Death After Death

Chapter 401 - A Man of Constant Sorrow

Wildon, as the stranger eventually was persuaded to introduce himself, didn’t calm down until the three of them were eating. Even then, he never relaxed completely, but it was enough that he could tell his tale of woe to them. To Simon, it sounded like the plot of a bad comedy.

One day, he was just a normal merchant, moving from village to village. “I’d buy carded wool from the shepherds along the Raiden mountains, then bring it to the lowlands and sell it for wheat and beer, then go down to the coast and sell it for a profit before I repeat the trip again. But then, after I met that crone, everything changed,” he told them, before going into his tale of woe.

Apparently, he’d offended a customer when she’d tried to haggle him down with the quality of his wool, and according to him, she’d cursed him. While that sounded like normal enough behavior to Simon, he really had no way of knowing, and as the man was actually cursed, it did lend a great deal of credibility to his story.

Cursed really was the right word, too. It would have been tempting to think the man was exaggerating. However, as they traveled they had constant problems along the way, which made everything he’d said more believable. First were the goblin attacks. Almost every night Wildon slept at their camp, their sleep was interrupted by goblins.

Normally, the pests were rare enough and skittish enough that they wouldn’t approach two or three people unless they’d picked an overgrown campsite with an easy approach.

Even a bare field and a watchman didn’t deter these groups, though, and on the third night of their trip, Varten got a second kill to his name, which made Simon proud even though he did the lion’s share of the fighting. Wildon didn’t do much but cower. That wasn’t the only misfortune he brought to them, either.

Simon’s horse threw a shoe on a bad road, and near constant rains all conspired to slow them down. Still, they made steady progress toward their destination. Simon expected to find the witch he was looking for in the village of Drummond. He’d never been there before, but it wasn’t so far south of Ordenvale that it hadn’t ended up on Simon’s maps. They almost shared the same woods; only a river cut between them.

There was no witch to be found there, though. The woman that Wildon had fingered as the culprit was dead. However, there were plenty of witch marks present to show the problem was even bigger than Simon feared. They weren’t even leeching luck from everyone like they were from Wildon.

The culprit was stealing beauty from a couple of other women, and health from several more men, along with other, more esoteric things. One man who’d been sleeping almost continuously for months had a mark that was draining his wakefulness. A spiritual infestation was taking place here, and no one understood why.

Simon had planned to bring the village together for a frank discussion, but they did that without prompting, begging him for aid as soon as word of his white cloak spread. They knew something was wrong, but they just didn’t know what. So, before he questioned them, he led them all in a prayer to make them feel at ease. That wouldn’t do as much good for them as drawing a symbol of greater nullification and canceling all their curses, but then, as a Whitecloak, he didn’t really have that option.

Patience, Simon, he cautioned himself. Finding the culprit will cure them just as easily. Afterwards, he asked those who had been affected when the symptoms of their curses had started and who they thought was to blame.

The villagers were obviously surprised that he unerringly approached those who were most affected without being given any details, but that didn’t help them to give him any answers that were helpful. They could describe their symptoms well enough. He could see those branded on their soul, though. What they couldn’t tell him was who had done it.

Oh, every last one of them had ideas. The kindly young baker who’d apparently been the most beautiful woman in the village the year before was a withered old crone who looked twice as old as her mother. She said it was a peddler who had come through town. Others remembered him, but had nothing to say about him.

Another said it was the old widow Spence who had cursed her man, but even after the town had banded together and burned down her house, the symptoms had persisted. Everyone was certain of who had done this to them, but none of them agreed.

Simon made a mental note of each suspect, but wouldn’t have been surprised if it was none of them at all. Some of the suspects were local and quickly ruled out. Others were strangers who had passed through with no information about where to find them next.

That would be the most dangerous sort of witch, he quickly decided, remembering Aranna’s experiences. Not one who preys off the same people day in and day out, but one that moves around from place to place, leaching as she goes.

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There were probably limits to that. He knew for a fact that the word of distance had its limitations, but they had to be close enough to here, and to the place where Wildon had been cursed and where they’d ultimately found him. Simon drew a simple map from memory and studied those three points, creating overlapping circles until he found a point where they all intersected.

“That’s where we’ll search next,” Simon told his squire after the village smith had reshoed his horse.

