Death After Death 183-185

Ch. 183 - Something To Do

This time it wasn’t a question of where he wanted to spend his time, it was a matter of how he wanted to spend this life, and Simon spent several days considering that question. At this point his lives were stretching for decades rather than ending in weeks, so in a way, he was picking what kind of play-through he wanted to have. Maybe picking my major would be a better choice, he added as he reflected on his previous life. 

It was that thought that made him decide he definitely wasn’t going to do what he’d planned. Once he finished recording every fact worth remembering into his ever-expanding personal library, he’d thought about going to Liepzen and living a similar life for as long as he had the last time in a different library. It was sensible. The facts were all fresh in his head, after all. Surely, he’d be able to learn the most by comparing what he’d read in Darndelle and the Broken Tower. 

But it sounded incredibly dull. He’d spent years reading and tinkering, and right now, he wanted to do what? Besides seeing Elthena, he wasn’t sure, but seeing his sword leaning against the wall, called to him more than a little, and he wondered what enchantment he might put on it when the time was right. 

Strangely, though, he didn’t feel like enchanting anything. He wanted to in theory, but he knew exactly how much work that was. It would be weeks and months to set everything up, depending on what he wanted to do, and right now, that all just looked like more waiting to him. Truthfully he was chaffing at spending so much time just talking to the damn mirror for day after tedious day, but he knew if he stopped, he’d never pick that back up again, and he’d forget an awful lot. 

“You know, you do a terrible job and holding up your side of the conversation,” he told the mirror at one of the points he felt like giving up on this part of the project. 

‘I do not understand the point you are making,’ the thing said after only a slight delay. 

“Exactly,” he laughed. “That’s the problem.”

Simon managed to put up with the boredom for almost two weeks before he gave up. In that time his only real entertainment was hunting, fishing, and thwarting the increasingly aggressive goblin raids. 

Simon had never tried to stay on this level for so long. Indeed, he remembered a time when he regarded staying here for five days as impossible. This time, though, he looked forward to the sunset raids that only intensified day after day. 

The first time they tried to burn him out was on day four. Simon didn’t even have to resort to magic for the half a dozen little bastards. He just took out the shaman with a well-aimed shot, then plinked off a few more of the buggers before they scattered. He’d been forced to use his crossbow ammo for that fight because he was saving his good arrows for hunting. Still, it worked well enough. 

After the shaman was dead, he hoped to see more new monsters he hadn’t seen before, but instead, it was just more angry swarms of goblins. Without the spells splashing against the side of his cabin, though, he finally got a workout with his sword. 

Even five- or six-on-one, the goblins were only challenging in that he wasn’t half the swordsman he’d been a couple lives ago. Simon was happy to take that frustration out on them, though. “Note to self,” he told himself, gasping for breath after he finished night eight’s fight, “Don’t stop sword fighting for like thirty years, between two lives.”

Shockingly, the last really good fight he’d had was against the monster in the volcano, and that was a long time ago. Still, slowly, but surely some of it came back to him, and by the time he decided he was ready to go, he felt like bandits wouldn’t be an imminent danger for him. 

Of course, the skeletons almost proved him wrong. Simon hadn’t fought them in decades, either, and it was the first time he struggled against them in a long time. They didn’t wound him, of course, at least, not badly, but it took a little bit to clear the room enough that he could take down the death knight in a good clean fight.

Afterward, he paused and took the Blackheart out of the knight’s chest to examine it more closely. That, at least, was interesting, and he paused only long enough to gather some silver and use a lesser word of earth to make a mirror so he could compare his current analysis to his previous notes. He decided he wasn’t far off. The thing used runes of Uuvellum to create anti-life and area effects, forcing the dead to come to life. Whether the original sorcerer had done so to keep himself alive and if it had worked. 

“From my brief stint as a zombie, I’m leaning toward no on that one,” he decided before he put it carefully back. Then, he gathered as much gold and silver as he could before he continued on his way. 

This time, he didn’t dig down into the subchamber. Instead, he just took the exit to the Wyvern level. 

“A handful of silver is enough to get to where I’m going.” He decided. “I only have half a decade to waste before I go back to Ionar.” 

His logic on that was pretty straightforward. The wyvern level was the level before the volcano level. That meant that somewhere between tomorrow and a couple of years from now, he was going to fight that thing, and then about four years later, his lover was going to refuse to marry him and send him away. 

Which meant that in the meantime, he’d fight and maybe do a little exploring. Simon’s map had largely been filled in through the Kingdom of Brin and up to the Northlands. Likewise, he’d traveled past Ionia all the way to Abresse and the seas beyond that. 

