They were a formidable duo. Tomas the Rabid Dwarf: a very short man – although not truly dwarfish – with bad teeth and an impressive mustache, so called for his temper and predilection for explosions and unprovoked violence. And Yelm the Iron Giant: single-armed and Cyclopean after the final engagements of the War, so named because he stood eight feet tall and consistently survived what broke other men. Together, they ranged the European lands once ravaged by the armies and the creations of the New Scientists and the Madboy Kings, hunting down the Haunts which had survived the Second Thirty Years War. Those peasants and burghers who had likewise survived the conflicts, and who now found themselves piecing back together the old nations in spite of the vestigial aristocracies, paid well for proof that yet another of the monsters and machines created by the Madboys had been destroyed, and so Tomas and Yelm were able to stitch together a living in the midst of the ruins and the fear.
Now three years after the end of the War, they found themselves in Vsetin drinking through the proceeds of a bounty not from haunt, but rather from the defeat of a band of brigands. Yelm grimaced, still unsure as to how exactly he felt about his own role in the affair. He finished his beer as Tomas set a fresh round on their table.
“I really ought to make you get your own,” the Dwarf complained. “It’s too hard to carry a pitcher and a pint at the same time.”
Yelm grinned in spite of himself, an uncommon sight on his scarred face. “Your round.”
“I know, I know,” Tomas said. “And you paid for the extra. Still, I have to work harder than you for the same effect.”
Yelm shrugged lopsidedly and raised the pitcher, which looked like little more than a mug in his massive hand.
Tomas wiped foam from his mustache, and said casually, “Inez tells me they were sentenced today.”
Inez was a bar wench, Tomas’s latest conquest. Yelm thought, We’ll have to seek new lodging soon. She’s already talking too much for his tastes.
“The mines for the rest of their lives, and anything that they would have earned goes back to the villagers.”
Yelm raised an eyebrow. Not the one above his missing left eye.
“It’s true,” Tomas said. “The Masters of this District have a keenly developed sense of justice. And they perhaps feel a little guilt over having so long ignored Kulczak.” He drank a little more of his beer. “I expect those bandits now wish we’d just killed them up there. If I’d known they’d already finished all of Yanosh’s beer, I would have done so.”
Yelm nodded. But this was where he felt uneasy. Only three of the bandits had been brought to Vsetin to face justice. The others, some twelve men including the leader, had already paid for their crimes with their lives. These three faced a technically more civilized justice in which they would repay at least a little of their debt to the society which they had wronged. But what was left of their lives would be brutal in the extreme.
Was that civilized? he wondered. Was it truly civilized to condemn men for the actions they took in reaction to the circumstances forced upon them by the civilized society that surrounded them? Which had in effect created them? True, Yelm thought, the bandits had acted in almost purely criminal fashion. But without the Madboy Kings, without their War, these men would never have been conscripted, would never have been trained to the ruthlessness of war. They would probably have quietly pursued legitimate trades in quiet little towns, with quiet little lives, instead of landing in such desperate circumstances.
But when he cast his thoughts back a week, recalled what the bandits had actually done….
*
The Dwarf and the Giant were not given to performing charitable acts. To be sure, they did good, generally, but they expected to be paid. A man eight feet tall and twenty-eight stone required rather a lot of food to fuel his body. And even a man of four feet had needs. These villagers had little enough for themselves, much less to spare to hire warriors. But their situation was desperate.
“Please, you must help us!”
Yelm the Iron Giant leaned on his ten-foot long steel-hafted glaive and looked down at the poor collection of huts, hovels, and half-timbered houses before turning his gaze to his companion. Tomas the Rabid Dwarf looked up at Yelm, grinned a horrible, rotted grin under an oversized mustache, and shook his head.
“Actually, senor,” Tomas said to the bent old village headman, “We must do nothing.” He picked a scab on his elbow. “Well, we must sleep and eat and breathe. But we are under no compulsion to do anything for you.”
