Death After Death-Chapter 328 - The Stink of Sulfur

If Simon still had his sight, he was sure that he would have been able to see the problem here from the first moment. As it was, he was only able to glimpse it in pieces as he was getting ready by positioning a mirror strategically so that it reflected everyone who walked by it while he pretended to pack.

Most people looked just like he expected them to. Just because they were unfriendly to outsiders didn’t make them bad people. The town was typified by the white auras of people with good karma, even if there were a few bad apples that were a much darker gray. All of these were women, and mostly, he’d picked them out with his dowsing rod the night before. They weren’t just any women, either. By and large, they were the most important wives and matrons of the clanhold.

How deep does this rabbit hole go, I wonder? Simon thought. Though he could hardly walk away from this strange discovery, he hadn’t planned to seek out a new cult, and he’d left many items back in the capital that might have been useful to him to this moment. Still, he was conflicted about what he was going to do about it, at least until the headman’s wife insisted on hugging him goodbye as he went to walk through the gate.

"Thank you so much for your help," she said with a poisonous smile. "Know that you are welcome to return any time."

Though Simon didn’t feel anything. The way her jaw had moved as she held him tightly for a moment made him quite sure she’d done something to him, and as soon as he was out of sight from the town, he quickly peeled off his shirt, and for once he used the silver mirror he carried for its intended purpose. He found the mark she’d left on him almost instantly, and as he translated it, he realized how much worse it was than the mark that someone had left on Elgah, and he removed it immediately with another lesser word of flesh manipulation.

Hers had been made to sap her lifeforce and transform the misfortunes of others to herself, which had made her very sick, hinting at the sort of misfortunes it had alleviated from someone else. Simon’s curse, though, or whatever it was, eliminated the middleman; she’d just given him the equivalent of magical cancer. The purpose of the mark was to directly siphon his life force and use it to directly harm his health, making it doubly toxic.

The thing used minor words, so it was designed to work slowly, but he doubted he would have made it another month before he’d had a stroke or organ failure or something had he not noticed what the woman had done. That angered Simon. He’d been on the fence before about what exactly he was supposed to do in this situation, but now it was personal. He’d stumbled on a nest of witches, and he was going to deal with it.

However, before he could deal with anything, he had to find a safe place to sleep at night outside of the clanhold. It was summer now, and the nights were restless. So, he searched until he found a large boulder that had been cleft in two long ago by glacial action. It wasn’t much, but if he heaped large stones on one side and built a large fire at the mouth of it, then it would be impossible for anything to sneak up on him.

He wasted his first day setting up his fortified camp and didn’t start to skulk around to investigate things further until the following day. Those next two days were fruitless, and though he saw many people going about a wide variety of errands, there was nothing sinister about that. A town of hundreds of people had a million things to do. There were herds to shepherd, animals to slaughter, firewood to chop, and water to fetch. The Stoneslopes Clanhold was a hive of activity. It wasn’t until his third day watching that he saw something strange.

Fetching firewood was a common enough task, but it was usually brought inside the town. However, that evening, he saw a number of girls taking split wood out into the forest, which was the opposite of how this was supposed to work. Simon followed them from a safe distance, and it was there he found a sort of earthen lodge. It was hardly a glamorous building, with rough timber walls and a sod roof. The clanhold was certainly prettier, but the fact that the building was this far out into the wilderness at all made him raise an eyebrow.

When the servant girls had delivered their cargo, Simon crept inside and examined it briefly. If magic had a smell, the place would have reeked, but even without that, he was sure he detected the faint odor of sulfur, which is strongly associated with demons. He’d detected it in his basement after a few of his experiments in that vein.

Simon quickly made his exit before anyone else arrived, but he used the vorpal setting on his sword to cut a small hole in the roof, and then, when it got dark, and he saw smoke rising from the chimney, he returned to see what it was these women were up to.

Things started slow, and if he didn’t know better, he would have assumed this was a social club, not a coven. However, once the door was barred and the meeting came to order, the dozen began to discuss a series of issues one at a time.

At first, Simon lacked the context to figure out who it was they were talking about, but when they reached Elgah, a blonde woman spoke out. “I reapplied her mark. She is a part of our web once more, and things are as they should be,” she assured the gathering.

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“What of the man that purged it?” a brunette asked. “I’m shocked that you allowed him to live.”

That final accusation seemed to be addressed to the headman’s wife, who was looking more and more like the woman in charge of this strange circle of witchery. “Killing him after what he’d found would only cause news. He’s a valued servant of the clan. It might have created too many questions.”

