Ch. 423 - The Langdons
Simon spent the rest of the day worried that he’d been caught, or would be caught. He’d left neither trace nor clue behind, but he knew enough magic to be certain that wasn’t enough. He can’t see the threads of fate that tie everything together, Simon decided, but he could know any number of divinatory techniques to know his inner sanctum had been disturbed.
So, even though he knew where to go to find the hidden door, he waited for a few days to see if he’d been caught. He still smiled and chatted, but he looked through anyone who approached him, searching for certain betrayal. He never found that, though.
Pity was the only constant. The knights that he was surrounded by, old and young, thought that his life was over, despite his many victories. No one was cruel enough to mock him openly, of course, but he could see it in the color of their emotions as they spoke.
Simon shrugged all of that off. Pity was good. It meant he was being underestimated. He used that time to check the runes on his arm and carve another complex pattern into a brass amulet that was little more than decoration. He wasn’t going to tangle with a warlock hiding in plain sight without more than one means of protection, not after the breadcrumb trail he’d put together.
Simon knew nothing of Lord Langdon beyond what the book had told him. It was light on the evils that had seen them expunged, though, and instead focused on the history of the storied family until they’d gone wrong.
He knew in his bones, though, that the Grandmaster was the same man who was given such short shrift in those pages, all these years later, and if he was, what he was doing wasn’t so hard to guess.
“The biggest problem that every mage has is that they have to learn everything from scratch,” he told himself as he etched his backup plan. Metal could take more powerful words than wood, and he might need the power. “You learn a few words, figure out how it works, and by then, you’re an old man. You need more than one life to figure this stuff out.”
Simon had certainly needed more than one life. He’d needed many, many lives and more than a few lucky breaks to get as far as he had, but clearly, the person posing as the Grandmaster had a similar idea.
What better way to gather the secrets of every other witch and warlock in the land than to found an organization to find and kill them? Simon thought with a shake of his head.
It was a rare man who could do that, of course. He’d need to be someone who had learned the word of transfer, Zyvon, at a minimum. More importantly, someone whose brain didn’t work the same as everyone else's. Most people gained brightness by doing good, but if you enjoyed doing evil, well, anything was possible.
That realization gave Simon pause. He’d leaned on the idea that bright meant right for so long that he’d thought very poorly of his brothers on certain occasions. What if they’d found bad people who had taken joy in poisoning their neighbors or murdering travelers? It was possible, just as it was possible that someone might have a dark aura if they were just plain miserable. He’d met a few curmudgeons like that who’d done nothing wrong, but lived inside their own storm clouds.
“I was probably like that, once upon a time,” he muttered to himself as Helades' pages full of wasted days came to mind. It didn’t matter; he’d just need to be more careful in the future.
The future wasn’t what he was concerned about, though. What he was going to do now was the only thing on his mind. That should have been to kill the Grandmaster, but he decided that could probably wait until later. For the moment, he wanted to learn what he could.
Simon had originally joined the Unspoken as a mute librarian several lives ago to do exactly that. He’d later snuck into the ranks of the Magi, and both of those lives had been, to some extent, wasted. Now, though, he had a clear source of magical knowledge in the form of someone else’s library.
That someone else needed to die, of course. Simon would probably arrange a showdown with the Grandmaster in a few weeks or months to handle that. He might even recruit a whisperer or two to help, as much as that idea of using one of those poor women rankled him. He could use a witness.
To do all that right now, though, would be wasteful. Not when the keys to the kingdom were right there.
“First, I learn what I can, and then I reveal him for the fraud he is,” Simon told himself as he started mentally laying out his plan of action as he poked around the man’s bookshelves.
As he did that, it occurred to him that it was possible that the man didn’t need to be killed. Such an idea was a long shot, of course, but he argued with himself in silence about rushing to judgement.
“You do happen to know one warlock that isn’t evil,” Simon reminded himself. Even if he was the exception that disproved the rule, the rule was still disproven.
That tugged at his mind for a little while, and eventually, he decided the best way to figure out what sort of man the Grandmaster was would be to read through the Grimoire that the man had left on his desk in greater detail.
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Surely that’s enough to know what his plans are, Simon told himself. Anyone who reviewed his own notes in the mirror could probably say a lot about Simon without ever speaking to him, after all.
He felt better after he decided that. The hints in the Grandmaster's strange aura were certainly telling, but he wasn’t going to condemn a man to death, even a centuries-old warlock, without more evidence than that.