Although they’d had little enough to eat lately, Yelm knew that this, or something very much like it, would be the Dwarf’s response, and he sighed. True, the pair were bounty hunters, little better than base mercenaries, but the Giant often wished that the Dwarf was a little less mercenary. He wasn’t about to suggest to Tomas that they simply volunteer, but the Dwarf could have employed a little more tact. Except that he couldn’t – he was seemingly constitutionally unable to use any kind of diplomacy that did not involve a flintlock or grenades.
In another age, perhaps in another part of the world, the villagers’ plight might have excited more sympathy. But nearly everyone in Europe had suffered the ravages of the War – the marauding armies of petty kings and the bio-mechanical horrors of the Madboys’ Haunts. Some still suffered, and thus a few hardy men made a living cleaning up the mistakes of the New Scientists. The Headman, who had looked hopeful when the pair of bounty hunters had come grunting and swearing down the high pass path with their little cart, drooped further into a resigned slouch.
“It is true that I cannot compel you,” he said. “But though you are unwilling, you may yet be forced to aid us.”
The Dwarf rested his hands on the butts of the paired flintlock pistols ever-present on his belt. “And what does that mean?” he said, eyes narrowing.
The Headman said, “Just that the bandits are unlikely to let you simply leave. You are not farmers; you are far more threatening. And perhaps more likely to return with reinforcements.”
Yelm saw that the Headman possessed his share of cunning. Isolated though it was, the village had likely seen a share of the fighting during the War – it was a rare place that had not. And the survivors tended to a certain toughness.
Tomas growled and looked up at Yelm with a sort of spiteful acceptance in his eyes. “I am sure he is right. I suppose I will have to scout ahead,” he said. He cursed and scanned the spruce-clad slopes below the ramshackle little village. “Have you at least got beer?”
The Headman nodded.
“You will feed us then.”
The Headman and his villagers might not have any money, but the Rabid Dwarf could find a profit anywhere, Yelm thought. And the Headman seemed well aware how much it would cost him.
“You will eat with my family,” the old man said heavily, and turned back down muddy, rocky path.
Yelm noted that only a few men dared stare from open doorways; most of the inhabitants peered through gaps in curtains and walls.
“I am called Tomas,” the Dwarf said. “And my loquacious companion is called Yelm.” He grinned at his little joke. “I hope you will not think me disrespectful, but what is the name of this little hamlet? We find ourselves rather turned around in your mountains.”
Yelm grimaced as he pushed his glaive deeper into its socket on the cart he pulled, laden with the Dwarf’s supplies and weapons. The Dwarf’s gift for understatement could not be overstated, he thought. They’d been wandering by barely discernible goat-paths for a week, navigation hindered by an omnipresent overcast and all-too-frequent drizzle. Fortunately, the Dwarf was an excellent hunter and fire-starter, so they’d not been desperately deprived. But they still felt keenly the anticipation of a little civilization sparked by the sight of even so small and poor a village.
The Headman grunted. “This is Kulczak, and I am the Venerable Yanosh. The nearest town of any size is Vsetin, four days walk to the south.”
Vsetin, Yelm thought. He shook his head, dislodging drops of collected drizzle from his sparse beard. It didn’t ring any bells.
“Vsetin, Vsetin,” Tomas said. “We did not see much of our service in this region. Where is that in relation to Czermusk?”
“Ah, old Czermusk used to be the regional capitol,” Yanosh the Headman said. “Until his Excellency the Seer Mordecai got his head chopped off in the Mad Days. When the south roads were maintained, a strong man could walk there in a week. I don’t know of anyone in the area who has done so in a handful of years though. The furthest anyone of the village has gone in the last few years is to Hanoshka, when Virolka went for a bride. That’s three days south and west. He brought back a pretty little flatlander who still hasn’t quite adjusted to our winters, ha ha!”
Yelm thought, the Headman likes to talk. Good. Information is survival in war.
Half way through the village, they turned to approach a house, only a little more grand than the rest of the village in that it had half-timber walls instead of the exclusive use of wattle and daub.
“Yannick,” the Headman called to the blonde child whittling on the doorstep. “Tell your mother that we have guests. Bring beer to the front room.”
