Death After Death-Chapter 324 - A Long Winter

A few weeks after his trial by combat, the snows started in earnest. Up until now, every day had been getting drearier and grayer as the temperatures fell, but soon, the scattered flurries were replaced with sustained storms that would often fill up the streets of the capital with drifts that measured several feet high.

In Ordanvale, the winter wouldn’t have even started for another month, and in Brin proper, it might have been a few weeks later than that, but he was in the high mountains now, and warmth was as fleeting in the weather as it was in the people.

None of that bothered Simon once he bought enough firewood to light all four hearths and patched the holes in the walls and ceiling where the heat was leaking from. After all of that hard work was done, he was looking forward to bundling up for the winter and studying a few of his projects. Unfortunately, that was the same time that the white fever broke out among the residents of the capital.

While not as wretched as some of the plagues he’d seen, it was still nasty stuff. Those who were afflicted by it suffered high fevers, pale skin, and distant, milky gaze as if they were halfway to blindness.

Apparently, it wasn’t uncommon, though this year was worse than most. He hadn’t dealt with it before but had the chance to study it up close when Kayla fell ill. Then, after seeing how hard she struggled to work through it, he decided that he should probably try to help the other residents of the city.

Adonan had not been kind to him, but he was not feeling vengeful about it. Instead, he started with the smallest clans, going door to door and offering his services as a healer. The most common reaction was to slam the door in his face or undisguised skepticism. “What expertise does a sellsword have with herbs,” the matron of clan Kerrara demanded.

It was certainly a reasonable question, but fortunately, he had an old lie already prepared that came to his lips so smoothly that it was practically the truth by now. “When you get wounded as many times as I have on the battlefield, you learn how to fight a great many maladies.”

Only some he was allowed to help. Unfortunately, those were often the people who were truly desperate and in need of a miracle. Fortunately, Simon was good at those. While he prescribed rose hip tea, a cold compress, and bedrest, as well as a cessation of all bloodletting, the real heavy lifting was done by whispered words of curing in those dire cases.

All of that advice was good advice, of course, and would be of genuine help to anyone who was afflicted, but most of those he was allowed to see at first would not have survived without magic. It frustrated him that he had to lean so much on those powers for the first time in years, and he knew this would set back his attempts at regaining clarity, but he wasn’t about to let people die when he could save them. Given that this fever tended to affect the young far more than the old, the idea of doing nothing when he had the power to save so many innocents struck him as barbaric.

Unfortunately, his methods worked too well. When word of his miracle cures got out to the wider public, there was a run on all of the herbs he’d recommended people buy. While the city was well stocked on all of the beer, smoked meat, grain, and other sundries to survive the long, brutal winter, some of the herbs that Simon recommended weren’t considered important up to this point and were exhausted by hoarding almost immediately.

Worse, no one wanted to leave the city until the worst of the winter storms were over. This forced him to brave the main road on snow shoes to lower elevations for a few days to look for more. “It’s too dangerous now,” even Eddek insisted as Simon made preparations to descend the mountain. “After midwinter, the worst of the storms will be over. Then the larger clans sometimes send small caravans with sledges for urgent needs like this.”

“By midwinter, it will be too late,” Simon answered, shaking his head. “Those that are bedridden have days, or perhaps weeks, but not months left in them. I will do it because it must be done.”

“Well, if you can make it, then I can too,” the boy said, doing himself some credit, even though Simon knew he would surely perish without magic and endurance.

Still, Simon went anyway, and he traveled light. Despite the fact that Eddek wanted to go with him, Simon went alone, taking only snow shoes, his weapons, a bearskin that had been sewn into a sleeping bag, and a couple of rune tablets that he spent a few nights carving along with the heaviest winter garments he could find for sale.

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These last objects were simple things that converted cold into heat. They were basically the opposite of the orb he’d thrown into the volcano a few months ago, but for his purpose, it was all he needed. He put one in each boot and one in each glove, and each night when he went to bed, he would toss them in his sleeping bag to keep from dying of hypothermia since keeping a campfire lit would be difficult. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

There was one benefit to the terrible weather, though, and that was that it kept the slopes blessedly free of monsters. He barely even saw a goblin track on his whole trip, and though Simon was told that there were huge furry ogres in this part of the world, he found no evidence of them.

