Death After Death

While Simon had believed Sir Rozman when the man had said there would be an investigation, he was taken off guard by the aftermath of his actions upon his return. Simon had been hoping to find a chance to read the grimoire that had been found on the path back, or at least upon their return, but he never got the chance.

Instead, they arrived at the Broken Tower a little before sunset, and all surviving members of the party were bundled off for a debrief. There was some praise at first, certainly, but the treatment of those among them who'd been touched by the demon was far different than those who had not. No one of any importance even shook Simon’s hand, or even got within arm's reach of him.

“You have done as fine a service as could be asked of any knight on their first mission,” the master that they’d reported to told him in front of anyone, just before he was taken away.

Simon wasn’t even given the chance to feast or celebrate with everyone else before he was isolated. The only delay involved a cleansing ritual that had left his skin scrubbed red and raw; it had more in common with torture than with a bath. The squire he’d rescued was taken aside, too, though Simon didn’t see where he’d been taken after he was similarly cleansed.

After that, the days sort of bled together, and he was forced to fast for a day before he was given soup and water “to cleanse and purify his troubled soul.” Simon didn’t mind that so much, at least at first; he doubted dietary restrictions did anything to the soul with the possible exception of cannibalism, but he appreciated the effort.

For a moment, he’d feared he was going to be tortured, or worse, because they’d somehow decided he was a warlock, but he was way off there. The three men who questioned him didn’t ask about any of that, except for the first time they asked for his personal account and wrote everything down. He recognized one of the three as a Black Library archivist, which made him a little nostalgic, and the second was a knight who didn’t volunteer his name, leaving only the third one’s identity a mystery.

After the initial questioning and account, they went back through what he’d said, digging into every little detail, especially where a demon was concerned. It would have been easy to get annoyed at this, but Simon tried to remember who’d survived a fight with a demon, and he would have asked them a million questions, too.

“What was it like in the belly of the beast?” was something they found a hundred different ways to ask him. What did it smell like? What else did you see in there? Could you feel the presence of hell? They asked him for so many details that eventually Simon volunteered to draw it just to get them to move on.

He spent two days on the sketch, using ink and charcoal on a large piece of fine vellum to create the hazy, ethereal look that he remembered from using his sight. That made hard, defined lines almost nonexistent in his illustration. He reserved those for the squire he’d saved, along with the other debris he’d found in the body of the worm. Everything else he built up from shading and hatching.

The end result was monstrous, and though he was proud of it, he could understand the looks of revulsion that his questioners gave upon viewing it. When they rolled it up and bundled it off, he wondered whether it would be burned or end up filed away forever in the black library.

Once that was done, the second round of questioning focused on his soul. Did Simon feel tainted by it? Could he feel its presence even now? Had he made a pact of some kind with it?

Simon rejected all of that, of course. The clothes he’d been wearing when the thing swallowed him whole were ruined, and the armor would need a good scouring to remove the rust and bile, but his mind and soul? They’d come through without a blemish so far as he could tell.

When that conversation was concluded on the fifth day of his isolation, he expected they were nearly done with this charade, which was good, because his glacial patience was starting to reach its limits. He was tired of this dusty hall and this cold stone floor, and the sounds of normalcy that came to him from the outside called to him. Unfortunately, that’s where the conversation took a turn for the strange, and the questioners lingered on how they found the demon in the first place.

“It’s quite a coincidence that you found the house where the demon had been summoned and then the demon itself. How do you suppose that happened?” one of the men asked. “Did you find the demon, or did it find you?”

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“I didn’t find it,” Simon said quite honestly. “It was Sir Harvin who lifted the rug, and Sir Harvin who blew his horn to summon the other knights. I didn’t know what we’d found until Sir Rozman showed up.”

That last part was a lie, but they didn’t call him on it. Instead, all three of his questioners took turns asking him what the demon had tried to tempt him with.

“Money? Power? Women? What blandishments did it offer you?” another of the inquisitors repeated for the third time, but Simon shook it off.

“The thing spoke no words to me before or after it devoured me,” Simon insisted. “My partner found its summon circle, and I was attacked instead of the other knights because I wandered furthest from the light. There is no great mystery to the story beyond that.”

Though all three of the men didn’t seem to believe him, he was finally released on the seventh day, which seemed to be some kind of deadline in the process, though they didn’t explain that to him. In the end, they didn’t even render him a verdict like a proper court. He was simply given a litany of prayers to be recited each night to keep the darkness at bay and told, “If you have any troubling dreams or urges, you are to report them at once.”

Like hell I will, Simon thought, even as he agreed and left.

So they’ve got seven days to decide whether to burn me at the stake or not, Simon reflected as he went to the mess hall for some real food. Fasting for a week on broth and water had taken a toll, and he was all too happy to put that behind him.

It only dawned on Simon halfway through his second bowl of stew that everyone was treating him totally different now than they had before he’d left for his little adventure. Then, most of the other knights had been standoffish at best. That tense atmosphere had all but vanished in the face of exuberance as grown men sat down at his table and pestered him for details like excited young squires.

Simon was not a new knight now. He was not the oldest Unspoken squire anymore. Now he was the demon slayer, and the tone of their questions was entirely different from what the inquisitors' had been. There was little in the way of suspicion, of even attempts to get useful information from him. Instead, they focused on the danger and glory, which was exactly what he would have suspected from warriors.

Simon was only too happy to give them what they wanted, and as he finished eating, his answers became longer and more dramatic as he described facing down the shadow worm and unraveling the mystery of what must have happened in the belly of the beast. Though he repeated the lie that it was prayer that slew the thing, he described in detail the way he tried to slay it with his sword.

“That did little more good than it would to hack away at a fog bank, though,” he explained as a dozen knights and half as many squires hung on his every word.

Demons were not a common thing to encounter, which he knew, but the men he was telling the story to made sure that he knew how rare it was to survive such a thing. “For every ten knights that meet a witch, maybe five come back,” one man with a droopy mustache explained. “For demons? Well, nine die for sure, but the tenth? That’s a coin flip.”

Simon didn’t feel like he was particularly lucky to have survived. He just understood the threat. If he could have, he would have explained to everyone how he’d really beat the thing, but of course, then he’d be the one burned at the stake.

When Simon asked where they were off to next, Sir Rozman sent him back to Sir Kulthen, who informed him it was back to the library. “Your devout heart might have saved you from the clutches of one demon, but it will take knowledge, and plenty of it, if you hope to repeat that trick.”

Simon didn’t disagree with that stance even a little and was happy to return to the reading and sparring, especially given how much friendlier his fellow knights had become. Even as he returned to his usual routine of study in the days that followed, he reflected on the nature of the demon.

Most of those that he’d dealt with until now had looked like humans, at least at first. Though the books he read that mentioned them didn’t sort them by the way they looked, Simon started to categorize them in his mind. Demons were anything that hell vomited up.

He supposed there were probably lesser and greater varieties within that category. If there were worms, there could just as easily be dragons or hellhounds after all. For the ones that spoke and thought like men, though, he started thinking of those strictly as devils. Up until now, he used the words interchangeably, just as most texts on the subject did, but he vowed to change that.

One day I’ll put out a guide to all of this myself, he decided as he continued to read the manual on the hunting of werewolves he was trying and failing to memorize. I’ll make a neat little book and send out copies across the world so people can solve this problem themselves.

It was easy enough to say, of course, but it wouldn’t be much harder to actually do. The really tricky part, he decided, would be to make sure that he didn’t let any truly dangerous knowledge slip in the process. After all, he didn’t want to write a book on defusing bombs that taught people the best way to build them by accident.