From the smell, I knew none of the bandit’s blood had stained my hands. Nor had the old woman’s. No, the only blood which had found me this night belonged to the only innocent in the newly christened graveyard around me. And though my armor turned magic and steel away, it did nothing for the lifeblood of a harmless old man.
The scales retracted from my body, leaving behind my pink skin and fresh crimson the consistency of honey. When the armor had returned to its necklace, I let out the breath which had stuck to my lungs since the old man died.
At least I would make my gold and I could continue my journey away from this village. Would this grow my legend? The idea occurred once again to cover myself with a cloak or buy a bulky suit of human-forged armor to cover myself.
But it wouldn’t keep the blood from my skin either.
The second time I immersed myself in the spring the water felt cold, as if the fire of the earth held no heat compared to one old man’s life. But at least the water rinsed the stains away from my skin if not from my conscience.
Once clean enough, I retrieved my small pack where I stowed it. Odgen had wandered in monk’s ochre robes and never taught me to tailor anything else. And a dragon princess had no call to stitch her own human-sized clothing. Indeed, I had no call to stitch any clothing whatsoever.
Such dour thoughts burned me as I pulled the robe over my head and stepped into the sandals. I’d hoped to escape them with the killing of the bandits. But the greed of a woman had brought the memories of my former life down upon my shoulders as heavy as the debt to family.
I snorted at the ironic turn to my thoughts and slipped my vagabond’s pack over my shoulder. The Mountain Cutter I wrapped in cloth and used as a staff to brush my way across the forest. Like the old woman in the depths of her greed, I slit the pockets from the bandits, the woman, and even the old man. Odgen would have chided me, greed had ruined my life. But armies did not pay for themselves.
Monks chanted the sutras. I chanted my own seven-word affirmation as I collected a small handful of coins.
The couple left a small cart at the road not far from the spring. I supposed the woman intended to retrieve it when her bloody assassination finished. It contained two meals, blankets, and a pouch of coin large enough to bribe a troupe of bandits. Did the foolish old woman really believe the bandits would let her go with coin?
I did not linger over the thought. If the stupidity of all humans, beasts, and spirits gathered in one place, it would form a peak higher than all the mountains of the world. As I had added more than my shoulders could bear to that mountain, I had no place in mocking the foolishness of others.
The food I ate on the way back to Hakkaim village. The blankets went into my pack, someone had woven them tight enough to keep out the cold and I would not mind a place to lay my head when the trials of my journey forced me to sleep. Not that I possessed any illusion a comforting place to rest my brow would ward off the dreams which pursued me.
As with many mid-sized villages in the hills, stout log walls encircled Hakkaim. Bandits would not have attacked the town for no other reason than those walls made such an enterprise more difficult than profitable. But the walls did nothing to stop those same bandits from robbing and killing travelers to and from the village. Which was why they enlisted my services and now owed me seventy-five pieces of gold.
Dark had come and brought with it the smell of lilacs on the wind and the sharp chirp of crickets in the grasses. A few twilight birds gave their final cries of the day before the nocturnal hunters took their places. And a torch shifted in the watchtower over Hakkaim. My approach had been seen by the lookouts.
Among the coin I’d collected from the bandits, I’d also collected the key exchange of my itinerant profession: the ears of the offending bandits. Six dead men, six right ears, in return for twenty-five pieces of gold. Fifty more for dealing with a Magus the village had neglected to warn me about.
They would learn of the shift in prices soon enough.
Only one of the wooden gates swung open as I reached the wall. A headman, the same who’d paid me half the bounty up front eyed me from the crack between the gate and its mooring. “You’ve returned so soon?”
I dangled the line of ears before him. “Did you know the bandits had a Mage?”
The headman sucked in breath at my question and his eyes darted behind him as if to find a shred of courage standing at his back. “N..no.”
Shaking my head I stepped closer to the gate and shoved my sandaled foot in as a stop. “I told you the price was double for a Mage. I even told you why.”
“We didn’t know there was a Magus, how would we know?” His voice rose to a high pitch, recovering his composure as he settled into his lies.
I tapped my “staff” against the walls and stuck the end of my scabbard in where my foot had been. The headman’s eyes widened and he sucked in a gasp at my move. He knew what the staff was in truth. “Seventy-five more gold pieces. Or I collect what I’m owed from the town myself starting with your house.”
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“How do we know you didn’t grab those ears from corpses?” Someone behind the headman moved in the shadows and the sense of bolstering I gathered from the headman grew. For some reason he thought he had an advantage over me.
“What did you do?”
The headman leaned back and spat his words through the gap in the gate. “We don’t owe you anything, Jade Serpent! We hired a real protector and he will keep our village safe from bandits and from some woman who swings a sword as if she were a man.”
I took a deep breath and let it out as slowly as I could. The headman slipped back and a large bull of a man took his place. Hair curled over the man’s head and around the sides of his neck and over his shoulders. Muscles rippled and bunched through the man’s frame in a display of supposed strength, which I expected was supposed to intimidate me. His stench was more concerning than anything else about the village’s new defender.
