The bandits, dissatisfied with the family's paltry offering of material goods, had wandered away from the back of the wagon, having destroyed most and stolen the rest.
A rather heated discussion began then, undoubtedly over what they wanted to do with the four travelers now huddled, bound and shivering, against what was left of their earthly possessions. The family's patriarch, half blinded by the blood leaking into his eyes courtesy of the gash a cudgel strike had opened across his brow, strained to hear what snatches of muttered conversation he could catch over the constant rumbling of the nearby cinder peaks. From what he could glean, it seemed what the looting had lacked in entertainment, they felt activities to follow would more than compensate for. The glances at his daughter were increasing.
Soon, the highwaymen closed into a semi-circle around their whimpering huddle; seven of them, that he could see at least. Their leader -- or at least the one with the largest weapon, which probably amounted to the same thing -- stepped forward.
"We normally let people go if they can come up with the protection fee. But we been through all your stuff, and we know you folks is a little short. So, I think we discuss a little exchange, maybe."
He tossed a longer, more meaningful leer at the girl.
Her father lurched forward, doing his best to lunge angrily without the use of his arms or legs, no more menacing than a caterpillar.
"YOU BASTARD! I'LL KI--"
The threat was abruptly quelled by a vicious kick from the leader's steel-toed boot, sending him flying back against the side of the cart. He slumped down, half-conscious, nose disjointed, new blood mingling with the steady flow from the exacerbated wound now spanning his forehead.
"Excuse me."
The leader spun to face the sudden and quite unwelcome new voice behind him, his blade coming with him in an arc designed to meet the stranger at what would be head height on a normal man. What it met was the flat edge of a gleaming silver longsword, precisely where it needed to be to stop the crude scimitar, as surely as if the whole affair had been choreographed.
The skill of this maneuver and the craftsmanship of the weapon were both lost on the bandit, however, whose attentions were much more drawn to the black crossbow in the figure's other hand, simultaneously raised to eye level. He was close enough to see the wickedly barbed end of the bolt resting precariously in its nock, a green substance glistening on the tip.
"Yes, hello there," the new arrival continued, as though nothing of note had happened. "Might I inquire as to your business with these people? And I highly recommend you tell your men not to move. I'm certain they process change quite slowly, and I want to use this window of opportunity to assure them that trying anything...well, I guess heroic wouldn't be the best term here, so we'll stick with stupid. Often times the same thing. Anyway, it just would not be wise."
Several beats passed. The silence was broken only by the ambient seismic rumbling, the muffled sobs from the hostages, and gravel shifting uneasily beneath the feet of those bracing for whatever came next.
"Not that I believe they're truly loyal to you," the odd stranger continued, seemingly insulated from the awkwardness of the moment by his own stream of consciousness. "And I'm sure one of them is thinking, 'Oi, shoot the bastard, then I'll be in charge because I've got the second biggest sword,' or some rubbish. But as you currently find yourself on the business end of me, I feel you can speak with utmost authority on the fact that any attempts on my life will only make them next in line. Now, once again, if you can please pass all that along in a language they can understand, I'd appreciate it. I'm not very good at monosyllabic speech."
Most of the stranger's features were hidden in the cowl of his hooded cloak. What light battled through the ash clouds above, the sickly green of a fading bruise, still revealed the faintest glimpse of an odd little smile, made all the more unnerving by the unnatural hue. He gingerly flicked the crossbow, encouraging its target to get on with it.
"Er...right. You...you blokes lay off a moment."
The hood tilted to one side, and the figure's stance changed. A slump of a shoulder, a shift of the weight, his whole profile deflating in a disappointed sigh.
"Is that it? I expected you all would have some sort of rich bandit code-speak, firmly rooted in the heritage of outlaws everywhere. Dripping of history and the quiet, misunderstood dignity of your profession. I couldn't even understand the last group once they got going. They even had a sign language all their own, it was quite amazing to watch. I suspect you're not very proper outlaws at all."
