The Amoral Hero

by Logan Jacobs

  Sheriff Cavendish hesitated. I think he knew that the decision could easily be a matter of life and death. And I don’t think he liked his odds. But his pride wouldn’t allow him to slink back to Sunderly in defeat for a second time. And maybe he also reckoned on the Red Kerchiefs getting shamed into joining the fray, if they saw the lawmen leading the charge.

  Whatever it was that spurred his decision, he arrived at it swiftly. He looked to the deputy standing beside him, and to the one who was awkwardly stranded between the cave and the campfire as he waited to see whether he would be called to retreat, or to charge. And this time he only addressed them, not Kennedy and his men.

  “We don’t need these worthless pieces of shit!” he screamed. “Do your job, men!”

  And Cavendish himself drew his sword and ran with them.

  As the trio approached, all in line with each other, I backed up to defend the ladder of holes leading up to the twins’ hideaway. Theo came to stand beside me like a huge reassuring shadow, and he snorted and pawed the ground in anticipation.

  They all scrambled past the remaining boulder that partially blocked the way still and charged at us.

  “Wrong move, motherfuckers,” Theo screeched.

  The deputy on the right was so shocked when he heard that come out of not my, but my horse’s mouth, that he froze completely in his tracks. It was only for an instant, but that instant was long enough for me to swipe his head off with my sword. As the head toppled off, it struck the deputy next to him in the chest who let out a girlish scream and jumped backward as though he had been burned. I lunged forward, and we clashed swords furiously. Four strokes later I won past his guard and slashed his stomach open. He dropped his sword and doubled over clutching at his bleeding stomach. It was already a mortal wound, but I had no personal grudge against the man and no reason to wish him the additional suffering of the slow death that a stomach wound would bestow, so I did him the favor of cleanly removing his head too in one swipe.

  That left only one lawman in the room with his head still attached to his shoulders: Sheriff Cavendish himself.

  Face to face, I could see those squinting blue eyes of his again, and his grim mouth. He didn’t look ferocious exactly, but he didn’t look like a man cowering for mercy, either. If I had to describe his expression, I’d say that he mostly looked resigned.

  With his sword at the ready, and his pale hat somehow still impeccably clean and crisp and set straight across his brow, he opened his mouth and addressed me.

  “You know, Mister,” he said, “a man of your talents could do so much good in the world. And yet you choose… this… ”

  “It’s too late to save yourself with talk, Sheriff,” I said. Not harshly, and not kindly either. Just matter-of-factly.

  “I know that,” he replied. “But maybe it isn’t too late to save you.”

  “I don’t need saving,” I said.

  Theo chose that moment to rear up and then bring his fifteen hundred pounds of weight crashing down on top of the sheriff. He probably pounded the poor man’s skull all the way down into his pelvis, but damned if I could tell, from the gory flattened lump of blood-soaked flesh, fabric, and sinew that was left behind after Theo gingerly removed his hooves and pranced backward a few steps.

  “I just said I don’t need saving,” I chuckled to Theo.

  “You’re welcome,” my horse replied.

  I walked back over to the door to see Kennedy and his gang waiting. I don’t think they could see everything that occurred inside the cave, but they could tell that the sheriff and his men had gone in, and that they hadn’t come back out.

  When they saw me appear at the doorway, the one archer among their number nocked an arrow back, and I ducked when it twanged overhead. After that, I pressed myself to the side of the doorway and peered out without exposing myself to see what they would do next.

  “Thank you kindly, my friend, for ridding of us of that twat Cavendish,” Kennedy shouted. “He and his men had been dogging us for years!”

  “You’re welcome,” I shouted back. “Does that mean you and I are on good terms?”

  “It could mean that,” Kennedy replied.

  “On what terms?” I asked, since it sounded like there were definitely terms.

  “Hand over those treacherous bitches that you’re guarding!” Kennedy yelled. “They’re the ones I want. I don’t even care about the prize money. My men are entitled to half of it, but you can have the rest if you like. Two thousand five hundred gold coins. All yours. For a couple of worthless she-dogs without a faithful bone in their bodies.”

