Death After Death

As strange as it was to be judge, jury, and executioner wherever he went, the way he was treated by inns and lords was nearly as strange. Sir Derinholt had certainly leaned on that hospitality wherever he went, so Simon was more than familiar with it. Nonetheless, he soon found himself annoyed with obsequious men seeking to barter worldly comforts for favor as if he could be bribed by such things. He would rather sleep in a ditch than turn a blind eye to any serious crimes.

Simon adjusted to the fear and obsequiousness that those around him alternated between as he made his way slowly south. In truth, he hadn’t felt this isolated since his first days in Ionar when they saw him as nothing but a mercenary and an outsider.

Simon didn’t struggle with loneliness, though, only with where he should draw the line. None of the other Unspoken he’d traveled with felt the need to intervene with villains at every interaction. Sir Derinholt certainly hadn’t; the man had only done so once in the months that Simon had traveled with him, and now three weeks into his journey, Simon had killed more men than monsters.

He didn’t feel especially good about that, even if they’d all been bad men. So, when he finally got the chance to hunt down some gnolls that had taken up residence in an abandoned copper mine, he jumped at it, leaving his horse in the care of an innkeeper before continuing on the hunt alone. While Simon thought it a little strange that no one had volunteered to join him, he could see by their swirling shades of suspicion that it was because several men of the village hoped he’d bit off more than he could chew before coming back.

Simon was able to disappoint them, but it took the better part of a week. Given the numbers involved, he had to thin the pack with a series of ambushes. Fortunately, as smart as the dog men were, they were too stupid to resist the smell of roasting meat, and each trap he baited in that way bagged a few more until he was able to assault the lair proper and purge the pups.

Simon spent some time inspecting those tunnels, well past the point where the dogmen had taken up residence. He’d hoped for a mystery to solve, but he found only half-drowned passages in the depths and tapped out veins, which was the natural end to most mines.

In the end, that adventure was only a side quest, but it helped the village see him as more than a hanging judge for at least a night or two, and he quickly moved on before that goodwill expired. The only reward he accepted for his troubles was a small book to use as a journal. The first thirty pages were filled with notes about the buying and selling of goods, but that left plenty of space for him to note what he’d done and when.

Normally, he would have used a mirror, but this was something he intended to give to whichever Master of the order quizzed him about his adventure upon his return. It would be easy to forget things in the course of a year, and he wanted to get the body count right. One thing he didn’t worry about yet, though, was looking for a boy who might make for a good squire. While he enjoyed his time spent teaching his own son, and even Niko, the idea that whoever he took on might be killed if he was found unworthy gnawed at Simon’s soul like a rat. The anxiousness was bad enough that even if he found the perfect boy, he’d probably still hesitate.

Fortunately, that wasn’t a problem he had to worry about right now. He just had to keep moving and keep looking for monsters, human-shaped or otherwise. This far south, there weren’t many goblins to speak of, and as he left the mountains and the forests behind him for the endless plains, settlements became fewer and farther between.

It was in Anywynn’s Hall, named for a building that no longer existed, where he was asked to adjudicate a murder that turned out to be the best news of the trip so far. His arrival was pure happenstance, and the man that they’d obviously planned on killing already wore a noose.

Still, when they asked Simon for input, he took one look at the man and said, “This man hasn’t killed anyone, in self-defense or otherwise. Cut him down.”

“How can you be sure?” the headman asked, obviously stunned by the news.

Would you like me to share with everyone how you spend your time with your neighbor’s wife to prove the point? Simon asked himself silently before deciding against the move. Instead, he said, “Bring me your witnesses, and we will see what falls out.”

Simon had only intended to stay the night before cutting east to see what the centaur clans were up to this time of year, but he had no problem staying longer. Saving a life instead of taking one would be a nice change of pace.

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The answers came slower than he expected, but mostly because it turned out none of the witnesses was lying. At least, not on purpose. All of them saw what they saw, but it was obvious that none of them saw the truth. The matter was further complicated by the fact that the victim’s body had never been found.

“He was the last one to come back to the village that night,” one young man said, “And my sister was never seen again!”

“He had blood on his hands!” another man said. “How could it be anyone else?”

