Simon’s first instinct was to cast a spell and murder all three of them, but he held back. That wasn’t because he thought he could learn something or even because it would screw up the future. It was because everything in their body nguage told him they didn’t sider him to be the least threat to them.

  That made sense. While Simon was still a little softer than he would have liked because he’d spent more time reading than fighting in this life, he’d still lost a ton of weight. As a result, he must have looked like a sy scribe or courtier to these men. He didn’t even carry more than a khese days, further reinf the image.

  “Is there a problem?” he asked with more indignation than might have been appropriate for the situation.

  He quickly caught himself and tihis time, he tried to add a touch of fear to his surprise, “I mean… what are you doing in my room. This is—”

  “This is a long time ing,” the seated man said. “You’ve been flitting around the court for a while with a little storm cloud over your head. That’s not so much for the circles you run in, but it’s long past time we do something about it.”

  “Circles? Stormcloud?” Simon asked, only partially pretending to be lost by the straurns in versation. “Will someoell me what this is about?”

  One of the standing men had moved behind him and, very gently but firmly, guided Simon to the chair at his small table before pushing him down into it. He didn’t resist, even though it was a terrible tactical position to be in, but only because he didn’t want to arouse their suspis.

  “Oh, with the works you’ve been reading in the library, I don’t think I o spell that out. Not for you. You may not kly who we are, but after reading…” the man pulled out a list, “The Histories of Sanit Modraihe icles of Ionia’s first Kings, At the Crossroads, Travelers Tales of Darkness, The Wars Against Witchcraft… you get the idea. This is not a normal list of scrolls and tomes. It goes on at length.”

  “I-I was searg for all the monsters of the region so that I might present my Lord with—”

  “Aye, you did that too, but to what end?” the man asked, leaking forward far enough that Simon could see most of his face along with a cruel, thin-lipped smile. “The Baron you cim to work fht be a try lord, but he’s no monster syer. He hasn’t even heard of a Nimos before.”

  That took Simon by surprise by a little, but only a little. A good man with a strong horse could cross the deserts and reach Corwin nds in two or perhaps three weeks. They weren’t so far from the main trade roads, but the idea that they would look into him so thhly spoke volumes.

  “For a while, we thought you were simply a social climber who’d padded your resume with the names of strangers for pure clout,” the hooded man said with a shrug, “But given your reading list and the gray haze that gs to you at ye… well, we were more ed that your master might be the true source of evil. He might still be, too.”

  “I thought you just said that the Baron didn’t know me?” Simon answered, actually fused now. “How he be my master if I don’t—”

  His words were cut off as one of the men beside him uhed a dagger and smmed it deep into the wood of the table between his spread hands. It was obviously meant to be an intimidatioure, but it worked.

  “Your true master,” the man growled, “We know you have alternative purposes. Tell us the who and why of it willingly, though, and this will hurt less.”

  Simon paused, sidering his options, before saying, “I may not know your names or what you’re after, but I know you’re the ones purging the books I’ve been searg through.”

  “Are we now?” the man across from him leaned forward, steepling his fingers and revealing enough of his face that Simon was sure he’d seen him at one or two of the parties i year. “And why would we do that?”

  “To elimiches and keep more people from being them, of course,” Simon said fidently. “I think it's a wise and noble idea, but ’t you see that it's harming people’s ability to solve other problems, like the ht here in—”

  “Problems made by witchcraft ot be solved by witchcraft,” the third hooded figure said, sitting down at the table to join Simon and the first man. “And givihe tools of warlocks will not reduce the number of warlocks in this world, young man.”

  Of the three, his words carried by far the most weight, and Simon instantly uood he was the boss. No, it was more than that. Simon realized. He’s the boss, and he’s been using these other two here to py good cop, bad cop with me so that he get a read on how I reabsp;

  Simon sat there quietly while he waited for the shoe to drop, but in his mind, his heart was already rag, looking for a story to tell these people. He wasn’t sure what story they wao hear yet, but he khat they wao hear one.

  So, even as he listeo the ominous man start to lecture about responsibilities and the subtle nature of evil, his mind was already stitg the pieces together. He needed an in that couldn’t be corroborated, and he did his best to craft that from the pieces of the world he’d most experienced around the Kingdom of Brin.

  His first instinct was to give them the Schwarzenbruck sob story. He would have, too, if he hadn’t figured out that those events hadn’t happened yet or were happening right about now. So, instead, he decided to go with Maritin. That was the tiny vilge he’d rescued from starvation with a load of basemeables.

  It probably still existed, too but wasn’t the sort of pce for keeping records, and he knew just enough o make it pusible. Plus, it was only a few days from Lord Corwin’s nds, so it spliicely into what he’d already told them.

  When the man was tired of the sound of his own void asked Simon who he really was, he was ready. “Nimos is a false name,” he admitted, “And I’m not a schor. I grew up poor, but I just learo read and write during my time in Leipzen and found out that fanames open the doors to lots of pces that mine ’t.”

  They stayed quiet, so Simon expined his life. This time, he gave his name as Ennis. It was the name of a couple people he’d met and a on enough name for the region. Anywhere he was asked about would remember an Ennis or three, and if he was lucky, one of them would be from a family who’d been wiped out during a pgue. He definitely needed a pgue, too, along with as much suffering as he could heap on his fial self.

