Death After Death

Of course, even after a month, the work was only halfway done. They still spent days and days cementing the thing in place once Bertrand was happy with the placement of all the pieces. It was only when the entire project wasfinished, and they’d spent half a day sealing and polishing it with a cake of beeswax that they sat on the canyon rim and admired it from above with a celebratory bottle of wine.

Simon was pleased. Even if it wasn’t perfect, the giant mosaic below was a much better effort than all of the paintings that Bertrand had made up until now. Once he stopped obsessing over the quality of his lines and his strokes and was forced to use nothing but imperfections, he finally got out of his own way, Simon thought to himself. He said none of that to the boy, though. He was already smiling from ear to ear. Now, all that needed to be done was show his father. @@novelbin@@

The two of them returned from the canyon skinner and dirtier from the wear. Simon said nothing about the fight, and Lord Alexin was pleased enough at the mosaic once he’d set eyes on it that he said, “It’s a shame you put it all the way out here where I cannot rub the faces of my rivals in the work of my son.” That was as high a praise as Bertrand was ever likely to receive from the man, but even so, he beamed.

“Sometimes art must be done for its own sake,” Simon said, “In this case, the audience was only a single person.” He let that comment hang there, unwilling to specify whether the audience was the father, the teacher, or the artist himself. That was the main lesson he’d got from being a teacher so far. The longer he asked questions of children to get them to think about things, the more he realized there were often many answers to the same question.

The three of them rode back to the house together after that, and on the way, Bertrand’s father offered him a commission to retile the guest house at their summer estate in similar heroic themes. The price for the task was a little low, but that was the way the man was with his tests, and Simon vowed to help the boy cut some costs with a couple of the suppliers he knew to make the project that much more lucrative for him.

In private, Lord Alexin confessed, “I did not know if your mad plan would work, but now, after thinking on it, I believe that simply tearing that boy away from his friends and the girls might have done as much good as all the broken pottery and high-minded ideals in the world.”

“Hence the guest house,” Simon said, acting perfectly aware of the man’s ulterior motive, even though he hadn’t given the isolation part of the project a lot of thought since those first few days when his pupil had been nothing but complaints.

“Hence the guest house,” the Lord agreed.

Bertrand never mentioned the way that Simon slew the bandits to anyone, but once he completed his task and redid the floors with brand-new works of art for his father to brag about, he begged Simon to add sword lessons to his curriculum. Simon saw no problem with that. He’d done plenty of art at this point and was spending more and more time teaching Bertrand’s younger siblings, so he had plenty of time. He was running down the clock now.

There were clues in the name, he supposed, but it was hardly a common art form in Ionia. He’d seen a few paintings in the houses of the wealthy in Abresse, but the only stretched canvases he’d seen were in Brin and their mountainous neighbor to the east.

It’s so weird that a few hundred miles make such a difference, he thought to himself. On Earth, I could have gotten all this from one trip to the mall.

That was as true of foods as it was of art supplies, of course, though he wasn’t sure if that was true anymore. He had no idea how much time had passed on Earth now since all of this had started. It might have been centuries. At this point, they were in some weird post-human future where they could replicate anything with machines, or the entire place was a post-apocalyptic wasteland. There was no way to know for sure.

“It doesn’t matter,” he sighed to himself contentedly. “Either way, I’m still out here trying to invent paint.”

Sometimes, he thought about what he could have done with his life if he’d been like this from the start, but it was always an irrelevant question. He never could have been this person from the start. It had taken an awfully long time to hike this far on the road of life, and he felt like he was still nowhere near the peak of the mountain.

In Simon’s last few years before he turned south again, he only engaged in one complex project, and that was the vampiric knife he’d been designing and daydreaming about for some time. It wasn’t like it was even hard at this point. He had a small private forge he used to make his tools on the Alexin estate already, and even rare materials were easy enough for him to afford.

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Something about the transfer magic just kept him away, and for years, he always found something more important to do. It was only when he felt the beginnings of arthritis after particularly intense sparring sessions that he realized he probably needed something more if he wanted to provide the same sort of instruction to his own son that he’d provided to the Alexin family for the last few years.

Before he started, though, Simon did some experimentation on small farm animals and noted that lesser life transfer was nearly as powerful but less euphoric than nothing but a pure word of transfer. He was unable to determine if it was more or less powerful, though, because both the written and spoken versions of the lesser word killed chickens and goats, and he was unwilling to test if on ne’er do wells, or even his beloved donkey, Daisy the Third.

