The Amoral Hero Read online

  I grabbed an open bottle of whiskey that was sitting near me behind the bar and started taking swigs from it as I watched the fight unfold.

  There were exactly six card players, and the group quickly divided itself into two opposing trios. Three of them were blonds with bony faces and matching scowls, whom I took to be brothers or cousins or at least some kind of kin. The other three didn’t appear to be a genetic match, but they moved more cohesively like a team. One of them was huge, one of them was scrawny but quick, and the other was medium-sized with a bald head and a red beard.

  As I sipped my whiskey and analyzed the fighters from my spot behind the bar next to the dead saloon keeper, two of the blonds jumped on the huge one’s back, while the other dueled the scrawny guy. The giant sort of roared and thrashed around. He was clearly one of those types who relied so heavily on his superior size and strength that he’d never taken the trouble to learn any kind of technique. One of the blonds seemed to have him in some sort of chokehold. I guess the most charitable interpretation would be that the lack of air flow to his brain was making the giant temporarily stupider than usual, but I wasn’t convinced that that was the case. In any case, he flailed around uselessly for a solid minute or so, under the burden of two clinging humans, and grew progressively clumsier and more and more red-faced, until he finally had the idea to fling himself backward onto a vacated table that was covered in mugs. The pottery shattered under the three men’s combined weight, and the table itself cracked in half.

  One of the blonds appeared to have been knocked unconscious when his head struck the table. The other, however, immediately grabbed a shard of broken pottery and plunged it into the side of the giant’s neck. He started to bellow, but it quickly turned into a gurgle as blood bubbled out of his mouth, gushed from his neck, and soaked the two fellows pinned beneath him. As the conscious one struggled to get out from beneath the giant, the red-bearded fellow calmly walked up with a sword in hand and surgically sliced his throat, and then that of his unconscious lookalike.

  The dying giant reached out a shaking hand to him as if in a mute appeal for help, and Redbeard sidestepped his grasp with an expression of faint distaste. Then he turned his attention to the other two surviving fighters, the last of the three blond relatives, and the scrawny guy. Both of them had swords, and both of them appeared moderately competent. That was actually rather refreshing to see. Not very many people had the wherewithal to afford swords, and of those that did, a significant percentage were just wealthy fops who considered them as ornaments, or pudgy lawmen who’d been issued swords but passed their entire careers without ever bloodying them.

  Redbeard made no move to intervene as the two fighters danced around each other. The few remaining saloon patrons who hadn’t fled the building altogether scurried to take cover under other tables or in other corners in order to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the flash of steel. The blond one hacked away rather mechanically, with about as much flair as a lumberjack splitting wood. His scrawny opponent moved with less precision, but had quicker reflexes that saved him more than a few times.

  Eventually the scrawny one tripped over a chair that some other patron had knocked over. Only then did Redbeard make a move. As the blond raised his sword to stab his opponent, Redbeard plunged his own sword through the man’s back. The blond man dropped his sword, which clattered down next to him. Then he sank to his knees. Then Redbeard planted his foot against the man’s back in order to yank his sword back out.

  “Took you long enough,” the scrawny fighter snorted as he started to get to his feet.

  Then, the blond-- whose white shirt had blossomed with red blood by then, and whose movements had turned as labored and jerky as a poorly operated marionette’s-- grabbed onto the sword he had just dropped. He grabbed it by the hilt in one hand, but he grabbed it by the blade in the other, with no regard for how deep it sliced into his palm. Then he sort of fell on top of the scrawny fighter, and slammed the sword down horizontally across his throat, like a manually operated guillotine. The scrawny fighter’s face remained frozen in a sneer as his head rolled off the gory stump of his neck across the packed dirt floor of the saloon. The blond had landed facedown atop the frail corpse, and he didn’t move another muscle after that, clearly having wrung out the last drops of his life force in that vengeful effort.

  “I believe what you meant to say was thank you,” Redbeard informed his dead comrade.

