The Amoral Hero

by Logan Jacobs

“Well, ladies and gentleman,” I said, so as to include Theo in my address, “Here it is. The solution to our present woes.”

  “It’s… a pile of rocks?” Janina asked skeptically. “I suppose we can hide there, but won’t they still find us when they see the horses’ tracks?”

  “Those caves look so dark inside,” Katrina shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. Somewhere along our flight, the twins had either lost their bonnets or cast them off intentionally, and now their ash blonde hair fell in disheveled waves around their pretty faces.

  “Not as dark as the inside of a grave,” I said sharply. “Which is where you’ll end up if-- ”

  “What if there’s someone waiting inside?” Katrina worried aloud.

  “I’ll go in first and make sure it’s clear,” I said. “And deposit this chest.” The chest of gold wasn’t terribly heavy at its current reduced size, which was as small as I could make it, but it was certainly awkward to hold on to, and it made me nervous to carry on horseback, because if my hand ever lost contact with its surface, it would instantly start growing again, and probably cause serious injury to both Theo and me. “You two wait out here, and I’ll come back for you.”

  “Maybe you can build us a fire inside, so it won’t be so dark?” Katrina suggested.

  “Sure thing,” I said. “If you want to suffocate on the trapped smoke.”

  “You aren’t very polite, you know,” she huffed.

  “Yes, I do know,” I said. I swung off Theo’s back with the chest still clutched to me, drew my sword with the other hand, and headed into the entrance of the lowest cave.

  Once my eyes adjusted to the darkness inside the rock formation, I was able to figure out that it was composed of five interconnected caves, three on the ground floor and two above, that could only be reached by climbing ladders made of handholds carved into the rock. Most of the formation was solid rock. Only those five caves had been hollowed out. Likely by some ancient Savajun tribe that had long ago vanished from the earth. They weren’t currently in residence, anyway, and neither was anyone else. This small cave system really was as dark and quiet as the grave. I couldn’t blame Katrina for finding it a bit eerie. Once I was satisfied that it was safe, however, I left the chest of gold in one of the upper chambers to grow back into its actual size, and hurried back outside to rejoin my companions.

  Janina and Katrina each clung to one of my arms and used their other hands to draw their horses in by the reins. Theo and the three loose horses gently clip clopped in after us.

  “I can’t see anything,” Katrina whispered.

  “You’ll be able to soon, once your eyes adjust,” I said.

  “There aren’t any skeletons in here, are there?” she asked nervously.

  “Not unless they’re buried,” I replied. That caused her to look down at the ground, trip over her own feet, and nearly fall if I hadn’t caught her.

  “The safest place for the two of you would be upstairs,” I said as I pointed toward one of the upper caves. “That one has a window, so you can act as lookouts and alert me if you see anyone coming. I’ll stay down here with the horses.”

  The girls went over hesitantly to the carved handholds.

  “I don’t know about this,” Katrina said.

  “It isn’t very high up,” Janina told her before I had to say anything.

  I watched the two of them struggle to climb up. But then after a few false starts Janina figured it out and managed to pull herself into the upper chamber, and Katrina did too.

  “How many exits are there?” Theo asked me.

  “Two, on the ground level,” I answered. “But I think I’ll cut the harness from the carriage off that horse over there that’s still wearing it, and store it upstairs as a makeshift rope that we could use to climb down from the second-story window if we needed to. And I’m going to seal up both of the openings on the ground level.”

  “How?” Theo asked.

  “I’ll bring back some boulders,” I answered. “There are a few that I saw outside, not too far away. Make sure the other horses stay inside, all right? And the girls, of course, but I don’t reckon they’re thinking of leaving.”

  Theo grunted his agreement.

