Death After Death-Chapter 376 - Getting Used to Anything

In the days that followed, Simon’s new situation stabilized and quickly became normal, and every interaction reinforced what he’d already suspected: that his initiation had been anything but normal. He saw it in the way that other knights looked at him during meals, and whispered about him as he passed. He might be Sir Enis, but the word was pronounced with a sneer half the time it was spoken to him.

Simon didn’t pick any fights over it, choosing instead to be amused by it while he bided his time. There were a lot more valuable things to do than get into fist fights. Those first few days, he spent a lot of time with an armorer, getting fitted for something more appropriate than his beat-up leathers.

Simon had worn chainmail in only a few lives, and he’d almost never worn a breastplate, let alone a helmet, spaulders, and everything else that went with it. For him, heavy armor had mostly been a vehicle to work on various fire resistance spells rather than anything, but that was going to change now.

“It still slows me down quite a bit,” he complained to the smith as he showed up for his second fitting after a few days to see how the ensemble was coming.

“Aye, it will do that,” the man agreed, “But that doesn’t mean it don’t fit right. A little practice and you’ll have the way of things.”

“Plate has never really been my style,” Simon admitted, flexing his arms and studying where he’d lost any range of motion. “It gets in the way, and used properly, a shield is almost as effective anyway.”

“Well, that might be true for the blows you see coming, but the ones you don’t?” the smith said with a smile, “Now you’ll be fighting monsters, not men, and I think you’ll be glad for the added protection when you see their teeth and talons.”

Simon didn’t need any reminding there. He’d been torn apart by all sorts of beasts. Most recently, a troll and an owlbear had done him the most harm, and while there was no denying that a steel shell would have aided him against the bird, he was less convinced that it would help against the troll. Chainmain might have stopped it from ripping off his limbs, but it would do nothing to stop the ten-foot-tall monster from pounding him into mincemeat.

Simon didn’t complain, though. He’d chosen this path. Instead, he asked the smith for advice in an attempt to curry favor. He didn’t expect to learn anything of value, and indeed the man’s advice was largely, “Just practice as often as you can and you’ll soon get the hang of it.”

“That might be hard without a squire or the cooperation of my brothers,” Simon admitted with a sigh. Inside, he smiled. This was exactly where he wanted the conversation to go.

“Aye,” the smith nodded as he rearranged his tools uncomfortably. “Well, you’re a bit unusual, you might say, but you’re a sworn member of the brotherhood, so I’m sure they’ll warm to you in time.”

“I’ve heard that, but I’m afraid I have no context,” Simon confessed. “What does usual look like?”

There, the smith was more helpful. While talking about Simon specifically seemed to be a bit touchy, talking about the Unspoken in general was safer ground, and instead of rushing Simon out, he sat on a rough wooden stool after lighting a pipe from his forge and pontificated for a bit.

“Truth be told, the Unspoken almost never recruit anyone old enough to shave,” he explained. “A sixteen-year-old, or maybe even an eighteen-year-old, might get the chance to be a squire if they’re promising, but after that… Well, you know. As for making someone a brother without watching them like a hawk for a few years as a squire, it's damn near unheard of.”

Technically, I was a squire for a while, he almost said. It wasn’t the fact that it was a lie that stopped him, though, but that he knew the smith would clam up.

Instead, he said, “I can see that. I’m sure it takes a long time to train a witch hunter.”

“A lifetime,” the smith agreed. “First you have to find men of good character, uncorrupted by the world, and then you have to spend years and decades teaching them what’s what, knowing good and well that most of them will die before they live to be as old as me.”

“Hunting witches and demons is dangerous,” Simon agreed noncommittally, earning a scornful look.

“You shouldn’t talk so easily about things you know nothing about,” the smith answered. “It won’t win you any friends among the veterans.”

I actually fought a demon once, but I was a sort of vampire at the time, and I’ve summoned them before, too, his mind whispered. Instead, he offered the much more sane answer. “All I ask for is a chance. I know my circumstances here are… unique, but those aren’t my fault either, are they? I have no idea why the Unspoken would allow me to break so many rules to join them.”

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“Well, I’ve heard it whispered that you’re destined for greater things. I can’t see auras anything like you can,” the smith admitted after a moment of hesitation, “But some say you might be the chosen one that would fulfill the prophecy.”

“Oh?” Simon asked, trying and failing not to seem too interested. “I’m not sure I’d say I’m anyone special, but if there’s a prophecy about Enis the Great, I’d love to read it.”