So his blank spots were mostly Ionia in the west and the mountainous Kingdom of Chiara in the mountains to the east of all of this. Chiara was almost a complete mystery, but in Ionia, at least, he knew where the cities along the coast and on the islands were.

The Kingdom was a large peninsula surrounded by a scattering of islands off the coast to the west and south. Knowing the names on the map and what those places were actually like, though, well, there was a world of difference between those two. 

And this time, once the volcano exploded, he was going to start purging other parts of this supposed curse. At least, he would once he learned more about it. He was resolved. In this life, he was going to solve Ionia. Well, probably not solve, he corrected himself. I doubt I can go fix everything, then come back and kill the wyvern a decade from now, and Helades will let that count. 

Understand was a more doable goal. By the time this was done, he was going to figure out everything he needed to know to fix it. “That should be easy enough,” he said to himself as he made his way down the mountain.

He spotted the wyvern half a dozen times over the next few days, and each time, he crouched behind a boulder or a tree and waited for it to turn toward him. Fortunately, it never did. However, on the second day, someone else’s fortune obviously wore out, and Simon spotted it carrying the corpse of someone back to its nest. 

“That’s probably the thing I’m supposed to prevent,” he decided. Simon didn’t take the failure to heart, but he did decide to go and investigate where it was the wyvern had taken off from, even if it meant a little extra walking. 

He spent the trip wondering just how many levels had minor, almost petty events. “Kill this owlbear, and those children live. Stop this plague in that village, but let everyone die first,” he said to himself, looking for the logic. “Oh, and don’t forget to bring this village food so everyone doesn’t starve to death.”

He’d hoped that his intensive study of history for a few years would have given him a better perspective on this issue, but he still found it more than a little confusing. All he could do was hope that if he found this guy’s wagon or whatever, this level would make a little more sense.

Simon was huffing and puffing that evening when he found the site of the battle. There was no wagon, but even so, it was pretty unmistakable. There were other corpses, along with the remains of two horses. The first lay atop the dead man, and the second split into two gory halves. One half of it lay in the middle of the road where a vulture had claimed ownership, and the other half of it was up a tree where the ravens were having a party. 

Simon left them alone and decided that he wasn’t camping anywhere near there. Before he left, though, he took the coin purse off the corpses, and then he dug through both sets of saddlebags. Mostly, he found camping supplies for people traveling light. He helped himself to some of those since it would reduce his need for hunting. 

More interestingly, though, was a sealed letter that he found on the half a horse. There was no name on it. All there was was the impression of a signet ring on the wax seal. Simon thought it looked like Brin Hearldy, but he wasn’t a hundred percent sure. 

Inside, there were some names, but not enough that he’d ever find who this had been meant for. ‘Dearest Antonia, we have been betrayed. If this letter reaches you before the worst should befall you, I urge you to kill your brother and flee south. I will meet you in Abresse. Look for my ship. L.’

“So, this woman never gets this letter, and the worst befalls her, and what? She gets killed? He gets heartbroken and commits suicide?” he said aloud as he talked himself through the sequence of events. “I can’t even find who sent it because he didn’t even sign his damn name!”

Simon crumpled up the letter and threw it away. Then, he started walking to the northwest. He couldn’t sleep until he put some distance between himself and the wyvern nest, but even without the frustrating letter, going this way was clearly the right choice. He’d never gone this way around these mountains before, and he wanted to approach Ionia from a new direction. 

That was one part of the world where he knew what went where, thanks to the map in the Queen’s library. This time, instead of approaching the northern reaches of Ionia through the mountains and starting in the south, he was going to travel around the mountains to the north and then travel south along the shore. It would be a lot of walking, but he was sure he could find plenty of paying mercenary work. The people of Ionia weren’t very trusting, but they weren’t especially peaceful, either, and during his time in the capital, he’d never seen a sell sword go hungry.  

Ch. 184 - Out of the Way

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.

“Even if he had, it ain’t like he’s capable of giving the things away,” another man laughed. 

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. 

“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. 

“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. 

Ch. 185 - Teach a Man to Fish

Over the next few days, Simon turned his dejected farmers into something closer to fighting men. Their abilities were entirely inferior to the fighting force he’d built to fight the centaurs, but so too was his opponent, which was good because Simon needed the practice.

“We don’t want to fight; we just want our land back” was a popular refrain, but Simon ignored it after the first ten times. He’d run out of patience for explaining why no one was going to do the right thing just because it was the right thing to do.

“If you want to leave, that’s your right,” he would answer dismissively if he even answered at all. 

No one left, though he attributed that more to fear and cowardice than men who wanted to fight for what was theirs, at least at first. Most of them knew how to use bows, though, and a couple of the farmers were even halfway decent at fletching new arrows, which was the skill that really came in handy because, after a few encounters on open ground, he steadily went the way of Robinhood. 

