Death After Death

Chapter 405 - Somewhere Familiar

For the better part of a year, Simon was sent on nothing but wild goose chases. He eventually started asking for something more challenging, but was told, “The gods will challenge you when you are ready to face those challenges, and not before.”

One part of him started believing that he’d slain the last monsters left in Brin, making it safe for everyone. Another, more paranoid part began to worry that they were intentionally wasting his time and sending him places where he was likely to find nothing worth knowing.

This would have been Sir Derinholt’s perfect assignment, Simon thought wistfully as they traveled from noble manor to inn to pub and back again. He chafed at that, and almost relished the bands of bandits and other ne’er-do-wells they would occasionally stumble across.

It got so bad that even Varten complained about having nothing to kill. In all that time, they scoured all the unimportant places in southern Brin, only skipping Crowvar for obvious reasons.

This time, they were sent north to the Capital of Liepzen to investigate a wealthy merchant who had been just a bit too lucky lately. To Simon, the whole thing reeked of politics as soon as he was informed that he was to report to Lord Trantis, who was a count that served the King's brother, the duke.

Simon didn’t fight the task because there was no easy way to do that, but he was determined to go out of his way not to make waves. Whatever he did or didn’t do at the capital could easily ripple out to the rest of Brin and unlock any number of levels. He was more concerned about that than he was about political backbiting or a stray murder. Even a real warlock probably didn’t rate more than the tangle of causality that was his life now.

He wouldn’t let a truly black soul slip through his fingers, of course, but he’d regret it later. The last thing he wanted to do was redo one of the early levels again. He wanted to jump through the trap door, kill a village of lizardmen, and then see what Freya’s level really was supposed to be before she screwed it all up, and as soon as Varten got to an age where he became a knight in his own measure he’d do exactly that; Simon just needed to go another decade without fouling anything up.

When he told Varten, the boy claimed, “My father mentioned Count Trantis on our last trip north. The words were not kind.”

While Simon’s opinion generally aligned with his charge, he urged him to look on the bright side, and he tried to do the same. He hadn’t been to the capital in many lives because he didn’t want to screw anything up, so this would be an opportunity to learn more about the situation on the ground.

After all, according to his math, it had been a year or two since the much younger version of himself had done a life transfer to the King and forestalled a war, but according to his future experiences, that wouldn’t last forever. Getting a few more data points on how exactly that process played out would be good information to have.

If I’m going to risk resetting my progress, I might as well get something out of it, he told himself.

The first thing he got out of it was actually seeing the city again. He’d been here before, and it hadn’t changed at all, but seeing it was nostalgic, and as he looked at the main gate, he recalled the time he’d died right there trying to overthrow the duke. It made Simon smile, but when his squire asked him what was so funny, Simon just waved it away.

While not half so impressive as the Murani capital, the city was a respectable place with a stone skyline. It might even be considered grand. It was much nicer than the capital of Charia, Adonan, and while it wasn’t as pretty as Ionia, or even Abresse, it would stand up better in a fight than both of them put together. They were made for trade, and to some extent art, while Leipzen leaned more toward battle and functionality like the clanholds of its mountainous neighbor.

During Simon’s first visits here, he’d never considered what such details might say about a people, but now he couldn’t unsee them. Everything spoke to him now, from the heraldry of the guards and the men walking along the city wall, to the cobblestone streets and the wagons that traveled them.

The guards barely acknowledged his existence, extending him carte blanche rather than any obvious preference. That was just the opposite of the commoner’s reactions. Almost to a man, they shied away from Simon’s cloak, condemning him and his squire to isolation on an island of two, no matter how crowded the street or the marketplace.

Only a few men and women would violate that pattern during their stay. They would instead ask for Simon’s blessing, and the colors that swirled in their aura indicated that they were usually on death's door because of some illness.

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He probably could have saved some of them, even without magic. That was obviously what they wanted his blessing to do, but even though he was tempted to do just that, he didn't. For once he resisted the urge to put on his doctor’s hat. This time he wasn’t going to save anyone, not even if the King himself perished while Simon was in town.

The best way to blow up your house of cards is to start saving people or killing them, he reminded himself. Each of those lives will ripple out in a thousand ways you will never know.

