Death After Death
Chapter 263: The Crown of the World

Zurari didn’t disappoint, even in those first few minutes. The outermost portion of the city he’d already passed through, even before Simon had reached the main gate, was completely different than the world beyond the fifty-foot-high walls. It had been full of dusty streets along with two and three-story buildings.

Inside the city proper, the place was cleaner, and the buildings were taller. They were more colorful, too. Every shop and home seemed to be a different hue. As he went along, asking after a good inn near the closest bazaar, there seemed to be some patterns.

This street favored blues, and that one greens, certain shops like herbalists were usually green, but barbers and doctors tended to prefer red. Only the truly wealthy preferred a more muted palette. Goldsmiths had simple, white-washed homes, and the wealthy, who often dwelt on the top floors of the urban canyons he walked through, did likewise.

Still, despite those patterns, it was a dizzying experience, and it didn’t get any easier once Simon found a free spot in the yard at the Golden Ass, a small caravansary that hugged the wall near the edge of the gate district. It wasn’t the cheapest place around, but it did have guards patrolling the yard day and night, which made the half a silver a night worthwhile.

Simon didn’t try to lowball the owner. Instead, he offered a bulk deal and traded a gold coin from his stash for a two-month stay at a discounted rate. This marked him as a man with some wealth, but that still wasn’t enough to make him stand out among this crowd. Even the poorest merchants in this city seemed to be enough to justify two or three bodyguards.

While pickpockets were a danger, Simon wasn’t afraid, and the first thing he did was go to a bathhouse for a soak and a shave. Once he was clean, he arranged for a small stall in one of the lower traffic areas of one of the lesser bazaars and then set about exploring the area.

He didn’t even try to enter the inner city walls that marked the line between the common and the powerful. The old city could wait until he’d sold off his inventory and reinvented himself a time or two. His first thought was to fall back on his map-making, but he realized, only belatedly, that he didn’t have enough information about the north to make that feasible.

The Murani don’t care much about the world beyond their borders, he reminded himself. I’d have to buy maps of my own before I could make something they’d want to buy.

It was frustrating to think of so many of his usual skills as regional. Many of the herbs he would have used as a healer simply didn’t grow in the area, and none of the surroundings were places he’d ever explored before. Even his swordsmanship wasn’t what it should be, thanks to the unfamiliar shape of his new sword.

Still, Simon didn’t let any of that bring him down, and from his third day in Zurari, he was hawking his wares by day and listening to strangers trade gossip in tea houses and gambling dens by night. After a few weeks, Simon even found which parlors were the most rigged and often used those to his advantage to make almost as much money as he made selling off his stock on a given day.

It was easy. You just waited for certain pits to let a winner run up, and then when everyone was on his coattails, you switched sides. Simon never won big enough for establishments like the Three-Tailed Cat or Gods’ Grace to single him out for any rough treatment. It was the other men who lost when he won that were most unhappy with him.

“You’ve stolen our luck!” more than one drunkard declared on nights when they were wiped out while he walked away a little richer. To Simon, the rules of the dice games were complicated, but he wasn’t really playing the game; he was playing the other players, and that was easy enough, given their boisterous culture.

Turning on the group when the good times were rolling seemed to be unthinkable for them. So, his behavior earned him a couple fistfights when it came time to go home for the night, but fortunately, a good left hook worked the same in Zurari as it did anywhere else he’d lived.

On quieter nights when he wasn’t feeling up to gambling or he was trying to make himself forgettable after a decent win, he spent his time in tea houses or hookah shops more than bars. In this city, bars seemed to almost always be associated with prostitution, and though he had no interest in the trade normally, the idea that the owner of the establishment owned a number of beautiful slave girls who could be rented out for the right price sickened him and made it impossible to stay for any length of time.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Increasingly, that was the answer that Simon was leaning toward. A good slave uprising might do wonders toward hobbling the Murani for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, they were a broken group, and he hadn’t figured out how best to put them to use.

Still, even if he didn’t learn how to unleash the spirit of revolt amongst the servants of the God King, he always seemed to find out something interesting. He almost spit out his drink when someone tried to convince him that there were still giants that lived high in the mountains to the north.