If someone was centuries old, then getting the drop on them was absolutely essential. If anything, he needed to shoot them with a crossbow or a wand from the doorway before the man knew he was there. That wasn’t very sporting, of course, but it was still necessary. Simon abstained from magic as much as possible these days, but in a life-or-death situation, he could do real damage to almost anyone.
He spent another few days preparing and figuring out exactly what he’d do if he was caught before he descended into the same disused passage he’d discovered before. This time, he carried something special: a hollowed-out book that had been a water-damaged and barely legible copy of the Songs of Sivia, which was a reasonably popular hymnal. He made sure that the library had several other copies before he spirited it away and chopped it into pieces.
Before, it had been a holy song book. Now it was just a disguise to put around other, eviler tomes that he planned to fetch. That was his plan now. He imagined that the Grandmaster might be in the room during the night, and Simon knew he was busy during the day, so he chose just after sunrise as the most likely time to explore.
Simon walked through the dark just as cautiously as he had last time. This time, though, he was more excited than afraid because he knew what awaited him. When Simon reached the door this time, it was shut, but fortunately, not locked.
This time, the oil lamp was not ignited, and the room was pitch black. Still, he looked through that keyhole for several minutes, studying the dark room with his second sight, looking for any hint of ambush before he slid the door open on creaking hinges enough to go inside.
Simon had no plans to light the lamp or do anything else that might give his visit away. That meant he wouldn’t be able to see well enough to read any of the books; he’d have to decide based on their size and shape rather than their titles.
He pondered how he should handle that at first, but eventually decided to take the leftmost book on the top shelf. He’d work his way down, left to right, top to bottom, and work his way through the library. If that proved too hit or miss, then he’d light a candle, but the risk of getting caught greatly outweighed the risks of reading dull books at this point. One false move and the jig would be up, and that was the last thing he wanted.
Simon wanted to read every book on the man’s shelf. He’d spent lifetimes trying to set up this exact opportunity, and he wasn’t about to throw it away now, especially since he didn’t seem to be hurting anyone.
As he walked back to his room, he reminded himself he wasn’t in any hurry. No one can see what you’re carrying, he reminded himself as he intentionally slowed his pace so that he didn’t seem suspicious.
No one cared what he did at this point. He was sure that the more he stayed out of Master Harrin’s wiry gray hair, the more the man appreciated him. As long as Simon was carving something, painting something, or studying something, no one seemed to care what he did anymore. That was the only real benefit to losing his hand; except for Varten, no one saw him as a real knight anymore.
For once, he appreciated that casual bigotry, but didn’t attempt to push his luck by reading, or even taking a peek at his new book, where someone might see. Instead, he waited until he was alone. Then he unwrapped his fake book like a present to reveal his first illicit read.
“All Roads End, huh? Tell me something I don’t know,” Simon said with a sigh, as he looked at the cover of the thin, nondescript tome.
If anything, he was a little disappointed by it. He’d hoped for something grander, but it did tell him one thing immediately. The books in the man's collection were alphabetized. There was no way he would have grabbed a book that started with A any other way.
Anyone anal-retentive enough to alphabetize their magic library will certainly notice if I put them back wrong, he told himself as he opened the book and started to read. So I need to watch that.
The book was more philosophy than magic. In fact, he didn’t find a single word of power among its pages. He did see them in some of the delicate illustrations, though. The unnamed author contended that magic was everywhere, all around everyone, at all times.
Simon couldn’t argue with that, but the fact that he saw the words of power as emergent properties of the world interested him. He’d always believed that they were the result of evil leaking up from hell, or perhaps the meddling of demons, but the person who wrote the book and drew the pictures argued that it was the will of the gods leaking into the world in the simplest of ways.
He showed Delzam in the shape of a leaf, and Meiren in a perfect sunset. “Knowledge is around us, at all times,” he said many times, in different variations, “but we are too blind to see the power of simplicity.”
That’s what the book was about, more or less. That all roads lead to the same place, and that was a mastery of the divine. It contained many illustrations showing images of shapes in nature that almost looked like magic words of power, and claimed that with enough introspection, all words could be deduced in such a way.
Simon didn't quite believe that and thought this was meant to be a coded way of passing down knowledge. Indeed, there were several pictures where the theoretical word that was depicted didn't jump out at him, indicating there might be something new to learn, and he studied those pages intensely to try to decipher their secrets.
It was told in a series of travelogs and fables, along with a riddle or two he was sure the Oracle would have been happy to use in the right conversation. Simon smiled at the thought and noted them down so he could tell them to her the next time he saw her.