The first tongues of dawn flame had begun to lick across the sky and cast light upon the carnage. Flies, fat on unexpected viscera, flitted from corpse to corpse, finding the blood of men preferable to suckling at the hinds of goats. The future emperor of mankind passed through the blood and the shadows of the well town, each step quicker than the last. The rush of battle was fading from his veins, which transformed the bodies from mere enemies back to the figures of men. This alchemy of ideas transpired entirely within his mind, and without the self-protection of labeling them bandits. He had something more pressing upon his mind.
He needed a suitable place to take a piss.
My pupil had not yet earned the name that would make him famous. He was still a boy of seventeen at this time, and still growing into the prowess he would need. However, he had grown more than he realized, and yet to realize I had nudged him to the precipice of the nest and was about to kick him off the side. In the shadows of my protection, he didn’t think about what ambitious flights he might make. The boy was preoccupied with very droll concerns, such as not wanting to piss on a man he had just killed not half an hour past.
Part of his problem was how terribly little space there was in the clutch of buildings that called itself a town. It wasn’t even a crossroads, but merely a spot along the road where the locals had managed to dig a well deep enough for shepherds to water their flocks. We were in the northern reaches of the Giordanan desert, in the contested fringe that by rights belonged to Giordana, but the central kingdoms always had something to say about that.
The locals had barely been able to scratch out sustenance farms from the sandy loam, so neither the so-called policing patrols nor the more gluttonous chevauchees had bothered the little stopover town. By rights, they should have been able to keep their heads down and get on with their lives with no concerns about kings and gods, not even taxes. The bandits had changed that permanently.
They must have thought the owner of the inn and stables had hidden away some mass of gold or silver, accumulated from travelers over the years. They had torn the place apart and killed the proprietor for less money than they had in their own pockets.
It’s little consolation for the dead, but we in turn killed them. I doubt their goddess passed along the message in the afterlife.
Almond eyes fixed upon my pupil as he hiked up his chain and undershirt. Beyond the last mudbrick house he had sighted upon a scraggly thorn bush as his target, as had one of the meandering goats. The animal stood, nonplussed by his natural display. It neither cared that their owner laid some twenty paces away, stuck full of arrows.
“I hope you weren’t planning to eat this.”
The goat bleated at him as he watered the plant, but it was my shouting which cowed it away. “I told you to leave one alive, didn’t I?” We weren’t done with our work. A half dozen bandits would barely get us a purse of copper in bounty. The real prize was somewhere in the knobbly hills of sandstone. We needed a proper lure, and that meant preparations.
Which was why I was marching through the town, holding a dead bird by the neck.
The real brawn of our operation was the elder of the Tolzi brothers, who sat upon the lip of the well with a flagon of wine in one hand, and a cleaning rag in the other. Leomund Tolzi was one of the berserkers that had earned the north its reputation. A troll hunter nearly wasted upon a cadre of thieves. He spat some dregs of sediment out as I approached and gestured at the boy. “I thought he was supposed to save you one?”
The boy came strolling over, refitting his belt. “You’re the expert. Couldn’t you have just taken off one of their legs or something?”
“I tried. He bled out.”
I wanted to just toss the crow into the well and forget about it, but I wasn’t out of options. “I’ll make do with a goat. What about the other problem?”
Leomund nudged a corpse with his foot. “Right here, Master.”
The bandit was nearly perfect. About the same age as my pupil and with the same blond hair, fair skin. A Vassish man, very far from home. “Excellent. Strip him. I’ll get the goat.”
The boy sneered, sizing up the corpse’s appearance against his own. “Are you sure this is going to work? We don’t exactly look alike, and we don’t know the first thing about this guy.”
“It’ll work. You’re an actor aren’t you?” I left them to the scavenging and wooed a goat over.
My pupil was on his knees first, tugging off the chain coif and sand cape. He muttered as he worked. “Don’t even know his name.”
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Leomund gave one last swipe of his oilcloth and sheathed his sword. “Not a problem, boy. The ruse doesn’t have to last long and you’re not going to be asked for a name.”
“What if they ask me anything?”
“Make it up. Act delirious. I’m going to have to give you a hell of a cut. You should strip yourself.”
While Leomund got down and untied the bandit’s boots, my pupil stripped off his armor. He folded it neatly and bundled it within his own cape. He had just taken his undershirt off when he saw the cut across the bandit’s gut that had done him in. “I won’t be able to do much if you slice my stomach open.”
Leomund tossed the bloody shirt at him. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll stick to your little baby fat, yeah?”
He squeezed the bloody tunic. “Well, be careful, would you?”
“Can’t be too careful. Still has to get you into their camp. Now get changing. Can’t you hear them coming?” If Leomund truly could hear them coming, his senses would have surprised me.
