The Amoral Hero

by Logan Jacobs

  “Well, then, what is this ‘minor’ thing they want from me?” I demanded. I had thought that the offer on the poster sounded too good to be true, but I didn’t really care what kind of trick the sponsors intended. I was entitled to the reward and even if I didn’t in fact already have it in hand, even if the case had been weighted with something other than one hundred gold pieces, well, I was sitting in a bank, and I was confident that Mr. Walters and his nephew could be persuaded to relinquish it. I was morally opposed to bank robbery, but it wasn’t robbery if you were just taking what you were rightfully owed.

  “They wish to invite you to dinner at their home tonight,” he replied.

  “That’s it?” I laughed.

  “Yes, that’s it,” Mr. Walters said. “They said it would be their great honor.”

  “Who are the sponsors, and where is their home?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid they have instructed me not to disclose their identities to you yet,” Mr. Walters said apologetically. “But you will certainly find out for yourself if you kindly consent to take dinner with them tonight. And their house is not far.”

  “Very well,” I shrugged. “I don’t see why not.” I liked food, and all the better if I didn’t have to pay for it myself.

  “Oh, excellent, they will be most pleased,” Mr. Walters said. He sounded relieved. I wondered how hard these mysterious sponsors had pressed him, exactly, to ensure that I accepted their invitation. And what the hell they wanted with me. Simply to demonstrate their gratitude, I hoped. But if it had been that innocent, then why withhold their names? Well, the wealthy were often eccentric, I supposed. Anyhow, I didn’t fear anything that anyone in this dusty little nowheresville could do to me. Not when a petty villain the likes of Ermenildo Zabala had evidently held them all in terror for years.

  Mr. Walters instructed me where to find the house, and then I took my leave of him. On the way out, I passed his nephew Caleb, who was on his hands and knees furiously scrubbing away at the floorboards. More amusingly than that, though, was the fact that he had evidently seen fit to cover Ermenildo’s head with a lace-edged handkerchief.

  “So, how did it go?” Theo asked when I met him outside.

  I held up the case in reply. I had glanced at the contents after I stepped out of the bank, and it was indeed filled with gold.

  Theo groaned. Being my horse and therefore responsible for carrying all my worldly possessions, he always had mixed feelings about it whenever I collected a substantial payment for my services.

  He also just liked complaining and took it upon himself to point out the sourness of any given situation.

  “At least you drink your way through your money quicker than anyone I’ve ever seen,” he remarked. “And I mean the stuff that comes in vials, and the stuff that comes in glasses.”

  “Oh, and we have a dinner invitation for tonight,” I informed him. “I mean, I do. You have a stable invitation. But I promise to save the best of the fruit for you.”

  “With the banker?” Theo asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Then who?” Theo’s tone turned curious. “We don’t know anyone in this town.”

  “I don’t know who,” I admitted.

  “Then how--”

  “It’s the sponsors of the reward,” I explained. “But they want to remain anonymous for now, but we’ll find out who they are at dinner.”

  “Multiple sponsors?” Theo asked.

  “I guess so.”

  “Rather strange of them to be so mysterious,” Theo remarked. “You know, the wise thing to do would be to leave now. You’ve got your money, haven’t you?”

  “That would be the prudent thing to do,” I corrected. “But wise? Not necessarily. It could be a grand opportunity lost. This money that I have in my hand now could be a mere fraction of what they might be willing to offer me for some other task.”

  “Greed killed the cat,” Theo warned me.

  I didn’t bother to correct him on the idiom, since the cat’s actual vice would be even more applicable in this instance.

  The house, as it turned out, was the largest and most freshly painted in town. Everyone who lived in Dunville must have known exactly to whom it belonged, but I’d just wandered in a few hours ago, so it was a mystery to me.

  I stored the gold in Theo’s saddlebags. That seemed less risky and less awkward to me than carrying it inside, given that Theo was an intelligent creature and wouldn’t let anyone paw around in there and steal it, and even if for some reason he couldn’t stop them, he’d at least be able to remember their faces well enough to identify the thief to me afterward.

