Death After Death

The first thing Simon did was escort the survivors to the nearest village. He left his mule there with them, along with most of his supplies, because it would only slow him down. It was only once they were safe, that he followed the centaur’s tracks back to see where they’d come from.

No one volunteered to come with him, but that was fine. He might be known as a witch hunter or a gifted healer further south, but he had no reputation here. That sort of trust would come in time, which worked out for him because he was more than a little rusty. In fact, he almost resented having to buckle his leather armor back on after going so long without it.

Of course, by the time he got there, the trail was long cold, but it was a place to start. He’d learned through hard experience during his time serving the Raithewaits that finding the main centaur herd for any given region could be tricky because they were always on the move.

Theoretically there were dozens of them on the plains, and the only reason they weren’t a bigger problem was because they warred with themselves and the orcs as much as they did the humans. Normally all you needed to do was kill the war bands interested in picking fights with men, and the rest would find something better to do with their time. Simon didn’t feel like that was going to be enough in this case.

Three days later, he found his first herd and followed them from a distance, waiting to see what they would do as he hid in the tall grass and the other cover the empty plains provided. He didn’t do anything beyond that, though. Not until he saw them fight with a band of gnolls that had wandered too far from the foothills of the mountains that rose up to the east.

As they skirmished and taunted each other, he moved into position upwind of them, but it was only once the fight was fully joined that Simon lit fires. When he’d worked as a warrior for Baron Raithewait, his favorite tactic had been to bait the trap and surround it with hidden archers. Since he had no army behind him yet, though, he settled for another form of encompassing attack instead: brush fires.

A centaur herd was more than just the young male war bands that did the killing. It was also full of women and colts that would grow up to become killers. He wasn’t an anthropologist or anything, but that much was plain to see. In that sense, this was some kind of war crime, he supposed, as the fires started to spread and fan out, driven by the wind, but he didn’t care.

Half a dozen spot fires lit by a lesser word of fire hundreds of feet apart became a wall of fire in less than five minutes when the winds were right, and right now, the winds were perfect. Within minutes, he could no longer see the herd, and the wall of fire raced toward them. He could imagine what was happening, though, based on what he was hearing.

Right now there was more running than dying. There was probably a stampede, and it was headed right toward the gnolls. That was bad luck for them, but Simon didn’t exactly care if the dog men survived either. They were in no way man’s best friend.

A centaur attack was so successful, oftentimes, because they were patient. They could dance around with their superior mobility and wear down their foes, even if they were stronger or better armored. That didn’t work so well now, though.

Now everyone was running, and those who weren’t fast enough were being burned alive, giving the gnolls just what they craved most: the chance to rip out the throats of their enemies up close and personal. The next half hour was a bloodbath, and as Simon approached the fighting once it was all but done, he walked past more than a few charred corpses.

He had no doubt that much of this herd had gotten away. Perhaps half of them might have escaped, but they were a shadow of what they’d been this morning. It would take them many years to build back up to what they’d once been, and for now, that was enough.

Simon fought the last few with his bow, sniping a few where he could as he hid amidst the smoke. He was out of practice and didn’t always hit where he aimed, but he would get better. He had to get better.

By the time it was done, he counted sixty corpses on the ground, including the gnolls. He spent the rest of the day gathering the trophies he’d need to prove he’d done this thing in the form of the ugly bone jewelry that the warriors wore in the noses and ears. A pile of such trophies would make him a lot more believable when he started recruiting people to his side, and if things hadn’t changed too much, they could also be sold in Crowvar for quite a bit of silver.

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It was grisly work, and once it was done, Simon found a stream not so far away to wash in despite the fact that the sun was getting close to setting. Once he was mostly free of blood and smoke, he slept warily and spent much of the next day making normal-sized arrows from the Centaur’s huge ones before he continued on.

This far from the main trade roads, the herding villages that dotted the prairie all hid behind palisades to help keep the monsters at bay. As he visited them, one at a time, his legend started to grow with every story he told.

