Simon didn’t waste any time once he decided that someone was definitely onto him. These mages had captured Freya, and Simon knew exactly how powerful she’d been. The words from his doppelgänger came back to him immediately in that moment.

“They won’t let her die for a long time.” his evil twin had whispered. “Not until they learn her secrets. In that way, she ended up rather like you did, though her cage is a bit nicer than a rotting, bricked-in casket.”

Simon had only recently gotten over that terrible, claustrophobic experience, and he had no desire to repeat it as a lab rat instead of a prisoner. He only even went back to the inn because it would have been stranger for him not to. The truth was that his most important notes were already in the mirror, and while he didn’t want anyone to go through his log books, they were unlikely to find anything of value in his cryptic notes.

He’d planned to wait for the city to go to sleep, then sneak out and hop the wall to the outer city by dark. From there, he’d steal a horse and then start south before they even realized he wasn’t even sleeping in. That wasn’t the way it turned out, though. In the end, they didn’t even give him an hour. Before, guards swarmed the wagon yard outside and the common room below. He heard the commotion before he’d even finished packing.

That was enough to make him move to the window of his room and peer out from between the shutters. What he saw annoyed him, but it also gave him hope. He was up against a canny enemy, but not a perfect one. They’d already placed guards on the surrounding rooftops, but those men weren’t even all looking in the right spot.

Whoever had planned this noose had thought ahead, but they were fallible, too. Or at least that’s what they want you to think, Simon told himself before he cast a word of illusion on himself to create the appearance of a heat-shimmered outline. It wasn’t quite enough to make him invisible, but for the next few minutes, it would make it much more difficult to target him and much easier for him to blend in with walls and rooftops, especially if he stood still.

There wasn’t going to be a lot of standing still, though. Not when he heard the sound of heavy boots thundering up the stairs toward his room. Then he threw open the shutters and used a word of force to propel him out of the window, over a dozen or so men with swords in their hands, and onto the first building on the far side of the caravan yard.

The man he landed close to looked at him in confusion, then raised his bow. Simon didn’t bother to draw his weapon. He couldn’t cover the gap in time. Instead, he used a word of lesser light on the man’s eyes, willing all of the light to be repeled by them, plunging him instantly into a blindness that was as complete as it was temporary. He’d recovered in a few minutes, but by then, Simon would be long gone.

The man dropped his weapon and clutched his face as he screamed, “My eyes! I’ve been blinded by a Magi! My eyes!”

Simon had been feeling rather good about his decision to spare the man, but he regretted it immediately as he felt dozens of pairs of eyes turn toward him. He didn’t wait for any shouted commands; he just darted across the roof to the other side and used a word of lesser force to cushion his fall when he jumped over the busy street on the far side and landed in an alley.

At that exact moment, Simon would have given several years of his life to know exactly how they had found him. The Unspoken had sprung the word of nullification on him when he wasn’t ready, and he had no doubt that these pricks had a trick or two up their sleeves that he hadn’t seen before either.

They probably can’t read my mind,

he decided as he ran down the alley like a phantom. If they could, they would have known what I was about to do. So either I asked someone the wrong question or one of the spells I used gave me away. Is there a way to detect magic?

Simon didn’t know, but he kind of worried that there was, which meant he should try to use less of it as soon as he shook his tail. He was pretty sure if he’d merely asked the wrong question, he would have been arrested by a guard or two. Mages and a small army meant they were expecting trouble.

He darted down the long dark alley between buildings and outran the sound of the chaos he left in his wake. Still, eventually, after he made a left and leaped over a beggar, he could hear distant gongs. Someone had sounded the alarm, and the gates were closing. That was a shame because he was so close to one of them, but he was never going to outrun everyone on the ground.

Instead of trying, he made his way toward the nearest guard tower and ran inside. That was the last place anyone would expect a fugitive to run, but even if he was going to have to fight his way out, it was the only place with easily accessible stairs, and he wasn’t about to try to Superman it over the top of the wall with a word of greater force. It might be fun, but he’d rather save the big guns in case he needed them later.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Simon unsheathed his vampiric blade even as he started running up the eight-story spiral staircase. He had his scimitar, but he didn’t trust himself with it nearly as much as he did his short, straight blade.

