Death After Death Ch. 125-126 (Patreon)

Ch. 125 - The Way North

That morning, he went down to breakfast early to make sure he didn’t miss an opportunity, so he was still working his way through a mug of watered-down beer and a plate of biscuits and sausages half drowned in a peppered gravy when the other mercenaries came down. The gossip about last night started almost immediately, though Simon pretended to ignore it. 

It sounded like a couple of guys were working themselves up to challenging ‘that fatass’ to a rematch because the honor of the Butcher’s Bill was at stake. That only came to a stop when a man sat down next to Simon and introduced himself as Kell. Simon recognized him; he should have, of course. He’d seen the man with Freya last time he was here. 

“I heard you kicked Hodge’s ass last night,” Kell said, pretending to sound impressed. “Quick fight, too. Not a lot of people can say that. What’s your secret?”

The leader of the mercenary company was a tall, handsome sort, and Simon could see the blonde man’s natural charisma from the first moment. There was a sense that he’d seen him somewhere before, but at this point, Simon got that all the time, especially in Schwarzenbruck, so he ignored it.

“Goblins mostly,” Simon nodded. “I’ve cashed in plenty of ears over the years, and they’re quick little bastards.”

“They are,” Kell agreed. “Got any tips on beastmen? Near as we can figure, that’s what we’re up against for our next little stretch.”

“I heard about that,” Simon nodded. “Why do you think it’s beastmen and not something bigger, like an ogre?”

“Nah, ain’t been nothing that big in the northern lands in an age,” Kell said with a smirk. “It’s just a few farmholds and a lonely road until the hills give way to the mountains. Nothing more scenic than the occasional swamp, and if we get as far as the Bahamed Pass and the fort up there, well, then it's a northern Kingdoms’ problem, and we can let those desert dwellers deal with it. King Wilden’s charter only covers to the edge of Brin, so if we go that far and find out it's a civil war or something, well - we can paid just for showing up. Interested?”

Simon doubted very much that it was something as simple as a few beast men sacking trade caravans. In fact, he was almost certain it was zombie playing out, just like before, but on a slightly different timeline, and in a slightly different way. 

He didn’t say any of that, though, because it would sound crazy. Instead he just said, “Well, I’ve rooted out a couple den’s of gnolls. Can’t be much different than that. You just gotta pick your ground and bait 'em, and they fall easy enough.”

“Good to hear!” Kell said, shaking his hand. 

They chatted a while longer and agreed on a 3% stake, which was pretty good since the man had tried to talk him into a 1% cut on account of him being so new. Fortunately, for all his talk about how easy this was going to be, some part of Kell seemed to think they didn’t have enough people for whatever it was they were up against. 

Still, Simon was pretty good about the whole thing until Freya came down and kissed the man on the cheek. He introduced her as Frey and described her as the most vicious shield maiden you ever did see, but Simon wasn’t really listening. Instead, he was shaking her hand with wooden fingers while he willed his expression into something approaching normalcy. 

He avoided her after that and fell into line somewhere near the rear with Hodges while they crossed the wide stone bridge and started heading north. Simon had gone this way before once, so he mostly knew the way. Still, it took several days to reach the place he thought they’d find trouble. There, at least, he wasn’t disappointed. 

In their slow trip north, he chatted with the guys and did a little sparing. He even taught some of the guys a few things and started the long, slow process of making new friends, one joke at a time. All that came to an end when they found signs of a fight, and damaged buildings. 

They all stopped to investigate the first burned-out farmstead. It showed plenty of damage and blood, but no sign of corpses, which fit Simon’s zombie theory precisely. When tracks were pointing further north, they all agreed that it was the right move to follow them. 

“These don’t look like beastmen to me,” Simon said, pointing out the flaw in their assumptions. “Not unless they’ve learned to wear boots.”

Boots on a beastmen was literally impossible, of course, and that gave everyone pause. “Maybe it’s bandits, then,” he ventured. “They don’t usually get this brave, but then this would hardly be the first time that we’ve had to take bandits down a peg, is it?”

The men largely agreed with that, and even though Simon pointed out that the beastmen might take the corpses, but the bandits would only take their valuables, he was largely ignored. Only Garth asked him what he thought it was after they started moving again. 

“Well, a man wearing boots that doesn’t leave corpses behind…” Simon said like he was trying to think. “Either we’ve got some deranged cannibals, or maybe something worse than that.”

“Worse than deranged cannibals?” Garth laughed. “Like what?”

