Death After Death 201-203

Ch. 201 - Hints and Warnings

As time went on, it became increasingly apparent that one of the reasons that Brin was losing was the white cloaks. It wasn’t them directly. Though Simon had no inside knowledge in this regard, he was sure that they were fighting alongside their countrymen against the external threat, given the dark rumors that were becoming increasingly common. 

If one side was using evil magics and the other was not, then it was like waging a war with arrows against forces that had gunpowder. The odds were against it. Simon knew that better than anyone. Even as an old man who could barely fight three guards at once anymore without a good chance of success, he could fight ten if he used magic subtly, and he could probably kill hundreds if he went all out and used words of power indiscriminately. 

It was a troublesome development, and when that news reached the court, it was one of the few times she placed his counsel above those of her generals and even Vizer. “What should I do?” she asked. “To refuse to take sides in a normal war is the right answer, but in something like this…”

Simon believed that she should throw in with Brin directly, but he also knew that as open to that as she was, she would bristle if he tried to tell her what to do. Instead, he offered her advice that would lead to that eventual conclusion. “Send more spies,” he advised. “Dispatch more patrols along the main roads and in the passes. If they truly wield mages in their army, then one or two men sneaking into Ionia could cause as much damage as a hundred soldiers.“

She listened to his advice and did as he suggested, even though her other advisors chafed at it. Some of them had started to advise openly that they should throw in with one side or another before the extended stalemate took that choice out of their hands. 

That’s probably what would have happened without me here, Simon thought, realizing that he’d already changed the future in a fairly substantial way. Or maybe Ionia would never have been a player to begin with because of the eruption. 

With everything that had happened and all the different versions he’d seen, it was getting hard to determine which event caused or stopped which other event. Even looking at the notes his mirror held at night after everyone else had gone to sleep didn’t clear that up. 

One thing that was totally clear, though, was how much magic was starting to shape things. Until now, he’d gone back and forth as to whether or not the mage killers were doing more good than evil with their secretive, murderous ways. On the one hand, almost all of the warlocks he’d met or read about seemed to be pretty awful people. Power corrupted, and absolute power corrupted absolutely, and denying that seemed like a net good if you ignored how they achieved it. 

In light of some of the things he was hearing about the war, though, that was less certain. He knew for a fact that the White Cloaks were not a world-wide, monolithic organization. They had power in Ionar and the lands to the south, but to the east, west, and north, they had only occasional dealings with those powers, and hedge mages tended to flourish more there. 

That didn’t mean that Ionar tolerated magic, of course. They still burned witches now and then or banished hermits. Both of those seemed unlikely to be true mages, though. If you had words of true power, you were unlikely to get taken alive in his experience. 

But now, there were rumors of necromancy and war mages at key engagements. One thing was clear to Simon after spending more time in the library; these Murani were not the same ones that had attempted to invade the region a half-century before. Those men had been part of a simpler, more martial culture based on light horse and lightning tactics. These invaders might look the same and speak the same language, but they acted very differently. 

Simon dearly wished he could go to the fronts and learn firsthand. He wished even more than he’d taken the time in previous lives to learn about this group. Hell, for that matter, he wished he knew exactly where he was in relation to other levels. 

As near as he could figure, the levels were mostly a year or two apart, which meant that he was somewhere around the time that he slew the basilisk probably, but there was no way to know for sure. 

A war would sure be a good reason for people not to notice that thing dying one day, he decided. 

Ultimately, he was pretty sure that Brin won, but he didn’t know that for sure. He was just pretty sure that the country still existed based on his limited interactions with the powers that ruled the area in a couple of decades when he’d fought to purge the centaurs. 

Poor Brin, he told himself. Zombie apocalypse, civil war, then invasion, followed by centaur outbreak. They can’t catch a break. 

Simon couldn’t investigate personally. Not only did he have duties here, but he was enjoying watching his son shape up into a fine young man, and he was not willing to sacrifice that. 

Still, the idea that Brin couldn’t catch a break did not leave him, not during lessons, art, or even his time spent tinkering on various experiments. 

Between lessons with the children, he began to spend more and more time in the Queen’s library, researching it, and slowly but surely, he came to an inescapable conclusion: those large lowland plains between Ionar’s mountains in the west and Charia in the east were sort of a crossroads of history. 

Everything that happened only seemed to matter when it was there. Ionar’s disasters and curses rarely reached beyond its borders, but what happened in Brin, or even Montain to the south, spread far and wide thanks to the easier routes and more extensive trade network. 