By the time I returned, live bird in hand, the two Vassish boys– to call the bandit anything other than a stupid boy would be silly– had traded clothes. Leomund and his brother Nikolai stared with pursed lips. I took one look between my pupil and the corpse and shook my head. “The nose is wrong.”
The boy threw up his arms. “You’re asking too much here. We barely have a plan.”
Leomund nodded. “Nose is wrong. Gunna have to fix that.”
“Fix what?” the boy asked. “There’s nothing wrong with my nose.”
“You see that?” Leomund asked, pointing at the corpse’s pig like snout of a nose. Then, he punched my pupil in the face, snapping his nose.
He reeled back, screaming and cussing as blood squirted down his face. “Wha whuz ah oor?” he demanded, barely able to speak with his crooked nose.
I laughed. “Perfect. Now they won’t even question the voice. Now, let’s see here… get you into character. Your name will be Sieg. You’re a long way from home, working for bandits. Why, I bet you were a sailor that got in bad with some gambling debts. By a stroke of good fortune, after you got sold off to a slave mine, the transport was beset by bandits. Thankful like you never were to the gods, you threw yourself at the chief’s feet and pledged to work for him. Now, a few months later, you haven’t quite paid off your debt to him, which is why you took on such a dirty task as ravaging this dung heap of a town. You were cut down by knights in blue. You couldn’t make out their emblem but you know they had a bit of yellow on them. Hard to see by the moon. Very dangerous though. Most important you see the chief at once to inform him. Injuries or no.”
Three days of apprehension had nurtured inside him, ever since we had found the bounty posting. It screamed out inside him that he was in danger and should go back. But, I had taught him well that the heart of danger was the quickest way to grow. He was to be the sword I would thrust at the world, and so I first thrust it to the deepest heart of the forge.
Sieg steeled himself and locked eyes with me as Leomund fetched up a fallen sword. One quick slash and his belly opened up. I watched him gasp, double over, and crumple to the ground. He choked down a gasp and bit off a whimper. He squirmed across the sand, writhing from the pain as if worms had set into his gut.
Leomund tossed the sword into the well. It clattered and splashed as shock began to set in for the boy. “Looks real enough to me. Plenty of blood.”
“Right then,” Nikolai said, and grabbed the actual bandit by the legs. Leomund took the shoulders and the two of them carried it off to the stables. The bandits had so kindly piled up the bodies of the villagers and a slain horse there. They tossed this body in with the rest, they threw a lantern to the hay. Within a few moments, oily black smoke belched to the sky, and that would spur on the rescue team.
Meanwhile, I squatted beside Sieg. I tugged the scarf down from my face and looked at him quite seriously. It was the look I used when he had made a mistake and needed to learn his lesson, so he paid rapt attention to me. “You’re almost eighteen boy, almost a man. Show me the worth of what I’ve taught you all these years. A great opportunity is about to come to us, so prove that you’re up to the task.”
Sieg swallowed some blood that had dripped into his mouth and nodded his head. “Yes, Master.”
“And try to not rely on this, yes?” I added, tapping him on the chest. Then I tapped his forehead. “What I nurtured was this, so make use of it.”
He nodded again, and then the Tolzi brothers and I had to make our escape. Even I could hear the approaching hoofbeats. So I tossed the crow to a rooftop where it clumsily landed and made off in the opposite direction.
Sieg was left behind, and in no way had to fake his faintness of mind. Their approach was only heralded to him by the tremors in the ground. Then a dozen red cloaked bandits poured through the town. They shouted and swore, cussing in their guttural dialect. They screamed at the fire, at the smoke pluming to the heavens and lamented their lost comrades. Sieg nearly missed the time to feebly croak for help.
At once the leader of the rogues leapt from his horse and descended on him. “Oh, by the goddess. What happened here?” the swarthy man cried out as he put Sieg flat on the ground. “Medico!”
“Knights,” Sieg said, coughing up blood.
“Knights?” the bandit asked, gently taking Sieg’s head in both hands. The man wetted his lips, gently put his thumbs to the boy’s crooked nose and asked, “What Knights?” then he snapped it back into position.
Sieg screamed. He snorted more blood out. His whole face felt ablaze as swelling spread from cheek to cheek. Then he made no effort whatsoever to stay awake. The bandits screamed again, half fear and half warcry. The medic shredded the hem of Sieg’s shirt to bind his wound. At the leader’s order, they tied him onto one of the horses and departed with barely enough time spent to retrieve the coin purses and swords. The bodies they left behind as they fled back to their encampment.
Not one of them questioned why the town’s lone crow ignored the plentiful carrion to soar after them into the sandswept hills.