Ch. 382 - Wearing the White
Simon made most of his preparations that day. He didn’t need much: a horse, his armor, and some supplies, along with a little ready coin, would see him through for a long time; it was more than he had in most lives. Still, he couldn’t shake the words he’d been told earlier that day.
They’ll likely kill the child and send you back out to find another. They kept him up half the night.
Up until this point, he hadn’t really understood why people had gotten so bent out of shape about skipping a step in their process, but now he did, and it brought the Unspoken one step closer to the Murani in his mind. Is it just a whole world of child soldiers? He wondered. There was a big difference between the Lord of the Flies-style magic school of the northern kingdom and raising someone from a young age to be a warrior and champion of good, but even so, Simon didn’t like the trend.
In the morning, he received a second surprise, but for once, it was a good one. He ate a simple breakfast of eggs and ham, and then, as he saddled his horse and checked his preparations, he was approached by half a dozen of his fellow knights, dressed in full regalia. For a moment, Simon thought he was about to get a beat down or worse, but it turned out to be just the opposite.
Instead, they embraced him as a brother and exchanged kind words as they pinned the cloak to his back that he’d been waiting for since he arrived nearly a year before. “It’s finally time for you to go out in the world and see it as it truly is,” one knight said before another finished the statement, “But that is the way of things; you are well prepared to meet and beat whatever evil you find.”
The way that the words switched off between speakers without any gap in the content certainly indicated that this was a scripted ceremony, but as each of them bid him well on his journey he was a little moved by it; he could only imagine how moved a fresh young knight who was going out into the world alone for the first time after spending a decade as a squire would have been.
Despite himself, Simon felt a flare of pride in his chest as he rode out of the gate a few minutes later. He knew the psychological tricks at play, but that didn’t stop them from working on him, and as he went, he considered how much more effective the Unspoken brainwashing was than its Magi equivalent.
If I ever have to make a secret cult, I’m definitely going to do that, he told himself before leaving the broken castle in the distance behind him.
After that, Simon turned his attention to the more important question of where he should go. All things being equal, he should go to wherever the most danger was, and fight it, but charging off half cocked like that would be reckless, at best, given the precarious nature of the levels.
“You do too much, you’ll reset a bunch of things you’ve already locked in,” he told himself. “You do too little, and the Unspoken won’t be happy with your performance. It’s quite a pickle.”
It wasn’t as if these were new concerns for Simon; it was the greatest danger of his current life, and each time he’d gone off on a mission, he’d come back and checked his mirror to see if he’d done any damage to his cause. So far, he’d been lucky. He only had the same five levels to deal with.
Level 19 - Lizard men in a swamp.
Level 20 - A Basilisk amongst the ruins.
Level 21 - A haunted cemetery.
Level 27 - Centaur raiders near Crowvar.
Level 34 - ?????
Two of those would be easy, one would be dangerous, and two were entirely unknown. He wouldn’t be surprised if he blew through all of them in one life and ended up in fresh territory before he knew it, but that would be complicated if he started accidentally changing things with his heroics.
Where he could go proved to be too complicated a knot for Simon to untie, so instead he started at the other end of the puzzle and started crossing off where he couldn’t go. This ruled out the capital, anywhere near Gregor’s home of Slany, Ordenvale, and any number of places he had history in the country. It also ruled out some nearby places, like Schwarzenbruck, the road to Abresse, and all of Ionia. Taken together, that ruled out nearly a third of the country, and half of the area he was most familiar with, but he could work with that.
By the time he’d camped, he’d half convinced himself that he should go to Montain,seek out Castle Gravenstone, and dig deeper into that. But by the morning, he’d chickened out. It wasn’t that Montain was a little far afield for the Unspoken and that the organization had no power there. It was that he worried he might find a vampire somewhere in that crypt, even though the place should have been empty, and he wasn’t prepared to deal with that.
