Death After Death

Simon was as taken aback by those words as he was by the new assignment they were giving him. He was being transferred from the library to the forbidden vaults, which were in a dank section of the ruined castle two floors below where he’d been serving so far.

That was a far cry from the execution he’d expected, but the truth was even stranger than that. At first, he thought his new duties would be similar to his old ones. He’d just be translating artifacts instead of books. He would kill for that opportunity since that was one skill he desperately wanted to improve after the severe case of frost burn he’d gotten from the armor he’d spent so much time making.

What he found was more than that. However, he only learned that after he was made to take yet more oaths.

The Unspoken seemed obsessed with them. They made him sign a document in blood, swearing that any betrayal would be met with the most painful of all afterlives. After that, he had to swear eternal service to the order. They also made him swear not to tell any sworn brother what it was he learned from this point forward and that he would only speak freely with the inquisitors from now on, which struck him as both tantalizing and suspicious.

Simon wasn’t impressed or intimidated by any of that, though he did have to admit that the pageantry associated with the whole thing was rather impressive, especially in a shadowy cathedral. He could see how much all of this would impact him if he’d really been a young scholar with a hard life.

It was only when those rituals and blood oaths and the fasting associated with each of them were complete that the truth was finally revealed. The senior members of the unspoken used magic items. He’d already suspected this from his time with Aaric, of course, but now he knew for a certainty.

They weren’t quite standard issue, but they weren’t exactly uncommon, either, but they had an armory full of them, based on the principles of items they’d found or seized from warlocks, and now his job was to help make more of them.

“There’s no evil on this,” the inquisitor assured him as he showed Simon around the secluded workshops. “These items are blessed, and in this way, we use the strength of the enemy against them.”

While that logic made a twisted sort of sense, it also made the Unspoken giant hypocrites, which bothered him even more than their misguided crusade against magic. He wasn’t about to make any waves about it, though. Not in this life. Just from the quality of the tools and the complexity of the patterns, he knew he was going to learn a lot here.

That was even truer than Simon thought it would be. At first, he was underwhelmed as the silent man in charge put his calligraphy skills to use preparing blades for the acid etching process that they used to score perfect lines. This involved applying a clay mask everywhere they didn’t want to damage the metal. It was tedious work, but once it was complete, he could see why it was so important.

Simon already understood that the cleaner the line, the better the mana flowed, but that was further reinforced by feedback from the silent smiths. A shape that wasn’t perfect in execution had about the same effect as a word of power that wasn’t spoken perfectly. Either could alter the effect, increase the power required, or flub a spell entirely.

It was interesting work, and Simon thrived in his new environment even more than he had in the library. Once upon a time, he’d played many games where crafting had played a big part, but it had only been crafting it the same way that he used to consider using his mouse fighting.

This was infinitely more complicated than that. He’d never really made anything more complicated than assembling Swedish furniture with unpronounceable names during his time on Earth, and he didn’t realize how much he enjoyed it. There was something about the perfectionism and the slow process of watching a steel ingot become a long, slender blade that he found very satisfying.

Well, I probably wouldn’t have then, he realized.

With enough distance, it was easy enough to be honest about that. Back then, using an Allen wrench had been an insufferable ordeal, but now he didn’t even mind the hardest jobs, like fueling the forges or bumping the bellows for hour after hour, while more experienced men than him turned steel into blades.

For season after season, he soaked it in, and he admired every little technique that he learned. At first, he was mostly responsible for marking the blades, along with other simple things, like sharpening blades and assisting smiths.

However, even in those tasks, he learned a great deal. The chief example of that was the way that they refilled those acid-created channels with silver, making the runes both functional and nearly invisible because of how well the silver blended with the steel. Unless you knew exactly what you were looking for, you’d never see them.

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Sometimes, they had him translate and attempt to understand the way that new items worked if the language was rare or the symbols were too stylized for other people to work out since he had a good eye for that. Mostly, though, that was handled by more trusted, senior acolytes.

Still, the glimpses he got into various patterns and designs were fascinating. Many of them were so complicated that they made the frost sword that had been his major inspiration seem clumsy and primitive by comparison.

Still, he was inspired by many of the designs he saw, both in what they did and the way that they were fueled. The blades that they made all seemed to share a few traits; the first was that the effects were subtle. After all, it wouldn’t do to have the secret antimage society be seen wielding magical weapons all the time.

