Death After Death

Chapter 407 - Missing

Simon found the merchant that had started all of this trouble just where he’d left him in the market shortly after midday. This time, he showed up in his full armor, presenting a much more imposing sight, but somehow, Mr. Dekarlo recognized him almost immediately.

“You were here the other day, with a boy, right?” he said with a brittle smile. “What can I do for a knight like you?”

That surprised Simon. The man clearly had an incredible memory, and the false bravado was more than most managed around the Unspoken, and when Simon told him he’d like to speak with the man in private, that cracked completely, and he was already offering apologies before he even knew what he was guilty of.

“What is it you think I want to speak with you about?” Simon asked with a stony expression.

“When it comes to those who wear the white, who can say?” the man said. “Once you’ve found the heretic, you’ll look into his soul and find the crime. Isn’t that what they say about you?”

Simon flinched. It was something they said about the Unspoken, but never to their face, and he found he didn’t care for it. Still, he took the offered moment to peer deeply into the merchant’s soul. He stared long and deep, past the curtain of fear that tinged everything yellow, but he didn’t find too much. The man drank too much and appeared to have a girl in every city he traded between. Neither of those were capital crimes.

Simon didn’t see any blood on his hands, though, or even any evidence that he cheated at dice, reinforcing the impression he’d gotten after meeting with the count. He didn’t bring any of that up. Instead, he said, “The powers that be said that you’ve been swindling their peasants. They consider the behavior so widespread that, as far as they’re concerned, some kind of wicked charm is the only answer.”

“I… My lord, I promise you this, I have no tuck with devilry of any kind. I run an honest business and—” he started, truly scrambling for the first time as his faltering confidence finally broke.

“Honest?” Simon asked. “How so? Square that circle for me.”

“I… I’ll try,” the merchant agreed, “But first I must fetch some documents.”

He did that, and didn’t even try to run, as Simon thought he might. When he returned, he didn’t show Simon the same sales logs he’d already gotten from the count. Instead, he showed him the sales pitch he’d laid before the farmers. The scroll was a banner with almost no words. It was sensible, since most people who toiled in the fields couldn’t read, but it was still clear.

“I didn’t cheat anyone,” the merchant explained. “I just tried to explain to them that if they had a good year, and their neighbors did, then the rest of the kingdom probably did too, which meant that there would be far more supply than demand.”

“These are optimistic figures,” Simon responded, smiling at the way it was all handwritten. What sort of trouble will the world be in when this kind of thinking gets involved with my printing press? He wondered.

“Optimistic but reasonable,” Mr. Dekarlo insisted.

“Reasonably below the price you’re selling what you bought at,” Simon scowled as he did the math in his head.

“That is true,” the merchant agreed. “I’m earning a great deal from this season’s bounty, but that’s all to the good. The king will get his fair share. I would never try to cheat the tax man.”

“Just the farmers, then?” Simon challenged the man. He didn’t like what he’d done, but manipulation wasn’t a crime, and it certainly wasn’t magic. Somehow disappointed by the simplicity of the scheme.

He’d expected that the man had cheated the farmers with a sophisticated math trick or figured out some kind of futures pricing mechanism and roped fools into it, but instead, he’d simply made a rational economic case. If everyone grew more grain, then there would be a glut on the market, and it would be worth less than before. While that was true in a broad sense, using that information to drive down the prices was new to him; he hadn’t seen that before.

Mr. Dekarlo continued to plead his innocence, but eventually Simon came out with the real complaint. “Lord Trantis feels as though he’s been robbed by you. I’m sure other lords have made similar complaints. None of your fancy arguments will help you escape from their dungeons or knife men unless you find a way to salve their wounded egos.”

The merchant started to agree that he’d do just that, and began to thank Simon, but Simon quickly interrupted them. “As for my part, I don’t care who you upset as long as you use no magic to do it, but if I see you chisel the common man like this in future years, I’ll treat you as I’d treat a brigand. There’s a fine line between commerce and robbery, and you crossed it.”

Mr. Dekarlo’s smile soured immediately, but he swore to stay on the straight and narrow going forward. Simon was unconvinced, but he left anyway. He’d wasted enough time on this fool’s errand.

Simon returned to the inn after that, whistling a tune and glad to have resolved the problem. It wasn’t a real fix, but according to his mirror, he hadn’t actually screwed up any other timelines, so he could live with that. He didn’t find Varten in their room, which wasn’t completely unusual. The boy hated to be cooped up all the time. So, Simon went downstairs and asked the innkeeper about his squire, but the man gave him a blank look that made his worry skyrocket. “Your squire? He’s still here?”

“He’s supposed to be,” Simon answered with rising concern.

“Really?” the man asked in genuine surprise, though not enough surprise that he stopped polishing his glass. “I thought you two was gone for good.”

The innkeeper’s words made a vein in Simon’s forehead throb. Gone for good. It was all he could do not to rage at the man as he made him repeat himself to make sure he’d heard the innkeeper correctly. He had, but it was only his generally bright aura that kept Simon from yanking him over the bar and beating the truth out of him. His words were truthful, but they were so incongruous that he made the man repeat them just the same.

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After that, he cast a look around the room, looking for any obvious evil doers as his pulse rose, but he found none. The merchant mentioned the boy to me, his mind whispered in a fit of paranoia, Could he…

No, Simon dismissed such bizarre thoughts as he turned and moved back to his room without explanation. He didn’t talk to anyone. He just slammed his door and dug through his pack until he found his dowsing rod. When he had that in hand, he tried and failed to clear his mind, but it still worked well enough to point him east.