  Then I went up to the door and knocked.

  A tall, thin man in a pale gray suit answered it. I stuck out my hand to shake and began,

  “Howdy, I’m--”

  But instead of taking my hand, the man kept his folded behind his back as he bent forward in a slight bow.

  “Welcome to the Elliott residence, Sir,” he interrupted me. “The misses are expecting you. Mr. Hale, is it not?”

  “Er, yeah,” I said.

  The man in the gray suit looked past me to Theo, who stood below the porch looking nonchalantly horselike.

  “I shall settle your horse in the stables,” he announced as he glided past me. He gestured toward the house. “Please, enter. The misses have been anticipating your arrival most eagerly.”

  So, the mysterious sponsors of the reward for Ermenildo Zabala’s head were the wealthy industrialist Elliott’s nieces? Well, he was the real sponsor, I supposed, since it was his money, but his wards had evidently taken it upon themselves to get involved in the affair somehow.

  I glanced back at Theo, who tossed his head at me in a gesture that I knew meant, Go on. So I ventured into the house through the open door.

  It was certainly very femininely, and very expensively, furnished, with lace and ivory accents everywhere. I supposed Mr. Elliott didn’t spend much time here and allowed his nieces to decorate however they pleased. They were probably spoiled rotten. I hoped they wouldn’t turn out to be insufferable brats, as such girls often were.

  I didn’t want to alarm them with the sudden appearance of a strange man in their house, so I called out, “Hello?” as I proceeded through the foyer and the parlor which was unoccupied.

  “Hello yourself,” a girlish voice called out merrily from the next room.

  I walked in and was met with the sight of an elaborate feast spread across a table long enough to seat a dozen. Only three places were set, however, and only one chair was occupied.

  It was the blonde beauty who had first drawn my attention to the Wanted poster.

  “You,” I gasped. “You set me up for this the whole time.”

  Her sister, also blonde, was pouring wine at a side table and had her back to us.

  “Set you up for what?” the seated girl inquired innocently. “A hefty sum for a few minutes’ work, and a lovely dinner as well?”

  “You entrapped me,” I said sternly. “When you stood and waited by the poster, you were intentionally luring me over to look at it.”

  “Well, Mister, that’s a funny way to talk to a lady,” she reproached me. “Especially one you’ve never met before in your life.” Her large eyes glittered with mischief. I still couldn’t quite tell whether they were green or blue. They seemed to be somewhere in between.

  “I met you an hour ago,” I said. “You were wearing a green dress-- you told me to meet you at that saloon. But you never showed up, now that I think of it. Only Ermenildo did.”

  “You must be mistaken,” the blonde said haughtily. She was dressed in a lace-trimmed blouse now, with a rose-colored skirt and a black velvet choker around her neck with a ruby teardrop pendant. “For I do not own any green dress. Really, it is a disgrace that I do not. It’s a matter that I ought to rectify most urgently.”

  Then, her sister turned around, wine glasses in hand, and suddenly I understood her strange denial of our encounter and her air of b
arely suppressed amusement.

  The two girls were mirror images of each other. They were twins.

  “Then it was you that I had already met this afternoon,” I said to the second blonde as she set a glass of wine in front of each of the place settings. She was wearing an outfit similar to her sister’s, except that the skirt was yellow, and her necklace consisted of a strand of pearls from which hung a rose carved of amber.

  “Are you quite certain of that?” she asked with a mischievous smile as she took the seat next to her sister’s.

  I sat across from them and looked from one to the other and sought any physical difference in vain. They both had that distinctive shade of blonde hair, a bit ashen and silvery, and that faint caramel glow to their flawless complexions. The same angelic features and bow-shaped lips, the same impossibly tiny waists. Then I realized that there was one difference, at least, that I could see. At least, I thought there was, unless it was just that the candlelight was hitting their faces slightly differently. But unless it was a trick of the light or of my vision, one girl’s eyes were the slightest bit more green than they were blue, and the other girl’s eyes were the slightest bit more blue than they were green.

