Death After Death

For as long as he was moving quickly, Simon stayed on the trail. After that, he made his way up the slope, sticking to the largest rocks he could. Despite the fact that they’d fired two volleys, and he’d made a big show of being hit once, they still waited an awful long time before they started to fan out and descend down the slope.

They definitely know they should be afraid of me, he said, repeating his earlier assertion now that he saw more evidence.

Once they were moving, he stopped moving and waited for the nearest man to come toward him. He’d planned to draw his blades immediately, but instead, he found himself studying the man’s armor. It was irregular enough to make him a mercenary, but there were enough pieces of leftover Ionian kit, including a well-blackened breastplate, to mark him as a former soldier.

His features, too, were Ionian rather than Murian, which he’d honestly expected. A bunch of army veterans? He wondered to himself as he waited for the man to pass by his nearly invisible shadowy form. I wonder which general it was I pissed off.

No sooner did the man move past him than Simon pulled his sword and swung it with both his hands at the back of the man’s neck. He had just enough time to turn at the sound of metal scraping on leather but not nearly time to dodge before Simon shattered his cervical vertebrae and dropped him like a sack of potatoes before he could make a sound.

The group’s line was diffuse and continued on without him, but for a moment, Simon ignored them. Instead, he pulled out his skull-marked dagger and embedded it in the man’s throat, just above his collarbone, seeking to drain the last few drops of his life. This was going to be ugly, and if there was ever a time when he needed to feel a little younger and more energetic again, it was this.

Simon held his blade there for the length of ten heartbeats until he felt the flow stop. That was enough for the rush to fill him. Though part of his mind said that he shouldn’t do this with everybody, another part of him hungered for it. Even with the metal as a filter of sorts, drinking in so much pure human life energy was far and away better than bleeding goats or slaughtering goat men.

It was a pleasure he’d denied himself for decades, and now he craved it. In the short term, though, the only way to push that craving away was bloodlust. He approached the second man more cautiously, but now there was a certain looseness in his steps that hadn’t been there in a long time, and Simon was slitting the second man’s throat before he knew he was in trouble.

As his dagger drank deep a second time, he regretted not doing this more often. He might have only drained six months of life from the first man and three months from the second, but at the moment, the intensity of it was enough to make him feel like a man of half his age, and with a burst of speed he no longer thought himself capable of, he raced toward the next target.

Simon took out four of them and was almost on the fifth before someone shouted, “It’s not him. Bastard got away!”

That warning was all it took for the fifth man to see the shadow of death approaching for him. He didn’t get to shout in alarm before Simon took his head clean off, but he did get to parry twice. Once high and once low. Each of those blows rang through the empty night like a bell.

“He’s out there!” someone shouted. “He took out Leo. God’s Above, Leo and Philip both!”

They were on alert now, but Simon didn’t care. He heard a few crossbow bolts ricochet somewhere behind him to both his left and his right. They had no idea where he was. They were just firing blind.

Even worse for them, he decided, was that he was having a great time. He bolted toward the next one, only detouring to weave to the right enough to kick up a spray of scree before weaving back to the left. The result was that his sixth opponent was facing entirely the wrong way when Simon kicked the back of his legs, dropping the mercenary to his knees long enough for Simon to plunge his sword down through his collarbone and cleave the man’s heart in two.

This time, he didn’t use his dagger to drink the man’s life force. He was already buzzing with energy. Maybe even with too much energy. He would regret the way he was using his vampiric blade when this was done. He’d promise himself that he’d never use it again, but that wasn’t quite true.

The truth was that he’d never use it again unless someone deserved it. Murder was wrong. Even murdering bandits and drunks was wrong. Murdering people like the Unspoken might even be wrong in some circumstances; they might be awful, but at least they meant well in theory. In their minds, they were trying to save the world.

As he considered this, he ran toward the seventh man, even as he was running away from Simon. He wasn’t running away from him specifically, of course. He couldn’t see Simon. He was running to get into formation.

Assassins armed with poison and a plan that was trying to get him alone so they could take him out without ever having to risk their own necks? Their lives were forfeit. He hadn’t been this angry since he’d nailed Varten’s father to a door with a crossbow of his own.

Simon hadn’t hurt anyone in years. He hadn’t killed a human since the bandits had tried to interrupt his time spent teaching Bertrand to make art. He was retired now. He taught kids how to read, and someone had hired these pricks to take him out and steal the rest of the time he might have shared with his son?

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“Monstrous,” he spat as he shoved his sword through the man’s back, sending him troubling down the slope.

There were four left now, and part of Simon wished he could take prisoners for questioning, but given the power of magic, he knew that would be a fatal mistake. A talented warlockcould make his head explode with a word.

Well, that’s probably a bit extreme, he decided. If they could have done that, they would have skipped the crossbows.

