Death After Death

By the time they docked in Abrese, it was clear that the plague had been strangled in its infancy. It was clear that the health of those they’d rescued on the ship was improving every day, and it was seen as a boon from the Gods. It felt like a real win to Simon, and honestly, he needed one of those.

At least until they reached the city, where he found cases in progress already. That made him sigh. So this was all about the ship, huh, Helades? He thought to himself. It had to be at this point because he knew for a fact that without intervention, the crew sickened, and the thing sank pier side right here.

Simon had no idea what that meant, but he was once again annoyed that the boat, or even one person on it, mattered more than the whole city, and when the captain announced they were leaving as soon as possible, it gave Simon an interesting decision.

When the Sea Seraph left, the gate to the next level would leave with it. That meant that his run was done unless he stayed on for the next leg of the voyage. Only, he didn’t want to.

Simon was sick of running from level to level with no clear purpose, and even if he’d solved this one, he wasn’t feeling particularly inclined to give up on a city of tens of thousands just because she had no need of them.

Still, he hesitated and spent a little time talking to the crew about the route they planned to take before he slammed the door on everything he knew. “We come back this way every year or two,” the quartermaster said with a shrug. “It’s hard to say exactly. It all depends on the price of wine in Vitilay and the price of rice in… Well, then there’s the storm season around the Summer Isles to consider, too. Certain sure we’ll be back someday, but when is anyone’s guess. Not even the captain can say for certain.”

It wasn’t much of an answer, but it was enough. Simon left the boat with his meager possessions and made his way to the inner harbor. Abrese was a town he’d already spent months in already, so he knew his way around, and instead of wandering around, he made his way to the lower temple courtyard that would eventually become a hospital of sorts and got started.

Last time, he’d been here six months in the future, so most of the dying had already been done, and the city was pretty hollowed out. This time, it was only just getting started, though, and thanks to the reduced amount of spread, the healthy still outnumbered the sick. That wouldn’t last forever, though.

The Weeping Pox, as the locals came to call it, because of the pustulant yellow sores and the way the dying cried out in pain wasn’t as deadly as the black plague he’d seen in Hurag. Not by a long shot, but left unchecked, he knew it would still kill half the city. Sadly, many of those deaths would be caused by some of the crazy treatments of the day rather than by the disease itself.

The local healers believed that the best way to prevent the disease from spreading was to seal the sores with hot irons or molten tar. Predictably, this didn’t end well for the patient, but that didn’t seem to stop them from thinking that next time, it would work, and Simon advocated against it almost from the moment he arrived.

No one listened to him, though, not at first. Why should they? He was just another guy with a strange accent peddling cures to the desperate public. The only real difference was that he had magic.

Simon was fairly sure that most of these cases could be solved by keeping them nourished and hydrated. In fact, that was the conclusion he reached over and over again in the circumstances; the disease was the killer, but only because the health of the average person was so bad in this world. It was plain to see when you looked at the rates that the nobles survived compared to the peasants. It certainly wasn’t because they had access to better doctors, he thought with a laugh.

Still, despite his belief that all most of these people needed was time to heal, he used words of lesser cure liberally in those first weeks to establish his reputation as a gifted healer, just as he’d done before. He even saved a few impossible cases with stronger words of healing and cure. These were just to show off, though. As a rule, he didn’t try to save every life. There were simply too many.

Instead, he used that early traction to end the practice of sealing wounds with fire and bleeding the feverish. Instead, he focused on nutrition and sterility. He taught the other healers that bandages had to be boiled and not just washed before they could be reused, and slowly, one day and patient at a time, he turned the disused little courtyard into a makeshift hospital of sorts.

It was a change of pace for Simon. On most levels and in most lives, he lived by the sword and was always on the move, but this time, there were no weapons of violence. Instead, day after day, he did his best to ease the suffering of those who came to him with blankets, bandages, and broth, and he got so used to the sickly sweet smell of disease that after a few months, he couldn’t even smell it anymore.

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Still, despite the chaos and the death, he saved more than most, and perhaps eight in ten of his patients went on to make a full recovery, with nothing but the ugly, discolored scars that the Weeping left behind to mark its passing. Many of these survivors went on to be nurses in his little field hospital since they were largely immune to it after defeating it the first time.

