Death After Death

At first, it was hard for Simon to put his finger on it. It was little things, but eventually, he decided that the real problem with the Grandmaster’s soul was that the colors of the emotions were wrong. They were just a little twisted compared to everyone else. It would have been easier to notice if he'd seen the man more than a brief moment every few weeks.

His happiness seemed to be shades of red instead of green, and his annoyance or anger flickered yellow or brown. Simon didn’t have a chance to dive into the details until an annual prayer service a month or so later. That gave Simon a chance to drill deep into the Grandmaster’s soul.

What he found there was poison. Memories of murder and magic dominated, and as Simon forced himself to look beyond the edge of what he was capable of, he very nearly fainted. He came away shaken.

The man is a sociopath, he decided after the experience. Suddenly, everything made sense. His aura was bright, not because he did good, but because he enjoyed whatever it was he was up to. It was the perfect disguise for an order of men who were trained from their earliest years to associate light with goodness.

What that was was an open question. He didn’t seem to be doing any killing or anything obviously malicious. According to the other knights, the Grandmaster hadn’t taken the field in years and rarely left the castle. He’d served for as long as anyone remembered, though there were several leaders who predated him in the records.

There were no good paintings of the previous Grandmasters, but Simon managed to track down a couple of sketches and a tapestry, and to him, it seemed like they had a bit of a family resemblance. It wasn’t advertised as a hereditary position, but that didn’t mean anything. Simon was always discovering new wrinkles in how the Whitecloaks did things.

Simon pored through the history of the order as much as he could, relying on books whenever possible to keep his questions, and therefore suspicions, to a minimum. Mostly, though, he didn’t learn anything new. They were a religious order of witchhunters. That’s what they’d always been. They were secretive, devout, and had ties to the nation that he didn’t fully understand, but none of that helped him understand why the Grandmaster of the order was a mage. If he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes in a past life, he would have never discovered it.

Simon only took breaks from that when Varten returned. Each time the boy re-entered his life, he set aside his investigation and enjoyed their time together, which made for a nice change of pace. He listened patiently as the boy explained his latest scar or told the story of his most recent adventure, and the whole time he grew and grew.

Most importantly, though, Simon could detect none of the cruelty he expected to blossom at some point. Instead, he was rapidly becoming a decent and even noble warrior.

That only stands to reason since he was born into nobility, Simon reminded himself.

Still, even those efforts couldn’t delay his investigations forever, and eventually, he struck paydirt when he found an ancient map of the castle that had become the Broken Tower tucked away in a disused corner of the library.

It stuck out to him because the book had been tucked away underneath a pile of scrolls related to northern heraldic coats of arms and related border disputes, but had nothing to do with any of that. The book itself was about the history of the Langdon family that once occupied this place before they lost their fortunes generations before because of a war, and the revelation that one of their patriarchs was in league with dark powers.

None of that mattered to Simon, and he leafed through those pages quickly. What mattered were the sketched maps of the castle in its prime. It showed areas he knew of, which weren’t common knowledge, but it also showed areas that he hadn’t been aware of at all. According to his yellowed pages, there was an entire building complex that was no longer there, where the sparring courtyard was. More interesting, though, was the tunnel that looped through the outer walls that he might conceivably reach that basement with.

While he was interested in the idea that some of those basements might still exist, he tempered his enthusiasm. “They might have nothing to do with the Grandmaster,” he sighed, as he used a mirror to copy the pages before returning the book to its hiding place.

More than most, Simon knew that this broken-down old castle had layers of secrets within secrets. The location was a secret to the outside world, and known only to the brothers, but they knew little of what the Whisperers did in the cloisters, and nothing at all about the black library or the secret forges that lay beneath the dilapidated main hall. Further, just because Simon had seen all those places across multiple lives didn’t mean that he’d seen everything there was to see.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

You didn’t know that Cassandra existed until this life, he reminded himself as he moved on elsewhere in the library to avoid drawing any suspicion. Who knows what secrets are still kept from you?

It took several fruitless days of casual, deniable searching before Simon found an accessible entrance to the curtain wall tunnel system hidden behind an old tapestry that showed a castle on fire. That was an exciting discovery, but he was glad that he’d avoided using dowsing to locate it, because once he was in there, he forced his heart to still, and then he looked for the threads of fate to decide the best way through.