Yelm noted how the boy’s eyes widened when he looked up and saw who accompanied the Headman. He couldn’t blame the child; he knew how he appeared to most people. It had taken a lot of courage for the aged villager to stop the duo as boldly as he had. Desperation made men bold; he hoped that the bandits they were likely to face were feeling a little more complacent.
*
Hours later, having eaten and drunk not nearly their fill, the pair scouted toward the bandit encampment. The rain had returned while they ate and discussed what little the villagers knew, and they found the bandits’ encampment was well-marked by the fires of the sentries trying to keep warm. They’d already avoided one outlying picket by the simple expediency of staying downwind of his pipe. Now Tomas and Yelm peered through a screen of needle-clad branches at their target.
“It’s a hells-damned War Walker!” Tomas hissed.
Yelm grunted. It was indeed a War Walker, although something about the construct worried him less than it seemed it should.
War Walkers had been a late invention of the War, designed and built to allow the average soldier to effectively combat the Haunts that the New Scientists had created at the command of their Kings and Barons as they sought an edge over their rivals. This Walker was a smaller example of the class, barely twenty feet tall and balanced on two legs like some kind of featherless, headless metal chicken. Much of its interior would be given to the steam engines and flywheels necessary to move it. The remaining space would be given to whatever armaments could be commanded by its builders – often breech-loading cannon, sometimes phlogiston-powered cannon, rarely lightning generators – with the crew stashed in whatever nook they could find.
But, Yelm thought, there’s no smoke. And I don’t see any cannon poking from the ports.
“Look,” Tomas said. “The damn thing’s propped up with tree trunks. It’s not operational!” He loosed an exaggerated sigh. “I was just about to suggest abandoning our gear and slipping away any way we could.”
Yelm nodded, although he knew Tomas could not possibly see the motion. The bandits hadn’t been in the area very long. Yanosh the Headman had said they’d only started raiding the village three weeks earlier, likely soon after their War Walker had broken down on its way to more profitable hunting grounds. The absence of obvious major armaments spoke to efforts to lighten the load for the aging engines, or difficulty in obtaining ammunition. The villagers had only ever seen six bandits at a time, armed with flintlocks and swords. Probably all erstwhile crew of the Walker.
But, Yelm thought, even a Walker this small usually had a complement of ten. Engineers, gun crew, Marines, and a captain. A tightly knit unit, Walker crews. Losses were not easily replaced. But on the run for perhaps five years – that was time to replace and even recruit. He calculated an opposing force of anywhere between ten and twenty. It usually paid to err on the side of caution.
“I don’t see any guns,” Tomas said. “Hells, I can only see one sentry.” He snorted. “Looks like they must have half the village’s livestock down there, though.”
Yelm grunted softly. Yanosh hadn’t made any demands of the livestock. The aged Headman probably didn’t think any of it survived. The bandits had early stolen most of the villagers’ foodstuffs, and beaten the few men who had had the courage, at least at the beginning, to resist. None of their women would yet admit to any interference. But the existence of the animals alive implied much to the Giant: the bandits were planning on staying. And they weren’t planning on integrating with the village.
It would only be a small step from livestock to human lives for such men, Yelm thought. And if we were going to be truly good, thought Yelm, we would try to save as much of the livestock to return to the villagers as possible. God knows they need the animals.
But the Giant didn’t know if they could afford to be that careful, given the likely imbalance of force arrayed against them. The bounty hunters as yet had the element of surprise on their side; if they didn’t attempt to rescue the livestock, that might just might, barely, make their forces even. But if they tried to spirit away the animals…. He shook his head. They couldn’t afford to be good, couldn’t afford to be civilized. These bandits weren’t perhaps evil; but they were desperate. And so the bounty hunters were being forced to make an equally desperate gambit, to behave in commensurately uncivilized fashion.
Even if they went back to the hamlet and recruited the three or four villagers who had been conscripted to serve in the War, they would all too likely lose whatever of the element of surprise they had. Yelm just couldn’t see any way around it. No, he thought, As far as Yanosh and his villagers were concerned, their livestock was already dead and eaten. They only wanted the bandits driven off or killed, to be allowed to continue living their lives in peace.