As the operation grew, Simon financed the salvation of the poor with donations from the rich. They were often desperate to survive, and eventually, he was the only one who would be sent for when someone important, like the wife of the eldest son of a noble, sickened. After six months, this happened with such frequency that he was forced to invent medicines and potions that did almost nothing, just to make them feel like they were getting their money’s worth.

It was ironic, of course; he’d spent so long trying to chase the quacks out of business with their tar and their razors, and now he was knowingly peddling snake oil himself that was little more than herbs and alcohol to make the patient sleep and ease their pain. At least it didn’t actively harm them, though, and it wasn’t like he was going to get the funds to save the poor any other way. Even simple fare like bread and soup started to cost a lot when you were feeding dozens of peopleday after day. It was easy to take handfuls of silver for a few bottles of colored water and a whispered word of lesser cure when he remembered what that fraud was paying for.

Throughout all that he wasn’t tempted once to siphon the lifeforce from any of the dying either. It was strange. He could remember craving it so badly in his previous run that it was like a drug addiction, but it was only now, when he was actively spending months and years of his life to help others that he realized he hadn’t been tempted to top it back up at any point. Simon wondered why that was, but could only assume that the affliction was physiological, and that he lost that dark urge between lives. It was good to know, in case he ever had to do it again.

After six months, Simon was moving his whole operation into a mostly empty warehouse not far from the ivy-strewn square he’d spent so much time in, thanks to the dying bequest of a merchant he’d saved earlier. That was good because winter was on its way, and the storms that came in off the straight weren’t doing any favors for the survival rate of the sick and the dying.

Simon didn’t complain about that, though. He’d known what he was getting into when he came here, and the worsening weather did mean there were fewer sick people, at least, thanks to people’s tendency to leave their homes as little as possible. In many ways, he felt like the worst was over, and as the overwhelming crowds diminished, it gave him more time to spend with each patient instead of leaving such tasks to his growing following of acolytes.

It was on one of those blustery days when even four walls and a stout roof couldn’t quite keep out all the chill that Simon had a most interesting conversation with a dying sailor.

“Simon, is it?” the man coughed. “I should have known it would be a Simon that got me killed after all this time.” The man looked like he would have walked right out of Simon’s little hospital if he had the strength to do so. Instead, he lay there looking miserable.

“That’s a strange thing to tell your doctor,” Simon answered dismissively. He’d had lots of less-than-cooperative patients by this point. People could get strange when the fever took them, and he’d long since grown used to the accusations that he was trying to kill them instead of save them.

“What else should I tell someone named Simon,” the man said with a scowl. “Not only is your name a rare one, but it’s well and truly cursed.”

That piqued his interest, and Simon tried to follow up further, but the man quickly became delirious, and all he could really find out about him was that his name was Lem, and he was from the north. It wasn’t until days later when he was past the worst of it and finally on the mend, that Simon learned the truth: the sailor was from Schwarzenbruck, and he had a strange story to tell.

“I’m sorry about before, Doc, but in my defense, I really did think you were poisoning me,” Lem told him apologetically once the fever had died down and it was clear he was going to be okay. “You have to understand. Where I come from, up near the Black River, that name is cursed.”

“Oh?” Simon asked, feigning disinterest. “And why is that?”

“I’m surprised you haven’t heard the stories, even this far south,” the sailor said, taking a drink of water before he continued. “Simon the Cursed. Simon the Black. Simon the Barrow Wight. It's an ugly thing. He was a necromancer that summoned the dead and nearly destroyed the whole region.”

“Warlocks do cause untold harm,” Simon agreed blandly. “Though I find that most of them are just stories.” His manner was almost disinterested as he pretended to check the patient's temperature and his bandages, but inside, he was seething as he wondered how the events with the Butcher’s Bill had gotten twisted.

Simon’s anger only grew as Lem proceeded to tell him the story of the brave warrior Kell, who had died thwarting the Arch-necromancer Simon’s evil plan to raise an army of the dead to conquer the region. “There’s still zombies that are found now and then to this day,” the sailor said finally, “but even if they weren’t, I can’t imagine a single woman that would dare give her child such an awful name.”

“Well, in my land, it doesn’t have such an evil reputation,” Simon said with a shrug before moving on. He was definitely going to have to solve that level because there was no way that he was going to let Kell end up as a storied hero after all the awful things he’d done.