Death After Death-Chapter 329 - The Stink of Sulfur (part 2)
For a moment, Simon almost used a greater greater word to smite them all as anger he hadn’t felt in lifetimes boiled up volcanically inside him. He’d already decided that the Whitecloaks definitely needed to set up shop here instead, but after that revelation, he could no longer contain himself.
Then he did what he should have done from the start and whispered, “Aufvarum Aufvarum.” It felt silly to use the same word twice like that with only slightly changed pronunciations but dispersed air was exactly what he needed in that moment.
Instantly, a gust of wind roared through the room, fanning the hellfires like a blacksmith’s bellows and sending flour in every direction. That was the obvious effect. What was less obvious was the effect it would have on everyone. As the dust billowed out to fill the room with powder, the fires of hell followed it. Freed of their bounds, they advanced with the circle’s now diffuse border, and as they moved, the floor vanished, and most of the coven fell directly into hell. They didn’t even have time to scream.
Eventually, only the headwoman and a few of her younger cultists were still there because they’d been standing opposite the direction of the gust. The four of them stood there in shock, but even as they did so, the bird demon turned on them and walked to the very edge of the half-obliterated circle. None of the women had the presence of mind to move.
“THAnk you for the feEST,” it squealed, “But if my summoner has no TASK for me, I’ll take my LEAVE!”
As the demon reached for her, its arm faded. The coven leader stood her ground, but her remaining acolytes shrank away, fearing they’d be dragged to hell, too.
“How could this have happened!?” the woman raged, casting a small light spell as soon as the fire extinguished entirely. “Someone has done this to us. Someone has taken out sisters, and they will pay!”
“Could it have been one of the Delven coven or perhaps another clan? We could—” one of the younger members started to say before she was silenced with a gesture.
The coven’s leader began to chant another spell then. Simon couldn’t quite make it out because it was half-whispered, but he heard Dnarth and Celdura, which were both words he’d use in a divinatory spell. He had to do something, so he reacted almost without thinking.
In a moment of inspiration that he wasn’t sure would even work, he spoke the words of distant flesh manipulation. Nothing happened when he did that, at least, not visibly. Still, the headwoman’s eyes widened.
“It’s gone,” she whispered, suddenly afraid. “I had it… a moment ago, and now…”
Simon could have used those words to seal her lips up or turn her heart into jello. He could have simply used a word of force to strike her head from her shoulders instead, like an invisible guillotine; he didn’t do any of that, though, because deep down, it was still harder for him to kill a woman than a man.
Instead, he chose a harmless option and gave her one of the same strange birthmarks she enjoyed so much. He didn’t try to give her cancer or rob her of her life’s vitality, though. He just used the technique to write the word of nullification on her back, just where she’s put her curse on him, and the results were instantaneous. Just like that, whatever she’d been casting had failed, and whatever other strange enchantments she operated had left her.
Simon would have been satisfied with that. While not a fitting punishment, it would have been appropriate, but it just kept going. Robbed of whatever power fed her… robbed of whatever other marks her coven had sprinkled throughout her community, the woman started to age in real-time.
One moment, she’d been a beautiful thirty-something matron, but within a few seconds, her hair started to gray, and her face began to wrinkle. “What is this madness?” she cursed, reaching out to one of her sisters, who backed away fearfully. “Help me, sisters… we’re under attack by evil magic… We need to… Wait, where are you going?”
When one of the girls shrieked at the site of the withering woman, all three of them spooked and ran. They might be witches, but without the group to back them, they had no spine and vanished into the night.
“Traitors! Cowards!” the woman screeched, blasting them with insults as her voice failed her. Simon got up then and hopped down off the roof. Now was the time to pay her a visit before whatever was happening reached its crescendo.
When he walked into the lodge to find the headwoman on her knees, he could have knocked her over with a feather. “You!” she roared with all the volume her failing strength allowed her. She followed that up with a word of lightning, but nothing happened.
“Me,” Simon agreed, though he only managed to stay calm at first. “Maybe this wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t tried to murder me or, you know, sacrificed unborn babies to demons!” By the end, he was raging, and the urge to strike her head from her shoulders welled up inside him again.
No, let her go out like this, he told himself, taking a deep breath. It’s crueler to let her die as she lived.
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“How?” she croaked. “You were supposed to be dead, and now you’ve cut me off from the powers of—”
“I know a few tricks,” Simon answered as he walked over to where her half-charred grimoire was lying. “But you’ve taught me a few more, and with any luck, this book will—”
“You shall not have my secrets!” she rasped, clawing forward, trying to drag herself across the hard-packed dirt floor of the lodge. Simon never moved from that spot, but she died before she could reach him.
