Death After Death PLUS 324-326

Ch. 324 - A Long Winter

A few weeks after his trial by combat, the snows started in earnest. Up until now, every day had been getting drearier and grayer as the temperatures fell, but soon, the scattered flurries were replaced with sustained storms that would often fill up the streets of the capital with drifts that measured several feet high. 

In Ordanvale, the winter wouldn’t have even started for another month, and in Brin proper, it might have been a few weeks later than that, but he was in the high mountains now, and warmth was as fleeting in the weather as it was in the people. 

None of that bothered Simon once he bought enough firewood to light all four hearths and patched the holes in the walls and ceiling where the heat was leaking from. After all of that hard work was done, he was looking forward to bundling up for the winter and studying a few of his projects. Unfortunately, that was the same time that the white fever broke out among the residents of the capital. 

While not as wretched as some of the plagues he’d seen, it was still nasty stuff. Those who were afflicted by it suffered high fevers, pale skin, and distant, milky gaze as if they were halfway to blindness. 

Apparently, it wasn’t uncommon, though this year was worse than most. He hadn’t dealt with it before but had the chance to study it up close when Kayla fell ill. Then, after seeing how hard she struggled to work through it, he decided that he should probably try to help the other residents of the city. 

Adonan had not been kind to him, but he was not feeling vengeful about it. Instead, he started with the smallest clans, going door to door and offering his services as a healer. The most common reaction was to slam the door in his face or undisguised skepticism. “What expertise does a sellsword have with herbs,” the matron of clan Kerrara demanded. 

It was certainly a reasonable question, but fortunately, he had an old lie already prepared that came to his lips so smoothly that it was practically the truth by now. “When you get wounded as many times as I have on the battlefield, you learn how to fight a great many maladies.”

Only some he was allowed to help. Unfortunately, those were often the people who were truly desperate and in need of a miracle. Fortunately, Simon was good at those. While he prescribed rose hip tea, a cold compress, and bedrest, as well as a cessation of all bloodletting, the real heavy lifting was done by whispered words of curing in those dire cases. 

All of that advice was good advice, of course, and would be of genuine help to anyone who was afflicted, but most of those he was allowed to see at first would not have survived without magic. It frustrated him that he had to lean so much on those powers for the first time in years, and he knew this would set back his attempts at regaining clarity, but he wasn’t about to let people die when he could save them. Given that this fever tended to affect the young far more than the old, the idea of doing nothing when he had the power to save so many innocents struck him as barbaric. 

Unfortunately, his methods worked too well. When word of his miracle cures got out to the wider public, there was a run on all of the herbs he’d recommended people buy. While the city was well stocked on all of the beer, smoked meat, grain, and other sundries to survive the long, brutal winter, some of the herbs that Simon recommended weren’t considered important up to this point and were exhausted by hoarding almost immediately. 

Worse, no one wanted to leave the city until the worst of the winter storms were over. This forced him to brave the main road on snow shoes to lower elevations for a few days to look for more. “It’s too dangerous now,” even Eddek insisted as Simon made preparations to descend the mountain. “After midwinter, the worst of the storms will be over. Then the larger clans sometimes send small caravans with sledges for urgent needs like this.”

“By midwinter, it will be too late,” Simon answered, shaking his head. “Those that are bedridden have days, or perhaps weeks, but not months left in them. I will do it because it must be done.”

“Well, if you can make it, then I can too,” the boy said, doing himself some credit, even though Simon knew he would surely perish without magic and endurance.

Still, Simon went anyway, and he traveled light. Despite the fact that Eddek wanted to go with him, Simon went alone, taking only snow shoes, his weapons, a bearskin that had been sewn into a sleeping bag, and a couple of rune tablets that he spent a few nights carving along with the heaviest winter garments he could find for sale.  

