Death After Death PLUS 260-262

Ch. 260 - Loose Threads

As Simon rode north in search of the three zombies that his evil twin had noted on the map, he had a lot of time to think about life and death. He spent most of that time contemplating what he knew, or at least what he thought he knew to be true for people who weren’t quite so confined to the Pit as he was. 

He imagined that the same cycle of endless reincarnation that he’d been subject to before all of this applied to them, too, and that when they died, they were either reborn to an appropriate fate or consigned to hell. As far as he understood it, no matter how many worlds there were, there was only one hell. That was one point he was pretty sure was true. 

He wasn’t sure how the dragon’s words played into that, though. Was he reliving different lives in the same world over and over as it changed from his actions, or was he living in different, nearly identical worlds each time? What made more sense? Did it take more energy to unscramble an egg or to create a copy of one? 

So we’ve gone from the chicken and the egg to the egg and the egg, I see, he told himself. That’s real progress right there. 

Simon had devoted a lot of time recently to deep thoughts, but he was still no philosopher. He was just a guy that was edging closer to the truth, whatever that was. There weren’t exactly many people he could ask about it, though. He could probably ask the Helades or the Oracle, though he wasn’t sure they would tell him. 

Demons might, though. He had the names of a dozen demons in his mirror. Summoning any of them to the world to have a conversation would be trivial at this point, but still, he resisted. He wasn’t sure what good would come of it. 

Even if the chance of a mishap where he ended up in hell was very low, he was just as likely to find lies as he was to find truth from the words of any of the devils. There was probably a lot of stray magical knowledge, too, but he had no desire to barter his soul or the lives of innocents to get it. 

Simon was still trying to decide how he might be able to summon a demon and have it end up going well for him when he found his first zombie on the second day. The thing was nearly whole, and at first, he’d thought he was merely a traveler. It was only when he got close enough to see that the sword on its hip was actually thrust through its guts instead of tucked into a scabbard that his mind let him see the rest of the gruesome details. 

He kicked his horse into a gallop and unsheathed his own longsword. The thing never even saw him coming. It didn’t even turn toward him as he rode by, separating its head from its shoulders in a single clean cut. 

Simon circled back as it slumped to the ground in two pieces, and he examined the desiccated, sun-damaged skin. When he was satisfied that the thing was no more, he took off and wheeled around, cutting to the east. It was straight across the rapidly desertifying grasslands, but his evil twin’s first x had been spot on, so it was likely that the others were as well. 

That, at least, he understood. He might not know how many worlds there were or how exactly they connected to hell. He didn’t even know if there was a heaven, but he knew precisely why his doppelgänger was helping him in this instance. It was to rub his face in the awful dichotomy. 

The sketchbook he’d seen just before his lengthy stay in the coffin had been the same sort of trick. Whether that was supposed to radicalize him against Helades or make him see that she was right, he really couldn’t say. All he knew was that it seemed to be a long con more than a trap, and he wasn’t going to fall for it. 

He found the second zombie almost immediately on the third day. It was right where it was supposed to be, as well. This one he found long before he saw it by the distinctive trail it left in its wake. Only the right foot made clear steps. The left one dragged behind it half useless, leaving behind a trail that blind man could follow. 

This one at least turned and looked at Simon with dead, milky eyes before he put it down. This corpse had been a watchman on duty when everything had happened. It was still wearing its gorget but had long ago lost its helmet, so Simon bashed its skull in with his pommel and left it in the dust as he rode off in search of his final quarry. 

After I get rid of these monsters, I’m going to have to keep going north, he reminded himself. I have to find some way to forestall the war that’s coming without using innocent lives. 

That was sensible. It was even the right answer, but still, he wanted to go back to Hepollyon and be with Zoa. He’d been gone a couple years, but he knew that she hadn’t forgotten him any more than he’d forgotten her. 

“You need to stop getting attached to women, Simon,” he told himself as he rode. “There’s literally no point. It’s not like you can have a future together.”

He meant what he said, but he couldn’t bring himself to take it too seriously. A flower wasn’t any less beautiful because it wilted at the end of spring. Nor were any of his lives, the good ones, at least, any worse off because they were forever in his past. That was easier to see now that he wasn’t obsessed with Freya anymore. Whether each of them took place in the same world or different ones, it didn’t really matter. 

