Death After Death

Chapter 134: A Wider View

It began with a massive ambush outside the tiny village of Brunn, where Simon used a hundred sheep to lure more than half that number of centaur warriors to their deaths under a fusillade of crossbow bolts and surreptitious magic spells. It was the first victory, but it would not be the last or the largest.

Every town he went through now, he compelled a few members of the village defense force to join his little band. He didn’t feel great about doing it, but his plans required numbers as much as they required picking just the right battlefield.

Sometimes, that meant box canyons or cliffs. Other times, it meant camouflage or even swamps, but with a little bait and the right edge, Simon was fairly confident they could win nearly every fight with a little planning. Eventually, the men who fought with him even believed him, and few of them died as a result of that trust.

Tchul. Krovel. Edenbrooke. Not every battle was bloodless, but everywhere they went, as Simon widened the scope to the north and east, he did his very best to take advantage of the terrain to make it more likely that their enemy would flee instead of fight to the last. Eventually, when they passed close through to Bellum’s Cross, Simon finally made a brief stop and retrieved his maps from where he’d left them with the survivors he’d started this chapter of his adventure with. He did this so he could add all the other places he was visiting to the paper he'd put so much hard work into, but mostly, the villagers took the opportunity to tell his companions about how he’d saved them single-handedly, further expanding his legend.

Less than two months after he started his second campaign as the Regent-General of the Raithewait Barony, he had a hundred men under him and was approaching a thousand centaur skulls. It was brutal, bloody work, and whenever possible, Simon did it all without magic. He could start to feel the pull of extra years on himself now, and he only spared weeks and months for the injured men who fought valiantly by his side.

But as time went on, especially during the winter months, new war bands and herds became harder and harder to find. Many of his men took that as a sign that they were winning, but Simon saw it differently. To him, it was evidence that they might never be able to win.

When all of this had started, Simon had been too simplistic about it. He knew that now. He thought he could hunt down the centaurs like mobs in a video game and grind on them until he reached a certain kill count, and then the future he sought to avoid would simply evaporate, like a quest that had been achieved.

They were intelligent, though, in their way. They found weakness and fled from strength. When the centaurs faced the inexplicable losses of Simon’s traps, they inevitably fled to another part of the prairie and found another opponent to face on more favorable ground. So, if he’d just been trying to keep them away from Crowvar, that would have been easy.

There was no guarantee that would prevent the rise of a warrior that would unite the tribes into a single terrible fist, though. That was what forced him out, ever further into the wastelands, away from the streams and the villages that made up the heart of the Barony. It was not a popular decision, but really, there was no one who could tell him no anymore, not after all the victories he’d given them. Still, he could see it in the eyes of his men. They wanted to go back to Crowvar, cash in their winnings, and move on with their lives.

Simon couldn’t do that, though, because now that he’d pushed the centaurs to the edge of the wastes he had a new plan. Well, it was an old plan that someone else had probably come up with a few levels down. He was just giving it new life: poison the wells and the oases of the border areas.

Poisoning the water supply hardly seemed like a valorous tactic. He would have preferred to meet the horse lords on the field of battle. However, now that they’d lost so many, the herds were skittish things, and no matter how tempting he made the ambush target, they would rarely take the bait. Instead, they fought with gnolls and orcs in the rocky foothills or the dunes of the desert.

“You sure we gotta keep going?” one of the younger men asked him the other day. Before Simon had drafted him to the cause, he’d been a green member of the city guard. Now, he was practically a blooded veteran who just wanted to go home and start a farm. “The Barony is as peaceful as I’ve ever seen it.”

“It is,” Simon agreed, “But I want it to stay that way for longer than a few months. All we’ve done is make it safe enough to get complacent again, but I want to end the threat for… well, for as long as we can.”

He’d almost said forever, but he held himself back. Eliminating all the monsters was probably impossible. Even if it was possible, though, it might not be desirable. The centaurs did good work keeping other invasive species away. If he was actually successful in eliminating the horse lords, then what followed might be worse. He didn’t want that. Not anymore, anyway. He just wanted better boundaries, and right now, the best way to do that was water or a lack of it.

