Jakob's eyes widened before he whispered, "It's true, then. You are a warlock."

"Only in the sense that the Unspoken think that everyone is a Warlock," Simon sighed, beating the man's blade hard enough to make him take a step back. "But in the killing and sacrificing people for power in the way you mean it—"

He grunted as the unspoken struck with an unexpected backhand. Simon acknowledged that his opponent was good, as the other man shouted, "Where did you hear that name?"

The White Cloak was certainly good enough that Simon would be struggling without his magical boost. As it was, he could keep this up long after the other man tired, but for once, trying to wear his opponent out wasn't a good idea. The volume of their conversation, combined with the sound of swordplay, was concerning.

"It's not a particularly well-kept secret," Simon said, taunting the man as he stepped back, letting him press the attack as his fury outpaced his training or his sense. "You know what is? That your Grandmaster knows how to use magic."

"Liar!" the White Cloak raged. "You know nothing of our order! You seek to smear us with your lies!"

Simon had expected that response, and let the man exhaust himself, peppering him with taunts more than blows as he fought fairly defensively. As he did so, he heard the sounds of distant shouting, and he could see a lantern heading in their direction.

"Do you know what your problem is?" Simon grunted, finding the rhythm of the battle. "The White Cloaks, I mean. Not you specifically."

"Anyone who uses magic is damned!" the Unspoken warrior shouted. Even as he did so, though, Simon forced him back.

"It's that you're too inflexible," Simon teased. "You've got the right idea. You should kill warlocks, necromancers, and demonologists, but maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't assume anyone that's the least bit suspicious is one."

"Evil shows itself easily enough for those with the eyes to see," the man shouted as they exchanged blows.

Simon wanted to tell him how wrong he was in that moment. He wanted to explain that if magic really poisoned the soul, then his would be ebon black, but he knew there was no point. The Unspoken had been brainwashed every bit as thoroughly as the Magi, he just hadn't seen the process close up.

Instead of talking, he finally took control of the tempo of the battle completely. If the time for talking was over, then they really only had one option left.

Then, when the exhausted man was in a vulnerable spot, Simon asked, "If what you say is true, and I know nothing, then how do I know what hides beneath the Broken Tower?"

That was enough to make the man pause just a moment, which Simon exploited mercilessly. This time, he didn't strike at Jakob's body or even his weapon. He struck at his wrist, slicing right through it with a powerful blow that sent his sword in one direction and his hand in another. A scream that was certainly loud enough to send people running to them a little faster than they were already.

"We could still talk this out," Simon offered, pulling back slightly as the other man fell to his knees, looking at the stump that had been his right hand in horror.

"I would never cooperate with black blooded filth like—" the man growled.

"Yeah, I thought as much," Simon said with a sigh before running the man through the chest. "Don't say I didn't give you a chance to avoid this."

The torches were getting closer now, so Simon released his sword and left it stuck into the man's chest, then pulled out his own dagger and gave himself a shallow slash across his chest as the torches of the night watch closed in. It wouldn't do for him to be caught red-handed and entirely injury-free.

Two members of the town watch arrived less than a minute after that. One had a spear and a lantern, and the other carried a crossbow that misfired, sending a quarrel over Simon's head and off into the night when the man saw the corpse lying on the cold earth.

"I don't really know what happened," Simon lied. "I'm not even sure he knew who I was. One second I heard someone breaking in, and the next, he was trying to kill me."

Not a single word of what he said was true, but that didn't stop everyone from believing it. Simon was a pillar of the community, and the dead man was a desperate stranger who had been asking everyone for work.

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When they left, Simon secured the severed hand, but he packed it in salt and let it sit for a few days while his self-inflicted wound healed. Mari visited him several times a day for the next few days, and the last thing he wanted to do was be involved with some dark ritual when she knocked.

"Why do we keep meeting like this?" she teased as she sewed his wound shut and applied a greasy ointment of ground mustard, erden leaf, and another ingredient or two he couldn't recognize by smell. He wasn't in any danger, of course. The only reason he didn't heal it immediately was to garner sympathy from those who mattered until the dead man was in the ground.

It was only when she stopped coming around to check on him, the body had been buried, and the rumors had died down, that Simon finally dug out the mummified hand and made a chalk circle in his basement to summon the spirit of the dead man and get some answers.

