Sylver hadn’t been bullshiting about being a 3rd-degree witch, more than once.

Granted, he was only a 3rd-degree witch for a couple of seconds, but that didn’t make it a lie.

Hierarchy within covens was simultaneously straightforward and stupidly complicated.

A witch who hadn’t made a contract with any spirit, or demon, was called an “initiate.” They handled the cooking, cleaning, and miscellaneous tasks the members capable of using magic were too busy to do.

Above them, were the 1st-degree witches.

These ladies were apprentices to a 2nd or 3rd-degree witch and typically were allowed access to a portion of their master’s magic. Once they gained enough experience, they formed a separate contract with their master’s spirit, and from that point were considered 2nd-degree witches.

2nd-degree witches had a considerable amount of range in their abilities and power. Some were weak enough that 1st degree witches posed a threat to them, while others were powerful enough to form multiple contracts, with multiple spirits, and if they were powerful enough, could be recognized by a 3rd-degree witch.

An old woman was standing outside the barrier that surrounded the coven. She had 3 lines on her sleeve and was backed up by two rather large women with 2 thick lines on their sleeves.

“You’re a long way from home, corpse,” the old woman said.

Her voice was low and raspy.

“None of that, please. I came here to discuss the sleeping curse you’ve been spreading,” Sylver said, as he wagged his finger at the old woman, the way he would at a small child.

She almost smiled when Sylver wagged his finger, but she looked like she was about to spit in his face as he mentioned the curse.

“Who are you with?” the old witch asked.

“Does it matter? You want to hurt the emperor, and I want to help you,” Sylver said as the woman lifted her head to look him in the eye.

She had an eyepatch over her left eye, and there was a line down her nose that Sylver was all too familiar with.

He’d gone through the same ritual once.

An incision down the nose is made and the sinus is filled up with a mixture of hallucinogenic herbs. The nose is then sutured back into shape, and the person spends several days in a drug-induced trance.

It’s a very crude, but effective, way of attracting a demon.

The reason they split the nose apart, as opposed to just shoving herbs in through the nostrils, was partly because that was what the original ritual specified, but also because blood from a cracked open nose was different from blood drawn from a vein in the arm.

This was another reason why Sylver never delved too deeply into witchcraft. It was too symbolic for his taste.

Mage craft was straightforward. It wasn’t simple, but once you understood the governing principles, the only potential for failure was human error. A spell performed by one mage could be repeated by another and required the exact same components.

Witchcraft was more art than science.

If two witches gave up their “beauty,” the difference in power wasn’t something objective, like desirable features relative to the culture/location, no, the difference was how much each witch felt she was giving up.

To an ugly woman, her beautiful eyes were all she had, while a beautiful woman still had her hair, face, lips, etc…

Sylver normally refrained from using this word, but witchcraft was dirty magic.

“Come with me,” the old witch said, as she seemed to come to a decision. She turned around and started to walk towards the invisible barrier.

“I want you to swear on your book of shadows that I won’t be harmed,” Sylver said, as he took a step towards the old witch and the barrier.

He felt everyone stiffen up, even the witches floating high above him, and the ones hiding in the trees behind him.

“I swear,” the old witch said under her breath.

***

In the middle of the village stood a giant blood-soaked wooden pole that had a pile of skulls around it. 6 pale blue flames floated near the top of the pole and gave it an odd-looking shine.

A wall was wrapped around the pole in a U shape, with a large altar directly in front of the pole. The magic circle that surrounded the pole, and separated it from the rest of the village, was about 20 meters in diameter.

Which meant the spirit inside was 5th tier, at best. Not a demon though, something local, going by the symbols carved onto the foreheads of the skulls.

As Sylver and the old woman approached the totem pole and alter, the floating balls of blue flame lowered themselves towards the skulls and made the various eyeholes light up.

The rest of the village was standard. Small 1-story wooden huts, built to be as close as possible to one another, with just enough room for people to walk between them. There was a public bath, several outhouses, and the rest of the space was used for herb gardens.

Two seats and a wooden table appeared just outside the circle around the totem pole, and the old witch sat down. The table was pressed right up against the edge of the circle painted on the ground.

“What’s the plan after the man that was with me goes back, and returns with a high-level party to retrieve the girl’s corpse?” Sylver asked as he sat down.

“We are prepared for that. But he won’t come back,” the old witch said, as Sylver realized something.

“I forgot to introduce myself. Sylver Sezari. Necromancer, adventurer, master of the dark arts, and 3rd-degree witch,” Sylver said, as the old witch nodded at him.

“Abby Metcalf,” the old witch, Abby, said.

“Why won’t he come back, Abby?” Sylver asked.

“Because a man will sit him down, and will come up with a believable reason, as to why the swamp is off limits. Then your friend, and his elves, will do their best to quarantine, cure, and help those affected, and when everyone infected is dead, they will leave,” Abby explained calmly.

Sylver reached up with his hand to scratch his cheek.