He had no idea if that trend continued to the north, in the Murani lands. He’d never found a book in any library that had covered the northlands or anything but the most important trade cities across the sea as anything more than a passing reference. 

“I’ll need to fix that one of these days,” Simon told himself, pondering the expeditions he could make to explore the world and better flesh it out. 

He promised himself he’d get ready for that by taking advantage of the city he was in to learn a bit more about sailing, but he never quite found the time for it. He was just too busy teaching. The only times that he found himself even touching on ships with them was when he taught the children about the stars and how to navigate by them. 

What he wanted to do was take them on a camping trip so that they could navigate by them. Unfortunately, the Queen forbade it. “These are not commoners, Simon,” she sighed after the third time he brought it up in as many weeks. “Skills that are valuable for peasants, like foraging and navigation, will never be used in the palace!” She didn’t ever say it was too dangerous, but he knew that's what she really meant. It was a common refrain in their disagreements about his curriculum. 

Simon thought that such an impulse was overprotective and totally unreasonable, of course. At least, he did until the war expanded to impact Ionar directly. The news of an entire unit far to the north being crushed was as unexpected as it was impactful. Of course, the ambassadors of both nations denied having a hand in it, but the writing on the wall was clear. Brin had been pushed far enough east that there was no way they could have reached out to cause such a devastating blow. 

This was worrying. Thanks to their naval power and the oceans to the west and the mountains to the east, the easiest and perhaps only way to attack Ionia was by sweeping down along the coast from the north in force. There were various fortresses erected to prevent exactly that, of course, but magic made planning and forecasting that much more complicated. 

Ionia wasn’t at war yet, but it soon would be, he feared. Simon continued his updates about the war as an academic topic, but he did his best to shield his students from the realities of how close it might be to affecting them, at least at first. It was one thing for the Prince to understand war and how it should be dealt with. It was another to go to bed afraid of what was going to happen any earlier than had to.

All of that changed when he was ambushed one chill fall night when he was deep in the mountains to the northeast of the city during his usual monthly expedition. 

Simon had heard the subtle sounds that he was being tailed for an hour before it happened. Here, he’d see a few rocks clattering down the slope, and there, he’d hear a little scree giveaway under heavy footfalls when the breeze was just right. He wasn’t afraid. He was out here to kill, after all. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be able to keep celebrating his fiftieth birthday every year for the foreseeable future. 

He’d assumed that it was a timid group of beastmen, not sure of their ability to take him down. It wasn’t until dark that they actually struck, and when they did, it was not the brute force charge he’d expected to face. Instead, it was a flurry of crossbow bolts. 

No, he corrected himself as one bit deep into his liver while he lay in his bedroll pretending to be asleep. Poison crossbow bolts. Seven or eight struck the dirt around him, but only one hit him in the side. 

He screamed in pain as he rolled away from his tiny fire, but only to cover up the sound of him ripping the thing free. The wound was painful, but from the way the liquid fire raced through his veins, he could tell that it would be fatal in short order. 

Simon used a word of healing and cure to repair the problems, using more magic at once than he had in years in a single moment. Then he whispered, “Aufvarum Barom Aufvarum,” and faded from view. 

The illusion wasn’t quite invisibility. It was something he’d worked on a few months ago. In a well-lit room, it mostly just looked disturbing. The spell was actually lesser anti-light, and except for his eyes, his body did its best to reject light. This made him look almost like a blurry, animate shadow, but at night, he was basically the predator. That was good because he wasn’t as fast as he used to be. 

Simon took a moment to fling his bedroll over a large stone that might have been big enough for a person while his attackers reloaded, and then he slipped off into the night. He wasn’t planning to retreat or to flee, though. Instead, he retraced his footsteps back along the goat path he’d used earlier that day even as they loosed another volley, and then he started to outflank his attackers. 

He had no idea who they were, but they clearly knew who he was, or at least had some idea. Bandits didn’t use poison arrows from a distance, and monsters didn’t even use crossbows. This is a hit, he decided. He was certain of it. Someone wanted to kill him, specifically, and they knew he was enough of a threat that attacking him from a distance was the best way to make sure he didn’t make them explode. 

“You should have been a better shot,” he whispered to himself. “It might have worked.”