Amidst these shouted accusations and calls to hang the hunter anyway, Simon doubted himself, but only briefly. As the story came together, he decided there had to be more at play. After all, no one had seen Belger anywhere near the woman, and he was being truthful that his bloody hands were from the traps he’d checked. He had the pelts to prove that much. Still, there was the matter of a missing girl who’d gone out looking for a lamb but failed to return by dusk, or any day since.

Simon endured the people’s vitriol as he took the case apart before most of the village without result. Finally, he said to her brother, “Show me where it is you think she would have gone,” before admonishing the crowd, “And do not think to carry the sentence out before my return, or I will see those who did it hanged next.”

That answer satisfied no one, but he didn’t care. It had only been a couple of days since the girl’s disappearance, so the trail hadn’t gone completely cold. While there was a chance that he’d find tracks, he was more interested in trying to use her brother to tease fate into showing itself.

What connection could be more powerful than family, he thought as he tried to find the line that would connect him to her corpse, wherever it had ended up.

In the end, the young boy’s aura reached out to a pond not far outside the village. It was muddy enough that it might have hidden anything, but Simon was sure that was where her bones were, and it didn’t take much effort to find the culprit.

“I see,” Simon said, looking at the creature lurking beneath the water. “So that is what happened.”

“What is it?” the young boy asked. “What do you see? Is she in there?”

Simon ignored the question. “First, we will need a goat or a sheep. A sickly one will do. We’ll also need some oil to douse it in.”

The boy treated Simon as if he were confused, but he wasn’t. He was just determined not to use magic, and making fire was much harder when you had to do it the old-fashioned way.

When he returned to Anywynn’s Hall, Simon was given everything he’d asked for, though they treated him just as skeptically. When he returned to the pond an hour later with a well-oiled farm animal, a torch, and an audience, he let the doomed animal go to the water’s edge and slake its thirst while he watched what lurked beneath.

Simon waited there, as the ridicule around him rose, waiting for his pretty to take the bait. Then, when it surged forward, he pulled the aging goat back, forcing the slime to breach the surface to attach to its prey. Everyone except for Simon was surprised by that, but he merely secured the rope to his horse and used its strength to pull the amorphous, struggling predator further and further from the water while the goat screamed its last.

It was a vicious, ugly sight, but it had happened to Simon so long ago that he could scarcely remember what it had been like to suffocate while his skin melted off. Still, he felt bad for the goat, but it was better a dying old farm animal than the string of herders and hunters who would have inevitably fallen prey to it next.

When the two were hopelessly entangled, Simon set it alight with a touch from his torch, and the result was immediate. The slime was incapable of screaming in pain, for it had no mouth, but its skin crisped quicker than anyone might have expected, transforming from a translucent horror into an ashen one as the oil it had bathed in and consumed was, in turn, consumed by fire.

It was an ugly scene, but no uglier than the fact that these people had been about to murder an innocent man. As he stood there, Simon glanced from the smouldering slime to the hunter and back. The man’s aura was a muddy brown, and his loss would have been no great loss to the world, but even so, Simon was glad to see even a minor injustice undone.

It came with few apologies from anyone involved, even after Simon was forced to take off his armor and strip to the waist to retrieve the girl's bones from the bottom of the pond. He tried to get the girl’s brother to do it, but he was terrified to go into muddy water that had an invisible predator in it a moment ago, and Simon didn’t really blame him for that. No one else could see what he saw.

That night, he stayed at the headman’s house, since the village was too small for an inn, where he butchered a fat pig to celebrate Simon’s deed. It was a quiet, mournful celebration where they talked about anything but the events of the day, which suited Simon fine. He entertained his hosts with tales of other, more common monsters, and asked about the centaur clans, but they hadn’t been a problem this far west in some time.

“Some orcs were sighted last year, only a couple of days to the east,” the headman admitted. “Centaurs, though? I can’t imagine they’ll ever be a problem again in my lifetime.”

Simon looked at him and agreed. It wasn’t just to keep him from worrying, either. Though he knew there were some flare-ups of the four-legged menace in the coming decades, the real problems wouldn’t occur for forty and fifty years, and the headman would be dead and buried by then, so there was no use troubling him.

Even if the horselords weren’t a problem, though, he was sure something out there was. So, he’d find it and handle it so people like this could live their quiet little lives in peace.