Death After Death

Chapter 384: A Force for Good

While the accused man Belger left the village of Anywynn’s Hall immediately, Simon stayed a few more days. This was as much because the headman’s wife had asked him to, as to try to help them get back on their feet in the wake of their tragedy.

“The shepherdess, Tara, she was a sweet girl, and the community will take it hard,” she told him the following morning while he ate after her husband had stepped out of their home to start the day. “They would take things a bit better if you… Well, if you were to stay a while.”

Simon sensed no ill intent from her, though he joked, “People don’t take heart in my presence,” while he finished his porridge. “But as long as they fear the monsters I fight more than me, I won’t take offense.”

“We’re a long way from Crowvar,” she finished, “And safety is hard to find. People appreciate it, and they appreciate you, even if they fear you too.”

That set Simon’s heart at ease, at least a little bit. He hadn’t known that he needed to hear those words until after he’d heard them.

While this time he felt temptation to linger, he decided to give it another three or four days. Not that he was very tempted. The place might have been lovely generations before, but now it was mostly shepherds living amidst the ruins of a better time.

Still, even these humble people had areas they feared not to tread, and Simon explored one barrow mound before pronouncing it clean, and purged another knoll den before he was on his way.

Anywynn’s Hall had no wealth to offer him, nor did he ask for any. Technically, he was supposed to bring tithes back with him when he returned to the Broken Tower; running a secret society was an expensive undertaking, and the Unspoken were firmly of the opinion that good deeds deserved to be rewarded. Simon didn’t care as much about that as he did about saving people.

What they did give him was gossip and hope, and he valued both of those things far more. It was good to see that even though no one had initially agreed with his determination, no one had challenged it, but it was better to know where his services might be put to use next. The town’s butcher told him that South Fork was having problems, though he didn’t know what kind, and the seamstress told him that merchants whispered the main road had been getting more dangerous all year.

They weren’t in the same direction, but Simon still hit them both up. South Fork was a small farming community that irrigated its land with the river they were named for. It would have been quite prosperous if the waters had been a few feet deeper, but as it was, no barge traffic, or even deep-drafted skiffs, would be getting through.

Simon showed up looking to fight, but all the locals had to offer him was watery soup and tales of woe. It wasn’t monsters that were making their life hard, but blight. They begged him to end the witchcraft that was causing it, which was ironic, because without magic, there was little that Simon could do to solve this problem.

Nonetheless, he went through the motions, and he used his sight to confirm that there was no magical cause. In the end, the best he could offer them was a command to burn the affected fields closest to the river. “If we do that, we’ll never have enough to pay the baron his taxes,” one of the farmers protested.

“You worry about your fields and your families,” Simon instructed them. “I’ll go to Crowvar and let the Baron know that witchcraft has crippled your lands for a season or two.”

That cheered them, but it obligated Simon to find a scapegoat to pin the whole thing on. That turned out to be a small group of bandits. They weren’t the worst men, but they were murderers, so after Simon separated their heads from their shoulders, he had no qualms about blackening their names further.

In his journal, he sketched their filthy hovel before he burned it down, and added a few unnatural symbols for effect. He claimed that because they were upriver of the affected town, their taint had spread south, and it would resolve itself.

That was a fine story, and he had no doubt that the masters of the Whitecloaks would believe it. The baron was another matter, and for him, Simon packed one of the heads in salt and brought it with him in case he needed a gory prop to drive the point home.

It took a week for Simon to cross the badlands to Crowvar, which was two days longer than he’d expected because he had to double back to avoid a centaur tribe moving through the region. Still, the trip was otherwise smooth.

When he reached the town, he was surprised at just how little had changed in decades. It was a little smaller, and the walls were in slightly better shape. This was most apparent in the graveyard, where he lingered for a few minutes to mourn a person who had never existed.

After that, he went into the walled town. No one attempted to stop him or even ask his business, which was the biggest contrast of any of his previous visits. Lord Raithewait’s men were bullies, but apparently that poor treatment didn’t extend to Whitecloaks.

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Simon noted blood on the hands of several of the gate guards, but without further study, it would be hard to say whether that was shed because of their own desires or the baron’s, so for the moment, he ignored it and instead inquired about the city.

“All’s quiet this season,” the guard captain insisted. Simon didn’t know him, but he was just familiar enough that he wondered if he’d worked with one of the man’s descendants at one point.

Simon pressed him and asked about the problems with the trade road. Those he admitted to, but said, “The baron has hired mercenaries and put out bounties. Those roads will be set safe again before the year is out. Mark my words.”

