Death After Death-Chapter 348 - A New Perspective

Simon didn’t get married in the year that followed, but he wasn’t quite driven out of Rivenwood either by the efforts of women who were trying to change that. What he did do was start making preparations to leave. Rather than adopt another town and put down more roots, he decided that he needed to move on.

If I keep this up, there will be a Simon living in every town in Brin in another hundred lives, he chastised himself. What will people say?

He couldn’t keep solving levels, but just because it was tempting to carve out a home here didn’t mean it was the best idea. There were lots of other, more effective ways to fill in his blank spots about the world until his sight came back or he died of old age.

Blank spots. Just the words were funny to him. He’d spent several lives trying to fill in a map so that he’d know where everything was, but now knowing when something was felt far more important to him. A given town might be somewhere for centuries, and a mountain might be there forever, but each would only be really important to history on a specific day or two.

To that end, since his recent lives had taken him west to Ionia, North to Murin, and east to Charia, he decided to go south to the crossroads city of Darndelle in Montain, and then beyond that to the port town of Abresse. Simon had intended to do that a few lives back, but had been waylaid by other priorities.

Now, the time had come to fix that mistake. As a harbor town and a thriving trade hub, it would be a great spot to set up for a year or ten and listen to all the news from the travelers that stopped through. It might not be the best place to meditate, but he’d figure something out.

Since Simon would become known as an herbalist and healer there in a few years, he decided to pose as a scribe and a merchant this trip so as not to accidentally cross paths with himself when that plague ship came ashore.

Of course, merchants needed capital and goods, and he had neither, but he’d figure that out in due time. That winter, he made himself a new tent and a fine bedroll that would keep him warm on future hunts. He didn’t actually do a lot of hunting, though, when the world thawed.

By then, his focus had shifted, and he spent several months working with the village’s wainwright, Mr. Kobson. The man even offered to take Simon on as an apprentice if he was planning on putting down his sword, but of course, Simon declined that.

He only wanted to help and learn a bit of carpentry, and after helping the man build a few wheels and wagons for other people, they finally got to work on one for him. It was a process that was more complicated than he would have thought, and it gave him an appreciation for delicate asymmetries. Such things could be tolerated in art, and even in rune design by and large, but in wheels, something was either round or it wasn’t.

Even when they finished, though, Simon didn’t leave immediately. He wouldn’t do that until the following spring. A set of wheels meant little when he had nothing to fill the back with. Those would come, though. He could gather a few pelts hunting and plenty of herbs to dry over the course of the winter. Even if he wasn’t going to be a healer this life, he knew an awful lot about them. Those would give him enough cash to get by until he retrieved one of his silver caches to fund the next stage.

Still, even with those broad strokes, he had many questions about his trip that he hadn’t yet made a final decision on. What day should he leave? When should he tell the people who’d taken him in? Should he try to make another printing press in Abresse?

Most importantly, though, was the last question: should he kill Varten Raithwaite when he stopped in Crowvar to visit the grave that no longer existed? He was deeply conflicted about that and asked himself the question almost every time he started to mentally plan his route south.

“Varten, at least this Varten has never done anything to harm me,” he would remind himself sometimes. That didn’t help. Just because this snake hadn’t bitten him didn’t mean it wouldn’t as soon as it was given the chance.

Sometimes Simon leaned toward no, but most of the time his answer was, ‘if given the slightest provocation.’ He might no longer feel rage at the young man, but there was a deep loathing there that would probably never leave him.

As the year passed, Simon put in the work. He planned planks, nailed together frames, and most importantly, he made wheels. These were more complicated than he’d even considered before, and the idea that the metal hoop that went on the outside of the wheel had to be heated so that it would expand enough to be installed on the completed wheel fascinated him.

There’s probably some lesson there, he told himself before following it up with the question he always asked himself these days when he learned something new. What magical device could I make with this technique?

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Most of the time, the answer was nothing, but the idea of a tight press fit like this, well, he was sure he’d find a use for it someday. Joinery wasn’t as interesting as art or even smithing to him. But he did appreciate the precision of it and the limitations of the medium. If you screwed something up in the forge, well, most of the time you could just heat it back up and try again, but with wood working, that piece of lumber would probably have to be used in some other way now, because you could only ever take from the work piece, you couldn’t add to it.

Not without magic anyway, he thought with minor annoyance.

