Death After Death-Chapter 358 - A Familiar City

They spent another day getting ready to travel, and the two days more helping Bessa get everything squared away. Simon was in no real hurry, but he could see Aranna’s eagerness growing by the hour. At first, her blank expression did a good job of hiding that, but he could see the blues of curiosity and the golds of eagerness creeping through her aura.

By the time they left, she didn’t even bother to hide it. She just waited until they were alone, fifty yards down the trail, before she started to pepper him with questions. Were they really going to find her parents? Was he actually a warlock? How far would they have to go?

There was no fear in her questions, even when she talked about warlocks, which amused Simon, so he gave her the short version. “I know magic, but I don’t really use it these days, but sometimes I make things that do,” he explained. “It clouds the soul, you see?”

She nodded at that. “Poisons the soul more like,” she muttered.

“That’s not the magic, generally,” Simon answered, “That’s the person corrupted by it. There’s no word of power that turns people into maniacal monsters; they do that on their own.”

Technically, the word Zyvon probably did the heavy lifting there, but he saw no need to explain that to her. Instead, he went on to explain how he could see the world more clearly with an unclouded soul.

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” she answered as he explained the auras he saw around people. “It sounds like magic to me.”

“You can’t see beyond the clouds of your own soul,” he explained, suddenly feeling very much like the Oracle. “That darkness the witch mentioned? That’s all the terrible things you’ve been through. You need to find a way to push that aside if you want to see what I see.”

Aranna didn’t like that answer at all and sulked quietly on the far side of the mule that carried their supplies for almost a minute before she said, “How do you know what you’re seeing is even real? How do you know you aren’t imagining it?”

Simon nodded thoughtfully, then instructed her to pick up a stone. She seemed befuddled, but did as he instructed. Then, after she studied it enough that she was confident she remembered every detail, he turned his back and had her throw it down the trail.

Then, as soon as Aranna said, “Alright, you can turn around,” he focused.

Every human was connected to hundreds, or even thousands, of other things in their lives. In a village, those threads were a tangle, but out here, Simon could see only a few from both of them extending off into the distance. He had more than Aranna, but then, he’d been a lot more places than she had.

“Do you remember when the white cloaks used magic to look for you?” he asked. “They were doing the same thing I’m doing now, on some level. Every person you contact, every place you go, you build a tiny connection and…”

She’d thrown the small rock only twenty or thirty feet in front of them, just off the trail, and as Simon followed that thread to its source, he found it almost immediately, in the tall grass. It was a plain stone, and other than the fact that Aranna had touched it, there was nothing special about it. Still, her expression when he handed it back to her was priceless.

She spent a few minutes arguing there had to be some trick to it, and then, when she finally believed it, she wanted to know more. No, she wanted to see more. She wanted proof that magic was real, but he refused to give it to her. He couldn’t. Once upon a time, he would have blown a few months of his life on pretty colored pyrotechnics, but now even if he’d been able to do that without muddying his soul, he wouldn’t have. There was no point.

His pretty, dark-haired companion had a long history with people who used magic, and he could see the colors of fear and elation surging through her in a way that he didn’t like. The last thing he wanted was for her to see him in the same way that she saw the witch Esmella.

The closest he came to showing off more magic tricks was to talk about some of the people that they passed by. He would tell her which ones were good people and bad ones. Over those first few days, they made a game out of it. Every time a group of people would pass them traveling away from Abresse, Aranna would study them carefully, and then, when they were out of earshot, she would guess who the best or the worst of them was.

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She was often right, too. After serving people from every walk of life in his tavern for the last couple of years, she had good instincts and a keen eye for such things. She was only able to judge the strangers by the way they dressed, or the way they looked at her, though; Simon could stare into their souls, and tell her what he found.

Sometimes those skeletons were minor. Drunks and philanderers were nearly as common as liars and men who cheated at dice. Sometimes they passed by cutpurses, or even cutthroats, too, of course. The road was a hard place. Still, at least this close to the city, they were spared any bandits, which was a small mercy.

