Chương 438: Secrets Don’t Stay Buried

Ch. 438 - Secrets Don't Stay Buried Simon stayed there until most of the candles he'd found had burned almost to nothing, learning all he could. Then, in the wee hours of the morning, with a few new books in his sack, he closed the place up tight and left through the second-floor window, avoiding anywhere where guards might have been hiding, and staying in the shadows as much as he could. I stayed too late for shadows tonight, Simon told himself as he made his way back to the inn.

False dawn was coloring the horizon now, and the wide streets of the trade city were empty enough that it would have been easy to pick him out. He made it back to the inn, but that was due to luck more than skill. No one had been looking for him. If they had, they would have found him. When he got back to his room, he'd intended to sleep before he started reading, but since sunrise gave him just enough light to read, he decided to start reading the first volume. That was a mistake.

He told himself he would just skim it, but it was only hours later, when he was more than halfway through the thick volume titled Verses of the Soulstealer, that he realized it was getting close to lunchtime. Simon went to bed, but his mind spun with all of the new information, and his dreams were flooded with what he'd read.

He dreamed of a darker, more evil version of the city, where manual labor was done by the dead, the common people were fed a meager diet, and their bodies were consigned to the deep mausoleums that powered everything from the skeletons in the field to the hot water in the nobles' houses. Only the rich and powerful escaped this fate and were allowed to be buried in private tombs. Everyone else's soul was devoured and shredded to power the madness. There would be no reincarnation for any of them.

"Not so different from the Pit," Simon whispered as he woke with a start. At least, the way that Helades had explained it. He didn't really buy that at this point, though he couldn't explain why that was the case. There was a greater mystery here than turning a doomed world into a wastebasket. If the whole universe really were powered by suffering, she could always just send everyone to hell.

Well, that's probably against the rules somehow, he decided as he got up and got dressed, but even so, using a world for this is overkill. Such a thought wasn't worth wasting his next question on, but it did take up more and more of his headspace as time went on. Still, for now, he only allowed himself to brood on it as long as it took to go downstairs and eat a quick lunch. After that, his mind was monopolized once more by his pilfered books.

If the Murani were ruled by a Godking, then the necromancer he killed the other night had considered himself the secret king of this city. He had hexes cast in brass that, by his own admission, he barely understood on the homes of the most important citizens. So, he could get any favor he wanted, and he had enough wealth for lifetimes squirreled away in various caches. Only some of these were documented and written down in any way that Simon could decipher.

Still, he took the time to take pictures of those with a mirror and mark them on his map as best he could in case he ever needed the money. While Mr. Blackton didn't exactly lay out his life story, one of the books he'd taken was a journal that documented some of the man's experiments for several years from a decade back. It was hardly conclusive, but it gave Simon enough information to be certain that this man had been at his grisly work for decades, at least.

It also made him even more certain that the reason he hadn't met him before was because of the Blackheart. This mage's efforts almost certainly predated that device. So, one day, he'd probably just gone into one of his tunnels and never returned. No one would have been the wiser for a long time. Simon certainly hadn't been, and apparently, neither had any brothers who had come through this city.

"The Unspoken don't have a lot of presence outside of Brin, but they do have temples here, at least," he muttered to himself.

"I wonder how many lost their lives trying to bring the necromancer down." It was an unanswerable question. Over the years, Simon had copied a lot of information into his mirror about who went missing where, or had been confirmed dead. None of the names they knew with certainty had died to the living dead, but several men had gone missing here. I wouldn't be surprised if they had a presence here because they knew there was an evil they couldn't locate, Simon contemplated as he rubbed his eyes.

The Whitecloaks had done that a lot, flocking to different areas in search of evils hidden beneath the surface. Just because Brin was relatively safe from monsters these days compared to the surrounding lands didn't mean that it had always been the case; the oldest records of the Unspoken had painted a completely different picture of the region. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings. Why didn't Helades start the Pit back then?

he thought idly as he wondered again how all of this fit together. Unanswerable questions plagued his investigations at every turn, but he did the best he could. How long Mr. Blackton had been doing this, and how many he'd killed, were just the tip of the iceberg as far as Simon was concerned. The real question that he had in mind as he read more and returned to the scene of the crime was why the skeletons weren't still running. The necromancer had set up an almost automatic system.