Wood was one of the mediums he most wanted to spend more time exploring magically. While he hadn’t quite figured out how to do it in a way that wasn’t totally destructive. The idea that he could simply grow some simple magical implements, or even some hideously complex ones, using trees to do the hard work in some kind of repeatable way never left him.

Simon doubted he could fix all the ills of the world that way, but healing talismans that quite literally grew on trees, or berries that could cure certain ailments seemed entirely possible, and if he could do that it a way that bred true, well, he didn’t know the first thing about antibiotics, but he imagined that this could replace them on a long term basis.

All of that was in the future, though, and the most Simon did was doodle on a mirror as he made notes. For now, he focused on tradecraft and traderoutes, and he did a little work for everyone in Rivenwood as he slowly built up the things he needed. A wagon, a horse, barrels, and things to fill them with slowly added up in his name. It became hard to hide the fact that he was leaving once word got around that he was building his own wagon one fine fall day.

That wasn’t so bad. Attending another goodbye party in his honor was bittersweet. He was getting to hate long goodbyes. That was doubly true when they surprised him with it in the midst of winter, months before he planned to leave, and then he just had to linger awkwardly after that and endure the sad looks that Majoria gave him whenever she thought he wasn’t looking.

When Simon left Rivenwood the following spring, he was barely a tinkerer, let alone a trader. He was just a man with a wagon, a horse, and a sword. By the time he’d fetched one of his many hidden caches of silver, though, and made his way south, buying and selling as he went, all of that changed.

A few weeks later, strangers wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference as he got into character and haggled for every copper. Simon didn’t care much about making money, of course, but he did need the funds for his trip south. He didn’t really know what would be in demand so far away, but he recalled that there had been little in the way of sheep in the same way that Ionia had few cows. Montain had sheep too, of course, but there weren’t too many other options in this area. So, he went from town to town, using profits to slowly collect a wagonload of woolen yarn and cloth.

He’d briefly been a cloth merchant in Murin before he’d been forced to flee the city, and spending a winter weaving had given him a better eye for the craftsmanship involved. It was a good synergy, and he went with it. He didn’t even encounter his first bandits until the desert that separated him from all the places he wanted to be.

The Wantari desert was a place he’d only passed through on one or two occasions, but thanks to a certain basilisk, he’d spent a lot of time there. It wasn’t very large if you were going north or south. As long as you didn’t find yourself stuck at any poisoned oases, you could get through it in a couple of days. East to west, though, was another matter. Combined with the Raiden Mountains, it served as an effective boundary between Brin and Ionia to the west, and though Brin continued a little further south to Crowvar and the badlands beyond, this was the effective end of the kingdom, which is why bandits and raiding clans tended to proliferate.

Simon tried to handle these peacefully. He shared his fire with riders one night at the oasis that had once been poisoned so many lives ago, and paid a toll to men who had no business charging it in the first place for ‘safe passage,’ but only to avoid murdering the smirking man who declared it. On the fourth day, though, when the end of the desert was in sight, and a few scraggy trees were starting to force their way out of the patchy sand, the third group to bar his way decided they’d rather have whatever was in his wagon than anything resembling a toll.

So, like it or not, Simon had to kill all four of them. The desert was doing such wonderful things for my mindset, too, he thought, remembering to act scared before he lashed out with his boot and kicked the man who was about to drag him down off the buckboard square in the nose with his booted heel.

After that, everything was violence. Simon regretted not being in his armor or having his shield in easy reach. That cost him a superficial slash and a deeper stab wound, but the men who inflicted those injuries on him did not survive the mistake.

Simon killed each of them with brutal efficiency, but there was more annoyance than emotion behind it. He didn’t even hate them as he did it; he just pursued it with a ruthless economy of motion. With a magic sword in his hand that could cut through their weapons and armor whenever he found it convenient, they didn’t really stand a chance. Stab, parry, side step, then slit the next one’s throat. The final bandit begged for mercy as he tried to edge back to where they’d left their horses, but Simon didn’t allow that.

“I would,” he agreed as he raised his sword one final time, “But I doubt you’d extend the same courtesy to the next man you try to rob, now would you?”

The bandit was dead before he had a chance to dispute the charge, but Simon wasn’t in any doubt. He couldn’t read their auras, but he could tell the difference between a good man and a bad one these days.