Which way am I most likely to be discovered? he wondered, studying the dark tunnels in both directions as the threads made themselves known. Which way will I discover what I’m looking for? Where will I find the Grandmaster’s secrets?

Each of these questions showed him a slightly different path, and it was the third one that he selected. He moved with padded feet and the wand of ruin that he hoped he wouldn’t need at the ready, and moved into the dark without so much as a candle.

Simon couldn’t see in the dark, but he could see where he would trip if he stepped, which amounted to much the same thing. So as the darkness enveloped him, he moved slowly and carefully, paying attention to every flicker. It was a strange way to navigate, and he wished he could study the walls for any clues about where he might be going.

Unfortunately, he had no way of knowing who might be ahead, and if there were any guards, they’d see light long before they saw him. Still, despite hearing the sounds of distant footsteps more than once, he saw a light before he stumbled upon anyone.

That light turned out to be from a study, somewhere below the earth. He couldn’t say exactly where he was, but it was about where he’d expected to find the old basement. The door was ajar, but Simon didn’t open it more, because he could hear the sound of pages turning within, followed by a yawn.

He froze then and waited a long time, breathing silently and shallowly. His fear made it hard to focus his vision, but he could see one aura in the room, and after a little time, it resolved to the familiar miscolored aura of the man he’d been studying for so long: the Grandmaster of the Unspoken.

From where he was, Simon couldn’t see the man or what he was reading, but he didn’t try to force the issue. Instead, he studied the fringes of his aura for half an hour, gleaning what he could before the man got up and stretched.

“Time to call it a day, I suppose,” he said, closing his book with a heavy thud, which told Simon how thick it was.

In that moment, Simon froze, worried he was about to come right for him. He thought about running, though that would be hard to do in the dark with such a small head start.

He didn’t panic, and instead tried to see the route that the Grandmaster planned to walk. When it pointed away from him, Simon suppressed the sigh of relief and waited for the man to depart. He took his time, extinguishing most of the candles before he left, and then he walked out another door and away from the room.

The man left a small oil lamp burning when he left, and when he was gone far enough that Simon could no longer hear his footsteps, he crept inside. There, he didn’t see anything particularly evil or incriminating. Other than its hidden location, so far from where the Grandmaster was normally found, he might have mistaken it for a normal office. Still, Simon only needed to peruse the names of the tomes on the nearest bookshelf to see that they were wrong.

Every book listed was a dread work of magic. A few names he was familiar with, but most of them were unfamiliar to him.

“You knew he used magic,” Simon whispered to himself as a chill ran down his spine while he investigated. “Why should this surprise you?”

Objects didn’t have auras, so he couldn’t use his sight to help him locate subtle clues, but still, he was putting together a pretty convincing picture. That was made more complete when he reached the man’s desk and looked at the book he’d left closed on it. Other volumes had all been named. Englton’s Dark Path, The Book of Dread Names, and Colven’s Grimoire all stood out on the shelf, but what stood out here was the lack of a name. This, along with the blank pages toward the end, marked it as the Grandmaster’s personal journal cum grimoire.

Simon dared to flip through it, but little more than that. Something about being where he was, and finding what he’d found, was making his hair stand up on end.

Tempted as he was to take the book and run, Simon told himself, “You don’t have to figure it all out today. You can always come back.”

He turned to leave, resolving to do just that, but stopped short. There, on the wall, was a giant framed painting of the Grandmaster. At least, that’s what Simon had assumed it would be.

The resemblance was striking, but they seemed more like relatives than the same man. The inscription on the plaque bore that out and named the subject as Alspeth Langdon.

At first, the name meant nothing to Simon. He had no way of knowing the name of the Whitecloak’s leader. However, when he remembered where he’d heard that name before, he paled and quickly retreated as the pieces clicked into place.

The Langdons were supposed to be dead and gone decades ago. If one still lingered, well. He might be a distant relation, but something about the way the eyes were painted told Simon it was the same man, despite the superficial differences. There were only so many ways that could happen, and all of them involved magic.