So, instead, he decided on the wastelands around Crowvar. It was a dangerous enough area to do some good, and had little impact on most of his levels. The only portal that was even in the area that he’d seen so far was one he had to deal with in the future anyway. That last detail sealed it for him, and when he got up and dressed, he started south, thinking about the Raithwaite family as he went. He certainly wouldn’t be happy to see them again, but didn’t feel the same murderous rage he had for so many lifetimes.
“Varten’s father won’t be much older than me,” Simon mused, “And his wife might still be alive.”
That made for an interesting thought. He’d never been in that region so early, and it wasn’t like Freya had a grave that he could accidentally erase at this point. The idea that the prick that had killed her would be a child made it harder to hate him, too. Simon had killed the man many times, but as a child, he couldn’t even imagine it.
Rather than try, he made his way south, happy that he no longer had to worry so much about toppling his fragile house of cards. If I just use the portals properly and go further and further into the future each time, then I won’t even have to worry about these problems, he reminded himself.
For the first couple of days of his journey, he had the solitude of the plains to keep him company, so those sorts of thoughts dogged him, along with other random ideas, like branding himself with soul protection marks on his body every time he restarted in the cabin. Tattooing was a complex process, but with some carefully bent metal, he should be able to burn and heal them even without magic, and of course, if he used magic to mark himself, it would be even easier.
“But what if it blocks Helades' magic and the reality knot doesn’t work?” he asked himself at one point. That one stray question was enough to push the whole idea aside. After all, what would be more ironic than trying to protect yourself from one form of death and permanently causing another? He’d feel like an absolute moron if he did that.
While the soul damage he’d suffered had affected his reincarnation for several attempts, the idea that protective measures would do the same thing was less certain. So, while he passed the time riding a couple of dozen miles every day, he started trying to come up with experiments to prove that, one way or the other. Those efforts became harder to focus on as he encountered more people.
Intellectually, he knew the way that people treated Whitecloaks. They didn’t talk about it, and certainly not in public, but they gave the knights a wide berth, and no reason to take offense. Simon had seen it countless times before, both in their service and when he encountered them in the wild.
Still, it was one thing to see it and another thing to feel it directed at him, and it left Simon uncertain of how to react. When he sighted a caravan from a distance, they needn’t do more than wave or offer him a few respectful words.
However, once he reached a main trade road and encountered looks of fearful respect on a regular basis, those interactions became much more frequent, and at least once a day, men would stop him to ask him a question or help him adjudicate some disagreement. Simon had expected to fight monsters and bad men, but before he drew his sword in anger for the first time, he’d been forced to decide a number of disputes ranging from the damages owed for a lamed horse to deciding on whether the name ‘Alyteya,’ for someone’s daughter, was auspicious or not.
Those interactions were complicated, but finding bad men wasn’t. Simon had spent a year amidst the Whitecloaks, without murder or magic, and even the worst of them glowed a light gray. That wasn’t so true in the wider world. He saw many people on the road who were polluted by shadowy auras. They weren’t the majority, but there were still enough of them that Simon could have made a full-time job of cutting them down if he’d been a zealot.
He refrained, saving interventions for those who had the blackest souls, and before he reached the first inn, he’d strung up three murderers. All of them denied it with their last breaths, but all of them would do it again if given the chance.
“Please have mercy on poor Tyrel!” one woman begged when Simon dragged him back to the group after he’d tried to run. “He wouldn’t harm a rabbit! He’s a gentle soul…”
“Maybe not a rabbit, but your sister?” he asked.
They both paled at that response, which told Simon he’d been right, but really, he’d been guessing. He could see that the man was a murderer, and that the murder had affected his wife in some important way, but whether she was a sister rather than a mother or a cousin was tenuous.
“He didn’t do anything to Mara!” she insisted. “She just disappeared one day! You can’t blame Tyrel for something that happened in the woods!”
Simon noted that the condemned man no longer argued his own innocence. So, after he’d hung the noose around the man’s neck and thrown the rope over the tree, Simon asked him, “How about it? One last chance to unburden your soul and give your wife the closure she deserves.”
