Chương 264: Heart of the Serpent

Ch. 264 - Heart of the Serpent Simon spent the next few weeks nibbling around the edges of his discovery, which explained the Murani's bottomless appetite for slaves in an effort to learn more. It was hard to get a glimpse of anything but the propaganda, and so his efforts to replace his suspicions with facts were slow. He tried efforts that were straightforward, as well as those that were more speculative and even magical.

At first, he would simply wander around the inner two rings of Zurari, keeping his ears open and, whenever possible, his mouth closed. As that made less and less progress, though, he turned to magical tools at his disposal. Some nights, he would meditate, willing his soul to become calm so that he could try to get a sense for the powers that flowed through the city like currents through the water. Those efforts never revealed much insight.

That was both because it was hard to find any real stillness in a city this large and because he was also experimenting with magic in an effort to create his own divination spells, and as the oracle had taught him, using magic to change the world made it that much harder to see the world. Still, like teleportation, scrying was a sort of magic he definitely needed to invent.

At first, he tried using lesser words of distant illusion to try to show him things from other nearby buildings, but the results of those experiments were erratic and inconclusive. After that, he tried using lesser words of connection plan to make a pendulum swing back and forth as he asked it questions. If the answer was yes, it would swing forward and back; if it was no, it would swing left and right, and if it was uncertain or maybe, it would swing in circles.

Sometimes, that seemed to work extremely well, but other times, it was nearly as inconclusive as his illusion efforts had been. Still, if the question was definite and unambiguous, he would get clear answers. Though each use of the spell was only good for a handful of questions, he learned much in this way.

"Are the Magi sacrificing slaves on an industrial scale to use them for blood magic?" Yes.

"Are they using those rituals to keep themselves young?" Yes.

"Are they summoning demons regularly?" Uncertain.

"Have the God King's Magi summoned at least ten different demons in the last year?" Yes.

"Have they summoned fifty demons in the last year?" No. Question by question, answers started to take shape. As a technique, it wasn't always exact, and sometimes, he tested it with more mundane questions he could verify. He determined that the market he was in would have poor business the following week and that the place he'd been staying wouldn't be serving roasts next week. Both of those turned out to be true, though in neither case did he find out why until it actually happened.

The first case was caused by an unseasonable rainstorm, which kept most potential customers in their homes, while the second incident was caused by a kitchen fire that had almost burned the place down one night. Both of those circumstances would have been nice to know, but then, Simon didn't plan on playing twenty questions with the universe at the cost of blowing several weeks of his life. He tried the same techniques on questions with a wider scope, but there, the answers were much more mixed.

Anything that had to do with Helades ended up with a maybe for an answer, which was frustrating. Questions like "Is Helades telling me the truth about the Pit?" or "Does she want the Murani to conquer the world?" never showed clear, repeatable answers, no matter how hard he focused. Other topics, such as the Pit, provided certain answers, but sometimes they would change from a yes to a no when he repeated them days or weeks later.

Simon kept notes on all of those things, but as interesting as the technique was, it was the next one he discovered almost by accident that was most promising. One evening, while he was scribbling away and trying to discover why the Magi seemed to like the pyramidal shape so much, he said to the silver mirror he had propped up on his desk, "Show me the Pyramid of Lesser Miracles."

Simon had meant to say, 'Show me my notes on the Pyramid of Lesser Miracles,' but he didn't, and that slip of the tongue showed him something entirely unexpected. As he looked up, expecting to see the text he'd made about the thing, along with the sketches he'd produced circumspectly from the west plaza, he was surprised to see a fuzzy, distorted image of the massive structure itself. For a moment, Simon thought he'd taken a picture of the thing using a mirror.

That was certainly something he was capable of doing, but he was fairly sure he hadn't. He'd been very careful not to use any magic inside the inner city. He had no idea what countermeasures might exist for that. The most he would do was jot down a few quick notes or a sketch while he was pretending to admire the wares in someone's stand or shop. Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

His confusion only deepened when he realized the picture in front of him was moving.

"Wait, what in the hell…" Simon asked as he watched a couple stroll across the picture.

"I… Mirror, how are you doing this?"

'I do not understand the question,' the mirror answered in glowing blue text across the image in a way that was mostly expected.

"You're showing me a live image of somewhere," Simon repeated.

"How are you doing that?"

'I have merely obtained its reflection for you, as requested,' it typed.

