Death After Death-Chapter 333 - Further Expeditions

During Simon’s third year in Charia, the first of the mines he’d argued for and sold the rights to began serious operations, increasing the wealth at his disposal dramatically. Most of this went to pay for the papermill he was constructing, though, so it changed little about his life. Rather than make single pages in artisanal batches as merchants did now, he planned to make them in huge sheets that would then be cut and dried into the pages he needed.

He’d originally wanted to go a step further and make huge rolls of the stuff that could be cut to size. Unfortunately, both his knowledge and the tools available proved inadequate to the task.

Next time, he told himself. Another life or two and I’ll figure out the secrets to such things.

Of course, the process, every step of the way, was complicated, which is why he made copious notes in his mirror. He might get everything he wanted done in this life, but he’d be able to recreate all of it in the right future life that much faster.

Still, as the winter passed, those things became less important. After he saw that his now witch-free clanholds weathered a winter just fine with a little magic of their own, he set to work on exploring the rest of the country. Ostensibly, this was done both as a missionary for a goddess he didn’t really believe in and to stake more mining claims he could sell to one clan or another. By this point, most clans that weren’t allied with the Himar were actively inviting him to visit them. They saw the riches their neighbors were reaping thanks to his previous efforts and wanted wealth of their own.

Simon didn’t care much about any of that at this point, though. He had more money than he could spend in one life, and several ongoing business ventures; he barely had time to work on the historical epic that he hoped to bring the nation together with, because he was consumed by any number of other important tasks.

Above all of those, his most important task was ending the scourge of witchcraft and breaking the kingdom free of its grip, one clanhold at a time. So, on his second trip, he didn’t go alone. He did it with a small group of devotees and assistants who could offer up his bona fides to the locals without forcing him to brag, which Simon hated to do.

These trips were entirely different in character than any of the ones he'd previously taken, because he rarely traveled in large groups like this. He found he enjoyed it more than he thought he would. He even learned to play the lute. He didn’t do it well, but as his group moved from Burrum’s Gap to the Dark Wood clanholds, and finally, over the spine of the range through the Shattered Pass, he improved.

Some part of him had expected it to be harder for him to purge witches on this second go around. Especially given the fact that there’d been a year in between, he expected the word to get out somehow, but that didn’t seem to be the case. If anything, they might be even more disconnected than wider Charian society. Each little cult ruled over its own tiny kingdom, treating the humans there as their own private herd of livestock.

That’s even more true now that I know they take care of them too, in their own way, he thought wryly as he watched the women that he’d already picked out as the core of the problem in Horngeld Clanhold. He didn’t even look for unnatural beauty or youth as a sign now, especially in the smaller communities. There was a certain sense of entitlement that women of the coven displayed that rivaled even the most arrogant headman, warrior, or landowner.

While it was easy to see why such men might become drunk on power, it was harder to understand why those same men were deferential to milkmaids and herbalists, making those not-so-humble women stick out like a sore thumb.

None of them cared for the inroads that Simon was making in their community with religion. However, rather than open hostility, they treated him and the men and women that accompanied him with veiled contempt, even when the rituals they pedaled actually cured the sick.

That was fine. Simon endured mostly by pretending not to notice it, which wasn’t hard considering that he spent most of his time in the wilds outside of each place exploring and marking locations. Normally, everything went just according to plan, and his last act, on the morning of his caravan’s departure, would be to mark those same haughty women with words of nullity, locking their magic away for all time. He did that last, just as they were leaving, because he didn’t want those with whom he was traveling to notice the pattern. It would have been pretty hard to explain why a woman or two aged into dust in almost every town they visited.

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The only time they deviated from this was when one of his errand boys came up with a witch’s mark on the second day of their visit to Keldonsland. The idea that someone would lay a hand on someone who was with him angered Simon greatly.

He’d discovered witchmarks more than once on himself at this point, and he checked himself whenever a witch touched him out of force of habit. These were always on his back, though, and easily removed. The idea they’d thought to touch people under his protection, though, well… he sought to make an example out of all of them in what someone, somewhere, would probably write about as a miracle.

