Death After Death Ch. 127-128 (Patreon)

Ch. 127 - Complications

After that, Everything was a mess. He drew his sword, but only so that he could parry whatever was coming next. His Freya or not, he had no interest in striking her down, even though he was fairly certain he could without too much trouble. He didn’t even want to hurt the other members of the Butcher’s Bill, even though he couldn’t even remember their names just now. He just wanted to get free. 

“You touch that paper, and the whole roof is going to collapse,” Simon yelled, ignoring the other accusation and the looks in the eyes of his comrades. 

He didn’t think they were listening to him, but then he didn’t think they’d listen to anything he had to say at this point. Instead, he pulled out his shield and started to retreat, using the broad kite shield to cover most of the corridor as he moved back with quick, certain steps into the gloom. 

“Somebody stop him!” one of the men yelled, but Freya was already closing in on him with her knife. 

“He’s a warlock,” she yelled. “Simon is a warlock!”

He fended off her attacks with a few casual swipes. They weren’t nearly as much trouble as the other people starting to come out of the side corridors as he moved toward the surface, a step at a time. 

“It’s the gas!” Simon yelled, seeking to muddy the waters further. “I told them not to go in there, but now they’re seeing things!”

“What’s this now?” Garth asked, coming out of the nearest side passage. “Gas? Warlocks? Maybe we should all put away our weapons and—”

“Kill him,” Freya yelled, “before he steals your soul, Garth!”

Despite the pain of hearing his one-time love baying for his death, Simon had to smile bitterly as he appreciated the irony of the moment. Garth was the man most likely to believe that Simon was a warlock, but also the guy in the Butcher’s Bill most likely to take his side. 

Everyone held their breath for a moment as the man took it all in, and then Garth turned to Freya and said, “It seems to me you’re the one that’s acting crazy. So why don’t we put down our weapons and talk this out beneath the open sky? We can—”

As the older man tried to talk some sense into the armed group that was stalking Simon through the corridor and get everyone to calm down, a tremendous thud shook the barrow, and a shockwave of sound and dust traveled up the torch lit corridor to them. Simon knew what had happened immediately, but it only took Freya a few seconds longer before she turned and ran back down into the dark.

“Kell!” she cried out, rushing toward the collapse. 

Part of Simon wanted to try to stop her, but he was pretty sure she would be safe. Kell was almost certainly dead, but the collapse seemed to be restricted to the main chamber rather than the entire burial mound. Besides, he thought sardonically, I’m probably not even going to be able to save myself in all this.

“Screw it,” he said finally, as he turned and ran toward the surface, hoping to use the confusion to outpace the danger. 

And, at least for the first minute, that gambit seemed to pay off. Simon reached the surface while everyone else was trying to figure out what had just happened, and when he got there, he started yelling. “There’s been a collapse! Kell is trapped down there. Get the mules. We need shovels and timber! We’ve got to get him out!”

Everyone set to work immediately, and as soon as they were busy, Simon ran around the far side of the barrow and made himself scarce before rumors of his powers could spread any further. This had been a complete bust, and though he didn’t know if they’d done enough to clear the level at this point, he desperately hoped that they hadn’t because he was going to need to come back here by himself and do all this again. 

Once Simon had enough distance, he used a second barrow mound and then a third to hide his retreat before looping the long way back toward the treeline. He felt a little bad leaving everyone here, but not bad enough to try to salvage the situation. 

“They’re probably better off without that asshole,” Simon muttered to himself as he hiked as fast as he could from the image of Freya trying to cut him to ribbons. “Seriously, everything that guy touches turns to shit.”

Simon had run into Kell so many times and watched the man ruin so many levels at this point that part of him wanted to figure out where it was the asshole was born so that he could kill Kell before the guy caused so many problems. He wasn’t so myopic not to realize that his urge to strangle the man in his crib was motivated by the fact that he’d managed to end up with Freya in at least one of his miserable little lives. 

“I am so done with this level for a while,” Simon sighed as he continued to make good on his escape attempt. “If Kell wants to turn people into zombies with his short-sighted bullshit, that’s on him.”

He made it back to Schwarzenbruck in less than a week and saw no zombies on the way there, which was enough to make him think that this level probably was done for. Even that wasn’t enough to make him pause and wait around to see what had happened to Freya. She’d survived the collapse, and that was all that mattered. 