“I don’t rightly recall,” the smith lied. “I ain’t much for reading, and well, if it don’t involve the forge, my memory ain’t what it used to be.”

Simon nodded and pivoted back to discussing the squires. It wasn’t a very detailed answer, but it was an answer to his question. In time, he’d get a better one.

They talked for a while longer, but after the silence became uncomfortable, he made his excuses and went to eat lunch. Then, when he was finished eating and being gossiped about, Simon returned to the library to continue his studies. The smith wasn’t wrong about that. It took a long time to train members of the Unspoken, and the powers that be, most specifically the knight he reported to, had him spending every afternoon here reading.

He supposed any other knight would have been annoyed at Sir Kulthen for that, but Simon only feigned weariness when the old knight would come here to quiz Simon from behind his thick gray mustache. Simon had gone through all of this to learn, and he would have happily read for eight or ten hours a day even if it hadn’t been required of him.

He burned through a few candles a day for a while there as he slogged through volume after volume of cleansed, compressed lore that had already been carefully vetted by the silent archivists that he only ever saw in passing. Their appearance always reminded him of just how much was missing from the books he read, but that was a trade-off he was going to have to live with.

Many of the books were filled with information he already knew. Simon could have written his own book on combat within goblin warrens or battling centaurs. Even so, he learned a few things about beastmen and ogres, and he was still happy to read the sections where he learned nothing new.

Just imagine if we put all of this together in one volume and printed a thousand copies, he often thought. We could put one in every village between here and Ionia and make countless lives better.

He wasn’t about to try to convince the Whitecloaks to build a printing press, of course. They were the last people who should be in charge of deciding what was and wasn’t publicly accessible. Still, they had a lot of knowledge to share with the world, and over the following week he read a thin tome on judging the age of a dragon and therefore threat by size and color, a book on the evil spirits in foreign lands, one that mentioned the Magi even though it didn’t offer much in the way of details, and three books on identifying witches. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

Even though those last three had more in common than they differed from each other, Simon spent several days comparing and contrasting them, as if he were preparing for a book report or a presentation. He would have taken notes, but that wasn’t permitted.

“A member of the brotherhood should be able to memorize every book on these shelves and recite them on command,” Sir Kulthen had said without a hint of irony when Simon asked. He would have recorded the most important bits with a mirror, but he was sure he was being watched, so for now he just trusted his memory.

Foltrim’s Razor, The Book of Black Souls, and Burning Words weren’t so different that he needed to record every last detail. None of them gave him practical advice on what he wanted to learn most, which was to shield his soul from magical attacks. He found a few prayers and charms that were purported to work, but from the way they were written, they seemed to be mostly placebos for the masses after their community had been purged of evil..

True members of the Unspoken were told to rely on meaningless platitudes, like “Use your righteousness as a shield and you will never be overcome.” That was disappointingly useless, but Simon wasn’t discouraged. He still had a whole library to read through over the next year or ten.

Besides, on the whole, they were well written. If someone synthesized all of them into a single volume of witch lore, Simon felt like he would have agreed with two-thirds or even three-quarters of what was presented in those pages.

There were even a few references to witch marks, which would have been valuable information a few lifetimes back. The chapter in question didn’t even hint that the marks were associated with words of power, unfortunately, though Simon thought that was genuine ignorance rather than any attempt to obscure key details. It only noted, “Those affected by the witch’s dark powers are often afflicted by these dark blemishes, which are inimical to life. Though they can be removed from innocents by fire and blade, they will often lose power, or fade entirely when the witch who has so marked them has been dealt with.”

Simon didn’t agree with that entirely, nor did he agree that witches had the power to hide their dark auras. He’d long wondered how it was that those who saw the truth of things could kill good people as well as bad for what amounted to superficial signs, like a knowledge of herbalism, and the answer was what Foltrim’s Razor referred to as ‘the shroud.’

This supposed magic technique “blinded the true eye, making villains look like anyone else to all but the most perceptive of seers. When dealing with common criminals, you must trust your gaze, but when dealing with warlocks, diabolists, and witches, you must use what you have been taught more than anything else.

That made Simon roll his eyes. Who are you going to believe? The Unspoken or your own lying eyes?

Still, it was probably better than them knowing the truth. If they did, they’d go around branding everyone to prevent anyone from using magic. They were zealots like that.