Chapter 180: Small Details
Simon was as taken aback by those words as he was by the new assignment they were giving him. He was being transferred from the library to the forbidden vaults, which were in a dank section of the ruined castle two floors below where he’d been serving so far.
That was a far cry from the execution he’d expected, but the truth was even stranger than that. At first, he thought his new duties would be similar to his old ones. He’d just be translating artifacts instead of books. He would kill for that opportunity since that was one skill he desperately wanted to improve after the severe case of frost burn he’d gotten from the armor he’d spent so much time making.
What he found was more than that. However, he only learned that after he was made to take yet more oaths.
The Unspoken seemed obsessed with them. They made him sign a document in blood, swearing that any betrayal would be met with the most painful of all afterlives. After that, he had to swear eternal service to the order. They also made him swear not to tell any sworn brother what it was he learned from this point forward and that he would only speak freely with the inquisitors from now on, which struck him as both tantalizing and suspicious.
Simon wasn’t impressed or intimidated by any of that, though he did have to admit that the pageantry associated with the whole thing was rather impressive, especially in a shadowy cathedral. He could see how much all of this would impact him if he’d really been a young scholar with a hard life.
It was only when those rituals and blood oaths and the fasting associated with each of them were complete that the truth was finally revealed. The senior members of the unspoken used magic items. He’d already suspected this from his time with Aaric, of course, but now he knew for a certainty.
They weren’t quite standard issue, but they weren’t exactly uncommon, either, but they had an armory full of them, based on the principles of items they’d found or seized from warlocks, and now his job was to help make more of them.
“There’s no evil on this,” the inquisitor assured him as he showed Simon around the secluded workshops. “These items are blessed, and in this way, we use the strength of the enemy against them.”
While that logic made a twisted sort of sense, it also made the Unspoken giant hypocrites, which bothered him even more than their misguided crusade against magic. He wasn’t about to make any waves about it, though. Not in this life. Just from the quality of the tools and the complexity of the patterns, he knew he was going to learn a lot here.