He didn’t fight with a bow, of course. He stuck to his sword practice whenever he could, but once the hornets' nest was riled up, small patrols were darting here and there in an effort to protect the Lord of the land from his own mistakes. 

Simon used each of these as an opportunity for his men to practice their ambush techniques. If a dozen men could all loose at once, there was no reason they couldn’t take out half that number, whether they were on horse or foot. Still, try as they might, they disappointed him on that front.

“It’s okay,” Simon assured them after survivors would ride free and escape or once he’d finished cutting down the last of the wounded. “Rebellion 101 is just taking a little longer than we thought it would.”

In the end, though, Simon decided that his chosen side quest was probably hopeless. That didn’t mean he wasn’t enjoying it, of course. Once they’d started fighting back, they were widely regarded as heroes by the other local villagers. Simon’s little band of merry men even started to get a few new recruits in time. 

They didn’t know just how poorly their local heroes were doing in most engagements, of course, but they didn’t have to. Simon certainly didn’t tell anyone. He just drank his beer and did his part to spread the legend of Ennis the Bold, which is what they’d taken to calling the imagined leader of the little rebellion. Simon absolutely refused to let the man give credit to anyone else. 

“You’re the symbol,” he’d insisted, “These people will need a leader, especially once the Viscount is gone.”

“You’ve seen us in the thick of it,” the old farmer said with a laugh. “The wicked little man is going nowhere.”

“Oh, he’s going, and soon,” Simon promised. “I have places to be, but I’ll stay here until you’re out from under the thumb of tyranny. Whatever happens then is on you.”

With every disappointing engagement, they whittled down the Lord’s men, and with every battle, Simon shook a little more of the rust off. After a month of fighting skirmishes and tending to the wounded, he actually felt like he was getting to where he needed to be, or at least he was back on the road there. 

Just because all of his men lived didn’t mean that all of his enemies died. Even after they stopped escaping, there were survivors that they didn’t just murder outright. Instead, Simon interrogated them and let those who cooperated best go with the terrible messages for their liege. 

Those interrogations told him that this couldn’t last too much longer anyway. The Viscount had started with less than fifty good men, and they’d already cut down half of them. The man’s patrols had even started to thin out as he cowered in his hall and waited for the farmer’s rebellion to come for him. 

“It’s not even a proper fortress,” Simon said with a sigh as he looked at it for the first time. “It’s just a big house.”

“The Viscount said that Bracken Hall is impenetrable,” one man volunteered.

“I’ve seen few buildings more penitrable in my time,” Simon said with a laugh.

“Well, even if someone were to take it, he could fall back to that tower there and wait it out,” another man said, pointing. “The walls are stone and stout. A few archers could hold off an army until it lost interest.”

“That’s closer to true,” Simon agreed as he studied the thing that he’d first thought was a watchtower. He could probably implode it with a single word of earth or ruin, but that was hardly a conventional siege tactic.

The longer he studied it, the more he decided that he had a better way. They didn’t move on the manor the following morning, though. Instead, they played with the man for a few more nights to try to deplete his guards that much further. Then, once they had an appropriate prisoner, Simon finally revealed the endgame to everyone else.  

. . .

On the night that Simon rode to Bracken hall, he rode with one hooded man in tow, who he swore up and down was the leader of the fearsome resistance, Ennis himself. It wasn’t Ennis, of course; it was just a captured guard with a passing resemblance, but the men at the door didn’t need to know that. Simon had bound him well and swore, “I’ve come for my reward and will not be cheated out of it. I will only deliver this man to the Viscount himself!”

The guards at the door tried to dissuade him, and once, he almost had to draw his blade, but eventually, he was allowed to proceed and present his prisoner, though they forced him to disarm first. 

Simon took his time as they went inside. The man’s home might not have been a grand castle, but it was certainly well-appointed, and the smells of dinner drifted down to him, even from the entryway. He took his time appreciating the finely made furniture and the trophies and weapons of ages past. He saw nothing obviously magical, but now that he had a better eye for such things, he vowed to make a second pass through on his way out the door and see if there were any upgrades.

In the main hall, he found what he’d expected, a small family around a large table, completely outnumbered by their own guards. The size of the man at the head of the table made it clear to Simon that he wasn’t a fighter, but some part of him still hoped for a good duel. 

“Do these people ever realize that once they need so many guards, they’ve already lost?” Simon asked the guard who was escorting them in, but his only response was to look at Simon strangely. 

“State your name and your business, and present yourself to the Lord Bracken,” the guard demanded loudly, stopping just inside the door and far from the table. 