“Get lost, bitch.” The man’s breath should have rotted the wood where it passed by the gate. It struck me head on and threatened to make me retch and toss up the meal I’d eaten.
I shifted my foot over my blade and made as if to retreat before the man. He scoffed at me and the breastplate covering his chest jiggled in response to his movement. Using my own legs as a fulcrum, I twisted in place and drove the gate open with the base of my scabbard.
The man grabbed the side of the gate with his hand, but he’d chosen a poor angle with his hands. At once the gate popped open, I stepped back over my scabbard and let the tip pop up and land at the base of the odious’s man’s chin.
Not only had I broken his stance by forcing the gate open, but he moved like an untrained amateur. A skilled warrior would have seen my elaborate move coming and could have taken a small step out of the path of my scabbard. But this oaf took the full brunt of my attack on the bottom of his chin.
In one strike his eyes rolled up into his head, he stumbled back into the headman and laid him out, and fell on the same. I’d knocked him unconscious with a move which had meant to unsettle and possibly frighten him. The headman moaned under his hired sword and tried to roll away from the man’s filthy body.
A crowd gathered while I bent down and checked the mercenary’s pockets. As expected, he had a small pouch of gold stuffed into one of those pockets. I regretted touching his clothing as much as I did and longed to return to the spring to clean my hands again. But I counted out ten gold coins and tossed the pouch back over the sleeping pile of body odor.
“You should have charged them twice.” The headman remained trapped by the fat hill of mercenary, so I used the sole of my foot to roll the man over.
At once the headman scrambled away from me, panting and dancing on all fours. His eyes were as wide as the one-armed bandit as he shrank against the logs of his village walls. “He said he would protect us!”
In a way, I despised the man more than I did the bandits. At least those six men earned their keep, dishonest and violent as it was. The man groveling and soiling himself in the lee of the fine wooden walls of his village had abused my trust as well as that of the villagers he was supposed to represent.
“Pay me what you owe me, no more, no less, and my shadow won’t darken the soil of your little town one night.” The man burbled in fear at me, but didn’t respond with words.
The crowd around us had circled in and someone closed the gate behind me. My mind rose up to the moon right as a rock sailed toward my head. No time to curse or do much more than deflect the missile, so I shifted the Mountain Cutter in my hand and the rock sailed off in a different direction.
When I turned to face the semicircle of villagers, they all took half steps away from me, all save a little boy wearing a nicer robe than even the headman. He stormed forward with his head down and his topknot bobbing in time with his treads. “You leave my papa alone!”
Too many spirits from my past had gathered around me in too short a time. Not that I would kill a child, even for five times what I normally charged arrogant villagers like this. But they didn’t know that.
I grabbed the boy and pulled him toward me, he screamed and flailed his arms. He showed more bravado than most of the bandits I’d slain that night as he hit and kicked me at the same time as I hefted him up. The headman’s wail shook the walls of his village and brought the line of adults nearly to their knees.
The boy continued his struggles as I turned toward the headman. “What will it be? My fee or…” I didn’t have to finish my question. With his hands waving toward me, the headman produced a pouch much fatter than the mercenary had carried and pushed it toward me with his head bowed.
At the very end the man had discovered both his humility and his honor. I set the boy down and snatched the pouch from the man, irritated to find it contained the balance of my fee minus what he’d paid to the fat guard on the ground.
The boy spared one step to turn and kick me before he fled to the shelter of his father’s shadow. I weighed the pouch in one hand and considered my future course. In all likelihood, these people could not afford to pay me for the Magus, even if the headman had known. They must have been desperate to hire another wandering mercenary to protect them from me. And I suspected they would regret that choice sooner rather than later.
“Fine. I suppose this will do.” I cinched the pouch to my own belt and turned from the townspeople.
A stout man armed with nothing more than a plain staff stood between me and the gate to the city. Odgen had taught me to extend my will, the killing urge which dwelt in the base of my soul out like a whip. The staff-wielding guard all but voided his bowels as I turned the full edge of my will upon him. He stepped out of my way without the need of a single word from me.
I put a hand on the gate and the headman recovered a measure of his composure. “Wait! What about Toban the Ox!? If you leave us with nothing how will we pay him?”
The mercenary called himself the Ox? What little sympathy I felt for him fled. “You mean if he wakes up he may pillage your city and ravage your people.” I pushed the gate open with the tip of my cloth-covered scabbard. “It does not sound like you have enough gold to pay me to deal with a second problem. Goodnight Hakkaim.”
I walked from the village gates unopposed. No more rocks flew at me from the assembled villagers. Before morning came or the Ox woke up, one of those men or women would realize how easily a dagger across the throat solved the problem of the mercenary they could no longer afford. It was one reason I rarely slept in the villages where I chose to work.
The gate slammed behind me and I turned on the dusty stone road toward the East. It led away from the hot springs, away from Hakkaim, and most important, away from the West and the remnants of my family.
