Chapter 181: Days Go By
Simon had not noticed Aaric’s arrival, but after he saw the girl, he started to look for the young man. It only took a few dinners to find that he had become a squire in the service of an older brother. That allowed him to line up his timeline between the levels a little better, but it also helped him regain interest in what was going on in the outside world.
Though he’d occasionally gotten involved in some of the minor mysteries and petty power struggles that typified this strange place, he’d mostly lost interest in the outside world as he’d focused on ever more detailed handiwork and learned more complicated metalworking techniques. Never in his life did Simon think that he would learn about the ins and outs of various forms of annealing and quenching to get just the right properties from metal, but here he was. Worse, knowing what he knew now, he could see just how much there was to learn. It was a humbling thing for him to realize that one could spend a lifetime learning a skill and still not know all there was to know about it.
Life is basically the opposite of a video game in that sense, he decided, which was funny because crafting, as it turned out, was addictive. It was even more addictive than learning, and it was as close to playing a good game as he’d found so far in the pit, and he lost years of his life exploring those delicate techniques.
Familiar faces, though, that was new, and for the first time in a long time, it was enough to make him set down his hammers, files, and his ever-expanding sheaf of notes and poke around a bit in the outside world. As it turned out, very little had changed except for the women he saw at the evening meal.
Sisters were not often seen for long because, as he’d noted previously, whisperers were used up rather quickly by the needs of the Unspoken. One could see them around the compound, it was just hard to see the same one for more than a few months or years. It took only a few missions to turn a sweet young girl into a crone because they bled out their entire life just to stop a hedge wizard or two. That was a high price to pay to stop a man who was experimenting with things that the unspoken didn’t want anyone to know.
He’d seen the two of them talking in the courtyard on more than one occasion. While romance was forbidden by the Whitecloaks, it sometimes happened among the junior members of the order. Simon had never seen any harm in it, though he had seen members of both sexes punished very publicly on more than one occasion. He was sure that the two of them would get together and escape soon enough.
However, Simon eventually decided to intervene anyway. It was just his nature at this point. He couldn’t simply trust that they would get away as they always had before; he might have already screwed that up in some small way. One day, when no one was looking, he placed a short tract on the nature of the whisperer problem in young Aaric’s cell so that the boy could become better acquainted with the costs of the cult he’d joined.
The document was something that Simon had read years before, and technically, it was secret from junior members of the order, but he didn’t care. He supposed that it wouldn’t be too hard to trace it back to him, but that didn’t bother him too much, either.
He’d long since prepared a self-destruct switch in the form of a sharp-edged amulet that he wore. He hadn’t shared the design with any of his peers, and no runes were visible on its polished brass surface, but the thing would be more than sufficient to blow his head off with a word of fire if he cut himself on it and bled a bit.