Instead of ruining everything on the first day or even trying to finish as soon as possible, Simon started with subtlety. After they secured a room at an inn not far from the waterfront that went by the name of the Broken Oar, which he’d never before set eyes upon, he used conversations instead of blades or accusations to start getting his bearings.

He didn’t visit Count Trantis or the merchant who had drawn his ire. Instead, he visited other lesser nobles within the city and gauged the lay of the land from innocent-sounding questions over dinner, where Simon was always the guest of honor. While he asked those men about the principals who had brought him here in a round about way, he also asked them about an ever-growing list of names that he learned as he went to muddy the waters.

After a dozen such meals, he learned many things, but not all of them were relevant to his case. Still, they were details he scribbled away after he was alone in bed in case they should become relevant later.

He learned that after a brief and unexpected respite gifted to him by the gods a few years before, the King was ailing once more. Neither of those facts surprised Simon since he’d been the one to give him that respite, and knew what the cause was. Age came to everyone on a long enough timeline, even him, on at least one occasion.

This time, though, the shoe seemed to be on the other foot, and it was the King’s son who was actively drumming up allies to stand against the duke when his father finally keeled over. Some were worried the young man wouldn’t wait that long and might rush things to their proper conclusion himself, but after the way he’d been treated in the previous timelines, Simon couldn’t really blame him. He’d never know he’d been assassinated over and over, but still, he seemed to sense the precariousness of his position and was acting accordingly.

“Maybe he thinks that such forward thinking will forestall a civil war,” Simon suggested one night to the Viscount of Burgundon. The man seemed scandalized by the mere suggestion.

“Gods protect us, such a thing will never come to pass,” the noble said, reaching for his glass of red wine even as he swore the oath. “Such a war would be bloody beyond measure.”

It will be, Simon agreed, wondering if the man he was sitting across from would survive it.

While royal politics was always interesting to him, he also learned a hundred pieces of gossip he’d never need to know. In fact, it seemed a matter of course for the gentry to throw their neighbors to the wolves in the hopes that service would get them off the hook for whatever sins they imagined Simon had come to their door for.

He learned that Lord Harlan hadn’t been faithful to any of the three women who had held the distinction of being called Lady Harlan. He learned that Duke Brin’s youngest son might not be his, and that Lady Linderly was fond of drink and the handsome young servants who attended to her every need when her husband was away.

The scandalized noble who told him that even managed to whisper, “They even say she doesn’t care if it's a footman or a maid who serves her on those nights.”

More than any of that, though, Simon discovered that he loved putting the fear into these pompous, preening men who lorded over their fellows. It wasn't a sadistic thrill; it was more just than that. Despite all of their power and wealth, these men knew that his nebulous authority as a witch hunter could damn them with a single accusation, and there was almost nothing they could do about it.

He promised to investigate the matter, but truthfully, he cared very little who slept with whom, and the most he was ever likely to do was note it down. The only rumors he was really interested in were the paranormal kind, and those were few and far between. He learned about a few old buildings in hushed tones that were said to be haunted, and a section of the trade quarter near the river docks where children went missing, but even when he brought up the merchant he was investigating, Mr. Dekarlo, he was given no leads.

The most anyone would say about him was that he had “A devil’s luck for sure. He’s a decent trader, but never touch a pair of dice while he’s in the room. You’ll live to regret it.”

He did not bring his squire to most of these meetings, for reasons both social and practical, but he always talked with Varten about them at night when he returned to their inn before he went to bed. That wasn’t just to make him feel included, either. The boy was a noble himself, or at least he had been in another life.

He’d met some of these people, and heard his father speak about many more of them, and on several occasions he was able to confirm those rumors, though just as often he would say something like, “I’m told that story is older than I am. If it’s true, it hasn’t been true for a decade or more.”

Still, after half a month inside the walls of Leipzen, Simon had found no deep dark secrets. None of the men or women he’d met had overflowed with darkness. Most of them had been a light gray of one sort or another. While he was sure that most of them had servants with blood on their hands, they obviously left the dirty work to the help and didn’t feel bad enough about whatever happened to share those stains with them.

“Well,” Simon said finally one night after paying a visit to the Meleigh family. “I suppose I’m going to have to pay Mr. Dekarlo a visit and see if he really is dabbling in witchcraft.”