Simon walked outside to find the most ragged version of Kell’s little mercenary company that he’d seen to date. It was easy to see what had happened. The Butcher’s Bill had certainly lived up to their name today and paid the price.

Instead of being over a dozen men and women, the little cult of personality was down to 5 members, a horse, and a cart piled with the bodies of the dead. The fact that they were at least bringing their dead home for burial touched him a little, though he worried about the possible biohazard.

Simon sighed and used a rag to wipe the soot off his face and his hands as best he could. He was soaked in sweat from the work he’d been doing, and he was sure he looked like a wild man, but he really didn’t care.

Not at first. When he saw that Freya’s hand had a bloody bandage on it, though, well, his flinty heart melted a little. At least, it did until he saw that they’d tied up a zombie and put it in the cart they were lugging with them. That used up most of the sympathy he had right there, but the rest of it died when he looked closer and saw that it was Kell.

“He’s the one that bit you, isn’t he?” Simon asked, pointing to the bound zombie that was still squirming on the pile of the dead. It wasn’t really a question, though. He already knew it was true. “You tried to save a zombie instead of killing one, and now you’re screwed.”

“I…” Freya said as tears started to tumble silently down her dirty face. No matter how angry he was, that was still enough to twist the knife in his soul.

“We have to save him,” she continued. “Surely someone knows a way. It’s just a temporary madness. Perhaps a priest could—”

“That man,” Simon said, pointing at the squirming corpse, “Is not mad. He’s dead, and dead is dead. There is no bringing him back. All he can do is get free, kill other people, and condemn them to the same fate.”

The words were harsh, but he didn’t know what else to say. He knew more about magic than anyone he’d ever known at this point, and though there might be a way to bring back the dead, he did not yet know it.

“I told ya,” Garth shouted. “We should put him out of his misery and be done with it. We can bring the bodies back to—”

“You should burn the bodies,” Simon said, looking over the group. In addition to Freya, it looked like the big man in the back, Hodge, had also been bitten. “You should kill the zombie, burn the bodies, and put those who've been bit out of their misery before they start to turn.”

That caused all of the survivors to start screaming at each other. Some of them even drew blades as their accusations got louder, but Simon ignored them. Garth was a good guy, but he didn’t really care who lived or died in this group. He’d put them down himself if he had to. It would be easy.

Well, it would be easy for most of them. “Tell me how long ago he bit you,” Simon asked Freya, taking her hand and unraveling the bandage.

“L-last night,” she said haltingly. “H-he… he turned last night. We’d lost half the company, but then a few hours later, some of the wounded they…”

She wasn’t able to get the rest of the story out, but that was fine. He had all the answers he needed. Her bite was already eight hours old, and the skin around the ragged wound was already going necrotic. It was probably too late for her, but it probably wasn’t good enough where Freya was concerned.

Simon studied her pupils, the pallor of her skin, and every other detail he could bring to bear from the years he’d spent as a healer as he tried to figure out what the right answer was here. Experience said that she was fucked, and that she’d only lasted this long because the bit was on a limb so far from her heart and her brain. Science said that something about the way that magic wiped out the virus or the bacteria was incomplete. It said that the relapse was caused by some reservoir of evil somewhere else in her body that caused it to flare back up.

It’s not science, though. He corrected himself. It’s magic.

Was that the problem? Had he been so concerned with curing the body instead of the soul that he’d used magic to make people’s bodies whole while the rot spread on some more etheric level? Not for the first time, he wished he had that sight that let some people see the miasma that was his soul. However, before he could go further down that rabbit hole, there was a cry of alarm that derailed his train of thought.

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Hodge has been warding off his one-time friends with a blade, but before things could escalate further, he fell to the ground and started convulsing. That made the men who had been about to kill him pull back in alarm, which was something that Simon might have thought was funny under any other circumstances. Instead of smiling, though, he shouted. “You can kill him on the ground now, or you can kill him when he’s trying to kill you in less than a minute. The choice is yours.”

That stirred them to action. Instead of standing around trying to figure out what was happening, they started stabbing the man repeatedly, and though most of the blows were ineffective, eventually, one of them went through the neck, and the dead man stopped twitching.