Even the one arrow that had struck him was still hurting despite the magic he’d used. He suspected he didn’t get all the poison out, but he could always do that again later. It's not like it will be the only wound I get before this battle is done, he told himself as he closed on the enemy. 

Ch. 202 - Brutality

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?

“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.”

Ch. 203 - Not so Surprising

The declaration of war followed quickly after that, but because of petty pissing contests in the wording of the agreement that had to be sabotage, the alliance that Ionar desperately needed took somewhat longer. Somehow, despite the attack on him and a few other scattered attacks throughout Ionar that were almost certainly the work of the Murani, it was months before Ionar officially allied with the Kingdom of Brin to push the invaders back in any real way. 

Unfortunately, that turned out to be about how long it took Simon to shake himself free of the terrible urges to use more transfer magic s. In the moment, his actions had been reasonable and even justified, but now there was no denying that it was a budding addiction. This time, he vowed not to let it control him. So, for better or worse, during that time, Simon's life changed almost as drastically as the world around him. 

The first and most obvious change was that he was always armed now. For a long time, he’d rarely even worn a dagger unless he was leaving the city. Now, he was always armed with both sword and dagger, and he made sure that Seyom was with a real short sword as well. Simon rarely left the palace after that day, and he never left the city. 

Instead, he spent all his time with either the children, the generals, or in seclusion, coping with the withdrawal symptoms of his foolish act and planning for what he could do in the face of the new threats. One thing that his most recent opponent's methods had done was make it clear that there was more he could be doing. Just because he didn’t plan to start using blood magic to fuel powerful rituals didn’t mean he couldn’t use the power of his foes to more effectively eliminate them.

These efforts all bore fruit, and as time passed, he felt more and more ready for any surprise. Still, it was aggravating that even in failure, the assassins had still managed to shatter the perfect little life he’d been building. 

He rarely held lessons in the gardens now, and even those were always accompanied by a detachment of the Queen's personal guards. Worse than that, though, was the fact that his curriculum had become almost entirely martial. 

Seyom was only just fourteen, and two members of Simon’s class were only twelve. They were old enough to know their way around wooden blades but far too young to worry about killing or dying. Yet those were now inevitable consequences of what he was teaching them. 

It was unavoidable. One assassination attempt would lead to more and next time, he was unlikely to be the target. So, he taught them basic first aid and where the most vulnerable spots on armored training dummies were. He taught the girls to aim for the throat of anyone that they suspected might be a mage, and he taught them all what signs to look for that indicated that magic might be afoot. 

He hoped they’d never need to use it, though. He wanted his son to be a competent warrior, but more than that, he wanted him to be a talented general and a wise leader. Reality, though, might not be giving him those choices. 

The Queen expressed in private that she thought Simon was being a touch paranoid, but she never did so in public, nor did she ask him to stop. Where the safety of their son was concerned, paranoia was acceptable, it would seem, as long as it did not cause too much of a stir. 

He wasn’t the only one who was more paranoid than usual, though. Guests to the palace were limited, fortifications were increased, and guard patrols were doubled.

Elthena eventually even took on a full-time poison tester, which was something she’d resisted for a long time. It was something that Simon had never worried about too much since poison was easy enough for him to handle, but it was a gesture that she was taking all of this very seriously. 

How could she not? The battle reports came nearly daily now, and though the fighting itself was still far away because the northern front was holding up well, that didn't make it any less inescapable. More than that, though, most legions were trained, equipped, and dispatched from Ionar, and the upper market had been converted into a drilling space and parade ground, making the sounds of battle inescapable, even from the palace. The northern cities and the island kingdoms still supplied money and men for the war effort, of course, but it was dwarfed by the capital. 

Still, when the hammer finally dropped, Simon was surprised only by the timing, not by its nature. He’d known that a betrayal was coming. He could feel it in his bones, even if he couldn’t figure out who the one to cause it would be. The Murian wielded money and magic as well as armies, so bribery was certainly a tactic that he expected.

Still, he hadn’t expected it in the middle of one of his lessons. He’d been in the classroom teaching the children about phalanx tactics and the importance of spears against cavalry attacks when he heard a scuffle in the hallway. That was unusual enough, but when armed soldiers in full kit threw open the door and demanded, “The Prince is to come with us immediately!” 

Knowing something was going to happen and experiencing it were very different things. Simon didn’t hesitate, though. He strode toward the Prince even as the two soldiers did, while Seyom looked around like a deer in the headlights. 