  “No,” I had to admit. “I’m not quite certain. Has anyone ever mentioned to the two of you that you, ah, bear a not insignificant family resemblance to one another?”

  They both giggled.

  “Well, at least you are honest,” the slightly more green-eyed one purred. “Why, I’ve had fiancés who swore up and down that they’d know me from her blindfolded, but sometimes we’d switch places for an evening to make a test of it, and they never noticed a thing.”

  I wasn’t sure I’d ever met a girl who’d been betrothed to multiple men before, and if I had, she certainly never would have confessed to it so cavalierly. One broken engagement would have been fodder for town gossip. But more than one? The girl’s prospects in polite society would be entirely ruined. The rules were a lot looser out West than in the Old World, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t still rules. Not for females who still wished to retain the status of ladies, anyway.

  “Give me a bit more time,” I said. “I’ve only just met you. One of you, anyway, and my acquaintance with the other is still less than an hour old. Soon enough I’ll be an expert at distinguishing. But look here, I don’t even know your names yet, even though your manservant knew mine.”

  “I am Katrina Isabelle Elliott,” the slightly more blue-eyed one, in the rose-colored skirt, said as she took a dainty sip of her wine.

  “And I am Janina Meredith Elliott,” the slightly more green-eyed one, in the yellow skirt, said as she forked a mouthful of steak.

  I was starving, the food looked delicious, and although they seemed about as full of tricks as a couple of fairies, the girls didn’t seem malicious enough to poison me. So I started shoveling food onto my plate too. Steak, potatoes, cornbread, gravy with beans, apple cake, roasted carrots, whipped peas, and all kinds of other wonderful dishes, far more food than any three people could consume. I guessed the girls must have other servants, because I couldn’t imagine them cooking all this themselves, and I doubted that the man who had received me at the door was responsible.

  “So, your uncle,” I said. “He takes a particular interest in, ah, rooting out lawlessness?”

  The twins exchanged a glance and giggled.

  “Our dear old uncle takes a particular interest in money, and absolutely nothing else,” Katrina replied as she daintily spooned some peas into her mouth.

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. It seemed a bit of a harsh thing to say about one’s own guardian, although of course plenty of folks had accused me of exactly the same character flaw. “So he is not… er… a particularly affectionate guardian?”

  “He is the perfect guardian,” Janina assured me. “He gives us everything we want, and he does not interfere with our activities in any way.”

  “Most of the time he does not remember that we exist,” Katrina said as she sawed into a turkey leg.

  “I suppose he must be a very busy man,” I said hesitantly. I took a sip of the wine. It tasted like dark berries. “But when you were children, was he around more often? Or, I suppose you were raised by a nursemaid?”

  “We raised ourselves, for the most part,” Janina asserted.

  “That must have taken great fortitude,” I said after I swallowed a bite of apple cake.

  “Well, we had no choice in the matter,” Katrina said.

  “So… the matter of Ermenildo Zabala, was that your choice?” I asked. “I mean, was it your idea to put out a reward for him? If your uncle was indifferent?”

  “Yes, it was entirely our idea,” Janina confirmed.

  “But the money-- your uncle permits you to use his money however you see fit?” I could not help asking. If there was going to be any legal difficulty over my reward, well then, I would make sure to put a great deal of distance between said difficulty and myself, posthaste. “Or he gives you an allowance, I suppose?”

  “It is more that we give him an allowance,” Janina smirked at Katrina. “For avuncular services rendered, as needed.”

  “Avuncular services?” This sounded more and more peculiar by the minute. The girls’ sheer beauty and the miracle of their identicalness was bewildering enough in itself to begin with, and almost every word out of their mouths only added to the confusion.

  “Oh, yes, now and then there is a business contract that must be signed, or, you know, a suitor who must be declined as insufficiently wealthy, and on such occasions, dear Uncle does tend to make his due appearances,” Janina said airily as she took a sip of wine.

