Death After Death
Chapter 253: The Wrong Mission

Simon was interested in the men as soon as he saw them riding through the city like an impromptu parade, but it was only when he recognized the faces of one of the men from the vision that he knew this was the group he’d been waiting for. If not for that, he would have let them pass right by.

The men he recalled were much fewer in number and far more desperate looking. These men were peacocks by comparison, and yet, somehow, Simon knew that his next path started here. Still, for now, it would have been strange to approach them, so he steered clear while they booked lodgings and then waited the rest of the day for the rumor mill to catch up with what they were doing here in Schwarzenbruck.

Simon didn’t have any trouble finding out about them after that. No one did. Now that the wedding had passed, it was all anyone was talking about. Eight men wearing shining plate mail on warhorses with a couple dozen men at arms, squires, porters, and various henchmen was like a small army.

Small caravans came through Schwarzenbruck all the time, but that was entirely different. According to the locals, an army hadn’t been through the area in more than three decades, but in the minds of those same men at the bar, this was almost enough to reset that counter, even if Simon wasn’t bowled over by it.

They looked more like heroes that Simon had in most of his lives, and many of them looked tough, but they were far from a real army, and they had just enough pomp and pennants around them to lower the group a few notches in his eyes. Real heroes spent less time preening and more time getting things done.

All of that was normal enough, though. The strange part was that their expedition had nothing to do with a necromancer. Simon was sure he remembered that from one of his earliest lives. Adventurers had come to the town, they’d gone off to fight a necromancer, and when they came back, one of them had been bitten. The rest was history.

“Hell of a thing, isn’t it?” one of the farmers he was drinking with said when someone else asked what was going on. “Apparently, some noble’s wine shipment never arrived, and they’ve gone to clean up the bandits or some such.”

Simon laughed at that, but only to cover his dark thoughts. It wasn’t quite as simple as that. Truthfully, it was pretty similar to the mission the butcher’s bill got in a previous timeline. It seemed that the powers that be in Brin only cared about this part of the world when trade to the north became difficult, and now that a couple of caravans had disappeared, they were sending some people to fix that.

Did I do something to fuck this up already? Simon wondered. Did I wait years for a problem I already fixed? That would have been funny, in a sardonic way, and after a day of self-doubt, he decided that couldn’t be the case because of the events that the Oracle had shown him.

Simon considered what other elements the new arrivals and the Butcher’s Bill might have in common as the conversation flowed around him like a river. He didn’t contribute much, but he kept his ears open.

He left as soon as he heard they were searching for hunters and porters as much as supplies for continuing the mission north. Simon couldn’t sign up with them fast enough after that. He dickered with their quartermaster over pay, but only so his interest wouldn’t seem suspicious. Truthfully, he would have paid them to be a part of this expedition, but they didn’t need to know that.

The deal he finally negotiated was twice as much as he got cutting the heads off chickens, but only a little more than he made unloading beer barrels. Worse, it wouldn’t even be paid out until they returned, but Simon wasn’t too heartbroken by that. Instead, he got to work, and he quickly helped the group buy up every spare mule in the region that he knew about, and set up a proper mule train and load it down with hard cheeses, salt pork, and all the other foodstuffs that would store well, then when they were ready, he went north with everyone else.

That was the good news. The bad news was that Rodrick had gone and signed himself up for this, too. That was an unwelcome surprise. It wasn’t that he hated the man, though he didn’t care for him. It was that he’d just unfucked Brena’s life, and if this asshole died on the trip, he was going to undo all that hard work.

He wasn’t the only familiar face of the group, but he was the only one that Simon cared about personally. When Simon asked Rodrick about it, he just said, “They’re paying top coin to men that can keep their expedition in meat, and I know the woods as well as anyone.”

“Yeah, that’s the reason they need you,” Simon agreed, trying not to stare at the man’s now crooked nose. “What I want to know is why you want to go with them. Don’t you have a new wife to take care of?”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“Damn right, he does,” one of the other porters agreed. “Hot one, too. You sure you can leave her all alone for weeks or months?”

Rodrick shook his head. “Brena is as faithful as they come, and I’ll miss her, but a little coin will come in handy.”

Simon didn’t believe that explanation for a second, but he told himself that no matter what happened, that guy was coming home in one piece. As promises went, though, it wasn’t hard to enforce because the further north they went, the less evidence they found that anything was wrong.

