2
Thorn lay flattened on the tree branch with a pair of leather binoculars held to his eyes. Through the blurred leaves in the foreground he was watching a cabin. A trail of smoke rose from the chimney against the dusky sky, and through the windows came the soft orange glow of a fire. Thorn could not clearly see the interior of the cabin, however he could discern movement by the shadows that passed between the fire and the windows.
He set aside the binoculars and stretched. He’d been planted in this tree for most of the day and his muscles were stiff. He put his tin cup to his lips and drank down the last of his coffee, grimacing as it had long since gone cold and he was down to the dregs. He spat the grounds out before hopping off the tree branch and wiping the tree bark and cornbread crumbles from his clothes. His first order of business was to relieve his aching bladder of some of that cold coffee, then he ran through some calisthenics to get his muscles moving again and his blood pumping after so many hours of torpor.
The shadows moving inside the cabin represented three people that Thorn had been hunting for weeks. They were the Dane Gang: Nestor Dane, his younger brother Taftis, and their close friend Jayce Keaton. They employed other auxiliary members in their pirating, but these were the core three, and together they would fetch a hefty bounty.
Much of the Free Lands had been experiencing economic hardships after the collapse of the L & D Shipping Company. The company had spent decades tying itself inextricably to the government of Bradenfield, and especially to the town of Webster Grove, leaning on politicians to enact laws which drove their competitors out of business, and consolidating power through bureaucracy, that their collapse left a mess of laws that prevented anyone else from filling the vacuum legally. And while the Bradenfield police force, or pale greens as they were known due to the color of their uniforms, was shutting down upstarts who didn’t have the proper licensing for the myriad goods they were transporting, the black market smugglers were doing booming business. With the increased black market activity inevitably came an increase in piracy. It was common for a group such as the Dane Gang to offer a respectable front, in their case that was Jayce Keaton, to attract business from desperate towns which no longer had a reliable means of transporting goods to and from the massive trade caravans, only to lead those shipments into the wilderness where they were preyed upon by Nestor and Taftis. The Dane Gang was one of the worst because they weren’t just interested in stealing goods. They seemed to take great pleasure in killing, and had left a trail of bodies along their hunting grounds, which included the territory along the border of the Fiann and Bradenfield.
Thorn had tracked down Nestor and Taftis by following the glyphs they left on rock faces as a means of communicating with peripheral members of the gang. They had around a half dozen people who helped them on raids and received their orders by a simple code of squares, circles, and triangles that were carved into out-of-the-way rock faces across the territory. Thorn didn’t have the patience or the time to crack the code, so he found a rock face with recent markings and waited in ambush. After a couple of days one of the peripheral gang members came by to receive orders. Thorn captured him and began breaking fingers until he told him when and where the next raid was going to be.
With this information Thorn was able to track down the Dane Gang as they pirated a shipment of goods crossing the border. He was woefully underequipped to take down the gang at that time, and had been planning simply to follow them back to their safe house, but he was prepared to intervene after they had tied up their prisoners and Taftis looked ready to do them all with his cruel boltslinger. Taftis was a mean little man who took exceptional delight in pain and death. Jayce Keaton, however, would not allow it. He and Taftis had nearly come to blows, and one or the other of them would probably not have made the return journey to their cabin if Nestor had not stepped between them to keep the peace.
Thorn was able to follow their physical trail back to this isolated cabin in the northern Bradenfield wilderness, where he had been watching them for the better part of a day. Taftis was still fuming for not being allowed to kill the prisoners, and they had gotten into a terrible argument. Though he couldn’t make out the words, Thorn could hear the shouts all the way from out here. That argument ended when Taftis had exploded out the front door, screaming and cursing at the sky and everything else.
Nestor stayed behind, presumably to smooth things over, as Taftis vented his anger by firing his boltslinger into the trees, shouting curse words with each pull of the trigger. During this outburst Thorn had taken refuge behind the tree he was using for reconnaissance, because with Taftis’ mercurial nature there was no telling where those bolts might wind up.
Taftis was a short and mean-looking man with narrow eyes, a scraggly beard, and greasy shoulder-length hair. His brother Nestor was a little taller and had shorter hair, but he was just as mean and rough-looking. It was no wonder that Jayce Keaton was the one who approached their potential victims as he was the only one of them that looked halfway respectable. He had short dark hair and a well-trimmed beard. He usually wore an expensive suit and a bowler hat.
Their argument had been resolved when after a little while Nestor came out and sat with Taftis. They were talking, but again Thorn couldn’t hear what they were saying. From reading their body language, however, he surmised that Nestor had patched things up with Jayce, and was now trying to patch things up with his brother. Eventually the two of them had gone back inside and Thorn returned to his perch on the tree branch to watch them for the rest of the afternoon.
As the curtain of night drew over the forest Thorn’s stomach began to churn with excitement. Most of the bounties he had taken recently were low-profile jobs that, while they had provided a steady (albeit small) stream of revenue, had not been able to quench his insatiable desire to test himself. The Dane Gang, however, if they lived up to their reputations, might just end that dry spell.
While he was not someone who could hold onto money for any length of time, Thorn was also someone who did not live beyond his means. He lived in a log cabin in the far reaches of the Western Frontier and was more than capable of sustaining himself on what food the forest provided. What required the most sustaining recently was Thorn’s new buggy. He had commissioned it several months ago and had only recently acquired it. And it was a beast. The engine ran on hobby gas, which was a rare and powerful fuel. It had a lightweight frame, with independent suspension and thirty-seven inch tires for tearing over the ragged terrain of the Western Frontier. Under ideal conditions it was capable of bursts of speed of nearly two hundred miles per hour, and had a specially-designed frame to handle that amount of torque. All buggies in the Free Lands were custom, but Thorn’s was truly one of a kind, and there was none that could catch it.
