Simon was as taken aback by those words as he was by the new assighey were giving him. He was being transferred from the library to the forbidden vaults, which were in a daion of the ruined castle two floors below where he’d been serving so far.

  That was a far cry from the execution he’d expected, but the truth was even strahan that. At first, he thought his new duties would be simir to his old ones. He’d just be transting artifacts instead of books. He would kill for that opportunity sihat was one skill he desperately wao improve after the severe case of frost burn he’d gotten from the armor he’d spent so much time making.

  What he found was more than that. However, he only learhat after he was made to take yet more oaths.

  The Unspoken seemed obsessed with them. They made him sign a dot in blood, swearing that arayal would be met with the most painful of all afterlives. After that, he had to swear eternal service to the order. They also made him swear not to tell any sworn brother what it was he learned from this point forward and that he would only speak freely with the inquisitors from now on, which struck him as both tantalizing and suspicious.

  Simon wasn’t impressed or intimidated by any of that, though he did have to admit that the pageantry associated with the whole thing was rather impressive, especially in a shadowy cathedral. He could see how much all of this would impact him if he’d really been a young schor with a hard life.

  It was only when those rituals and blood oaths and the fasting associated with each of them were plete that the truth was finally revealed. The senior members of the unspoken used magic items. He’d already suspected this from his time with Aaric, of course, but now he knew for a certainty.

  They weren’t quite standard issue, but they werely unoher, but they had an armory full of them, based on the principles of items they’d found or seized from warlocks, and now his job was to help make more of them.

  “There’s no evil on this,” the inquisitor assured him as he showed Simon around the secluded workshops. “These items are blessed, and in this way, we use the strength of the enemy against them.”

  While that logic made a twisted sort of se also made the Unspoken giant hypocrites, which bothered him even more than their misguided crusade against magic. He wasn’t about to make any waves about it, though. Not in this life. Just from the quality of the tools and the plexity of the patterns, he knew he was going to learn a lot here.

  That was even truer than Simon thought it would be. At first, he was underwhelmed as the silent man in charge put his calligraphy skills to use preparing bdes for the acid etg process that they used to score perfect lihis involved applying a cy mask everywhere they didn’t want to damage the metal. It was tedious work, but o was plete, he could see why it was so important.

  Simon already uood that the er the lihe better the mana flowed, but that was further reinforced by feedback from the silent smiths. A shape that wasn’t perfe execution had about the same effect as a word of power that wasn’t spoken perfectly. Either could alter the effect, increase the power required, or flub a spell entirely.

  It was iing work, and Simon thrived in his new enviro even more than he had in the library. Once upon a time, he’d pyed many games where crafting had pyed a big part, but it had only been crafting it the same way that he used to sider using his mouse fighting.

  This was infinitely more plicated than that. He’d never really made anything more plicated than assembling Swedish furniture with unpronounceable names during his time oh, and he didn’t realize how much he e. There was something about the perfe and the slow process of watg a steel ingot bee a long, slender bde that he found very satisfying.

  Well, I probably wouldn’t have then, he realized.

  With enough dista was easy enough to be ho about that. Back then, using an Allen wrench had been an insufferable ordeal, but now he didn’t even mind the hardest jobs, like fueling the fes or bumping the bellows for hour after hour, while more experienced men than him tureel into bdes.

  For season after season, he soaked it in, and he admired every little teique that he learned. At first, he was mostly responsible for marking the bdes, along with other simple things, like sharpening bdes and assisting smiths.

  However, even in those tasks, he learned a great deal. The chief example of that was the way that they refilled those acid-created els with silver, making the runes both funal and nearly invisible because of how well the silver blended with the steel. Unless you kly what you were looking for, you’d never see them.

  Sometimes, they had him transte and attempt to uand the way that ems worked if the nguage was rare or the symbols were too stylized for other people to work out since he had a good eye for that. Mostly, though, that was handled by more trusted, senior acolytes.

  Still, the glimpses he got into various patterns and designs were fasating. Many of them were so plicated that they made the frost sword that had been his major inspiration seem clumsy and primitive by parison.

  Still, he was inspired by many of the designs he saw, both in what they did and the way that they were fueled. The bdes that they made all seemed to share a few traits; the first was that the effects were subtle. After all, it wouldn’t do to have the secret antimage society be seen wielding magical ons all the time.

