Death After Death Ch. 133-134 (Patreon)

Ch. 133 - For the Right Reasons

It was evident from the first moments that Varten didn’t stand a chance against Simon. In the time since they’d last met, he’d grown older and lazier; his steps were not as sure, and his sword strokes were not as decisive as they’d once been. He was obviously out of practice.

Simon had grown older, too, but he’d spent the last several seasons using his sword constantly, and he was as sharp as he’d ever been. So, he parried each blow easily, getting inadvisably close to the Baron and practically daring him to do something about it just because he was pretty sure the man couldn’t lay a finger on him. 

“What are all of you doing!” Varten yelled to his soldiers after half a dozen slashes, and a few thrusts showed him how one-sided this was likely to be. “Kill this man!”

They’d already made their decision, though, and stood there silently in a wide circle, watching the dual. “They’d fight for a ruler that commanded their respect or their fear,” Simon taunted the Baron. “You have neither, though. Not like your father did before the Orcs brought your whole family down a peg.”

“You know nothing!” Varten raged, lashing out wildly with a series of strokes that forced Simon to give ground for the first time. “My father was a great man, and the people love me.”

“There’s been no love in Crowvar for a long time, and I blame you for that more than anyone,” Simon answered, smiling grimly, knowing that his opponent would never understand the comment, not even if Simon explained it to him. 

How could he? The world that Simon remembered had never happened. Crowbar wasn’t important to anyone but him anymore. That was plain to see on the map he was slowly making. 

It was the backwater of a backwater at the very edge of the Kingdom of Brin. That was part of the reason he’d thought it was a safe place to settle with Freya so long ago. Now, though, well, if the desert were to encroach a little further north, and the Barony were to dry up and blow away, no one except the King’s treasurer was likely to notice when the annual tax receipts never arrived. 

“Your family's stewardship, if you even want to call it that, has ruined this place,” Simon taunted. “You hid behind the walls of your fine fortress while everyone else died or fled. Even you can see it's nothing more than a shell of what it was like in your childhood.”

“That’s not what happened at all!” Varten said, fending off Simon’s words even less successfully than he was fending off his attacks. 

“And now you feast while your people starve!” Simon yelled, growing angrier. “You are a vulture, picking at the bones of this place, and when there’s nothing left, the centaurs will sweep across the land, and it will be like Crowvar never even existed!”

Each word was a cut, of course, but most of them were also accompanied by actual cuts too. Simon was in no hurry to kill Varten; he’d done it before, and he’d do it again. For now, he seized every opportunity, slicing at the man’s arm or leg whenever his guard was insufficient or his reach exceeded his grasp. 

No one would miss him, Simon told himself as he rained down a series of blows on the Baron that left him increasingly frantic as he faltered beneath the storm of steel. No one. He…

As Simon knocked the man off his feet and sent his rapier skittering across the floor, he delayed only a moment before making the final blow. 

“No, please. I—” Varten cried out, about to beg for his life. 

No words could have softened Simon’s heart, though, and instead of listening, he brought the long sword down into the chest of his enemy. Then he stood there long enough to watch him die, surprised to find that it gave him no joy or peace as it had in the past. He stayed there long enough that he was forced to step back because of the growing pool of blood. It was only then that he regained his senses and turned to the onlookers who were looking at him, unsure of what to do next. 

Simon could see some guards looking at him with relief and others with greed. This had been a fragile situation before he’d gotten here, and he had no doubt that any one of them might try to become the next ‘legitimate’ warlord of the area. What would follow would be a particularly ugly civil war that would continue until someone who was even more ruthless than a Raithewait took control, and the only way to prevent that, and all the bloodshed that would come with it, was for that someone to be him.

“Ding dong, the dick is dead,” Simon said to himself as he flicked the blood free from his blade and resheathed it before he cleared his throat to address everyone else. 

“Alright, everyone,” Simon said, raising his voice so that no one would misunderstand what he was about to say. “The leech you’ve called your leader for your whole lives is dead. That fixes one problem but creates a lot of others. So I’m going to need people to go fetch everyone of any importance. I want the captain of the guard, the heads of any important guilds and leading families—”

“So you can kill them too?” someone asked, obviously expecting some kind of palace coup to follow. 