These last objects were simple things that converted cold into heat. They were basically the opposite of the orb he’d thrown into the volcano a few months ago, but for his purpose, it was all he needed. He put one in each boot and one in each glove, and each night when he went to bed, he would toss them in his sleeping bag to keep from dying of hypothermia since keeping a campfire lit would be difficult. 

There was one benefit to the terrible weather, though, and that was that it kept the slopes blessedly free of monsters. He barely even saw a goblin track on his whole trip, and though Simon was told that there were huge furry ogres in this part of the world, he found no evidence of them.

The weather was miserable, but so was the hospitality of the clanholds he received along the way. Even with a letter from Eddek explaining his mission of mercy and asking for help on behalf of his clan, the mountain people did little more than let him sleep on their floors. 

That only annoyed Simon on the way down the mountain. Once he reached elevations where he could harvest what he needed and returned to find those same doors slammed in his face a second time, he became truly angry. What’s the point of trying to help people who don’t want to be helped?

He’d spent days harvesting rose hips, pale moss, and half a dozen other helpful herbs one could find this time of year on skeletal branches and under leaf litter. There were slim pickings, but he could only carry so much in his pack, and eventually, he filled it enough to justify the trip. 

There was one night, on his way back into the mountains in the midst of a blizzard, he really considered giving up after being turned away from a clanhold because Eddek’s note said ‘his trip down the mountain,’ and they considered that legalism enough to deny his request for hospitality. He was braving frigid conditions for other people and could have easily burned down every building in that wretched crag, and they still treated him this way? It pained his soul in a way that showed him just how much work he had yet to do on his patience.

Still, when he returned to the city, his welcome was much warmer than it had been on the road. There, he might be an outsider, but he was a helpful one, and the mere fact that he’d gone out in such lethal conditions when everyone else had insisted it was far too dangerous had bought him some credibility, and he was grateful for that. He’d come too late to save some of the dying he’d left behind. He regretted that and castigated himself for it even if he’d helped hundreds more. 

You can’t always rely on magic, he told himself. It’s a powerful crutch, but a crutch just the same!

Still, the idea wouldn’t leave him, and after the worst of the plague subsided, inspiration finally struck. He cursed himself. As usual, he’d been thinking too small. If he could make talismans of heat and divining rods, he could certainly make a curative talisman. He’d practically thought of it not so long ago when he wondered what a healing stone might look like or how it might be powered, and the answer, unsurprisingly, was any way he wanted as long as he traced the runes correctly. 

His first impulse was to create something that drew life force directly to heal or cure, but he decided against it because it didn’t seem wise to weaken a patient when you were trying to strengthen them. Likewise, cold was a bad choice because it would only be available for a few months of the year.

“Light’s off the table, too,” he mumbled as he remembered how dim it had made the sunlight in a previous experiment. “They’d definitely say it was cursed then, no matter what good it did.”

In the end, Simon decided he pretty much had to go with fire. Something that used Dnarth Meiren to channel distant fires to heal the sick. It seemed safe enough to experiment with, and if it worked, all he’d have to do was build a bonfire nearby and then move it from patient to patient’s chest, letting the magic do its work. In the end, he had to use Delzam in several places in the complex runes he drew up as well, both as curing and as order. 

While it only took days to come up with the original idea, it took weeks to refine it to something he might fit on a small object and actually carve the thing. It was simple enough, and the runic circuit, once completed, roughly translated to ‘use nearby heat to fuel healing and curing to bring the user back to their normal condition slowly.’ 

It wasn’t the most complicated rune he’d ever designed. The switch system he’d built into his sword to use multiple effects as needed was much more difficult; the problem here was size. A sword had all the surface area in the world to etch runes, and when the gaps in steel were backfilled with silver, only a well-trained eye would notice a difference. 

In this case, though, Simon had to use jewelry engraving tools to carve fine lines in an amulet he’d made to resemble the holy symbol of a local deity. The front was a sunburst embossed with the hands of friendship, and the back contained the necessary runic circuitry. By the time the spring thaw came, he was ready to test it, and he got good results, too. Though he tried it on himself first to make sure it wouldn’t cause the patient to burst into flames or anything, eventually, he tried it with others who came to him asking for help now that word had gotten around that he was a healer. 

