Chapter 412: Idle Hands |
The first weeks after Simon’s maiming were hard ones for him, though that had to do with the fever that came from the bone infection more than the pain of the wound. Varten was still there, by his bedside at first, when he was still conscious, but sometime, in the blurry, agonizing weeks that followed, he’d vanished. When Simon slowly returned to the world of the living, he wasn’t to be found anywhere.
As it turned out, he’d been left in the care of the gray-robed silent sisters. He found that out when he woke up trying to fight a demon that looked just like a dark mirror of him and practically socked a woman old enough to be his grandmother in the face. “Be still, Sir Enis, be still!” she told him, yelling that he was safe until the words penetrated his fever-addled skull.
The women were the whisperers too old to hunt witches any longer, and attended any number of humble tasks at the broken tower, from weaving and cleaning to tending to the sick. He fell into the latter category, and though he didn’t remember all of that time, he did remember the way that many of the women would read poetry and fables to him as he languished in the grip of his infection.
Those voices were the thread that kept him from drifting off, back to the familiar lumpy bed of his cabin whenever he got lost in his nightmares. The dreams of some hellish evil sliding inside his skin haunted him long after the arm was gone. For a time, they were frequent enough to make him fear he hadn’t succeeded, but they faded along with his fever, which was a huge relief.
That didn’t change his current circumstances, though. He woke to a world where he had a smooth stump instead of a left arm, and real doubts as to whether or not he should continue the run. He hadn’t learned everything he’d wanted to, but he’d learned enough.
He had a plan to protect himself from soul damage going forward; those efforts would be crude and painful if he chose to keep his sight. He didn’t fancy the idea of branding himself with a mark of triggered self-destruction before every run, but it was still probably better than going through life as a cripple.
Killing himself had started this whole mess, though, and Simon tried to avoid that whenever possible. Still, the feeling to do so only intensified when he noted that he’d unlocked the wyvern level again with something he’d done in the capital.
You just can’t do anything right, can you? He chastised himself.
Of the levels he might have to do again, that one was hardly the worst choice. Still, he wondered why it was so sensitive to being reset. Needless to say, he was conflicted, and the memory of Varten made that conflict worse. He’d probably traumatized the poor kid, and if he died now, Simon was certain he’d blame himself.
He didn’t even have to get dramatic and jump off a cliff or hang himself from a tree. He could go out into the middle of nowhere, inscribe a circle of death, and just step into it. He didn’t really like the idea of leaving his body where anyone could find it, but there were always cleverer options. He could do it in the winter, but inscribe the circle into ice, for instance. If he added a little fire to that and wore his armor, he’d die painlessly, and the only one to know or benefit from it would be the fish.
Winter was a long way away, though, and so was Varten, so for now he focused on getting his strength back. Food helped, and so did exercise. Whenever he approached the gate, he was told very politely that he wasn’t allowed to leave. The words were couched in phrases like “until you’ve recovered,” or “for your own good,” but he heard the orders clearly enough.
The other knights no longer looked at him like he might be someone important, and Master Harrin barely gave him the time of day, but the knights who knew the story of how he’d lost his arm treated him with the utmost respect. He’d only been with the Whitecloaks for a couple of years, but living demon slayers were rare things.
He didn’t kill any demons, of course. Even as a vampire, he hadn’t succeeded in that; he suspected there was a trick to it that he hadn’t figured out yet, but this wouldn’t be the life to experiment with that.
It was months more before he saw Varten again, but in that time, Simon kept busy. He tried sparring for a time, but stopped when he realized there was no way to stop everyone from taking it easy on him. After that, he worked at the blacksmithy, pumping the bellows with his one good arm to strengthen it. Hammering on his own was an exercise in futility unless he could put a workpiece in a vice just right.
That, more than anything, was what inspired him to work on a prosthesis. Most of the time, he didn’t need his second arm. It was strange that it was missing, but he could eat, read, and mostly dress himself without much effort. Even fighting one-handed wasn’t so bad. He simply switched from the opponent-facing shield-heavy style he favored to a dualist’s approach, side on with a light sword. It lacked the power he was used to having, but it was a learning curve that was fundamentally different from the others that he struggled with now.
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A limb that he could at least hold things with, though, would allow him to do any number of tasks that he enjoyed for a while. He’d be able to carve and craft. He’d be able to dress and even use a sword again. Just a couple of years, he told himself, as he worked on the project. Just until Varten becomes a knight in his own right. Then I can check out.