He was lying, which Simon didn’t care for, so he made the man find him a copy of the posted bounties, if only because he’d been screwed out of similar rewards once in a previous life here. That amused him, in a dark sort of way, and it was only when he let it be known that he was here to see the baron that he was disappointed.

“I’m afraid our lordship is north with his family for another few weeks at least,” the guard said apologetically. “Kingdom business. I’m really not sure what it’s about.”

That tickled something in the back of his mind. Still it wasn’t until after he’d delivered a missive that explained South Fork’s troubles, and how they would not owe traditional taxes until the year after next, when they put him up at the local inn that he found the privacy to use a mirror. It was then that he got an answer.

Ah, this is where he befriends Lord Corwin, I think,

Simon thought after poring quietly through his notes from that era. I do remember him mentioning that, or was it Lord Corwin who did? The notes didn’t say who gave him the information, only that the two were friendly in their younger years. Simon couldn’t really say what it was that Baron Corwin saw in a cadaverous weasel like Lord Raithewait, but then he supposed most nobles were probably weasels.

“Beggers can’t be choosers, I suppose,” he mumbled to himself as one final detail caught his eye, and his stomach sank.

At some point, there had obviously been a Lady Raithewait. Neither of the baron’s wretched sons would have ever been born without one. She’d died shortly after the birth of their second child. For a long time, Simon had presumed that it was in childbirth or illness, but during his centaur campaign, he’d learned the truth. She’d been killed on the baron’s return trip from Leipzen, which was one of the many reasons he no longer traveled.

That means she either has, or will die soon, he reflected, trying to decide how he felt about that. On the one hand, this was the last family he owed any favors, but on the other… “Well, maybe Varten wouldn’t grow up to be such an enormous piece of shit if he had a mom in his life.”

Simon stewed on that question the rest of the night. Could he interfere? Absolutely. Should he? Of course. Would he? He didn’t know.

Still, as he sat in the common room and adjudicated on a few of the petty concerns of the locals, he went back and forth on the issue. The very thought disturbed his clarity more than the drinking he did that night, and he really had to concentrate to ensure that he separated the truth from the falsehood in each case.

In the morning, Simon left the city at first light, after checking with the gate to make sure they still hadn’t found the baron’s bounty schedule. While he enjoyed twisting that knife, it didn’t improve his mood, and as he rode off, he decided the best he could do was deal with the problems that had been reported on the trade road.

If that makes their trip home safer, then maybe it will do some good, he told himself.

Making the main roads safer was the right thing to do, and with no reports of witches in the area, it was certainly the best use of his time. That said, even after murdering Varten several times, he still couldn’t entirely forgive the man, even if he was a child at the present moment. That was wrong, and he knew it was wrong, but it was one thing to be done killing the man and another to want to save him and make his world a better place. He only had to remember all those horrid little scars he gave everyone in his life to be reminded what an irredeemable piece of shit he was.

Fortunately, all it took was an encounter with a merchant caravan that afternoon to make him forget about that horrid family entirely. They’d been waylaid by a particularly bad stretch of road and broke a wheel, so Simon spent the afternoon making sure no one thought to prey on sitting ducks until they changed it. After that, he accompanied them to the village of Sparel, where a shepherd boy showed him a box canyon frequented by centaurs.

Simon spent two days setting up a proper ambush, drilling the residents with slings and bows, which was downright nostalgic for him. Their trap only got four of the big bastards, but everyone was overjoyed with that, and it made for another fine note in his journal. In the grand scheme of things, four centaurs weren’t much, but it was enough to burn down a farm or kill a family, as he reminded the villagers.

The days and weeks that followed were similar. Simon found no ghosts, faeries, or witches, but he found lots of little problems that needed to be addressed as he went. He did eventually find a man that he suspected of having some kind of magic, though that was as much because of the way he practically fled the common room to escape Simon’s presence as anything else. While Simon was certainly curious after that sort of reaction, he let the man escape because his aura had been a very light gray, bordering on white. He clearly wasn’t hurting anyone if he had that sort of karma.

Simon’s own karma was doing quite well. Well, his experience points were at least. He was up to 274,599, which meant he’d been averaging seven or eight hundred a week this life, which was about double an average week. That seemed to be as much because of the good he was doing as the enjoyment he took from it. He planned to stay with the Unspoken at least a few more years before he moved on, and he wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he broke half a million before that point.

Will people start to treat me differently when I get to a million, or two million, he wondered? Barring another magical disaster, he didn’t expect his trend to change, which meant that he was going to be racking up another hundred thousand every two or three years. If it took him fifty years to beat the Pit, then three million wasn’t out of the question. It wasn’t a question he could answer, but it was one he thought about while riding between towns and monster dens.