that much when Simon asked him how all of this had happened. No, he was at fault because when one of the nobles had mentioned people disappearing on the riverfront, he hadn’t looked into it.
It wasn’t that Simon had turned a blind eye, or even that he didn’t believe it, either. It was that he was too focused on his larger mission.
Simon reflected on that, as much as everything else, as they made plans to leave the city a few days later. Really, he should have stayed longer, but there was a more pressing concern: his hand. He lied and told Varten it was his burns when the boy asked, “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”
The truth was that his burns would have been better served staying put for a few weeks and using the excuse to read the books before he turned them in. Unfortunately, the way the darkness was slowly creeping up his hand made that impossible. It had started as a coal blackness that extended almost the length of his fingers, but now it had spread to his palm and was already halfway down. As it went, it took on a deep, dark gray instead of the tar black it had originally been.
Even stranger, the affected area went numb at night. The first day, he’d gone to bed early so he hadn’t noticed, and the second, he was halfway to drunk by then for the pain, so he’d assumed it was his imagination. By the third, though, he was sure. By day, the hand was his, but by night it might as well have been meat for a roast.
It didn’t seem to be affecting his experience either, according to the mirror, so he had some hope that whatever it was wasn’t permanent. Still, there was zero chance that the Unspoken hadn’t seen something like this before, and he needed to find out how screwed he was before he suffered some kind of soul damage. He didn’t mind getting his face melted in one life, but getting his hand poisoned in all lives would be a real problem.
The cart made the journey slower than normal, but aside from painful wounds and his squire’s inexperience in changing them, it wasn’t so bad. Men and women avoided looking at him even more than usual, and he had to announce himself as a knight to innkeepers when he stopped for the night, since his cloak had burned away, but other than that, it was quiet. That was good; Simon wasn’t in the best shape for fighting, especially not when his fever started on the fifth day.
He wasn’t too worried about that. He needed rest, fluids, and medicine, all of which were a few days away. The problem was that the shadow had crept halfway to his left elbow, and the nightly numbness had followed it. If this kept up, he wouldn’t be able to fight properly once the sunset, which might be considered a career-ending injury for a member of the Unspoken.
Still, he tried not to worry too much about it until one night he realized he’d lost control of his hand completely. It was a surreal experience, and Simon thought he was dreaming as it happened. One minute, he was reading about cultural prohibitions of golden Magi, and the next, he looked over, and his left hand was writing a message in the margin of the book.
Simon froze as he read it. “What is this?” he asked, willing his hand to stop. Simon wasn’t ambidextrous. He couldn’t write left-handed, and yet here he was, doing just that.
He tried to stop himself from writing, but no force of will even caused him to slow. In the end, he was only able to make it cease by rotating his elbow and denying it contact with the page. When he lowered it again, the writing continued immediately. He realized two things immediately. The first was that he could read the words it was writing, and the second was that it was in the same script that all of the demons' names he’d recorded so far were in. Hell hadn’t just touched him; it had infected him, and what it said was chilling.
‘You escaped your death, and even Anthroditen, but you can’t escape yourself, can you, Simon, no matter where you go or who you pretend to be.’