Eventually, he was ready. So, using the same techniques he’d learned in the forbidden forges of the Unspoken, he finally got to work. First, he forged three identical daggers, knowing full well that half of all the blades were rejected for quality issues in the second stage. He carefully tempered and sharpened all of them over the course of several weeks before he did anything remotely magical.

Once that was done, he carefully drew the inverse of the symbols on the blade in inert clay. The pattern he’d chosen was complex but not ridiculously slow. It has a trigger point on the tip so that it would activate whenever it stabbed into something living. To that circuit, he added the words of lesser life transfer.

Then, when it was masked appropriately, he soaked the thing in acid overnight. The next day, he found that his efforts were in vain and that he would have to start again. Though most of the marks were fine, one of the sections of clay had come loose, marring the lesser word that was now etched on one side of the blade.

After the failure, he hammered that blade into unrecognizable uselessness, and then he started again. The second result was much better than the first, and Simon spent a few days carefully gilding and polishing it before he started to carve the handle and fit it to a pommel and crossguard. He might have lavished a month on clever designs. The idea certainly appealed to him, but not as much as the idea of keeping a low profile, at least in some regards.

In the end, his only effort at artistry was to carve a skull into the pommel as a small memento mori. After that, he tested the thing. For this, at least, he went into the mountains until he found evidence of a beastman tribe. Then, he hunted them until he found a group of two of the creatures alone. The first one he slew quickly, only grazing it with his new dagger once for a noticeable jolt of life force.

The monster’s friend wasn’t so lucky. Once Simon was faced with only a single foe, he took his time, and he used his sword only to parry the creature’s weapon. He wasn’t trying to torture the beast or anything, but he wanted to know just how potent the life-drain effect was.

This sure would be easier if I could see damage numbers above his head every time I struck him, he sighed as he inflicted a death of a thousand cuts on the monster. In the end, it took six stabs with the knife to drop it to the ground where it lay, bleating weakly. After that, Simon plunged the knife into the thing's back and felt the energy flow through that bloody link for several seconds before the creature finally stilled.

In the end, there were too many variables for him to know for sure. He wasn’t sure how long beastmen lived and how much of the fatal damage was done by the blade rather than the magic in it, but Simon felt like each stab had gotten several minor words worth of power back from the creature, but not quite a full word. ȓА𐌽ꝊΒÈṨ

That means what? Two or three weeks' worth of life per stab? He thought on the way back. Maybe four months altogether?

Simon thought that was very interesting. For two or three hunting trips like this a year, he might never age again. It seemed ridiculous, but he could find no fault in the logic. Well, only one, at least.

At the moment, he hadn’t noticed the terrible euphoria building one stab at a time. It only wore off while he slept that night, and in the morning, he felt a terrible craving he hadn’t felt in a long time. That both annoyed and disturbed him because he hadn’t felt any similar cravings when he’d been testing the blade on farm animals. That complicated things, and he vowed to leave the blade in its sheath until he determined if it was the dose or the type of victim that caused him to feel like this.

Simon took that as his cue to leave. He gave his patron little notice. He just packed up his most prized possessions, left a note for Bertrand regarding a few unfinished projects if the boy wanted a challenge, and then approached Lord Alexin for a letter of recommendation.

“You’re leaving us already, Master Ennis? What have we done to deserve the shoddy treatment?” the man asked. “I’ll double your wages again if that’s what it will take to keep you a good while longer.”

Money, of course, was no object to either of them, but this was all part of the dance when it came to his patrons. They all wanted a famous, talented artist in their pocket that they could show off to their friends and enemies alike. At this point, half of Simon’s job involved attending parties and sounding wise.

He refused the man, of course, insisting, “I’ve heard that the queen will soon be selecting a tutor for the young prince. I aim to shape the future of the nation. Should she reject me, I will return in due time.”

“Oh, well, then we shall just consider this a vacation,” he mused. “A loan to the queen until you come back here to continue your great works.”

Simon laughed at that. Lord Alexin’s youngest children were already almost as old as Bertrand was when Simon started here, and his eldest son was an artist with a growing reputation in his own right. Simon had done everything he needed to here, and he doubted that he’d ever be back.