Death After Death

Three months after he’d had the Tome of Bahgmorrda taken away from him, the librarian returned it. Apparently, that was because it was written in five different languages, and the crude cipher worked differently on each of them. Simon had barely noticed that fact, but the person that they’d had working on it since was having great difficulties with translating it.

‘We’ll be relying on you to make continued progress,’ read the note that the Head Librarian gave him with it.

Simon nodded and made all the gestures that he would do his best on it, but he wasn't really interested in it anymore. Truthfully, translating the whole thing, line by line, would take months, or maybe even a year, and his time would be better spent reading new books to pass on. He didn’t have a choice in the matter. So, instead, he got to work.

Even though he didn’t really get anything out of it, there was something very zen about sitting in a library filled with other men who could not speak, scribbling away in the quiet as he attempted to make his writing as beautiful and readable as possible.

Simon had terrible penmanship for most of his lives. It was only after reading so many barely legible scrawls or awkwardly crabbed writing and trying hard to puzzle out its meaning over his last few lives that he’d tried to improve that small but important aspect himself. He hadn’t even used cursive since he was a child, but with every page he transcribed, he did his best to improve. The result after a few hours was something close to a trance.

He could think much faster than his pen could move while he tried to create something clean and clear that bordered on calligraphy. As a result, he had more than enough time to consider how each line might be reworded. For a time, he used that extra time to think about how he might clarify or obscure the meaning of the words. After all, he wanted to preserve knowledge, but he didn’t necessarily want the white cloaks to have it. It was a conundrum, but in the end, eventually, he opted to write largely what was written while he used that extra time to ponder the nature of magic. Nôv(el)B\\jnn

That was mostly all he did anymore. Even his initial fervor for spending his spare time in the fighting yards slowly faded, and those workouts became less and less frequent. It wasn’t because he didn’t want to be in better shape or anything; it was because the nature of what he reflected on consumed him.

Each night, after work but before dinner, he would go on walks around the walls to try to clear his mind. He tried to think about Elthena and his son or daughter, who was not yet born. Sometimes he even reflected on other things, like the dragon, and what the point of that strange level was. However, invariably, those were forgotten in favor of questions about the nature of magic more and more as time went on. Eventually, it bordered on obsession, as strange symbols and words would dance in front of his eyes later that night while he tried to sleep.

In time, only the occasional words and shouts of the white cloaks intruded on his peace. Mostly, he could tune these out because people rarely asked him questions about what he was working on directly. He’d succeeded in fading into the background.

Sometimes, though, that solitude became impossible, such as the day that a patrol came back to the Broken Tower all but annihilated by zombies north of Schwarzenbruck. That was enough to pique Simon’s interest, and while they built a war party to counter the threat, he listened in to the talk. For a few days after the survivors came back it was all anyone talked about. Even the library wasn’t completely silent as commanders and other members visited, looking for more information about what it was they faced.

At times, it bordered on the apocalyptic. Though the leaders tried to downplay the threat, in private, many whispered that it was a sign of the end of the world and a fulfillment of the prophecies. However, through all of the chaos and panic, Simon mostly just smiled to himself. He knew that by the time the men they were assembling made it back to Schwarzenbruck, they’d find nothing at all to fight, thanks to him.

That didn’t stop him from leaping at the chance to dig through the section of the archive that dealt with necromancy and the dead when the Abbott came down and gave them all new orders. “Though all of your work is vital,” he explained to them sourly. “Right now, the urgent takes priority over the important. Effective immediately, all other research will cease, and we will focus solely on the dead and the foul necromancers that raise them until our expeditionary force departs.”

Simon didn’t mind those instructions at all. He was over a hundred pages into his grimoire, and it had long since become an exercise in patience and penmanship rather than anything scholarly. He was more than happy to see if he could find some bit of lore or information that could help the order in the trials to come. Unfortunately, all he ever found for them was remarkably unhelpful, though he didn’t share that with anyone.

For the next week, Simon dutifully copied down and delivered significant amounts of information, even if his experience told him it was nonsense. He recorded an entry that explained the proper prayers that would put the dead back into their graves, noting that they contained no words of power. After that, Simon translated a document that explained how a zombie could be stilled once more by driving a stake through its heart. He even relayed the old wives' tale that he’d heard so many times before about how the bites of a zombie could be cleansed with salt and ashes.

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It’s too bad they’re unlikely to actually find zombies by the time they get back, he told himself. Because I’d love to see how they fare with all this knowledge.