Simon responded by yanking on the leash and pulling his prisoner forward into the room where everyone could see him clearly. “Who I am is unimportant,” Simon said. “Just as this man is. Not in the sense that all of us are unimportant, of course, but just in the sense that he’s not the person leading your little tax rebellion. For better or worse, that man is the Viscount himself. You could kill my prisoner right now, and it would solve nothing.”

“Nothing? What nonsense is it that you’re saying?” the Viscount demanded as he stood, visibly annoyed. “Did you bring me the leader of this rabble or not? Either he dies, or you do, but both of you aren’t leaving this room alive.”

“Kill him you like,” Simon answered, as he stepped forward and stole a bite of bread off the nearest guest’s plate, “But hospitality laws being what they are, I don’t think you should casually threaten those that you’ve invited into your home and allowed to dine at your table. The Gods take a dim view of those sorts of people.”

The man looked even more incensed as he strode over to Simon and drew his sword. The other guards drew their weapons as well but backed off a bit to leave their weaselly-looking master room to work. 

The man thrust his sword right through the prisoner without even looking at his face. “This is what happens to those who oppose me,” he said with a sneer as he looked at Simon, but Simon didn’t even flinch. 

Instead, he removed the man’s hood and shrugged. “Killing your own guards probably isn’t the smartest move, either. You keep it up, and soon, no one will be loyal to you at all.”

The noble looked completely unconcerned, but Simon could see the recognition and the revulsion on the faces of all the other armed men as his false Ennis fell to the ground in a pool of his own blood. It was one thing to understand that you were poorly paid and disposable. It was another to see it. 

“Why would you bring one of my…” the noble asked in confusion before a spark of recognition crossed his face.“You’re one of them!”

“I am,” Simon agreed, elbowing the man in the face as the noble tried to pull his blade free from the dying man before taking it for himself. The blow was light, but it still sent the blustering bully sprawling. “And right now, your home is surrounded by dozens of rebels. There’s no escape for anyone here!”

It was a lie, of course, but it was a useful one, and the armed guards looked to each other uncertainly. A moment ago, they’d all been about to rush Simon. Now, they were less sure. When Lord Bracken bolted from Simon like a coward, that uncertainty only grew. 

“Oh, come on,” Simon sighed. “I come into your place of power looking for a good fight, and you do this? Even Varten would fight me, and he’s the worst person I’ve ever met!”

For a moment, Simon allowed himself to hope that the Viscount was running to get a new weapon. However, when he seemed content to cower behind the two closest guards, Simon just shook his head in disbelief. 

“Are you two going to defend him? Or do you just want to walk away?” Simon asked, trying to be sporting. 

The first man glanced back at the noble and said, ”He’s my Lord, and you’re just mercenary scum. Who do you think I’m siding with.” The second man wasn’t nearly so bold and just nodded in agreement with the first. 

Simon shrugged again, then took both of them out in seconds. He used a vicious, showy thrust to get them off balance, and then he used the half-hearted feint of the quiet man to shield himself from the more serious attack of the first man. These two weren’t used to fighting together, which was fortunate because they would never do it again. 

Simon’s second slash caught the bolder guard just above his breastplate at the base of his throat. Then, once he was bleeding instead of breathing, Simon batted the blade of the other man aside and ended him quickly with a thrust under the armpit. Before the second guard had even joined the first, the Viscount stopped cowering and started running once more. 

This time he’d learned that no one in this room was going to save him at least, and he was running for it, but that suited Simon fine. It was part of his plan. 

A couple of the guards looked like they might want to slow him down, but Simon said, “You can fight me and die just like your friends, or you can wait here and surrender once the Viscount is taken care of. Maybe take care of his family and make sure no accidents happen.”

He regarded them a moment longer, then set off at a jog after the waddling Viscount. He almost caught up with him just outside the back door when the man slipped and fell. Simon laughed at that and taunted. “Stop making this so easy! Just put up a fight. Something. Anything!”

Muddied and bloodied, the Viscount reached the door seconds before Simon and slammed it shut in his face. Simon didn’t gnash his teeth or threaten to break it down, though. He didn’t even use a word of force to shatter it. Instead, he smiled. 

He did that because Ennis and his own private army were already in that drum tower waiting for the man. Now, they could hash things out for themselves, or they could just kill the man and take their vengeance that way. Though Simon thought it likely that they would choose the former rather than the latter, he left that decision entirely to them. 

So, instead, he went back to the man’s main hall to have a little dinner and explain what was about to happen to Lord Bracken’s family. Once that was done, he’d pick out a better sword, take a quick swing by the kitchen for some decent food to take with him, and then he’d go to the stables to pick out a horse. He’d fought against injustice for weeks, but that was the only reward he needed. He had places to be, after all.