Death After Death-Chapter 351 - A Different Path

Simon went down the coast, stopping in a number of fishing villages on his way to Abresse, but he didn’t quite make it there before he turned around. It wasn’t the condition of the roads, or even the weather, that turned him away, either; it was thoughts of the Black Dog Inn.

The whole trip, Simon had been trying to decide what he’d do when he got to the wealthy city-state. Part of him had decided that a lumber mill just upriver from the river that it spanned would be the best choice. His goal this life wasn’t to get rich, though; it was to learn more about the world while he cleared his mind and his soul, and while he was well on his way to do the former, he’d been doing an abysmal job of the latter.

So, because that decaying, neglected inn called out to him, he turned back and started the other way again. Walking three days away from it and three days back was the waste of a week, but he found the place pretty much as he’d left it. Whether it was because of the still displayed bodies or just its level of disrepair, no one had thought to loot the place or burn it down.

“Whoever actually owns the place might have relatives, you know,” he told himself as he regarded the place. “They might come and claim it later, after you’ve started to fix it up. Wouldn’t you feel stupid then?”

While Simon acknowledged that was true, he didn’t really care. The idea of hanging out at the wharf or one of the marketplaces in Abresse might be fun for a while, but it seemed to be altogether too hectic for his main goal, which was to regain his sight. If he didn’t want to set down roots anywhere, he’d be tempted to stick around, then an inn half a day from anywhere seemed like a good choice. The fact that it probably had an evil reputation spreading in all directions even as he stood there, well, that just made it a better boulder to roll uphill.

Simon started by inventorying the remaining provisions and then creating a list of the most urgent repairs that had to be made to keep the weather out. Once all of those were done, even before he traveled up the road in search of a brewer who might help him with his critical beer shortage, Simon started to clean.

That, more than anything, was the biggest problem with the Black Dog, well, besides its name. We’re going to have to change that soon, he told himself as he opened every window to air out the place and started on the sweeping. It was filthy, and Simon was willing to bet that there’d been no cleaning done since the bandits had done in the original owners. That was the main reason he didn’t cut down their rotting corpses and throw them into the sea. They deserved to suffer as long as he did.

Their immortal souls have long since reincarnated as goblins or sloths, he reminded himself. Still, they kept him company for now.

On nice days, he beat rugs in the front yard or mucked out the stables, and during periods of bad weather, he scrubbed floors or sorted supplies as he added more and more items to his ever-growing list of repairs. That wasn’t so bad, though. In a way, it reminded him of the random tasks he was assigned day in and day out in the Oracle’s caldera city. It was very freeing to select some small detail and accomplish it in the rambling building, putting his thoughts in order as he put the rooms in their place.

The structure was simple, but vast. Outside, there was a low-walled yard, stables, and a small well. Inside the main building, there was a large common room, a small dwelling for the owner's family, kitchens, a large basement, and eight small rooms. Individually, none of those places were very large, but somehow they’d added up whole lifetimes of dirt to be scrubbed away. It was like the more he cleaned, the more he found.

During all that time, he didn’t get any prospective customers, though as long as the corpses of highwaymen were still decorating the road, he didn’t really expect to. That was half the reason he’d left them up.

His first visitors were mercenaries from Abresse who’d come to check on the story that had reached the city about the Black Dog, and the vermin that ran it. Though he was initially viewed with suspicion as some kind of squatter, after he explained to them that he was the one who had discovered the nefarious plot, their whole attitude changed. Simon had no beer left to offer them, but he let the men inside and gave them bowls of warm split pea soup and fresh-baked bread as he relayed the tale again.

“So you’re a merchant and you just decided to set up shop?” their leader asked, turning the conversation from the bandits and the building to Simon himself partway through the meal. “That’s quite the switch, isn’t it?”

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“Well, to tell you the truth, I was getting tired of the road anyway,” Simon answered. “One too many blows to the head will do that.”

As Simon spoke, he gestured to his head and the scars from his orcish encounter, before relating an entirely false story about a bandit attack some years back. “I was bringing a load of building supplies down to your city, but then I ended up here in this empty building and thought repairing it and trying to help those who ply the trade roads might be a bit more relaxing.”