“What is this!?” he demanded, bringing the boy before the headman when breakfast was scarcely finished, and crowds still lingered in around the main hall. “What vile warlocks do you harbor among your kin?”

The headman was stricken, then torn between powerful women in the shadows of his clanhold and the offense incurred by an honored guest. It was an unenviable position, but it was a chance to put some of the heat that his latest adventure was no doubt incurring on someone else, and he took it.

Jarin wasn’t a zealot. He wasn’t even religious, so far as Simon knew. He was just one of the errand boys that had come to him from Aldor, that had been foisted on him in the hopes of learning Simon’s incredible knack for finding riches hidden in the wild. In that regard, at least, he and the other men that Aldor had loaned to him would learn nothing, though he did try to teach them about the wildplaces and swordplay in an effort to make the trip worth their time.

Today, he wasn’t a student or a burden, though. He wasn’t even a victim; he was a tool that he could use to make some examples with. Simon could have resolved all of this quietly, like he had in every clan hold to date, but the idea that these witches just siphoned off of whoever they found convenient had finally become too much for him.

Even as the headman tried to suggest they handle this privately, Simon refused to be persuaded. As the priestess and acolytes who had joined him on this trip exchanged worried looks, Simon called them over and had them begin to pray. There was no bonfire burning within range, so that wouldn’t be enough. Simon didn’t care about that, though. Instead, he challenged the crowd and said, “Whoever has done this to my charge has brought their own doom down on themselves!”

Then, before he even used a word of lesser flesh to remove the mark, he whispered the words of lesser light to make the boy glow. There were collective gasps at that, but he kept his eyes closed and his mouth covered with his clasped hands as he pretended to pray. Then, one witch at a time, he began to give them their own marks right there in the midst of everyone.

Nothing spectacular happened to most of them, but a few began to waste away almost instantly. Simon waited until that moment before he removed the boy's mark. By then, no one was looking at Simon. Indeed, some people were screaming in horror, and some men had drawn weapons. Simon had seen those sorts of reactions before, but he’d rarely stuck around to watch the fallout. This was just the first time he allowed his actions to be more than just a coincidence.

When the show was over and the boy's light faded, Simon insisted he had nothing to do with it. “It’s the boy’s noble soul that allowed for this miracle to occur,” he told the assembled group. When pressed further, he let the priestess speak for the group instead of him, seeking to avoid as much of the spotlight as he could. “For caravan logistics, I’m in charge, but for all things spiritual, I bow to Sophana.”

There were many conversations that day, including the boy who would almost certainly grow up to be a priest himself after this. Simon felt a little bad about lying to everyone, but that guilt was easily outweighed by the good he was doing. With every coven he purged, he was creating a world where people lived longer, fuller lives, and no one lost years to feed someone else's existence in the most perverse form of taxation imaginable.

The acolytes began to tell that story everywhere they traveled in the weeks and months that followed; while Simon hadn’t counted on that, he wasn’t too bothered by it. He just told a version that gave him less and less of a role in the miraculous events.

Even with those stories, things continued on as they had before, and it was only in the fall, when they finally turned around after visiting nearly every clanhold in eastern Charia, that the members of his caravan finally discovered the truth. The events that they had started calling the Light of Keldonsland were not unique. Witches had been decaying before the light of Dionia throughout the trip. 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

Simon supposed that everyone had to find that out eventually, but he was glad that when they did he’d been out in the woods looking for something to that he could drain. Casting dozens of spells a month was taking a toll on him.

Though everyone thanked him for causing such miracles, they meant more for organizing the mission than for causing all of this. Once Simon understood that, he just smiled and nodded. He was happy to be thought of as the financier for miracles rather than a miracle worker himself.

By the time they returned to Adonan, the size of their caravan had more than doubled. These were converts from various clanholds that had seen the metaphorical light and were ready to worship the Goddess of Dawn. Simon’s guilt about misleading them so pointlessly intensified then, but he made the best use of them that he could by teaching as many as he could the basics of herbalism, wound cleaning, and bandaging whenever he could.

If they’re going to be healers, they should do so with more than magic, he told himself. Because one day they’re going to try those prayers with a holy symbol made by someone else and they aren’t going to do shit.