Bandits and Refugees
The chairman of the Far Eastern Front Alliance.
In the Far East, where the lords seldom gathered more than once a year, this second summons was the first of its kind.
Ferda swept his gaze across the fourteen lords. Some had already shed the plump ease they had worn at the first gathering; jawlines were beginning to show.
He looked at them and said,
“There is a young man named Stefan.”
A youth named Stefan. Not the sort of words one would expect from a boy who was not yet nineteen. Yet even that choice of phrasing carried a weight that swallowed any urge to scoff.
“I trust you all know well what sort of man that youth is.”
“We know.”
“Thanks to him we can now go and fetch whatever we need without delay.”
One after another they offered their praise. Self-sufficiency had always been a hard limit in the Far East. Most of them had simply made do, or pretended the shortages had never existed. Stefan had given them room to improve their lives; he was a fine merchant.
“The reason you were able to do so,” Ferda continued, “is because I made him a single promise.”
He raised his index finger.
“I promised I would help him become the master of a trading company.”
“Master of a company?”
“A young man of Pascal’s caliber is more than worthy of becoming master of the Pascal Trading Company.”
“I thought the same. Yet it seems the youth is now so hard-pressed that he is ready to abandon that dream.”
A brief silence fell. Ordinarily Count Consiler would have stirred the wind in a moment like this, but he only watched, wanting to see the true current of opinion.
“Then is it not only natural that we should step forward ourselves?”
A viscount who looked every inch the champion of justice sprang to his feet. Another lord rose with him and shouted,
“Exactly! Who made life in this Far East halfway livable? We cannot simply pretend we do not know!”
“If we do not even think of repaying that kindness, the Sun’s judgment itself would not be enough!”
“Aye, aye!”
There were also faces that only half-heartedly agreed. Ferda carefully memorized every one of them.
“I understand the lords’ will. Until the Pascal Trading Company is stable, I wish to request escort troops be dispatched there. Of course, only to the extent that the defense of the Grand Ducal Territory itself is not hindered.”
“Of course! We will dispatch thirty men of our standing garrison.”
“We shall send thirty-five…!”
“Forty…!”
The contest to prove loyalty grew so heated that Ferda was forced to cap the contribution at thirty men each. Even so, four hundred soldiers gathered in an instant, and some fifteen knights were also drawn out.
Ferda handed the pledged documents to Count Consiler.
“I leave it to you.”
“As the Regent wills.”
The problem of the caravan mercenaries was half solved. The other half depended on whether the root of the matter itself had been cut out. In the meantime Ferda turned to the work that was his alone.
“Ruri.”
“Yes.”
“Can you take me to the place where the attack occurred?”
“Do you take me for Your Lordship’s personal shuttle?”
“I simply have no wish to waste time.”
Grumbling, she slipped her hands under his arms, locked them around his shoulders, and pulled him close.
“Hold on tight. If you fall, I will not catch you.”
Ruri spread her great wings and took flight. The distance that would have taken two days from Baldrova Castle was covered in less than a minute.
The site of the incident lay a little way beyond the Grand Ducal Territory, on ownerless land. In other words, land of little value and considerable danger. Given the grim season, the scene itself had been savagely trampled. Men of the Grand Ducal Territory stood watch around the perimeter, preserving the site as carefully as they could.
The investigation itself was being carried out by Dragon Spawns who had been sent to maintain the magic formations. Commanding them was Administrator Isabella. Spotting Ferda and Ruri, she bowed.
“You have arrived. And Miss Ruri is with you as well.”
“Yes… somehow.”
Ruri’s expression made it plain she was not pleased to see Isabella. It was less the usual friction between affiliations than a personal dislike of Isabella herself.
“What is the scale of the damage?”
“Ten carriages in total were moving into the Grand Ducal Territory. Three of them were for transporting monsters; the remaining seven were carrying goods to be stored at the branch in Count Consiler’s domain.”
The three intact carriages were those loaded with monster carcasses. No one would touch cargo so foul that even approaching it felt unclean; that much was only natural.
“Casualties?”
“Of the twelve merchants, eleven dead, one missing. All twenty-two laborers are dead. Of the twenty hired mercenaries, two are dead. The company staff can be considered wiped out; most of the mercenaries escaped alive.”
“Typical.”
Even when everyone else died, the mercenaries always came home.
“Any peculiarities?”
“There are.”
