Death After Death

Eight days after Simon had killed the Grandmaster, and four days after the news became public knowledge, he made his move. The first thing he did was to bring the quartermaster a forged note from his master requesting supplies for an urgent mission related to the current unpleasantness, and the second was a similar missive given to the stable master.

He couldn’t very easily requisition every horse on the premises without ringing all the alarm bells, but a few wagons and horses were a common enough request, and no one was inclined to look too closely into a request that involved the death of the Grandmaster. It was all anyone talked about, but only in guarded and veiled ways.

“We’ll find out who inflicted this treachery upon us,” and “We’ll have our revenge soon, brother,” were phrases that Simon heard more with each passing day. He even mouthed them himself when required, but few were willing to say the other facts that were known. That the man seemed to be summoning a demon, or that he was found in a library full of forbidden books. They were too much for any man who’d spent a lifetime fighting evil.

Simon understood that. If he’d known from the beginning that the entire organization was equal parts killing competitor mages and stealing their secrets, he might have handled the whole thing a bit differently.

I could have left a few traps in the book I exposed during my tour in the black library and given the bastard a nice surprise, he thought wistfully. He wasn’t typically fond of the idea of sending anyone to hell, but for Lord Langdon, he’d make an exception.

Simon worked as fast as he could, carving wood by night using candles, but still, the events threatened to overtake him. It was strange. He also wrote a short letter to Varten, but eventually burned it rather than tuck it away in the boy’s footlocker. It would bring too much trouble down on Varten’s head if he left him a missive.

That decision was reinforced by the growing paranoia of the order. For an hour or two, everything would seem normal, then at lunch, dour-faced knights would come for one or two people, and they’d just vanish. They didn’t leave the Broken Tower, of course, but it would be days before anyone saw them again, and they’d often look shaken.

Once, they scooped up someone sitting right next to Simon, and he felt certain his turn was coming up. It wasn’t his death, or even torture, that concerned him. His soul was safe with these tormentors; it was his fear that he wouldn’t get to save those who needed saving that motivated him.

Still, when no more preparations could be made, he spent a morning scattering around his firestarters. These were simple wooden disks based upon the warmers he’d once made to keep himself alive through the Charian winter. They did nothing until it got cold enough, and then they drew that cold out of the air and started to smolder. They weren’t a weapon; they were a distraction.

He hid them under casks and in piles of hay, but always outside, and in places where they were liable to spread. They’d do nothing indoors where the fireplaces kept the buildings warm. Sometime shortly after dinner, but well before midnight, they would start to ignite as night’s chill rose. There was no way to time them exactly, though.

Well, there is, he corrected himself mentally. He’d worked out a timing circuit with words of minor minor Weylara, the 'on condition of' meta word he’d learned from the Murani, but it was a complex design, and would take a month’s worth of carving. Such sophistication would be fine if he had the time to sandcast something important. His simpler system, despite its drawbacks, would have to do for now.

When that was done, he journeyed to the sisters and told them he’d received another revelation. “The rot has spread too deeply,” he declared in a room full of nervous women. “Now, only judgment can follow. Fortunately, the gods will allow the righteous to escape before it is too late.”

He received many questions about that, but they were not words of disbelief. The women were fearful and believed him more than they should have, really. They just wanted to know how and why. Those answers Simon couldn’t give, so he leaned on the Gods again, insisting, “It is part of their grand design. They told me the fruit was rotten and that the seeds must survive. Now they are telling me that there is a way out, and a distraction while we pursue it, and I will handle that, too.”

He didn’t tell the sisters that the distraction would take the form of fire. That would have worried them. All he said was that he was promised a divine intervention.

Before those fires started, though, Simon was hard at work. He told the sisters that he’d located an old secret door through the wall, and he didn’t want to be disturbed while he looked for it, but the truth was simpler: they were going to have to cut their way out.

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The wand he’d crafted for the task might not be enough. He knew that, but he was prepared to use real words of power for the first time in decades and blind himself if it came to that. He could spend years recovering, and maybe even pay another visit to the Oracle.

I could see Zoa again, he thought wistfully.

There was more nostalgia than emotion in that thought, and he briefly did the math and realized he probably hadn’t been gone too long from her perspective. He could probably figure out the exact day he left, and arrange to return there some time, but he dismissed that thought just as quickly as it appeared. It hadn’t been a good idea for Elthena, and it wouldn’t be a good idea with his toga-clad lover, either.

