Death After Death

As the two of them approached the gate, Simon’s stomach grumbled in protest at how little he’d eaten. He didn’t even try to ignore it. He just hoped that the Willens were still running their inn in Crowvar.

They’d been wonderful hosts before he and Freya had moved into their cottage that the Raithewait family had finally given them, and with every other good thing from the life he’d lived here gone, he was certain that their braised boar would taste like home even if nothing else did.

He shouldn’t have gotten his hopes up, though, because as soon as he entered the city, he was disappointed on a variety of levels. Not only was Crowvar in rougher shape than he remembered, but it was overrun with refugees from the countryside. Not only had his preferred place to stay been burned down years ago during an orc attack, apparently, but even if it had still been there, food would have been hard to come by.

Simon asked around about the rumors and looked at what the small market had on offer, but eventually, he decided there was only one place in this cursed town where he was likely to get a good meal, and that was at the Baron’s table. So he went right up to the guard post at the inner keep and said, “I’m here to see Lord Raithewait. I want to fix his little centaur problem.”

That at least was enough to get the guard’s attention, and after a few discussions, he and Murphy were granted entrance and sent to a small room to await an audience with the Lord. Simon found it more than a little ironic that the man who had been trying to rip his throat out only a couple of days ago was now following him everywhere he went like a meek little puppy.

From werewolf to puppy; it was enough to make him laugh out loud, but when his puppy looked at him strangely, he didn’t repeat the joke. Instead, he was grateful that he had something to distract him from thinking about Varten and how he wasn’t sure he was going to be able to keep from gutting the man like a pig once he saw him.

Even after all this time, Simon wanted nothing more than the man’s death, but for the moment at least, he couldn’t have it. The fact that he had to help these people was the worst irony imaginable. Just thinking the man’s name was enough to raise Simon’s blood pressure.

When the two of them were finally fetched to the audience hall, Simon made introductions for both of them, trying hard to keep the hate from his eyes as he raised his head and was introduced to the man who had killed his wife. The fact that Varten Raithewait had been disfigured by the orcish attack and still bore the burns of the day in a twist of cosmic irony did nothing to help improve Simon’s mood.

On the table between them, Simon could see many fine foods, including the roast boar that he’d been hungering for earlier. He could also see a familiar map with a number of wooden pieces on it arrayed across the region. It was the same one that Varten’s father had used in so many briefings.

The picture it painted was quite bad. Honestly, it was worse than Simon would have thought. Two of Lord Raithewait’s five frontier forts had already fallen, and the centaurs seemed to number in the thousands, which was more than twice as many as Simon would have expected.

Varten must have been neglecting these dangers for many years, Simon thought to himself. However, before he could dig deeper into the tactical situation, the misshapen Lord interrupted him.

“What does a boy like you even know of centaurs?” the Baron asked disdainfully. The man was probably ten years older than him instead of ten years younger than him now, so the remark wasn’t entirely unmerited, but it did nothing to improve his mood.

“I’ve killed more than my share. I’ve fought in border skirmishes on the northern villages more than once and set ambushes using shepherds as their bait. I’ve—” Simon said, trying to be reasonable.

“Enough,” the Baron thundered, cutting him off. “Skirmishes have nothing to do with this. They’ve been getting worse for years, but their Kahn is unbeatable. I thought my men had found a miracle worker, but it’s just another upjumped soldier with delusions of grandeur.”

Simon laughed at that. He couldn’t help it.

He knew he was supposed to be taking this seriously and trying to get into this man’s good graces. He knew that he needed to solve this level by defeating this enemy and saving lives, but being talked down to by this creep was a bridge too far for him. Even the idea of free food that was waiting for him if he could just be a good boy wasn’t enough to play nice with this man.

“Big words from a man that couldn’t hold off the orcs that burned half his city to the ground,” Simon smirked. The guards stationed on the sides of the room bristled as he said that. Even Murphy backed away a step as the Baron’s eyes widened in outrage.

“H-how dare you!” the man sputtered. “I’ll have you know that—”

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Simon didn’t bother to listen to him. Instead, he spun on his heel and started walking toward the room’s exit. The guards standing there crossed spears to bar his path. In fact, a quick look around showed that all the guards in the room were advancing cautiously toward him at a few gestures from the Baron, and once their cordon tightened, even the graying old Lord got up from his sumptuous table and approached him cautiously to gloat.

