Roan Belgard

“Hey.”

My voice was flat, barely raised, but one of the bandits still turned around. No one else seemed to have heard, so I spoke again.

“Oi. Hey.”

This time I said it loud enough that every bandit in the place had to have heard. Proof of it: over in the corner, the big one who’d been beating a man had stopped mid-kick.

“The hell is this prick?”

All at once a raw, iron reek stabbed at my nose. I couldn’t tell whether it came from my rusted helm, from the blood running off the mountain of corpses heaped here, or simply from the foul breath of the bandit who’d come striding up to me.

“Was there a prick like this in Shurn?”

Shurn.

That had been the name; I was sure of it. For a moment my mind went back to the ruined village I’d stopped at on the way here, where I’d taken a man’s commission and tracked the bandits this far.

“Do you remember Elena?”
“What?”

He had been a man cradling a heap of burnt ash.

‘…I’ll give you everything I own. Please — find these bastards heaven itself would curse, and kill every last one of them.’

I’d gone to that village for no grander reason than to throw out my fraying cape and buy new clothes. But Shurn had already been taken by bandits, its people murdered, the whole of it burned. Wandering the charred ruins a while, I found a man not yet dead.

He said:

‘Only — before you kill them, ask them one thing.’

The wind blew, and the ash he cradled to his chest like treasure scattered a little.

‘Do you remember Elena.’

Elena.

I turned the name over. Maybe because the ash the man clutched looked like powder scooped from a child’s pyre; maybe simply because I’d repeated it hundreds of times so as not to forget.

‘And after that?’
‘If they say they don’t know, tear every one of them apart. If they say they do, let them live.’
‘Let them live?’

The man steadied his breath once. What he forced out after that was enough to move even me.

‘I can promise you this. They won’t wonder who Elena was, or why you’re asking — not by so much as one grain of this ash.’

The bandit gave no answer. I asked again.

“Do you remember Elena?”

The bandit in front of me burst out laughing. The dried blood crusted in his beard looked like it was laughing along with him.

“Elena? Your daughter?”
“No.”
“Then why ask?”

I picked my words. What came out a moment later struck even me as a passable excuse.

“She’s an acquaintance’s daughter.”

The bandit laughed again. I can say with certainty that I have yet to meet a man who laughs more crudely.

“Well, that’s a shame. We killed every last kid in Shurn. An acquaintance, you said? Don’t worry, we laid him down next to the brat so he wouldn’t feel left out.”

The others laughed along with him. Only after a while did I catch on that it had been a joke, and not just the crudest laugh in the world, but the least funny joke, too; he’d have been offended to place anywhere but first in both.

I checked the state of my scabbard a moment, then drew my longsword.

“I’ll keep this short. A survivor of Shurn commissioned me to kill you. Said he’d give me everything he owns.”
“A survivor?”

The bandit turned on his heel and strode over to the one who’d been beating the man a moment ago. Then he set to kicking him in the shins.

“Oi, you little shit. I told you to round up every last one. And you let one slip?”
“S-sorry! I’m sorry!”

The beating didn’t last long. Whether he’d worked it out of his system or not, the bandit turned his head back to me.

“And what the hell are you, that he’d hand you a job like that?”

Instead of answering, I spread my arms a little. Rusted and worn as it was, the cape fell open on leather armor backed with iron plate, and a fair amount of other gear besides.

“Fuck me. Any prick in armor’s a knight now? Looks to me like you stripped it off some knight who died in a ditch.”

His sneer left me briefly without an answer. In truth I looked nearer to a beggar fresh from rolling in a gutter than to any knight, and dress it up however kindly, “filthy vagrant” was hard to get past.

“You don’t have to believe it. What matters is that I met a survivor in Shurn, and that I tracked you this far to kill you in exchange for everything he owns.”

The bandit set a bolt in the crossbow he was holding and asked:

“Right. So you’re going to kill us?”

The other bandits had finished loading as well.

“By yourself?”

Looking at the crossbow he had leveled at me, I answered:

“No.”
“The hell, this prick.”
“Pay me more than everything he owns and I’ll let you walk.”

The bandit shook his head. The others laughed as if they couldn’t believe it.

“This one’s out of his skull.”
“Choose. Pay, or die.”

A lie, of course. Once I’d taken the commission, killing them and lining my pockets was a foregone conclusion. Money is innocent, after all. It’s only that pocketing what they cough up comes easier than rifling through corpses.

The bandit spoke as if it interested him.

“And how much is everything he owns?”
“One silver coin.”

One silver coin. Enough to buy a single decent spoon.

At that, the bandit scratched his head, making a show of turning it over. After a short silence, he spoke.

“No thanks, prick.”

The bandit squeezed the crossbow’s trigger, and at that signal the rest loosed their bolts all at once.

— FWIIING!

The shriek of splitting air lasted only a moment. Red spread slowly across my ragged armor. Most of the bolts had missed, but a few landed clean on my vitals.

“No thanks, is it. That’s a pity.”

