The trip down the mountain was as exhausting as ever, but at least Simon had no need to look over his shoulder now that the apex predator of this particular level was dead. The only thing that troubled his sleep now were memories of the same trip he’d taken with Freya so long ago, and he passed several good campsites as he went, just to make sure he didn’t dredge up any more memories than he had to.
At the base of the mountain, he reached a familiar game trail that led to a familiar road. Here, he parted ways from his experience. With Freya, he’d gone south to avoid the zombies that he’d thought were taking over the world.
This time, he knew better. In fact, as far as he was concerned, the world should be zombie-free now. So, he headed north in search of the village of Slany. That didn’t stop him from finding one more familiar sight, though.
That evening, while he strolled north in search of an inn or even a tavern where he could get a bite, he found a small camp with a very familiar merchant’s wagon under attack. Several people were already dead, and those that still stood were fighting for their lives against goblins, but still, Simon had trouble taking his eyes off the wagon itself.
It was like the world was taunting him. It was the very same tinkerer's wagon that he and Freya had lived in for weeks until they’d finally sold it in Crowvar. It was even being pulled by the same aging mare.
For a moment, he didn’t understand how that could possibly be the case, but then he realized what happened. “That wagon had to come from somewhere,” he told himself as he walked forward. “Somewhere in the range of a man who'd been bitten might have made it to the tavern we found him in before he turned…”
Simon regarded the man bludgeoning one of the goblins to death. It had latched onto his leg and he was trying to get it off with the smoldering piece of firewood. Simon should have been helping him, but he couldn’t; it was the same merchant he’d killed so long ago when the man had turned into a zombie in the tavern. Only the man wasn’t dead yet.
Instantly, Simon sprung into action. He unsheathed his sword and came in swinging. The man probably would have been able to save himself. He had before against the zombies, after all, but the other man that was with him had already been gutted, so time was of the essence there.
The little monsters didn’t see him until it was too late. Even with Simon’s clumsy body and chubby fingers, half a minute later, all the goblins were dead, and he was dealing with the dying man.
“Wh-who are you?” the familiar merchant asked, but Simon shrugged him off.
“I’ll deal with you in a minute,” Simon said. “Your bite can wait, but your friend—”
“It’s nothing,” the merchant yelled. “Just a scratch!”
“Fine. But you keep an eye out for me, or your buddy isn’t going to make it,” Simon said, not even bothering to look up. Instead, he was already mumbling words of power under his breath.
The merchant started to say something about how there was no way Simon could save Marley, but Simon didn’t pay any attention to that. Moments later, he was distracted by another goblin crashing out of the bushes, and he quickly turned to crush the thing’s skull while Simon did his best to save the dying man.
He started with a word of cure because a wound this ugly was almost certainly overflowing with disease, and he wanted to trap as little of that in the body as he could. After that, he used normal healing just to offset the blood loss as the man went into shock. Then he proceeded to use a series of lesser heals as he tried to find and seal as much of his patient's damaged and ruptured intestines and arteries as he could.
It was a horrible, gory business, and honestly, Simon didn’t hold out a lot of hope that he was going to make it, but twenty minutes later, his patient was closed up, breathing softly by the fire. He hadn’t died on the table, so to speak, but Simon didn’t know how he felt about the man’s chances once the inevitable infections and internal bleeding started.
Marley was young, and he looked strong, at least. Simon had given him the best shot he could, while the other merchant looked on in mute wonder.
“You can do magic?” he asked Simon finally as he tried to clean the blood off his hands. “What are you?”
“Just a man that owes you a favor,” Simon shrugged. “You did me a good turn once, and I still haven’t forgotten.”
“I did?” the merchant asked. “I— you’ll forgive me, but you don’t look familiar.”
“I get that a lot,” Simon nodded. “Now sit down, and we can deal with your scrape.”
“It’s fine,” the merchant said, clutching the bloody bandage defensively. “I put wood ash and salt on it and said a prayer, which is all the magic I need.”
Stolen novel; please report.
“Maybe,” Simon shrugged, whispering a word of cure under his breath. If he wanted to stay bleeding and get a nice goblin scar, that wasn’t Simon’s problem. It certainly went a long way to explaining how it was that he'd turned into a zombie the first time, though.
They chatted a little bit after that about how dangerous the roads were getting in this part of the country now. Then Kurtz, which turned out to be the peddler's name, drew him a map in the dust that showed the way to Liepzen and Slany by association, which was all the recompense Simon needed for his efforts.
Finding the way to his destination was something almost anyone could have told him, but he was glad that it had been this ghost from his past. Somehow, it felt right.
After that, they slept in short shifts to stay mindful of the threats that might yet be lurking in the woods, and in the morning, Simon helped Kurtz burn the corpses of the dead and load his friend Marley into the back of the man’s overstuffed wagon.