These two were part of a larger group, but no one else tried to interfere. They were too afraid of what Simon might do to them. That didn’t stop Tyrel from looking around for a savior, but when he found none, he turned to his wife and said. “I didn’t do what he’s accusing me of, at least, not on purpose. I need you to know that I’m a good man—”
Simon had heard enough after good man, and with a flick of his reins, his horse yanked half a dozen feet of slack out of the rope, raising Tyrel two full feet off the ground and leaving him to sputter and choke. “I gave you a chance to confess to the one you loved,” Simon spat. “Not explain why what you did wasn’t your fault.”
While he didn’t have a legal code for which aura colors worked out to which crimes or anything, he was fairly certain that the soul of someone who slew men in honorable combat looked different than those who choked women to death in the woods. To her credit at least, his wife stopped screaming and started crying; when her husband was finally still, she turned to Simon and asked, “What did he mean by on purpose?”
“He meant that he’d done something terrible but wished he hadn’t,” Simon asked, resisting the impulse to comfort her any further before moving on to the rest of the group.
Simon lectured the men they’d been traveling with, outlining the man’s black deeds in the broadest strokes, before pointing out some of the lesser criminals among them and their individual misdeeds in a similar fashion. “It is not my place to punish drunkards, gamblers, or wife beaters,” Simon finished as he selected several men to dig Treyl’s roadside grave. “But if you do not mend your ways, and graduate to worse deeds, then I might just come for you next.”
That took hours, but by nightfall, he and the group were on their way once more, moving in opposite directions. In the past, he’d thought that the common reaction to the white cloaks had been the fact that they sometimes killed good people in suspicious circumstances. After that day, though, he could see how some people would hate him forever, even though he’d done nothing wrong, and there wasn’t an easy way that he could see to fix that.
Ch. 383 - Unintended Consequences
As strange as it was to be judge, jury, and executioner wherever he went, the way he was treated by inns and lords was nearly as strange. Sir Derinholt had certainly leaned on that hospitality wherever he went, so Simon was more than familiar with it. Nonetheless, he soon found himself annoyed with obsequious men seeking to barter worldly comforts for favor as if he could be bribed by such things. He would rather sleep in a ditch than turn a blind eye to any serious crimes.
Simon adjusted to the fear and obsequiousness that those around him alternated between as he made his way slowly south. In truth, he hadn’t felt this isolated since his first days in Ionar when they saw him as nothing but a mercenary and an outsider.
Simon didn’t struggle with loneliness, though, only with where he should draw the line. None of the other Unspoken he’d traveled with felt the need to intervene with villains at every interaction. Sir Derinholt certainly hadn’t; the man had only done so once in the months that Simon had traveled with him, and now three weeks into his journey, Simon had killed more men than monsters.
He didn’t feel especially good about that, even if they’d all been bad men. So, when he finally got the chance to hunt down some gnolls that had taken up residence in an abandoned copper mine, he jumped at it, leaving his horse in the care of an innkeeper before continuing on the hunt alone. While Simon thought it a little strange that no one had volunteered to join him, he could see by their swirling shades of suspicion that it was because several men of the village hoped he’d bit off more than he could chew before coming back.
Simon was able to disappoint them, but it took the better part of a week. Given the numbers involved, he had to thin the pack with a series of ambushes. Fortunately, as smart as the dog men were, they were too stupid to resist the smell of roasting meat, and each trap he baited in that way bagged a few more until he was able to assault the lair proper and purge the pups.
Simon spent some time inspecting those tunnels, well past the point where the dogmen had taken up residence. He’d hoped for a mystery to solve, but he found only half-drowned passages in the depths and tapped out veins, which was the natural end to most mines.
In the end, that adventure was only a side quest, but it helped the village see him as more than a hanging judge for at least a night or two, and he quickly moved on before that goodwill expired. The only reward he accepted for his troubles was a small book to use as a journal. The first thirty pages were filled with notes about the buying and selling of goods, but that left plenty of space for him to note what he’d done and when.