“Questions?” another woman with heavy braids said like a challenge. “Don’t you think it will raise questions if he gets to the city and—” 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

“He will not reach the capital,” the headman’s wife reiterated in a way that made it clear that she would brook no further argument. “I placed a wasting mark on him. If he’s not dead already, he’s certainly hobbled. He’ll only have a few days left before he wastes away to nothing, and when he does, it won’t be anywhere near here, and no one will think to suspect us blameless.”

Someone else challenged her, earning a serious glare. “But he was able to remove Elgah’s mark, surely he can—”

“He was no warlock,” the headwoman snapped. “Breany told me he had only a faint white glow and nothing more. He showed none of the signs, and when our servants snooped through his things, they found only healing herbs and that medallion of his. He’s just a holy man who got lucky. That’s all.”

There were murmurs then about how the gods usually didn’t answer prayers, but the woman in charge ignored that and moved on to the next topic, which apparently involved a thick, goat-skin grimoire that Simon would dearly love to get his hands on.

Meanwhile, as he watched them read and recite certain ritual lines that seemed to have no real magical content, Simon silently fumed at the idea that they’d gone through his things. While he was pleased that lifetimes of paranoia and fear of being identified as a warlock had paid off, the fact that he hadn’t even noticed haunted him.

If I’d missed that, then what else am I missing, he wondered as he refocused on what was happening below him, which was apparently that they planned to summona demon. Why? He wasn’t sure. He’d missed that part. Something about a rivalry with another clan. Something about ‘ensuring our prosperity,’ which could only mean more petty vengeance. He was tempted to sigh at that, but he stayed perfectly silent and still instead. No one would know he was here until he made a move.

As to how they planned to do this, well, that was what he was about to see unless he stopped them. Why is magic so different in every culture? Simon wondered as he watched two of the women start to draw a circle around the firepit. They did it with leaking sacks of flour, leaving a broad, white line of powder on the dark earth. That gave him plenty of time to process all of the awful things he’d just heard.

He supposed that the whole process was related to secrecy and isolation, but even before they finished setting up the ritual, he had questions. Why would you draw a circle in something so fragile? Why aren’t they inscribing the demon's name and the binding wards? Those were all good questions, but he got the answer as soon as the headwoman said, “Dannitha will lead this summoning unless anyone has any objections.”

No objections were made, so a broad-hipped woman who was noticeably pregnant stepped forward. She smiled as she thanked the head woman for the privilege, but it was fear in her eyes, not excitement, and that puzzled Simon.

Why is a pregnant woman summoning a demon? He asked himself, wondering again if he should stop it; he wanted to, but only the idea that he might have to fight or even kill a room full of women. He’d become numb to violence over the course of many lives, but maybe not that numb. Why is anyone summoning a demon?

Simon remembered interacting with her once or twice during his stay and seemed to remember her husband being a butcher. None of that prepared him for what happened next, though.

As she spoke, she delivered not another pointless bit of ritual like he’d been expecting but a careful chant of over a dozen words of power linked together with a demon’s name, Bazubratel. As she spoke, her sisters took up the chant in a more muted fashion, adding their voices to hers in a small way.

Whether they actually added to the spell was an open question; he’d never seen a spell cast by more than one person, but whether it was done alone or in concert, it worked. He was still trying to puzzle out the meaning of Zyvon when the ring solidified.

He’d known the word of transfer for ages, but in this context, it seemed to mean something more like sacrifice. He set those thoughts aside, though, as the room began to swim and blur with her words.

No, it didn’t change at all, Simon realized as he studied the room more closely. It was only becoming more real compared to the small piece of reality that it bounded, making the fragile structure look solid by comparison. The bonfire faded, replaced with hellfire, the scent of sulfur, and a yawning pit that led to the infernal realm. That was something he’d seen before, but when the four-winged, raven-headed demon walked through those fires to stand amidst the circle of chanting women, that got Simon’s attention.

“You have KAlled me, and I have KAme,” the bird demon pronounced, screeching some of the constants quite loudly. “What is your price, and what is the task set before me to accomplish this night.”

“You have already been given a soul!” Dannitha answered, delivering it like it was part of a careworn ceremony. “Not mine, but my infant child’s who will never be born now. For this, we ask…”

Even though Dannitha’s mouth kept moving, her words faded to silence past the ringing in his ears as he heard that.

Infant sacrifice? He asked himself, struggling to make sense of the two words he’d placed next to each other. He might have imagined the Magi doing such a thing. Surely, an infant had decades of life in it, just waiting to be consumed. He supposed that any mother could, in theory, use their unborn child as a horrible battery, but could and would were very different things, and this development was entirely beyond the pale.