"Well...we do...we do rob people."
This seemed to perk the stranger up a bit.
"This is true! Tell me, what do you do with what you take? Does it fund a guerilla war effort? Do you give it to the less fortunate in a nearby village? Do you have a dark and sinister plan to summon an eldritch god that needs the resources?"
The leader's brow furrowed deeply as he weighed where to go with this. Being a small-time brigand didn't require a lot of quick thought. You gave people the usual "money or your life" menu, and whatever they did next put them in one category or the other. Sometimes, if you were feeling feisty, both. He wasn't used to questions. And above all, he didn't catch on very fast.
"Er...ale and whores, mostly."
With another disappointed sigh from the dark recesses of the hood, the finger squeezed the trigger. The bolt embedded itself in the bandit leader's skull with a thok, sending him flying backwards with the force of the point-blank impact.
To anyone with a working knowledge of mechanics, what happened next was a minor miracle of technology.
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A perfectly-balanced and meticulously measured weight attached to the crossbow string pulled it forward with an elasticity not usually found in such material and, when inertia gave out, snapped the string back, causing it to set itself without any winding or resorting to the usual "stand on the bugger and pull till it clicks" methods common to reloading a crossbow.
As the weight passed back across the point where the string was anchored, it flicked a small lever, which activated a repeater mechanism, which then in turn lifted another bolt out of a chamber beneath the body of the crossbow and nocked it, readying the weapon for immediate use once more.
All this happened in the span of seconds, and the bandits were not men known for their intimate knowledge of physics, apart from the pressure needed to cause the edge of a sword to pass through the space occupied by an uppity peasant's skin. Rather than marvel at its ingenuity, they stood, frozen and leaderless and absolutely unsure what to do now.
"It's really quite masterful," said the robed figure cheerfully, as if he'd just demonstrated an appliance of some kind in the market square. "I don't understand all of it, but it works like that every time. The dwarves designed it, bloody brilliant with tools they are. I think a few of the principles and mechanisms were gnomish, so I do count myself lucky it hasn't exploded yet, but you pays your money and takes your chances, right?"
He strode over to the masked man nearest to him and held it aloft like a proud father.
"And this string is from a spider they get down in their mines, beautifully elastic, nothing else like it," he gushed, plucking the tension-filled fiber, watching the bandit flinch each time the bolt wiggled in its perch. "Really gives it that extra oomph it needs to have some stopping power. I mean, honestly, your leader flew...what, three, four feet before he hit the ground? Simply marvelous."
The man with the second biggest sword, now entirely less happy with his promotion than he thought he would be, was not in the mood for a lesson on advanced arms design.
"Look, we'll give them their stuff back, alright?"
The stranger glanced around at the splinters of wood and glass that were strewn all over the ground. "Not sure how much good that will do, unless you've stolen a good bit of glue recently."
The newly-ascended bandit quickly untied his coin purse and threw it on the ground at the hooded man's feet, motioning for the others to do the same. They didn't argue. The figure prodded each pouch with the toe of his trail-worn boot and seemed to be lost deep in thought for several minutes. The silence was almost worse than the noise of the bolt making intimate contact with their late leader.
It is an unfortunate human tendency, during silences like these, to try and fill them.
"You might as well let us go. You can't shoot us all."
The hood angled up again as the man came out of his reverie. And chuckled. This had not been the intended effect.
"Oh, I don't know about that. Tell me, what arrangement were you going to make concerning this man's daughter, hmm?"
"I...er...we was..."
"Going to have a bit of fun with her? Maybe a tea party? Dress up all nice like and play dolls? Have a sleep-over! You could talk about how cute the nobles' sons are, and have a pillow fight!" The voice from the hood was taking on an increasingly manic edge. Unfortunately for all involved, their new leader was even slower on the uptake than his predecessor.
"Yeah! Right! Just some harmless fun, s'all!"