Simon immediately took the exit from the inn to the flaming ruins of Ionar. There were no plants there, which he took as a good sign, even though he was pretty sure there wouldn’t be even if he hadn’t defeated them. He wasn’t a hundred percent certain, but he was pretty sure that the levels didn’t connect that way where failed attempts were involved. 

Still, he didn’t stop to ask questions, at least not until he got to the abandoned throne room and saw the gate of the demonic church. There, he relaxed and took the time to check a few things with a mirror mounted on one wall. The mirror could offer no clarification about the plants, but it was able to confirm that level six was still accessible, which meant that he had not, in fact, completed his time with Freya yet. Simon was unsure how he felt about that but resolved to ignore it the same way he planned to ignore the demon in the next level. 

“Back so soon?” the devil asked as he strode through the portal, “You’re making fine progress lately, aren’t you.”

Simon ignored the man and paused only long enough to check a few runes to see if anything had changed before he left through the exit. All in all, he spent less than two minutes at that level, which had to be some kind of record. He simply didn’t have time to deal with that forked tongue bullshit just now. 

Instead, he only calmed down when he finally reached the gently rolling decks of the Sea Seraph and walked out unto the darkened deck to enjoy the night sea air. Those other places were levels he could do nothing about, but here, he was certain he could save these people as long as he didn’t let himself get distracted again. 

So, after giving himself enough time to calm down, Simon spent the rest of his days and nights on the ship doing just that: looking for the source of the plague. Sadly, he had no source of magical detection, which seemed like an obvious power that he would have to discover or create one day, but he saw no way to do so with his current words. 

As this happened for the next few days, he resisted the urge to heal anyone. It would have been a simple thing to do. The refugees on the boat were crawling with coughs and rashes, but eliminating them before they’d resolved into something substantial would do very little to help him on this or future runs. Not that I’ll let anyone die, of course, he told himself, but I need to know who’s the cause of all this suffering once and for all. 

This time, given his more limited funds, he was a little less free with his coins than he had been before and stuck largely to telling stories and trading gossip instead of winning and losing coppers at the dice games that sprung up every night. He learned nothing new like that, but in a way, it was nice to see how little things changed. Sometimes, the parts of his journey that changed the least were the most reassuring, and he often found those moments among the soldiers or the sailors of the realm that were just trying to get by. 

Almost a week into their voyage, they reached Ionar as always and stopped to take on water. This time, he didn’t even try to leave the boat. It felt like he’d spent half a lifetime here, marching up and down the cliff face in an effort to purge every last tendril and flower, and he wasn’t eager to repeat the experience. 

The next time I make that hike, he told himself as he watched those broken cliffs retreat into the distance, it will be because I’ve saved that cursed city, and there will be something worth seeing from up there. 

It was three days out from that city that he finally found the cause, or at least what he was almost certain was the cause of all this suffering. It turned out the reason that he’d never found it before was because it wasn’t on the ship all along like he’d presumed. Instead, late one evening, as the sun was beginning to set, the lookout called out a ship in distress off the port beam. 

Simon didn’t have to get particularly close to see that they were in rough shape. Their sails were ragged, and their people were gaunt. Some callous part of Simon told himself that he should just discreetly sink the ship from a distance. He was fairly certain he could do that with a word of force. 

It wouldn’t take much to hole the ship and send it below. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he did that, though. Instead, he watched as the small boat came alongside, and the survivors were ferried between the ships. 

He saw the sores immediately on a number of people, and while everyone else watched what was happening, he was using a word of cure on each boat load of people just before they came aboard. As a result, he was completely exhausted by the end of that desperate evening.  

He didn’t know what the vector for this plague was, of course. If it was rats or fleas, he was probably still screwed, but thanks to his time with Doctor Fallster, he was fairly sure that the spread was largely caused by touching infected fluids, so Simon was pretty sure he had it handled. He’d better, according to the sailors, they were less than two days from port, and he was too exhausted to do much else magically between now and then. 

Instead, he contemplated what this level wanted. Honestly, it probably wasn’t even to save the Abrese. After all, if that was the point, the portal would be there and not on board the ship here. 

So what was it she wants, then? He wondered. Am I supposed to save this ship or the refugees on that one? What’s the important element here?

It annoyed him that saving the city they were heading to probably wasn’t even the goal, but not so much that he didn’t spend the rest of the voyage obsessing over it as he scrambled for some kind of insight.