Leaving Zoa like this by choice, though, wasn’t fair to her, and Simon vowed to make his little side quest as short as possible. Maybe there’s someone I can bribe, he thought hopefully. He had a lot of gold. Maybe he just needed to find the right baron or whatever titles it was that the Murani used in the north and convince him that it was better to invest in his mistresses instead of his armies. 

Though he’d never tried to probe for such fault lines to stop the wars in Brin, he was fairly sure that they existed, and if he just explored the Duke’s social life for a pressure point or two he was sure he’d find one. With any luck, his money could do just as much damage to the war effort as hordes of zombies, and he’d be heading back to Ionia within a season or two with tens of thousands of lives saved. 

The following day, Simon spotted another in a long scattered chain of oases he’d been using to water his horse on the horizon. It was toward sunset, and though he only planned to stay there for the night, that plan changed as soon as he heard a distant scream from that direction. That was when he knew he’d found the third zombie as well.

It might just be bandits, he reminded himself even as his horse started to gallop, kicking up a trail of dust behind him. There are many dangers in the desert, and just because he hadn’t seen anyone except for a few riders at the very edges of his vision didn’t mean that there wasn’t more to be afraid of than zombies. 

“Are there even goblins in the desert?” he asked himself as he got closer. “Orcs and centaurs, yes, but what else might there be?”

All of that speculation was pointless. As he got closer, he discovered that it was in fact zombies. Specifically, it was some poor caravan that had been putting up camp for the night when the zombie he was looking for had found them. That annoyed Simon and he couldn’t help but feel like that was an Easter egg his doppelgänger had left for him. The man could have very easily marked the map with ‘do this one first,’ but he chose to let these people die instead. 

That was enough to really piss Simon off, and he shouted a battle cry as he dismounted and drew his blade in the hopes that the zombies would focus on him instead of any survivors who might be left. As an idea, it was fine, but as a strategy, it might have been too successful. Simon had grown too used to fighting dried-out aged zombies, and when the corpses of tonight’s fresh victims charged him in a wave as he swatted his horse away, he decided that he might have misjudged the situation. 

Simon took the heads off the first two that came at him, but the dozen behind them forced him to use a word of force. “Oonbetit,” he said calmly and clearly, visualizing the neck-level guillotine-like shockwave that radiated out from him in a 90-degree arc that was just wide enough to encapsulate the horde. 

The ripple that followed his word was nearly invisible, but even as it spread, most of his attackers lost their heads, or at least half of them. Some of the shorter women didn’t have their heads cut off at the neck as he'd intended. Instead, they had their skulls sliced in two at nose or eye level, which was far more gruesome. 

The spell was as ugly as it was effective, and it even cut down a few of the closest palm trees just behind the boiling mob at the same level before its force was entirely spent. Unfortunately, as powerful as it was, its focus had been very limited, and it didn’t get everyone. 

A couple of the child zombies kept charging at him even after that, and Simon shook his head in disgust as he cut them down. It was harder to get over his revulsion to the act that it was to smash their skulls, but he knew it was the right thing to do. He’d been in their shoes, and the last thing he wanted was for anyone to live a second longer than they had to in such a hellish state. 

When that was done, he looked for survivors, injured or otherwise. When he found none, he checked every corpse with a prod of his sword and decapitated anything that even twitched. That took longer than the initial fight because the oasis was decently sized. Once that was done, he dragged the corpses of men away from the water, then used his horse to do the same for the carcasses of the animals. He remembered the last oasis he’d seen poisoned, so no need to repeat the process. 

Maybe that’s one way you could prevent a war, some dark impulse whispered to him. The army can’t travel to the South to fight a war if there’s no water. 

He could do more than that, he suspected. He could wander the region using words of greater earth to fracture the bedrock and drain the natural wellsprings, or shift sand to bury them. It might even work, too, he realized, but it seemed too cruel. 

“Poisoning the wells is for bitches,” he told himself as he started to dig through the tents and wagons, looking for both zombies and valuables. 