Though Simon was careful not to overdo it and be called a miracle worker, there was no doubt about it; his ‘prayers’ were every bit as effective as his healing spells had been, even if they were much slower because he used lesser words. 

Ch. 325 - Always an Outsider

Despite the inroads Simon made with the people of lesser clans and the sick and desperate, it did little to improve his standing in the wider society of Adonan. It certainly did him no favors with Eddek’s father when the man finally arrived in the city after the spring thaw. That was a little frustrating, but the worst part was having to redo all the names in his head. Suddenly, Eddek was no longer Eddek because there were now several Eddeks, including the Karl and several others. 

Now, he was Eddek Farel, or more commonly, Erben, neither of which Simon cared for. In mixed company, he addressed him by his title, but in his mind, the backward names were something he’d never really get used to, and he called the kid by his surname as he’d done up until now whenever they were alone. 

None of that mattered compared to the Karl’s presence, though. While he praised his son for surviving his perilous encounter with the owlbear and the work he’d done to rehabilitate their clan’s hall in the capital, he had nothing but disapproval for Simon. While he thanked him for saving his son’s life, he offered him no reward for it. 

“I’d planned to,” he said, “I am grateful that you saved my son's life, but those gifts will have to go toward Himar now in an attempt to salvage our relationship after the stunt you pulled.”

Simon’s days were numbered there after that. The Karl didn’t dismiss Simon immediately, but he and his son argued loudly in private for three nights running before the boy was forced to do it. 

“My father insists,” he pleaded, as he apologized to Simon more than he commanded him. “It’s the price of making peace with some of the clans that your actions have alienated.”

“How can you be sure they won’t retaliate when I’m gone?” Simon asked. He wasn’t angry. He was just curious if his young charge had thought this through after all their discussions on strategy and the law.

“It’s possible,” he admitted. “I told my father as much, but he feels the risk of keeping you in our service greatly outweighs the risks of letting you go.”

Simon nodded. He was forced to agree with that logic. While he didn’t fear any man, he could see why the Karl did. Truthfully, this isn’t how Simon had wanted things to go at all. He’d wanted to get to know the man and better understand the problems at their clanhold next, but the way things were now, he didn’t think that was very likely. 

Still, he didn’t try to force the issue and accepted his young friend’s judgment; he would not try to pit father against son. That was simply too cruel. When word got out that he was leaving soon, though, Kayla seemed to be the most affected. Whereas Simon and Eddek had developed more of a student-teacher association, the girl viewed him almost as a surrogate father, and he could hardly blame her. Not only did he save her life, but he also doted on her whenever he had the chance. 

Simon considered it an effort to make her the sort of person who would never work together with warlocks to massacre innocents, but she didn’t know that. She just loved the attention. So, she was heartbroken by the news. 

“What will you do now?” she asked. 

“That’s a good question,” Simon answered. Truthfully, he hadn’t decided. He’d planned on spending a couple more years here. At the very least, he’d planned to make sure that Eddek graduated from the academy he attended happy and healthy. 

After that, he should probably go back to the bridge and see if the portal to the troll still worked and take care of that. If that wasn’t an option, he had some ideas about spending a few years in Liepzen, the capital of Brin, to learn a bit more about their political fault lines. 

However, rather than tell Kayla any of that or express uncertainty, he merely said, “I’ll find somewhere else to stay for a while, I think before I leave Adonan.”

“Really?” the girl asked, as her eyes lit up.

“Why not. At least through the summer,” Simon offered. “I stayed here all winter. I might as well get to see what the mountains look like when it’s nice out.”

“Well, if you’re going to start a new household, you’ll need a servant or two…” she hinted. The implication was very clear, and Simon politely but firmly turned her down. While he wanted to be there for her and Eddek both, the last thing he needed was this blossoming into a juvenile crush. 

