Death After Death-Chapter 231: The Head of the Snake

The mist was silent, but it was not invisible. More than one man must have spotted him, but in the damp mountain air, no one seemed to care. Simon ignored them, too. He did his best to avoid the brightest spots, but if a soldier blundered through him, there was little he could do but hope the man kept going.

Eventually, he found the large pavilion in the center of the camp. That was his first clue that something was wrong. He had not met, or even seen, the man that the soldiers whispered about around the fires at night, but he had a good idea who he was, simply by virtue of his actions. General Jubar made good tactical decisions. He was decisive. He was not the sort of person to sleep in his own tiny cloth palace. Not unless Simon had sorely misjudged him.

Still, the thing had guards around it, so he decided to investigate and poured through the fabric at the back of the tent just enough to peer inside the darkness. It was there he found as lavish a home as he’d ever seen outside of Ionar’s palace. There was a large bed atop rugs, and tapestries hung on the walls. There was even someone in the bed, but that wasn’t what caught Simon’s eye.

What he noticed was the pattern on the rugs themselves. They were runes, and more than that, they were reasonably powerful. The large one was a rune of binding, but the smaller ones that were scattered around were more gruesome. It was difficult to comprehend them fully while he was limited by his misty form, but he was fairly certain that they would slice him into thick chunks like an industrial-sized blender.

He retreated immediately. He had no idea if his misty form could trigger such things, but he had no wish to find out. There was always the possibility that the person in that bed was an important mage or warlock, and that was the way that they slept, but Simon wasn’t willing to risk it. Even if it was, he wasn’t looking to hunt mages tonight. He was looking for the head of the snake.

So, instead of striking at the target of opportunity, he floated away, gaining elevation and becoming more diffuse as he became the wisp of a cloud. The position made him nervous because he was sure that many people could see him now if they cared to look, but he needed a better view to figure out which tent the general was really in. He would be in the tent of a common man, but not a small one, since he doubtlessly had papers and other possessions. He was also sure to have at least one guard, which would narrow the search quite a bit.

Simon’s plan for tonight was a simple one. He would kill the leader, then rampage through the camp, killing as many as he could. That chaos was the signal, and when they saw it, Ara’s men were supposed to attack at the front and send the whole army sprawling heedlessly away. It was a fine plan, but it relied almost entirely on Simon, and he would only get one chance to get it right.

Still, despite that, it took only a few minutes to find his next likely target. It did not contain what he expected to find either, though. Instead, it contained either a few young members of royalty or mages. It was hard to say for sure, as they slept in their beds. Still, Simon added them to his secondary target list as he drifted on.

In the third tent, he finally found the man he suspected to be General Jubar. The man had gray in his mustache and was snoring quite soundly. For a moment, he decided that it was possible that the man was an illusion, but he would have no way to sniff through that until he reclaimed his body.

Still, everything else fit. The general had two guards standing by the front flap of his tent, a table full of letters and maps, and an armor stand topped by a helmet bearing a general's crest. That was what sealed it for Simon as he coalesced from the thin vapor behind the man’s tent. Only a single layer of canvas hid Simon’s hulking form from the general, but Simon delayed for a moment to see if this was another trap.

He didn’t smell or hear anything out of the ordinary, though it was hard to say for certain since he was bombarded by the smells of hundreds of men where he stood now. Still, that would change in a moment when he washed them all away with blood.

When Simon finally struck, he didn’t rip apart the canvas. That was just part of his motion as he thrust his hand through the tent and yanked the sleeping man from his bed in a single violent motion. As soon as he had a good hold on the general’s rib cage, he used his other hand to rip his head clean off. He barely had time to scream. Simon waited for his guards to come running around the other side with spears in hand. He knocked both of them down with the headless torso and then tossed the head into one of their laps, making the man scream.

He bellowed an inhuman challenge that was probably loud enough to wake half of the camp. It made both of them flee in panic, but Simon didn't chase them. They were the only survivors that Simon planned to leave tonight. He wanted the word of the general's death to spread.

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Rather than pursue them, he began to blunder through tents, killing anyone who crossed his path as he fought his way to where he’d seen the sleeping young men earlier. They proved to be mages, and one managed to set Simon alight with a word of fire before he crushed the young man’s skull. The other man wasn’t so bold, and he just pissed himself while he waited for death.