Normally, he would have used a mirror, but this was something he intended to give to whichever Master of the order quizzed him about his adventure upon his return. It would be easy to forget things in the course of a year, and he wanted to get the body count right. One thing he didn’t worry about yet, though, was looking for a boy who might make for a good squire. While he enjoyed his time spent teaching his own son, and even Niko, the idea that whoever he took on might be killed if he was found unworthy gnawed at Simon’s soul like a rat. The anxiousness was bad enough that even if he found the perfect boy, he’d probably still hesitate.
Fortunately, that wasn’t a problem he had to worry about right now. He just had to keep moving and keep looking for monsters, human-shaped or otherwise. This far south, there weren’t many goblins to speak of, and as he left the mountains and the forests behind him for the endless plains, settlements became fewer and farther between.
It was in Anywynn’s Hall, named for a building that no longer existed, where he was asked to adjudicate a murder that turned out to be the best news of the trip so far. His arrival was pure happenstance, and the man that they’d obviously planned on killing already wore a noose.
Still, when they asked Simon for input, he took one look at the man and said, “This man hasn’t killed anyone, in self-defense or otherwise. Cut him down.”
“How can you be sure?” the headman asked, obviously stunned by the news.
Would you like me to share with everyone how you spend your time with your neighbor’s wife to prove the point? Simon asked himself silently before deciding against the move. Instead, he said, “Bring me your witnesses, and we will see what falls out.”
Simon had only intended to stay the night before cutting east to see what the centaur clans were up to this time of year, but he had no problem staying longer. Saving a life instead of taking one would be a nice change of pace.
The answers came slower than he expected, but mostly because it turned out none of the witnesses was lying. At least, not on purpose. All of them saw what they saw, but it was obvious that none of them saw the truth. The matter was further complicated by the fact that the victim’s body had never been found.
“He was the last one to come back to the village that night,” one young man said, “And my sister was never seen again!”
“He had blood on his hands!” another man said. “How could it be anyone else?”
Amidst these shouted accusations and calls to hang the hunter anyway, Simon doubted himself, but only briefly. As the story came together, he decided there had to be more at play. After all, no one had seen Belger anywhere near the woman, and he was being truthful that his bloody hands were from the traps he’d checked. He had the pelts to prove that much. Still, there was the matter of a missing girl who’d gone out looking for a lamb but failed to return by dusk, or any day since.
Simon endured the people’s vitriol as he took the case apart before most of the village without result. Finally, he said to her brother, “Show me where it is you think she would have gone,” before admonishing the crowd, “And do not think to carry the sentence out before my return, or I will see those who did it hanged next.”
That answer satisfied no one, but he didn’t care. It had only been a couple of days since the girl’s disappearance, so the trail hadn’t gone completely cold. While there was a chance that he’d find tracks, he was more interested in trying to use her brother to tease fate into showing itself.
What connection could be more powerful than family, he thought as he tried to find the line that would connect him to her corpse, wherever it had ended up.
In the end, the young boy’s aura reached out to a pond not far outside the village. It was muddy enough that it might have hidden anything, but Simon was sure that was where her bones were, and it didn’t take much effort to find the culprit.
“I see,” Simon said, looking at the creature lurking beneath the water. “So that is what happened.”
“What is it?” the young boy asked. “What do you see? Is she in there?”
Simon ignored the question. “First, we will need a goat or a sheep. A sickly one will do. We’ll also need some oil to douse it in.”
The boy treated Simon as if he were confused, but he wasn’t. He was just determined not to use magic, and making fire was much harder when you had to do it the old-fashioned way.
When he returned to Anywynn’s Hall, Simon was given everything he’d asked for, though they treated him just as skeptically. When he returned to the pond an hour later with a well-oiled farm animal, a torch, and an audience, he let the doomed animal go to the water’s edge and slake its thirst while he watched what lurked beneath.
