Death After Death
Chapter 256: Digging Deeper

Simon had planned to listen to the man. He wouldn’t let him go no matter what he said, of course, but he would at least do his best to minimize his suffering. Unfortunately, even as he helped the necromancer to his feet, he saw the hint of a wicked smile cross the other man’s face and knew that something terrible was about to happen.

Will the word of nullification still protect me from his magic? Simon wondered even as he drew his dagger.

Ultimately, he decided he wasn’t going to wait to find out, and even as the necromancer opened his mouth to say something, Simon embedded eight inches of steel into the other man’s larynx. Whatever word he’d planned to say in another attempt to kill Simon died on his lips and was replaced with a look of surprise.

He struggled for a few seconds then, twisting in Simon's grip while he tried to escape the death that was all but certain. Simon could have pushed the blade all the way through his spine to make the man’s death more merciful. A vile necromancer like him didn’t deserve mercy, of course, but he still would have done it if the necromancer hadn’t pulled out a wicked kris and tried to gut Simon with it.

Then, Simon stepped back, knife still in hand. The warm glow of the life force he’d been draining from his enemy faded even as blood fountained from the wound in his throat. Simon stepped back as the necromancer waved his curved blade back and forth almost at random. Then, with one last look at one particular pile of books like he wanted something from him, he turned and fled out the door.

Simon didn’t chase him; he knew that he had an archer out there at the ready. Even if he didn’t, the man wouldn’t have made it far as he drowned in his own blood. It turned out the necromancer didn’t make it twenty feet from the door before he toppled to the ground, but by then, Simon was already rifling through his things. Anything that hadn’t just died with the man would be written down, and whatever that might be, Simon had to find it before everyone else showed up and lit a bonfire.

Fortunately, Rodrick was justifiably nervous about entering the lion's den and gave Simon a couple of minutes to loot through the stack of books in search of the dead man’s grimoire. That would have been bad if he’d been lying on the ground bleeding out, but as it was, it was the perfect reaction. Simon quickly flipped through each book, noting that most of them were log books and merchants' ledgers that obviously belonged to the dead caravans.

At least those will confirm who actually died in this awful place, he thought as he dug deeper into the stack.

Near the bottom of the stack, he finally found what he was looking for in the form of a thin brown leather volume. Unlike most of the evil books he’d found before, this one was undecorated. There was no gilding or external signs that it contained evil, but he only needed to glance at a few pages before he saw words of power that he recognized. He kept searching after he slipped that book into a familiar-looking pack, but he found nothing else in his searches after that.

Well, he found no other books containing dark magics after that, but he did find his sword. It had been set aside with a number of other items that might have been rune-marked in some way, judging from the fact that Sir Bevin’s sword and protective talisman were sitting amongst the pile. Simon pocketed what he could for later inspection and was standing there trying to figure out how he might be able to sneak the rest away without appearing too suspicious when Rodrick finally entered the hut.

“Uhhh, Simon, are you still breathin’ man? I…” he said as he nervously crept into the door.

“What?” Simon asked, turning toward the door, somehow worried he’d forgotten something incriminating.

Rodrick didn’t say anything. He just pointed. Simon looked, and after a few seconds, he saw what had stunned him into silence. In the far corner was a knee-high stack of gold bars that he’d uncovered in his search of the room. Simon had ignored it because it had no value to him, magically speaking, but in retrospect, he could see how that wasn’t the normal reaction. Such a pile represented lifetimes of wealth to the average man in the world.

“I was going to let Sir Branaugh handle that,” he answered with a shrug. “It seemed like too big of a decision for—”

“Simon, think, man, think!” the hunter said, “If we give all of that to the knight, he’s going to pocket some, then take the rest on to his lord, who will pocket some before handing whatever’s left off to the king! The people of Schwarzenbruck will never see a thin silver coin from that pile.”

Simon smirked as he resisted the desire to point out that the pile contained no silver coins at all. Instead, he said, “So, what do you propose? We take a couple bricks and—”

“We could take it all,” he said. “You and me. Right now. We could take it all and—”

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“And what? How do you propose to spend a dozen bars of solid gold?” Simon asked. “Don’t you think that’s going to be a bit suspicious?”

Truthfully, Simon thought they still needed to be refined further. The metal looked like it had only been roughly smelted and wasn’t quite fit to be coined yet.

“I didn’t think of that,” he sighed. “Still… don’t you think we deserve something after all we’ve been through?”

