Part of Simon wanted to explain that hoping that students would get better because they feared another beating was about the worst teaching method imaginable. If he’d taught his own son like this…. Seyom. Simon clamped down on that thought before it could blossom. He didn’t think about Freya at all anymore and Elthna only rarely. Neither woman caused him much heartache, but the idea that he’d saved his son without even getting to spend more time with him still hurt enough that he avoided the memory.

He was scarcely older now than the boy had been at the end. It didn’t matter. Memories of people that didn’t exist weren’t any more important than learning to write words, which he already knew exactly how to draw with perfect form. What mattered was what he did with his evenings.

Though there weren’t a lot of words of power hidden amongst the documents he’d searched so far, they were there. They were always written in the same strange way, though, so that someone wouldn’t accidentally cast a spell or something. Zyvon was not written as Zyvon. It was written as Zy/von. In the same way, Barom was written as Ba/rom, and Hyakk was written as Hy/akk.

These were training texts, so there were only a few of the most basic words. He found no new words of power or new meanings for the ones he had, at least no useful ones.

Someone very smart Magi, at some point in the past, had come up with a clever idea to solve one of Simon's biggest problems with the idea of teaching people magic, and that was to make the minor word mandatory to every spell.

In the primer that was apparently meant to teach acolytes their first spells, Auf/varum wasn’t listed as minor or disperse. It was listed as ‘By order of the God-King I invoke.’ His fellow students were basically being taught that they couldn’t cast a spell without using that word, which was clever in a way. Simon actually respected that. That one little change probably saved a lot of lives.

That wasn’t the part of the book that interested him, though. That was the section on hand motions.

Simon didn’t know how much longer it would be until he learned from this book as a student in some official capacity. He was tempted to start casting spells the very night he found it. Instead, he waited because he wasn’t sure they had some way to detect if he was doing magic.

It had not been such a long time since they had hunted him throughout the city for his divination efforts, and he still wasn’t sure what had triggered that. I soon might, though, he thought, hopefully. For all their awfulness, the Magi knew many things that he didn’t, and he would put up with a great deal to pry those secrets free.

Still, just because he couldn’t try to cast the spells he’d discovered in that thin blue volume labeled The Basic Techniques for Calling Down the God-King’s Blessings

didn’t mean he couldn’t read about them. That he did from the very first moment, devouring page after page of fairly biased theory.

To some extent, it reminded him of some of the demonic tomes he’d read so early in his adventures. Rather than thanking this demon or that one and invoking them in the rituals they listed, though, this was all about the state religion. Indeed, in most cases, there was a long litany of phrases that one had to recite before they were supposed to speak the words of power, which served no purpose at all.

It’s still pretty common with warlocks, though, Simon reminded himself as he mentally reviewed many of the texts he’d read over his many lives. If a word contains power, then more words must contain more power.

While he understood the flawed logic, the only benefit it might provide was in the way it strengthened the caster’s belief and imagination in what was about to happen. As Simon read the book, he ignored most of the pages, but he took the time to use a mirror to commit the most important pages to his library in case he died before he had the chance to try them for himself.

Really, the thing seemed pretty straightforward; he only had a couple of concerns about the new concept of gesture-based magic. The first was that the information was woefully incomplete. The book contained gestures for only the words of light and fire, but the second one was the product of pure paranoia as much as anything else. The book showed a series of complicated hand gestures that were no doubt slower than speaking the words.

Each gesture required only a single hand, so Simon supposed it might be possible to trace the modifier and the actual word of power simultaneously, but he wasn’t completely sure on that front. It would require experimentation.

All of this will, he reminded himself with a shake of his head. He wasn’t even sure how the words and gestures would interact together. What he was sure of, though, was that the information was incomplete, at the bare minimum.

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If they lie to the students about what Aufvarum means, then what else are they lying about? He wondered.

It wasn’t like he only had one night to figure all of this out, though. While all of the other acolytes were eager to steal as much sleep as they could every night, Simon had weeks to think about these things on his nighttime adventures.

By day, he would scribble on sheets of paper as he tried to make his handwriting look as awkward and juvenile as possible, and by night, he would creep around looking for any scrap that he could find in the slumbering building. His minder didn’t seem to have any fear of what the acolytes in his charge might find because they were a long way from possessing real reading skills, and that gave Simon any number of opportunities.