Simon waited there, as the ridicule around him rose, waiting for his pretty to take the bait. Then, when it surged forward, he pulled the aging goat back, forcing the slime to breach the surface to attach to its prey. Everyone except for Simon was surprised by that, but he merely secured the rope to his horse and used its strength to pull the amorphous, struggling predator further and further from the water while the goat screamed its last.
It was a vicious, ugly sight, but it had happened to Simon so long ago that he could scarcely remember what it had been like to suffocate while his skin melted off. Still, he felt bad for the goat, but it was better a dying old farm animal than the string of herders and hunters who would have inevitably fallen prey to it next.
When the two were hopelessly entangled, Simon set it alight with a touch from his torch, and the result was immediate. The slime was incapable of screaming in pain, for it had no mouth, but its skin crisped quicker than anyone might have expected, transforming from a translucent horror into an ashen one as the oil it had bathed in and consumed was, in turn, consumed by fire.
It was an ugly scene, but no uglier than the fact that these people had been about to murder an innocent man. As he stood there, Simon glanced from the smouldering slime to the hunter and back. The man’s aura was a muddy brown, and his loss would have been no great loss to the world, but even so, Simon was glad to see even a minor injustice undone.
It came with few apologies from anyone involved, even after Simon was forced to take off his armor and strip to the waist to retrieve the girl's bones from the bottom of the pond. He tried to get the girl’s brother to do it, but he was terrified to go into muddy water that had an invisible predator in it a moment ago, and Simon didn’t really blame him for that. No one else could see what he saw.
That night, he stayed at the headman’s house, since the village was too small for an inn, where he butchered a fat pig to celebrate Simon’s deed. It was a quiet, mournful celebration where they talked about anything but the events of the day, which suited Simon fine. He entertained his hosts with tales of other, more common monsters, and asked about the centaur clans, but they hadn’t been a problem this far west in some time.
“Some orcs were sighted last year, only a couple of days to the east,” the headman admitted. “Centaurs, though? I can’t imagine they’ll ever be a problem again in my lifetime.”
Simon looked at him and agreed. It wasn’t just to keep him from worrying, either. Though he knew there were some flare-ups of the four-legged menace in the coming decades, the real problems wouldn’t occur for forty and fifty years, and the headman would be dead and buried by then, so there was no use troubling him.
Even if the horselords weren’t a problem, though, he was sure something out there was. So, he’d find it and handle it so people like this could live their quiet little lives in peace.
Ch. 384 - A Force for Good
While the accused man Belger left the village of Anywynn’s Hall immediately, Simon stayed a few more days. This was as much because the headman’s wife had asked him to, as to try to help them get back on their feet in the wake of their tragedy.
“The shepherdess, Tara, she was a sweet girl, and the community will take it hard,” she told him the following morning while he ate after her husband had stepped out of their home to start the day. “They would take things a bit better if you… Well, if you were to stay a while.”
Simon sensed no ill intent from her, though he joked, “People don’t take heart in my presence,” while he finished his porridge. “But as long as they fear the monsters I fight more than me, I won’t take offense.”
“We’re a long way from Crowvar,” she finished, “And safety is hard to find. People appreciate it, and they appreciate you, even if they fear you too.”
That set Simon’s heart at ease, at least a little bit. He hadn’t known that he needed to hear those words until after he’d heard them.
While this time he felt temptation to linger, he decided to give it another three or four days. Not that he was very tempted. The place might have been lovely generations before, but now it was mostly shepherds living amidst the ruins of a better time.
Still, even these humble people had areas they feared not to tread, and Simon explored one barrow mound before pronouncing it clean, and purged another knoll den before he was on his way.
Anywynn’s Hall had no wealth to offer him, nor did he ask for any. Technically, he was supposed to bring tithes back with him when he returned to the Broken Tower; running a secret society was an expensive undertaking, and the Unspoken were firmly of the opinion that good deeds deserved to be rewarded. Simon didn’t care as much about that as he did about saving people.