Simon couldn’t help but nod to that. In that moment, he thought of all the things he could do with much gold. He could stash it somewhere and dig it up in a future life when he needed to. He could use it to increase the defenses of Schwarzenbruck so it would be more able to defend against Murani attacks that awaited in its future. He could do lots of things.

However, after a few seconds of contemplation, he decided that was the wrong priority. “I think we’ll make sure that our friends and neighbors get something out of the deal,” Simon said. “Before we do any of that, though, there are more zombies we need to kill and—”

“But it will be too late by then!” the hunter said.

“Then it will be too late,” Simon answered, pulling his hatchet from his belt.

It was hard to be too hard on Rodrick in that moment. Simon couldn’t lecture the man. He’d just done exactly the same thing with his treasure, and as he went off to see if anyone’s lives needed to be saved, he felt a little guilty about that.

Still, by the time he arrived, he found that everyone was fine. They’d made the smart move and collapsed the entrance to the mineshaft, sealing the zombies that were inside away forever, and the corpses of only a few were scattered around the entrance. Simon took a moment to feel sorry for those who were trapped in there and hoped that most of them had been crushed.

That was like his two worst fates combined into one endless nightmare. Still, that private sorrow didn’t stop him. After a brief update about the dead necromancer, he checked everyone for bites before tending to lesser cuts and scrapes with bandages instead of magic.

“I wonder what it was they were mining anyway?” the young knight asked.

Simon didn’t answer. He just looked to Rodrick and left that to the hunter. “Well, you see,” the other man started. “It looks like… maybe… it was gold. We found some in the man’s hut and—”

To the knight’s credit, he didn’t talk about how rich they were all going to be. He talked about how they’d have enough to provide a proper recompense to the families of the dead men, which was exactly what Simon had hoped for. Not everyone echoed those sentiments, but Simon didn’t really care.

“Even if we spread the funds widely, there’s more than enough for everyone,” Simon said. “The real problem is that it's going to be hard to get all of that back with only a single mule.”

“There’s that much?” Sir Branaugh asked.

Simon only nodded. “That much and more, along with the logs and ledgers of all the caravans that were waylaid, and a good portion of their goods and supplies.”

It turned out that it took longer for them to decide what to take back with them than it had to defeat the enemy. The small group spent the rest of the day stacking gold bricks, sacks of coins, and trade goods into a cart they were eventually able to cobble together, and by night, they were heading back toward the mouth of the canyon. No one wanted to stay in such an evil, bloodstained place that night if they didn’t have to.

He never found his leather armor or his tent, but that was fine. He could always get a new set made. Do I even need a new set if I’m going back to the Oracle after this? He asked himself. He wasn’t sure that he did, but then he wasn’t exactly sure that he didn’t, either. That question only became more complicated when he cracked open the dead man’s grimoire that night and started reading.

The book was more of a journal than a proper grimoire and contained sporadic entries over the course of a decade, but what surprised Simon the most was the source of most of the man’s knowledge. Vaustin, as he was apparently called, claimed to have raised the dead souls of several notable mages and forced them to share their secrets with him.

Such a story was incredible and entirely beyond Simon’s own magical experiences. Unfortunately, he couldn’t dig too deeply into it because his comrades kept distracting him and asking questions, so he had to act like he was pursuing a ledger rather than reading a story about evil powers.

Still, he did learn a new word in the midst of all that, Which was a greater reward for him than any number of gold bars. Eszloum was a word that seemed to quite literally mean soul. And at least according to Vaustin’s notes, it could be acted on by a number of other words of power, though he didn’t seem to know as many as Simon did.

In one example, he theorized that if there was a null modifier, then one could use it to dispel a soul, killing them instantly or at least zombifying them. The necromancer hadn't been sure which. Even more horrific, though, was his idea that if there was a drain modifier, then one could use it to siphon specific knowledge from the soul of another mage rather than summoning their spirits and going through the tiresome process of asking them questions. Simon had both those words, of course, but he wasn’t sure if he wanted to try either experiment.

The former seemed like it would fuck up the whole cycle of life thing pretty bad, and the latter, well, it could go wrong in any number of ways. Your soul is the one thing you keep through each loop, he reminded himself. If you fuck that up, then who knows what you become.

Playing with such evil magic could very well turn him into exactly the sort of monster that thought that detonating volcanos was a good idea, he realized. That was all he really needed to put that thought as far from his mind as possible.