Death After Death

Chapter 144: A Trail Gone Cold

Simon thought about leaving the plate mail behind under a pile of branches in the woods because of how heavy and bulky it was, but he decided against it and instead loaded it along with the rest of his meager supplies. He might not come back this way, depending on what he found. The last time, Freya had painted him as the villain, and there was no guarantee that this time would be any different, so there could be a lynch mob waiting for him in a few days, or maybe even something worse.

He would have honestly preferred to skip Schwarzenbruck on the way back. That, however, would have been difficult. It might even be impossible. The entire reason it was an important city was because the large stone bridge that the town was named for was one of the few good crossing points for quite a ways. He would be crossing there or not at all. Those were all later problems, though, and right now, he needed to focus on the now since the forest was still crawling with the dead in places.

Simon wasn’t worried. Fresh zombies could be frighteningly vicious. Older ones that started to dry out and decay, though, you didn’t even have to outrun those. You could just out-walk them. The only reason that he bothered to put them down when he found them was because he knew what a mercy it was.

Freya had no idea how much she was tormenting the man she loved by tying him down to the cart for half a day instead of putting him immediately out of his misery, but Simon remembered it all too well. He'd never forget it. She could never comprehend that hunger and he hoped that she would never have to, despite the fact that with this many lives, countless versions of her had ended up as zombies by now.

That thought saddened him, but at least this one was saved, probably. It was possible that in a day or two, she could still turn. He knew that; he just tried not to think about it. Her remaining friends seemed to have the right amount of wariness. They’d put her down if it came to it, and if they didn’t - well, he could save Schwarzenbruck again. It wouldn’t be the first time.

The trip to the barrows was easy enough now that he knew about where it was. The only problem was finding relatively safe places to sleep at night without someone to stand watch. There were just enough dead wandering around that if he did nothing about it, he was likely to wake up teeth in his throat.

So, he slept in trees both nights and thankfully, as much as the sound his mule made attracted them, the zombies made no attempt to attack the thing. The same couldn’t be said about the reverse, though. Both mornings, Simon woke up to find one or two zombies on the ground with their head or their skulls caved in by a good hard kick.

“Yeah, I’ve been there,” he nodded, remembering the cranky donkey that had taken him out like that.

He was very mindful of where he was standing in relation to pack animals and horses now. Getting killed that way once was a little amusing, but dying like that repeatedly would just be sloppy.

If I’m going to get killed again, it's going to be by something new, he promised himself. That meant no zombie bites, no donkey kicks, and most certainly, no getting crushed to death by the barrow again.

So, when he found it, he approached it very carefully. First, he checked around outside and on the grassy slope on top.

There was nothing there, but then, he didn’t expect there to be. So, he tethered Daisy to one of the closest trees and went inside for a closer look.

The place was very nearly undisturbed, with the exception of the rubble at the entrance and deeper in some zombies that had been killed and lay strewn around the floor. Other than making sure he didn’t see anything that looked like a magical trap, though, he ignored all of those. He was here for a handful of reasons, and all of them were in the central chamber.

There, in the central sarcophagus, was a single zombie struggling to rip free of the blade that was pinning him down like a bug. On the thing's head was the crown made of folded paper that he’d come for. Still, he knew better than to go take it. He’d already seen this roof collapse twice, and once was already one too many.

For now, he ignored both the paper and the zombie and studied the sword before moving to the candles. Someone had stabbed this guy hard enough that it had embedded in the stone. That told Simon that magic was involved, but that was nothing new since he already knew magic was involved with the cave-in.

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The sword was a plain, long sword that was a little on the short side. It was about the same size as the blades he preferred, but there were no signs that the magic was in the blade. It was just plain steel with a cheap hilt that had seen a fair bit of use.

That meant someone had cast a spell, using the words for force, earth, or something new he hadn’t yet discovered. If he moved the zombie out of the way, he would definitely get a better idea, but for now, that was chancy.

Instead, he moved to the candles, and a clumsy circle traced in the ground around them. It was only on a second look he saw that the circle extended all the way around the central sarcophagus. It was an ugly, rushed sort of job that Simon would not feel comfortable trying, but it seemed to be fairly straightforward based on the way he read the runes. There was nothing new there.

If its boundary was violated, it used the energy of the person that violated it to trigger an earth rune that channeled power to the near wall and brought the whole dome down. It was a controlled demolition of a sort. The only complicated part about disarming it was that it was only at the last minute, when he reached for the transfer rune to strike it out, that he realized that if he did it with his hand, it would likely trigger it as he did so.

Instead, Simon searched the dead warriors that had already been slaughtered in life and death, and then when he found a broken spear, he wiped the whole thing out from a distance in case he needed to run for it. The moment was anticlimactic, and when the runes were obliterated, nothing happened. Leaving him free to explore the rest of the place.

The first thing he did was put the poor bastard that the tomb belonged to out of his misery. All it took was a couple hard bashes against the stone to brain him, and he stopped moving once and for all. Simon picked up the paper and, noting that the message was identical, pocketed it.

Sorry, I needed to borrow this. Maybe we can meet again in your next life and discuss why. Even taking a moment to consider the words.

“Well, I’m here, buddy; where in the hell are you?” he murmured to himself as he searched the tomb.

There wasn’t much here, though. The warlord or King or whoever it was that was buried here had a golden torc on his arm and a few golden rings. Simon pocketed those, only feeling a little bad. Call it a put you out of your misery fee, he thought to himself. Grave robbing was wrong, but it was a victimless crime, and he was low on cash. This would be enough to tide him over nicely for what he needed to do.

What it didn’t do was offer him any answers. He’d figured out the trap but not who left it or why. He didn’t even know who this dude was or why he was important enough to be buried in a tomb like this.

Simon sighed. He almost didn’t want to cut this dude in half to look at the sword, and it was only when he was procrastinating about that and studying the leathery, decayed visage of the tomb's occupant that he noticed something.

The rings he’d removed had left marks from where they’d been on this man’s half-mummified skin for decades or centuries. The same sort of marks were visible on the man’s head and the wispy remains of his matted hair. It didn’t match the paper crown that Simon had taken, either. Whatever had made it, it was thinner… like a diadem, as opposed to the chunkier crown that came to mind when he pictured the word.

“So it’s what isn’t here, huh?” he said to himself as he realized the shape of the note had been the clue and not its contents. That made him feel pretty stupid.

“Why didn’t I figure that out the first time,” he asked rhetorically. “Oh, that’s right, I was crushed to death by the ceiling.”

He still didn’t have an answer, of course, but now, at least, he had a question. Who was this guy, and why would his crown be worth stealing? That might be enough to point him at whoever had done this, which in turn might be enough for Simon to figure out who was taunting him. It was a tenuous plan, but it was a plan. There would be libraries or monasteries around here that would know the answer, and if they didn’t, there would be bards or drunks in taverns that would. He could figure it out, but not today.

“I didn’t spend all this time working on that armor to bail,” he sighed. Simon used a word of earth on a silver coin in his pouch to make a mirror and spent several minutes explaining all that he’d learned to it just in case something bizarre and awful should happen.

I need to get in the habit of using save points, just in case, he thought to himself with a smile as he walked out into the sunlight to fetch his mule.

As he left the barrow, he considered looting or at least searching some of the other ones just in case for clues but decided against it. If the zombie plague started from this one, and whoever had done it hadn’t broken them open as well, then they probably weren’t too important. Besides, he’d had enough of the dead and was heading south. Solved or not, he was done with the place for a while.