Simon had long ago cleared out the barrow mounds, but unfortunately, they weren’t the cause. That didn’t leave much else, though. Even if they send a knight ahead dressed as a merchant with only a few pack mules for company, some days, no one tried to ambush him.

No, even though Simon had taken all the trouble to pull his armor out of mothballs for this trip, there was no use for it. Every day was nothing but plodding forward as the mountains in the distance grew ever larger and the land grew ever drier.

Maybe I’ll finally see Bahmed Pass, after all, he thought as the days wore on. The person that Simon was pretending to be had to pretend to love these events. He was getting paid just to walk around and perform minor errands. The most exciting thing he did was gather firewood after he finished making camp. Really, he chafed at it, though.

Who wouldn’t? The only bright side to the boredom was that it gave him a chance to check out the men that he might one day have to fight beside. One of the men, Sir Bevin, was definitely a member of the Unspoken; Simon could tell by the pin that held his cloak, even if it wasn’t white. Another knight that he often associated with might be another member of the cult as well, but the rest didn’t seem to be, and despite how shiny their armor was, when Simon watched them spar, he judged them all to be competent warriors.

About half of them might be better than him, and Simon would have loved to spar with them to find out. He was sorely in need of practice. Thrashing someone like Rodrick was nothing compared to letting steel ring out against steel against a talented opponent. That was where you learned something, and it had been too long since he’d had that experience.

Letting everyone know you used to be a badass would be counterproductive, he reminded himself as he suppressed a sigh. Instead of fighting, Simon behaved and contented himself with wondering what kind of bandit operation would make whole caravans disappear. He’d taken apart a pretty large encampment by himself in the not-so-distant past, but twelve men couldn’t expect to ambush a group much bigger than half their size unless they wanted to let casualties pile up.

To listen to some of the men who were more in the know on exactly what it was these knights were here for, caravans of a dozen wagons and fifty men had occasionally failed to arrive, and to Simon’s mind, that meant an army.

Simon tried to talk to some of the other men he was trying to stay friendly with obliquely, including Rodrick, but none of them were particularly interested. As far as anyone was concerned, this was the work of bandits, and they would be run to ground sooner or later. Eventually, Simon was forced to talk to his mules about it, just for some intelligent conversation on the subject.

“Armies are expensive to keep, though,” he told the mule at the head of the line as they walked up the long, winding road that led into the mountain together. It was a frequent habit of his to talk to them like people when no one was around. “If you’re paying the cost to employ so many men, then why not snag all the caravans instead of just a few?”

The mule had no answers, and strangely, the mountain had very few threats. Once, they encountered a den of dog-faced gnolls, and the warriors made great sport of purging their lair. That was fine, but simply building a fire at the entrance and smoking them out would have done the same thing.

Still, it was the only interesting thing to happen in weeks, and by the time they were far enough up the mountain pass that food was growing scarce, and the fort that guarded the pass was in sight, he was convinced that this was going to turn out to be a Murani trap.

He was willing to bet money on it. He could practically feel the way that they were contained on three sides for whatever ambush had been prepared. Nothing happened, though. Instead, the fort opened the gates and welcomed them without any issues.

Stranger still, the Murani soldiers that manned it appeared to be helpful about the whole thing. Though Simon wasn’t invited to the discussions that took place, by all accounts, the men in charge of the fortification were concerned enough to open their books and show them exactly when each group of missing men had passed through. That puzzled Simon.

A hundred men or more had gone missing; there was evidence that they’d come this far, but somewhere between here and Schwarzenbruck, they’d simply vanished without a trace. That was quite a puzzle, and the fact that it somehow tied into a zombie plague that hadn’t happened yet made it all the stranger.

The large group spent several days at the fort before they turned around and started back the way that they came. This caused a great deal of argument to spread through the camp. Some people insisted that the logs of the fort had to be fabricated, but apparently, based on what they knew about the rest of the groups that had successfully reached Schwarzenbruck, that seemed unlikely.

There were no answers when they started down the mountain, but Simon felt like he was just starting to see around the edges of the problem. At least, it seemed like it when he thought back to the bandit camp he’d gutted so recently. He didn't think they were related, of course, but there was some similarity there that he just couldn't shake, and he was almost at the point where he wanted to tell the leader of the expedition, Sir Kongrin, on the night that they were attacked for the first time.