Ch. 128 - For A While

By the time they docked in Abrese, it was clear that the plague had been strangled in its infancy. It was clear that the health of those they’d rescued on the ship was improving every day, and it was seen as a boon from the Gods. It felt like a real win to Simon, and honestly, he needed one of those. 

At least until they reached the city, where he found cases in progress already. That made him sigh. So this was all about the ship, huh, Helades? He thought to himself. It had to be at this point because he knew for a fact that without intervention, the crew sickened, and the thing sank pier side right here. 

Simon had no idea what that meant, but he was once again annoyed that the boat, or even one person on it, mattered more than the whole city, and when the captain announced they were leaving as soon as possible, it gave Simon an interesting decision. 

When the Sea Seraph left, the gate to the next level would leave with it. That meant that his run was done unless he stayed on for the next leg of the voyage. Only, he didn’t want to.

Simon was sick of running from level to level with no clear purpose, and even if he’d solved this one, he wasn’t feeling particularly inclined to give up on a city of tens of thousands just because she had no need of them. 

Still, he hesitated and spent a little time talking to the crew about the route they planned to take before he slammed the door on everything he knew. “We come back this way every year or two,” the quartermaster said with a shrug. “It’s hard to say exactly. It all depends on the price of wine in Vitilay and the price of rice in… Well, the there’s the storm season around the Summer Isles to consider, too. Certain sure we’ll be back someday, but when is anyone’s guess. Not even the captain can say for certain.”

It wasn’t much of an answer, but it was enough. Simon left the boat with his meager possessions and made his way to the inner harbor. Abrese was a town he’d already spent months in already, so he knew his way around, and instead of wandering around, he made his way to the lower temple courtyard that would eventually become a hospital of sorts and got started. 

Last time, he’d been here six months in the future, so most of the dying had already been done, and the city was pretty hollowed out. This time, it was only just getting started, though, and thanks to the reduced amount of spread, the healthy still outnumbered the sick. That wouldn’t last forever, though. 

The Weeping Pox, as the locals came to call it, because of the pustulant yellow sores and the way the dying cried out in pain wasn’t as deadly as the black plague he’d seen in Hurag. Not by a long shot, but left unchecked, he knew it would still kill half the city. Sadly, many of those deaths would be caused by some of the crazy treatments of the day rather than by the disease itself. 

The local healers believed that the best way to prevent the disease from spreading was to seal the sores with hot irons or molten tar. Predictably, this didn’t end well for the patient, but that didn’t seem to stop them from thinking that next time, it would work, and Simon advocated against it almost from the moment he arrived. 

No one listened to him, though, not at first. Why should they? He was just another guy with a strange accent peddling cures to the desperate public. The only real difference was that he had magic. 

Simon was fairly sure that most of these cases could be solved by keeping them nourished and hydrated. In fact, that was the conclusion he reached over and over again in the circumstances; the disease was the killer, but only because the health of the average person was so bad in this world. It was plain to see when you looked at the rates that the nobles survived compared to the peasants. It certainly wasn’t because they had access to better doctors, he thought with a laugh. 

Still, despite his belief that all most of these people needed was time to heal, he used words of lesser cure liberarly in those first weeks to establish his reputation as a gifted healer, just as he’d done before. He even saved a few impossible cases with stronger words of healing and cure. These were just to show off, though. As a rule, he didn’t try to save every life. There were simply too many. 

Instead, he used that early traction to end the practice of sealing wounds with fire and bleeding the feverish. Instead, he focused on nutrition and sterility. He taught the other healers that bandages had to be boiled and not just washed before they could be reused, and slowly, one day and patient at a time, he turned the disused little courtyard into a makeshift hospital of sorts. 

It was a change of pace for Simon. On most levels and in most lives, he lived by the sword and was always on the move, but this time, there were no weapons of violence. Instead, day after day, he did his best to ease the suffering of those who came to him with blankets, bandages, and broth, and he got so used to the sickly sweet smell of disease that after a few months, he couldn’t even smell it anymore. 

Still, despite the chaos and the death, he saved more than most, and perhaps eight in ten of his patients went on to make a full recovery, with nothing but the ugly, discolored scars that the Weeping left behind to mark its passing. Many of these survivors went on to be nurses in his little field hospital since they were largely immune to it after defeating it the first time. 