By the time Simon was done with that, most of his burns had already healed, and horns of alarm were being blown throughout the camp. Simon smiled at that. The more people panicked, the less anyone knew where to go.

His rampage became more aimless after that. He clawed and ripped and tore. He was stabbed and shot many times, but that did little to dissuade him. Even a massed formation of crossbows was a nuisance more than a deterrent, which was funny to him because a few stakes on those weapons and they could put him out of his misery fairly quickly.

He wouldn’t even mind. It was always better to die by someone else's hand in moments like this.

I’m probably not what people think of when they use the word vampire, he thought to himself, as he slaughtered almost at random.

He continued to do so until the number of defenders that had joined together in any one spot grew too great, and then he would dissolve into a storm of crows and flee to another part of the camp to repeat the process.

By the third time he did that, there weren’t very many people willing to fight him anymore. There was too much chaos. They had no way of knowing there was only a single monster in many places. As far as the shouted reports went, there were monsters attacking from all sides, and when the shouts that “An army in league with the beasts is attacking from the valley!” began to ring out, it was all but over.

Anyone who could get a horse by then was on one and riding away, but that didn’t stop Simon from going to the tether lines that held the remaining mounts and freeing them to scatter in all directions. The only thing that he wished he could do to add to the chaos was to add some pyrotechnics to the mix, but magic took too much out of him to bother when he was like this.

I have my own gifts, and for better or worse, they are not words of power, he thought, resigned to who he was for now.

The fighting was done, and the survivors had fled it was still well before dawn. Simon estimated that hundreds of men lay dead, but thousands of them had fled, which was probably the best outcome. If they played their cards right, the defenders might even be able to hold the pass from this point on, which was all he’d ever signed up for.

Simon dissolved into two dozen crows and flew back to Castle Gravenstone to let Ara know that they’d won. She looked at him pensively as he spoke, and when he was finally done, she asked, “Then your task is done. What will you do now?”

“Greet the sunrise?” he mused, even though he wasn’t sure he was ready to die just yet.

She looked at him in shock for a moment before answering, “Well, you’re a braver man than I’ll ever be, Simon.”

“I’m not sure,” he countered. “I want to die, but there are a few things left I need to do. All I know is that I’m never going back to that wall. Have you heard from Freya?”

Simon kicked himself then for not asking that question first. If she were to suddenly appear, then all of this would be for nothing.

“That’s not how it works,” Ara answered. “Can’t you feel your connection to her? She’s your progenitor. There’s a link there that can never be broken. Through it, you can feel her, and she can feel you.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I never want to feel connected to her again,” Simon spat. Still, even as he discounted it, he groped around mentally for it but found nothing. He probably hated her too much for too long to ever feel connected to her now.

Ara concentrated for a moment, then turned and pointed north. “She’s there, somewhere, far, far away from us. Hundreds of miles, at least. She’s alive, but she’s not very happy. I can tell you little beyond that.”

“Well, it sounds like she’s been captured by the enemy,” Simon answered with a shrug. "Hundreds of miles puts her past the mountains and the desert. That’s deep Maurai territory." freeweɓnøvel.com

“Do you think she needs someone to save her?” Ara asked uncertainly.

“I think she needs someone to finish her off,” he answered. “Fortunately, no matter what I do next, my business takes me west, not north.”

“If you’re not going to kill yourself, then we could use you here, Simon,” Ara said. “You’ve been a great help and—”

“Yeah, you could,” he agreed, “But I think I’ve done all the killing I’m going to do for a long, long time.”

“How will you live then?” she asked as he turned and started walking away.

“Miserably,” he answered, “But it’s not like this is the first time I’ve lived that way.”

When Simon walked out of the throne room, he was tempted to stay one more night in the basement. Not only did it feel much safer, but it would give him the chance to inspect the walls of the strange room with etching. He decided against it, though. The last thing he wanted to do was give Ara or Freya the chance to get their hooks into him, and when he dissolved into a flock of ravens and flew back toward his goblin-scented sanctuary, it was very freeing. Live or die, he’d put this chapter of murder and misery behind him.