“Your horse is in the Wardwatch stables. Your quickshooter and gunbelt are in our cabinet; I’ll have Niles bring you both,” Komo told him. “I presume, Lord Karn, that you wish your servant to be mounted and armed?”
“I do,” Kard agreed. “How is he to protect me without his weapon?”
Teer grimaced. He was surprised to hear that the Wardwatch still had Star. That was going to require some explanation to his new Lord—since neither his gun nor Star belonged to him!
7
Mounted and armed again, Teer followed Kard carefully. He had no idea what the Spehari’s plan was now, assuming the big man even had one. Neither of them said anything, Kard just glancing back over his shoulder to be sure that Teer was sorted out before kneeing his horse to greater speed.
It seemed that his initial plan, at least, was to get out of Alvid. Star was easily able to keep pace with the nondescript speckled gelding Kard was riding. Not that Teer could lose the other man now. He only had to think of the man to know the exact direction and distance to Kard.
They cleared town swiftly enough, drawing eyes all along the way in the midafternoon crowd. Kard kept up a solid canter on the horse for about a quarter-candlemark after that, heading farther east, before Teer finally worked up the courage to say anything.
“The horse and the gun belong to Hardin,” he told the other man. “I…I need to go home.”
“You need to say goodbye, if nothing else,” Kard agreed. The formal tones and lilting accent he’d used in town had vanished, replaced by a slow drawl that sounded a lot like Ohlman. “I can’t argue, Teer. We need supplies anyway. I have enough for one for two tendays, but we have work to do.”
“Work, Lord Karn?” Teer asked.
The Spehari chuckled bitterly.
“Lord Karn of House Morais,” he recited the name in the lilting accent he’d been using in town, “is a lie, a story. Morais is my house and I hope they don’t draw the link between Karn and Kard. I couldn’t risk giving a name I might not answer to, but…”
He shrugged.
“You don’t need to call me lord, either,” he continued. “Kard is sufficient. It’s my name and the only one I’ve used for a long time. I’m known by it in a lot of the Wardtowns. Thankfully, not in Alvid.”
“I don’t understand,” Teer admitted. “You are Spehari. Why lie?”
“That is a talk for later, I think,” Kard told him. “For now, know that I will never enter a town under my own face. Lord Karn is a tool I must use at times, but the less I call on my house’s name, the better.”
“Okay,” the youth agreed. “Can we go to Hardin’s Ranch?”
“I hope so,” Kard said with a chuckle. “How far off the route did I go?”
“This is the right road,” Teer told him. “But we’re pretty close to the turn. Follow the track of two hundred cattle.”
“I’ll admit that’s hard to miss,” the other man replied. “As for work, I act as a bounty hunter for the Unity.” He pulled a rolled-up sheet of heavy paper from inside the gray duster. “Here. You can read, right? You had that book.”
“I can read, I can write, I can do numbers,” Teer confirmed. “I can manage the books for a ranch of five hundred head of cattle. I could probably work out books for most things from that.”
“I don’t keep books. Nobody needs to know,” Kard told him. “Take a look at the writ.”
Teer unrolled the paper and followed the letters with his finger, Star following Kard’s horse without much urging.
WRIT OF SEIZURE
The BRIGAND known as BOULDER is to be brought to justice.
He is known to travel with SIX to EIGHT other BRIGANDS
The BEARER OF THIS WRIT is authorized
to use ALL NECESSARY FORCE in pursuit of this man.
A REWARD of TWENTY STONE will be paid for BOULDER
LIVING OR DEAD
A REWARD of FIFTY SHARDS will be paid for each of his BRIGANDS
LIVING OR DEAD
A BONUS of TWENTY SHARDS will be paid for each
DELIVERED ALIVE
WRIT OF SEIZURE
“What is this?” he asked aloud after reading the text. There was a signature and a sequence of numbers on the bottom of the sheet that meant nothing to him.
“A bounty writ,” Kard told him. “Any Wardkeeper issuing a bounty has a number of them done up. A bounty hunter who wants to hunt a target gets one. Means I don’t have to haul Boulder and his men all the way back to Wardtown Kodiz, almost a hundred miles away. Any Wardkeeper’s office will honor the writ if I deliver Boulder and his men.”
“How do they know you’re delivering the right people?” Teer asked cautiously.
“There’s a second sheet with pictures, gives them some idea,” Kard explained. “Plus, a Wardkeeper will use truth stones to confirm that the extras we bring in worked for Boulder. Anything stand out to you?”
Teer glanced down the page again.
“The bonus for bringing ’em in alive only applies to the brigands,” he concluded after a moment. “Plus, the bounty on Boulder…that’s almost a tenth of what Hardin’s Ranch brings in in a turning.”
“Boulder is scum of the worst kind,” the older man told him. “I tracked him this far by the dead bodies he’s left in his wake. Unity likes to bring people in alive. Best case, they can send them north to fight the Kott. Worst case, they feed a wardstone.
“Bonus for live delivery is normal. A clean writ to bring him in living or dead?” Kard shook his head as he glanced back at Teer again.
“They want Boulder dead, but the Spehari like to pretend they’re the font of civilization on Aran,” he concluded. “They don’t issue dead-only bounties and I don’t like hauling in corpses. We’ll try and take him alive.”
“We?”
“You’re