“I swear on the throne of the God-King himself,” the man insisted, continuing to tell the story of an ill-fated prospecting trip that was almost the end for his cousin’s cousin.

Simon had chatted with a dragon, so really, he shouldn’t have doubted that such a thing was possible. Still, for some reason, he did. The idea of twenty-foot-tall men living in the mountains struck him as very strange.

They weren’t the only mythological creatures that were in the north, though. There were the goblins and the orcs he was used to, but there were other strange elemental spirits and even jinn, though fewer people were willing to say that those really existed. Some claimed they were merely devils in disguise.

Still, the whole thing made for an interesting backdrop, and Simon couldn’t help but plan out expeditions in his head to journey to some of the places that the travelers had discussed, even if he had no plans to go anywhere but south once he figured out how to foment a slave rebellion.

Simon’s strange little life was comfortable and, indeed, almost unremarkable. He appreciated the pageantry of city life and did his best to ignore the ugliest bits, except for when he was trying to figure out how to exploit them for his own benefit.

Even when he finally journeyed into the inner city a few times, it didn’t make any waves. There, the bustle of city life was replaced with ritual and opulence. The decor was more somber, and the guards were more numerous. The biggest difference, though, was that there were magi.

Nobles and the other rich people of the city could be seen throughout the city, especially at night. They were his most frequent customers at the bazaar as his inventory slowly waned. The magi, though, were another story. He never saw them outside the inner city unless they were with a unit of the army. Aside from that, they kept to themselves like they were a religious order more than they were mages.

The magi were a hard thing to bring up in casual conversation, and people almost always steered away from the topic. Still, he did learn a few things. He learned that they were said to get their power from the blessing of the God King and other things, which he knew not to be true. People also seemed to have some idea of blood magic.

They never said that in so many words, of course. There were euphemisms. “The inner city’s appetite for slaves is bottomless,” a dealer of flesh once told him. “Even the ugly or the infirm are in demand. The Pyramid of Lesser Miracles will give you a decent price for almost anyone as long as they aren’t old.”

Simon had to suppress the urge to shake his head at that. The people of Zurari believed that magic cost nothing. It was used to exercise the God-King’s will. They used magic to build monuments and fight wars. They healed the sick and kept evil at bay. No one knew the terrible cost of all that, and increasingly, Simon felt like that might be the wedge he needed to shatter the unity of the Murani.

The capital ruled over the hordes with magic, and the people tolerated it because they knew that the Magi were a source for good. If they knew that all of those little miracles were powered by the lives of the disposable, Simon thought the relative harmony of the metropolis might change a bit.

I haven’t even been mugged since I’ve been here, part of his mind tried to argue, looking for some upside to a society powered by slaughter.

Still, before he could decide on the best way to do all of that, he saw his first selection. He didn’t know what it was at the time; he had to ask a few of the regulars about it afterward, but no one else was surprised by it and studied the strange procession of masked figures as they whispered to any children they happened to come across like some demented circus.

“There’s a few of them a year,” Ihmal answered. He was a greengrocer, two decades Simon’s senior. He was a bit dull, but he knew everything about the city, which made it worth Simon’s time to listen to the man complain all and sundry half the time. “Nothing special about that. Maybe they’ll find someone special, maybe they won’t.”

“But how?” Simon asked. “What are they looking for? Are they selecting future Magi, or…”

“My friend, you definitely aren’t from around here,” the older man laughed. “The magi select their own, but talent is not hereditary. They seek it out where they can find it.”

“How?” Simon asked again.

“No one knows,” the man said with a shake of his head before he took another drink of his tea. “They ask young people questions… if they get them right, their families are paid handsomely, and they’re taken away into the old city, and if they are wrong, well… they use magic so you forget what you were even asked in the first place.”

Another secret fucking society, Simon told himself as he fumed silently. Despite the fact that the Magi were pretty much the polar opposite of the Unspoken, somehow, he couldn’t get it out of his head that they were the same thing but inverted and more evil. The magi hid the true nature of magic just like the white cloaks did, they just did it in plain sight.