“Mines,” Tomas said.
Yelm returned from strategic to tactical considerations. Tomas’s arm swept through an arc of space in front of them, apparently only recently cleared. Broad swathes of ground had been turned over, and a non-soldier might have assumed it to be preparation for planting. But much of the disturbed soil had been covered with leaves and branches, as if to disguise what lay beneath. The Giant grunted affirmation. As he looked closer, he noted an obvious path on their right, leading from the main road to the village through the cleared space, and covered by a pair of loosely fortified firing positions on the ground beneath the Walker.
Tomas sighted down the barrel of his rifle. “Assume sentries there and there on the ground,” he said, shifting his aim to each of the hasty rifle pits. “Probably one on top. Call it two or three more shooters able to bear on our current position from those ports.” His aim shifted to the body of the Walker. He sighed. “Those are not good odds, amigo.”
Yelm shook his head. Especially not with at least one picket somewhere at our backs, he thought. Should have let Tomas kill him, quietly, as the Dwarf had wished.
Tomas squatted against a tree trunk and looked up at the shadow of the Giant’s face. “We are not Vigilantes, mi amigo,” he said. “I suspect we could quite easily sneak past these jokers and simply go find a proper bounty.”
Yelm felt more than a little conflicted. They could get past the bandits’ loose blockade. Easily. They weren’t tied to the land like the villagers. And they might even be able to convince whatever passed for authority in the district to send help, some kind of small army or peacekeeping force. But in the meantime, the bounty hunters would certainly lose all of the gear stowed in their cart, and probably doom any number of the villagers. It wasn’t like him to vacillate this much, whatever the odds they faced, and the Giant was uneasy as to what it meant about his heart and his mind. He shook his head, not in negation, but in an attempt to clear it.
“Well?” the Dwarf said, and still Yelm found no answer on his tongue.
It was always this way in a fight: there came a moment when one could still back down. The duo did not often do so, but that was because they were generally very careful about choosing their battles. This time, they had rather less control than usual. It was like the bad old days, the mercenary days. Someone else chose the target, the target chose the field, and their only choice was whether they would fight, or slink away. In their mercenary days, choosing to leave the fight only cost them their pay, in lieu of costing their lives. They were now choosing between their own lives and the life of a whole village.
The Dwarf, Yelm knew, loved to fight. He never consciously chose otherwise.
Yelm sighed. It wasn’t a choice between their lives and the lives of others, but a choice between their lives and their souls. And that perspective made it no choice at all for the Iron Giant.
“We fight,” he said.
*
As if to reinforce their decision, a red flare climbed into the clouds overhead, casting its glare over the clearing and the immobilized War Walker. The bounty hunters dropped to the ground, and Yelm barely avoided the shot intended for him. The muzzle flash was nearly blinding, it was so close, but reflexes trained by a decade and a half of survival on battlefields and ambushes sent his glaive into a nearby thicket. A short scream quickly turned into a heavy weight on the end of his weapon.
The immediate threat was overcome, but the damage was done. Bells were set clanging throughout the clearing, and bright chemical lamps activated around the top of the Walker, starkly illuminating the clearing in cold white light.
“Mierda,” Tomas growled as Yelm pulled his weapon free. A swift shot put out the lamp pointed most directly at the duo, and they quickly moved to avoid the return fire centered on the Dwarf’s muzzle flash.
It had been years since the Giant and the Dwarf had faced a concentrated force of human attackers – they were bounty hunters, after all, dealing with largely solitary Haunts – but neither of the pair had forgotten formerly important combat skills.
“Return fire, six shots,” Tomas yelled.
Yelm grunted acknowledgment. With the dead sentry, that made for seven confirmed bandits. One hundred percent response was impossible in any army, no matter its size or drill efficiency. Irregular forces were not generally known for their procedural correctness, and given known sentry positions, he figured twenty was maybe even a conservative estimate of the force arrayed against them. That wasn’t good.