As the operation grew, Simon financed the salvation of the poor with donations from the rich. They were often desperate to survive, and eventually, he was the only one who would be sent for when someone important, like the wife of the eldest son of a noble, sickened. After six months, this happened with such frequency that he was forced to invent medicines and potions that did almost nothing, just to make them feel like they were getting their money’s worth. 

It was ironic, of course; he’d spent so long trying to chase the quacks out of business with their tar and their razors, and now he was knowingly peddling snake oil himself that was little more than herbs and alcohol to make the patient sleep and ease their pain. At least it didn’t actively harm them, though, and it wasn’t like he was going to get the funds to save the poor any other way. Even simple fare like bread and soup started to cost a lot when you were feeding dozens of people for day after day. It was easy to take handfuls of silver for a few bottles of colored water and a whispered word of lesser cure when he remembered what that fraud was paying for. 

Throughout all that he wasn’t tempted once to siphon the lifeforce from any of the dying either. It was strange. He could remember craving it so badly in his previous run that it was like a drug addiction, but it was only now, when he was actively spending months and years of his life to help others that he realized he hadn’t been tempted to top it back up at any point. Simon wondered why that was, but could only assume that the affliction was physiological, and that he lost that dark urge between lives. It was good to know, in case he ever had to do it again. 

After six months, Simon was moving his whole operation into a mostly empty warehouse not far from the ivy-strewn square he’d spent so much time in, thanks to the dying bequest of a merchant he’d saved earlier. That was good because winter was on its way, and the storms that came in off the straight weren’t doing any favors for the survival rate of the sick and the dying. 

Simon didn’t complain about that, though. He’d known what he was getting into when he came here, and the worsening weather did mean there were fewer sick people, at least, thanks to people’s tendency to leave their homes as little as possible. In many ways, he felt like the worst was over, and as the overwhelming crowds diminished, it gave him more time to spend with each patient instead of leaving such tasks to his growing following of acolytes. 

It was on one of those blustery days when even four walls and a stout roof couldn’t quite keep out all the chill that Simon had a most interesting conversation with a dying sailor. 

“Simon, is it?” the man coughed. “I should have known it would be a Simon that got me killed after all this time.” The man looked like he would have walked right out of Simon’s little hospital if he had the strength to do so. Instead, he lay there looking miserable.

“That’s a strange thing to tell your doctor,” Simon answered dismissively. He’d had lots of less-than-cooperative patients by this point. People could get strange when the fever took them, and he’d long since grown used to the accusations that he was trying to kill them instead of save them. 

“What else should I tell someone named Simon,” the man said with a scowl. “Not only is your name a rare one, but it’s well and truly cursed.”

That piqued his interest, and Simon tried to follow up further, but the man quickly became delirious, and all he could really find out about him was that his name was Lem, and he was from the north. It wasn’t until days later when he was past the worst of it and finally on the mend, that Simon learned the truth: the sailor was from Schwarzenbruck, and he had a strange story to tell. 

“I’m sorry about before, Doc, but in my defense, I really did think you were poisoning me,” Lem told him apologetically once the fever had died down and it was clear he was going to be okay. “You have to understand. Where I come from, up near the Black River, that name is cursed.”

“Oh?” Simon asked, feigning disinterest. “And why is that?”

“I’m surprised you haven’t heard the stories, even this far south,” the sailor said, taking a drink of water before he continued. “Simon the Cursed. Simon the Black. Simon the Barrow Wight. It's an ugly thing. He was a necromancer that summoned the dead and nearly destroyed the whole region.”

“Warlocks do cause untold harm,” Simon agreed blandly. “Though I find that most of them are just stories.” His manner was almost disinterested as he pretended to check the patient's temperature and his bandages, but inside, he was seething as he wondered how the events with the Butcher’s Bill had gotten twisted. 

Simon’s anger only grew as Lem proceeded to tell him the story of the brave warrior Kell, who had died thwarting the Arch-necromancer Simon’s evil plan to raise an army of the dead to conquer the region. “There’s still zombies that are found now and then to this day,” the sailor said finally, “but even if they weren’t, I can’t imagine a single woman that would dare give her child such an awful name.”

“Well, in my land, it doesn’t have such an evil reputation,” Simon said with a shrug before moving on. He was definitely going to have to solve that level because there was no way that he was going to let Kell end up as a storied hero after all the awful things he’d done.