  Simon was surprised that he hadn’t had to blot out more of those references in the books he’d seen, but then the on people really didn’t have any idea what magic was. If someone said a on was holy instead of witchcraft, then how were they supposed to know the difference? So, a lot of them had subtle glow effeinor strengthening and healing effects for their wielder.

  The purpose wasn’t to make the most powerful on but the most in-character on. Simon imagihat the rune bde that had briefly been in his possession worked in a simir fashion. Truthfully, he probably could have puzzled out how it had been built after so much exposure, but the sed desig was what ied him more because he hadn’t seen it before.

  Rather than being powered by the wielder or even the enviro, all of their ons were powered by their victim's life force via a simple rune circuit he tip of the bde in the blood gutter. It was an ingenious design, audied it as much as he could without attrag attention because he was definitely going to copy it iure.

  The future was ing at him more quickly than he would have thought down there in the dark. Ever so slowly, he moved his from assisting those with the pns in the hammers to being the oo wield them uhe observation of others.

  The pce was a small factory, and with all the slow, careful steps, nearly half of the final bdes were rejected for some defect, but they still made several a month. That wasn’t all that they made, either. It was sometime in his sed or third year when he graduated from f to sand casting. Simon’s time at the anvil had made him strong, but there was nth was needed for this.

  Instead, it involved taking finished, nearly funal amulets that had been carved from wood that had all the proper runes and using them to create molds with sand. Ohat happehose molds were then filled with molteal, which was usually silver but sometimes brass old, depending on what it was they were making. Most of the amulets they made were in the shape of holy symbols to further hide their true purpose. Simon had seen a couple of those explode while trying to carry out their purpose wheaken out that group of white cloaks a few lives ago, so he khey had something to do with prote. At least, some of them did.

  The Unspoken were more creative with their amulets than they were with their bdes, and they had a whole array of uses. Oegory warned of undead or demonic taint nearby. Atempted to shield the wearer from certain specified forces via boundary runes. Acc to their st dotation on those, they only worked on spells of lesser power, which expined why a greater word had caused them to explode.

  Even in the best case, though, they were fragile things. Most of those were rejected because of air bubbles, cracks caused by cooling, or other imperfes. Uhe swords, this wasn’t a problem because the metal could just be melted down a sed time for them tain.

  The amulets had no victims to power them, so instead, they stole essence from the surrounding world in a way that was simir to how he’d powered his armor with waste heat. The Unspoken used runes of order and e to draarently free energy from the world, but Simon had been alive long enough to know that there was no such thing as a free lunch. Still, he couldn’t figure out what exactly they were siphoning away. It had to be something, though, because they obviously worked. He’d seen them in a.

  Several times, early oried to improve these objects by simplifying their shapes, but those who supervised him wouldn’t allow it. ‘Tradition demands it look this way,’ was what the hat came ba would say. ‘They are ceremonial objects first, and holy ons sed!’

  Simon uood that, but he also khat it was the plex shapes that caused so many of them to fail, not the ruhemselves. A simple, ft amulet of bronze scored with ruhat was then covered in a yer of silver old would have been a huimes easier to mass produce. They could give oo every man wearing a white cloak in the space of a year.

  Still, he didn’t fight this point too hard. Instead, he focused on learning every teique that a more experienced craftsman was willing to teach him. He rarely left that silent world after a while, except to sleep, and for a long time, nothing seemed to ge but him as he slowly grew older. Brothers would e and go, but mostly, they would e back safe and sound. The Abbott, too, along with other people like the Head Librarian and the ander of the Order, seemed almost eternal.

  The only people that really seemed to ge oftehe sisters. They cycled much more frequently than the brothers, though everyone pretended not to notice. It wasn’t talked about, but Simohe answer. It was because they were only taught a single word of power, and they were expected to t it at every enter with a possible warlotil their pretty throats bled.

  They might not know what that cost them, but he did. Whispering null over and ain would take decades off their lives with every enter, and for what? It was sloppy and wasteful. They could get the same effect with a more plex spell using lesser words. He couldn’t share that with ahough. That would just make the powers that be look at him with suspi.

  Still, he couldn’t look away from the travesty. It was good that he didn’t, too. If he had simply stayed ed up in his own tasks and experiments, he would never have noticed the day that Carelyn finally arrived at the Broken Tower.