Death After Death

Chapter 186: Lay of the Land

simon was gone before ennis emerged from the tower, but he preferred it that way. he’d done a good deed, but there was no knowing how it would all play out from this point forward. the best of intentions could still have horrible effects, and simon didn’t need all of those on his conscience.

his only regret in all this was not finding out if the viscount would have paid him or not. simon would have bet not, but now he would never find out. not that he needed the money, of course; it was just the principle of the thing.

he had a good horse, a full purse, and overflowing saddlebags. other than a good backpack and a book to write things down in, he was in pretty good shape. still, the roads only got worse as he made his way to the coast, so it was good he was traveling light.

simon saw evidence of beastmen at one point. they were fresh enough that he shifted camping sites, but he never did encounter them. civilization all but disappeared until he reached the coast.

once there, he was never out of sight of a fishing village. they dotted the coast and were never built far from the next one. bigger cities than that took a little longer. though it took him almost a week to reach the coast, the first town of any size, coramin, took another three days to reach.

simon took that in stride and adjusted its position on his map. when he arrived, he took on the role of a trader waiting for his ship to come in. that worked well since there were always ships coming and going from its broad harbor. coramin wasn’t even half as nice as ionar, but it was big enough to have a lighthouse, two markets, and even some gardens and an amphitheater.

he was in no rush here and took his time eating seafood and getting to know some of the regulars at a few of the most popular taverns over the next week. it was men like that who had what he really needed: information.

all of it was useful, and he didn’t try to stop anyone from talking about news from abroad or even the political climate between the governors of the different cities. he even spent hours listening to someone trash talk elthenna and what a poor job she was doing in ruling the nation. what he was really interested in, though, were the myths and legends of the region.

some of those people seemed inclined to talk about it. they would tell him about mortal demigods who had walked the world in ages past. apparently, some people considered elthenna’s grandfather, who had founded her dynasty, to be a demigod, making her divine in a way. that thought made him smile.

finding out about the curse was harder, though. there were strange superstitions around it. it was a strange cultural taboo, but in time, familiarity and enough free drinks penetrated it, and simon found a couple willing to tell him the whole story of andus the undefeatable, the first king of ionia as it was today.

though the thespian and the fisherman who told simon the story disagreed on some parts, they agreed on enough that he was pretty sure he got the gist of it.

“in the time before time, this land was almost uninhabitable,” the thespian started, playing as much into the drama as he could. “the three elements ground against each other with all the inevitability of a millstone, and the few settlements that existed between them were nothing but grist for the mill!”

it was a little over the top, but it did remind simon that so many people bought into a strange three-element formulation of nature, like the plague doctor he’d saved so long ago. in their world, only air, metal, and water existed. fire was just elevated air, which explained the sun and why no light from it could reach all the way to the depths of the sea.

simon was unconcerned by that. he just went further south and repeated the same act for a few days at a time. though no one ever pointed out the mountain in question to him, eventually, he reached thebian, which was the next large city on his way. there, none of the locals seemed willing to name the tallest mountain in view, even though he eventually got the names of every other one. the unmentionable one was half shrouded in clouds, too, making it even more mysterious. that was when he decided he’d found his target.

simon sold his horse and other things he wasn’t likely to need, and then he started walking. the road lasted longer than he thought it would have, and he almost regretted getting rid of the horse. eventually, the mountains got wild enough that he would have been forced to abandon it.

at the end of that road, less than halfway up the mountain, he found a monastery that had been built into the cliffside. it was populated only by old men. they offered him hospitality for the night and told him many interesting stories, including one about how basilisks roam wild beneath the earth, where they gnaw at the roots of the world and cause earthquakes. simon doubted that was true, but he still found it interesting.

he, in turn, told them the story of the blackheart and the haunted graveyard, though he embellished it in places to make it seem more fictional. when the time finally came for them to ask him where he was traveling to and why he was so deep in the mountains, he lied, showing some of the sketches of fishermen and landscapes that he’d done since he’d bought a journal in coramin. “i’m an artist and an explorer. that’s all, and ionia is not well known where i come from, so i plan to write a book on the subject.”

the sense of relief in a few of the men he was talking to was obvious, and simon was very sure that if he’d admitted that he planned on visiting the oracle, they would poison him or murder him in his sleep.

that didn’t happen. instead, after they tried to convince him that the raiden mountains were a dangerous place and that he should not trifle with them lest his body never be found, they wished him well. in the morning, he continued on his way, well-rested with a full belly.

it wasn’t that simon didn’t believe the monks, of course. there was a reason they built their little monastery as if it were a fortress. there were clearly monsters in these hills. he was just hoping to fight them. fortunately, in that regard, he didn’t have to wait too long. the higher he rose on the mountain slopes, the more signs of beastmen he saw. he still hadn’t seen a single harpy, though a couple of times when he saw vultures or condors, he thought that perhaps he had. on his third night past the monastery, the goat-men attacked him for the first time.

he was lucky in that the wind shifted just before they attacked, and he smelled their foul musk only half a minute before they charged out of the night, screaming and braying. they had spears, but simon very quickly realized they weren’t trying to kill him with them or even fight him in hand-to-hand combat if they didn’t have to. instead, they were trying to herd him off of one of the nearby cliffs so that he would dash his own skull on the rocks before.

that’s a very interesting hunting tactic, simon told himself when he figured it out, but he had no interest in obliging them. instead, he slew two with his sword and then used a word of force when another six tried to charge him in mass, blasting them all sideways. the beastmen had an impossible sense of balance, but even they weren’t prepared to be slammed past simon, and right over the edge by enemies that weren’t there.

he enjoyed that fight, which was good because it was repeated every couple of nights after that. he never found anything resembling a village where the beasts were coming from, but he did occasionally find bloody altars decorated with the corpses of men and, more occasionally, goblins. once, as he rose above the tree line, he even found an altar with the remains of what had to be a harpy on it. that made him smile, and he spent his few remaining hours of daylight trying to sketch it so that he would have a better idea of what it looked like.

when he was done, they looked like a real horror show in his mind, but he didn’t think they’d be so tough. even an eight-foot tall wingspan and vicious hooked claws didn’t mean much when you had hollow bones and couldn’t have weighed more than thirty or forty pounds.

“well, that’s one mystery solved,” he said as he set off on the ridgeline, looking for a defensible place to camp. “endangered, yes. extinct, probably not.”

as the sun set, simon still couldn’t see the peak of the mountain he was climbing. that was frustrating, but not entirely unexpected. it didn’t matter. he had to be more than halfway, and soon enough, he would answer a completely different question.