Death After Death-Chapter 365 - At Stake

On his way down the mountain, Simon chose his route carefully, and he steered well clear of the goblin cave. While he had to go through the pass that the tiny village of Maritin occupied, he didn’t linger. He doubted they’d remember a single traveler years before he saved them from their famine, but he didn’t want to chance it. This was his more direct route to the capital, but he had no wish to complicate things. What he needed to do in this life was complicated enough.

And that’s even if they accept me, Simon reminded himself. He might have had to do what came next several times in several different places across a number of lives.

That wasn’t hard, of course. He just needed to be a hero and catch someone’s eye, but every Simon running around the world at the same time complicated things. Even now, by himself, he could see what that Unspoken knight had been talking about when he confronted Simon years before. The way that the colors of the world warped around him was a little disorienting if he fixated on it for too long.

“Maybe that will be so suspicious they’ll steer clear of me regardless,” Simon told himself, but those were just his worries. Everything he’d glimpsed led him to believe it was just the opposite. The strangeness of his aura is what would draw them to him; he just needed to seem like a hero to be recruited instead of a monster to be slain, and everything else would take care of itself.

That’s why he had no plans to engrave any sort of words on his sword or anything else for the foreseeable future. They’d done their research on his previous persona, too, which was what shaped his current plan. He was going to save who he could, and when he found someone he couldn’t save, he’d take over their identity and hope for the best.

Without being able to glimpse the skein of fate, he actually rated the chances of this plan working as very low. Fortunately, he’d spent several nights studying the maps of the region, and he had an excellent idea of where disasters were going to befall people that he might or might not be a part of. While Simon didn’t know the day or the hour that these things would happen, he found that if he was in the area, he started to get a feeling for these things.

Still, for at least the first week, this strategy was hit or miss, for a couple of reasons. The first was that he had no coin, so he couldn’t easily stay at an inn, or linger near civilization, and the second was that what he wanted to fight evil, he didn’t want to do it in a way no one saw.

So, he lingered near a village where he’d seen a vision of a building burning to the ground, but only until the people who lived there grew suspicious of the stranger hunting in the nearby woods. After that, he found the bandits that he’d known were in the area, but he’d been forced to lie in wait for days while they in turn waited for the right caravan to rob.

That did eventually happen, thankfully. Three days after he started his lonely gnat-bitten vigil, a merchant with more money than guards finally arrived, and the bandits finally struck. Simon let the situation play out just long enough that his arrival wouldn’t be too suspicious, but by the time swords were out, he was already entering the fray.

He took care not to kill those he didn’t have to, and shattered two bows, sending their wielders running before he made the ring leader flee with more superficial wounds. The merchant and his tough were less careful and left two corpses on the ground. It wasn’t Simon’s place to judge that, though. In another life, he would have done exactly the same thing.

When the violence was done, the two of them eyed Simon suspiciously, but once they decided that he meant them no harm at least, they grudgingly thanked him, and after some small talk about where each of them was going, the merchant said, “You know I could use a good man with a sword. You aren’t him yet, of course, but you’re brave enough. With some proper tutelage, it might be that you could make something of yourself.”

Simon found the offer amusing and pretended to consider it, but the man had just dark enough of an aura for him to be certain that he wasn’t an especially good person. He wasn’t wicked enough to strike down, but he wouldn’t take Simon to the places where he wanted to go either, so he thanked the man and declined.

The merchant didn’t even offer a reward past dinner, which was really all he needed to know. Fortunately, the bandits had a small treasure of copper and silver coins from their past victims, and Simon used that to continue on his way.

After almost two weeks of hunting for his opportunity, it was hard for Simon not to feel a little frustrated. “I can see the future, but I still can’t find the right opportunity,” he sighed one night around his small campfire. He was losing weight, but otherwise, he was making little progress. Still, he vowed to stay positive.

That positivity was tested a few days later when he found a community burning a witch, though. That pained him to watch, especially when he noticed how bright her aura burned, outshining even the fire that engulfed her lower body.

Even though he knew it was exactly to the contrary of what he needed to do, he still wanted nothing more than to free her from the cheering crowd who watched her burn. He would have, if there was a chance of saving her, but it was too late. At this point, even multiple words of major healing might not have been enough.

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The most he could do was note the date and the location of the small village to attempt to rectify the incident in a future life after he spent some time saying the right things about the incident to a few of the more suspicious locals.

“A witch? That’s one thing no community should have to tolerate.”

“I’m sure your harvest will be much better with her out of the way.”

Silently, though, he berated himself for every word. You should get used to this, he tried to tell himself that night over a couple of pints of ale. The White Cloaks will do this much and more. They might make you be the one to set the blaze. How are you going to cope with that?