"I…" Simon's brain hurt. Did this fucking thing really have this power all along? He asked himself. He supposed he should have guessed, at least after the Oracle used it to show him his own aura. It could obviously display things beyond writing, but a distant location?

"Why is the image blurry?" Simon asked this time.

'The reflection is from the large fountain near the structure,' it answered.

'The water is quite turbulent, which makes image quality unavoidably poor.'

"S-show me another view," Simon almost trembling with excitement.

"Show me the view from the northern reflecting pool I was at yesterday." The image faded away, and almost instantly, a new one appeared. This one was from a different angle, and though it was clearer, it was more fisheye because the mirror was further from the source.

"Have you always been able to do this?" Simon asked the plain silver mirror incredulously. Realizing the thing would just give him an 'I don't know what you mean answer again,' he quickly followed up with, "Have you always been able to display distant locations? What about other levels? Can you show me those, too?"

'Without being able to look for you in reflections, how would I ever be able to find you?' the mirror asked.

'Other levels, though… even accessible ones, that would be more complicated. I am bound to your location and can only move forward in time when I cannot locate you.'

"I see…" Simon said. To him, that sounded like a lot of words to say no, which meant the answer wasn't exactly no. It wasn't a yes, either, though. Still, for now, he didn't need to see the future. He hadn't fully explored his present with this new ability, stating that night, though, that was pretty much all he did as he struggled to learn the limits of a tool that had been under his nose this whole time.

Though Simon still went out every day and pretended to be a merchant, he dropped all of his other lines of research in favor of this one. Each night when he came home, he gave it targets to explore, and he studied them. The first limitation he found was that if it wasn't a place that he had been near recently, the mirror had a hard time finding it.

It could not, for example, show him the south side of the old city or the inside of any of the pyramids because he hadn't been to any of those places and could not adequately explain their location. He could sometimes make it go somewhere it had never gone by jumping from reflection to reflection. That was how he got into his neighbor's room while he was using the chamber pot. Simon had canceled that view immediately, but still, the man didn't seem to notice.

There were no obvious giveaways that he could see that anything was amiss. The next big problem was range. Even if Simon knew exactly where something was and had been there many times before, if it was too far away, the mirror couldn't find it. While testing showed that it could reach anywhere in the city, he could explain and describe somewhere past that it couldn't reach anymore. It also couldn't give him anything approaching an estimate for distance.

As dumb as the mirror was, it genuinely didn't seem to understand distance, which puzzled Simon. Directions like "50 feet from your location" seldom worked, but others like "the carpet monger's shop with the vibrant red I visited three days ago" did. The one thing he did figure out was that the quality of the image was entirely dependent on the quality of the reflection. Simon was not yet sure how he could use this new ability to his advantage. His first thought had been to spy on rooms he could never enter.

He wouldn't be able to hear anything the people inside might say, of course, but the fact that going somewhere he'd never been was difficult made that unlikely. Likewise, if he could see between levels… even the same spot between two levels, that might help him make a lot of decisions, but that didn't seem to be possible. The only thing he could really say for sure was that image quality was all about the material that he borrowed the reflection of. Water was a poor choice, and moving water was even worse.

Silvered mirrors were best, followed by polished metal and pretty much anything else in between after that. For weeks of work, it wasn't exactly a lot of progress. Still, he would have counted it a success if he hadn't managed to attract the wrong sort of attention. At first, no one noticed Simon's investigations. He was just a merchant selling out the last of his wares and looking to buy new stock. He made sure to play that up quite a bit.

He used the mirror to keep tabs on his karma, and he was back in the negative hundred thousand range. That was still a lot, but it was in a normal range, at least as far as Simon could tell. Now that he was using his mirror more, he tried to use it to check out the auras of other people in the common room and the market squares, and a light glow to a light darkness was pretty typical.

He had no way to put an actual number on anyone, but he would bet that most people were slightly positive, in the quarter million range, especially if they were young. Older people were almost always brighter. There weren't a lot of saints or monsters. Well, not at first. He realized that he was being watched when he started to see more and more night black auras in his immediate vicinity.

The first one surprised him, the second one concerned him, and the third one, well, by the time he saw the third one, he was fairly sure they were watching him, not the other way around. Simon made plans to leave the city the very night he saw two of them together. They might not look like Magi, but he was almost certain that they were.