It was quiet. No scream of pain, no thud of a body hitting the ground, only scarlet drops of blood sinking into green grass. Over that silence lay nothing but the sound of my own footsteps.

The bandit watched me come, bolts planted all across my body, and the fear in his eyes was past hiding.

“Wh-what the…”

I pulled the bolts from my throat out one after another, then the one buried in my solar plexus. More blood, a thicker reek, spread out.

“Nothing’s changed.”

I tossed the bolts in my hand aside.

“You lot really don’t change. Not in decades.”

I brought the longsword down. Frozen where he stood, the bastard split open in a long diagonal from the collarbone.

A man died.

Blood soaked the ground, and a choking reek spread.

As if only now realizing it, one of them tore the silence with a scream and thrust a spear.

“Ah — AAAAAGH!”

The long spear ran through my abdomen. It punched through the old armor, tore the skin, churned my insides, and came out the far side. I watched it in silence.

“Ngh, nnh… huuh…”

I was the one run through with the spear, and yet the one who dropped to the ground and pissed himself was the one who’d stabbed me.

“When you thrust a spear, aim for the heart. That way they die on the spot, with no chance to fight back.”

I took his head. The homely thing went rolling across the red earth.

I gripped the shaft still buried in my belly and put my arm into it. With a wet crunch, the spear came free of my body. Iron and blood ran together into one stench; the shaft turned slick and slipping in my grip.

They should have been more used to the sight in front of them than anyone, those bandits, and yet they were shaking like farmhands dragged out onto a battlefield.

The spear I’d pulled out dropped to the ground. As if at a signal, the bandits broke and ran, screaming.

“When you run, you spread out. Bolting all in one direction like that is a fine way to get wiped out.”

Then I pulled the rest of the bolts still lodged in me. The wounds closed quickly. I set off after the bandits.

Some fired crossbows; some thrust swords, bold to the end. I killed them all. One, two… and how many did this one make?

Before long the last of them caught his foot on a stone and went down. He’d been watching me over his shoulder instead of the ground.

“Huuh… hiik! P-please, spare me!”

Sprawled on his face and crawling, he cried out between sobs.

I stopped in front of him. And squatted down.

“Do you have a silver coin?”
“Y-yes! Yes! I’ll give it to you!”

Trembling, he rummaged through his pockets. The hand he drew out held a silver coin.

I took it without a word and tucked it away inside my armor.

“Thank you, sir knight! Thank you for sparing me!”
“One silver coin is the survivor’s commission. You’ll have to give me more than that.”

He kept digging through his pockets. Two copper coins came out.

“H-here you are.”

I took those as well. And then I added:

“Now give me a reason not to kill you.”
“…What? B-but, you said if I paid you’d spare me…”

I stood up. My knees had begun to ache.

Dozens of bolts in me and I’m fine, but squat too long and my knees ache.

A more wretched body there could not be.

“I lied.”

His face went blank. With nothing left worth looking at, I brought my heel down on his skull.

— CRUNCH!

A small sound, and a handful of bloody water. That was the only trace the last of the bandits who had sacked a village left in the world. For men who had taken hundreds of lives, it was a remarkably shabby end.

I searched his body myself. His pockets held six silver coins and twenty-one coppers.

Retracing the way I’d come, I set to stripping the corpses one by one. Looting stolen goods is unpleasant work, of course, but if dirtying my hands a little buys me the money to live tomorrow, there’s nothing I won’t do.

The take came to thirty gold coins and forty-one silver. The pouch jingled loudly.

I felt no particular regret at having crushed the last one’s hope with a lie. Beside men who had thrown a feast of slaughter, how shabby a sin is a single lie?

I was on my way back, heavy pouch in hand, to where the first bandit had died.

“U-um…”

I turned toward the voice and found a huddle of people shaking. They’d been penned naked inside a large cage, and the owner of the voice that had called to me was hidden behind the press of bodies. Even among bandits, the ones who had sacked Shurn seemed to run to considerably nastier tastes.

“…Please help us. Sir knight, please, help us.”

I stepped closer to the cage. I still couldn’t see who was speaking.

“Help you how?”
“…It’s my husband.”

A thin arm rose from the crowd and pointed beyond the cage. At the end of it lay the man the bandit had beaten to the ground.

Only then did I meet the eyes of the one who’d been speaking.

“Please bury him.”

She was crying. It wasn’t that the others weren’t, but she truly wept in grief.

“Hic, huuk… I beg you…”

I shook the sword out in my hand. At the sight of bandit blood spattering the ground, the huddle flinched.

Then I brought it down hard on the cage’s lock. Sparks flew, and the wire-mesh door swung wide open.

“Do it yourself.”

Leaving behind the many blank stares fixed on me, I walked out of that place. I had no wish to linger anywhere that reeked so badly of blood.

Feeling the coin pouch jingle at my waist, I moved on. My next destination was already decided.

“Now then. Let’s go collect the down payment.”

A knight who never throws away so much as a single silver coin.

That was me. Roan Belgard.