Death After Death

Chapter 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.

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. Even though Simon was fairly certain he wouldn’t see those terrible plants again, it was still a relief to see those desolate cliffs when they arrived.

Truthfully, he didn’t know how it all worked. Some part of him felt like the plats would have been gone anyway, even if he hadn’t so ruthlessly chopped them up. After all, the levels he didn’t clear reset to some sort of default state. That didn’t quite make sense to him either, though. If he took the seed from one level, it had to end up in another, didn’t it?

So where is it now? He wondered to himself. He had no answers, though.

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.