Simon stayed there in Eddek’s clanhall for another week before he arranged for alternative lodgings. Despite all of his good works when the white fever was raging, not many were willing to take him in. In the end, he was forced to go to clan Aldor, a minor family that already hated the Himar and were hated by them in turn. 

They wouldn’t accept money for that service, either. Instead, they required him to go on a little monster hunt for an ogre that was troubling one of their clanholds. 

“If that’s too much trouble for an outlander, then perhaps you weren’t meant to stay here anyway,” Erben Aldor told him with a smirk on his face when they were discussing terms.

“Who’d be afraid of a mere ogre?” Simon answered after draining and slamming down his drinking horn. “You just tell me where its lair is and what proof you want that the deed is done, and I’ll have it for you within a fortnight.”

In the end, they agreed on decent enough terms, and Simon left the city with most of his things, along with a writ that would guarantee him reentry and hospitality anywhere within valleys controlled by clan Aldor. It wasn’t the adventure he’d expected to take, and the nights were still a bit chill, but he had magic for dealing with that. The bigger problem was that the monsters of the region were no longer stuck in their lairs waiting for spring. 

In any other life and any other place, he would have simply slept in the wild and fought what came, but the nights here were too dangerous for that, and he had to move between the clanholds judiciously. Sometimes, he even had to help in their defense. Once, that meant fighting off a pack of goblins that had managed to claw their way into a large dairy barn, and another time, that meant hunting down an actual werewolf. 

While the former task was trivial, the latter task was made dangerous only by not knowing which member of the community was so afflicted while he was at the Lake Grinell Clanhold. “I’m just here for the night before I go off to fight an ogre,” Simon told the community when they asked for his help. 

He only said that because of how rude they’d been to him at first, though. He was happy to help, and after he made a big show of looking for clues as to who it might be, he used his diving rod to find the culprit. 

That was a frustrating experience; the thing didn’t detect werewolves at all on his first few attempts because, he realized, the creature didn’t actually exist during daylight hours. When he looked for someone bearing the curse of lycanthropy instead, though, he found them quickly enough. 

The gruff wood cutter denied everything at first. He even threatened Simon with an axe, but when the man couldn’t so much as hold a silver coin without pain, he finally admitted it. “I don’t want to hurt anyone. It’s not my fault I have this curse!”

He proceeded to give Simon a litany of excuses and justifications, but it changed nothing. “I don’t doubt any of that,” Simon agreed, “But you’re still a terrible danger to your community. You might not have killed anyone yet, but you will.”

“Please don't tell anyone. They’ll kill me!” the woodsman pleaded. “I’ll flee… I’ll go into exile… I’ll”

Kill people wherever you go, Simon thought. 

He didn’t say that, though. It was clear that he was already panicked enough. Instead, he said, “You won’t go anywhere. We will cure you here and now or kill you to put you out of everyone’s misery. There is no third option.”

“But there is no cure,” the woodsman protested. “Perhaps witchcraft, but that’s a cure that’s worse than the disease.”

Simon nodded in feigned agreement. “I would never resort to such dark magics,” he lied. “Still, I think with the right herbs and prayer, we can remove this curse from you.”

The prayer was a lie, of course. It would just be an excuse to lay his holy symbol-shaped medallion on the man for hours at a time. The herbs were a different story. Simon could have gone for something that would boost his immune system, but instead, he chose purgative herbs that left his patient as sick as a dog for their week together. That wasn’t because he enjoyed making the man suffer, though. It was because he knew that he wasn’t ready to accept the idea that he could be healed and that for such a miracle to happen, it would require a great deal of suffering. 

He even made sure to do a similar, though less awful, version of this ritual with a few other villagers, including the chief’s prime suspects, just to make sure that no one would be pilloried when this was all done. That was cruel, too, but given how xenophobic these people were, it was entirely necessary. Those who wouldn’t cooperate and insisted they weren’t werewolves were compelled to do so by their own leaders.