  “Can’t do that, I’m afraid!” I yelled back.

  “Why not?” he demanded. “Are they really your cousins then? Or is it that you want one of them for yourself? I’m sure they’d be a good fuck, but you can’t keep a woman like that. They’ll promise you the world and leave you with less than nothing!”

  “Look, I’m sorry the engagement didn’t work out, but I can’t let you kill my clients,” I told him.

  “Clients? What the hell do you mean, clients?”

  “I mean that I’m a mercenary, and they hired me for protection,” I answered. “Name’s Halston Hale. If you walk away from this, and you ever happen to be in need of an extra sword, I’m sure you’ve seen for yourself today that mine’s more effective than most.”

  “Is this really the time?” Janina yelled down at me from the chamber above.

  “You never know!” I called back up to her. “I’m a businessman!”

  “Well, your career’s about to be cut short, unless you give them up,” Kennedy snarled.

  His six red kerchief-wearing ruffians all had their swords out by now. They were all on foot and ready to run at me. Their horses, and the horses that had belonged to the now deceased lawmen, were all hobbled and grazing peacefully a little ways off, just as happy to be uninvolved in the whole situation as were our horses inside the cave.

  “Giving them up would be bad business,” I replied. “I’ll just have to decline.”

  “They’d be dead!” Kennedy yelled at me in exasperation. “No one would ever know! It wouldn’t affect your reputation!”

  “You’d all know, and I would know, and I gave my word I’d protect them.” I replied. “So if you want them, come and take them.”

  So instead, I threw myself up the ladder handhold by handhold and into the upper chamber with the twins. They were clinging together in fear in the corner. I grabbed the chest of gold, shrank it down so that I could lift it, and balanced it on the edge of the hole that provided passage between the two caves. Then I expanded it back to its actual size of about four feet by two-and-a-half feet so that it covered the hole almost completely. You could stick a hand or a sword through the gaps at the edges, but you certainly couldn’t fit your body through without moving the chest aside first. Which you couldn’t do unless you could lift three hundred pounds-- not up from the ground, which some men could certainly do, but above your head, which I didn’t think many at all could do, and furthermore, in this case, while hanging from the side of a wall and unable to plant your feet firmly on the ground beneath, which I didn’t think anyone could do without magic.

  Meanwhile the Red Kerchiefs converged on the cave entrance. The entrance was directly below our window and I could see the tops of their heads, which gave me an idea. I used the hilt to smash open the lock on the chest of gold. Then I grabbed a gold coin in each hand and enlarged them to the size of dinner plates before hurling them, one after the other, into the clustered knot of men below.

  One gold coin just hit the ground at their feet and rolled off into the dust and shrank back to its actual size as it went. The other, however, conked one of the men in the skull and he went down like a sack of bricks. Whether unconscious or dead, I didn’t know, but either way he was out of the fight.

  The others looked up and shouted and the archer aimed his bow, so I had to duck out of the way. Then they started storming into the lower cave and they we
re no longer below our window anyway. I could hear the horses whinnying in panic, not because the outlaws were after them, but just at the sudden intrusion of their space by so many strangers at once.

  The twins shrieked as swords started to stab up through the narrow cracks around the chest. They clung to the opposite side of the wall, and I could hear grunting and knocking on the chest below as the Red Kerchiefs struggled in vain to move it.

  After a minute or two had passed, and we could still clearly hear the struggle of the men below, but the chest still didn’t budge, the twins seemed to gain a bit of reassurance.

  “You may as well go away now, Kennedy,” Janina yelled. “I’ll give you back your bride price if you want. All two hundred of it. But I’ll never be yours, dead or alive!”

  “I don’t want your money, I can’t be bought!” his enraged voice yelled back. “You’re the one that presented yourself as a thing to be bought! And I paid the price, and I got nothing!”

  “I’m sorry I deceived you,” she said simply.