  I chuckled. Redbeard turned around in surprise at the sound, since despite the numerous other people that were looking on, none of them were anywhere close to laughter.

  And as his eyes met mine, I suddenly recognized him.

  The bald head and red beard had distracted me, and from my vantage point, I hadn’t happened to get a good look at his facial features before that. But now, I could see that his nose was about as crooked as a peddler of elixirs, and there was a deep V etched between his eyebrows. His face was lean and tanned like leather.

  I took one more swig from my bottle and set it aside, then I whipped out the Wanted poster to confirm. I looked from the sketch, to the man staring at me from across the saloon, and back to the sketch again, until there was no doubt in my mind.

  Redbeard was in fact Ermenildo Zabala.

  “And what the hell are you gawking at?” Ermenildo demanded as he began a menacing saunter in my direction.

  “Trying to decide which hairstyle I prefer on you,” I replied. “The beard does convey a sort of… barbarian reaver aesthetic. And the color is quite fiery. Many a sonnet has been written to hair of that hue. But I think you may have glued it on a bit crooked. And frankly, the dark hair suited your skin tone better. It made your eyes look--”

  “Are you trying to get yourself killed, you cock-sucking clown?” Ermenildo demanded as he continued to approach, slowly. He was probably trying to evaluate how much of a threat I posed. Maybe he was also considering how best to navigate the obstacle of the bar between us.

  “No, but I’m afraid someone is trying to get you killed,” I replied, as I turned the poster to face him so that he could see it for himself. “Several someones, in fact. The person who bankrolled this reward. The management at the Emerson Brothers Bank that agreed to handle it. And of course, due credit must be given to the extraordinarily talented artist, whomever he or she may be. An impeccable likeness, don’t you think?”

  Ermenildo’s only response was a wordless snarl. I guess his vanity probably led him to regard the accurate portrait as an insult. Then he dashed forward and leapt up onto the bar.

  I swung my sword at his ankles, and he tucked his knees up in a jump so that the blade passed under him. Then he launched himself off the bar at me.

  I scrambled back so that he wouldn’t land on top of me. Then I charged him.

  Between the bar and the wall of the saloon, there wasn’t really enough space for us to maneuver our swords easily. The blades kept hitting the furniture around us.

  I noticed that he had a handkerchief knotted around his neck and reached out to grab it with the intention of shrinking the cloth and strangling him, a move that I’d used variations of before to wonderful effect, but as soon as I laid hold of the handkerchief it just came loose in my hand, so I dropped it.

  A flicker of confusion crossed Ermenildo’s face. He of course couldn’t understand why I’d try to take his handkerchief.

  Then he rammed me into the shelf behind the bar where all the liquor bottles were standing. The wooden wall of the saloon shook, and I dropped my sword in order to shield my head with my arms as a barrage of heavy glass bottles came tumbling down on top of us and shattering at our feet, which unleashed a flood of liquor and sent glass shards flying in every direction. I heard dismayed yelps from the saloon patrons cowering in various corners of the room. I suspected that it wasn’t so much out of concern for my safety, as out of horror at the waste of liquor, a sentiment that I rather shared with them.

  I grabbed the wrist of Ermenildo’s
sword hand to restrain it and punched him in the face with my other hand. I felt the crunch of cartilage beneath my fist as his nose shattered and blood spurted from both nostrils, but he seemed oddly unfazed. I wondered if all the nerve endings in his nose had already been destroyed. I was going to punch him again and experiment with targeting a different part of his face the next time, but then he wrenched his sword hand free from my grip.

  I had a sudden idea, based on the daub of congealed white glue that I spotted at the edge of his fiery red beard just then. The beard was most certainly fake, not just dyed, and that made all the difference in regard to my magical ability. I could not cause any living thing, whether plant or animal, to grow or shrink, and that applied to every part of them, including hair. But a glued-on beard that was made of dead hair and not attached to a living body? That wasn’t any different, as far as my ability was concerned, than a garment.