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So, five months after Simon had started his apparently endless war against the centaurs, it ended with a whimper instead of a bang. There was no final battle. There was no single combat with a twelve-foot-tall stallion with eyes full of murder. Instead, they just filled all the watering holes that were nowhere near the trade roads but still within a few days’ ride of vulnerable villages with corpses of whatever they could kill, leaving behind a toxic curtain that he hoped would be enough to keep the monsters at bay, or at least redirect future attacks to the most defensible locations along the roads and rivers.

With that done, Simon returned to Crowvar for a hero’s welcome. He hadn’t expected it, of course. But as soon as the gates opened, there was a celebration already waiting for him. They’d seen his small army coming from quite a ways off, it seemed.

Still, he was determined not to let his guard down, even after both he and his horse were draped with flower garlands. The common man might welcome a warrior, but the powers that be still looked at him with suspicion from balconies and second-story windows.

Simon didn’t pay too much attention to any of that, though. Instead, he looked at the damaged walls that had never been fully repaired, and the burned-out buildings that had never been replaced from the orcish attacks years before.

His proactive defense against the centaurs and even his murder of Varten might keep things from getting worse, but really, when he got down to it, had he made things any better? It was hard to say that he had.

He was welcomed inside both the main gates and the fortified residence in the center, where a small feast awaited him. He brought several of his trusted lieutenants with him, more to honor them for all their hard work than because he feared a trap. There were undoubtedly traps, of course. He just wasn’t afraid of them.

“Did the King tell you that you can kill me yet?” Simon asked the nobles as he came in.

Most of them only scowled, but the tax collector said, “His Majesty encouraged us to find a solution to the matter ourselves and suggested that perhaps the Regent could marry Lord Raithewait’s widow and—”

“Like that would ever happen,” a woman spat, making Simon raise an eyebrow. He agreed with her, of course, but he had no idea that the woman who had been sitting among the rest of the nobles was the widow in question until just that moment.

“...and barring that,” the tax collector continued, “That we find amicable arrangements and solve our own problems, lest he appoint a new champion of the land and send them down to lay claim to ‘this troublesome province.’”

Simon smirked at the quote at the end. Instead, he sat down at a place at one of the lower tables that obviously hadn’t been the one reserved for him, and he raised his glass to call for wine. “Well, let’s have a toast then,” Simon said, “To the defeat of the centaurs and never marrying the widows offallen foes.”

Quite a few people scowled at that, but he was surprised to see that Lady Raithewait at least raised her cup. She was clearly very in favor of at least that idea of his, though otherwise, she seemed unlikely to help put him out if he was on fire.

The dinner started not long after that, and though the seat of honor at the high table remained conspicuously empty, the servants worked it out. The tables were piled high with roast pork bread while beer and wine flowed like water. It was the best that any of them had eaten in months. At least until Jak started coughing up blood, and it became apparent that the man had been poisoned.

He started convulsing as Simon lowered him to the floor and whispered a word of lesser cure to see that he lived. He could heal him more later if he needed to. Once that was done, he stood and shouted, “Seal the doors! No one leaves until this is sorted out.”

Simon tasted the wine and then spat it out immediately. The poison was bitter and obvious, and whoever had done it had clearly waited until they were drunk before they’d tried to end Simon.

“I spend the best part of a year… Jak freezes his ass off most nights fighting to make the world a better place for the people of Crowvar, and this is the thanks he gets?” Simon demanded. “We come back only to be killed by those who think they are our betters?”

A few nobles tried to speak conciliatory words then, but Simon kept talking. He didn’t care much for consolation after attempted murder. He would not be mollified. Instead, he marked the faces of every snake in the grass, which let their glee show a little too clearly on their well-bred faces as he spoke. He would never know who had given them poison, but he already knew who wished it had succeeded, and that would be enough.

“There is no one better than Jak in this room,” Simon yelled over them. “There is no one who’s taken more arrows or shed more blood than the man who just took one more blow for me, and someone will pay for this outrage.”

The denials started then, but it was too late for that. Simon picked out the half a dozen men who seemed most gleeful about what had just happened and ordered the guard to “Seize them and lock them in the dungeon before I decide which of them need to be hanged for this outrage.” There was a flurry of shock and outrage then, but Simon didn’t care. Instead, he turned his gaze back to his sickened comrade and tried to decide what more needed to be done for the man.