“You sure I can’t convince you to come south with me?” he asked. “I’ve got friends in Doulm and Hurag. They could help me reward a miracle worker like you properly.”
Despite being gifted a horse that Kurtz no longer needed now that most of his men were dead, Simon declined. Though they sounded familiar, he didn't think he’d never been to either city, but he was sure he’d get around to it one day. Only that wasn't quite true. It was only half an hour down the road that he realized that Hurag was the name of the plague city.
At least, he was pretty sure it was. He felt bad about that. He probably should have given the man some kind of warning about it, but it was too late now.
“Would it have even mattered, though?” he asked himself as he slowly rode north. He had no idea how long it would be until that happened or if his warning would do anything. It might be months away. There was just no way to say from his perspective.
He was only just getting the spatial relationships between all the levels down, but he had very little to go on as to when all the wheres were. It was on his to-do list, certainly, but not really anywhere near the top.
He gave that a lot of thought as he made the six-day ride to see Gregor and his father. This level was sometime after the zombies, of course, which was sometime after the succession war, but even with all that, it shouldn’t be more than what, a few years?
Simon didn’t find out just how wrong he was until he reached the small town he’d lived in so long ago. It had grown some, but at the same time, it had obviously fallen on hard times. When he called on the manor as an old friend of the family, he could see the obvious disrepair in the sagging roof and the patchy whitewash as easily as he could the faces of the grim looking footman that answered the door.
The servants brought him inside, but the man they introduced as Baron Corwin wasn’t the man he expected to meet. He’d expected to meet the kindly old Baron he’d known before. He’d be a few years older, certainly. Simon knew that. Instead, he found his grown son had replaced him, and in turn, Gregor the Third had already been ravished by the hand of time. It had been decades since he was last here, and time had not been kind to any of them.
Simon bowed and did his best to pretend that nothing was amiss, but he found this turn of events to be more than a little shocking. Lord Raithewait had not been referring to Gregor the second, as Simon had always assumed. He’d been referring to Gregor the Third, who had presumably replaced his father sometime during the troubles.
Not only had at least two decades passed in six levels, but the man that stood before him bore little resemblance to the boy he’d known so long ago. He was grimmer, certainly, but he also had several nasty scars that had been hastily powdered over, and he was missing his left arm just above the elbow.
In Simon’s absence, the young noble had obviously led an awful life, and though no one could possibly blame him for it, he couldn’t help but feel guilty. If he'd been here, he was confident he could have saved the man who was looking at him in confusion a lot of grief, but then, even with infinite lives, Simon couldn’t exactly be everywhere at once.
“You’ll forgive me for saying so, ser, but you seem a little young to have known my father.” Baron Corwin said finally. “If you’ve come here hoping for some easy mark, I’ll have you drawn and quartered in the yard.”
“I get that a lot, actually,” Simon said, hastily improvising. “Baron Raithewait often said the same thing.”
“‘Simon - you’ve fought those confounded centaurs for me for how many years now, and yet you still look like a child; how can that be?’” he said, doing a passable impression of the Baron.
That at least seemed to relax Gregor. “You’ve worked for a lot of Barons, then,” he said with a laugh. “That lets you stay for lunch at least so you can tell me all about what that wiley old bastard is up to.”
Simon had come all the way to get a little comfort from a familiar face, but that was the one thing he didn’t get out of this trip. He got a decent meal, and a little information. However, on the whole, things were more depressing than anything. Gregor was farther from the boy he knew than he would have thought possible.
Looking at him all through their meal, it was almost impossible to catch even a glimpse of the earnest young man he’d spent so many hours sparing with. Honestly, he reminded Simon of Vatren a little bit, now with his cruelty and jaded humor, which was disgusting but hard to deny.
However, the longer he stayed, the worse things got. After two bottles of wine, after Simon had told the Baron a few stories that the man’s father had once told him, Gregor told Simon how he lost his arm. It made Simon’s blood run cold.
He told the story of another sell sword that had come through town decades ago and offered to clear the silver mines that provided so much of the town’s wealth. “The man bungled it, though,” Gregor said sardonically. “He promised my father he’d take good care of me, but instead, I barely got out of there with my life. Weeks later, the doctors finally had to take the arm because it was rotting so badly. It was it or me.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Simon said. Truthfully, he was more than sorry. It was more disaster he would have been able to prevent if he’d been there. Now, he had to deal with a broken man who was barely a shadow of the man that he could have been.
Simon promised to return another day after the Baron was drunk enough that he had to be half carried away by his manservant, but it was a lie. He’d start riding back to the portal tonight. There was nothing here he wanted to see for even a moment longer; it was simply too depressing.