“You won’t get many customers with that name above your door,” one of the mercenaries answered.

“Nor without beer,” another added.

Simon nodded and explained to them that he’d start carving a new sign soon. “I plan to go north to one of the villages there and buy a few kegs of beer soon,” he explained. “I just knew that someone would be coming to investigate, and I wanted to make sure you had all of the particulars before I cut the corpses down and opened for business.”

That wasn’t true, but it was close to what they seemed to want to hear, and though they didn’t stay in the inn itself despite Simon’s invitation, they camped in the courtyard that night, and then cut down the corpses before returning home on the trail to the southeast.

The week that followed was filled with resupplying. He journeyed north and east to the villages of Darbin, Geford, and Pebble Bay and had conversations with brewers, millers, and farmers about buying goods from them on a regular basis. Everyone was happy to sell him what he needed, but to a man, all of them were more interested in how he’d come to be the owner of the Black Dog.

“Well, it’s not the Black Dog anymore,” he explained. “It’s the Wayfarer, and as to how I came into possession of it…” He told them all the same tale, dramatized only slightly to make the men who had squatted there for the best part of the year seem more monstrous.

The fact that several of those he’d spoken to had actually done business with the place under the new owners after poor old Mister and Missus Medelarono had moved back to the city unexpectedly made them more, not less willing to help Simon with his endeavor, and almost no one tried to rip him off, which was welcome news, because most of his funds were tied up in trade goods he currently had no plans to sell. That was okay too, with the state of the roof and some of the doors, his clumsy carpentry would need all the nails he could get his hands on.

Simon kept himself busy, but hadn’t even started carving his new sign by the time his first guests arrived a week later. Fortunately, he had enough food and drinks on hand for everyone, but working the bar and the kitchen by himself made for a busy night, though not unpleasantly so. Simon charged a copper penny for a space in the common room and another for a space in the stables. A room was twice that, and another coin besides for the meal. Drinks weren’t much more, though he was willing to let anyone sleep for free if they wanted to help out with firewood, mucking the stables, or doing the dishes, but strangely, no one took him up on that.

That was fine. In the two days before that group left, Simon made enough profit to make him wonder why he’d ever thought doing the merchant thing was a good idea. Sure, they’d managed to put a dent in his beer supply, but rough math said that every beer he sold was nearly a hundred percent profit. There would probably be some bad barrels and spilled drinks, and other things that reduced that, but even so, it was a good deal.

The food and rooms had an even better profit margin, since he didn’t have to pay anyone, though an extra pair of hands or two would be welcome. He lost a little money every day he made fresh bread, and no one came to eat it, but that just meant more for him. In this world, fresh food was a luxury that he didn’t always have access to, and he enjoyed it.

Simon still had no guests more often than he had some, and except for the worst weather days, his inn was never full. Even though he gave the inn a new name, and carved a large set of letters that spelled Wayfairer across an old wagon wheel he’d found in the stables, most people still called the place The Black Dog, and it would take time for that reputation to dissipate.

“Youh might make more money if you jussst burned the placcce down and built a new ssspot half a day up the road…” one patron suggested drunkenly one day.

Simon nodded as if he had a point, but he disregarded the idea immediately. While the history of this spot was a problem, it was the location that made it valuable. Half a day and either direction, and there would be other villages with other established lodgings. He’d visited them, and they were certainly nicer than the Wayfarer.

But not as nice as the Wayfarer could be, he told himself.

He’d decided to settle here almost on a whim, and the quiet life was definitely doing him some good. So was not wearing a sword on his belt every day. He wasn’t supposed to care about the place too much. He was supposed to be sitting on a rock overlooking the sea and meditating half the time, but he was no longer the sort of person who could do things in a half ass way, and each time he went to a nearby village for more supplies, he asked if anyone was looking for work.

He didn’t need a cook or even a barmaid, but it would take a lot off his plate and give him more time to rehang doors, fix the moldering thatching on the roof, and all the other tasks he’d need to make his little inn shine.