What they did give him was gossip and hope, and he valued both of those things far more. It was good to see that even though no one had initially agreed with his determination, no one had challenged it, but it was better to know where his services might be put to use next. The town’s butcher told him that South Fork was having problems, though he didn’t know what kind, and the seamstress told him that merchants whispered the main road had been getting more dangerous all year.
They weren’t in the same direction, but Simon still hit them both up. South Fork was a small farming community that irrigated its land with the river they were named for. It would have been quite prosperous if the waters had been a few feet deeper, but as it was, no barge traffic, or even deep-drafted skiffs, would be getting through.
Simon showed up looking to fight, but all the locals had to offer him was watery soup and tales of woe. It wasn’t monsters that were making their life hard, but blight. They begged him to end the witchcraft that was causing it, which was ironic, because without magic, there was little that Simon could do to solve this problem.
Nonetheless, he went through the motions, and he used his sight to confirm that there was no magical cause. In the end, the best he could offer them was a command to burn the affected fields closest to the river. “If we do that, we’ll never have enough to pay the baron his taxes,” one of the farmers protested.
“You worry about your fields and your families,” Simon instructed them. “I’ll go to Crowvar and let the Baron know that witchcraft has crippled your lands for a season or two.”
That cheered them, but it obligated Simon to find a scapegoat to pin the whole thing on. That turned out to be a small group of bandits. They weren’t the worst men, but they were murderers, so after Simon separated their heads from their shoulders, he had no qualms about blackening their names further.
In his journal, he sketched their filthy hovel before he burned it down, and added a few unnatural symbols for effect. He claimed that because they were upriver of the affected town, their taint had spread south, and it would resolve itself.
That was a fine story, and he had no doubt that the masters of the Whitecloaks would believe it. The baron was another matter, and for him, Simon packed one of the heads in salt and brought it with him in case he needed a gory prop to drive the point home.
It took a week for Simon to cross the badlands to Crowvar, which was two days longer than he’d expected because he had to double back to avoid a centaur tribe moving through the region. Still, the trip was otherwise smooth.
When he reached the town, he was surprised at just how little had changed in decades. It was a little smaller, and the walls were in slightly better shape. This was most apparent in the graveyard, where he lingered for a few minutes to mourn a person who had never existed.
After that, he went into the walled town. No one attempted to stop him or even ask his business, which was the biggest contrast of any of his previous visits. Lord Raithewait’s men were bullies, but apparently that poor treatment didn’t extend to Whitecloaks.
Simon noted blood on the hands of several of the gate guards, but without further study, it would be hard to say whether that was shed because of their own desires or the baron’s, so for the moment, he ignored it and instead inquired about the city.
“All’s quiet this season,” the guard captain insisted. Simon didn’t know him, but he was just familiar enough that he wondered if he’d worked with one of the man’s descendants at one point.
Simon pressed him and asked about the problems with the trade road. Those he admitted to, but said, “The baron has hired mercenaries and put out bounties. Those roads will be set safe again before the year is out. Mark my words.”
He was lying, which Simon didn’t care for, so he made the man find him a copy of the posted bounties, if only because he’d been screwed out of similar rewards once in a previous life here. That amused him, in a dark sort of way, and it was only when he let it be known that he was here to see the baron that he was disappointed.
“I’m afraid our lordship is north with his family for another few weeks at least,” the guard said apologetically. “Kingdom business. I’m really not sure what it’s about.”
That tickled something in the back of his mind. Still it wasn’t until after he’d delivered a missive that explained South Fork’s troubles, and how they would not owe traditional taxes until the year after next, when they put him up at the local inn that he found the privacy to use a mirror. It was then that he got an answer.
Ah, this is where he befriends Lord Corwin, I think, Simon thought after poring quietly through his notes from that era. I do remember him mentioning that, or was it Lord Corwin who did?