He met the first guard on the third floor, coming out of a door that led into a tunnel in the wall. He didn’t even bother to stab him. He just grabbed the armored man by the gorget and yanked him down the narrow, winding stairs. While that wasn’t sure to break his neck, the odds were good. They were even better when the guard barely even cried out.

Simon looked down at his hands and noted that he was still largely swirling and translucent. Up close, he probably looked more like a ghost than anything else.

That works for me, he decided, slowing down a touch rather than taking a break. Fear is a great edge for moments like this.

When he reached the top of the wall, he expected another fight, but instead, he found this section of the wall clear. “Aufvarum Barom

,” Simon whispered to himself, using a word of minor illusion to reshape his lingering heat shimmer into the plain uniform of the guard he’d just tossed down the stairs. Surely that would be enough to…

Simon's thoughts trailed off as a Magi flicked into existence not thirty feet from him. They can detect magic! His mind screamed. They can teleport, too! Like that asshole doppelganger!

Both of those surprised him, but not so much that he let the other mage beat him to the punch. Even as the other man opened his mouth to cast whatever it was he was going to cast, Simon had already finished speaking, “Vrazig.”

The words for fire and lightning were both two syllables, but fire traveled at the speed of a flamethrower, whereas lightning moved at almost three hundred thousand miles an hour. That was fast. It was certainly fast enough to be an advantage in a tense moment like this. A word of death might move faster, but Simon hadn’t used Gelthic like that before, and he wasn’t about to risk it. Instead, he stopped the other man’s heart and seized his throat even as he leaped over the far side of the wall.

Simon knew exactly what was going to happen seconds after the other man died, and he didn’t want to be anywhere near that fireball. It detonated on the wall behind him, even as Simon had already fallen four stories toward the street on the far side.

The eight-story fall would have almost certainly been fatal, except that he used a word of force when he was ten feet above the ground to arrest his momentum, letting him land smooth and almost untroubled. A few people stared at him, but more were still staring up at the wall where the mage had just exploded. From their reaction, Simon could tell that they knew what that meant but not how they felt about it.

Before anyone could link him to it, though, he was gone. He moved almost at random between streets. His scimitar was out now, and he was doing his best to look menacing.

His armor would be fading away in the next few minutes, but for as long as it was still convincing, Simon yelled at anyone who walked too near him. “Which way did he go!”

No one had any idea, of course. They’d heard the explosion, and everyone could see the wall on fire, but none of them had any idea what it was about. “The foreigner!” Simon shouted again. “Which way did he go!”

Simon got a dozen different answers to that, but he ignored them all. Instead, he headed toward the nearest caravanasery and hid out in their stables for a few minutes so that his illusion would wear away entirely; normally, he would have spoken the words of lesser nullification, but this time, that would give away his position all over again, so he had to take it slow despite the urgency of the moment. Then he stole a stranger’s horse and rode out of there like he owned the place.

The city was an angry beehive now. Men were everywhere, exchanging rumors or searching for the foreigner mage, as many were calling him. Simon didn’t interact with any of them. He just rode directly east as quickly as he could without drawing attention.

He didn’t really have supplies for a long expedition, which meant he needed to visit a town or a nomad camp first to resupply. That wouldn’t be a problem, of course; he had all the money in the world right now. From where he was right now, he could ride a day or two out, but a week's worth of food, and be back in the desert before the commotion had died down.

Still, something made him hesitate. He was tempted to say that he hadn’t accomplished his aim. If anything, he might have made things slightly worse. If the Magi believed that a foreign mage had moved against them, they were more likely to attack the South sooner rather than later.

That wasn’t it either, though. It was that all of this had raised more questions than answers. The magi of Zurari could do things he couldn’t begin to understand. They could teleport. They could detect magic. He’d seen them do some interesting things when he’d waged a private war with them for a few months as a vampire, but apparently, demonology was only the tip of the iceberg.

“I need to know,” he told himself. “There’s too much here to just give up on.” The same was true in Hepollyon, of course, but somehow, learning reasons not to use magic wasn’t nearly as interesting to him as learning more ways to use it, and surprisingly, Simon was okay with that.