In the end, over a hundred people, including sworn brothers, acolytes, and whisperers, set off to save the world, and Simon’s time in the necromantic archives came to an end. Still, it wasn’t a total loss for him. In that time, he learned that Gelthic had an association with death, and thanks to one particularly gruesome story about a necromancer that sought to have an army erupt from the graveyard around him, Simon learned that Uuvellum could also be used as a modifier in the form of anti-.

In this case, the man had attempted to cast a spell of greater antilife with Gervuul Uuvellum Meiren. He’d succeeded too, but according to the witch hunter who found his corpse once the battle had done, the man had been reduced to nothing but a shriveled corpse that was halfway mummified by the dark magics he used.

Simon spent several days trying to figure out what might have happened to cause that effect, assuming the document was entirely accurate. In the end, he decided it wasn’t that the greater word had burned too much vitality or that the caster had botched the spell by mispronouncing something. Instead, he was fairly sure that the caster had used the spell over a large area that he himself had been standing in. So, while all of the dead were infused with the antilife as he’d intended, he was as well.

It would be like casting a fireball and centering it on yourself, he decided, almost certain that was what occurred. He imagined he’d try it at some point, too. He wouldn’t be able to see what it did to him, of course, but it would be a fairly painless suicide if he ever needed one of those.

Simon enjoyed little riddles like that and looked forward to the day when he’d finished the grimoire that he was working on. As it turned out, though, he never got the chance. Not long after the expeditionary force returned and declared the zombie menace to be eradicated after taking suspiciously few losses despite the heroic and unlikely stories that circulated, two of his brothers in the library died under mysterious circumstances.

The first to go had been the archivist in charge of the section on demonology. All they’d found of him was a boot with a foot still in it, which was fairly horrifying, even for someone as jaded as Simon. A few days later, though, while an inquisitor was investigating, he also vanished. The second man's disappearance wasn’t quite so subtle. There was a brief explosion when it happened, but by the time the first people arrived in the reading room, the only sign that anyone had been in there was a spray of blood on one of the walls and a stack of books on the desk.

At first, the worries were that one of the men that had come home had gone crazy or been replaced with a warlock or worse. The entire compound was locked down for the better part of a week. Simon didn’t mind that; he spent his time sitting in his cell contemplating what might have happened, but he didn’t have information to say one way or the other.

After that, they started interviewing everyone who’d been in or near the library on either occasion, moving Simon much closer to the top of the list of suspects. He wasn’t concerned. Even if they decided to execute him for some crazy reason, this sort of weirdness was exactly the reason he was here.

“Do you have any idea what happened to Archivists Malen or Shroud?” the inquisitor asked when he was escorted into the small room where questioning was taking place.

Instead of picking up the provided quill and ink, Simon simply shook his head. That was obviously the wrong answer because the man’s face reddened slightly at it.

“Are you taking this seriously, Ennis?” the man asked a little more forcefully. “People have died. Someone is to blame!”

‘They were both reading the same book when they died.’ Simon wrote finally. It wasn’t a question. He wasn’t sure, of course, but after thinking about it for days, he realized it was his best answer to this locked room mystery. No one had done it. Instead, a particularly dangerous book in the collection had, he just didn’t know how.

The man’s eyes narrowed as he looked at him silently for several seconds. Then he said, “How do you know that?”

‘I don’t know.’ Simon admitted in a quick flourish. ‘Just a guess.’

“Pretty damn good guess,” the man grumbled as he reached into a bag by his feet and pulled out a particularly evil tome. The thing was bound in dark leather and had no title. If Simon had been a betting man, he would have said the thing was human skin, but he couldn’t say for sure without a closer explanation. “Have you seen this before?”

Simon answered with a shake of his head. He’d remember a book like that.

“So you didn’t see it before, but you know that it killed them?” the inquisitor tried again. “How does that work?”

‘I’ve been translating a grimoire for months,’ Simon responded. ‘Ask the Head Librarian.’

“We already have,” the other man nodded. “But now you’re on this instead.”

‘Why me?’ Simon protested in one quick line, frowning that he’d smudged the ink on the y because he was in too much of a hurry.

“Because you were the only one to guess it had to do with a book,” the man answered smugly. “I’ve been through it myself, and though I can’t read all of it, I’m hoping you have better luck.”

Simon sighed and then nodded. There was no point in fighting this because he knew he wouldn’t win.

On the plus side, it beats transcribing any more of the Tome of Bahgmorrda, he told himself. That was soft-pedaling this more than a little bit, though, he noted grimly. If he wasn’t careful, this could definitely be one of those deaths that wasn’t just a death.