  There was a pause. I did wonder, for just a second, if that was all it would take. But then Kennedy shouted back,

  “It’s too late for apologies! And it doesn’t change what you are. Wretched creatures like you have no place on this earth.”

  The thumping on the bottom of the chest became more rhythmic. Then, I heard an ominous sound indeed. The sound of cracking wood.

  I grabbed the leather harness that I had taken off the horse earlier for just this purpose and gestured silently but urgently to the twins.

  I looked out the window again, and confirmed that there was no one left outside the cave, except for the Red Kerchief whose forehead had been dented by the giant gold coin. He still lay prone in exactly the same position he had fallen in, and there was now a pool of blood spreading from his head, so I mentally updated his status from uncertain to definitely dead. In other words, no threat whatsoever to the twins.

  So I dangled the leather harness which I had already cut apart strategically in a few places to elongate it into a sort of rope, out of the window, and wrapped one end around my hands and braced myself, while Janina lowered herself out the window and climbed down the harness, pushing off with her feet from the outside of the rock formation. Luckily, all the men below were so entirely focused on the chest, and so convinced that they had us all trapped, that they didn’t look out the door and see her descend.

  Katrina followed after that. I could tell she was nervous to trust the rope, and trust herself to hold on, but she could hear the cracking of the wood just as well as I could, and knew that the option of staying in the cave wasn’t any more safe. When she reached the bottom safely and joined her sister, the two of them ran off toward the horses in the field.

  Meanwhile, I could see a shallow depression appearing in the center of the chest of gold, as the coins started to fall out of the crack that had been created in the bottom of the chest, and that was steadily enlarging. The chest was bound in iron, but it was made of wood, and it couldn’t withstand the furious efforts of six strong men forever. The gold was already gradually spilling out on its own, and the chest didn’t guarantee my safety for much longer. So I started grabbing handfuls of coins and hurling them down at my attackers through the cracks, just to irritate and distract them. I didn’t think they were poorly disciplined enough to stop what they were doing and start scrounging for the coins on the ground, but there was always a chance. And even if they weren’t, no one liked having small metal discs thrown at their faces.

  Then, when I calculated that it was a matter of minutes left before the chest gave way altogether, and I figured I had bought the sisters sufficient time to unhobble a couple of horses and make their getaway, I decided to make good my own escape while I still could.

  There was a small, roundish rock in the corner of the chamber, that I had noticed Katrina using as a seat earlier. It wasn’t very heavy, probably only about forty pounds or so. Certainly not heavy enough to hold my weight. But I could fix that.

  I dragged the rock near the window. Then, I started to enlarge it as much as I could. I quickly stopped and shrank it back down when I realized that one side of the rock was about to become visible through the cracks around the chest.

  I couldn’t let the men below see what I was doing, or my plan would be ruined. I scooted the rock farther over to the side away from the chest of the gold so that it would be safely out of view. Then, I hastily enlarged it again, to about five times its actual size. At two hundred pounds, it would weigh about the same as me, which would be sufficient, especially with the added consideration of the friction of the harness against the window sill. So I proceeded to loop the harness around the base of the rock and tighten it down. Even those few seconds that it took with my hands off the rock allowed it to shrink slightly. So I put my hands back on the rock and willed it as big as I could once again.

  Then, I grabbed the loose end of the harness, and flung myself out the window.

  It was about thirty feet down from the window to the ground. I slid just about as fast as I possibly could without tearing the skin off the palms of my hands, but even so, I tumbled down the last ten feet or so as the harness rope came flying loose out the window after me, as soon as the rock above became too small to keep it pinned in place.

  I hit the ground rolling and sprinted for the nearest boulder that I saw of sufficient size for my next purpose. It was about twenty yards away, and when I reached the boulder I shrank it down, scooped it up, and sprinted back to the cave opening.

  “Hey!” one of the Red Kerchiefs yelled from inside the cave.

  Shit. I’d been seen.