“No one else is dying,” Simon answered wearily. “I mean it. No one, that’s why we’ll post a guard at the door of the Baron’s family. So, no one gets any ideas. I just want to bring everyone together so that the people of Crowvar can decide what’s next. If they want me to leave, then I will. If they want me to stick around until the centaurs are under control, then—”

“What if they want to hang you for killing the Baron?” one of the guards shouted at Simon, making him laugh.

“Well, you are welcome to try, though I do not think that will end well for you,” he said as he walked over to a chair and sat down. 

People milled around for a few minutes, and they discussed everything that happened with each other and tried to decide what they should do before going off to do as he instructed. That let Simon breathe a secret sigh of relief before he asked one of the serving girls to bring him something to drink. Even if killing Varten had been on his to-do list for this trip, toppling the government and taking over hadn’t been the plan for today, so he was just sort of winging it.

Less than an hour later, everyone of any importance had been assembled, and though the Baron’s body had been covered with a linen tablecloth, everyone’s eyes kept wandering the bloodstained lump it hid on the floor. The guards there testified that it was an honorable duel that the Baron had started, leaving out their reluctance to help the man. That wasn’t so unbelievable, at least when he was younger; Varten was fond of such things since he lost so rarely.

There was no agreement among the group. Instead, there was bickering about what should be done and who should be the one to do it. 

“We must send for advice from the king!” the city tax collector advised.

“That will be months in the waiting,” one of the rich men who ran some vineyards to the north of the city sighed. “We should appoint someone, me by preference, as the regent to Lord Raithewait’s son and then elevate him from Viscount to Baron.”

“But the lad is only four!” another man cried out in frustration.

Simon let these conversations go in circles for almost half an hour before he finally stood and said, “All good advice, gentlemen. Thank you. We will do exactly what you have suggested.”

“What we said?” the guard captain asked, confused. 

“Who are you to—” another started to say. 

“We will notify the King, inform the populace, appoint a reagent, and get to work against the greatest challenges the kingdom faces: the centaurs,” Simon said, smiling as if he had all the confidence in the world they’d accept his plan.

“But who will be the Reagent?” the tax collector asked. 

“Why, me, of course,” Simon said. “I have no intention of staying longer than I have to, but it’s clear that Crowvar is facing problems right now that only a warrior can solve, and if none of you will pick up the sword, then it falls to me and my men to do it.”

For a moment, the room exploded in bickering, but Simon ignored it. Instead, he started to give orders as if he expected them to be obeyed, and shockingly, they were. No one was happy with it, of course, but he’d very clearly reminded them he was the one with the small personal army, and though many of them might disagree with his methods, he doubted there was a man in this city who didn’t think something had to be done about the depredations of monsters that was currently grinding this country to dust. 

By the time he returned to his small camp next to the Inn hours later, most things had been settled. The widow had been informed, the bounties had been paid at the usual rate, and people were coming to grips with the new reality: the Baron was dead, and though perhaps not in name, Simon was the new Baron. He was well aware that many of the men he’d talked to only obeyed him out of fear and that they hoped the King would strike him down or that they’d poison him or stab him in the back, given the chance. 

Simon didn’t plan to give them one, of course. He planned to stay as far from the center of power and out in the field as much as possible. In the morning, he gave his men the short, short version of what had happened. 

“So he tried to cheat us of our due, and you did what you had to to make sure we got paid?” Jak laughed, slapping him on the back. “I knew I liked you for a reason.”

I knew I liked you for a reason. Simon didn’t linger too long that day. He had everyone start packing up and returned to the Baron’s walled compound at the center of town only long enough to get a few proclamations written and stamped. He didn’t expect a lot of help from Crowvar, but with these, the rest of the towns and villages in the regions should be a little more useful, and Simon had a plan. 

Well, he had several, but right now, the one he was most interested in was the most straightforward: push the centaurs and everything else that thought that humans tasted like a delicacy back away from the largest towns and agricultural areas. Nothing was going to get fixed if people were afraid to live their lives. They would just continue to flee north, and the desert and the centaurs would chase them.

