An Epic Hero Story: Book 2 Chapter 44 (Patreon)

So there I was, staring down a more-or-less guaranteed pistol shot. No armour. My Thaumaturgical plate would’ve laughed at a pistol ball of course, such things struggled even damaging regular plate, but even something like the chain layers and padding I wore below would’ve been welcome here. Anything to put between my skin and that shot of lead. 

I had no such thing, and however tough my body had gotten I wasn’t confident in its ability to soak impact with so fast a projectile. Lifting heavy desks was one thing, but I was still made out of flesh and blood.

“Why haven’t you shot me yet?” I asked Cedwin, “are you losing your nerve?”

“Shut up,” he snarled, took half a step closer to me and then thought better of it. He retreated two paces. I noted the increased distance, considered how it made his shot that little bit harder. Right. Maybe my odds of him missing had dropped from one in ten thousand to one in five. 

“Why couldn’t you just let me run?” he asked, hand trembling as the anger got to him, “why—”

My pillow hit him right in the head and I went low as it did. Nine times out of ten, a man firing a gun misses high. I didn’t know why that was at the time, I’d never felt the harsh kick of burning powder, but I knew it was a fact and I knew what to do with it. 

Nine times out of ten, a man firing a gun misses high. This time, Cedwin didn’t miss. He was thrown off by the pillow, apparently surprised by so un-lethal an assault, but corrected his aim fast and fired. The shot struck home in my shoulder, then my body struck home against his gut. I bowled him right over and took him hard to the ground, ending up on top and bearing my weight down like  a portcullis closing atop him.

He smashed me across the face with the butt of his gun and started fishing around his hip. My head was slow, dizzy from sleep and the blow and the pain of my wounded arm. I took so long to work out a knife was coming that he almost stuck it in me before it did. 

Just barely, I knocked the blade off-kilter and then smashed a fist across Cedwin’s face for his trouble. We were both moving, practically flailing, and my blow was off-kilter enough that it more glanced than rebound from his skull, but apparently the sheer strength of it was enough to more than compensate for my deficiencies of aim and skill. Cedwin’s head was sent down hard to bounce off the floor, and I actually heard one of the shoddy planks snap as it did.

More surprisingly still, Cedwin didn’t stop struggling after that blow. If anything he got fiercer, and somehow drew another knife. I was slower on seeing this one, and by the time I realised what was happening he’d already dragged the steel right along my arm to leave a line of hot pain jutting across it.

While I was seizing from that, Cedwin took his chance to sliver halfway out from under me. He was drawing another weapon, a pistol, and I knew that one would be the death of me if he got the distance to use it. With my good arm I snagged his ankle as he moved, dragging the leg out from under him with one tug. For the second time, his head struck the floorboards hard. 

And just like the first, it didn’t knock the fight from him. A boot smashed into my face, aimed perfectly and with seemingly every bit of strength Cedwin could muster. I was flung onto my back, but not dazed. If I had been, he’d have had chance to raise that pistol, aim it properly, and put a hole in my head. As things were I smacked it aside just in time to make the gunshot go wild. It was so close to my head, so loud, that my ears got this deep whining sound in them that’s hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t experienced a gunshot in similar proximity. Like a pair of little bells were ringing in my ears.

They were almost as high pitched as the noise Cedwin let out as he stared at the fingers I’d broken by smashing the gun out of his grip.

“You—” he didn’t get to finish. My fist caught him as hard as something you’d compare a panicked punch from a man who could pick up thousand-pound desks to, and Cedwin’s whole body left the ground as it landed against his face. I felt more than heard his jaw crack, the bone splitting right down its middle and tangibly shifting beneath the skin on collision. Then he landed, and made no sign of moving again. 

It was, of course, that precise moment, with the gun knocked from Cedwin’s hand and me standing over a slumped-over body, that some fucking woman entered the room. A woman and several large men with her, all barging in as she screamed and pointed and made sounds that might have resembled words if the recipient were terminally drunk or terminally scared. 

There was no chance to explain, and I doubted anyone would’ve cared to hear it if there had been. The men lunged for me screaming murder—literally, in this case—and the fact that it was my own damn room the attack had happened in, and the unconscious man an intruder, did not appear to occur to anyone. 

Of course I didn’t just stand there and let myself be man-handled, as soon as the first of them tried to grab me I thumped him. Rage left my wits so scattered that I barely thought to hold back in time to spare him a nasty bone fracture before he went down. Nobody else seemed to appreciate my spasm of decency, which is ironic past the point of possibly being funny.