He had a new mission now. He’d just saved the people of this region from being devoured by a wave of death, even though they’d never know it. Now, he needed to figure out how to stop, or at least slow, the war that was to follow without doing something awful.

That last bit might seem like an unnecessary qualifier, but it was important to him. He had no real idea where to start, but he had money and magic, so surely he’d be able to figure out something.

Ch. 261 - The Edge of the Map

That night was a busy one for Simon. He was no longer in a hurry to find the zombies before they caused further havoc. Now, he was in a hurry to leave the scene of this massacre before someone decided he’d done it, and he had no idea when the next trader might come through. There were only so many places that one could stop for more water in the middle of nowhere. 

So, he worked quickly. First, he found the largest wagon, which was small enough to be drawn by a single horse. Then he removed everything he didn’t think he’d need, keeping only basics for camping along with a barrel of water and plenty of flatbread and spiced meat that the locals seemed to prefer. 

Once that was done, and he had room, he started to load his newfound wagon with the trade goods he thought were most appropriate. He didn’t take all of the richest items with him. Anything that was particularly distinctive he decided to leave behind. Instead, he went with a mixture of spices, bolts of cloth, and tools. He also brought a few sacks of grain and a cask of dates, though the last one was for eating more than trading. 

This deep in the desert, he was worried about running low on supplies, though. So, he took things with a dual use whenever possible. 

When all that was done, he gathered the journals and logs from all the wagons to review. Those were incriminating documents he’d have to get rid of before he reached a major city. But between their maps and notes he could learn much about the world around him, both geographically and politically.

This was probably a southbound caravan, and most of those items had been chosen for the value they’d been bringing in southern lands, but that didn’t bother Simon. He didn’t care about the exact price he got. The whole thing was worth less than the gold he had hidden in his saddlebags. The wagon and everything in it was just a tool for blending in along the road ahead. 

It was only after he got moving and made camp an hour away, in a place where there was nothing but sand and a star-filled sky, that he finally slept. He fell asleep with ideas about the last change he’d need to make if he really wanted to blend in. 

For a long time, Simon had both the words of flesh sculpting and the talents of an artist, but other than a few minor tweaks to make himself appear to be someone else during his lifetime as Ennis, he’d only barely used them to disguise himself. Instead, he’d really only used them to make himself a little skinnier at the start of each new life. 

That was going to have to change this time, though. He’d only read a few works that dealt with the desert dwellers, but he knew they were a clannish people and that he would make few inroads in learning about them as an outsider. 

That was what he did the following morning. He didn’t start with magic, of course; that would have been foolhardy. The first thing he did, even before he drove the wagon back to the trade road, was to make a mirror from a silver coin and draw his reflection into one of the log books. 

He wanted to be the same man he’d been when he’d traveled north years before for Zoa, more or less, and that would be impossible without having some idea of what his face looked like.  Once that was done, he sketched a second image of one of the zombies he’d just recently killed.

He’d never know the man he was stealing the face from, and truthfully, he didn’t want it to be exactly the same face lest someone recognize it on the road ahead. Still, he paid attention to the shape of the ears and the slightly larger hooked nose, along with the bushier eyebrows. 

When he was done, he compared the two pictures and decided the two people he’d drawn couldn’t even be considered distant cousins. 

He was happy enough with that. Simon stilled his mind and fixed the image he’d just made in his mind. He imagined what it would be if it came to life off the page with dark tan skin and black hair. Then, with the words “Celdura Hyakk,” he took on the identity of the dead merchant, more or less. 

A strange tingling shot through his skin, and the muscles of his face went numb and then tight as the magic took hold. It was like he’d lost control of parts of his body, and the muscles were spasming at random, but he knew that was just the magic forcing reality to conform to his will at the cost of a month or so of life. 

Simon waited for all of that to die down, then he opened his eyes and looked in the mirror again. He found that he no longer recognized himself. More importantly, he hadn’t made himself look like a monster in the course of the magic. 

He followed up his first spell with a second, lesser word of flesh shaping. This one adjusted a few of the details he’d missed the first time, deepening the lines in his forehead and putting more wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. That was enough to satisfy Simon and make him feel like a real person, even though his new identity had only recently come into existence. 

