Death After Death-Chapter 350 - A Crossroads

Simon left Crowvar before the word of what happened could get to the watch, and he made a point of telling the guard that he was headed back north to Leipzen as he did so. That must have helped to throw whoever came after him off his trail that night because there were no riders. Even so, he didn’t sleep. He didn’t dwell on what he'd done either.

His heart was at peace. He’d done the right thing; perhaps if it had been someone he didn’t know so well, the right thing would have been to kick his ass, but for a monster like Varten? Well, he’d always thought it was stupid that superheroes locked up super villains so that they could go on to commit the same atrocities over and over again.

“Maybe I should make a list,” he told himself that night while he let his horse slake its thirst at a stream. “People that need to die every life, no matter what, and store that in the mirror so I don’t forget.” It would be a pretty short list right now, but he was sure that with enough lives it would grow too long for him to remember.

Despite the fact that people were undoubtedly hunting him, he actually made a quick and relatively painless crossing to Darndelle. If there were riders from Crowvar, they never caught up with him. He did see centaurs on the horizon twice, but whether they saw him or not, they never approached, letting him continue on his way.

The capital of Montain was smaller than almost every other capital he’d been to. It was only very slightly bigger than the capital of mountainous Charia, but it was still large enough for him to lose himself in, at least a little. Simon didn’t plan on staying long; he knew the Unspoken had a very active presence here, and he had no desire to get on their radar just yet.

Still, he couldn’t breeze through without spending a few days playing tourist, and a few more looking for the right deals before he continued on his way. Mostly during that time, he marveled at how different the character of the city was. With no Blackheart curse, the oppressive aura he’d long since grown used to no longer existed, and that was almost enough to make up for his orphanage, which was no longer there.

Maybe that’s what I can do with the money I earn this lifetime, he told himself. I can open a new orphanage to replace the one I erased. He couldn’t do anything to replace the son that no longer existed, but this much at least, he could do; it wasn’t quite as ambitious as building a printing press or creating a multigenerational clan, but it was something he’d be able to remember no matter how many lifetimes he put between now and the end of the Pit.

Simon was relieved that there was no statue of him anymore, at least. He still sketched it from memory, along with the prettiest parts of the central graveyard, out of pure nostalgia. Now that he was moving south, paper was getting cheaper, and he’d purchased himself a fine white journal that would do double duty as both a trading ledger and an art book.

For all the time he’d spent here, this city didn’t evoke nearly so many memories as the last town he’d visited. Darndelle was more about the things he’d done than the memory of having done them. After all, the Black Swarmers were an ugly memory, and the cemetery, well, once he’d figured out the secret of the Blackheart, it had been simple enough.

“Besides reading endless scrolls in an attempt to unravel a riddle, and almost becoming addicted to the lives of others, what did I even do here?” he asked himself before deciding he should leave soon. Darndelle would only ever be a place on the way to somewhere else; it just wasn’t worth lingering in if he didn’t have to. It wasn’t ugly, or even unpleasant; there was just nothing here for him.

Before he went further south, he made a point to empty his wagon as best he could and pick up loads of sundries that seemed to make more sense. He’d originally considered wool to be his best option, but apparently, Abresse was undergoing a bit of a boom right now. So, Simon sold what he had for the best price he could and bought nails by the pound, along with what hand tools were available, along with the supplies he’d need to reach the coastal city-state. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

There would be no profit in hauling bricks or boards from so far away, but it seemed to be a reasonable choice given the gossip. By his count, he had at least a decade until the plague struck the city, and while he expected to be gone by then, he’d heard that the years before that were good ones by those he treated so long ago, so he prepared for that.

What he didn’t prepare for was how long the trip from Darndelle to Abresse was. Sure, he knew that on the map, just over a week of travel separated the two places, but as he went south, all of his good luck so far ran out. He found nothing but bad roads, bad weather, and eventually, bad people.

Simon spent three days at an inn near the ocean cliffs during the worst part of a storm. It was a squall that came off the sea to soak and chill every inch of land that wasn’t covered by a good roof and heated by a warm fire.

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While the Black Dog Inn hardly had a good roof, it was better than the alternative, and he chose to stay in that falling-down place rather than press on. He was in no hurry, but he didn’t much care for the company he was forced to keep, or the prices that the owner charged for meals during those trying days.

“I can’t get no new supplies until the weather lets up, now can I?” the man asked when another angry customer confronted him about the price of beer. “All I’m doin’ is earning a fair bit for doin’ my part, and that’s all!”