“What is the meaning of this outrage!” Simon shouted, waving his empty hands about as if he had no idea what was about to happen. “The Prince is in the middle of his lessons and is not to be disturbed unless the sky is falling, do you understand?!” 

For what happened next, it was imperative that they think him nothing more than a harmless old man. Any violence that happened in the same room as his pupils had to be as quick and precise as possible, or young lives would be shattered and lost. 

Of course, the fact that both men had swords in their hands and blood was pooling in the doorway where they’d taken out the Queen’s guard that had been positioned there made it more than obvious what was happening. The sneer of the man in the lead certainly made no secret of the fact that they were about to run Simon through and kidnap his son. 

That was the way coups worked. Capture or kill the high-value targets, then take control for everyone’s good. The Queen was a reasonably popular ruler, so he wasn’t sure this would go exactly the way that whoever was in charge wanted it to, but Simon aimed to make sure that it didn’t happen at all.  

When the sword came for Simon’s guts, he twisted just enough that it stabbed into his robes but missed his flesh. Then he grabbed the man’s overextended wrist and twisted it, disarming the first soldier even as he flung him to the floor. 

The second soldier had time to react to this and dropped into a ready stance. Simon didn’t hesitate. He reversed the grip on the stolen sword and shoved it through the man’s unprotected throat before he could raise his own blade high enough. Then he turned and stomped on the first man’s skull before he could rise and collapsed face-first onto the stone floor. 

Normally, Simon would have delivered a coup de gras then, just to be sure. The man was limp and probably had a skull fracture from the way his head had bounced violently off the stone floor, but with the way that his class was looking at him, now was not the time for more unrestrained violence. 

Instead, he picked up the second sword from where the man who was still in the process of drowning in his own blood had dropped it. “I hope that everyone has been paying attention because we are now going to have to fight our way to the throne room to make sure that all of you are kept safe,” he said, trying to keep his tone light despite the bloodshed that had just happened, and the shocked look on the faces of some of the children. “Now, quickly, don your arming jackets and ready your weapons. Time is of the essence.”

He would have preferred a couple more years before this had happened, he realized as he watched the door while the children burst into action. No, I would have preferred they’d never known war at all, he corrected himself. But if they had to know war, I just wish I’d had more time to train them. 

That wish was in vain. Unfortunately, you went to war with the army you had, not the army you wanted, which meant that Simon would have to do more of the fighting himself. 

For a moment, he thought about taking some of the dead men’s armor for himself, but he decided against it. He would have killed for the chance to return to his room and put on his own well-worn leathers, but at this moment, looking like a strange soldier was not likely to be an advantage. 

Instead, he waited impatiently for the boys to draw their swords and the girls to string their bows, and then he said, “Alright, we move as one. No matter what you see next, follow me, and just keep moving.”

Then he moved out into the hallway. There was no hiding the dead body; he didn’t even try. He just urged them to keep moving as he took the way that was likely to have the least traffic between where he was on the garden side and the grand hall. A quick look out some of the windows revealed that the city was placid, but he could hear chaos coming from the courtyard side. 

There was other fighting going on. It simply hadn’t spilled out into the city yet. Depending on who won, that was a foregone conclusion, though. As they transitioned to the south side, he saw exactly what he feared: an entire legion of at least 500 freshly minted soldiers marching up the long path toward the palace. If loyal soldiers controlled the gates, they’d never get inside. But then, if loyal soldiers still controlled the gates, he reminded himself, then the coup plotters weren’t doing their job. 

Simon wanted to rush there immediately, but with his tiny entourage, he couldn’t. Instead, he continued on to the throne room. Along the way, there was blessedly little fighting. There were two stampedes of servants and one soldier that Simon disemboweled as he was chasing after a particularly pretty maid. 

It wasn’t until he got to the main hall that he found real opposition. There, he found more than a dozen men facing off the last four of the Queen’s guards that were still standing. 

Simon’s first impulse was to behead all of them with a wave of force, but he decided against it. It was far too public for such an overt act. So, instead of that, he told his students, “Boys, stay back and defend the girls. Girls, do what you can to hurt these brutes, but aim carefully. Those bows won’t even penetrate light armor.”

He didn’t expect much, but as he drew his skull-marked dagger and prepared for real combat, he didn’t want much from them. A few arrows would cause a little chaos, and the archers would provide the boys with something to guard without feeling like they needed to strive for something more heroic. 

This place is going to be a bloodbath, he told himself. But there’s nothing I can do about that.