Chapter 130: Before It’s a Problem
As interesting as it was to see himself in statue form and read the only slightly tarnished plaque about how he defeated Blackheart’s curse, Simon didn’t linger in the city and was quickly on his way. It wasn’t that he was afraid that people might catch him or something. His anonymity felt reasonably secure as long as he wasn’t standing right next to that statue.
Even if that wasn’t the case, though, it had only been a few years. He could always say he’d decided to come back and visit or something. The worst he’d probably face was a series of feasts in his honor. Maybe he’d have to fend off a marriage proposal or two.
He wasn’t really interested in any of that, though. Instead, he briefly toured the hospital and orphanage that had been built with the reward money he’d refused. They weren’t exactly the nicest-looking places, but that was to be expected. They were functional, at least, and they seemed to be doing some good. Really, in this dark world, that was all he could ask for.
He thought about joining up with a caravan, but he was enjoying the road too much to bother with company. So, instead, he restocked his meager supplies with things that did well on the road, like potatoes, coarse bread, and salt pork. The only luxury he spared some of his silver on was a thin folio full of blank paper. He had paper for his maps, of course, but as he’d encountered different vistas on the road north, he’d felt the urge to sketch some of them, and he didn’t want to mar his otherwise meticulous cartography with his childish drawings.
The road north was in better condition than the one he’d used when he’d come in from the east, but Simon didn’t use that to travel any faster. It would have screwed up the scale of his map. He had no idea how professional cartographers did this sort of thing in the days before GPS, but his way was simple. Every day, he tried to go about ten miles at a nice leisurely pace, and every day, he added another millimeter of line to the road on his map. It was tiny, but he had no idea how far apart any of these places were, so he was leaving himself extra room as he documented each village and lake he came across.
By land, no one seemed to know how far apart anything was. Traders that he talked to spoke in terms of weeks rather than miles, and though people expressed a bit more confidence about the sea routes, from what he’d seen, most of those maps varied wildly, too.
He wasn’t sure. Hell, Simon wasn’t even sure he was going to share these with anyone when he was done, but he needed it for his own sanity. He needed as much of the world that he knew to fit together as he could. It would give him the information he needed to make better choices. He couldn’t keep treating every level like it existed in a vacuum.
This point was driven home as he moved north and found the hills he’d been navigating slowly but surely turned into a desert. The Wantari, it was called, according to the traders he dined with one night. He wasn’t exactly equipped for a desert, and he didn’t have the word for water to fall back on, so he paid careful attention to them when they talked about distances and oases.
It turned out he didn’t have too much to worry about. Four days into the desert, he found a suspiciously familiar oasis that was thankfully unpoisoned. There were some horsemen there that seemed more like nomadic tribesmen than raiders, but he left them alone, and they, thankfully, returned the favor.