Ch. 134 - A Wider View

It began with a massive ambush outside the tiny village of Brunn, where Simon used a hundred sheep to lure more than half that number of centaur warriors to their deaths under a fusillade of crossbow bolts and surreptitious magic spells. It was the first victory, but it would not be the last or the largest. 

Every town her went through now, he compelled a few members of the village defense force to join his little band. He didn’t feel great about doing it, but his plans required numbers as much as they required picking just the right battlefield. 

Sometimes, that meant box canyons or cliffs. Other times, it meant camouflage or even swamps, but with a little bait and the right edge, Simon was fairly confident they could win nearly every fight with a little planning. Eventually, the men who fought with him even believed him, and few of them died as a result of that trust. 

Tchul. Krovel. Edenbrooke. Not every battle was bloodless, but everywhere they went, as Simon widened the scope to the north and east, he did his very best to take advantage of the terrain to make it more likely that their enemy would flee instead of fight to the last. Eventually, when they passed close through to Bellum’s Cross, Simon finally made a brief stop and retrieved his maps from where he’d left them with the survivors he’d started this chapter of his adventure with. He did this so he could add all the other places he was visiting to the paper he'd put so much hard work into, but mostly, the villagers took the opportunity to tell his companions about how he’d saved them single-handedly, further expanding his legend. 

Less than two months after he started his second campaign as the Regent-General of the Raithewait Barony, he had a hundred men under him and was approaching a thousand centaur skulls. It was brutal, bloody work, and whenever possible, Simon did it all without magic. He could start to feel the pull of extra years on himself now, and he only spared weeks and months for the injured men who fought valiantly by his side. 

But as time went on, especially during the winter months, new war bands and herds became harder and harder to find. Many of his men took that as a sign that they were winning, but Simon saw it differently. To him, it was evidence that they might never be able to win.

When all of this had started, Simon had been too simplistic about it. He knew that now. He thought he could hunt down the centaurs like mobs in a video game and grind on them until he reached a certain kill count, and then the future he sought to avoid would simply evaporate, like a quest that had been achieved. 

They were intelligent, though, in their way. They found weakness and fled from strength. When the centaurs faced the inexplicable losses of Simon’s traps, they inevitably fled to another part of the prairie and found another opponent to face on more favorable ground. So, if he’d just been trying to keep them away from Crowvar, that would have been easy. 

There was no guarantee that would prevent the rise of a warrior that would unite the tribes into a single terrible fist, though. That was what forced him out, ever further into the wastelands, away from the streams and the villages that made up the heart of the Barony. It was not a popular decision, but really, there was no one who could tell him no anymore, not after all the victories he’d given them. Still, he could see it in the eyes of his men. They wanted to go back to Crowvar, cash in their winnings, and move on with their lives. 

Simon couldn’t do that, though, because now that he’d pushed the centaurs to the edge of the wastes he had a new plan. Well, it was an old plan that someone else had probably come up with a few levels down. He was just giving it new life: poison the wells and the oases of the border areas. 

Poisoning the water supply hardly seemed like a valorous tactic. He would have preferred to meet the horse lords on the field of battle. However, now that they’d lost so many, the herds were skittish things, and no matter how tempting he made the ambush target, they would rarely take the bait. Instead, they fought with gnolls and orcs in the rocky foothills or the dunes of the desert.

“You sure we gotta keep going?” one of the younger men asked him the other day. Before Simon had drafted him to the cause, he’d been a green member of the city guard. Now, he was practically a blooded veteran who just wanted to go home and start a farm. “The Barony is as peaceful as I’ve ever seen it.”

“It is,” Simon agreed, “But I want it to stay that way for longer than a few months. All we’ve done is make it safe enough to get complacent again, but I want to end the threat for… well, for as long as we can.”

He’d almost said forever, but he held himself back. Eliminating all the monsters was probably impossible. Even if it was possible, though, it might not be desirable. The centaurs did good work keeping other invasive species away. If he was actually successful in eliminating the horse lords, then what followed might be worse. He didn’t want that. Not anymore, anyway. He just wanted better boundaries, and right now, the best way to do that was water or a lack of it.