Simon was surprised that he hadn’t had to blot out more of those references in the books he’d seen, but then the common people really didn’t have any idea what magic was. If someone said a weapon was holy instead of witchcraft, then how were they supposed to know the difference? So, a lot of them had subtle glow effects or minor strengthening and healing effects for their wielder.

The purpose wasn’t to make the most powerful weapon but the most in-character weapon. Simon imagined that the rune blade that had briefly been in his possession worked in a similar fashion. Truthfully, he probably could have puzzled out how it had been built after so much exposure, but the second design element was what interested him more because he hadn’t seen it before.

Rather than being powered by the wielder or even the environment, all of their weapons were powered by their victim's life force via a simple rune circuit near the tip of the blade in the blood gutter. It was an ingenious design, and he studied it as much as he could without attracting attention because he was definitely going to copy it in the future.

The future was coming at him more quickly than he would have thought down there in the dark. Ever so slowly, he moved his way up from assisting those with the plans in the hammers to being the one to wield them under the observation of others.

The place was a small factory, and with all the slow, careful steps, nearly half of the final blades were rejected for some defect, but they still made several a month. That wasn’t all that they made, either. It was sometime in his second or third year when he graduated from forging to sand casting. Simon’s time at the anvil had made him strong, but there was no strength was needed for this.

Instead, it involved taking finished, nearly functional amulets that had been carved from wood that had all the proper runes and using them to create molds with sand. Once that happened, those molds were then filled with molten metal, which was usually silver but sometimes brass or gold, depending on what it was they were making. Most of the amulets they made were in the shape of holy symbols to further hide their true purpose. Simon had seen a couple of those explode while trying to carry out their purpose when he’d taken out that group of white cloaks a few lives ago, so he knew they had something to do with protection. At least, some of them did.

The Unspoken were more creative with their amulets than they were with their blades, and they had a whole array of uses. One category warned of undead or demonic taint nearby. Another attempted to shield the wearer from certain specified forces via boundary runes. According to their scant documentation on those, they only worked on spells of lesser power, which explained why a greater word had caused them to explode.

Even in the best case, though, they were fragile things. Most of those were rejected because of air bubbles, cracks caused by cooling, or other imperfections. Unlike the swords, this wasn’t a problem because the metal could just be melted down a second time for them to try again.

The amulets had no victims to power them, so instead, they stole essence from the surrounding world in a way that was similar to how he’d powered his armor with waste heat. The Unspoken used runes of order and connection to draw apparently free energy from the world, but Simon had been alive long enough to know that there was no such thing as a free lunch. Still, he couldn’t figure out what exactly they were siphoning away. It had to be something, though, because they obviously worked. He’d seen them in action.

Several times, early on, he tried to improve these objects by simplifying their shapes, but those who supervised him wouldn’t allow it. ‘Tradition demands it look this way,’ was what the notes that came back to him would say. ‘They are ceremonial objects first, and holy weapons second!’

Simon understood that, but he also knew that it was the complex shapes that caused so many of them to fail, not the runes themselves. A simple, flat amulet of bronze scored with runes that was then covered in a layer of silver or gold would have been a hundred times easier to mass produce. They could give one to every man wearing a white cloak in the space of a year.

Still, he didn’t fight this point too hard. Instead, he focused on learning every technique that a more experienced craftsman was willing to teach him. He rarely left that silent world after a while, except to sleep, and for a long time, nothing seemed to change but him as he slowly grew older. Brothers would come and go, but mostly, they would come back safe and sound. The Abbott, too, along with other people like the Head Librarian and the Commander of the Order, seemed almost eternal.

The only people that really seemed to change often were the sisters. They cycled much more frequently than the brothers, though everyone pretended not to notice. It wasn’t talked about, but Simon knew the answer. It was because they were only taught a single word of power, and they were expected to chant it at every encounter with a possible warlock until their pretty throats bled.

They might not know what that cost them, but he did. Whispering null over and over again would take decades off their lives with every encounter, and for what? It was sloppy and wasteful. They could get the same effect with a more complex spell using lesser words. He couldn’t share that with anyone, though. That would just make the powers that be look at him with suspicion.

Still, he couldn’t look away from the travesty. It was good that he didn’t, too. If he had simply stayed wrapped up in his own tasks and experiments, he would never have noticed the day that Carelyn finally arrived at the Broken Tower. n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om