As iing as it was to see himself in statue form ahe only slightly tarnished pque about how he defeated Bckheart’s curse, Simon didn’t linger iy and was quickly on his way. It wasn’t that he was afraid that people might catch him or something. His anonymity felt reasonably secure as long as he wasn’t standing right o that statue.

  Even if that wasn’t the case, though, it had only been a few years. He could always say he’d decided to e bad visit or something. The worst he’d probably face was a series of feasts in his honor. Maybe he’d have to fend off a marriage proposal or two.

  He wasn’t really ied in any of that, though. Instead, he briefly toured the hospital and orphahat had been built with the reward money he’d refused. They werely the -looking pces, but that was to be expected. They were funal, at least, and they seemed to be doing some good. Really, in this dark world, that was all he could ask for.

  He thought about joining up with a caravan, but he was enjoying the road too much to bother with pany. So, instead, he restocked his meager supplies with things that did well on the road, like potatoes, coarse bread, and salt pork. The only luxury he spared some of his silver on was a thin folio full of bnk paper. He had paper for his maps, of course, but as he’d entered different vistas on the road north, he’d felt the urge to skete of them, and he didn’t want to mar his otherwise meticulous cartography with his childish drawings.

  The road north was ier dition than the one he’d used when he’d e in from the east, but Simon didn’t use that to travel any faster. It would have screwed up the scale of his map. He had no idea how professional cartographers did this sort of thing in the days befPS, but his way was simple. Every day, he tried to go about ten miles at a nice leisurely pace, and every day, he added another millimeter of lio the road on his map. It was tiny, but he had no idea hoart any of these pces were, so he was leaving himself extra room as he doted each vilge and ke he came across.

  By nd, no one seemed to know hoart anything was. Traders that he talked to spoke in terms of weeks rather than miles, and though people expressed a bit more fidence about the sea routes, from what he’d seen, most of those maps varied wildly, too.

  He wasn’t sure. Hell, Simon wasn’t even sure he was going to share these with anyone when he was done, but he for his own sanity. He needed as much of the world that he ko fit together as he could. It would give him the information he o make better choices. He couldn’t keep treating every level like it existed in a vacuum.

  This point was driven home as he moved north and found the hills he’d been navigating slowly but surely turned into a desert. The Wantari, it was called, acc to the traders he dined with one night. He wasly equipped for a desert, and he didn’t have the word for water to fall ba, so he paid careful attention to them whealked about distances and oases.

  It turned out he didn’t have too much to worry about. Four days into the desert, he found a suspiciously familiar oasis that was thankfully unpoisohere were some horsemehat seemed more like nomadic tribesmen than raiders, but he left them alone, and they, thankfully, returhe favor.

  The starry nights there were beautiful, aed down some of the more promi steltions, unsure of what they were actually supposed to be. Two days ter, the desert started to fade away in favor of grassnds, disappointing him.

  “If the basilisk city isn’t here, thehe hell is it supposed to be?” he grumbled as he searched the desert horizon behind him for any signs of the pilrs he’d been hoping to find. Simon might not be able to explore the whole world, but he’d settle for at least finding most of the levels he’d been to before.

  The whole trip was starting to feel self-indulgent to Simon when he finally figured out where he was and what he o do. Even though time was meanio him, spending weeks slowly traveling to who knew where over the best part of a thousand miles, sketg ndscapes as he went, didn’t seem like the best use of his time.

  Then he figured out how near he was to Crowvar. That was all the information he o decide that it was time to pay Varten a visit. As far as Simon was ed, he was the Raithewait family curse, and he would gdly kill every single version of that mohat he found. He didn’t care if it hurt his experieals or his karma or however that worked. He didn’t even care if it screwed with history. Varten was and always would be, a dead man.

  That wasn’t the main reason he was going to go to Crowvar, though. That would have simply bee. Simon had a much better reason foing - this was the perfect ce to kill the taurs before they became a real problem in a few years.

