Death After Death-Chapter 210 - Perfect Timing
Depending on what was going on, the right answer was either to linger for a long time until Simon was in excellent shape or if it was to immediately proceed to the next level. He chose neither and instead lingered only a couple more days, spying on the white cloaks as they came and went in the hopes that he could read the tea leaves to figure out what had happened to Aaric.
When he finally jumped down the well in the dark of night a few evenings later, though, all he’d really done was get rid of some of the other Simon’s junk before he took the backpack with him. The gold and silver, especially, he dumped. Except for a couple silvers, in case he had the chance to use them in the next level, and one of the gold coins bearing his image, he left the hand-sized sack just inside the bakery’s oven where the woman that ran the place would find it when she woke up.
Simon had no idea if she was a good person or if those coins would help or hurt the arc of history. He knew that the other him had anticipated he would be here at this moment, so he was trying to be a bit more unpredictable from now on.
The ride down the well and out of the cave was just as wild as it had been before, but at least this time, he was a little ready for it, and he stood and dusted himself off on the trail without too much effort.
Simon was just getting his bearings and mentally preparing himself to start jogging uphill, which sounded like about the most awful thing in the world when he noticed there was a large caravan of people coming up the road behind him.
Most of the wagons were still behind the curve of the mountain, and he could only see the lead riders, but Simon immediately recognized them as the dragon slayer’s caravan. That confused him quite a bit.
“Shouldn’t they be in the valley already?” he asked himself. In the past, they’d beaten him by hours or days, but now he was ahead of them? It didn’t make sense.
“But really, what does in this run,” he said with a shrug as he sat down on a rock and waited for them to catch up.
Truthfully, Simon had no idea what was going on, but it was giving him a lot of time to think. These were either changes he’d induced with his last run or something that had been inflicted on him by the version of himself that had left him the journal. He really couldn’t say which, and right now, he didn’t care. He just scrambled to figure out what he was going to tell the dragon slayers.
It turned out that he needn’t have worried. He decided to pose as a mercenary and twice tried to tell his story, but each time he was rejected. The lead riders couldn’t have cared less once they decided he wasn’t a bandit, and the caravan master just laughed and said, “We need men with strong backs a plenty for butchery and gathering treasure if you're inclined to that sort of work, but dragon slaying? Well, you just stand back and leave that to Sir Anias unless you’re in a mood to be used as bait.”
That line got plenty of laughs from the surrounding men, and Simon feigned some embarrassment, but really, he didn’t care. He just shook the man’s hand, climbed on board the wagon, and endured the ribbing that the other men gave the new guy as he learned what he could.
Though the timing was a day or two off what he was used to, nothing else seemed to have changed. The men still planned on getting up to Weldon and spending a day or perhaps two resting and scouting before they finally moved on to the dragon's peak itself. That seemed a bit fast to Simon. If he was planning on taking out a dragon, he’d want to spend days on reconnaissance alone, but no one seemed concerned when he raised that point.
“Sir Anias? Nah!” one big man blustered. “He’ll just walk in there with his big magic sword and cut the big scaly bastard in half.”
Another man insisted, “No, he uses a giant bow and shoots a magic arrow straight into its heart!”
The fact that none of them could agree told Simon only one thing: none of these men knew how the dragon slayer did it. According to those who did most of the talking, this was either the third or the fourth dragon that the man was going after, but even that they couldn’t decide on.
Still, from those flimsy foundations, he was able to build a fairly solid thesis. If no one knew the truth about the knight, then that was because no one had seen him make a kill. Truthfully, if he hadn’t seen the body himself, he would have never believed that the man had killed anything. Since he had, though, that theory was right out.
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Which meant there had to be a trick to it. There were excellent reasons why a hunter might not want an audience, of course. They could be distracting. Their scent or sounds might alert the prey that it was in danger. In this case, though, Simon doubted that it was any of that. He’d seen the knight in person. He’d been a strong, bold-looking man covered in blood, but Simon doubted that anyone of any strength could kill a dragon the size of a small whale with steel weapons, no matter what he used.