For so long, I hated the way the few grimoires I found hid real magic beneath pointless rituals and infantile prayers, and now here I am, doing the same thing, Simon thought, chastizing himself as he went through the process. 

While he would have loved to take a more measured approach and level with the guy like a doctor might, that was impossible. Instead, he made the man vomit and sweat for five days and nights leading up to the next full moon. It was the cruelest kindness that Simon had ever done, but the bonfires powered the magic of his amulet, and that amulet stripped the curse as well as any other ailments that the woodcutter's body had. By the time the full moon rose, Simon had not just cured his lycanthropy; he’d cured his vision and his arthritis as well. 

“It’s a miracle,” the woodcutter breathed, gazing at the full moon in the sky for the first time in more than a year without transforming. “I didn’t think such things were possible.”

“Through the divine, all things are possible,” Simon answered, spouting a platitude that seemed appropriate. 

Two nights after the full moon, the elders of the clanhold agreed that the problem had been dealt with. For his good deed, he was given no parade or even a feast; because he refused to tell the clanhold’s leader who the werewolf had been, he wasn’t even given a reward. 

“You might have merely scared it off with your rituals,” the headman said. “Who can say if it will return?”

While that was true, the point was to cheat Simon, not to be cautious. Still, he didn’t let that bother him; he would have done the same thing for nothing at all. In this case, the good was its own reward. 

“Well, the next time you face a problem, do not send for me,” he answered with a shrug. “You will clearly deserve whatever retribution is due an honorless host.”

“You take that back,” the headman growled, but Simon merely smiled. 

“If you take issue with my words, then challenge me to a duel for them, as is your right, or take it up with your Karl,” Simon countered. “I’m on his business with this ogre hunt, not yours.”

The man did nothing but spout insults as Simon left the hall and the hold. Really, though, Simon hadn’t expected anything else.

Ch. 326 - Big Game

With his five-day trek already extended to almost two weeks, Simon wasn’t exactly in any hurry, but when he saw the signs of the devastation that the ogre he was hunting had left in its wake, he slowed down even more out of pure caution. Although there was no damage to any of the buildings, Simon spotted whole trees toppled and animal pens shattered on the way here; something big had done all of that.

The clanhold of Baleger Pass, didn’t seem to mind his intervention in the slightest, though. They seemed grateful that anyone had come. They were the first people since the sickness ended who were honestly grateful to see him, which showed their desperation more than anything. No one was ever glad to see Simon in this part of the world unless things were truly dire. 

They even held a feast in his honor, where he learned he was the third would-be hero to take down this monster. He supposed that should have scared him, but it didn’t. Unless it could rip the soul out of his body or condemn him to a miserable, undead existence, he really wasn’t afraid of much anymore. 

When he was asked if he really thought he could defeat it, Simon answered honestly, perhaps too honestly, considering how much they’d drunk up until now. “This wouldn’t be the first ogre I’ve slain.”

That brought looks of doubt and whispers, so he quickly added. “Although I should say that I caught the last one coming out of his lair and levered a boulder right onto his thick skull.”

That made everyone laugh. It wasn’t an honorable fight, but it was a believable one. 

“Do you intend to do the same thing this time?” a young man asked hopefully. 

“Maybe,” Simon answered, holding up his horn for another beer. “We shall see what I find when I get there. Every beast is… well, there’s a lot of factors involved.”

It was a lie, but it sounded good, and when he used it to switch over to talk of smoking out goblins or laying in ambush for centaurs, no one complained. None of his strategies were particularly clever, but all of them were effective. Really, though, he could have just struck the ogre’s head from its shoulders with a word of force. He could have cleaved it in two with a word of greater force. That would certainly have been the safe, sane thing to do. 

