Death After Death

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. While 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.“@@novelbin@@

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.

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, or even beyond it and learn about the people from their own books and mouths. 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.

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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. ŕἈɴÒΒĘ𝘴

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.