Death After Death

Simon didn’t miss a lot of things about the Broken Tower, but after a week of sleeping on rocks and damp grass, he did miss the bed he’d had there. It was almost as hard as the stone floor it sat on, but at least he’d slept like the dead. So, most mornings, he used his recently returned ability to speak, and sang a little song, or at least talked to himself as he continued on, and as soon as he had the chance to splurge and get a room at an inn, he did so.

The little village of Elbenval was too small to matter; in fact, it was barely big enough to be noted on his ever-widening map. It was little more than two dozen homes and a few fields next to the neglected trade road he was walking along.

What it was good for, though, was information. For the price of a few beers spread around the small common room, he heard every scrap of gossip in the county. Mostly, that was about people who didn’t matter and feuds that would never go beyond the families who held their grudges for generations, but it was entertaining, at least, and he did learn a few useful facts. The two most important things he learned were that he was approaching the western limits of Brin and that the Viscount was a petty old weasel with a bandit problem.

While Simon didn’t have so little money that he had to go track down assholes like that, he definitely wanted to. He could use the funds to get a mule and a backpack, or maybe even a horse once he could hike for a day without wanting to die.

In the morning, on the way out of town, Simon checked the notice board, promising three golden crowns for information leading to the whereabouts of the Bandit leader, Ennis, ironically enough. The notice had a picture of the man on it, but it was a likeness drawn by what appeared to be a child. Beyond showing that the man in question had a mustache, it was less than useless.

Still, after Simon had finished feeling wounded by the sloppy handwriting of the man who had written the wanted poster, he folded it up and pocketed it. It might be useless for identifying his target, but it did say where his men had been recently seen, in places that weren’t so far up the road from here. More importantly, it spelled the reward out very clearly, which was what Simon was really after. His experience with Varten and the centaurs had taught him to get things like this in writing.

Simon spent two more days traveling through the area. He approached every roadside grove of trees with caution, though he needn’t have. When he finally found his bandits, it was he who caught them by surprise. Toward sunset on his third day north, Simon smelled wood smoke on the wind and followed it. While he’d found the bandit camp, it was just a dozen half-starved farmers, not the rogue's gallery of bloody-thirsty killers he’d been promised.

This disappointed Simon because he’d been looking forward to a real fight. He thought he might even get the chance to throw around a few fire spells. Sadly, that turned out not to be the case. Instead, when he sat down at their fire and asked about the fire, he got more humor than hostility.

“If that skinflint has the three gold coins to actually pay that reward, I’ll give you my thumbs!” Most of these men couldn't read, so Simon read the thing aloud before he gave the flyer to the man on his left, and it slowly passed around the fire. When it reached Ennis, the man had a hearty laugh at the illustration.

Slowly, in dribs and drabs, a not-so-unfamiliar story came out. The domain of Viscount Bracken wasn’t as large as the ones that belonged to Barons Corwin or Raithwaite, but it was every bit as mismanaged as the latter, and the men in question were more like tax cheats than bandits. Even tax cheats wasn’t very appropriate since, in their version of events, he charged them enough to run them off their land, and then he still pursued them for debts they had no way to pay after their plots had been seized.

“Not a lot of good nobles in this land, is there?” Simon asked after he took a sip from the wineskin being passed around. n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

“If there’s a single one, they must live pretty damn far away,” the man to Simon’s right said, “Because I ain’t never seen em.”

That brought another chorus of laughs, but it wasn’t something Simon could refute. He agreed with the man. The rulers of every city he’d seen mostly seemed to care about the area around the capital, but everywhere else, well… as long as they paid their taxes, it was an out-of-sight, out-of-mind situation.

“So is this the part when you take my head to see if he pays up?” Ennis said finally.

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“Seems like an awful hassle,” Simon answered with a shrug.

“Didn’t think so,” Ennis said, spitting into the dark. “You don’t look much like a bounty hunter yourself.”

“Don’t let the flab fool you, I’m just a little out of practice, that’s all,” Simon answered. “Once upon a time, I used to fight centaurs down south, but lately, it's just been goblins and whatnot.”