  “Or, sometimes, some small-minded person in town will start an unpleasant rumor about us, and then when Uncle’s portly and magnificent shadow falls across Dunville, that does have a striking effect of tying the serpents’ tongues,” Katrina added.

  “The frontier is no place at all for delicate women to survive alone,” Janina sighed. “Dear Uncle is absolutely indispensable to our operations, indeed he is.”

  “Your ‘operations’?” I narrowed my eyes. “What gripe exactly did you have with Ermenildo, anyway?”

  “You mean besides murder, and robbery, and horse theft, and cheating at cards?” Katrina exclaimed. “Why, didn’t you read a word of our lovely poster?”

  “I’m sure he isn’t the first outlaw Dunville has encountered, nor the last,” I said. “Did you feel that he was a personal danger to you?”

  “Ha, as if we ever consorted with the likes of him,” Katrina sniffed. “I’m sure I could smell him a hundred yards away, and that would be plenty of time to retire someplace secure.”

  “Well, then, why did you set me on his tail like that?” I demanded. “For nothing but your own amusement?”

  “Why, are you displeased with how it worked out for you?” Janina inquired.

  “Not at all,” I answered honestly. “I’ve just got a feeling that what I thought was the end of it, wasn’t the end of it at all.”

  “You know, you strike me as quite the opportunist,” Katrina informed me with a smile.

  “Beg pardon?” I said.

  “I mean it entirely as a compliment,” she continued serenely. “My sister and I also identify ourselves with that particular class of human.”

  “Yet you seem like such well-bred young ladies,” I objected teasingly. They certainly weren’t conventional, as I much preferred women not to be.

  “A credit to our uncle,” Janina agreed. She looked like she was trying not to laugh.

  I had let the joke go on long enough.

  “Your nonexistent uncle?” I guessed.

  “Of course he exists, almost everyone in Dunville has met him or at least seen him from afar, and do you think this is a town full of lunatics?” Katrina inquired.

  “The biological tie between us, however, is a bit more tenuous,” Janina conceded.

  “One might almost say nonexistent,” Katrina agre
ed.

  “We can’t exactly know that, can we?” Janina pointed out. “We hired him partly for the physical resemblance. His ancestors came from the same nation as ours. And his pedigree is as inconsistently documented as ours. So it is entirely possible that we do in fact share blood.”

  “All things are possible, but are they probable?” Katrina retorted.

  “I didn’t say that,” Janina corrected her. “My point is simply that it cannot be proven to be a falsehood that the gentleman whom this town regards as our uncle, is our uncle.”

  Katrina reached out and clasped Janina’s hand. “Say it,” she demanded. “Say that he’s our uncle.”

  “Morton Dunderry is our uncle,” Janina proclaimed.

  “He certainly is not!” Katrina exclaimed triumphantly as she removed her hand from her sister’s.

  “Kat, that doesn’t prove a thing,” Janina insisted. “That only proves that I’m not really convinced that he is our uncle. But my intuition could be wrong. I am not apprised of the true facts of the matter.”

  Well, well. This dinner, and my stunningly beautiful companions, grew more and more intriguing by the minute. Their little exchange just now suggested to me that Katrina possessed some kind of truth-telling magic. Possibly dependent on physical touch, unless she had just grabbed Janina’s hand as a sort of gesture of sisterly coercion.

  “So, you’re orphans?” I asked them. I wanted to observe Katrina’s use of magic, if that was really what it was, further before I asked them any questions about that. I showed off my size manipulation skill at every suitable opportunity because it augmented my abilities as a sellsword and therefore garnered more interest from potential clients. However, magic users in general tended to be a bit more circumspect, as we weren’t entirely trusted by the general population, and often it wasn’t considered a polite topic to discuss openly.

  “So to speak,” Katrina answered. “What about you? Have you a nice family waiting for you at home somewhere?”

  “I’m an orphan too, so to speak,” I replied.

  “Well, we opportunistic orphans ought to stick together,” Janina purred as she sipped from her wine glass. “Don’t you think?”