Unfortunately, the hobby gas that fueled the fastest vehicle in all the Free Lands was exceptionally expensive, and so it was wholly impractical for hunting down bounties, as Thorn would be spending more in fuel tracking them down than he would receive as payment for turning them in. The pride of the Western Frontier, therefore, sat under a tarp in Thorn’s front yard while Thorn pursued bounties astride a rackety old pile of bolts that had been given to him as a reward for ridding Crooked Crag of a particularly nasty interloper this past spring. The tractor buggy ran on slop fuel, which was a quivering mass of solid organic material that had to be cut into thin slices and fed into the caked-over fuel compartment. It was loud, bumpy, slow, and rumbly and Thorn hated it. But it was the only realistic means of transportation he had available right now, so he made do with as little complaining as possible.
The tractor buggy was parked nearby in the trees off the path leading to the cabin. Thorn had shut it down about half a mile away so the rumbling from its noisy engine wouldn’t give him away, and had pushed it the remainder of the distance. He had hidden it behind some bushes off the path before finding a tree which offered a decent vantage point from which to observe the Dane Gang.
The front door opened again an
d Taftis came out. He spat on the ground and relieved himself on the side of the cabin before gathering up an armload of firewood and heading back inside. Even from here Thorn could see the boltslinger hanging from Taftis’ belt. Taftis used cruel barbed bolts dipped in poison that prevented coagulation. It was a slow and cruel way to die, and he had murdered dozens of people with it.
After so much time tracking and waiting Thorn was aching for a good fight, but he wasn’t about to go charging in there if he was just going to get shot up with those barbed bolts. He had been hoping that an avenue of attack would present itself if he only waited long enough, but as dusk was falling over the forest Thorn began to think that he would have to make his own distraction if he wanted to get in there.
The owls had begun their deep-throated vigil. The moon was early in rising, and although the light from the gibbous didn’t penetrate the canopy with enough light to see by, it created silver shadows upon the ground. Contrasted with the falling darkness, the warmth from the fire inside the cabin looked all the more inviting. Thorn was frequently troubled by the idea that he was a perpetual outsider, always looking and never belonging. He had not been born in the Free Lands, although he had taken it up as his home. The orange glow through the windows made him feel lonely. But he pushed these thoughts from his mind. The glow from the fire was dying down, and that meant that it wasn’t being tended, and that meant that there was a good possibility that they had gone to sleep. Thorn was a hunter, and the time was drawing near to pounce on his unsuspecting prey. That thought filled him with excitement and adrenaline as he ran the twenty yards to the cabin and drew himself up against the wall.
He peered inside. They had been drinking hard, that much was clear by the number of bottles lying around. Jayce was asleep in a bedroom by himself, while Nestor and Taftis were asleep in cots by the fire in the main room. Thorn saw a pile of loot on the table: money mostly, with a few pieces of jewelry, and that gave him an idea.
They had three buggies out front. Thorn went to these. They were liquid-fueled, not like the slop engines you usually saw, and they appeared to be fast. Thorn knelt down to examine the engine, and saw the name Dioneo stamped in the metal. These were good buggies. Dioneo was one of the most famous buggy makers in the Free Lands, and although Thorn preferred his mechanic Rich Tanning’s work, owning a buggy stamped with Dioneo’s name was a mark of extreme prestige. Either the Dane Gang did very well for themselves, or these were stolen. Thorn surmised that the latter was the most likely case.
Thorn disengaged the brake and pushed one of them into the trees. He was astounded by how well it handled, with the steering wheel responding to his slightest movement. He was overcome with the desire to hop on and drive it around to see how it measured up to his own, but he fought that down. He could play with the buggies after this job was finished.
He pushed the buggy between two trees that were close together, working it backwards and forwards until it would be difficult to extract. If his plan was going to work he didn’t want any of the Dane Gang to be able to utilize this buggy. Then he went back to the others and pulled the starter coil from one of them. He let it drop and kicked it underneath the chassis. The last buggy he left untouched.
He didn’t know if he would need all these preparations, but they couldn’t hurt. He just wanted a distraction so he could pick off the Dane Gang one at a time.
Thorn took a deep breath before quietly pushing the door open and slipping inside.
Taftis and Nestor were competing over who could snore the loudest. Thorn was thankful for the noise as it helped mask his footfalls as he made his way across the room to open the rear window.
Thorn took an armload of the loot from the table and dumped it out the back window. It should be enough, Thorn thought to himself, at least to make it look like they had been robbed. And the missing buggy would make it look like the robbers had used it to get away.
He looked down at Nestor, who was sleeping right next to the window with his mouth wide open and snoring loudly. He had his boltslinger partially covered by the pillow. Thorn thought it might be a good idea to secure the weapon now, giving himself the advantage when he started up the last buggy outside and drove it into the trees before doubling back around. He was banking on the sound of the buggy to wake up at least one of them, and hopefully they would panic at the sight of their missing loot and chase him outside. It wasn’t much of a distraction, but Thorn only needed to separate them long enough so he could take them down one at a time. He was an expert on choke holds, and only required a few seconds once he had his arms around one of them. But then again, having a boltslinger might make it easier if things went badly.
He knelt and began trying to work it out from under the pillow. The weight of Nestor’s head was on the stock and it wouldn’t budge. Thorn tried inching it out. He could smell Nestor’s whiskey-soaked breath every time he snored. Thorn had no idea how anyone could sleep with this much racket.
Nestor rolled over on top of the boltslinger, erasing all the gains Thorn had already made. He sounded like he was choking, as if his throat had collapsed and he was struggling for air. Thorn was about to make a sprint for the door because this had suddenly become too dangerous.
And then Nestor’s eyes opened.
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