Worse, they were assaulting a fortified position, with only the Dwarf’s munitions for a ranged attack. Yelm’s single eye was ill-suited to accuracy at range. But if he could get free of the trees, if he could close with a concentration of the bandit force…he growled in frustration.
Tomas finished recharging his rifle and sent a shot through one of the firing ports. A fusillade of return fire answered his shot, most of it well clear of the duo’s current position.
“Eight shots,” Tomas shouted over the ringing in his ears. “Can’t have been many from the original round.”
True enough, Yelm thought. Not many marksmen could match the Dwarf’s reload speed. He eyed the tree trunks propping up the Walker. If he could get close enough, he could even the odds.
Yelm shrugged off the bulky, heavy pack he carried for the Dwarf and pulled out a pair of items. One was a rough sphere some six inches in diameter. He bit the projecting fuse in half, spitting loose powder away, and clamped the sphere between his knees. He then applied glowing end of a small device, looted from a Madboy’s devastated lair, to the fuse. It caught immediately, and he heaved the ten-pound lump of iron, shot, and powder into the center of the suspected mine field. Both of the bounty hunters threw themselves sideways to avoid once more the shots concentrated on the shower of sparks from the black powder fuse.
Of course, he thought as he crashed through the brush, soon the interior of the Walker will be too choked with smoke for the bandits to aim effectively.
The Giant’s thoughts were cut off by the detonation of the grenade just above the surface of the mine field. Soft lead shot blew outward with fragments of the cast iron casing, peppering the ground all around. The impact of the deadly debris set off several mines simultaneously, which detonation was sufficiently forceful to cook off nearby mines in a glorious cascade of wasted destructive force.
“Guapo!” Tomas screamed over the noise and the ringing in his ears. “You magnificent bastardo!” he shouted at Yelm. “That was perfect!”
Without waiting for the air to clear, without hesitating to consider that perhaps not all of the mines had detonated, Tomas the Rabid Dwarf rushed forward, drawing two long-barreled flintlock pistols from scabbards on his back. Yelm would have preferred to hold a moment, to better assess the situation, but he could not fail to back up his partner. He gathered up the pack and his glaive, and followed the Dwarf stumbling quickly across the pitted and scorched earth.
Tomas slewed around the corner of the first piled-stone defensive positions. Had he been a full-sized man, the sword stroke that whistled over his head would have been instantly fatal. Instead, the Dwarf’s shot took the bandit in the belly. He spun and put his second round into the second sentry emerging from the next defensive position flanking the entry path. Goats and sheep and geese battered all around the Dwarf, driven before a trio of bandits charging from the far side of the clearing. Yelm’s long glaive swept overhead and crushed the life from one of them, and the flying corpse tangled the legs of the second attacker. Tomas was still yanking his paired hatchets from his belt when the glaive speared over his head once more and stopped the third bandit. The Dwarf leaped forward and dispatched the remaining sentry before he could untangle himself from his erstwhile comrade.
The Dwarf laughed maniacally and ran for the ladder leading up the undercarriage of the War Walker.
“No!” Yelm yelled, and pulled the Dwarf down.
Tomas growled and bared his black teeth at the Giant.
Yelm stabbed the butt of his glaive into the wet earth and swung the pack off his shoulders again. Once again he applied the glowing hot end of the little Madboy’s fire-lighter to the end of a fuse. He jammed the grenade into a nook in the leg of the War Walker as sparks showered into his face.
The Dwarf cackled. “I love it when you fight dirty!”
A shot ricocheted off the Walker leg next to the Giant, fragments of the shattered bullet spanging from his armor. The shot was answered from above, the bandits in the immobilized Walker apparently not realizing that they were firing on one of their own sentries. Yelm did not mourn their lack of discipline. He shoved the pack into the Dwarf’s arms and collected his glaive. The bottom hatch of the Walker opened even as the pair ran for cover in one of the emptied sentry positions.
The explosion of the grenade was somewhat muffled by its concealment, but was more than compensated for by the grinding screech as the leg cracked, shattered, and sheared off. The War Walker toppled slowly as the jammed logs cracked under the suddenly unsupported weight. Tomas and Yelm just made the stone redoubt as the body of the Walker struck the earth in the middle of a second mine field.