You’ve never killed an ogre without heavy magic, he reminded himself. While he’d killed two, both had died to words of greater earth, not his blade, and killing one without casting a spell would be challenging, yet he was determined to do it. 

If you want to go the Unspoken route, you can just turn a banner into a garrote wire, he reminded himself that night as he lay drunk in bed. If it works on dragons, it will work on ogres. That wasn’t good enough for him, though. While he certainly planned to use his magic sword and shield, he wanted to see what he was capable of and if he was going to die doing something stupid… well, he’d had a pretty good run so far. 

Simon stayed in the clanhold the following day to review maps of the area, as well as any other hazards. Then, on his second day there, he awoke at dawn and went into the craggy slopes that held the ogre’s lair. The villagers didn’t know exactly where it was, exactly, but he did. Once he’d gotten all the relevant information and copied as many of their maps as he could into something that was close to accuracy, he’d spent half an hour with a pendulum to find it. 

The cave he was looking for was on the lee slope of a granite escarpment almost eight miles from the clanhold. That was the only reason it largely attacked their herds more than the buildings or the people themselves; it was just close enough to be a nuisance but still too far away to be a menace. It was also just far enough away that Simon would have trouble getting back before dark.

“That’s okay,” he grunted as he marched up a scree-covered slope. “If I kill the bastard, then I’ll just crash at his place for the night.” 

While the idea of sleeping in a stinking cesspit like an ogre lair was unappealing, at least it would keep all the lesser monsters at bay. They knew better than to become a snack for an eating machine like a twelve-foot-tall ogre.

As he went, the damage became easier to spot. Eventually, he decided that he’d spent too much time preparing to find it. It turned out he didn’t need magic or even maps. “A blind man could follow these tracks,” Simon muttered. 

Still, too much preparation was better than not enough, and his caution was rewarded when he crossed paths with the thing hours earlier than he’d expected. He froze then, as still as the scraggly pine trees on either side of him as the thing looked around absent-mindedly before moving on. It wasn’t fear that Simon was filled with, though; it was interest. The thing had just reached into a tall cottonwood, ripped off a branch, and eaten a beehive, bees and all, in a single sloppy motion.

Well, that’s a new one on me, he thought as he watched the lumbering giant move away from him. 

Simon didn’t follow it, then. Being out in the open would give it too much of an advantage. Instead, he followed its path back the way it had come and eventually reached its lair. 

The first thing he did there was check for any easy way to drop a giant boulder on the thing, but he wasn’t that lucky. There wasn’t even any good place above the cavern entrance for him to hide and ambush the monster, which was a shame. That had been his main plan; leap from somewhere high up onto its skull and give it a heavy-duty lobotomy. 

Instead, he pulled out a torch, lit it, and descended into the darkness and the stench of the ogre’s lair. It was spacious, at least, and Simons's light didn’t quite reach both walls at the same time. It was also shallower than he'd been expecting. It was little more than a deep overhang with a slight curve at the end, which wasn’t ideal for his backup plan. 

“What I wouldn’t give for an amplify light spell,” he muttered as he looked around the room for a better plan. The spells were only a word or two away, but he refused to use them. Instead, he happened upon a new plan. “Time to go goblin mode, I guess.”

Simon spent the next half gathering firewood and building a small fire in the heart of the ogre’s cave. The smoke covered up the worst of the stench and made it a little difficult to breathe, but he lingered just inside the mouth behind some rocks and waited for the beast to return. All this time, his plans had revolved around the idea of getting above it and attacking the brain or the spine; it was ironic that he was going to have to do the opposite. 

Simon had to stoke the fire of his bait twice because the ogre didn’t return until close to sunset, dragging a half-eaten elk in one hand. When it arrived, though, and saw fire in its cave, it abandoned its dinner and charged forward, which is exactly what Simon had hoped for. 

The thing had only just lumbered past the rock he was hiding behind when Simon sprung out with his sword. He’d planned on hamstringing the monster, but with the razor edge of his magical sword, he cut almost halfway through the ankle without much effort.  