As he put away the mirror, he found that even though his skin was only a few shades darker, and his features had only changed a little, he couldn’t recognize himself at all. The change was even more stark when he stripped and donned the clothes and weapons of one of the dead men. 

He kept his vampiric dagger tucked away in the folds of his dun-colored robes, but he hid his vorpal sword away in the wagon and donned a scimitar in its place. It was a good-looking weapon, but he’d need to practice with it if he wanted to be halfway decent at fighting with it. The balance was unfamiliar, and the reach was slightly shorter. 

All of that took hours, and the sun was approaching its zenith by the time Simon set off again. First, he headed east toward the road, and then when he reached it, he headed north toward the nearest oasis.

Later that day, he passed another wagon, and when the other man waved at him, he waved back. That was enough to make him feel comfortably anonymous, though the fact that all languages still blended together made him feel somewhat uneasy about the whole thing. Well, that and the fact that I don’t yet have a name, Simon reminded himself. 

That was what he did that first night. He went through the logs, not for information about where he was or for where he should be going. He just read the names of people and got a feel for how people were addressed. Eventually, after some consideration, he decided to name himself Nijam. Though it only had a passing resemblance to his real name, he’d seen it used several times in different logs, which meant it was common enough for his purposes. 

A new name and a new face didn’t make him feel any less like he was in familiar territory. Even if the Murani were not yet at war with the South, he’d only ever known them as the enemy, and that was a hard switch to flip overnight. 

Still, as he shared his dung-fueled campfires on the long road north with other travelers, he slowly began to see that however different their ways were, they were just people, by and large. Sometimes, he met people who seemed likely to try to rob him, but never someone who was suspicious he might be anyone but Nijam, the humble merchant. There were still inns, though they were often large caravansaries rather than humble little establishments. 

The foods were different, and so was the alcohol. The former was a nice change of pace. He ate well on steamed rice served with peppers and spiced olives instead of the breads and stews he was more used to. Drinking, on the other hand, he did much less of. He didn't care for their bitter alcohol and drank little of it as he continued north. 

He did indulge in gambling, but only as ever, to learn things from strangers. The best way to make a man see you as no threat at all was to lose a silver or two to him over a couple of hours. After that, he’d say just about anything. 

Simon learned more about people this way than any amount of trading. He learned that the culture here really was more tolerant of magic, though only of the sanctioned magi who wore the amulets that Simon had seen many times before. No one knew that those amulets were suicide bombs waiting to go off or anything. They just knew that it was death to cross a magi, and at the same time, abominations who used magic without allegiance to their God-King should be stoned to death. 

In time, Simon learned that it was political will more than even the desert that stymied attacks to the South. The Murani mostly warred with each other, which was why larger wars were so rare. They had a capital and a number of large cities, but much of their strength existed in the nomadic tribes of the plains.  

He interacted with them a few times when he tried to sell his wares in some of the larger villages he ran through, but the things he’d brought with him didn’t appeal to rural herdsmen. All of these were detours, though. His destination was never in doubt. 

While there were many nomadic and semi nomadic tribes, there were only a few large cities worthy of the name. As the desert faded to a vast and endless steppe, all of those little encounters steered him toward the same few cities as the books he’d long since devoured did.  

“Does that mean I’ve just crossed the equator?” Simon wondered as the land began to blossom around him. He had no idea where he was on the globe, but he knew of at least two large deserts now. Surely one had to be caused by its position on the planet. The other, though? That had to be because geography, probably, and because of all the mountains to the south he was betting the area near Darndelle and Crowvar was because of rain shadow, and not latitude. 

The same didn’t seem to be true for this place, though. Simon hadn’t exactly mapped the whole thing out yet, but at least according to other traders, the coasts up ahead were warm and clear with hot summers and mild winters. The Murani had a few coastal towns and cities, but they lacked the tools for navigation, so they clung to the largest inland rivers instead. Apparently, one had to travel a lot further north before the forests dominated things again. 

Simon was well aware that the Greeks had figured out the world was round with math thousands of years before. He was even pretty sure they had some idea of where they were on the planet, but he had no idea how any of those equations worked when he’d been on Earth. After being in the Pit for centuries, though, even most of what he had known was lost to him. He might remember the words ‘Pythagorean Theorem,’ and that they had something to do with Triangles, but he no longer knew the equation involved. 