  There was just enough moonlight that I could still see my way around outside as I left the cave and walked over to a huge boulder the size of a horse. I placed my hands on it and shrank it down to a more manageable size that I could carry in my arms, although even then, not easily. With the boulder in tow I waddled back to the rock formation and positioned it strategically in front of the larger of the two cave openings. As soon as I let go of it, the boulder started growing, until it had filled most of the opening. I made a few more trips and used my magic ability to collect a few more rocks that I used to block the rest of that larger cave opening completely. I also found a boulder large enough to block the smaller of the two cave openings all on its own, which made it a relatively easy door for me to open or close, although even at its smallest possible size, it was too massive for one man to lift, so I had to roll it.

  Then I climbed up to check on my worried clients.

  “I’ve sealed off the cave openings downstairs,” I informed them. I held up the harness that I had taken off the horse. “This can be used as a rope to evacuate from the window here if necessary. But I’m pretty sure that inside the cave will be the safest place to be.”

  “You said there were fourteen of them?” Janina asked.

  “That’s what it looked like to me, not counting the tracker,” I said. “But it was sort of dark, and they were far away. It might’ve been thirteen, it might’ve been fifteen.”

  “But about fourteen,” Janina repeated.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I don’t understand it,” Janina said.

  “What don’t you understand?” I asked. I appreciated her confidence in my abilities, but I hoped she wasn’t delusional enough to think that it was a good idea for me to try to take on fourteen men single-handedly out in the open, where I’d be sure to get overwhelmed by sheer numbers despite my best efforts.

  “Even a town the size of Sunderly rarely keeps more than half a dozen lawmen on the payroll,” she said. “And there were those two men that you killed last night. So how can there be fourteen of them coming after us?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” I said dryly. “Do you have any other enemies you haven’t happened to mention to me? Now might be a good time.”

  “Oh, lots of them, I suppose,” Katrina said casually. “I mean, they don’t usually get quite as angry as Sheriff Cavendish, but if you just mean anyone who might have cause to be a little cross with us? We could go on listing them for days. And you can’t possibly expect us to remember every name.”

  “Sounds to me like we’re lucky it’s just fourteen,” I muttered.

  “Well, what about you?” Katrina asked as she crossed her arms across her chest defensively. “Don’t you have lots of enemies?”

  I considered the question for a moment and then shrugged. “Not really. Most of ‘em are dead.”

  “You can’t just solve all your problems by killing them!” Katrina declared.

  “Don’t suppose I can,” I agreed as Vera’s features flickered across my mind’s eye. “But I can solve all of your immediate problems by killing them.”

  When I’d first met the twins, I might not even have qualified that statement with the word ‘immediate.’ They seemed like some of the most carefree girls I’d ever met. But hearing them talk about their troubled past, and the vague terms in which they envisioned their unconventional and precarious future, made me change my mind about that. Whether they were telling me the full truth about any of it didn’t much matter. It was plain enough for me to see that the Elliott sisters didn’t fit easily into common society any more than I did, although they were a damn sight better than me at pretending to. Or maybe their oddness was just more readily accepted since it came in blonde, hourglass-shaped, pert-nosed packages, and it didn’t t
ravel armed with a sword.

  “Maybe you won’t even have to fight them,” Janina mused. “If you’ve really sealed up the cave openings so well?”

  “There are enough of them that they’ll probably be able to get through by brute force eventually,” I said. “But even if that weren’t so-- have you ever read up on castle sieges in the Old World?”

  Janina raised her eyebrows and wrinkled her cute little nose as though I had just asked her whether she’d ever considered perfuming herself with skunk juice. I took that for a no.

  “Well, I’ll tell you, sometimes the attacking army got through by scaling the walls, or knocking the walls down, or digging tunnels underneath,” I said. “But sometimes they didn’t get through at all. The castle was too strong for them and withstood all their efforts. And yet they still won, and the people inside surrendered or died.”

  “How could that be?” Katrina asked.

  “They ran out of food or water,” I answered. “Safety from attack isn’t worth shit, without that. And we have nothing but our waterskins and the jerky and biscuits in Theo’s saddlebags.”