For the second leg of their trip, they left behind their bad luck charm and continued together so they could move faster. Simon considered using a divination technique to verify they were going the right way, but he didn’t want to do that too often in front of Varten. He was a perceptive child, and the more that Simon flirted with tools he shouldn’t have, the quicker he was likely to out himself as a sort of mage.

It turned out he didn’t need to, though; they didn’t even reach their destination before Simon noticed something disturbing. While their first two days trekking through the woods in the search of a witch they didn’t seem to be able to find were uneventful, they were also unproductive. Goblins and weather no longer assailed them at every turn, but there didn’t seem to be any hidden witch at the location he’d guessed.

“If they’re not here, then they’d have to be, what, wandering through the woods?” he asked himself, but that didn’t make a lot of sense. At least until he spotted the change in Varten.

Sometime between when they’d left the village of Drummond and now, the boy had been marked. This mark didn’t drain his health or his luck, though; it targeted his emotions with Eszloum, the word of soul.

Simon kept his cool. First, he checked himself and determined he had no nasty surprises. Then, he casually asked his squire what they should do next. Gradually, he bent the conversation toward retracing their steps in case they were being watched, but there was nothing unusual in the boy’s story, and Simon did nothing to let him know he’d been assaulted with a curse.

He was in no danger, and panicking him would only make it worse. Instead, Simon waited until they made camp for the night and Varten was asleep before he acted. He was angry that someone would dare to touch his squire, especially under his nose, but he was angrier at himself for not noticing it at the time.

Still, he pushed all of that anger away and forced himself to be calm. His vision was clearest when the waters of his soul were still, and the only way he was going to find the person who had done this was to see as clearly as possible.

Rather than run off into the forest immediately, he sat there in meditation for several minutes. Then, when he opened his eyes, the world was burning with life. Plants might not be good or evil, but they were alive, and as Simon looked from Varten to the forest, he could see the thread of fate that connected the boy to whatever had done this.

Then Simon started to move. Slow at first to make sure he didn’t lose the trail, and then faster as he went. The underbrush thickened, but so unevenly that it seemed almost like it was trying to lead him astray. It couldn’t do that, though. If this were a maze, then he could see the exit clearly at all times.

After half an hour of walking and jogging by turns, he felt a tingle and looked down to see someone had marked him. When he looked down, the witchmark was as clear as a brand or a tattoo against his glowing aura. Dnarth Weylera Zyvon.

That sent a chill through him. For a moment, he read it as a distant word of soul-stealing, but only because he almost never used the Weylera rune. It was common in Murani mechanisms and acted as a trigger, but he rarely saw the need to complicate things so much. Still, the meaning was strange, and he wasn’t quite sure what it was supposed to be stealing.

Regardless, it was a mistake. The witch had tied herself to Simon directly now, and escape was impossible. The path became clearer as he got closer, but when he finally reached his goal, there was no one there. It was just a grove. There was no house or cottage. There was no bubbling cauldron. He was alone.

Well, almost alone. There were fireflies that drew his eye. They were certainly an anomaly that meant something, but they only manifested into something more when he strolled through a ring of toadstools, and they began to glow.

At that moment, the world seemed to congeal. It didn’t quite freeze solid, but he could tell something had happened, and as he looked down at his feet, he could see the way the mycelium tendrils of the mushroom had linked together, forming a natural summoning circle of sorts. That made his blood run cold, but even as he started trying to decode the strange looping cursive ring, he heard a voice.

“I sample many men, but it is rare for any of them to see me or feel me, let alone find me,” it whispered.

Voice was the wrong word. It was no more a voice than grasshoppers rubbing their legs together was the chirp of a bird. What he was hearing was the sighing of the wind through the branches and the rustling of leaves. It was just done in such a way that it made words.

“If you do not release me and explain yourself, you’ll be the one feeling me soon enough,” Simon countered. He felt anger and fear surge up through him. This was new and unexpected, but he suppressed both feelings; emotions would only weaken him, and at this moment, he needed to see everything.

“You’ve placed a curse on me, and I want to know why,” Simon answered.

“As I said, to taste you,” the voice answered. This time, as it spoke, the fireflies came together closely enough that Simon could see their aura coagulate into the shape of a tall, slender man. There was no man there visually, but it was clear that a spirit lingered. “And since you’ve come all this way… Well, I might as well devour you completely, but that will take time. So why don’t we pass it by discussing how you found me…”