That line, along with other transparent attempts to hide his greed behind a greasy smile, worked pretty well until the third day, but Simon didn’t let it bother him. Instead, he stayed sober and wasted his coppers in an attempt to make friends with those who seemed least likely to rob him or slit his throat while he slept.

Unlike the owner and the guests who seemed to be related to him in some way, everyone else was decent enough. They were just like him; all they wanted was to be back on the road, and anywhere but here.

That part went well enough. While he made no real friends, he listened to plenty of talk and found out that only a day or two from here, the roads improved considerably, which cheered him almost as much as the news that there hadn’t been any bandit attacks in the area for months.

“Sometimes people still go missin’,” the messenger that frequented the area explained hastily, “But the Governor, well, he strung up every thief and cutpurse in and around the city a year or so back, and things have mostly been quiet. Now, if he could only purge the monsters on the trail, merchants wouldn’t need to hire guards at all.”

A couple of the men drinking with them were out-of-work caravan guards, so they groaned at the very idea, but everyone else welcomed it. Simon, for his part, appreciated the proactive approach. If every large city in the region did that, the world would be a much safer place.

Things continued in that unhappy but not entirely miserable state until the fifth day, when the weather finally started to let up. That morning, he got up early, eager to get on the road, but before he could do so, he noticed that a crate of his goods had gone missing.

It wasn’t a lot of money, really. It was just tools and cookery. Even if he sold all of it at a good price, it would have only amounted to a few silver coins, but it was the principle of the thing. It was the cherry on the shit sundae that had been his week, and he immediately decided that he was going to get it back.

Since it was first thing in the morning and no one had left in days, it would be easy enough to find the thief. So, rather than carve a dowsing rod to track them down, he just went inside and made a stink about it to the other early risers who shared his outrage. After a brief check, he wasn’t the only one with something missing, either. Soon enough, he’d rounded up a posse of like-minded men to help him get to the bottom of it.

The group had the air of a lynch mob about it, but Simon felt like he could keep it under control. He figured that whoever they caught red-handed would get a beating at worst, and that was true, until their growing group reached the inn’s basement and found a treasure trove of thievery, and judging by the blood stains on a few of the items, evidence of at least a couple murders.

Simon’s crate was sitting there in the pile that they’d found behind a row of empty casks, but there were also bolts of cloth, the personal effects of people from at least three different nations based on the languages they wrote in, and a few more grisly trophies. Someone had been busy.

“Could it be that these are the monsters making people disappear?” one of the other merchants asked.

“It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve found monsters in human form,” Simon agreed, thinking back to the worst group of bandits he’d purged recently, and their wagon graveyard.

The innkeeper was barely awake to start breakfast before the group of them arrested him at swordpoint. He protested loudly, "There’s been some kind of mistake here! This is just a misunderstandin'," but the fighting didn’t start until his kin, if they were even related at all, came down the stairs with murder in their eyes and weapons in hand.

Simon hadn’t been in a lot of bar fights, but something about the murderous nature of this one reminded him of fighting Zombies in Schwarzenbruck so long ago. There was a viciousness to it that he found familiar, and it was as fast as it was bloody.

This time, he managed to avoid killing anyone, but only because he was more interested in answers than he was in vengeance. Killing someone just because they’d ripped him off for a few silver coins would have been petty.

Still, the innkeeper didn’t know that he didn’t plan to kill anyone, so he played up that part in questioning the fat man, and slowly, one half truth at a time, the situation revealed itself, and the answer explained all the other incongruities.

If only I could have seen this man’s black soul at first glance, Simon thought as the conversation went on, having more and more sympathy for the woman who had killed him in his sleep in her inn so long ago. She didn’t know what made his aura so black, but she knew it was nothing good, and she’d done what needed to be done.

It turned out the man wasn’t the innkeeper at all, and the rest of his supposed family weren’t related to him. They were bandits who had gone to ground when Abresse had tried to reinforce law and order. This isolated road house, far from any village, had become a hideout, and they’d let it go to hell as they preyed on the people passing through.

After that, Simon didn’t need to hear anymore. They begged for mercy, but the only mercy he’d give them would be a good knot that would snap their necks instead of letting them suffer when he hung them. After that, he and the other actual guests hung those corpses up along the roadside, one at a time, as a warning to anyone who might try something like this in the future.