“That’s something I can do with one of my lives,” Simon told himself as he rode north. “I can invent math.” That made him laugh. It was a fine goal, but he put it way down the list of things he needed to do. He didn’t think math was going to help improve his magic, or save kids from owlbears.

Ch. 262 - The Way North

Really, the more Simon spoke with people in caravansaries and trading posts that dotted the roads, it seemed like he had two main choices on where to go, and between them, there was no choice at all. Three weeks to the northeast was the capital of Zurari, and a week to the northwest lay one of the largest coastal hubs of Urani. Both were large cities. The closer one was apparently quite wealthy. It even did some trade with points further South, like Ionar and Abresse, along with other cities that he’d never heard of. 

While he would have thought that the main reason for such a city was to trade with the wider world, the Murani largely turned their nose up at the cultures of the South and their trade goods. While Ionian pottery was prized, their bronze ingots were much more common since tin was scarce in the region, and the only thing that anyone cared about from Brin besides silver was its steel, which was apparently quite fine. 

It wasn’t foreigners that Urani traded with, though, it was the other large cities of the Murani, and most of those were linked together by a single river. While they were at heart a nomadic people, the Serpent River that came down from the north crisscrossed the vast plains in a meandering path that often changed when the river flooded. 

The people who lived on those barges and went up and down the languid yellow waters would never have the same status as the horse-riding clans that used their services, but it seemed to Simon that they were the people who truly connected the region. 

To the Murani, land was for fighting on and fighting over, and real commerce, especially for heavier objects like grains and stone, happened nearly exclusively on the water. Simon had to pretend he knew all this in these conversations, of course, and if he misspoke, he had to feign drunkenness and accept the mockery of other traders, but really, he found the relationships fascinating. 

While the three of the four kingdoms of the South seemed to be almost nascent, or proto-states, and Ionar was a real country within its small bounds, Muran was bigger than all of them combined and apparently more unified as well. The southern reaches didn’t even have monsters to speak of anymore, except for the occasional naga attack in the deep desert. One had to journey all the way to the far north, apparently, to find something to kill you that wasn’t another man. 

That fascinated Simon. Because of his encounters with them up until now, he’d considered the Murani to be the barbarians, but the farther he journeyed north, the more it seemed like it was the peoples of the South who were the barbarians. Still, it wasn’t all good here. As he cut further inland, bypassing Urani in favor of Zurari, he passed by several slave caravans heading in the same direction. In fact, he hadn’t even reached the city before he decided that was the true reason why the horse clans fought each other. 

It wasn’t for honor or even for grazing territory. It was so the winner could sell the loser into bondage to enrich themselves. This, combined with the fact that the South had little in the way of slavery, made the question of who exactly was the barbarian a little messier, but Simon held off on making judgment. He wasn’t here to decide which culture was better. He was here to try to stop whatever war might be on the horizon.  

Still, the way people talked about the capital as he approached it made it seem like it was more than just another city. Even the log books he’d read before he burned them said the same things. He’d saved a few pages that contained maps, illustrations, and important notes, but he could still recall what some of the merchants had said in their own private notes. Their assessment ranged from calling Zurari the Crown of the World and the beating heart of the Serpent to ‘a den of thieves and cultists who will steal your money and your soul.’

Assessments varied wildly, but everyone agreed the place was grand. They agreed on something else, too, and that was that in addition to being the seat of the God-King’s power, it was also the place where the Murani trained their mages. That alone made it a must-see destination for him. 

“I would stay far away from the Crown of the World,” one merchant told him while they smoked a hookah together at a crossroads. “It is the worst of all worlds. Mages and the imperial court, both.” The other men that were there laughed at that a bit before the conversation turned back to which city had the finest prostitutes and how many wives they had at home. 

Simon didn’t let any of that dissuade him. He’d need intrigue, and though he didn’t care for the rumor mill, he’d learned from his time in Darndelle that simply attending the right parties was nearly as valuable as any research to do on his own. 

I can’t exactly buy my way into that sort of engagement, of course, he realized. 