“You think you can show disrespect to me, in my home and in front of my men?” the Baron taunted. “With nothing but a word, they could chop you to pieces and leave you as a warning to everyone else to—”

“To never try to help people like you?” Simon joked. “I think your people understand that quite clearly already. They don’t need any more examples there.”

Lord Raithewait drew his sword then, but before he could order his men to strike Simon down, he pushed Murphy to the ground and then opened his mouth to say a single word.

“Oonbetit,” he barked. Force. It manifested as a single transparent ripple that flickered out around him for a moment, and then it was gone, and for a second or two, no one was aware of exactly what had happened.

They were already dead; they just hadn’t figured it out yet. Even before the first head started to slide from its neck, everyone surrounding him had died, and aside from the bodies that were collapsing around him like dominos, the only evidence of what had happened was a pair of severed spear hafts and a gouge in the door.

“What in the… how in the… You’re a demon!” Murphy whispered as he scrambled away from Simon.

“Murderer, definitely,” Simon admitted, “but this is the demon right here.”

As he spoke, he indicated Varten’s body with the toe of his boot, and when he looked up and saw that Murphy was still looking at him like he was crazy, he followed that up with, “Last time I killed him, it was vengeance for what he did to my wife, but this time? This was definitely in self-defense, at least, though I don’t think that the people of this Crowvar would see that. Maybe the last one would have.”

“This time? Last time? You can’t kill people twice, Simon. Have you gone insane?” the other man cried. “They’re going to kill us!”

Maybe you can’t kill people twice, Simon thought to himself, but with a little planning and effort, I suppose I could kill them as many times as I want.

He didn’t say that, though. He knew he would sound crazy. Instead, he followed up with, “Well, yeah, they’re going to try. You should probably get out of here and away from me. You’re kind of an inhuman monster, too, but you don’t deserve that.”

“I told you I’m not…” Murphy started to defend himself, but when he looked at the bodies lying in their pools of blood on the floor, he said, “I don’t do that to people, do I?”

“I don’t know what you’ve done,” Simon answered as he walked back over to the table and started cutting himself off a fat slice of pork. “All I can say is you tried to rip my head off the other night, and you’ll probably do the same to anyone else that crosses your path in a week or so, given the current lunar cycle.”

He wasn’t going to stick around to eat it because as soon as a servant walked in and sounded the alarm, it would spoil the meal. That was fine, though, because if he added a few pieces of bread and a little sauce to the mix, he’d have a perfectly delightful sandwich to reward himself with if he made it out alive.

Murphy got up and walked hesitantly toward the door after a moment, contemplating his misdeeds, but Simon called out, “Walk, don’t run! If you run, they’ll only chase you,” to the man just before he walked out.

As he watched his werewolf leave, he debated the morality of it. Should Simon have struck him down from the deaths he might cause, even if he was perfectly harmless right now? Probably, but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. Regardless, it probably meant he had to stick around until the full moon himself now, just to see what would happen.

He wrapped his meal in a napkin. Then proceeded to ignore the advice he’d just finished giving Murphy, and he bolted from the room, causing as much of a commotion as he could to attract attention.

He didn’t worry about it too much. The guards that remained in Varten’s service were a lot weaker than they’d been under his father’s reign, and Simon led them up the stairs to the third floor before leaping from a window and losing a word of lesser force to land gently. After that, it was just a matter of hiding away in an alley until he caught his breath.

Then, while the bells rang, and people ran to and fro looking for their Lord’s murderer, he sat on a bench near where he imagined Freya’s grave would have been in the graveyard and enjoyed his sandwich.

“That’s two,” he told her with a smile, even if she wasn’t really there. “Two hundred deaths would still be too good for him, though, baby. I can promise you that. It’s going to make it really difficult to solve this level, but I’ll figure it out somehow.”

Simon slept that night in the graveyard. Because of the danger and the not infrequent centaur raids, people shunned the portion of the city that had risen up outside the walls, but Simon wasn’t scared. He was itching for a fight, and he was honestly disappointed that none of the guards found and confronted him.

“On the bright side, when they finally get around to burying the bastard, it’s going to make it a hell of a lot easier to piss on his grave,” Simon said to himself with a smile.

He figured that he was stuck hanging out here to see if the werewolf’s lycanthropy followed him through the portal, or at least until Simon found the next one, but that was fine. He only had a couple more levels to go between him and his answers. He could afford to take his time with it.