  Just as I reached the door from the outside, he reached it from the inside, sword extended. My sword was sheathed, because I’d needed both hands to descend the rope, and right now, I needed both arms to be able to lug the miniaturized boulder I was carrying.

  I sort of raised the boulder just in time as a very clumsy shield to protect myself, and his steel blade struck rock. But I couldn’t effectively parry or knock the sword out of his hand with just the rock, since it was too heavy for me to maneuver fast enough. I dropped the rock, drew my sword, and engaged with the Red Kerchief.

  Meanwhile I set my hand on the other boulder that was still wedged in the doorframe which came waist high and served as a sort of barrier between us as we dueled, and shrank it down and rolled it out of the way, while continuing to use my body to block my opponent from exiting.

  “Theo, get the horses out!” I yelled.

  My opponent glanced backward in reflexive confusion for an instant. He didn’t know about Theo, of course, and his thought must have been that there was another man behind him somewhere that he somehow hadn’t known about. He wasn’t stupid enough to turn his head away from me completely, or lower his sword, but the instant of distraction still gave me enough of an advantage to run him through. Then as I yanked my sword back out with a wet squelch, I had to jump out of the way to avoid being trampled by fifteen hundred pounds of glossy black muscle.

  Close on Theo’s heels came the Elliott sisters’ four mares.

  Kennedy and his Red Kerchiefs had by then realized that something was wrong, that I had escaped and was no longer inside the chamber that they were fighting so hard to access. A shower of gold coins poured down from the now finally broken chest as the five men rushed for the exit. But the last horse to exit, the Hodgsons’ horse that had chosen to continue tagging along with our party, pushed past them and knocked down and trampled the foremost outlaw beneath his hooves, I think quite unintentionally. The horse vaulted past me and joyfully joined his fellow horses out under the open sky.

  Then I pushed the first boulder back into place and expanded it to waist height. After that I grabbed the additional boulder that I had just carried over, miniaturized it so that I could lift it, and stacked it on top of the first. Just as I did so, Kennedy himself, in his shiny blue suit, dashed up and swung at me wildly with his sword. I ducked down behind my
wall of boulders without letting go of the upper boulder, or pausing in the process of expanding it back to its natural size. Kennedy’s blade ended up getting wedged between the boulder and the cave opening, so tightly that he couldn’t get it back.

  “What?” He howled in fury.

  I could no longer see most of his body through the boulders between us, but I could tell that he was tugging at the sword hilt frantically-- as if the loss of his sword were his real problem at the moment, which it certainly wasn’t.

  “They’ll betray you,” he screamed at me. “You might think you’re different, but they’ll betray you!”

  No, they won’t, I thought. Not because I’m different, but because I’ll never give them that chance. But there wasn’t any point in arguing with Kennedy Cox. First of all because he wasn’t a rational being. Second of all because he was a dead man walking.

  “How can we help you?” a familiar feminine voice drifted to my ears. I turned away from my frantic captives to see the twins standing there hand in hand a few yards away.

  “I thought you rode away,” I said. “That’s what I meant for you to do, that’s what I was trying to gesture for you to do, upstairs. To get to a safe distance until I finished with this business.”

  “How can we help you?” Katrina repeated with a faint impatient sigh.

  “Go over to one of those campfires, get some branches lit, and bring them back to me,” I instructed. I knew that Kennedy and the four Red Kerchiefs trapped inside the cave could hear me, but I didn’t care. There wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it now.

  The twins hurried off to follow my instructions. I hoped they knew how to light a fire. I was sure their valet had been doing it for them ever since they moved into Marianne’s fine house in Dunville, but probably as children they had been obliged to perform such chores for their father’s gang of bandits when they were living on the run.

  Meanwhile, I guarded the window. It was about thirty feet up, which was certainly a low enough height to be a survivable fall, but it was also a tall enough height to make a broken ankle or worse likely, and a broken ankle for Kennedy or one of his Red Kerchiefs-- if it occurred in such close proximity to me and my sword-- would not be a survivable injury.