Simon spent the next several days trying to figure out how he might slip into the circles of the elite as he continued to the northeast. Every option, though, even the artistic ones, met with the same roadblocks. He just didn’t know enough about the culture to stay hidden for long as anything but a wandering merchant or something similar.  

Still, despite whatever concerns he might have when he got there, Simon enjoyed the trip. Without the threat of goblins and bandits, it was almost peaceful. He would occasionally wander through the territory of some new clan that demanded tribute, but those gifts were small and intended to show obedience, not smother trade or rise to the level of outright theft. 

He hadn’t actually had to pull his blade in weeks when he finally topped a low rise and saw Zurari spread out before him along both sides of the river. That was a surprising moment because he’d been entirely unprepared for the scale of the thing. He’d known that it was going to be a large city from what he’d read, but he’d thought that the stories he’d heard were exaggerated, at least a little bit, but that had not been the case. 

Other than perhaps the jungle city in the early levels, this was probably the largest city in the world. At least it was the largest city in the world that he’d seen. Ionar was tiny by comparison. It was the size of a single district that radiated out from the center like spokes. Liepzen was bigger, of course, but it was still less than half of the size. 

Now, this is something worth painting, Simon told himself as he burned the image into his mind. 

The city was surrounded by two layers of walls, spaced widely apart, which spoke to Simon about its history. Not only were walls still necessary because of the size of some of the horse-riding clans, but the city had outgrown them twice. It lent the whole thing the appearance of a bull's eye, but when he thought of it like that, it was impossible not to focus on the giant ziggurat that stood at the city’s center. 

There were two other step pyramids that were large enough to tower over all but that central monument. All three of them dominated the city skyline, making a dozen smaller pyramids and monuments seem like nothing but buildings. Still, of the three, the one in the center of Zurari stood out the most. It might have been thirty stories. 

It was hard to say exactly from where he was standing, so far away. It was undoubtedly the seat of power for the Murai kingdom, and though he had no plans to enter or topple it, he knew he was probably going to have to figure out something if he wanted to get back to learning to see the world around him better in the Oracle’s little cult.

Simon took his time approaching the city and spent as much time watching the rest of the traffic as other people. He wasn’t afraid of the city guards exactly, but in a place where there were state-sanctioned mages, it was impossible to be sure. What if they have magical metal detectors to detect auras on the main gates? He wondered. 

There were plenty of decorative markings and inscriptions around the massive forty-foot-tall gates that might have hidden such features, but Simon couldn’t spot anything like a word of power. Instead, he simply admired the way the architecture married beauty and defensiveness while he slowly approached the gate. 

He had no idea how he would even start to incorporate magic into those defenses beyond the obvious, like using words of earth to strengthen the very stone. Still, as he eyed the other travelers that were coming and going, he gave it some thought, just for something to do.  He was almost through imagining what an illusion-powered display might look like and was trying to imagine an interface by the time the slow line of wagons allowed him to make his way to the front. 

He needn’t have worried. Only the few foreigners in line, along with anyone who was obviously poor, seemed to be given any sort of extra scrutiny. Instead of identifying Simon as a spy or a mage, the guard who chatted with him just tried to press him for a bribe. That wasn’t so strange, not after dealing with the other tribal figures on the way up here. Bribes, or as the people here called them, gifts, were just a part of the process.

It was only a few coppers. Simon would have been happy to give it to him. Still, that would have been more suspicious than haggling about it. A man who didn’t push back was considered a sucker. It struck Simon as backward since he thought things should simply be priced according to their worth, but it was a fact of life here. Fortunately, half a lifetime in Ionia had gotten him used to it, and he didn’t hesitate. 

“I can hardly afford so rich a gift, even for a friend such as you, when I have yet to sell my wares!” he insisted. “Perhaps we could arrange such a thing when I am done with my business and leaving.”

That made the guard laugh, which was precisely what Simon had been going for. “Not even a small gift for the safety of our city? Surely a wise man like you can spare me at least enough for a good meal after a long shift,” the guard retorted. 

The two of them went back and forth like that a few more times before a couple of copper were exchanged. They disappeared in a well-practiced handshake like they’d never existed at all, and then, with a nod, he was allowed to enter the Murani capital without even a hint of violence.