The stranger flicked both of his wrists, his sleeves sliding back to reveal small silver tubes strapped to both forearms, holes on the ends facing outward. The sudden motion caused a steel dart to fly out of each, embedding themselves in the two bandits nearest their new boss. While this was still registering on everyone, the repeater crossbow fired three more times in nearly as many seconds, and three more bodies fell to the ground.
Before the man with the second-biggest sword could even get it out of its sheath, the hooded figure had him on the ground, knee on his chest, a small dagger pressed against his throat. He leaned in very closely, and spoke in a voice that dripped more poison than any crossbow bolt, suddenly cold and sharp as the dagger he held, devoid of all trace of the eccentric mirth it held meager moments before.
"Do not patronize me. Ever. Go to Last Lament. Tell them this pass is closed to outlaw activity on authority of the Old Wolf. Tell them it's your dead leader's fault, he won't mind. Tell them about what you've seen. Tell them about what I've done. Tell them I shoot fireballs from my ass, I don't care. Just tell them to leave this pass alone until I say otherwise."
He leaned in closer, as a trickle of blood began to creep down the prone man's neck where the blade had come to rest.
"I don't so much care about the stealing. Everyone has to make a living somehow. It's not your fault you're not very good at it. But you are never...ever...to threaten a young lady again. And if you do, I will know. I know everything. I'm always watching. If you do, I will find you, and everyone you have ever cared about. And you will think back to this day with your dying gasps, of which there will be many, and you will wish I'd leaned just a little harder on this dagger. Do you understand? I would recommend against nodding. Just blink twice."
The prone bandit fluttered his eyelashes like a desperate courtesan. And as quickly as it had begun, it was over. His assailant leapt up and the cheery, almost friendly voice returned.
"Right, that's settled then. Best be on your way!"
The bandit scrambled to his feet and bolted off down the rocky trail toward Last Lament as quickly as he could. Skittering and sliding on the loose downhill stone, he shredded the palms of his hands catching himself on the jutting obsidian, but never, ever stopped moving.
The hooded figure turned to the family, forgotten during the ordeal which had taken less than five minutes from start to finish.
They huddled still closer to one another as they stared at him and, on occasion, at the six bodies lying around his feet. The Old Wolf reached up to retrieve a cigarette from the vicinity of his ear, leaned down to strike a match on the stubbled face of a bandit, and threw back his hood to set about putting the badly creased dog-end out of its misery.
He was human, and a non-descript one at that. Brown hair, blue eyes, a scar here and there, but nothing extraordinary. A man that wouldn't merit a second glance on a busy street. The father wondered if that didn't make him even more dangerous. If such a thing were possible, all things considered.
"The coins are all yours," he said through a half-closed mouth as he walked over to cut their bindings, cigarette clamped tightly between his lips. "Take them, enjoy your stay in Mereven. Tell the people at the Rusted Mug that Albanos says hello, if you ever pop in. They'll take care of you. Sorry for the mess. Now if you'll excuse me..."
With that, he stood, bowed, collected his bolts from the corpses with an alarmingly nonchalant "stomp on the sternum and yank" technique, and hopped effortlessly up the stones off to one side of the trail.
A thought that had been nagging the father finally fought its way past the flashbacks of his life to the forefront of his mind. From his seat by the wagon, he had been facing the bandits the entire time. He could see behind them before all this started. And he'd be damned if he'd seen the man come up. He'd just sort of...been there.
Gathering his family, the coins, and piling their remaining belongings back on the cart, they set off toward Mereven once more, considerably richer and with only a broken nose and mild cases of rope burn for their troubles. As an afterthought, before they pulled completely out of the valley, they stopped to add their own stone cairn to the surrounding collection as thanks, to whom it may concern.
On a ledge above them, dividing his attention between making sure the family got on their way safely and chuckling at the dot of the surviving bandit as he frantically disturbed dust and ash into clouds behind him, a hooded figure finished his cigarette, flicked the butt into a steam vent, and wandered off.