The weather was miserable, but so was the hospitality of the clanholds he received along the way. Even with a letter from Eddek explaining his mission of mercy and asking for help on behalf of his clan, the mountain people did little more than let him sleep on their floors.

That only annoyed Simon on the way down the mountain. Once he reached elevations where he could harvest what he needed and returned to find those same doors slammed in his face a second time, he became truly angry. What’s the point of trying to help people who don’t want to be helped?

He’d spent days harvesting rose hips, pale moss, and half a dozen other helpful herbs one could find this time of year on skeletal branches and under leaf litter. There were slim pickings, but he could only carry so much in his pack, and eventually, he filled it enough to justify the trip.

There was one night, on his way back into the mountains in the midst of a blizzard, he really considered giving up after being turned away from a clanhold because Eddek’s note said ‘his trip down the mountain,’ and they considered that legalism enough to deny his request for hospitality. He was braving frigid conditions for other people and could have easily burned down every building in that wretched crag, and they still treated him this way? It pained his soul in a way that showed him just how much work he had yet to do on his patience.

Still, when he returned to the city, his welcome was much warmer than it had been on the road. There, he might be an outsider, but he was a helpful one, and the mere fact that he’d gone out in such lethal conditions when everyone else had insisted it was far too dangerous had bought him some credibility, and he was grateful for that. He’d come too late to save some of the dying he’d left behind. He regretted that and castigated himself for it even if he’d helped hundreds more.

You can’t always rely on magic, he told himself. It’s a powerful crutch, but a crutch just the same!

Still, the idea wouldn’t leave him, and after the worst of the plague subsided, inspiration finally struck. He cursed himself. As usual, he’d been thinking too small. If he could make talismans of heat and divining rods, he could certainly make a curative talisman. He’d practically thought of it not so long ago when he wondered what a healing stone might look like or how it might be powered, and the answer, unsurprisingly, was any way he wanted as long as he traced the runes correctly.

His first impulse was to create something that drew life force directly to heal or cure, but he decided against it because it didn’t seem wise to weaken a patient when you were trying to strengthen them. Likewise, cold was a bad choice because it would only be available for a few months of the year.

“Light’s off the table, too,” he mumbled as he remembered how dim it had made the sunlight in a previous experiment. “They’d definitely say it was cursed then, no matter what good it did.”

In the end, Simon decided he pretty much had to go with fire. Something that used Dnarth Meiren to channel distant fires to heal the sick. It seemed safe enough to experiment with, and if it worked, all he’d have to do was build a bonfire nearby and then move it from patient to patient’s chest, letting the magic do its work. In the end, he had to use Delzam in several places in the complex runes he drew up as well, both as curing and as order.

While it only took days to come up with the original idea, it took weeks to refine it to something he might fit on a small object and actually carve the thing. It was simple enough, and the runic circuit, once completed, roughly translated to ‘use nearby heat to fuel healing and curing to bring the user back to their normal condition slowly.’

It wasn’t the most complicated rune he’d ever designed. The switch system he’d built into his sword to use multiple effects as needed was much more difficult; the problem here was size. A sword had all the surface area in the world to etch runes, and when the gaps in steel were backfilled with silver, only a well-trained eye would notice a difference.

In this case, though, Simon had to use jewelry engraving tools to carve fine lines in an amulet he’d made to resemble the holy symbol of a local deity. The front was a sunburst embossed with the hands of friendship, and the back contained the necessary runic circuitry. By the time the spring thaw came, he was ready to test it, and he got good results, too. Though he tried it on himself first to make sure it wouldn’t cause the patient to burst into flames or anything, eventually, he tried it with others who came to him asking for help now that word had gotten around that he was a healer.

Though Simon was careful not to overdo it and be called a miracle worker, there was no doubt about it; his ‘prayers’ were every bit as effective as his healing spells had been, even if they were much slower because he used lesser words.