Students cycled in and out of this place, the same as they had when he was an initiate. Here, though, there was no order to it. It wasn’t just taking those who had been here the longest every few days. Here, those were almost always skipped, and it was those who were closest to writing in a clean hand that vanished one day without notice or explanation.

When those who might never master reading or writing vanished, they usually did so in groups, and Simon was quite sure they did not share his eventual fate. Something terrible happened to them, and as much as he wanted to investigate that, for now, it remained a mystery.

In all of his late-night adventures in those first few weeks, he was only almost caught on a single occasion. That time, their minder came back to the building well after midnight. The man was completely drunk, and the female Magi with him seemed halfway there herself, but even the unwelcome surprise of listening to the two of them fumbling in the doorway didn’t make him panic.

Simon had planned for a moment like this from the very first night, which was why he read so near the large table at one end of the room where lunch was typically laid out. His plan had been to roll beneath it and hide there until the danger had passed. However, when he realized the two of them probably intended to fuck on that very spot or somewhere close by, he decided to dash out of the room toward the privy and then returned blearily as he pretended to rub the sleep from his eyes.

Ruining the minder’s moment earned him a sound thrashing, but it was better than the alternative. “If I catch you sssleeping, I’ll lock you in the basssement for a week!” the man threatened him with slurred words. Simon believed him, but as it happened, in the morning, the man didn’t seem to remember exactly who it was he was annoyed with because he took his ill mood out on everyone who even looked a little tired instead.

Still, Simon endured it. That turned out to be one of his last forays into the dark, too. It wasn’t because he feared getting caught, either. It was because he stumbled into an even better way to disappear and explore things he shouldn’t.

Minder Dollen had no problem sending his students off to perform his personal errands. This was something Simon had learned in his first few days in the scriptorium. Sometimes, he even sent them to help other Magi with tasks in an attempt to curry favor with them. He chose the dullards of the group, but since that was exactly what Simon was pretending to some degree, he eventually found himself being sent off to do errands almost as often as he was scribbling.

Simon was trying to walk the tightrope of just enough progress to be worth continued effort, but not so much that he was in danger of graduating to whatever the next level was. He didn’t relish his time spent copying tracts from one of the many books of psalms that praised the God-King, of course, but his explorations had been very enlightening, even if they mostly revealed more about the nature of the venal Magi to him.

It wasn’t until he was sent with a note to fetch a few books from one of the libraries though, that everything changed. Simon had started that trip worried that he should really get his ass in gear so that he didn’t end up wherever it was that Minder Dollen sent the rejects, but as soon as he saw how easily the librarian accepted his presence, he changed his mind entirely.

It might be worth it to milk this for as long as possible, even if they do sacrifice me, he told himself as the librarian helped him to fetch several volumes.

He strolled the isles with the man, committing the names of a few of the more interesting volumes to memory should he ever find his way into this place again without an escort. When it was done, the man wrapped each volume in a ribbon and sealed that ribbon with wax and the library’s seal so that “No one would be tempted to read things they shouldn’t.” Simon assured the man that he could barely read, but it was through gritted teeth. He’d been so close to finding a new way to steal knowledge he wasn’t supposed to have. That frustration faded on his way back to deliver the books to the scriptorium as he figured out exactly how he could get around all of these measures and read whatever he wanted.

Slowly, a wicked plan was coming together in Simon’s mind, and though it took him a week to put all the pieces together, he enjoyed every minute of his scheming. The first and hardest part of the whole thing was to find a place he could read without being discovered. As an acolyte, he couldn’t just sit around. Unless he was walking very purposefully from one point to another, he was bound to get stopped by one or more Magi.

Punishment for shirking was bad enough. Those boys and girls were often publicly shamed and beaten. Simon was sure that the penalty for reading things the one wasn’t allowed to read would be much worse than that, though, which was why he needed to find a spider hole. While knowledge was plentiful here, if one knew where to look for it, privacy was normally only found while everyone else slept.

That was solved when he was sent one day to help remove furniture from a building that was going to be renovated. From the blood spatter on the walls, anyone could see that someone had died in it, but that didn’t bother Simon. He just wanted to know if it was a murder or a magical experiment that hadn’t gone so well for whoever had lived there before. It was an ugly end, but for Simon, it was an opportunity.