Isabella pointed toward the bodies. Corpses bearing a single sword wound each had been laid out in neat rows. Ferda had assumed they had been arranged that way for recovery.
“They were already like that when we arrived.”
“Lined up neatly?”
“Yes. Just in case, I asked a scout from the caravan; he says he never touched them.”
Ruri muttered in disbelief at the unexpected detail.
“Perhaps the humans of the Serdes Continent have risen in quality. Who would have thought bandits could be so polite?”
“Indeed.”
Ferda examined their condition. Every body lay straight, hands folded upon the chest. Was there any reason to go to such trouble?
“There is one more strange point. Some of the laborers carried weapons, yet there are no signs of combat.”
“No combat marks means…”
“All killed with a single blow. In other words, they were ambushed.”
Ferda understood at once.
“So from the beginning they had hired bandits, not mercenaries.”
“That is how it appears.”
It was classic. Yet even within that classic scenario something still refused to fit. Ruri sensed it and tugged at Ferda’s sleeve.
“My lord Ferda, if they ambushed the merchants they must have come to steal, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Yet for a robbery it ended far too modestly.”
She pointed to the carriages that still held valuables.
“Look. They left without even touching the goods over there.”
A cask containing golden candlesticks stood wide open, as if shouting, “Here I am.” Nevertheless the carriages loaded with precious items had barely been disturbed. Everything taken was fresh produce. Partial thefts of preserved rations and weapons. Of the jewels and high-value goods, only four pieces were missing.
“Miss Ruri, if I may answer: it was most likely the anti-theft magic.”
“Anti-theft magic?”
Ruri asked as if speaking to herself.
“For your sake I will explain. On certain expensive goods, the moment anyone other than the merchant touches them, a mana tag attaches that allows tracking. Modern merchants use it often for insurance.”
“I see.”
A tracking spell that clung like a criminal’s brand. Even so, the sort of men who would still reach for such things usually did.
“Were all the stolen valuables free of that tracking magic?”
“Upon checking, yes.”
“And who would know that fact?”
“The merchants themselves say no one else is told.”
Ferda stroked his chin in thought.
“The two dead mercenaries.”
“Yes.”
“Do they carry the tracking magic?”
“I will check.”
Isabella released a pulse of mana over the two corpses. Ferda’s prediction proved exact.
“As the Regent said, the tracking magic is on them.”
“So they killed the ones who grew greedy.”
Piecing the given circumstances together, Ferda reached a new conjecture.
“The missing merchant is likely the ringleader.”
“It seems so. It is a method that occurs now and then among small and mid-sized companies.”
One merchant had planned from the start to double-cross Stefan, brought in a band of robbers, staged a total wipe-out, filled their pockets, and slipped away. The rough sketch was clear, yet Ferda still could not shake a lingering doubt. The picture in his mind refused to resolve. Was he obsessing over something? He turned the question over and over, then asked Isabella,
“What if plunder was never the intent at all?”
Both Ruri and Isabella looked at him.
“No intent to plunder?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“That plunder was secondary, and murder and conspiracy were the true aims. A demonstration that the company is collapsing from internal division.”
“Murder and conspiracy…”
Isabella nodded at Ferda’s words, then tilted her head.
“But if that is the case, there is something odd.”
She showed him the list of stolen items.
“If murder was the goal, why take every scrap of the fresh food?”
“Could they not simply have been short of food?”
Ruri’s suggestion drew a sharp rebuttal from Isabella.
“If they were short of food they should have taken all the emergency rations. For people who need to flee, stealing fresh produce is something even third-rate thieves would not do.”
She was right. Fresh food was bulky and hard to store. Anyone intending a clean hit-and-run would have cleaned out the easy-to-carry emergency rations.
“The only people who would take that sort of thing are those desperate for food—refugees.”
“Which is practically synonymous with bandits.”
Meaning there was no guarantee the two groups had not cooperated. Ferda agreed with Isabella’s assessment.
Unsettling.
He turned the irritating situation over in his mind again and again, more suspicious than usual, determined to leave not even a sliver of doubt unexamined. Just then one of the Dragon Spawns assisting the investigation whispered something into Isabella’s ear.
“Good news. We have confirmed that one person still carries a tracking-magic tag.”
That was strange. The two mercenaries who had grown greedy and received the tags had died on the spot.
“What did he steal?”
“Apparently he took a single gold coin from a merchant’s purse. With this we should be able to track the bandits.”