So, five months after Simon had started his apparently endless war against the centaurs, it ended with a whimper instead of a bang. There was no final battle. There was no single combat with a twelve-foot-tall stallion with eyes full of murder. Instead, they just filled all the watering holes that were nowhere near the trade roads but still within a few days’ ride of vulnerable villages with corpses of whatever they could kill, leaving behind a toxic curtain that he hoped would be enough to keep the monsters at bay, or at least redirect future attacks to the most defensible locations along the roads and rivers. 

With that done, Simon returned to Crowvar for a hero’s welcome. He hadn’t expected it, of course. But as soon as the gates opened, there was a celebration already waiting for him. They’d seen his small army coming from quite a ways off, it seemed. 

Still, he was determined not to let his guard down, even after both he and his horse were draped with flower garlands. The common man might welcome a warrior, but the powers that be still looked at him with suspicion from balconies and second-story windows. 

Simon didn’t pay too much attention to any of that, though. Instead, he looked at the damaged walls that had never been fully repaired, and the burned-out buildings that had never been replaced from the orcish attacks years before.

His proactive defense against the centaurs and even his murder of Varten might keep things from getting worse, but really, when he got down to it, had he made things any better? It was hard to say that he had.

He was welcomed inside both the main gates and the fortified residence in the center, where a small feast awaited him. He brought several of his trusted lieutenants with him, more to honor them for all their hard work than because he feared a trap. There were undoubtedly traps, of course. He just wasn’t afraid of them.

“Did the King tell you that you can kill me yet?” Simon asked the nobles as he came in. 

Most of them only scowled, but the tax collector said, “His Majesty encouraged us to find a solution to the matter ourselves and suggested that perhaps the Regent could marry Lord Raithewait’s widow and—”

“Like that would ever happen,” a woman spat, making Simon raise an eyebrow. He agreed with her, of course, but he had no idea that the woman who had been sitting among the rest of the nobles was the widow in question until just that moment. 

“...and barring that,” the tax collector continued, “That we find amicable arrangements and solve our own problems, lest he appoint a new champion of the land and send them down to lay claim to ‘this troublesome province.’”

Simon smirked at the quote at the end. Instead, he sat down at a place at one of the lower tables that obviously hadn’t been the one reserved for him, and he raised his glass to call for wine. “Well, let’s have a toast then,” Simon said, “To the defeat of the centaurs and never marrying the widows of the fallen foes.”

Quite a few people scowled at that, but he was surprised to see that Lady Raithewait at least raised her cup. She was clearly very in favor of at least that idea of his, though otherwise, she seemed unlikely to help put him out if he was on fire. 

The dinner started not long after that, and though the seat of honor at the high table remained conspicuously empty, the servants worked it out. The tabled were piled high with roast pork bread while beer and wine flowed like water. It was the best that any of them had eaten in months. At least until Jak started coughing up blood, and it became apparent that the man had been poisoned. 

He started convulsing as Simon lowered him to the floor and whispered a word of lesser cure to see that he lived. He could heal him more later if he needed to. Once that was done, he stood and shouted, “Seal the doors! No one leaves until this is sorted out.”

Simon tasted the wine and then spat it out immediately. The poison was bitter and obvious, and whoever had done it had clearly waited until they were drunk before they’d tried to end Simon. 

“I spend the best part of a year… Jak freezes his ass off most nights fighting to make the world a better place for the people of Crowvar, and this is the thanks he gets?” Simon demanded. “We come back only to be killed by those who think they are our betters?”

A few nobles tried to speak conciliatory words then, but Simon kept talking. He didn’t care much for consolation after attempted murder. He would not be mollified. Instead, he marked the faces of every snake in the grass, which let their glee show a little too clearly on their well-bred faces as he spoke. He would never know who had given them poison, but he already knew who wished it had succeeded, and that would be enough.

“There is no one better than Jak in this room,” Simon yelled over them. “There is no one who’s taken more arrows or shed more blood than the man who just took one more blow for me, and someone will pay for this outrage.”

The denials started then, but it was too late for that. Simon picked out the half a dozen men who seemed most gleeful about what had just happened and ordered the guard to “Seize them and lock them in the dungeon before I decide which of them need to be hung for this outrage.” There was a flurry of shock and outrage then, but Simon didn’t care. Instead, he turned his gaze back to his sickened comrade and tried to decide what more needed to be done for the man.