Speaking as an Evil Overlord, I just want to say that I despise hypocrites.

Yes, I’ll burn down your village. It’s possible I sold your mom into slavery. I’ve unleashed eldritch horrors that slumber, forgotten to man, to wreak untold misery upon my enemies – and I’ll do it again in a heartbeat if it suits my plans.

But you know what I won’t do? I won’t bullshit you. I won’t piss on your leg and tell you it’s raining. I won’t make an entire populace suffer and then tell them, with a straight face no less, that it’s for their own good.

You can hate me, despise me, hunger for my death. You can call for my blood and burn me in effigy. I’m honestly cool with all that, and hey, stop me if you can.

But whatever your opinion of me, you can’t say that I’m full of shit.

~ ~ ~

Imagine me sitting up in my narrow bed, in my small room, in the dark. My mouth is slightly open and my eyes are wide. Moonlight is filtering in from the crooked slats of the latched shutter on my window. My pack is by the door, two paces away, and my ax is next to it.

I also sleep naked and without a blanket, but that’s neither here nor there, really, unless you happen to have an Evil Overlord fetish, to which I say fantasize away, you naughty thing, you.

Do you have everything firmly fixed in your mind’s eye? Good. Hold on to that.

The thing about people is, they’re assholes.

Of course not all of them; not all the time anyway, and not to everyone. But to a thoroughly disposable and possibly dangerous stranger?

Let me tell you a story. There was a wine shop in the capital. It had a big sign out front that said “Wine For A Single Copper” but when you went in for your one copper wine, you found out that renting the cup it came in cost another two coppers, and no outside cups were allowed.

Another case to bolster my point is Father Viker’s advice on dating virgins, which was to tell them that blue balls is a potentially fatal condition. I mean, I’m evil, but I’ve never tricked anyone into guilt sex. There are lows too low even for me.

My point here is that people will try all manner of bullshit tricks to make a profit, or to get what they want in general. Lying, cheating, stealing, it’s all part of the human condition, and to expect anything else is to court disappointment at the very least.

To sum up and reiterate: people are assholes.

Orson, brewer and council member, was almost certainly full of shit is what I’m getting at. He probably had no idea how things stood inside the fortress, be it how much food was left, or how many coins were in Titus’s strongbox, or what the state of morale was with Titus’s goons, or what sort of magic was left in Titus’s arsenal. The likelihood of him knowing fuck-all was, in fact, quite incredibly high, all things being equal.

Probably what Orson hoped was that I would just charge in, and whatever happened to me would give him at least a partial update on the condition of the foe, as it were. He was just taking a punt, because who knew? Maybe I would succeed, however unlikely that was. At the very least I might take a few of the foe with me.

The other side of that coin, for him, was that a messy death for me would rid the town of a potential troublemaker. It seemed pretty obvious that magic of any sort was a scarce commodity in Mudhelm, just as it was everywhere else. He seemed to know (not simply suspect) that I had fire magic, and Mudhelm was nothing if not flammable. The fact that he hadn’t asked me to demonstrate my pyromantic ability said to me that he was certain of my powers.

Or that it just didn’t matter to him if I was lying my ass off.

All this I had more or less figured out before I’d laid my pointy little head down on my pillow for the night. What woke me up was more in the way of a dark epiphany that bubbled up from my subconscious and started beating a warning gong in my brain (yes, I know I’m mixing my metaphors. What are you going to do about it?)

These council assholes had only recently seized power. No way were they standing on solid political ground. I hadn’t heard a single soul singing their praises the whole time I’d been in Mudhelm – most of the council members had worked with, if not for Titus before he’d been overthrown, from what I understood. Though their cooperation had been more or less grudging, was the inference I got.

Added to that, they were facing a weakened but still dangerous foe, and the ultimate result still hung in the balance.

Given those two facts, they should have been throwing money and possibly their daughters at me to get me on their side, or at least to keep me from going over to the other side. I should have been invited to feasts and been fawned over to the point of farce.

Instead I’d gotten, if not a cold shoulder, then a barely reheated one.

Something was way the fuck off, is what I’m trying to say, and what the deeper, darker recesses of my mind kicked me out of bed to make me pay attention to.

