Death After Death-Chapter 361 - Further Delays

The group’s trip back to the coast, and the trade city that sat on it, was slowed by Aranna’s mother, Lorinda, more than it was by Simon’s wounds. While he was definitely moving slower than he was used to, she was moving slower still. He used his icon at night by the campfire to speed up healing, but the location of his wounds made it hard for them to close completely when they were walking ten or twelve miles a day, so infection was an ever-present concern.

God, what I wouldn't give for just a little magic, he told himself whenever he thought the cuts looked redder than they had the day before. Sadly, for now, that was entirely out of reach. It was his burden to know magic, but not to use it.

If he still had the money, he would have bought all of them mounts, but those resources were running low until they returned to the inn. So, he opted to save them.

Still, taking the long way back wasn’t such a bad thing. Most of the time, he enjoyed the company of both women. The worst thing about the trek back was the profuse outbreaks of thanks that seemed to alternate from one woman to the other and back again. The first few were gratifying, after that, they became embarrassing, and eventually annoying. Simon kept those feelings to himself, though, and instead let the long-separated family enjoy this moment together.

Aranna glossed over a lot of the worst parts of her own experiences, and Simon saw no need to fill in those blanks. By contrast, her mother told her everything. At least she seemed to. She told her how her father died, and some of the terrible things that had happened to her over the years. It was heartbreaking stuff, but even those dark tales told around the campfire were drowned out by the joy of reunion.

In that sense, at least, every night around the campfire was a feast. They didn’t have much food, and after the first night, they were out of wine, but what they did have was an irrepressible hope that everything was going to be okay, and that was the whole reason they’d made this trip. Simon could now leave the inn with Aranna, her mother, Bessa, and Leon and pursue other projects for a year or two, knowing it would be in good hands.

He didn’t yet know how he was going to use that time, but he had some ideas. There were a few loose threads he’d never properly solved. Chief among them in this part of the world was the black swarmers. Fighting them without magic would be fatally stupid, of course, but they came from somewhere around here, so he should be able to research them more if he wanted to.

The idea of getting on a ship again was even more appealing. After spending so many lives on land and mapping the farthest extents of this continent, part of him wanted nothing more than to join a crew and sail off to some place he’d never heard of. After all, it stood to reason there was an entire world out there just waiting to be found.

The only idea that even competed with that was traveling west to visit Zoa again. It would have been over a decade for her, though, and he couldn’t decide whether returning to her would be a cruelty or a kindness.

For now, though, those were just dreams, and they continued to the coast. Day by day, those well-worn trade roads became more familiar, and when they reached the Farthest Feast, Simon decided they’d earned a rest.

It wasn’t as nice as his place, but it was on the very edge of the city, and had hot food and a warm hearth. So, the three of them stopped, for what he hoped would be several days of food and rest. His leg could use it, and both women definitely wanted the chance to bathe and clean up.

Something felt off to Simon as soon as they entered Abresse. Even at the outskirts, there was a tension and a muddiness to things. The streets were crowded, and more people seemed to be leaving the city than were entering it.

At first, he ignored it, focusing on buying all of them as fine a celebratory meal as he could afford. It’s a trade city, he told himself. Traffic is normal. It's trying to use your sight in such a crowded place that’s abnormal. That night, everyone got drunk, and only the presence of her mother kept Simon and Aranna from having the fling that had long been threatened between them. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

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That vanished with the dawn, though when Aranna fetched him first thing in the morning, “My mother, she’s sick,” the woman explained. Simon checked her out immediately and determined she had a decent fever, but nothing life-threatening.

“She’s probably just worn from the road,” he told her, but inside, some fear he couldn’t quite name nibbled at the back of his mind. He saw several other people sick that day, but that was hardly uncommon. It wasn’t until the evening that he noticed a lesion on someone, and by that point, even as the gossip permeated his brain, the pieces fell into place.

Still, but the time he raced upstairs to check on the older woman, she already had sores of her own. The plague, Simon cursed himself. I knew it was coming, but I didn’t think it would be here yet.

It was, though. He’d lost track of time, and sickness was once more sweeping the land.

Simon gave her the healing icon to hold, but knew it would do little good. It might keep the worst of the lesions at bay, but healing and curing weren’t the same thing, and he’d made the thing to deal with injuries he was likely to receive while adventuring, not for curing the plague. So, no matter how long they lingered here, she wouldn’t really get any better.

He didn’t wait. He’d seen how the city would look when the fever took hold. Those yellow sores would be the least of their problems. Lorinda was too sick to walk or hike, and Simon wasn’t about to leave her. Instead, he paid the last of his silver to a merchant charging extortionate rates for what Simon was pretty sure had been a dung cart. Then he hooked it up to his mule, and they quietly headed out of town.

It would have been nice to beat the panic, but of course, panic had already set in, and several buildings were burning on the waterfront. According to one version of local gossip, one of those warehouses was where the pestilence had emerged. Others were either the homes of evil warlocks or merchants profiteering from expensive cures, depending on who you asked.

Simon didn’t care. He knew the city would survive. In fact, another version of him was making sure of it even now. That wasn’t a guess. He could reach out to the threads that bound him to the region and see that one was different than the rest. It wasn’t a clear line racing to some distant point. It was a looping, tangled thing that stood out from all the others, and there was no doubt in his mind that the distant point it led off to was a much earlier version of himself treating the sick.

As much as he would have loved to go and glimpse that, without causing some kind of paradox, he couldn’t justify the delay. The longer they stayed, the sicker Aranna’s mother would get and the more likely it would be that her daughter would join her; Simon might even catch it. His body reset each life, so he had no immunity from surviving it previously, and unless he was willing to throw away all his hard work and use a word of power to cure himself of its ravages, he could certainly fall ill.

It’s fine, he told himself. We’ll get back to the Wayfarer, I’ll make a cure icon to go with my heal icon, and Lorinda will be okay.

They walked all that day, and slowly but surely the traffic thinned out. When Aranna was tired, she joined her mother in the cart. When she was refreshed, she walked beside him, but the only breaks they took were for the donkey. It got food and water, but he would wait. He wanted to stay ahead of the tide around them. People were afraid, and more than a few were already sick.

He wanted to help them, but unless he used magic, he was just as powerless to save them instantly as he was to save Aranna’s mother. It’s selfish not to use words of curing, he told himself. You should help these people. He knew that he should, of course, but he also knew where that road led. Once he started, he wouldn’t stop, and then he’d spend another lifetime.

No, he stuck to his guns, promising himself he’d do what he could for everyone as soon as he got back to the inn. There were ways to do this right, but the couple of days it took to get back there were hell.

When he finally saw it on the horizon, Simon was grateful to be back in his inn after months away, but it wasn’t really his inn anymore. It had become something of a refugee camp. Many of the sick and fearful had fled Abresse just as he’d done, but they hadn’t gotten very far before they were too weak to travel.

Leon had closed the front gate at some point, but even after that, even after the yard and presumably the building were full, they continued to gather outside, looking for any help. Most of them looked too weak to even make things ugly.

Still, Simon couldn’t exactly turn his back on them, and after he forced his way to the front of the crowd and inside the gates of his establishment, he promised the agitated crowd he’d help them. Those weren’t just words to placate them either. He meant them.