*
It must have been like Hell in there, Yelm thought as he surveyed the wreckage.
There was no telling what the bandits had stored inside their immobilized base, but it had burned ferociously all through the night. The Dwarf and the Giant remained warm and dry in spite of the rain, until the approaching dawn scattered the clouds. They breakfasted on a half-charred goat.
Scouting around, the Dwarf counted eight dead: three shot, four variously stabbed and hacked, and one hung up in a tree, seemingly thrown from the top of the Walker as it fell.
“Too many footprints around, even after the rain, to tell if any of them got away,” Tomas said.
Yelm nodded. Even if any had survived, they’d be unlikely to be an effective force. There certainly couldn’t be any survivors in the Walker – the metal hull was still too hot to touch. He sighed, He’d found a pair of goats wandering around and tethered them to a small cart that had escaped the destruction. While the Dwarf scouted, the Giant loaded as much of the dead livestock as still seemed fit to eat into the cart. At least the villagers wouldn’t go hungry in the short run. He wasn’t sure they would much thank the bounty hunters, but the duo had resolved their bandit problem.
“Time for more beer?” Tomas asked brightly.
Yelm nodded; Yanosh indeed brewed good beer. And they’d earned it.
*
The village was in an uproar when the bounty hunters returned. They hadn’t even reached its ill-defined bounds when they were noted.
“You!” The shout came from one of the former conscripts, now sporting a freshly bloodied bandage on his right arm. His face was dark as he stalked toward the bounty hunters, and a small crowd gathered at his back.
“You brought this upon us!” He stopped just short of what would have been the reach of the glaive in a normal man’s hands.
“Whatever are you talking about, puta?” Tomas cocked his head. The Dwarf did not like to be confronted or challenged – it tended to make him belligerent.
“Yanosh is dead, and Tovold, because you didn’t do your job,” the villager said. “And the bandits have hostages.”
The crowd at the leader’s back growled their assent.
Yelm dropped the handle of the cart and held his partner back. “Wait,” he said. He left his glaive on the cart as he stepped forward, towering above the wounded villager. The man paled; even with a good-sized mob at his back, facing down a giant was no easy thing.
“Details,” Yelm said. Information is survival, he thought. He didn’t care that the villagers blamed them for their current predicament, but he did mean to see the job through.
“Three, three of the bandits came into the village an hour or two ago,” the villager said, a little fire creeping back into his voice. “They grabbed Mirva and Lylla and demanded all the food we had. Yanosh came out and told them no and they cut him down in the street. Tovold and I were just getting ready to go to work in the fields. We had hoes and we rushed them. But they had swords. Mirva and Lylla got away, but they killed Tovold and almost got me. Then they ran into Yanosh’s house and said that if we didn’t bring them all the food in the village, on a cart, they’d start killing the women and children.”
The wounded villager had nearly worked himself into a hysteria.
“Guns,” Yelm said. He placed a hand on the Dwarf’s shoulder, holding his partner in place.
“We have no weapons,” the villager almost wailed.
“Them?” Yelm said, patiently.
“N-no. They had swords enough, and knives. I think.”
Yelm held up a hand as big as the villager’s head. “Wait.” He turned to his partner.
The Dwarf stood with crossed arms and an impatient expression. “See?” he said. “This is why I don’t like working with other people.” He looked at the gathered villagers and growled. He looked back up at the Iron Giant with a face that mixed resignation and a sneer, and said, “And I suppose you think we must help them.”
Yelm thought about that for a moment. On the one hand, it sounded as if the bandits were planning to leave: they’d asked for supplies on a cart. It would be so easy to let them go. On the other hand, the bandits might decide that it was just too easy to bully the villagers for the rest of their lives, to set up as warlords of this sad little mountain hamlet.
Yelm didn’t think he’d ever been allowed to take the easy choice in his life. Moreover, the Giant only had one hand. It was an enormous hand, a strong hand. Ease did not sit well in it, he thought, but justice…justice felt like it fit there.
He nodded, slowly, emphatically.