Simon almost bolted then, to follow the invisible line that his magic was drawing, but he stopped himself. “In a city of this size, following a stick?” he asked himself. “No matter how I disguise myself, I’ll be noticed.”

So he paused then, thinking about what he could do that wouldn’t get the watch called on him. Then he used a piece of charcoal to sketch out a quick map of the city on the dusty wooden floor. He included his current location, the river, the docks, the main streets, the walls, the castle, and the gates, and then he used a pendulum to search for the right quarter at least. In the time it took to do all of that, Simon calmed down a little, which made his magic work better.

Slowly, he filtered down his squire’s location to a place not far from where he was now, near the river docks. Once he had that, he went toward it, unconcerned that the sun had started to set. He’d confirmed that the boy was still alive, but unless he was playing with some of the other children in the area, he had no idea what Varten would be doing.

What he found wasn’t boys at play, or even getting into trouble, but a deserted street mostly lined with warehouses, and a decaying manor on a hill overlooking the wharf. The building had peaked roofs, and while it had once been nice, it had fallen on times hard enough that no one whitewashed over the graffiti that was daubed on the side facing the street.

It was old enough to be neighbors on two sides with warehouses. It had certainly been built long before the docks had expanded. In time, he thought that the whole area would be consumed by the infrastructure of commerce. On another day, he might even appreciate that; he never would have believed he’d be interested in how growing cities slowly evolved over decades. It seemed like an artform that existed for his enjoyment alone. Today, all he cared about was locating his squire, and as soon as he stopped in front of the door, he removed his dowsing rod to verify the boy’s location, and sure enough, it pointed ahead and down, toward the building’s basement.

That was all Simon needed to know. He pounded on the door, and when an aging servant answered, Simon forced his way inside, knocking the man on his ass.

“Sir, please, this is Lord Marhew’s residence,” the aging footman insisted. “You can’t just—”

He had a darker aura than any old person should have had after a long, full life, but it might have just been misery; Simon’s vision was too blurred by emotion to say for sure what the gray color meant, and he had to find Varten.

“Where is the door to the basement?” he thundered.

Cowed, the butler pointed immediately, and Simon turned from him, drawing his sword. He wouldn’t have given the man a second look, except for what happened next. He took two steps, and then he heard a syllable that was carved into his soul. “Meir–” He’d recognize it anywhere. The word of fire.

Simon had time to pull down his visor and cover his face with the crook of his arm before the man finished speaking. “-en!”

Flames cascade over him then, and though he felt the heat and smelled the commingled scents of sulfur and burning hair, he didn’t feel any terrible pain. As the fiery wave passed him, he turned. The servant opened his mouth again, but Simon kicked him hard in the jaw and then stabbed him in the chest deeply enough that he had to use his boot to pull his sword free.

All of this happened in front of the still-open door, and when Simon looked outside, he saw a young man standing there with a look of shock on his face. “Fetch the guards,” Simon ordered. “Inform them I have found a nest of warlocks in their city!”

He nodded wordlessly at that, then ran off. Simon could not say whether he would actually do as he’d been instructed, but it wasn’t as if he could do so himself. Varten was in danger, though the hows and whys eluded him. As he stalked through the household, the serving women scattered and screamed.

He was a stranger with a bloody sword, so he didn’t blame them. None of them was as dim as the footman had been, but he had to resist the urge to strike all of them down just in case. He stopped resisting when another dark-aurad man came out from one of the parlors. Simon cut him down without thinking twice. In that moment, he was probably as close as he’d ever been to being a proper Whitecloak. Guilt was automatic, and innocence needed to be proven.

That intensified when he found the door down, too, but he noticed one odd detail as he looked at the dim steps. It was fancier than any other part of the house. While it made sense to Simon that a practitioner of dark arts might have an elaborate ritual space, a mosaic on the stairs struck him as unusual, but something here felt wrong.

First, he noticed the grout was spattered with dark stains. However, his sense of unease was only satisfied when he found the word of force used repeatedly in a pattern between a dozen steps in the middle of the descending stairs. That sent a chill up his spine as he imagined what such magic would have done to him if he'd charged heedlessly.

He grabbed a small basket of potatoes sitting on a cask near the door and tossed them down the stairs. They tumbled together in a messy wave. For a moment there was a pattern to it, but it because lost after a few steps, when a different picture emerged. With every step they impacted, the potatoes left changed. Some were crushed, and others were sliced. It wasn’t clear to him what was powering the trap, or how it was disabled, but it was clearly an ugly one.

For a moment, all he could think of was the time he'd been paralyzed and devoured an inch at a time by one of the carnivorous plants that covered the ziggurats, but he quickly shook himself free of that mental image. It wasn't what he'd needed right now. Rather than have a panic attack, Simon shattered the first one with a long-handled copper pot that was nearby. That worked okay, even though he came back with only half a pot. He tried his luck with the next one, but it crumpled before he could get close. So, he backtracked.

He went to the parlor with the dead footman and took an old crossbow from a wall of hunting trophies, along with a dusty quiver of bolts to go with it. Then he returned to the stairs and started to shoot out the key runes one at a time. The quarrels shattered and splintered before they ever touched the wall, but each of those fragments was still moving with enough force to break the decorative tiles, and if anything, turning the crossbow into a shotgun made it more effective.

He’d long since lost the element of surprise, so when it was done and the way was clear, he proceeded cautiously. He sheathed his sword and grabbed a broom, waving it in front of him as he went, while he held his shield close and high with his other hand. The pain of the burns was starting to trickle in now, but compared to the idea of being shredded by a magical meat grinder, it barely rated as he descended into the darkness.