Chương 174: Haystacks and Needles

Ch. 174 - Haystacks and Needles After that encounter, Simon waited for the other shoe to drop for weeks. Even as he did, he still went through the motions, and carried on with business as usual. Well, he did his best to, at least. For a while, he was still jumping at his own shadows whenever a scroll fell off a shelf or a beggar he hadn't noticed accosted him on the street for a few coppers. That's probably a good thing, though, he tried to convince himself.

If I'm being watched, this is the sort of behavior that they'd want to see.

It would take a much harder man than Ennis to shake off that kind of unexpected visit. Even after the fear began fading, though, the confusion and curiosity lingered. He took measures to protect himself anyway. He'd been staying at the inn for too long. He'd grown used to its easy meals and the habit of coming home to a place that was already warm. If people were watching him, though, and he was supposed to be afraid, or worse, hiding something, he should be making it harder for them.

So, he used some of his growing savings to rent a small place that was closer to the library on the rickety third floor of an old building, and he made a point to be seen carrying notes home almost every night.

"Let them worry about what I might have found," he told himself the next time he thought he was being followed. Simon was sure that the more interesting he made himself to the white coats, the more likely he was to get a second visit from them. However, as the weeks passed and his cryptic notes swelled, that certainty began to wane. He'd started doing all sorts of paranoid things like leaving small stones by the doors and shutters as well as leaving papers in very specific orders.

Despite all of those efforts, he'd never once come back to find that any of those things had been disturbed. While he was initially annoyed that they'd intruded on his life on that first visit, slowly but surely, he grew more annoyed that they didn't seem to be watching him after that. If I can't cast spells, then there's no need to keep tabs on me, huh? He thought to himself as he continued his research. In that area, at least, he was making progress. The haystacks were fairly obvious, at least.

They were the city library that he'd spent so much time in over the last year, along with a few of the private collections he'd gained access to over that time. The needles he was supposed to be seeking out, though. That was harder. They were clues of some sort, probably, but clues about what? Where were they hiding, and how would he know when he'd found them? Simon asked himself that question with every new book he read.

He looked for hidden meanings in the words and the symbols, checked the illuminated portions of the text for coded messages, and looked in the illustrations for details that most might miss. He was always searching for more. What that more was, he wasn't exactly sure. When he'd originally decided what he was going to do with this life, he'd always hoped that he'd stumbled upon a few words of power that he didn't already know. The white cloaks had obviously thought of that, though.

Given how easy it was for witches and warlocks to pass their powers to each other, they'd obviously gone to great lengths to make sure that didn't happen. Months passed like that, and though he still sold maps when he needed to and attended banquets when the opportunity would come up, there was no joy in it. Where once he'd enjoyed the fancy food and the chance to listen to the rumors of the day with those of importance in the city, he now only wondered who might be watching him at the dinner tables.

That was just as well because the longer he stayed in this city, the less of an oddity he became. Eventually, the invitations he received to be shown off as one slowly trickled to a halt. Should his mythical patron arrive in town to slay some monsters, he was sure that trend would quickly reverse, but that was never actually going to happen. Eventually, he even grew tired of trying to track down the identities of the men who had waylaid him.

He'd only seen one of their faces clearly enough to recognize through the shadows of their cloak, but he was confident that he could recognize their voices if heard them again. What was he supposed to do with that information, though? Kidnap them and torture the truth out of them? It was a fun idea, but it was hardly his style. Even his least favorite, Raithwaite, barely conjured up that level of bloodlust at this point. The last thing that Simon ever wanted to be was a vampire.

However, right now, he had to admit that the strange compulsion power he'd endured would come in handy at times like this. Still, eventually, he lost interest in even those pursuits as he pursued his blind treasure hunt with more and more intensity. There are clues in these books, and I'm going to find them, he told himself. Eventually, it was all he lived for.

Days could pass by in the blink of an eye as he pored through tomes, cross-referencing them against each other in a search for some hidden meaning beyond what they actually said. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. Not even actual references to men who claimed to have experienced doppelgangers, as was discussed in the Temptation of Saint Karell, would get as much interest as a line like, 'a secret that cannot be spoken,' or 'victory was born on white wings that day.'