“We’ll, there’s lots of things worse than cannibals,” Simon shrugged. “I’d rather fight a dozen cannibalistic highwaymen than a single orc. Those things are insanely strong. In this case, though, I was thinking… what if it’s like a warlock? What, however, is killing these people is taking the bodies for some other purpose.”

Garth shuddered at the thought and made the warding sign against evil with his hands as he said, “Well if you think that, why aren’t you telling the boss. Kell needs to know.”

“He does,” Simon agreed, “But he probably doesn’t need the new guy to try showing him up by telling him in front of everyone.”

The man got the hint and nodded sagely. They didn’t speak of it again, but that night, Kell informed everyone that, based on the signs he was seeing, they could be dealing with something more evil than man or beast and that, somehow, the risen dead might be involved in all of this. He took complete credit for the idea, but Simon didn't mind as long as people were warned about what was coming. 

The stories that night around the campfire were told in hushed tones, and the guards were extra vigilant. That was good, because the first of alarm rang out some time after midnight. 

Simon was on his feet immediately, with a sword in hand. His first thought was to use a word of light to illuminate the situation, but he knew that with everyone so on edge, being branded a warlock would make for a bad end. Instead, he ran to the fire, pulled out a burning brand, and tossed it in the direction of the guard who was calling for help, then used the words of minor fire to set the underbrush on fire so that he and everyone else could take in the situation.

The result pained a grim picture. The group had left behind the flat lands and camped on top of a hill, almost a day’s walk north of the trade road. It was a good, defensible spot, with good sight lines in all directions. That wasn’t enough to deter the mob of at least two or three dozen zombies advancing on them in a wide arc, though. 

There was plenty of room to retreat, theoretically, but Simon didn’t think that they were too terribly outnumbered, and thought it was probably worth the fight. “You take their head’s off!” he yelled to the other men struggling to wake up and figure out what the hell was going on. Even as they did, though, he was charging the nearest zombies. 

He’d killed plenty of these bastards and was no longer afraid of them. Honestly, he was happy to put them down. His only regret was that with so many other people present, he couldn’t use words of force to scythe them down like the pests they were. Still, he hadn’t gotten to use his mace much in a long time, and the sickening crunch that each of the zombies made as they fell before him was very satisfying. 

Part of him had worried this was going to be a massacre for these men, but it would seem that aside from Riggs, who’d been the man on watch, everyone else was fine. It turned out that his call of warning had been his last, and moments later, his throat had been ripped out by an almost skeletonized ghoul. 

While the rest of the Butcher’s Bill mourned him and discussed what they should do next, Simon went through the bodies. This was both to make sure that they were really and truly dead, but also to see what he could learn. He recognized a few ancient dead from the barrows, but there were what looked to be bandits, soldiers of Brin, and more than a few farmers. There were even children among the bodies. Those were the ones that weighed on his heart the most. 

“How did you know there would be zombies?” he heard Freya ask behind him.

“Why do you think I know anything about anything?” Simon played dumb, not turning around to look at her as he continued to study the corpses because he didn’t trust his expressions where she was involved. 

“Don’t play dumb with me. I heard what Garth told Kell over lunch,” she said, sounding more pointed and direct than he ever remembered her being in all their lives together. “He as much as said that you knew there was going to be a warlock and zombies coming up.”

“Know is a strong word,” Simon said, finally rising and turning to face her. “Let’s say I had a feeling, and we’re lucky someone listened to it. Otherwise, it could have been a real bad time.”

“It was a bad time for Riggs at least,” she said with a sad shake of her head like she was disappointed in him. “Wasn’t there more you could have done?”

“You put together companies like this, and people die,” Simon shrugged, ignoring the fact that there was a lot more he could have done. “I had a feeling and shared what I knew. Thanks to that, almost everyone lived. You’re welcome.”

She opened her mouth again, thought better of it, and closed it. It wasn’t until much later after the sun had risen, that Kell got him alone and said, “Well, it looks like we lucked out bringing you along, Simon. Tell me, where do you think all this is going? Do you think there’s an evil wizard somewhere up ahead? ”

Simon could see the suspicion in the man's eyes. He was looking for someone to blame, and Simon was determined not to be it, more than that, though, that phrase, ‘evil wizard’ rebounded through his mind giving him a terrible sense of deja vu. 

Then it hit him. Kell was the asshole that had tried to kill him during the run he’d solved this level, and he was the guy that had opened the gate the time that Simon had been stuck as a zombie. For a moment, he was filled with rage, not just because he had to help this loser but also because Freya ended up with him. 

