Death After Death-Chapter 211 - The Trick to It

Simon didn’t catch up to the knight by dawn, but then he didn’t really want to. While he didn’t really want to sacrifice the village he’d just left as an experiment, his own experiences told him that he wasn’t in too much of a hurry. Whatever was going to happen wouldn’t happen until well after sunrise, regardless of what he did. He’d been cooked alive in the midst of a very late breakfast once upon a time, and none of the drunks he’d left behind would be up for hours yet.

Still, Simon wondered the whole way up what precisely he was getting himself into and how the man planned to bring the dragon down, but that mostly devolved into what he would do to slay a dragon. Mostly, he decided that using a word of greater force, a spear right into the thing's giant heart, was probably the right answer. It used maximum force against the smallest possible defense profile and was almost certain to be fatal.

“What if dragons are resistant to magic, though?” he wondered aloud as he spoke to the strange horse. “What if a greater word can’t get through its scales? Hell, what if the thing can use magic itself?”

Simon’s backup plan was to drop it out of the sky, the same way he’d done with the wyvern. That would let gravity do the dirty work, but that assumed that his wards would stand up to liquid napalm for any length of time.

The longer Simon considered it, the less he really wanted to fight a dragon. They were the bosses in half the video games he’d played for a reason. They were strong, fierce, and often terrifyingly tough. The idea that this one might be the intelligent sort worried him, but he wasn’t really sure what to do about that either. It would theoretically open up negotiation as an option, but it would also make the thing ten times more deadly.

Simon went back and forth on all of these issues throughout the night as he slowly ascended the mountain. He only slowed to a stop when the giant crag that was the dragon’s lair appeared in the distance at the top of the meandering trail. Simon noted that the knight’s horse had been tied to a tree not so far up the slope. That much made sense. What did not make sense was that the man seemed to be changing out of his armor.

Piece by piece, he set it aside, along with his sword, and then when he was down to his small clothes, he put on peasant’s rags instead. It was quite the transformation. Simon wouldn’t have recognized him if he’d not witnessed it himself. Really, the longer he watched, the more his anger grew.

So this motherfucker plans on tricking the dragon in some way, then getting dressed back up and splashing some blood on his armor like he was in a fight so that his men sing his praises? Simon asked himself as his blood started to boil.

Still, he didn’t interrupt the man. He watched and waited as Sir Anias was dressed and rubbed his face with dirt. Then he took a satchel from one of his saddlebags along with a fat scroll and started walking toward the lair. Simon chose that moment to spur his horse to life and quickly cut the man off. Though he desperately wanted to see how he was going to kill a dragon like this, he wasn’t about to sacrifice a village full of people to do it.

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“So what’s this game, then?” Simon shouted, riding up to the man.

Sir Anias spun on his heel at the sound with a look of horror on his face. At first, Simon thought that was because the man realized his ruse had been discovered, but as he raised his finger to his lips, Simon realized the truth: he feared the dragon could hear them, even from here.

It’s not impossible, Simon supposed, quieting down even as he watched the cave for any signs of activity.

There turned out not to be any, but even so, Simon couldn’t really bring himself to care either way right now. The man who had been masquerading as a hero on his last few visits was a White Cloak and a fraud, and finding that out was almost worth burning to death.

“What are you doing here!?” Sir Anias hissed as Simon “Everyone should be leaving the base camp and starting their way—”

“Obviously, I’m not part of your little LARP,” Simon interrupted. “I thought something stank about all of this, and now I know the truth.”

“You?” the man sneered. “The uninitiated know nothing. It is better that—”

“That those that do not know, do not speak,” Simon finished the saying as he dismounted, watching the knight’s eyes light up in surprise. “Yes. I know all your stupid little sayings. The voice of wisdom? The men who hide behind history’s pages? The silence that makes magic mute? I got all that. What I want to know is, what in the hell do the White Cloaks want with a dragon.”

Sir Anias ignored everything Simon asked and instead asked, “Were you sent from the tower?”

Simon ignored the question and punched the man right in his stupid face. “I’ll ask again. What is going on here, and how do you plan to kill that dragon? Why do you have to sacrifice the town to do it? Does this involve blood magic?”

Simon’s final accusation seemed to annoy the man more than the fact that his nose was bleeding. “Heresy!” he said, louder than he meant to. “I would never use magic to fight my battles, not even this one. I simply seek to use the dragon’s own greed against it. That is all, and if you are a part of the order, then you will stand aside. This is my mission, not yours, and unless you bear the seal of a Master or the Grandmaster himself, your opinion about my methods is not relevant.”

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“No magic, huh?” Simon asked. “Then what’s in the scroll?”

The man paled a little at that and reflexively took half a step back. The fighting didn’t start in earnest, though, until Simon reached for the man’s satchel. If he wouldn’t talk, then Simon would seize his answers by force.

He didn’t feel the need to draw his sword, though, not when he could simply beat it out of him. Sir Anias was a competent fighter, so that was harder than Simon expected, but he was armored and had at least thirty pounds on the guy, so it was only a couple of minutes before he had the other man in a chokehold, though they were both bleeding and gasping by then.