“Right,” the Dwarf said, and pulled his pistols free of their scabbards. “Let’s finish this.”
The Giant collected his glaive and the crowd melted away from them. The angry villager was nowhere to be seen. All was suddenly silent.
*
The Dwarf and the Giant stalked the muddy street to the erstwhile headman’s house.
“How do you want to do this?” Tomas asked quietly. “Without unduly endangering the hostages, I assume?”
Yelm grunted. Of course.
“Bah.” Any plan without explosives was a bad plan, in the Dwarf’s mind. “I could flank them, if you can draw them out.”
Yelm considered that a moment. He put little faith in words, but he was willing to try. He nodded, and Tomas faded between two rough huts before they came within full view of the bandit’s redoubt. Moments later, Yelm stopped in what passed for the village square. He didn’t see any of the bandits, but he was certain that they could see him.
He hoped that the villagers were correct, that the bandits had no firearms. He cleared his throat, a low rumble that built into a gravelly, wordless shout.
“Bandits. Come forth!” His voice managed to echo through the village in spite of the lack of hard surfaces.
He stood still as statue. After a long moment of waiting, after assuring himself that their courage was weak, he spoke again.
“See me! If you harm one more person within this village, I will hunt you down. I will hunt you like animals! I will hunt you like a Haunt.”
The villagers at least were listening. The Giant’s words provoked more than a few cheers, and some growling.
Yelm shouted again. “Throw down your weapons. Come out. Now! You will be taken to Vsetin to stand trial for what you have done.”
This provoked jeers from the hidden villagers – they’d had no help from the city in years of privation and predation. Killing the bandits now would be just. But Yelm felt somehow that it wouldn’t be civilized; it would not help to restore the society that suffered so badly during the War. It might be just, but it would not be justice. The Giant turned and glared back at the people hiding behind him, his gaze the more menacing for the scarred, drooping lid covering the empty left socket, burning through the wattle and daub walls. He turned back to the bandit’s hideout.
“It will be a fair trial. Or I can come in and get you, and leave you to the mercies of the people you have abused.”
The villagers liked that idea. Their bloodthirsty taunts and jeers hung in the air even as they themselves remained hidden. Yelm suspected the Dwarf of encouraging the performance.
It did not take much of this for the door of dead Yanosh’s house to creak open. Three swords were tossed out in the mud, and four knives. Then the three bandits emerged, bloodied and scorched; one limped badly. Tomas followed them closely, pistols trained on their backs.
“They were thinking of leaving by the back,” the Dwarf said. “My arguments were nearly as eloquent as yours.” He grinned.
*
And that was how the surviving bandits ended up suffering the tender mercies of civilized justice, Yelm thought. Upon review, it almost didn’t seem like enough. Before they’d left the village, two of the women had come to them, quietly, to report that some of the bandits had indeed taken their virtue by force; but they’d been unable to say whether it had been any of the three survivors. Yelm had almost executed the trio then and there. But while he generally discounted the strength of words, he knew that his must be honored. He brought the bandits unharmed to trial, to answer for their actions.
And their own actions? he wondered. Had he and Tomas behaved in moral fashion? He nodded.
Then he nodded again.
Because of course the bandits had once been soldiers, just as he had been. And had he not chosen to not follow the course of brigandry, and warlordism? They could have done so just as well as he. Whatever the difficulties created by life in the midst of society, civilized or otherwise, a man was still allowed to choose how he acted, how he lived in relation to that society. The bandits had made their choice, and reaped the eventual consequences in the same manner as had all the doomed Madboys and Scientist Kings who had been consumed in the War.
Yelm sighed. If only they hadn’t ruined so many lives as they went, he thought.
He was heartened that the local Masters were so keen to correct the mistakes of the past. Civilized society seemed to be returning to this corner of Europe. And it was providing him with a ready income and a worthy place. There were three known Haunts in the District, and an outstanding bounty on any others a hunter might find. The Masters were offering thousands of the local coin in compensation for work which the Giant and the Dwarf had been trained for years. True, it was dangerous work, with no civilized guarantees.
But then, that was their choice.
***
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