Right now, he needed to focus. His plan was now on a timeline, and when it got cold enough outside, the fires would ignite, and he would have to be ready to make his move.

Simon used the wand on the wall, cutting a thin arch with care, ensuring he used the largest stone to hold the load above. That was the easy part. The hard part was pushing and pulling the blocks out of the hole that he carved. Each weighed tons, and he was forced to cut them into many smaller pieces to move them at all. Even with force magic, it was difficult.

While the cutting was done in minutes, the moving took hours. It was a good answer to how the Murani built their pyramids, though, even if he still didn't entirely understand why. It was easy to build megalithic structures if you had a little magic up your sleeve.

It would require a lot of lives, though, he reflected. Even though he was using a regular word, and not a major word, he could feel his life force draining out of him, a few minutes at a time. By the time he was done, he was sure he had some gray in his hair. While he didn’t care about that too much, it did give him the perfect chance to study his degrading sight as he went.

The effect was most noticeable at the beginning. There was an immediate degradation in his ability to perceive his own aura. After that, though, it slowed down quite quickly. A few minutes of magic wasn’t much worse than a few seconds, as it turned out. Still, at the end of his massive project, he could only perceive a faint bright glow rather than the rich and complicated aura he’d had at the start; it wasn't his aura that had changed, though, only the eyes with which he saw it.

“That will probably take months to fix,” he noted, though for the moment it didn’t really matter. Still, it was interesting.

Speaking a word of power blinded him instantly, using an active magical item that was fueled by his life force affected him quickly, and using one that was powered by something else, or a circle, didn’t seem to affect him at all. He’d documented all of that to some degree, but these indirect measurements would help him to refine his theory further.

Partway through his excavation, he reached the same tunnel system he’d used previously. That helped immensely, both because it cut down on his work and because it let him choose an exit right behind the stables. So, he was all the way through and clearing a path before the first distant sounds of alarm rang out.

From outside the walls, he couldn’t see or smell the fire yet. Still, he ran through the outbuildings, gathering everyone he could find and sending them in to help. No one questioned why he was there, or how he’d appeared so suddenly. Instead, they moved toward the main gate.

They knew better than to question a knight. While Simon usually found that to be annoying, in this case, it was convenient. He marshaled every servant he could find, from the head quartermaster who was mid-meal to the youngest stableboy.

Then, when that was done, he produced his slender wand and used it to cut the chain on the portcullis, sending it crashing down and locking the Unspoken inside. A few small fires wouldn’t be enough to kill or probably even hurt anyone, but they'd provide all the chaos he needed for the Whisperers to escape. If they could get free and take every spare horse with them, then they might have a chance.

Rather than worry about the preparations, he ran back the way that he’d come from and told the Whisperers and the Silent Sisters that the way was clear. While they flooded the path he’d opened, he gathered up his satchel of books, and then, with one last burst of magic, he collapsed the inner entrance.

The Broken Tower had two small side entrances. The Unspoken could still escape and thwart his plan, but this bought a few more minutes, and he would need all the time he could find with a flock of helpless women to herd. Individually, they were smart and capable, but together, every little detail seemed to hang them up.

Who was supposed to be in each wagon? Was it right to steal Sir so-and-so’s horse? For the next ten minutes, Simon became almost dictatorial. If anyone asked a question, he answered it with the first command that came to mind. The women under his care might want to believe that they were shielded by their God, but he knew better. Their shield was as thin as his deception, and any minute someone would figure out what was happening.

When the horn of alarm blasted three times to indicate trouble beyond the wall, he knew that their time was all used up. It had been blowing single blasts for nearly half an hour because of the fires, but eventually, when those were under control, a watchman must have spotted the snaking column of wagons and riders leaving south across the plains. Even a thin crescent moon couldn’t hide that.

That was okay. By that point, almost everyone was already on the road and would soon be out of arrow range. Simon was only lingering to tether as many horses as possible to his own with rope. His plan was not only to deny their Unspoken pursuers mounts; he also wanted to obliterate the wagon tracks and eventually lead them astray. It was a tactic they’d sometimes used in the centaur wars to hide the tracks of human refugees, and he’d make good use of it here, because these women were now refugees in every sense of the word.