He’d planned on taking out the thing’s second ankle, too, but it reacted too fast and spun around, swinging a head-sized fist at his skull as it roared in pain. I thought I’d have a few seconds, at least! Simon’s mind protested as he moved to get distance. 

He lurched away at the move, but even so, he only barely avoided being decapitated, and when the thing’s leg went out from under it after three steps, he came within feet of being crushed to death by the ogre’s treetrunk-sized arm. When that happened, he paused right there in front of the thing’s three-foot-high skull and whirled around, impaling it through the left eye and lodging several feet of fine steel in the ogre’s brain. 

That should have killed it. That should have been enough to kill any opponent with a pulse, but the way it was moving its arms, it was clear it was about to squash him like an insect. So, Simon grabbed the thing’s lank, greasy hair and climbed over the top of its skull in a desperate bid to escape. 

I clearly did not think this through, he chastised himself as he moved as quickly as possible. He tried to think of what else he might do now that he was down a sword, but he needn’t have bothered. Before he got halfway down its back and ran for safety, it was over. The clumsy monsters had struck his sword hilt, thoroughly scrambling its brains. 

It shuddered and shook for several minutes, and even after it stopped moving, Simon waited for several more before he retrieved his gore-streaked blade. He’d brought down the thing, and the last thing he wanted to do was die because of a post-mortem muscle spasm.  

The night, the worst part of the ordeal turned out to be the filth-strewn lair. Simon kept a fire burning near the mouth of the cave to ward off anything dangerous, but he still felt disgusting. 

“The first thing I’m doing when I get back to Baleger Pass is taking a hot bath,” he told himself as he curled up in his bedroll. 

He went to bed that night feeling apathy, or perhaps even disappointment, instead of pride. I won, but I very nearly didn’t, twice, he told himself as he drifted off to sleep. When did I start relying so much on magic to win my fights for me?

In the morning, he left the cave behind, sure that his sense of smell would never recover. He noted that the carcass was where he’d left it in the entrance and that it already bore the marks of many types of scavengers. Right now, it's the better part of a ton of meat, but in a couple of weeks nothing but bones will remain. 

To provide evidence that the deed was done, he hacked off one of the creature’s giant sausage-sized fingers and brought it back to the clanhold. There, he presented it to a cheering crowd that became excited as soon as they saw he was returning alive.

Simon spent the next three days more or less drunk, as he was shown not just hospitality but gratitude for the first time on this level. He was forced to retell the battle at every meal, and he turned down several marriage proposals, as well as an offer to stay and help them slay other troublesome beasts in the area. 

“There’s a griffon that comes down from the peaks almost every month to take another cow!” the headman complained. 

Simon politely declined. Though he did consider staying, any help he gave this small clanhold would only help this community. He needed to think bigger. 

On the way back to the city, Simon took it easy and pondered the difficulties of this region. It was clearer to him than ever that the problem was the monsters as much as clan rivalries, but while they could eventually learn to get along, there was no easy way for the Charians to deal with the latter problem. They would really need guns, or the magical equivalent, to take out the bigger creatures like ogres and trolls. 

“I could make them something, but they’d only burn me at the stake for it,” he said to himself with a heavy sigh as he wondered what the answer was.

He pondered that all the way back, stopping at clanholds every night, but all along the way, he used his divining rod, taking little detours to confirm the locations of various ore veins. Some were obvious and had probably been seen before, but others were more subtle. In one stream, three days outside of Adonan, he found a knuckle-sized gold nugget panning in one of the streams. He pocketed that but added it to his list. 

By the time he reached the city, he had the locations of a dozen rich, exploitable veins ready to be mined; the only problem was that they were on the territories of half a dozen different clans. “Anywhere else, I could just go to a king or a duke, but what do I do here?” he asked himself. “Do I invite them all at once for a sit-down, or do I approach them individually?”