Simon would have happily choked him into unconsciousness and taken the scroll himself, but partway through the fight, he felt a cool breeze, and suddenly, there was a shadow over both of them. He didn’t have to look up to realize what had happened, and he immediately released the other man before stepping back and raising his hands in the universal gesture of surrender.

“What’s this then?” a seismic voice rumbled, passing right through Simon. “Don’t stop on my account. Dinner and a show at my very doorstep. How delightful.”

The dragon’s voice was proportional to its bulk, and it was impossible not to listen to it without hearing an undertone of malice. Slowly, Simon turned to face it and found the giant beast looming over him. It was larger than an elephant, which was one of the biggest living things he’d ever seen before, but it was hard to make comparisons after that. Its bus-sized body was covered with slightly tarnished brass scales, but with its wings spread as they were, it looked three to four times the size it really was.

Suddenly, he really wanted to know how this weasel had brought it down on all of those other times. Now wasn’t the time to be demanding answers, though. In fact, now wasn’t the time for any sudden movements. Instead, Simon waited, slowly taking a few steps back. That was when Sir Anias stepped forward and started to say, “Icefang, your eminence. I come with an urgent warning—”

“Measure your words carefully, little mouse,” the dragon interrupted in its deep base. “You only get a handful of them, and they will decide your fate.”

The knight swallowed hard before he continued. “In the village. I came to warn you. There’s a professional dragon slayer. The Red Knight comes for you.”

The dragon seemed amused by that answer and turned to Simon, as it said, “Very amusing. And what about you, little mouse? Have you come to warn me of something as well?” As the dragon spoke to him, it seemed to sniff him in a way that was both exaggerated and terrifying.

“I… No. I came to stop him,” Simon said. “That man before you is Sir Anias, the Red Knight.”

“Oh, is it now?” the dragon asked, practically purring with interest as it turned back to the first of the humans it had spoken to again. “Have you come to slay me and take my gold for yourself? Where is your sword? Where is your armor?”

The man froze solid and tried another lie. He started to explain that he was just a simple villager, but Simon ruined that by pointing to where the man’s armor was neatly stacked in the trees just beyond the path.

“To mean me harm is one thing, but to lie to me about it…” The dragon chastised Sir Anias. He opened his mouth to protest, but in the space of a second, the dragon’s sinuous neck darted forward, removing his head and his shoulders from the rest of his body and leaving only two-thirds of a corpse to bleed out on the ground.

“You seem to speak true,” it rumbled. “So you may have a little more time to explain this to me before I decide if you are to be a snack as well.”

“I, well, I come at the behest of a Goddess, I guess you could say,” Simon started, not sure how to make this sound any less crazy.

“I know that much,” the dragon responded. “I can still smell her touch upon you. We can speak of that later. For now, tell me of this man’s plot. I’ve seen many men try to slay me, but never without a sword at least.”

“Well, I hadn’t quite figured out how he’d planned to do that,” Simon admitted, sidling over toward the remains of Sir Anias, “But if you’d allow me to check, I think the answer is in here.”

Simon moved toward the satchel with deliberate slowness, and the dragon did nothing. When he took out the scroll and started to open it, the dragon reared up slightly, but it did not strike him dead.

Simon had expected there to be some new magic spell on here that he hadn’t seen before. He’d hoped he might even learn another word or two. None of those things happened, though. Instead, he found a fairly straightforward example of the Uuvellum Oonbetit runes chained together in a way that made this scroll the medieval equivalent of monofilament.

It was disappointing, and worse than that, it was clumsy. Still, as he remembered the last time he’d been here and seen the dragon’s corpse, he supposed that could have explained the injuries. He’d assumed everything was due to butchery, but a single terrible blow that had partially descaled one side of the giant beast as it reentered the cave would explain most of it, too.

For a second, Simon tried to imagine that as he tore the thing in half in front of the dragon. He tried to picture the giant, majestic predator blasting the town into ruin and then soaring to the edge of its cave as it returned.

It had certainly done just such a move a thousand times before, and it would have let its momentum carry it the last dozen feet as it folded its wings and landed, only to have already been dealt a fatal blow. It was horrifying but definitely possible. However, when he explained that to the dragon, it only laughed in unabashed ridicule of the idea.

“You think that he meant to kill me… with paper?” it asked incredulously, between uproarious bouts of sulfur-scented laughter.

“I think that he thought it would work, too,” Simon answered, trying not to sound annoyed. “If you don’t believe me, feel free to check out the caravan currently making its way up the mountain to butcher you and steal your hoard.”

That got Icefang’s attention, and its eyes narrowed immediately. “I shall investigate this, at least,” it rumbled. “You stay here, and we shall speak of other things when I return.”

The dragon took off like a hurricane without any warning. When it did so, Simon struggled to stay standing. Still, as soon as he was no longer buffeted by the terrible winds, he turned around and yelled. “The village did nothing wrong! You hear me? Weldon didn’t do anything!”

The dragon gave no sign that it had heard Simon, but he knew it had the hearing to if it wanted to. Still, inwardly, he vowed, If that thing kills all those innocent people after I saved its life, I swear I’ll kill it myself.