All told, it had taken me about sixteen hours to reach this conclusion, which is just embarrassing if I compare it to my ability to detect bullshit now. But I was still very young, and relatively inexperienced when it came to the deep levels of fuckery my fellow sentient creatures are wont to get up to.

Embarrassingly slow on the uptake or not, I figured out just enough, just in time to save my life. So that was all right.

Let’s go back to me sitting bolt-upright in bed now, in all my nude, pre-Overlord glory, shall we?

I had been sitting up for all of two heartbeats when the crossbow bolt tore through the slats of the shutter and buried itself in my pillow, and the mattress, and the bedframe, with a heavy, quivering thud.

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I flung myself toward the ax just as the door burst open, torn from its hinges. My fingers touched the handle, and then I got kicked in the face by the intruder, which altered my trajectory. I collided with the wall, a little stunned and with blood spurting from my nose.

The intruder was in dark leather armor. A rag covered the lower half of his face. He had a dirk in each hand.

I lit him up.

Head on fire, he dropped his knives and screamed and started beating at his face (they do that a lot, I’ve found). Then somebody much bigger squeezed through the doorway and shoved the burning assassin at me. I pushed Mister Screamy off of me and got to my feet, ready to flambe the second one.

I wasn’t sure at first, but the flickering firelight revealed enough for me to tell after a moment that the second intruder was Terces, the troll I had first met when I arrived.

I launched a spear of flame at him. It burnt through his shirt, and then the flame died out in a wink.

“Trolls don’t burn, goblin killer,” he said. Then he reached out with one of those unnaturally long arms, grabbed me by the top of the head, then slammed the side of my head against the wall once, twice, three times for good luck. Then he threw me down to the floor next to his now-dead but still burning coworker.

“Not that it’s any consolation, but this wasn’t my idea,” he said. Then he raised one very large booted foot above my head, ready to crack it like an egg.

My vision was more than a little blurry, but I saw the spearhead that suddenly sprouted from his chest just fine. I also heard the “Waaargh!” that accompanied it perfectly clearly despite the ringing in my ears.

Terces spat out blood and grabbed the spearhead, but his assailant wasn’t done. Using the spear as a handle, the person who’d just saved me shoved the troll out the window with brutal force. Terces fell, spear still lodged in him.

The orc who had decisively removed him from the room turned his heavy, tusked face to me. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

“Put out that fuckin’ fire,” he said, “and next time sleep with your weapon. You should fuckin’ know that.” The he walked out of the room.

I worked my way up to a sitting position and dazedly looked around for something to douse the flames with. Then Modie appeared with a bucket and, with a long-suffering and somehow still bored look, poured its contents over the assassin’s burning head.

“Who was that?” I asked, only slurring the words a little.

“That’s my dad,” he said with a shrug. “Help me drag this asshole outside, would you?”

“Eh?”

“Did you want to keep it as a pet or something?” He kicked the corpse’s ankle.

“Uh, no.” I got up, shaky but alright. “Maybe we should just put him out the window?” I asked.

“Nah. Mom’ll bitch if we make a habit of dumping corpses in her garden. She’s already gonna skin dad if that troll fucked up her roses. I don’t want any part of that.”

“Um, let me put some pants on.”

Modie rolled his eyes. “Nobody cares, humie.”

“I care.”

“Whatever. Hurry up, pasty.”

* * *

Half an hour later I was sitting in the common room with Modie, his mom Hella, and his dad, whose name turned out to be Goldfinch, I shit you not.

There were two other guests staying at the inn. One, a human, just checked to see if there would be any other violence and went back to bed, while the other (who I’d only caught a very brief glimpse of the cloaked and hooded back of) never came out of their room at all. Must’ve been a heavy sleeper.

We’d chucked the human assassin’s corpse unceremoniously out the front door and into the street. Terces, however, hadn’t been as dead as I’d assumed he would be. He’d disappeared, leaving behind a broken spear, a couple of flattened rose bushes, a liberal amount of blue-green troll blood, and an absolutely livid Hella. There was no sign of the crossbowman, of course. Or crossbow-woman? Crossbowperson, whatever. They’d fucked off after doing their part, leaving no sign or trace.