By the time they reached the village, and the giant caravan had descended on the place like a swarm of locusts, Simon had settled on the idea that the man had a rune blade and perhaps even runic armor to shelter him. While those weren't entirely disputed when he saw the man later, at the inn while Simon was unloading some crates, it was replaced by a new one.
Unspoken. Simon wouldn’t have bet his life on it, but he was almost certain that the clasp the man wore to hold his cloak closed was an amulet of protection against fire. It was a small detail, and he only glimpsed it for a moment, but it was enough for Simon to decide that it was probably him.
Rather than make their amulets simple, hidden things, they made them into holy symbols of sorts, and though there were dozens of patterns for that, and some were more subtle in their symbolism than others, Simon had seen them all and helped to make most of them.
As strange as he found that detail, it made their only other encounter make a bit more sense to him. The last time Simon had met the man, he'd looked at him strangely. Simon had still been pretty deep in his karmic hole at that point, and if he remembered correctly, he’d still been floating somewhere below negative half a million experience points. So, the aura that cloaked him was almost certainly still black enough to warrant a closer look.
That was only fair since now he was examining the other man more intently. Simon still wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen on this level. He was pretty sure that he was supposed to save this village or the dragon, or maybe both, but now that he knew who he was facing, he wanted to oppose them on principle.
Simon cursed himself for not taking the time to look up dragons in the Black Library of the White Cloaks when he was there. He’d obsessed over magic and history, with only a little demonology and necromancy thrown in on occasion, before he’d been taken down to the forges.
Wasted opportunity, he sighed inwardly, But not so wasted that I think I’ll go for another life without a tongue just for another chance to read through it.
Truthfully, now that Simon knew where it was, there was nothing to prevent him from going and sacking the broken tower on his own. It wouldn’t be easy, but he could probably do it if he wanted to. Right now, he didn’t need to know more about dragons, though. He needed to know more about Sir Anias.
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That night, as both the tavern and its courtyard overflowed with drunks and stories, he was surprised at how little he found out. Everyone had a story, and in that story, every dragon was named something different, but none of them had the ring of truth, and the only thing that came from the knight’s mouth were platitudes.
Still, as the night wore on, Simon found a number of other clues that led him to believe that a few of the other lesser authorities in this circus might be White Cloaks as well. Or they might just be normal guys, and I’m just getting paranoid, he reminded himself.
Simon had plenty of shadows to jump at these days. There was the doppelgänger and the White Cloaks, true, but there was also the Murian, lingering doubts about Helades, demons, and plenty of other strangeness from past levels to choose from. That wasn’t even the whole list. There were also warlocks and vampires and whatever else.
He could worry about everything so much that it paralyzed him, but that wouldn’t help any more than letting his paranoia run out of control and deciding that everything was a White Cloak plot that needed to be unraveled.
Still, as Sir Anias slipped out the side door with one of the other men that Simon was suspicious of, he whispered a word of lesser cure to flush most of the drunkenness from his system and staggered after them.
They left the inn and the grounds, but not so far away that it would be easy to follow them. So, instead, Simon staggered to the back of the stables that wasn’t so far away from them and took a piss, which they ignored.
He couldn’t hear what they were saying from that distance, but he could see their body language, and they were clearly in cahoots. Even as he tried to contemplate a spell that might let him eavesdrop, though, the conversation was already over, and the knight was walking to the front of the stables to ready his horse. Presumably, that was so that he could be in position for what came next.
“Definitely a trick to it,” Simon said to himself as he watched the man mount up and ride into the dark toward the mountain.
Simon didn’t know exactly how it worked yet, but at this point, he was pretty sure that it involved either springing a trap on the thing or using the town as bait to prepare a trap in the dragon’s absence. Simon couldn’t be sure, but the longer he thought about it, the more he leaned toward the latter, which made him angrier and angrier.
He waited for a few minutes for the commotion to die down and the hoofbeats to retreat into the distance. Then he saddled the nicest horse left and rode up the mountain after the man. Simon had no idea if this was the right way to solve the level, but even if he had to do it again, he would learn a lot from watching whatever it was that was going to happen next.