He saw the boy briefly now and then. His training for the next few years had been assigned to Sir Cedrin, but he visited Simon each time they returned to the Broken Tower and told him of their adventures. To Simon, it sounded like he occasionally burned or hung good men with the bad, but he hadn’t been there, so it was hard for him to judge.
All that mattered was that his aura was white, and Varten seemed to be doing well. These situations weren’t entirely uncommon. Knights and squires sometimes died on missions, and the survivors were usually redistributed to keep things running as smoothly as possible. The real oddity was that Simon had survived. The Unspoken rarely retired.
When Simon was fully healed, he was offered a position in the library, “You know, since you’re spending so much time here with us,” the librarian hastily explained. Simon thought it was strange that he simply wasn’t being ordered to do that, but apparently, one couldn’t order a knight to be demoted. They had to decide that for themselves, so Simon didn’t.
Spending a few years among books might have been interesting if he hadn’t known that all the really good stuff was downstairs in the Black Library. As it was, he had no interest in copying and illuminating empty psalters praising gods that didn’t actually exist. Instead, he kept working on his drawings for his prosthesis, and eventually, the prosthesis itself.
The thing was mostly made of leather, with only a few slender pieces of steel for strength and endcaps of wood for shape. The first version didn’t even look like a hand. It was just a sort of crab piner that he made from a wood clamp, but the reason for that was straightforward. He wanted to use that to carve the hand he planned to put on the end.
It was a simple device that would never give him real dexterity again. That would have required a machine shop and years of his life, and really, he didn’t care that much. He just made a fixed thumb, and then carved the four fingers together as one spring-loaded piece so he could easily insert something for gripping.
Everyone who saw him working on seemed to consider it a reasonable if strange obsession for a man who had lost an arm, but no one tried to stop him; after a few beers some of his fellow knights gave him shit from time to time, but once he could use a shield again, Simon got back into fighting enough to put the doubters in their place. He lacked the flexibility he once had, and his shield slams had little force behind them, but nearly a year after the incident, he could hold his own once more.
If they'd known he was embedding words of power inside the thing, though, they might have. The space from elbow to wrist was all but hollow. He made a big show of putting a small storage compartment in there that he kept a flask in, which was always good for a laugh when he showed people.
“I didn’t lose an arm, I gained a pocket,” he’d claim, while sharing it around.
What he’d gained had nothing to do with a pocket, though. What he’d gained was a place to keep wands and talismans, at least at first. Eventually, after he re-carved the fingers of the third version, making each of them into a wand for a different offensive spell. Ostensibly, he only made them articulated for appearances, but really, he made a magical multi-tool that operated on the basis of which finger was extended.
He turned the whole thing into a sort of talisman. Not only was the self-destruct circuit on the stump under the padding to kill him dead if anyone tried to touch his soul again, but he also put several protection runes into the thing.
These were an experimental idea he’d gotten from a fever dream, and rather than simply nullifying an attack as he’d done in the past, he only attempted to nullify half, in most cases, turning it against itself like a pair of noise-cancelling headphones. He had no idea how those had worked when he owned them, but he remembered being able to listen to whatever he wanted to fondly, even now, and while replicating the ability to plat music on demand was beyond his powers, adapting the idea in this way was not.
In theory, a protection rune carved into wood would never stand up to a major word of power like greater fire. In reality, though, if he used part of that word to power to pit one effect against the other there would be less strain. It was a simple trick in theory, but in practice, each of those recursive circuits was intricate, which meant he needed to carve them on fairly large rune plates that he hid in his false hand, which was time-consuming.
I could spend years before each run getting ready, he thought about all the different things he could do to make himself invulnerable, or nearly so, to the growing range of threats he understood.
He envisioned making a set of laminar plate armor, where each plate hid a secret rune that aided him in battle. One to make a warrior tireless, and another to make their armor invulnerable. He imagined a shield that absorbed the energy of each hit, only so that an axe that drew energy from the same stone could release it with vicious blows.
Simon spent a lot of time building castles in the sky that year, but most of them ended up as notes in his mirror for future projects. Only the modified protection circuits and wands came to fruition, which was probably for the best. It was more options than he expected he'd really ever need, and it felt dangerous to be walking around the broken tower with so much contraband, but at this point, no one was paying much attention to him, and he wanted to be ready for anything.
