Death After Death

Chapter 174: Haystacks and Needles

After that encounter, Simon waited for the other shoe to drop for weeks. Even as he did, he still went through the motions, and carried on with business as usual. Well, he did his best to, at least. For a while, he was still jumping at his own shadows whenever a scroll fell off a shelf or a beggar he hadn’t noticed accosted him on the street for a few coppers.

That’s probably a good thing, though, he tried to convince himself. If I’m being watched, this is the sort of behavior that they’d want to see. It would take a much harder man than Ennis to shake off that kind of unexpected visit.

Even after the fear began fading, though, the confusion and curiosity lingered. He took measures to protect himself anyway. He’d been staying at the inn for too long. He’d grown used to its easy meals and the habit of coming home to a place that was already warm.

If people were watching him, though, and he was supposed to be afraid, or worse, hiding something, he should be making it harder for them. So, he used some of his growing savings to rent a small place that was closer to the library on the rickety third floor of an old building, and he made a point to be seen carrying notes home almost every night.

“Let them worry about what I might have found,” he told himself the next time he thought he was being followed.

Simon was sure that the more interesting he made himself to the white coats, the more likely he was to get a second visit from them. However, as the weeks passed and his cryptic notes swelled, that certainty began to wane. Nôv(el)B\\jnn

He’d started doing all sorts of paranoid things like leaving small stones by the doors and shutters as well as leaving papers in very specific orders. Despite all of those efforts, he’d never once come back to find that any of those things had been disturbed.

While he was initially annoyed that they’d intruded on his life on that first visit, slowly but surely, he grew more annoyed that they didn’t seem to be watching him after that. If I can’t cast spells, then there's no need to keep tabs on me, huh? He thought to himself as he continued his research. In that area, at least, he was making progress.

The haystacks were fairly obvious, at least. They were the city library that he’d spent so much time in over the last year, along with a few of the private collections he’d gained access to over that time.

The needles he was supposed to be seeking out, though. That was harder. They were clues of some sort, probably, but clues about what? Where were they hiding, and how would he know when he’d found them?

Simon asked himself that question with every new book he read. He looked for hidden meanings in the words and the symbols, checked the illuminated portions of the text for coded messages, and looked in the illustrations for details that most might miss. He was always searching for more. What that more was, he wasn’t exactly sure.

When he’d originally decided what he was going to do with this life, he’d always hoped that he’d stumbled upon a few words of power that he didn’t already know. The white cloaks had obviously thought of that, though. Given how easy it was for witches and warlocks to pass their powers to each other, they’d obviously gone to great lengths to make sure that didn’t happen.

Months passed like that, and though he still sold maps when he needed to and attended banquets when the opportunity would come up, there was no joy in it. Where once he’d enjoyed the fancy food and the chance to listen to the rumors of the day with those of importance in the city, he now only wondered who might be watching him at the dinner tables.

He wasn’t talking about his Patron anymore, of course, but they didn’t need to know that. Instead, the questions in his mind about the Unspoken multiplied. He could see what they were doing on every level now; he could even guess why. How, though, was more of an open question.

They didn’t seem to be a religious order in that he found their breadcrumbs related to several gods and goddesses. They didn’t exactly seem to be royalty, though, either.

As near as he could tell, history and scholarship were far less important here than they had been on Earth. He hadn’t even been in this town for two years, and he felt like he’d read half of the libraries he had access to at this point. Well, skimmed, at least, he corrected himself mentally.

His point still stood, though. Very little of what he read was actual scholarship. Instead, most books were either devoted to glorifying some King or Duke who had no doubt paid for their writing, or they were religious texts that were as much fiction as they were history.

It was in those religious texts that Simon finally found his first real loose thread. Religion wasn’t something he’d given a lot of thought to since coming to this world. That was largely because he found out that Helades wasn’t worshiped as a Goddess. No one had heard of her, though he supposed that it was possible that if he brought her up to the demon, it might know her name.

Everyone else, though, mostly worshiped whoever they wanted in their temples and churches, and those names largely varied by region and country. In Ionia, one god was responsible for lightning and thunderstorms, but in Brin, it was an entirely different woman who was the bringer of rains. The former was a war god, while the latter was the goddess of spring. It was conflicting enough that he felt sure in his decision that the mortals without magic had no idea what they were talking about.

However, since the religions were, by and large, the keepers of history, he still had to read their books. That was why when he was doing a read-through of the saints of Hypaltia, who was the goddess of winter in this region but the goddess of light and further north, he took note that there was no Saint Geregus listed.

That shouldn’t have been important, but it was because Simon was sure he’d seen references to that saint listed a dozen times in random places. He was sure because the man often went by another name, too: the Silent Saint.

Sure that such an oversight couldn’t be correct, Simon went through another volume by a different author and another after that. The story repeated itself. Those works were not written by any of the relevant religions, but that only intrigued him more because he could go back through his notes and find many places where victory had been associated with this nonexistent saint.

“This is the hint I’ve been waiting for,” he told himself, smiling as he slammed the book shut and shelved it.

He didn’t think it likely that the church had edited one of their own heroes out of existence. Instead, after reviewing his notes on the subject, Simon decided that it was far more likely that the saint was yet another stand-in for the white robes. This rabbit hole went deeper than doves, though. On occasion, after great victories, certain rituals would sometimes be discussed, and even what turned out to be a nonexistent feast day was mentioned.

This, Simon decided at long last, was the way in, at least for him. He was sure that an organization like the Unspoken had many ways to recruit. He was certain that neither Aaric nor Carelyn had been big readers. He wasn’t even sure they were literate at all, beyond the very basics. The day in question was coming up, and he would be ready.