That was when Simon also started to slowly gather people to his banner, such as it was. One at a time, men interested in either the bounty on the horse lords, or their own personal grudges against the centaurs started asking to fight alongside Simon, and he was happy to let them join.

After another week, he had three people in his little mercenary troop, and after a month of tracking his equine enemy across the broad plains, he had almost two dozen. They faced the horse lords wherever they found them and with whatever numbers they had. Sometimes, Simon’s men thought he was suicidal, and he was often forced to use a bit of surreptitious magic to balance the scales, but as they won fight after fight against the horse lords, the men started to trust him. Still, it was only when he was lying in his bedroll and overheard some of the men he was fighting with talking about him that Simon understood how far his personal legend had gotten out of his control.

“They say he lost his whole family, you know,” someone said around the low fire, “In the massacre at Teller, or maybe Guin Springs. Hard to say, he don’t talk about that much.”

Simon had been to both villages and could confirm they’d both been sacked by the horse lords more than once. He’d never lived in either place, and he’d definitely never had a family get massacred there. Simon doubted that those truths would have been enough to stop the stories, though. So, instead, he just listened as the tales of his pain became more and more elaborate.

He’d been at this for years. He’d killed over a hundred centaur warriors by himself, including a few with his bare hands. Also, according to different voices around the fire, he’d sold his soul to the devils below, and he couldn’t die until he’d killed the last centaur.

“Simon? No,” someone else said. “I don’t believe it. He’s a good man. He wouldn’t truck with demons or other infernal things like that. He’s just very driven.”

“Believe what you like,” the first voice answered conspiratorially. “I’m telling you it’s true. No man kills so many without a reason or survives so many battles without some kind of magic on his side.”

“But what about you,” a third voice asked, “Ain’t you survive plenty yourself? You’re always talkin’ about how you’ve been through half a hundred battles without much more than a scratch.”

“I… that’s different,” the storyteller said, making Simon smirk as he lay there staring up at the starry sky. He tuned out the rest of the conversation as he contemplated what they’d said and tried to decide what he should do about it.

Over the last few weeks, they’d taken down over a dozen small warbands and all but obliterated a herd they’d chased into a box canyon. It wasn’t enough to turn the tide or anything, but as far as Simon was concerned, it was a start. They’d made a dent in the monsters that haunted the land and built up a huge pile of trophies that his men could turn in for the bounty.

It had also shaken all the rust off him. It felt like forever since he’d fought this often and this hard, and right now, Simon felt like he was as good with the bow and the sword as he’d ever been. He was also in excellent shape, which was nice considering just how often he wasn’t.

He was showing his age a little, too, though. He’d probably burned through two decades of life on this run so far, and he was starting to feel it in his joints. So far, he’d avoided the temptation to drain the lives of his enemies to solve that problem, but it was ever a temptation, especially during the heat of battle.

Honestly, the way the last few weeks had gone, he would have been happy to stay out here for a year, avoiding magic as much as possible and just hunting and stalking their next target and then ambushing them when they found the right battlefield. It wasn't quite as productive as mapping or healing the sick, but it was fun, and that had its place in his quest, too, didn’t it?

Unfortunately, they couldn’t stay out here forever. Living off the land was hard with such a large group and even harder on the battle-scarred plains they traveled across. They were going to have to stop for supplies again. Normally that wouldn’t be an issue, but this time, fortunately, or unfortunately, they were approaching Crowvar.

The men Simon fought beside could make up whatever strange backstories they wanted about him, but his real backstory was in the walls of that awful town, and just visiting it for long enough to stock up on the essentials was enough to risk making his whole life spin out of control. He might have grown as a person, but he doubted very much that any amount of personal growth would be enough to forgive Varten for what he’d done and what he’d tried to do.

Anything Simon did on that front would hopelessly derail his crusade against the centaurs, though. Did he want to stop the tribes from uniting more than he wanted to kill Varten? Did he want to save the whole region instead of just one family? That’s what he was going to have to decide, but for right now, he had no answers; his mind was as empty as the sky above him.

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