That thought put prisoners back on the table, but he still decided that it was best not to risk it. Truthfully, he didn’t know if that was because he just wanted to kill them or not. He supposed it didn’t really matter, not after one of them cast a fire spell, sending a gout of flame arcing out into the darkness.

The four of them stood in a circle now, shoulder to shoulder, practically daring him to try all four of them at once. It was a bad bet. Even as energized as he was at the moment, he knew he had trouble taking on three men on a good day as he was these days.

“Tell me who put you up to this!” he yelled out as he ducked behind a boulder, in case a bolt of force lashed out at where his voice had been.

“He’s here!” the youngest of the four called. “Ennis will—”

“Show some spine,” the older man growled, silencing the junior soldier before shouting. “Nothing personal. We were hired for a job, and clearly, we bit off a bit more than we could chew.”

Simon let the silence reign for a moment, trying to decide which spell he should kill them with and if he should do it one at a time or separately when the man that seemed to be the leader spoke again. “I’ve got some information, and I’d happily trade it for our lives.”

There were some tense whispers then between the leader and the mage. At least Simon was pretty sure it was between those two. It was too far away for him to say for sure.

“I can’t say I trust those that use magic so flagrantly,” Simon called back, moving slightly after speaking again.

“You know, I can’t say I blame you,” the man he’d been talking to said right before he drew his sword and put it through the neck of the mage, leaving him to fall to his knees and choke on his own blood. His hands were now free, and he held them up in a gesture of surrender. With a word, his two remaining men did likewise. “What say we talk like men, then, and I can tell you exactly what happens—”

He never finished talking. The mage had been silenced and killed, but death did not come soon enough, or perhaps it did, and what happened next was triggered by his death. Simon couldn’t say. Either way, the ground around the three remaining men erupted in a vicious firestorm, and when it was done, everyone was dead.

“And that is why you don’t try to take prisoners,” Simon told himself.

After that, he didn’t even really want to approach the bodies. He just sat there for a long time, running the scene over and over again in his head. Eventually, his spells wore off, and sometime after that, when his stolen energy started to fade, he went to retrieve his sword.

He tried to think of a way that he should have handled this differently or better, but really, he couldn’t. He decided to wait for dawn to investigate the corpse of the mage and instead busied himself with the corpses he’d killed earlier that night.

He found gold in every man’s pouch, which was unusual. However, the fact that it was neither Ionian, Brinish, nor any other kingdom he recognized almost certainly meant that it was Murani, which told him any number of things at that moment, and all of them were terrible.

Although he searched the last bodies once the sun was up, he found no smoking guns. In fact, he became more certain than ever that the magic that had tied up loose ends so neatly was triggered by the mage’s death precisely because of how little evidence was left behind. He eventually found the mage’s amulet, but the forces it had channeled were a charred ruin, and it offered no clues about how it worked.

Simon walked back to Ionar that morning, a day earlier than planned. Even though he found no trouble at any of the little villages he went back through on his way to the palace, he stayed ever vigilant, going so far as to buy a Shepherd’s colorful wool poncho to look less like himself.

Just because he’d survive one assassination attempt didn’t mean he’d survive another. The whole way back, he worried about who else might have been killed, and he feared for the lives of both Seyom and Elthena. Ultimately, though, those fears were unfounded, and he found the palace little changed from how he’d left it.

Seyom laughed at Simon’s ridiculous outfit, but when he saw the storm clouds in his expression, he quickly stopped laughing. Simon didn’t tell him anything, of course. Only that “my outing was a bit more exhausting than I was expecting, that’s all.”

Once he was shooed from the room, he laid out to the Queen what had happened to him. He told her a bit of a toned-down version, of course, because she would have to tell it to other people who didn’t know what he was capable of. Still, her horror grew with every word, especially after he told her of the mage that had self-destructed and showed her the coins his thugs had been paid in.

“This will be war!” she swore.

Simon sighed at that. He needed to lay down. Now that the emergency was over, he could feel the cravings for more life force crawling under his skin like ants. He needed a week to himself just to zen this shit out of his system. He wasn’t going to get it, though, not with everything that was happening.

On the plus side, now, I’m definitely a year or two younger than I was before all this bullshit, he thought, trying to find some way to tamp down all the emotions that were threatening to boil over inside of him.

“It probably already is war, truthfully,” he replied, “Even though I wish it wasn’t. If I had died, they would certainly have used my lack of council to convince you to join the winning side, but if that is impossible, then a surprise attack somewhere on the northern border is probably only a matter of time.”

“Why would the Murani want to fight us anyway,” she answered with a shake of her head. “We’ve done nothing to them.”

“Ionar is just territory to be conquered,” Simon explained, “And in this case, the territory is particularly valuable because it allows them to outflank their opponent via a dozen different passes. Brin holds the line because it is so narrow, but if they had to defend everywhere at once, they would surely fall.”