Whoever said life wasn’t fair never met Helades, he thought to himself. If they had, they would have said that life was the opposite of fair.

Simon didn’t say any of that. Instead, he gestured at the bodies and said, “There’s plenty of clues here to a careful eye. We should study them before we burn them.”

“Burn them?” Kell said. “That could take all day.”

“It could,” Simon nodded, “But better than this spreading, and having to deal with even more zombies, right?”

“Fine,” he agreed. “Now tell me what you see.”

Ch. 126 - A Trail of Bodies

“The story is practically written there, in the corpses of the fallen,” Simon told Kell, gesturing widely to the beheaded bodies of the fallen. 

“I mean, yeah, I see that,” the younger warrior said, pretending like he had some clue about what it was Simon was talking about. “But it’s not like it's enough to tell us what’s really going on, is it?”

“I disagree,” Simon answered with a shake of his head. “You can see these trappers here are freshest, and then these farmers and traders are at least a couple weeks older. That tells me that it spread to the villages along the main road before circling back into the wilderness, which was a stroke of luck. If they’d kept going south—”

“But what does that have to do with the warriors?” Kell asked in frustration. “They’re practically skeletonized. Are you saying those came first?”

“Logically, yes,” Simon nodded. 

“But how do ye’ know they weren’t like.. Dug up and reanimated by evil magics?” Garth asked, joining their little conversation while everyone else got busy stacking bodies or stacking firewood.

“I kind of think they were… in a sense,” Simon said, trying not to give away too much about his own magical insights. “I mean, I have no idea how this stuff works. I’ve heard the same stories you have, but I know armor, and this stuff is ancient. Look at it. It’s not just rusted through. The designs are all wrong. It’s something that your grandfather’s grandfather might have worn.”

Both men nodded at that, and finally, Kell said, “So it started with them and then spread to the northern villages before going back into the forests? Are you saying this came from the north of the pass, or…”

“Nah, not that far north,” Garth said with a shake of his head. “The style is all wrong. I’d wager someone dug this up from the old barrow mounds. Maybe it’s not even a warlock. Maybe it’s just treasure hunters who woke up some ancient curse or somesuch.”

“I was thinking something like that too,” Simon nodded, glad he hadn’t been forced to lead the horse all the way to water before they’d put the pieces together. The less he seemed to know, the better. He could already feel the way people were looking at him after he ‘predicted’ zombies instead of beastmen, and they appeared almost like magic. 

Kell quickly took the ball and ran with it. A few minutes after Kell started telling Simon and Garth what to do, he explained the whole situation to everyone else as if he were the one who had figured it out, which was practically ideal. 

“Be sure to keep a careful count!” he admonished the men as they started stacking pyres. I’m going to make sure we get paid for every bloated corpse we dispose of when all this is done.”

They spent the rest of the twilight hours until morning dawned, arguing about where they were going next and how far this might have spread. Garth argued, quite logically, that if this had started at the Barrow Mounds, that should have been their next stop, but there was no way of knowing if going to their source would get them all. Simon was pretty sure that getting all of them wasn’t required as far as the Goddess was concerned, but he said nothing. 

After all, the last time he’d cleared this level, he’d only saved Schwarzenbruck. He’d never even gone north. Helades didn’t seem too concerned with saving everyone. She just wanted to save a few very specific people, so history went the way it should. Simon was a bit pickier in that regard, but even he acknowledged that there were going to have to be sacrifices. 

“If trade stopped, then this has spread to at least Bahamed Pass, right?” Hodge asked, interrupting his brooding after the final pyre was lit and dawn was shining through the oily black smoke the greenwood was giving off. 

Simon merely shrugged. That was somewhere he’d never been either, but maybe he’d fix that this run and add it to the minimap that he was slowly building in his head. 

The group watched the fires burn from upwind, but they didn’t start traveling again until they’d had a little ceremony for Riggs, and Kell had talked to everyone as a group about what was going on. After that, they continued north. 

That first night, they camped at a farmstead after they cleared out three more zombies. Two days later they found a hunting camp devoid of life, but later that night, the village that they stumbled upon at the edge of the moors made up for it by swarming with zombies. 

Simon spent half the night trying to keep everyone in their motley little crew alive. At times, the fighting was desperate, but even so, he was fairly successful until Garth was bitten by a corpse that hadn’t been completely dismembered. It was then Simon was faced with an ugly choice. 

He could go down the road of the old wives tale and ‘heal’ the man with salt and wood ash, but that would get someone killed one day when they tried it, and he wasn’t around to use magic to make a fake cure real. The other option was just to let the man die, though, because his friends were certain to kill him when they learned the truth, as they should. 