  As Ermenildo raised his sword, with a triumphant leer presumably inspired by my current state of swordlessness, I grabbed onto his fake beard. Then, I caused it to grow as I ran backwards. The beard stretched to five feet long in my grip like a skein of yarn unspooling. Before the bewildered Ermenildo could catch up to me and close the distance, I yanked his beard in both hands, as hard as I could.

  Most of it ripped off his face, but the glue held strong enough that he was yanked off his feet first, and fell facedown into the glass-shard encrusted puddle of alcohol swirled with blood that covered the floor behind the bar. He screamed, which led me to believe that he’d been stabbed in the face with glass, possibly in the eye. Before he could get up, I ran over and planted my foot on the back of his bald head.

  Then I looked around. My sword was lying slightly out of reach, and it would also be hard for me to stoop to take Ermenildo’s without removing my foot from his head. The axe with which he or one of his companions had killed the poor saloon keeper, however, was still jutting out of said saloon keeper’s forehead, just a few feet away from me, so I reached over, grabbed the haft, and jerked the blade free.

  Then I raised it high above my head, and in the same instant as I lifted my foot off Ermenildo and stepped backward to stabilize myself, I brought the axe hurtling down and neatly decapitated him.

  I reached down and again took hold of his beard that had resumed its usual proportions and was no longer five feet long. I used it as a handle to pick up his head and then picked up my sword with my other arm. The face, I could see, was badly gashed, not to mention soaked in enough alcohol to pickle it, but I was confident that a quick rinse would suffice to make it recognizable as the same face on the poster.

  I stepped out from behind the bar, with Ermenildo’s severed head dangling at my side and his blood continuing to gush from the ragged red stump of his neck.

  “See ya around, folks,” I snickered. Pale frozen faces peered back at me from all around the room, but no one made a sound.

  Then I walked out of the saloon.

  Chapter Two

  I immediately headed for the Emerson Brothers Bank, which wasn’t hard to find since it was the town’s only bank. Ermenildo Zabala, as he swung from my hand, was by this time looking considerably worse than his portrait, even if you happened to favor the red beard version of his hairstyle. The flies, however, buzzed eagerly around me. It seemed like they were obsequious little congregants, congratulating me on the kill, praising my prowess in battle, and hoping desperately for a handout.

  When I reached the bank and stepped inside, the bearded, jovial-looking teller let out a yell as he stared in horror at my cargo in tow. He raised his hands in the air. “Sir, I d-don’t want-- the Sheriff will--”

  “Ah, shut your yap, I don’t mean you no harm,” I said as I raised Ermenildo’s blood-streaked, upside-down head in the air, and the teller squeezed his eyes shut and swallowed hard as if he felt ill. “This here is exactly what you done asked for. Well, what somebody asked for anyhow, and what the bank agreed to handle the reward for. So that seems to me to imply that this establishment entirely condoned my recent actions. As a matter of fact, the ‘Dead’ option even took precedence over the ‘Live’ option on the advertisement poster, which one could argue--”

  “P-poster?” the teller inquired warily. He squinted as if he were finally beginning to understand the situation.

  “The Wanted Dead or Alive poster,” I sighed. “I’m looking for a Mr. Walters. So are you him, or ain’t you?”

  “Oh, that’s my uncle, he’s back there,” the teller indicated a door behind him. “Wh-who are you?”

  “Halston Hale, sharpsword for hire,” I replied cheerfully. I gestured at the head, which was starting to drip on the floorboards of the bank. “And this here’s none other than Mr. Ermenildo Zabala.”

  The teller knocked rather urgently on the door. “Uncle? Uncle, there’s a fellow here to see you. He’s-- ”

  The teller pressed his ear to the door to hear the reply. The door was thick enough that from where I stood, I couldn’t make out the exact words, but they sounded a bit disgruntled.

  “He’s got… Ermenildo Zabala,” the teller squeaked in response.

  From the other side of the door there was silence.