When they arrived in Abresse, Simon rented the two of them a small room in a nice inn for a few days so that they could explore the city together and unravel the tangle of ghostly lines that connected Aranna to the trade hub. Given the amount of time that wasn’t necessarily going to be the quickest or easiest task, but until Simon found and understood most of the connections, they were not likely to find the strands that connected her to her parents.

Dead or alive, those connections would exist as long as the woman did, so Simon had no worries there. It was just a matter of getting the tangled loom that was her soul in order and understanding the pattern.

Unfortunately, being in a proper city for the first time in a long time dulled his supernatural senses. It was hard to follow a single thread in a city that was already crawling with them. Simon often had to take breaks to deal with the strain of it all.

As they wandered the city and even took a ride on some of the gondolas that filled its canals, they found a few of Aranna’s happier memories to start. As a slave and later bait for a witch that feasted on men, those were few and far between, of course, but she took every chance she could to avoid the dark snarl that was Esmella’s home.

The witch was dead, thankfully. He was certain of that, because they visited the ossuary where the Unspoken interred her ashes after they’d burned her corpse. Even so, a pall persisted on the home, which surprised Simon. He hadn’t seen anything quite like it, and while it was common enough for people to have auras, it was vanishingly rare for places to have one.

When they visited the place, they found that it was still a functioning brothel. This time at least, there wasn’t anything darker than drug dealing and prostitution going on, but even so, it saddened Simon.

Where there are people, there will be vices, he told himself. There was drinking in Hepollyon. Even the saints are no saints.

That was proven true that night when Aranna tried to sleep with him. It was Simon’s fault. He should have seen that it was coming. She wasn’t any more attracted to him than she’d been an hour before, or a day before, but after they got to drinking and talking, the need to blot out all of those awful memories with lust became too great for her to resist.

Simon let her down as gently as he could. Even if he was interested in having sex, his mind was filled with thoughts about the witch’s methods, which was about as big a turn-off as he could imagine. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

The witches of Charia had been monstrous enough, with the way that they parasitized members of their towns and clanholds with witchmarks, and used unborn infants to power large rituals, but drain men with sex? That was worse than the blood magic rituals of the Magi.

Fortunately, it seemed to be a relatively rare practice. In all the days they’d been in Abresse, he hadn’t seen anyone he thought likely to be a witch, and the only suspected witchmark he noticed belonged to a northerner, so he’d probably gotten it very far away.

Every witch is going to be different, unless they start a coven to spread their methods, he told himself. It was more than that, though.

Warlocks, often as not, were almost like tinkerers or scholars. They often researched magic for its own sake as much as the power it granted them. Every witch he’d encountered to date focused on draining some kind of power into themselves. The reasons and the methods varied, but the fact that it kept them young and pretty far longer than they would be normally probably meant that they lived longer than the mages and warlocks he found on average.

Which makes them a bigger threat, he decided, and that wasn’t just because they were so subtle, either. The longer any magic user lived, the more they learned. He was living proof of that. Back on Earth, people might have said knowledge was power, but that was largely a figure of speech. Here it was literally true.

Some day soon, a version of him would be entering Abresse, with little more than words of healing and curing to deal with a plague, but as he was today, well, Simon could accomplish almost anything with a few simple words. He could command the forces of nature or the minds of men, and he lay awake that night wondering what would happen if he really ever did turn to the dark side.

Simon visited Emella’s brothel two more times before he left the city, though he didn’t force Aranna to accompany him. That would have been needless torture. He just wanted to study the cursed grounds of the place before they left. He already knew where they were going, which was to the east. Now that they were in the city, he could see that Aranna had only a few connections to the rest of the world.

Ironically, most of those went back to the inn they’d come from, and one led across the sea to the land of her birth. The handful that were left went to the east and north east, which meant they would too, as soon as he’d finished learning everything he could.