This wasn’t the first time that Simon had experienced such a thought, but now it was no longer safely hypothetical. Now it was a real concern. He’d brought the pyramid down on the Magi to save the life of one child. Was he really going to start sacrificing people now to learn secrets when he couldn’t do it before?

Simon didn’t know. He wanted to believe that for the right cause, he could sacrifice lives, but that logic smacked of Helades, or worse, his doppelganger, and he resisted it.

To add insult to injury, there hadn’t even been one of the witch hunters there. Maybe he could have justified her death if it had advanced his agenda, cold though that might have been, but it had been a complete waste.

He was still ruminating on those thoughts when the real witch walked in through the door to join the rest of the celebration. She wasn’t an herbalist, or even an ugly old crone, as the crowd had been led to believe. She was a beautiful young priestess, actually. Simon hadn’t seen her at the burning, though she’d probably been there. It would have been hard to tell her aura apart from the foul black smoke coming from the pyre.

The woman’s soul was as ugly as her face was pretty, and somehow, he knew that she was responsible for what had happened here today. Simon made a point not to meet her eye, or even express any interest in her for the rest of the night. Still, despite his inebriation, his attention never left her, and when she finished her blessings and thanked those in attendance for what they’d done, she left the building, and Simon followed close behind.

Despite his ungraceful body, he didn’t have any trouble staying hidden. That was as much because he’d gotten better at stalking thanks to his recent refresher as because she wasn’t paying attention. Why would she? She was safe in a position of power and had just won some victory that he didn’t fully understand.

She won’t survive the night, though, he promised himself as he watched the woman enter a modest home.

Simon didn’t follow her in. Not immediately. Instead, he skulked in the shadows and then stared intently at the walls, relaxing his mind in an effort to gaze right through to the woman beyond.

That wasn’t something that Simon had tried before, but it came fairly easily once he did. A layer at a time, the layers of reed and clay in the daub and wattle cottage peeled away to reveal his quarry as she got ready for bed. He couldn’t see her nudity, though he wouldn’t have looked away if he could have. The image wasn’t detailed enough for that. It was just a dark cloud shaped like a woman as she stripped and readied herself for bed.

As she did so, Simon used his newfound X-ray vision to search for any other secrets she might have. Nonliving objects and places rarely had any auras of their own, but he could at least see the shapes, so he searched for hollows beneath the floorboards or anything that might appear to be a book or a weapon under the bed, but he found neither.

Still, it passed the time, and when she blew out the candle and tucked herself into bed, he waited another half hour before he used his knife to lift the bar on the shutters and sneak in through the back window. In that time, plenty of people passed by his hiding place, but he didn’t detect any more suspicion from them than he did from the sleeping woman.

For a moment, Simon stood there in the dark trying to decide if he should try to talk to her. There were definitely things to be learned here. What she knew… Why had she gotten the other woman burned as a witch instead of her… It was a tantalizing situation, but above and beyond his curiosity, there was an important reason why he couldn’t.

As much as he wanted to know, he couldn’t do anything to stop her if the first words out of her mouth when she woke up were soul destruction, or something equally nasty, and as dark and oily as her skin looked while she lay peacefully in her bed, there was a non-zero chance that was the case.

So, he pinned her to her mattress with a sword through the throat. She died almost immediately from that wound and only had the time to fix him with a hateful, accusatory gaze. Even after she died, though, he left his weapon embedded in the witch’s corpse for several minutes as he quietly searched her home for evidence of her misdeeds; he had no intention of letting her rise a second time, and waited for her aura to fade completely before he retrieved his weapon.

His search turned up nothing definitive, though he did find a few poppets that looked disturbingly like voodoo dolls. He searched them for any magical markings, but found none, which left Simon feeling disappointed. He’d done a good deed, but come away with no more knowledge than when he’d started.

“Next time I’ll make an amulet of nullification so I can try to interrogate them before I kill them,” he told himself as he left the way he came and sealed the shutter shut behind him, and went back to the inn.

There was no telling if that would work very well, since cutting a witch of any power off from her marks would kill her in minutes, but it would still be a useful tool to have in his tool belt, and he lay in bed in his room thinking about it. Part of him wanted to get back on the road tonight. He stayed, but only because it would have appeared more suspicious if he’d just left. Someone would have remembered timing like that.

No one found her body that night, though, and the next day Simon left town at sunrise without a backward glance. He felt guilty for not saving the life of the herbalist, but at least he’d avenged her by lopping off the head of the snake. He hadn’t gotten any interesting grimoires or artifacts out of the deal, unfortunately, but in this case, the good deed was its own reward.