It got to the point where he started to feel like a conspiracy theorist. Though he doubted that every one of those references was part of a secret society, the longer he studied the history of the region, the more he could see fingerprints left by some hidden hand. Sloppy record-keeping was one thing, but when nine out of ten books left out a name or two, and only one included them, that just meant it hadn't been purged yet.

During the winter, his favorite clue was when the handwriting that a book was copied in suddenly changed. That was doubly true when it changed back to the original a page or two later. It was a clear indicator that something had been removed, but often, it was impossible to say what that something had been. In rare cases, he was able to find two copies of the same book from different libraries with differing page counts. Sometimes, this addressed his concerns.

In almost every case, it turned out to be a hero doing some great deed that might have used magic. The text never said, 'and then he smote the beast with a word of greater fire,' but the inevitable replacement text usually read something like, 'Then with white wings and the strength of the divine he slew the beast with his own two hands.' Women seemed to get the worst of this treatment, and almost every heroic woman was carefully removed from the records.

Often as not, she was replaced by an effeminate-looking man when the illustrations were altered.

"Man, these guys really hate witches," Simon muttered as he made note of Kanara, another woman who no longer existed according to the annals of history. Simon sometimes wondered how his efforts would be felt by history, but that interest intensified as he slowly made a list of people who appeared to have been scrubbed out of the official narrative. Not that anyone cared. Almost two years after his arrival, people stopped noticing him. He was no longer a novelty but a fixture.

Sometimes, one of the other scribblers in the library might ask him how his research was coming, but Simon had little to tell them beyond, "The problem seems intractable, but in time I'll figure something out." He wasn't talking about his Patron anymore, of course, but they didn't need to know that. Instead, the questions in his mind about the Unspoken multiplied. He could see what they were doing on every level now; he could even guess why. How, though, was more of an open question.

They didn't seem to be a religious order in that he found their breadcrumbs related to several gods and goddesses. They didn't exactly seem to be royalty, though, either. As near as he could tell, history and scholarship were far less important here than they had been on Earth. He hadn't even been in this town for two years, and he felt like he'd read half of the libraries he had access to at this point. Well, skimmed, at least, he corrected himself mentally. His point still stood, though.

Very little of what he read was actual scholarship. Instead, most books were either devoted to glorifying some King or Duke who had no doubt paid for their writing, or they were religious texts that were as much fiction as they were history. It was in those religious texts that Simon finally found his first real loose thread. Religion wasn't something he'd given a lot of thought to since coming to this world. That was largely because he found out that Helades wasn't worshiped as a Goddess.

No one had heard of her, though he supposed that it was possible that if he brought her up to the demon, it might know her name. Everyone else, though, mostly worshiped whoever they wanted in their temples and churches, and those names largely varied by region and country. In Ionia, one god was responsible for lightning and thunderstorms, but in Brin, it was an entirely different woman who was the bringer of rains. The former was a war god, while the latter was the goddess of spring.

It was conflicting enough that he felt sure in his decision that the mortals without magic had no idea what they were talking about. However, since the religions were, by and large, the keepers of history, he still had to read their books. That was why when he was doing a read-through of the saints of Hypaltia, who was the goddess of winter in this region but the goddess of light and further north, he took note that there was no Saint Geregus listed.

That shouldn't have been important, but it was because Simon was sure he'd seen references to that saint listed a dozen times in random places. He was sure because the man often went by another name, too: the Silent Saint. Sure that such an oversight couldn't be correct, Simon went through another volume by a different author and another after that. The story repeated itself.

Those works were not written by any of the relevant religions, but that only intrigued him more because he could go back through his notes and find many places where victory had been associated with this nonexistent saint.

"This is the hint I've been waiting for," he told himself, smiling as he slammed the book shut and shelved it. He didn't think it likely that the church had edited one of their own heroes out of existence. Instead, after reviewing his notes on the subject, Simon decided that it was far more likely that the saint was yet another stand-in for the white robes. This rabbit hole went deeper than doves, though.

On occasion, after great victories, certain rituals would sometimes be discussed, and even what turned out to be a nonexistent feast day was mentioned. This, Simon decided at long last, was the way in, at least for him. He was sure that an organization like the Unspoken had many ways to recruit. He was certain that neither Aaric nor Carelyn had been big readers. He wasn't even sure they were literate at all, beyond the very basics. The day in question was coming up, and he would be ready.