Goldfinch, it turned out, was the Dripping Bucket’s cook, and he silently whipped up sausage and eggs for everyone (it being near dawn), then sat at the table beside his wife and glowered.

It all seemed rather surreal.

“Uh, thanks for saving my life,” I said to him. He just stared at me.

“He didn’t do it for you,” Modie said, his tone intimating I was an idiot. “Nobody gets to attack an orc homestead and walk away whistling.”

“Well, whatever the reason, I’m grateful.” And I was. I was very much not used to anyone coming to my aid.

“Then you’ll have no issue paying for the damages,” Hella said. “Meanwhile you’ll be needing another room. If you think this is likely to be a regular occurrence, that room needs to be in another inn.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know why I was attacked in the first place. Or who wants to see me dead, for that matter.” Oh, I had some very deep suspicions, mind you, but blabbing them out didn’t seem prudent.

“Terces works for Dillit,” rumbed Goldfinch. “Sometimes.”

“Dillit? Oh, right, the goblin with the bad taste in jewelry.”

“Dillit the councilor,” said Hella. “Which means the council probably wants you dead. What did you do to get on their bad side?”

“Nothing that would warrant squishing my head like a grape.”

“Well, be that as it may, I think it’s time you looked for other lodgings,” said Hella. “You understand.”

“No,” said Goldfinch. Hella glared at him. Modie yawned.

“And why the hell not?” Hella asked her husband, and he pointed a thick, greenish forefinger at me.

“He killed a home raider. Clan law is clear.”

Hella clucked her tongue. “Don’t you start that clan law bullshit with me, Goldie. This is Mudhelm, not Balzarek.”

He crossed his massive forearms under his massive pectoral muscles. “Dripping Bucket clan. Dripping Bucket homeland. Balzarek, Mudhelm, doesn’t matter. He fought, he killed, he stays.”

Hella threw up her hands. “Stubbornest fucking orc I ever had the misfortune to marry.”

I cleared my throat. “I can find another inn. It’s not an issue.”

Goldfinch leaned forward and speared me with his beady eyes.

“You fought. You killed. You stay.”

“Clan obligations go both ways, fire boy,” Modie informed me. “You proved your worth in battle, blah blah blah, so now you protect the clan and the clan protects you, for a year and a day. You can refuse, but you really don’t want to refuse my dad. Unless you want to make him a blood enemy, of course.

It took me about half a second to decide I did not, in fact, want to make Modie’s pappy a blood enemy.

So anyway, that’s how I became a member of the Dripping Bucket clan, or at least an affiliate member, which sounds vaguely alright if not particularly fearsome. But it got me no discounts whatsoever on my room and board, which still seems a little stingy if you ask me. Hella really loved her roses, though, and laid their fate squarely at my feet.

We talked a little more, but Goldfinch wasn’t what you’d call chatty and Modie wasn’t what you’d call interested, so it ended up being just me and and Hella soon enough.

Because I was clever, I’d learned a lot about the situation in Mudhelm. But because I wasn’t quite as clever as I believed myself to be, I hadn’t thought to ask anybody exactly who was on the council. They would’ve just been names. I knew Orson, and I knew Dillit,the goblin with the gold chain, and nobody else, not even how many.

What I’m getting at here is that I didn’t know Catapult was one of the councilors until I asked Hella for a list of the people who apparently wanted me dead. It hadn’t even occurred to me that she might be. It sure as hell hadn’t occurred to me to ask.

“There are five councilors,” she told me. “Orson, Dillit, Meyrstrict, al’Vulk, and Grim.”

When she said the last one, I got this weird, tight feeling in my chest. “Grim?”

“She’s the only woman councilor. Used to work for Titus, but went over to the council with the understanding she’d have a spot on it. She’s the one in charge of the militia.”

“Brown hair? Muscular, scarred face?”

“That sounds like her. Why? You know her?”

“I do believe we’ve met. You wouldn’t happen to know where she stays, would you?”

“She’s usually at the bulwarks opposite the fortress gate. Hey, where are you going? You haven’t finished your breakfast.”

“Gonna have a chat with my old pal Catapult,” I replied.

“Who? Whatever, you still need to pay.”