The notes didn’t say who gave him the information, only that the two were friendly in their younger years. Simon couldn’t really say what it was that Baron Corwin saw in a cadaverous weasel like Lord Raithewait, but then he supposed most nobles were probably weasels.
“Beggers can’t be choosers, I suppose,” he mumbled to himself as one final detail caught his eye, and his stomach sank.
At some point, there had obviously been a Lady Raithewait. Neither of the baron’s wretched sons would have ever been born without one. She’d died shortly after the birth of their second child. For a long time, Simon had presumed that it was in childbirth or illness, but during his centaur campaign, he’d learned the truth. She’d been killed on the baron’s return trip from Leipzen, which was one of the many reasons he no longer traveled.
That means she either has, or will die soon, he reflected, trying to decide how he felt about that. On the one hand, this was the last family he owed any favors, but on the other… “Well, maybe Varten wouldn’t grow up to be such an enormous piece of shit if he had a mom in his life.”
Simon stewed on that question the rest of the night. Could he interfere? Absolutely. Should he? Of course. Would he? He didn’t know.
Still, as he sat in the common room and adjudicated on a few of the petty concerns of the locals, he went back and forth on the issue. The very thought disturbed his clarity more than the drinking he did that night, and he really had to concentrate to ensure that he separated the truth from the falsehood in each case.
In the morning, Simon left the city at first light, after checking with the gate to make sure they still hadn’t found the baron’s bounty schedule. While he enjoyed twisting that knife, it didn’t improve his mood, and as he rode off, he decided the best he could do was deal with the problems that had been reported on the trade road.
If that makes their trip home safer, then maybe it will do some good, he told himself.
Making the main roads safer was the right thing to do, and with no reports of witches in the area, it was certainly the best use of his time. That said, even after murdering Varten several times, he still couldn’t entirely forgive the man, even if he was a child at the present moment. That was wrong, and he knew it was wrong, but it was one thing to be done killing the man and another to want to save him and make his world a better place. He only had to remember all those horrid little scars he gave everyone in his life to be reminded what an irredeemable piece of shit he was.
Fortunately, all it took was an encounter with a merchant caravan that afternoon to make him forget about that horrid family entirely. They’d been waylaid by a particularly bad stretch of road and broke a wheel, so Simon spent the afternoon making sure no one thought to prey on sitting ducks until they changed it. After that, he accompanied them to the village of Sparel, where a shepherd boy showed him a box canyon frequented by centaurs.
Simon spent two days setting up a proper ambush, drilling the residents with slings and bows, which was downright nostalgic for him. Their trap only got four of the big bastards, but everyone was overjoyed with that, and it made for another fine note in his journal. In the grand scheme of things, four centaurs weren’t much, but it was enough to burn down a farm or kill a family, as he reminded the villagers.
The days and weeks that followed were similar. Simon found no ghosts, faeries, or witches, but he found lots of little problems that needed to be addressed as he went. He did eventually find a man that he suspected of having some kind of magic, though that was as much because of the way he practically fled the common room to escape Simon’s presence as anything else. While Simon was certainly curious after that sort of reaction, he let the man escape because his aura had been a very light gray, bordering on white. He clearly wasn’t hurting anyone if he had that sort of karma.
Simon’s own karma was doing quite well. Well, his experience points were at least. He was up to 274,599, which meant he’d been averaging seven or eight hundred a week this life, which was about double an average week. That seemed to be as much because of the good he was doing as the enjoyment he took from it. He planned to stay with the Unspoken at least a few more years before he moved on, and he wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he broke half a million before that point.
Will people start to treat me differently when I get to a million, or two million, he wondered? Barring another magical disaster, he didn’t expect his trend to change, which meant that he was going to be racking up another hundred thousand every two or three years. If it took him fifty years to beat the Pit, then three million wasn’t out of the question. It wasn’t a question he could answer, but it was one he thought about while riding between towns and monster dens.