“What goes around comes around, I suppose,” he said with a shrug before he walked toward the door. He didn’t even look back as he said a word of lesser fire to spark up the wood pile they had indoors. He just let the lodge catch fire behind him as he walked back to his tiny camp. If there was any justice in the world, that foul place would be nothing but cinders by morning.
Still, as he walked, he reflected on everything he’d just seen. He thought about the demon and their strange way of summoning it. He thought about the strange way they marked the flesh and wondered why he’d never considered it before. Most of all, he wondered what he’d find in the book he’d taken.
That would have to wait until morning, though, because it was well past two in the morning, and he was exhausted. When he returned to camp, he had enough time to build his defensive fire and ponder how far back so many spells and murders set back his sight. He even took a moment to check his experience and found that the number had gone up, not down.
I suppose there’s justice in that, he thought as he curled up in his bedroll. They were awful people, and I don’t feel bad about killing them.
Simon left the area the following day. He considered hunting down the last two members of the coven he’d dismembered but decided against it. It would be better for everyone if he wasn’t associated with this tragedy at all. Instead, he got an early start and took breaks throughout the day to peruse his new tome.
While not useless, it was less useful than he’d hoped it would be. Much of it had been damaged by the fire that had whipped through the lodge, and most pages were incomplete. Most of the rest, though, were pointless prayers to the forces of nature that contained only the occasional word of power. Even after several days of study, he didn’t learn any new words from it. What he did learn, though, was what had happened to the headwoman and how the coven operated as a whole, and the marks they put on their fellow men and women were the key to all of that.
“Son of a bitch,” Simon breathed when he finally figured it all out. “Thankfully, the magi never figured this shit out, or we’d all be screwed.”
The marks weren’t a curse like he’d first assumed. They were a web of life force transference. All of the names were listed in the book, and some of them were even legible. The most junior members of the coven only fed on one or two of their fellows, but their leader had more than a dozen marked. They powered her spells that kept her young for over a century.
One by one, all the pieces clicked into place. Simon had only meant to block her ability to cast more spells, but instead, he’d done so much more. He’d cut her off from her support network, and she’d withered.
It also explained pieces about human sacrifice, and particularly the ability of pregnant mothers to power large spells with their unborn children. It was absolutely monstrous, but such things were made all the worse by the petty reasons they used their magic.
While they occasionally struck down monsters, most of their effort seemed to go toward the same petty grudges that Charian politics revolved around. It made Simon sick, and forced him to look for more signs of witchcraft as he made his way back to the capital.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t the isolated problem he hoped that it would be. Simon took his time on the road to Adonan as much to inspect the clanholds along the way as to explore for minerals and examine roads, and he did not like what he found. The rot had spread deeply, and most communities had at least a few witches living among them.
In time, he didn’t even need to use his mirror to pick them out. That wasn’t because his ability to see their auras returned to him, though. It was because he noticed an obvious pattern. Almost every witch he discovered was beautiful, and most of them looked younger than they should have. Though neither of those signs was enough to prove anything, the way that other women in the community seemed to obey them without hesitation or flinch at their presence certainly added to the weight of the evidence.
It’s like the white cloaks, but worse, Simon thought with a sigh, wondering what he was supposed to do about these wretches. He marked them with the words of nullification whenever he found them, neutering them from committing more evil, but that was a temporary measure, and he knew it. All they needed was a single witch to undo that.
That help might not come in time for the oldest ones, fortunately. They seemed to start withering almost immediately as soon as they were cut off from their web of victims and were dead in less than a day. Their younger acolytes, though, had plenty of years left in them and merely became uglier and more careworn as their magic faded, leaving Simon to decide what should be done with them.
Could I really kill every woman I suspect of being a witch? He asked himself. That would make him no better than the Unspoken, of course, but would it really be kinder to let them live?
He was deeply conflicted, so for now, he settled for magically lobotomizing them whenever he suspected someone by giving the woman a birthmark of nullification above their hairline where they’d have a hard time finding it. While the woman who had given him his mark had felt the need to touch him, Simon didn’t need to do that. He just needed to be close or add the distant word to his spell.
Why does everyone use magic so differently? He asked himself almost every time he thought about that discrepancy. That isn’t the way this is supposed to work.
This resulted in a lot of deaths on his way back to the capital, but Simon regretted none of them. If you died after being cut off from your magic, then you were obviously a leach on society and deserved to be put out of your misery. Though he was careful to move on quickly after each event like this, it was only to avoid being fingered as the cause and complicate his stay in the country, and not because he feared retribution from a defanged witch or whichever members of her coven he’d failed to target. He would deal with all of them eventually if he had to.