  “That wouldn’t last us more than a few days at best,” Katrina said quietly.

  “No, it wouldn’t. We didn’t come here to hide out,” I stated. “We came here to make our stand.”

  “Well, I’m glad it isn’t in Dunville,” Janina sighed.

  “If we had led the sheriff all the way back to Dunville, you could never live there in peace again,” I said.

  “Yes, but I mean, everyone in Dunville who knows us as Mr. Elliott’s nieces… I’m glad they can’t see us like this, and that if we get captured and hanged in Sunderly, they’ll never know what became of us, and what we were really like,” Janina said.

  “They’ll always remember us as perfect angels,” Katrina agreed.

  “It seems to me the two of you can’t make up your minds whether you do want to be respectable ladies, or have no interest in that at all,” I observed with a bit of amusement.

  “Well, of course we don’t want to live like they do!” Janina exclaimed as if it should have been obvious.

  “But we do want to have the nice things they do, and we want to be loved and respected by everyone the way that only proper ladies are,” Katrina added.

  “I for one have no interest in proper ladies,” I remarked.

  “That’s because you’re not a gentleman,” Janina informed me.

  “Nothing even close,” Katrina agreed.

  “No, I’m not a gentleman, I’m a prince,” I reminded them, just to make them laugh. It worked.

  “Then don’t you like princesses best?” Katrina teased.

  “Not in the least, they tend to be quite inbred with lunatic tendencies and hideous underbites-- merely cross-eyed, at best,” I replied. “Not to mention, they’ve been trained all their lives to be as dull as possible.”

  “Ah, perhaps I should be glad that we aren’t princesses then,” Katrina said with a giggle.

  “Yet you do have lunatic tendencies regardless,” I replied.

  “Absolutely everybody does,” Janina declared. “It’s just a matter of how far people act on them.”

  I guessed I couldn’t really argue that.

  Not when, according to nearly an entire kingdom, I had acted on my own lunatic tendencies by sailing across the sea, never to return to my “rightful” place.

  The twins and I lapsed into a dreamy silence as our own thoughts carried us off for a bit.

  “Do you know the constellations?” Janina inquired after a while.

  “Ah, I recognize a star, here and there, for navigating purposes,” I said. I pointed. “Like that especially big one. I know that one. He’s a friend to me.”

  “But I mean, do you know their stories?” Janina persisted. “Do you know about the gods and goddesses that they represent?”

  “Those five specks right there, that’s, er, the god of war kneeing the god of commerce in the balls. And that little cluster over to the right, that’s the god of wine fucking the goddess of fertility from behind.”

  The twins giggled at that.

  “So you don’t know?” Katrina asked. “A prince should be educated in the science of astrology!”

  At some point, I had indeed been taught the official stories of the stars. But I’d long ago forgotten them. And I’d never considered astrology to be a true science in the first place. Not the version taught to me by the court astrologer of Delorne, and not the completely different body of lore that Savajuns assigned to the stars above. I didn’t think there was a damn thing written in the stars, except for what mortals chose to perceive in them.

  “That was one of my great shortcomings as heir to the throne,” I deadpanned. “No subject could place faith in a future monarch who failed to properly identify the specific piece of divine anatomy associated with each ball of burning gas in the galaxy that’s visible from this earth.”

  “You’re a strange man, Mr. Hale,” Janina said. Her greenish-blue eyes were luminous in the darkness, and her bow-shaped lips curved in a slight smile. The twins seemed to have momentarily forgotten their fears.

  Then, as all three of us gazed out the window and I started looking for shapes in the stars despite myself, I noticed a sudden movement rather closer to earth.

  “Looks like we have company,” I said grimly as a group of men on horseback meandered slowly in our direction. They paused frequently and dismounted to check the ground. I knew what they were looking at. The trail of hoof prints that we had left behind.

  “What do we do?” Katrina asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. I handed Janina the Savajun knife that I had taken from the tracker whose leg I had broken. “Take this, just in case.”