Instead, Simon chose the third option and healed the man with a word cure and of lesser healing, making it so that it never even happened. Garth looked at him with shock, but Simon merely shook his head and insisted it wasn’t as bad as the other man had thought. “I’m telling you, your armor stopped it,” he said, acting confused. “Lucky thing, too, or you’d be one of these poor bastards here in an hour or two.”

As it turned out, Simon was a lot more comfortable with the personal risk of being murdered for dealing with evil spirits rather than the idea that the things he did might get someone else killed down the line. After all, for him, death was just a not-so-temporary inconvenience, and even the weight gain and the weakness it inflicted on him were easier to deal with than the weight of another death on his conscience. 

It was a good thing, too, because the way that Garth spent half his watch staring at a wound he no longer had and half of it staring at Simon, he was fairly sure that he was going to be murdered before dawn. Simon still found it easier to ignore the man’s accusing gaze than the way that Freya and Kell sat extra cozily next to each other, not so far from the campfire. 

Frey, not Freya, he reminded himself. She’d not my Freya. 

It didn’t help, though, and by the time he could finally go to bed, part of him was praying for Garth to strike him down in his sleep. That didn’t happen, though. Instead, in the morning, the Butcher’s Bill continued on to the Barrows. 

This part of their adventure didn’t look any different than the last time he’d been here. Most of the mounds were still sealed, and it was only the largest one that had been opened. Now that Simon knew what he was looking for, he saw the obvious signs of earth magic there. The stones that had once sealed the door into the depths were partially melted as someone had effortlessly pulled them aside with a greater word. That was enough to make him extra cautious. 

“Be careful,” he cautioned everyone as the first men started to descend into the darkness. “A place like this is likely full of traps. Don’t touch anything!”

Kell looked at him strangely for a moment but then echoed his comments. “The new guy is right. Treasure hunting can wait until after we make sure everything looks right, and there’s nothing trying to eat us down there.”

Only half the band descended. The rest set up a cordon outside, just in case. It was unnecessary. Even eight people were overkill as far as Simon was concerned. 

There was nothing down there but a sarcophagus that he was going to lack the privacy to truly explore. He didn’t know how yet, but he knew this was the epicenter of the whole level; even if it wasn’t the part that Helades cared about, it was the thing that he most wanted to understand. 

So, he let the various members wander off into the dank side rooms as he proceeded directly toward the heart of the mound. It was there he found exactly what he expected. There was the sarcophagus, and the mocking paper crown on the only wriggling zombie in the place, along with the evidence of what might have been a ritual circle of some kind. Before he could tease out any more details, though, Kell, Freya, and a couple other guys entered the room behind him. 

“This place gives me the creeps,” Freya said as Kell walked past him into the room. 

“Yeah, we should probably just burn it or collapse the entrance and be done with it,” Simon agreed. “Something dark and terrible happened here.”

Truthfully, he was hoping they went for burying this place. Then, he could circle back in a few weeks, dig back through it when everything else was done, and finish his research. Simon was fairly sure no one wanted to take the time to dump loads of firewood this deep into the tiny dungeon. 

All of that was ignored by Kell, though, who seemed hell-bent on looking for treasure of some kind to make the whole trip worthwhile There was certainly enough gold left behind on the corpse in the center to justify the effort, after the thing was killed permanently. 

For a moment, though, Kell ignored that as he got closer and said, “Why is this one still moving when none of the rest are… and what’s this note here…”

“I don’t know. Someone was obviously here before us but…” Simon started to say. When the man reached for the folded piece of paper on the zombie’s head he shouted, “Don’t touch that!”

“What? Why?” Kell said, looking at Simon in annoyance.

“There’s magic all over this room; can’t you feel it?” Simon said, groping for some answer that might satisfy the man. “I say we cut this thing’s head off and then get out of here before we—”

“And that’s why you aren’t the boss of a mercenary company,” Kell sneered. “Don’t worry. I get paid extra to make the hard calls.”

As Kell’s hand reached for the paper, Simon reacted without thinking. “Aufvarum Oonbetit,” he whispered, pushing the man back with lesser force before he could do something to break the spell in place and bring down the ceiling on all of them. He knew it was a mistake as he did it, but he simply didn’t have any other options. 

“What in the name of…” Kell blurted out as he was flung against the far wall. 

“Witchcraft,” Freya hissed, drawing her dagger, as Simon slowly backed away toward the door.