“A single gold coin?”
“Yes.”
Ferda asked again.
“He took one coin from a purse that held only one coin?”
“No. Of the five goldens set aside for travel expenses, after one golden and thirty shillings spent on security, one of the remaining coins was taken.”
From a purse containing three goldens and seventy shillings, he had taken only a single gold coin.
“Where is he heading?”
“Surprisingly, straight into the Grand Ducal Territory.”
Truly astonishing. They had gone to such lengths to avoid the tracking magic, only to be caught because of one gold coin. Walking contradictions.
Perfect yet full of gaps, brutal yet polite. Two irreconcilable things tangled together into chaos. Perhaps that foolish bandit would hand them the answer himself.
“Form a pursuit team at once and order them to take every last one ali—”
“No.”
Ferda cut Isabella off.
“There is no need to have them brought in. We will go ourselves.”
“We, my lord?”
Isabella looked thoroughly reluctant.
“It is unseemly for someone of the Regent’s station to clear out a mere band of thieves. Matters like this are better left to subordinates.”
“She is right. You should not handle this yourself.”
Ruri sided with Isabella and tried to dissuade him. But if he had ever listened to such counsel, he would not have been Ferda.
“I am the sort whose itch is not scratched unless I do it myself. And in this affair I refuse to leave any room for doubt.”
“Doubt, my lord?”
“Yes. No doubt can remain.”
Only Ferda knew: revenge is most beautiful when it is clean. A revenge play staged for someone else must be cleaner still than usual. That was the principle he lived by.
“This is a revenge play for Stefan.”
Late evening.
Following the trail they had left, the searchers came upon a campsite that appeared to belong to the supposed bandits. It was nothing like the den of vicious, base criminals they had expected. Some forty men, women, and children sat in small groups around a campfire.
“Can we eat now?”
“Not yet. It needs a little longer.”
“I’m so hungry I could die! Listen—gurgle-gurgle!”
“Better than dying of a stomachache.”
Even though Ferda, Isabella, and Ruri had drawn quite near, no one noticed them. Every sense was fixed on the fire—more precisely, on the pot sitting above it.
“It’s done.”
The children cheered; the adults smiled. In that moment they could almost forget that they were destined to vanish as fleetingly as day-flies.
Isabella, Ferda, Ruri—any one of them could have wiped the camp out with a flick of a finger. Instead of moving his fingers, Ferda kicked a discarded pot that lay on the ground.
Clang! Clang!
The men who had been staring at the pot snapped their heads around. A pot came rolling and bouncing toward them. They looked up and saw a man and two women standing there.
“……”
“……”
A brief silence. The one who broke it was a bearded man. He fumbled for his sword and drew it with a rasp.
The firelight glinted softly along the blade. A well-honed sword that did not match their ragged appearance. Ferda recognized it at once as one of the blades lost from the caravan.
“What are you all doing?! Draw your weapons!”
At the order the others finally grasped the situation and reached for their own arms.
“Stop!”
Everyone froze. The speaker was a man in half-plate. Unlike the other refugees who still floundered in confusion, he possessed clear insight.
“Everyone lower your swords! Lower them, kneel, and place your hands on the ground!”
“What are you—”
“If you want to live, do it now!”
At his words every man and woman dropped to their knees and pressed their hands to the earth. Accustomed more to submission than to resistance, they moved quickly. Truly swift judgment. Ferda, who had intended to make an example of at least one of them for the sake of conversation, had to concede the point.
The man rose, walked forward, and knelt before Ferda.
“I am William, leader of this band of refugees. The distinguished guest’s name is Ferda Valdrova… the Regent, is it not?”
He asked. His speech was nothing like that of a third-rate bandit.
“Yes, that is correct.”
“And having finished the investigation of the plunder, you tracked us here.”
“Yes.”
He had apparently been aware that an investigative team would be sent.
“I am certain you must wish to know the full circumstances of the incident. I will tell you everything. In return, would you first permit the children to eat?”
He asked with perfect courtesy. For that very reason Ferda let out a cold snort.
“Rats that gnaw at other people’s grain, yet you dare play at being human and beg for pity? You have no right to eat.”
He raked his gaze across them all.
“From this moment, anyone who moves without my leave dies. Adults, children, the elderly—every last one.”
Ferda sat down squarely on the pot he had kicked earlier.
“Confess properly. Otherwise I will begin with the children.”