  She nodded with wide eyes and a tightly closed mouth.

  I crawled over to the hole in the floor where the ladder led up into this upper chamber.

  “Theo?” I called down.

  He walked over and stuck his huge black muzzle through the hole. “They’re here?” he guessed.

  “That’s right,” I said. There wasn’t any window on the ground level, nor were there any openings left now that I had sealed both entrances with boulders, so I knew that Theo couldn’t see to the outside.

  “Ready when you are,” Theo said with a twitch of one of his tall, pointed ears.

  “There’s nothing to be done yet,” I said. “Let’s wait and see what they do.”

  Theo nodded and retracted his head from the hole in the floor.

  Slowly but surely, the group of strange riders approached. As they came closer, they started pointing at our hideout. They couldn’t see us inside, but surely it was quite an obvious spot to choose for refuge. Probably the only suitable spot available for many miles.

  Eventually, they came right up to us and stood outside, at a distance of about twenty feet, as we hung back from the window and tried to peer at them without being spotted. We could more or less see their faces now, although it was too dark for a clear view, and hear every word that they spoke.

  I recognized one of them immediately as Sheriff Cavendish, just as we had suspected. It was too dark to see his distinctive eyes, but he was wearing a tall white hat that marked him out from the rest, and a silver star glinted on his chest. He was accompanied by five deputies, it seemed to me. Based on the fact that five of the men wore similar hats, vests, and matching belts for their swords. One of them carried a bow and arrow, I noticed.

  The other seven of the men out of the thirteen in total, however, did not appear to be officers of the law. Except for one, they were dressed mainly in dark-colored, ragtag clothing and wore matching red kerchiefs around their necks. The one exception was dressed in an expensive-looking blue suit, with a black gambler hat and a luxurious brown mustache.

  It was Kennedy Cox.

  I turned to Janina. She had clearly noticed the same figure I had. She stared at him, with her hands clasped over her mouth.

  “I thought he was over me!” she wh
ispered.

  The group examined the hoofprints just long enough to confirm that they did, indeed, lead into the network of caves, but not back out. They could also see, however, that the entrances were blocked. One of Kennedy’s men gave one of the boulders an experimental push, but of course it didn’t budge. I wouldn’t have been able to budge it myself either, not while it was at full size.

  Then they retreated back to about twenty feet away and resumed staring up at the window of our cave, although we had pressed ourselves far back enough that I didn’t think they could actually see us inside. The two contingents of men, officers of the law and Kennedy’s-- hired thugs? personal friends? worshipful followers?-- maintained a slight, unconscious distance between them.

  I noticed that the injured Savajun tracker wasn’t among the men, and also that there were thirteen rather than the original fourteen I had counted. So either I had miscounted their number from afar, or my ploy had worked, and they had sacrificed one man to stay behind and aid the tracker.

  “We know you’re in there!” Sheriff Cavendish hollered up at us.

  They did have enough evidence to know that, and I was sure they weren’t just going to walk away anyway, so I decided I might as well have a conversation with them.

  “And what are you going to do about it?” I replied as I stood up at the window. Then I ducked, and an arrow twanged back and hit the rock wall behind me as Katrina let out a little shriek.

  I chuckled.

  “What are you doing?” Janina hissed.

  “Figuring out our enemies’ plan,” I answered. Although I wasn’t so sure that they actually had one yet. They looked quite confident that they had us cornered now, but they also didn’t look like they were in any desperate hurry to start smashing down the sealed doors.

  They lowered their voices to keep us from overhearing them as they discussed the situation amongst themselves, but I could still hear a few important snatches, including “Donny can use his power,” “… no, wait till morning… ” and “… yes, they’ll still be there then… ”

  They started setting out bedrolls and building a campfire. Two separate campfires, in fact, one for Sheriff Cavendish and the lawmen, the other for Kennedy and his companions.