  He was fairly certain that Hedes did not mean for him to solve levels like this. In fact, because of the way things worked now, he retty sure that the horse lords were supposed to win, at least for a while. Doing things like this might well screw things up as far as she was ed, but he didn’t care.

  All Hedes seemed to care about was that he saved that one family he’d fouhe exit portal. That wasn’t good enough for Simon, though. He was long past saving one person at a time when the world was falling apart.

  “If I go ba time and kill baby Genghis Kahn before he grows up to quer all the taur tribes, then I save thousands. Tens of thousands maybe,” he told himself, and that was exactly what he aimed to do.

  The only problem was that he really only had one shot at this. It was actually refreshing to realize that as he slowly made his way to Crowvar. Normally, he had as many ces as he o solve a problem, but win or lose, he retty sure this level was plete, which meant that when he died and tried to e back, there would be nothing here. In fact, there would be nothiweehedral and the taur levels, and those were probably a couple decades apart.

  “Figuring out the dates for every level is probably something I should have done first thing,” he sighed as he realized he needed a dar every bit as much as he needed a map. A sed try at things like this would involve him whiling away a dozen years doing whatever before baby Genghis Kahn was even bain.

  Obviously, that wasn’t going to happen, and the st thing he wao do was solve this Hedes’ way, so he was going to have to make this t. Simohe couple of days trying to decide the best way to take over the town and its military resources in a coup, as well as thinking about how he should kill Varten this time, but all that went out the window when he saw the bck plume of a vilge burning in the distanbsp;

  He didn’t have time to py political games at the Raithewait’s expehere were people to save and hazards to fight.

  Simon had to leave the main road to reach the pd was much too te to do much good. At least, that’s what he thought as he watched the fires already guttering in the distahat ged when the taur war band that had dohe deed spotted him as they were leaving the se. Apparently, they hadn’t gotten enough murder in for the day and decided he was worth killing, too.

  That was fine. If they’d run, he would have had to hunt them down, but this way, it made things easy enough for Simon to kill them all with a si of greater forces. He didn’t bother to hold back. There was no one around, and they deserved no merbsp;

  So, he waited until they were within range, used a world of lesser force prote to keep the arrows that they rained down on him and his donkey from finding their mark, and waited until they got inte. Then he said, “Gervuul Oo.” After that, they never saw what was ing. One sed, they were charging him with nces down in a tight group of almost twenty warriors as they jockeyed for position and raced each other to be the oo end Simon, and the , they were only so much cooli.

  With a single swipe of his hand, an invisible sword dozens of feet long sliced through the group in a single lihat left each of the half-men cut in half. Sometimes, their human torsos were eatly from their equine bodies, and other times, the line was closer to mid-chest or head. Some of them had time to scream, but most of them simply looked at Simon with unprehending eyes as their hearts beat their st.

  It was an unsatisfying victory, and Simo more time calming his mule as he tried to ast the bloody sight than he did actually defeating the group. He sighed. Normally, he wouldn’t have acted with such brutality, but just because this evil wore a human face didn’t mean it was remotely close to human, and he reminded himself of that as he made his way to the vilge.

  Simon’s heart fell when he didn’t immediately find any survivors, but once he started to shout that the taurs were dead and it was safe to e out, a few women and children started to crawl out from beh burned-out buildings. Many of them were wounded, but all of them were covered in ash and dirt.

  The men had died fighting. That much was obvious from the corpses, but they hadn’t done much. For every ten human corpses on the ground, there was only a taur or two. It was a familiar sight for Simon. He’d seen this kind of age before, though not in a long time.

  “Are they going to e back?” a little girl asked him as he was bandaging a split around an arm that might have been broken or simply sprained.

  “No,” Simon said fidently. “These monsters will rouble your vilge again. I won’t let them.”

  He wasn’t sure how he would keep that promise yet, but he was sure that he would, and it would take an awful lot more than a few taurs with bows to ge that.