“I don’t like where this conversation is going. But I appreciate that you’re being so direct Abby,” Sylver said, as the old witch shrugged her shoulders.

“The emperor knows we’re here. He also knows we’re responsible for the “sleeping sickness,” as you called it. The reason he won’t do anything about us, and won’t allow anyone to do something about us, is because then he would have to admit we exist,” Abby explained, as Sylver nodded along.

“Let me guess… All the people here were children who were thrown into the swamp, because of their low aptitude for Ki, who were collected by your predecessors, and were trained to be witches,” Sylver said, as Abby’s eye opened slightly.

“Are you from Elanor’s coven?” Abby asked.

“No. It’s just the only explanation that makes sense as to why a group of relatively powerful witches would hide in a swamp. Although I don’t understand why you wouldn’t simply leave. It would take several generations to get back to your current level of power, but what use is power if you can’t do anything with it?” Sylver asked.

“If only it were that simple, little lich,” a voice spoke from Sylver’s right.

He turned his head and saw a creature sitting on his right, almost as if it was sharing the table with Syvler and Abby. The spirit chose to give itself the form of a nude woman, with a face that looked eerily similar to Abby’s.

Sylver and the spirit locked eyes and stared at one another. The spirit's body made a faint crunching sound, as its face gradually lost any semblance of humanity, and bit by bit, it stopped resembling a woman, and instead looked like a sexless skin-covered doll.

“For your own sake, don’t be rude,” Sylver said calmly, as the creature blinked at him. This was probably the first time it had met someone whose mind was completely inaccessible to it.

It spoke without moving its lips. If before the spirit had sounded like a young woman, now it sounded like a child talking from the inside of a deep well.

“I told no falsehoods,” the spirit said, as Sylver just looked at it with a bored expression on his face.

Sylver turned towards Abby.

“Why are you still here?” Sylver asked the old witch.

“She can’t leave this place. No one born here can. They need the emperor’s permission, which they will never get,” the spirit explained, as Abby nodded her head.

Sylver pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes for a few seconds.

He imagined stepping into the spirit’s ring and then crushing all the skulls surrounding the totem with his foot. Sadly, he needed Abby’s help, and although he wasn’t afraid of the spirit itself, these witches weren’t exactly harmless.

“What was the point of spreading the sleeping curse? What’s the end goal behind it?” Sylver asked.

“We were hired to do it,” Abby said.

There was an odd pause.

“And I’m guessing you can’t tell me who hired you, and even if I guess correctly, you wouldn’t tell me,” Sylver said, as Abby shrugged her shoulders.

“That’s a fair assumption,” the spirit answered.

“But you are trying to hurt and kill the emperor, right?” Sylver asked.

“We aren’t trying to hurt anyone. But if we were, this curse wouldn’t be strong enough. I reckon, we would probably need, what? A couple tons of gold to make a curse powerful enough to kill the emperor?” the spirit said, in a singsong sort of voice.

The problem with the spirit speaking in hypotheticals is that even if it was saying something ridiculous, it wouldn’t be a lie.

Sylver’s further attempts to get something close to a straight answer out of the spirit annoyed him so much that he had to stop talking for a minute.

From the sounds of it, the only purpose of the curse was to annoy the emperor and the largest and strongest sects. Sure, the upper brass would be safe, but a sect without people to cook, clean, handle logistics, and so on, would at the very least get destabilized.

The sleeping curse, which would eventually kill hundreds of children, was nothing more than a distraction.

The witches went along with it because it was the only way they could acquire enough gold to craft an emperor killing curse.

But that meant that someone wanted the area to be destabilized for a reason.

Which begged the question, what was Nameless’ plan? Or Owls for that matter.

Sylver gestured with his hand towards the ground, a small branch sprouted and grew until it was about as tall as Sylver was while sitting down. The branch pulsed with life, and in the blink of an eye a flower appeared on the branch, and promptly dried up, and was replaced by a bright green fruit.

The fruit grew and grew until it was about the size of a person’s fist. It turned yellow, then red, and finally fell off the branch it had grown on and landed in Sylver’s hand.

“Normally I try to stay away from classics, but this seems the most appropriate,” Sylver said, as he tossed the red fruit towards the spirit, who caught it with both hands.

The spirit stared at the shiny red fruit, and as Sylver had predicted, a sick smile appeared on its pale and featureless face.

“A poisoned apple?” the spirit asked, with the glee of a child that had just been handed a large bag full of chocolates.

“Cursed, but yes. I figure it's easier to mix it into his food than have someone sleep in the same room as him,” Sylver explained, but the spirit wasn’t listening. It was already working on the apple.

Sylver had hoped he would be able to help them improve their curse, but even if he could understand the framework and circuit the spirit used, he doubted the spirit’s pride would allow any alterations from a “little lich.”

Sylver left the coven with the apple in hand, and as he made his way back to Tarragon and Anise, the ground shook beneath his feet. Aleri flew high up into the sky and confirmed that another mountain peak had disappeared into a cloud of dust.

The White Dog sect was gone.

And now only 10 sects remained.