  Then, it swung open.

  The slight, dapperly dressed man who peered around the side raised his eyebrows quite high at the sight of me and my offering, and his mouth formed a perfect O. After a moment he composed himself and cleared his throat.

  “Well, pardon me, Sir, but that’s not quite how I, er, expected someone to… well, never mind,” he chuckled nervously. “Come in, come in.”

  I took a step forward.

  “Oh, you can leave that there,” he said quickly as he held out a hand to stop me. He pointed. “On the floor will be fine for now, just fine.” I saw him glance at the trail of blood droplets that I had left across the floorboards as I entered, and frowned slightly. “Caleb, if you wouldn’t mind? The mop… ”

  His nephew nodded. I dropped Ermenildo with a thud and a bit of a wet squelch and then I walked around the counter and entered Mr. Walters’ office.

  “Sit, sit,” Mr. Walters urged me. There was a chair across from his desk. I sat.

  He sat behind his desk, folded his hands in front of him, adjusted his spectacles, and cleared his throat. He had gray hair and refined features, that were so delicate they might have suited a female better.

  “First of all, I really must congratulate you,” he said as he blinked at me from behind his spectacles. “The late Mr. Zabala… well, he has been the scourge of the town for several years now, and no one has dared to touch him. Well, that is not entirely true. A few men have dared indeed. And they are currently occupying the graveyard a mile from here.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “May I ask, how did you do it?” he inquired.

  “Well, I used his beard to yank him off balance, and then I cut his head off,” I explained.

  “Well… the town of Dunville is deeply indebted to you, Mr… what did you say your name was, again?”

  “Hale,” I said. “It’s Halston Hale.”

  “Very good, very good. Mr. Hale.”

  “And, I was rather hoping that the town of Dunville wouldn’t be indebted to me for any longer than it took to walk between the saloon and this bank,” I prompted.

  “Oh, oh, of course, not to worry, Mr. Hale,” Mr. Walters squeaked. He knelt at a safe behind his desk, one of several that was stacked there, and fiddled with the knob until the door swung open. He produced a large leather case and placed it on the desk. “The one hundred gold pieces, as promised. You are welcome to count them if you like. Or, we can go out front, where I have a scale for weighing the quantity.”

  I hefted the case. It felt right enough to me, and besides, based on his manner toward me, I really didn’t think that Mr. Walters would risk attempting to cheat me. And if I found out later that he had done so? Well, I wasn’t in a hurry to get anywhere in particular, so I could always make my way back to Dunville, and if th
at happened, he’d regret the incident a lot more than I would.

  “That won’t be necessary,” I said and placed the case by my feet without even opening it.

  “Well, then, I thank you, again, for your inestimable service to this town,” Mr. Walters said.

  I picked up the case and stood to leave.

  “Just a moment, Mr. Hale,” Mr. Walters said. “If you’d take a seat, please?”

  I stared at him. He was smiling in a friendly manner. There didn’t seem to be anything sly or sinister about his demeanor, and besides, even if he had had the most evil of intentions, I didn’t see any means for him to carry them out, so I decided I might as well hear him out and sat back down again.

  “The sponsors of this reward attached one rather minor condition to it,” he explained.

  “Condition?” I asked suspiciously. “The only condition was killing or capturing Ermenildo Zabala. That was what it said on the poster. And I’ve already done that. If you have any doubts whatsoever as to his identity, we can go examine the head together. And the rest of the corpse can be found at the saloon a few doors down, along with numerous witnesses who can surely--”

  “Oh, yes, to be sure, Mr. Hale,” Mr. Walters reassured me quickly as he waved his hands in the air in a placating gesture. “I am personally quite convinced of the identity of the deceased. I had the misfortune of seeing him in person a few months ago, and ah, let us just say he left quite an impression. And I have always had a remarkable memory for faces. But that is beside the point. The sponsors didn’t mention this other condition on the poster. But they asked me to convey it to whomever came to claim the award.”