He had souls of craftsmen chained to skeletal servants. He had laborers forever digging, working, carving, and hoarding. Each of them had their instructions stamped into tin plates that they wore around their necks or embedded in their sternums. It was an elaborate system to ensure he needed no living soul who might betray him, and Simon crushed every last skull just in case someone might still be trapped in one of them. Simon spent weeks down there, on and off.

Some nights were more productive than others, and some he couldn't visit at all because there were guards, or lights in the windows. While he never found an underground exit that would make for a good alternative entrance, he eventually figured out how the plug had gotten pulled. They'd stopped functioning because of the man's own paranoia. He'd rigged his whole organization like a set of dominoes.

While the energy from the graveyard was limitless, the throttle used a charged gem that was changed out periodically by the man himself. Were it not for that, the skeletons would still be marching around under orders, and he would have no doubt had to fight his way in on the first visit. No, fighting would be the worst of it, he realized; if someone set up something like this and no off switch, it might easily outlive the man who made it and eat the world. For a moment, Simon wondered what that would look like.

Despite the similarities with the zombie plague, it somehow horrified him more. Zombies were just driven by their hunger, but this would be like an assembly line of death. Before he could get too far down that grisly road, he forced himself to focus on the actual object before him. He was here to learn, not dread, and if he started spiraling, well… this whole place was a horror show, and he was well beyond that. It functioned like a fuse, maybe. Simon wasn't sure.

He couldn't quite remember what a fuse was, but he assumed it fused two electrical lines together, which is what this did with essence. It was the first time he'd seen anyone wire magic together like this, but according to the necromancer, the design was not his own. He complained endlessly at times about why certain runes should work certain ways when his own designs failed, which made Simon chuckle. He understood that pain to some extent.

Every time he looked at a complex Murani design like the Dreaming Orb, he felt useless.

"I guess it's nice to know I'm not the only one," Simon said with a smile. As he went through each book, he tossed it in the inn's fire late at night, or if there were too many people around, their latrine. He saved what information he thought was important, but he threw away the rest as a good knight would do. At least that's what he told himself. Still, the question always repeated: where did goblins learn magic? Where did humans learn complex rune structures? Mr.

Blackton talked about copying designs from ruins in the desert, but Simon doubted he meant the basilisk's level. It was curious. Simon had planned to go through this level in an evening, but for obvious reasons, he ended up staying for weeks, documenting and destroying. He gained no new words; indeed, he had far more than the necromancer. But there were interesting designs to study, and, of course, the hope that he would hit the jackpot.

One detail that stuck out to him after a few weeks was that runes, as written or carved, could be used by someone who didn't understand their meaning. He hadn't known that, but he supposed that made sense. After all, the Magi were regularly lied to about what their runes meant and what they could do, but they were still bound by the amulets they wore. The same was true of the Unspoken's amulets. They weren't even aware that they were magic. How does that even work?

he asked himself as he stopped what he was doing and shut the tome he'd been standing there perusing. No, better question: how did it take me so long to ask this question? For a very long time, Simon had understood that intent powered magic. He'd assumed that was universal, but now that he thought about it, there were certainly instances where the user's intent didn't matter at all. That thought allowed him a brief moment of insight as he considered how items impacted the aura less.

A dozen other related topics and ideas synergized inside his mind. Someone could act with intent, using the correct words, and the universe would obey. But if an object was marked appropriately, then the magic happened outside the person and in a vessel. He could almost hear the Oracle whispering something about clarity and vessels, then.

"Let me guess," he said with a low chuckle.

"It's because the universe understands itself, even if the people in it rarely do." It was funny to Simon because obviously, a stick didn't understand anything at all, but it was the only way the logic made sense. Words and gestures required understanding because they were intentional acts of intelligence, but markings were more like a circuit. That somehow implied that intelligence got in the way of magic, and he didn't quite know what to make of that.

Still, before he could give it much thought, he realized he had company. He heard one of the steps on the stairs behind him creak softly a half a second before his uninvited guest spoke, but even then he didn't whirl around immediately. Whether it was a guard or an apprentice, any sudden moves might cause them to skip the talking part and leap straight to violence, so he only turned around slowly as what turned out to be a woman started speaking.