I was actually doing quite a good job of holding my own, despite the numbers, until one of the sods attacking me got especially lucky and landed a punch right on the shoulder, where Cedwin’s pistol ball had impacted. The pain I felt then was so intense that it defies description, and my memory of what happened after feeling it just cuts right out. 

Even now I don’t have any recollection of what happened in the next hour or so, and frankly you’re better off just asking a few of the children of the people involved than me. They’ll have seen and heard more. Just make sure to filter out all their trite about misunderstandings and my unappreciated heroics. Eugh.

When I came to I was, fortunately, not being hanged. That actually came as a surprise to me, though if I’d had a clear head and been able to think things through it probably wouldn’t have. Morlo was still in town, after all, and Whirrngham wasn’t so big that something like a pistol shot in an inn could go unnoticed by any within it for long enough to have a man executed.

It helped that my situation wasn’t actually that precarious. There’d been some confusion about who had owned the gun, at first, and several of the bastards who barged into my room just bloody lied about seeing me wave it around for some reason, but enough witnesses to our group arriving recalled seeing Cedwin with all the firearms that it was soon agreed by the local magistrate not to have been mine.

Morlo not-so-subtly implying he’d kill the man’s entire family and burn his house down if he didn’t sweep everything under the rug helped, too, of course. After that we were all on clean-up.

The thing that needed cleaning up, of course, was Cedwin. The townsfolk had exhausted most of their bloodthirst upon finding out I was innocent, or, if they didn’t believe that, too protected by a Thaumaturge to be worth killing. That meant the job of murdering Cedwin fell to us.

If he needed murdering at all.

That was still to be decided when I received my treatment for the gunshot. Gandai was, fortunately, better specialised in such things than Morlo.

“It’s all about the body itself,” he murmured as he worked, “about the natural processes of its own healing. I’m not doing anything to it so much as I’m helping it do things by itself.”

“You mean you’re speeding up how fast I heal?” I asked him.

“Speeding it up,” he confirmed, “and helping it go a little cleaner. There’s some purely mechanical things I’m doing too, brace yourself.” As soon as he said that my shoulder flared with more pain than I could remember thinking. I screamed like a little girl, from the moment the agony began to when it finally stopped after what felt like hours.

“Oh don’t be so dramatic,” Gandai sighed.

“What the fuck was that!?” I spat, then blinked as he raised a handful of weird powder before me.

“I had to draw the bullet out of you, and it’s easier to do that by pulverizing the fragments and drawing them out that way. Stops them from widening the wound channel anymore when they’re a tenth as big as it.”

“So I’m done then?” I asked, still more than a little grumpy but mollified somewhat by the assurance that I’d not undergo any more torturous treatment.

“More or less. Give the arm a while to heal though. For most men I’d say a month, though by your physical display the other day I suspect you’ll be right as rain in a few days.”

That didn’t sound right at all to me. 

“I can heal that fast?”

Gandai shrugged. “It helps that the wound isn’t so deep.”

That left me grinning. “I had no idea I was that tough.”

“Ha!” The Thaumaturge cut in, “you bloody wish. The idiot who shot you was using bad powder, I’d bet the pistol ball was moving less than twice the speed of a good longbow. A saucepan would’ve stopped it dead.”

With the wind thoroughly knocked out of my sails, and treatment concluded, I had no excuses to keep putting off my confrontation with Cedwin.

He’d not been beaten up as much as I would’ve liked, most of my blows had landed badly on account of the fucking pistolball in my arm. Nonetheless, he wasn’t pleased to see me. Cedwin met my eye as I stepped in with a glare.

“Just kill me,” he spat. He was trying to be brave and strong, but the tinge of fear in his voice was unmistakable. There is such a thing as a brave man, but there’s no universally brave one. It’s always in gradations. A man who will lead a cavalry charge is less brave than the one who leads the skirmishers withstanding it, who in turn is less brave than the lone prisoner staring down the King’s pursuit. There’s always a point where courage caves in, and a man with any shred of wisdom or decency will let people keep up their illusions to the contrary.

“Have you pissed yourself?” I sneered, “I can hardly hear you over the tremble in your voice.”

Cedwin said a lot of very mean things, most of which I deserved, before finally quieting down enough for me to speak. 

“What do you want?” He demanded. I kept my cool somehow. 

“To let you go,” I told him, “With a condition from Morlo.”

He pretended to think about it, and pretended to be reluctant.

“Can you just stop insulting my intelligence and say yes?” I sighed. “It’s either this or we have Gruin smash your brains out.”

He said yes.