“What about her,” Garth asked, “She’s bit too, right?”

“She is,” Simon agreed. “But if you try to kill Freya, you won’t live long enough to wonder how I murdered you.”

She probably needed to die. He knew that, but he wasn’t going to let a stranger brutalize her like that. For a moment, he thought about using magic to behead her quick and clean. It would have been the kindest thing to do, but he was too weak for that. Instead, he was going to try to save her. All this work carving runes had given him an idea.

“Kill the zombie in your cart and keep traveling south,” Simon said finally. “I’ll take care of your friend, one way or the other.”

“But Frey’s part of the company,” one of the other men protested; at the same time, Freya said, “No, you can’t kill him!”

She tried to break away from Simon’s grip, but she was too weak for that now. She didn’t have a lot of time left. It was certainly less than an hour, but it was probably less than ten minutes before she was on the ground writhing and spitting as the evil claimed her body.

“I admire your sentiments,” Simon said to Garth as he lifted Freya into both of his arms, “But I’m going to try something to save this woman and won't waste any more time talking. Go wait a mile down the road if you like, or follow me and die. The choice is yours.”

With that, Simon turned and walked back toward the blacksmith shop. He needed his mirror, and then he needed some space. No one followed him.

“What are you going to do to me?” Freya asked softly. She was sweating now.

“Whatever I can,” Simon said. Part of him knew that he should be devoting more time to making her feel at ease, but there was no room for that in his mind. He was already trying to figure out how he could more thoroughly purge her body of the disease or the curse that was ravaging her. He imagined that would be something like the summoning circle that was used to bind hell but with a few key differences.

He just needed a sort of spiritual isolation chamber that he could flood with power so that not a single speck of evil could get away to blossom a second time. He’d never tried to save someone this far along, but even if it cost him a few years of life, it would be worth it; he owed her that much.

Once Simon had his mirror, he headed for a barn not so far from the blacksmithy that had been his home base for a while. “Alright,” he explained. “I need to draw something on the ground, and then we’re going to try to do a little magic to save you, okay?”

“Witchcraft,” she breathed. “Was it you that did this? Did you create the zombies?”

Simon suppressed the smirk that came with it, remembering the last time he’d done this level. Instead, he shook his head and said, “I swear that the only thing I’ve ever done to zombies is kill them.”

“So then you’re going to steal my soul?” she asked weakly. Freya, as frightened as she looked, sat where he left her.

“I’m probably going to give you a piece of mine,” he said after he whispered a few quiet commands to his mirror and brought up a diagram of the circle in question.

He quickly discarded all the aspects of summoning or displacement. Instead, he started dragging his heel around in the dirt, scratching in the outline of a circle. Then, once that was done, he started roughing in the runes that would seal the space with the handle of a pitchfork. Once he had all of those added, he started adding the runes for greater cure and greater healing. It was only as an afterthought that he added runes for transfer to the thing.

It wasn’t a spell he didn’t think he’d ever cast personally again, but it was crucial for the power circuits of these complex circles, and in this case, it would draw power from the surrounding world. That probably included him, of course, but this way, he could share the load with the nearby trees and animals and whatever else, which should blunt the blow.

“This is magic?” she asked in confusion.

Simon ignored the question. None of this was magic. It was preparation, and it was ugly, but only for a moment. He was going as fast as he could, but even as he did so, he wasn’t sure that it was fast enough.

“Vosden,” he said after a moment of concentration, fixing it all in his mind.

The runes he needed weren’t ugly things scrawled into the dirt. They were crisp, straight things that existed in his mind. Fortunately, he had a way he could carve something like that into the earth fairly quickly.

Suddenly, all the ugly squiggles he’d made melted into the earth as lines straightened and curves meshed more clearly. In seconds, all of his ugly preparations had faded. They were replaced by something that looked sort of like a crop circle or a particularly complicated piece of graffiti.

“None of that was magic,” he said with a smile, ignoring the stricken look on the woman’s face. “That’s what we're going to do next.”