This one was slightly different from the one he'd created last time. Its construction was tighter, but more importantly, it was not fueled by the soul itself. Instead, he made the whole thing in a way that it could be powered off a charged obsidian shard, which would be enough to power the thing for days at least.

After Simon had tried his previous experiments with dynamite and demons, he was more than a little concerned that he'd get a fairly large experience penalty from that. More importantly, he was convinced the reason the soul he'd asked about had started coming apart so quickly last time was because he'd been draining it to manifest it.

Depending on what Jakob said this time, Simon wanted more time to explore topics. Where the Unspoken were concerned, he was always interested.

When the man manifested in that candlelit basement as an ethereal cyan spirit, he was not pleased. "You!" he shouted, whispery and faint. "You were a warlock! I knew it!"

"Guilty," Simon answered dryly. "Now tell me how you found me? Did the Broken Tower send you?"

"I will never tell our secrets!" the translucent man spat.

"You will," Simon said. "If need be, I will torture you, or even give your soul over to the pit itself! My magic commands you to tell me what I want to know!"

Simon could see the ghost suffering, even as it tried to resist the command. Though he'd never throw an innocent soul into hell, Jakob didn't need to know that.

Instead of giving in right away, the ghost blustered about how his paradise was already secured. "As soon as your foul magic ends, I will return to Elysium!"

Still, minute by minute, and command by command, his will was eroded away, just like last time. The dead could not resist the living that had summoned them, any more than demons could.

"No one gave me orders to find you," the spirit eventually admitted. "I was questing, and saw it in the signs. The world practically conspired to pull me to you. If I'd known what you were, I would have struck you down sooner instead of trying to understand you."

Simon knew what questing was, of course. The members of the Unspoken, especially the younger ones, spent much of their time doing just that. They claimed to be doing good, but mostly, covertly or overtly, they were killing anyone a bit too far out of the norm.

A hermit studying insects all by himself in the woods? Probably a warlock. An old woman getting too good at curing people with herbs? Almost certainly a witch.

While Simon knew that the order killed warlocks, monsters, and even the occasional devil, he also knew that they did plenty of harm along the way. It was hard for him to see them as anything but tragically misguided heroes who had become villains somewhere along the way.

"Good luck with that," Simon smirked. "What do you mean by signs? Is this a sight thing?"

"You would never understand what eyes that have not been blinded by magic can see," the ghost said, before going on to paint a surprisingly familiar picture.

Simon didn't bother to explain to the man the few times he'd glimpsed exactly what he was describing, but it was fascinating to hear from someone else's perspective. "When my brothers and I see a man, we can often tell his importance and density at a glance. It is how he moves with the world, instead of through it. In your case, though, you have perverted that relationship. You do not move with the world, it moves with you!"

He went on to describe the currents of the air, and even the beams of the sun bending from where they should have to direct Jakob's path to Simon, one sign and coincidence at a time. While he hadn't quite described the black lines that Simon had seen on several occasions, it was clear that was what he was talking about, and after he ran out of new ways to explain it, Simon moved on to other subjects.

He tried to get the man to explain heaven, but he could not. He could only speak in generalities and couldn't quite explain what it was he'd been doing in the moments before Simon dragged him back to the mortal world. That intrigued Simon, but he wasn't sure what to make of it.

Maybe the dead can't remember such places because they're beyond understanding, he considered as the dead man spoke.

Regardless, when the man began to fade after more than an hour of conversation, Simon eventually released him. He'd learned plenty and didn't need to torture the poor guy; he'd done what he thought was right, and that made it hard to hate him too much, even if he'd wanted to kill Simon.

Even after Simon dismissed him, though, he wondered why Jakob saw what he saw. The man clearly didn't know the cause, and truthfully, neither did Simon. He couldn't even begin to guess at it, but he knew someone who could.

The Oracle. Simon still felt bad about the way he'd never come back to visit Zoa. Even if this version of her wouldn't know it, it was enough to make him hesitant to visit the caldera temple city again. Still, he might not have a choice.

Until then, though, how the hell am I going to hide from the people that are looking for me if the world is trying to tell them where I am? He wondered as he went back upstairs.

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