  These men were uhe false impression the dark auras came from magic use, but thanks to his versations with Aaric, Simohat it was just the visible representation of what the mirror called experience. While it was o know that his aura had gone from swirling berely a steel-gray color, he needed an expnation for how his aura could have gotten so polluted at such a young age.

  So, he lied his ass off. First, in broad strokes, and then, when he was asked about details, he filled those in with more tragedies. Parents dead to disease and starving ireets of Brin, he gave the saddest version of the old story about a kid that pulled himself up by his bootstraps he’d ever heard. He told them how he’d goo the capital where he was beaten and bullied. Later he fessed that he’d risen up to bee a messehe man who took him in and taught him his letters. He turned out to be a molester as well as young Ennis’s first murder victim.

  By the time he was done, he’d painted himself as an awful person who had e to Darndelle to start over, who’d developed a love of reading rather than a warlo hiding or anything like that, and after making him gh the story twice more, backward and forwards, it looked to him like they bought it. The hardest part of the whole thing wasn’t even keeping everything straight at this point; it was remembering that he couldn’t call these guys the Unspoken because they hadn’t mentio yet.

  “You ’t see them, though, you?” the white cloak leader finally asked him toward the end. “The auras. The dark residue that the use of magic leaves behind.”

  “What auras?” Simon asked, feigning fusion. “I mean, I pick a bad guy out of the crowd, but it's the look in his eyes, not the—”

  “That’s not what we mean,” he said, interrupting Simon as he pulled a card out of his pocket and slid it face down across the table to him. “I want you to read the word on this card, and as you do, I want you to imagi bursting into fmes.”

  “Imagi? Why?” Simon said as he picked up the card and looked at it. It said, ‘Meiren,’ i handwriting. “What’s this for?”

  They're testing me, he realized instantly. He willed himself not to go pale as he shrugged at the supposedly inscrutable word.

  “This is the time to do what you are told, not ask questions,” the man said. “As to what it’s for… well if you do it, I promise that you’ll get one hell of a reward…”

  “Reward, huh?” Simon asked with a nervous smile, willing himself to believe the lie. “t me in.”

  He tried to stay sounding nont, but inside, his heart was hammering. He could practically feel the garrote that the man behind him undoubtedly had, ready to murder him if he screwed this up.

  For a moment, Simon thought about murdering all three of them. It would have been easy. A simple word of force radiating out would kill all of them before they had the ce to speak. Then, he could flee the inn, journey north, and try this whole scam in reverse in Leipzen.

  This is an opportunity, though, his mind insisted, warring with itself for a moment. If they kill me, I just reset, but if they don’t, I might finally get a line in on these guys.

  In the end, if the choice was knowledge or death, it wasn’t really a choice at all. So, he looked at the card again, preteo trate, and then at the st minute, he realized his mistake, and said “I’m sorry, I ’t read it. What’s it supposed to say exactly?”

  One of the men sighed, and then very slowly, a sylble at a time, he sou out for Simon. Simon listeheed the word, mispronoung slightly on purpose by giving the sed ‘e’ a hard sound rather than a soft one, but there was no way they were going to let that slide.

  “Try it again,” the boss insisted after a short versation on pronunciation. The other man didn’t say the whole word at once. Instead, he pronounced only a single sylble at a time.

  “Meiren,” Simon said, pronoung it correctly this time. He tasted sulfur and knew he’d said it correctly, but nothing happened. At least, nothing appeared to.

  If he’d done as they asked, the whole area would have lit up in fmes, but that was the worst oute. So, since he couldn’t fool them one way, he fooled them another. Instead of maing the energy in the room with them, he maed it in the on room ey that ran up one wall. He imagined a thousand tiny ders rather than a single explosive fme because he didn’t want to make a sound, but just the same, he dumped all the heat into the appropriate vessel.

  If there were men watg them outside, then he supposed they might have seen a burst of flu gas catch fire, but Simon wasn’t super ed about that. He was fairly sure that these three people were all there were.

  When none of them moved, he did it a sed time in his bid to look sincere. He was only slightly ahat he was throwing away months of his life for no reason at all, but after the sed time, the man reached across the table and took the slip of paper back.

  “Was that it?” he asked. “I didn’t pass, did I?”

  The leader of the three white cloaks shook his head as he stood. “No, I’m afraid you failed.”

  “’t I try again?” Simon asked, trying to be as ving as possible.

  “No, failure is good in this case; it means you get to keep your life,” The other men were moving toward the door now.

  “My life?” Simon asked, pretending to take that in slowly. “But I thought you were here to… I don’t know, recruit me, not kill me.”

  “Our little… anization typically only accepts those who see what is unseen,” the man said after studying Simon for a moment. “Still, there are some uses for the blind like you when you are willing to get your hands dirty. We’ve hidden a few needles in your chosen haystack,” the mystery man said with a smile. “If you find one of them, well… You’ll know what to do then, won’t you, and if you’re not that clever… Well, I don’t think we’ll o bother you again.”

  Simon waited until all three of them were gone before he moved a muscle. It was only when he could hear their footsteps dowairs that he finally removed the carefully crafted mask that he’d spent the evening building, and he slumped in his chair, pletely exhausted by the hours of questioning he’d just endured.