There were a few more jokes at Simon’s expense, but they didn’t mean anything by it. Honestly, he didn’t blame them. He went to bed that night trying to decide if he should make this his problem, and he woke up deciding that he should just continue on his way and leave these men to their fate. He would have done just too if the riders hadn’t arrived while he was packing up the canvas tap he used as a tent.

One of the men was making fry bread when the sound of galloping filled the glen they’d made their hideout. Everyone looked around in confusion, and Simon readied a spell as he thought he’d see a wall of heavy horse coming over the rise, but it turned out to be only five men with lances. That changed things a bit.

“We outnumber them already,” Simon laughed as he unlimbered his bow and drew an arrow.

The five soldiers had paused on the rise not far from them, and one of them lifted his faceplate to make an announcement about coming peacefully; Simon wasn’t really interested in peacefully this morning, though. Instead, he put an arrow in the eye of the man doing the walking at fifty feet.

“In the name of your Lord, the Viscount of—” he started. His screaming spoiled the rest of whatever it was he’d been about to say, spooking the horses and sending them in all directions.

“What are you doing?” the supposed bandit nearest to Simon gasped as Simon drew his sword.

“Five riders? Three crowns?” This Viscount fella really doesn't take you guys seriously, Simon answered with a smile. “I’m just teaching him a lesson on that. After this, the price should go way up.”

Simon took the head off the first man to charge him with a word of force as he parried Simons's strike. It had been a clumsy thing, and Simon never had a chance of taking the man from this angle, but then, he’d never intended to. The blow had been for show because he couldn’t exactly strike people dead with lightning and expect to make friends. Just pretending to take the man’s head off with a lucky blow would keep people from asking questions later, and for now, all Simon needed was plausible deniability.

Well, plausible deniability and a damn mount, he thought as he pushed the rider off of his horse and then mounted it. It had been a long time since he’d ridden a horse and even longer since he’d fought from one, but he found it came back to him, more or less.

With a yank on the reigns, he wheeled and spurred the animal toward the nearest soldier with his heels. The move was clumsy enough that it would have embarrassed him once upon a time. He wasn’t great on horseback these days, but that didn’t matter. These soldiers weren’t going to kill him, and even if they did, this fight was completely pointless.

What mattered wasn’t the details of the peasant's cause or who had wronged who. What mattered was that he was having fun. He was on the side of the angels, he was having a good time, and he was remembering how to be a badass, which was what he needed as much as he needed to reach Ionar one day.

While the other bandits clustered together, brandishing their pitchforks and short swords like a pathetic porcupine, he fought with lucky soldier number three. The last soldier was green but not entirely untrained, and as they crossed swords, he managed to give Simon a glancing wound that skittered painfully across three of his ribs. Unfortunately, he paid for it by taking a sword thrust to the chest. Simon rode by, leaving it impaled in the other man as they both slowly came to a halt.

The other two men had seen enough. They turned tail and ran as fast as they arrived. Simon didn’t try to stop them, either. Instead, he just took a breath to make sure the man hadn’t broken a rib or punctured a lung. Then, he used a whispered word of lesser healing to staunch the bleeding. He didn’t try to heal it completely. A wound would make him look more human. No one would be inclined to call him a warlock if he just looked like a foolhardy asshole that didn’t always win.

He pretended to check his wound, then satisfied that he wasn’t going to die, he rode over to the man who was bleeding out on his sword and took it back. Once that was cleaned and resheathed, only then did he approach the men he’d technically just fought beside.

By day, they looked even more hungry and ragged than they had by the fire the night before. To call any of them bandits was an insult to bandits, but for better or worse, he’d taken up their cause. It had nothing to do with this level or with his plans, but he had half a decade to kill. He could play hero every now and then when he found the right cause.

“Didn’t look like a bounty hunter, huh?” Simon laughed. “Probably never seen a centaur?”

There was some nervous laughter then because no one knew where he was going with any of this.

“What say we go string up a tax collector or two and see if your Viscount takes you seriously then, eh?” Simon asked, giving them a manic grin.

A ragged cheer went up at that, but really, his mind had already moved on. He was trying to think of the last time he’d felt this way; the answer didn’t completely surprise him. It was when he’d fought for Crowvar. I might hate that place, but I did miss this, he decided instantly, as he tried to figure out how he could turn his little rag tags bandits into something worthy of the name.