After being debriefed by Enforcers, he had been given a generous payout and sent on his way. They flatly refused to tell him whether any further action would be taken against the Easterners. Frontier Agents weren't usually given much information, but Karzt assumed that the Imperium's cumbersome bureaucracy would ensure that nothing happened in the end. After all, there was no proof the Affiliation was behind the events. After much objection, Karzt was assured that a special team would be dispatched to excavate the destroyed temple at some point. He wasn't holding his breath. The men at the home office were do-nothings who had no idea what it was like out here. He wished that there were more men like Rockwall, men of action and courage.
Without a job to do, Karzt had decided to hire on as caravan security. The events at the temple weighed heavily on his mind and, as a result, he sought comfort in the familiar. Perhaps he'd get to deliver a well-deserved beating to some desert bandits – that was always good for lifting his spirits. Ever since leaving Woodswood, Karzt had felt compelled to remain in and around the wasteland border towns of the Ourolo. Now he wondered if the demon that haunted his dreams had used its dark magic to give him this compulsion. Perhaps it wanted him to find that place in the desert where its horrible transformation had taken place. The more the hangman thought about it, the more certain he became that the shapeshifter was unrelated to the Easterners who had caused such trouble in the Ourolo. In Karzt's mind, it didn't much matter. Magic in all its forms was evil – a thing to be feared, mistrusted, and defended against.
The job he had taken was uneventful, but things turned interesting when they arrived at a desolate little trading post set up a few miles north of the southern border of the Ourolo. The town was called Windswept, named for the dusty desert sirocco which regularly pounded the town from the north.
Rolling through the dusty thoroughfare, they were treated to a dramatic scene. A muscular young man in a ten-gallon hat was lying in the middle of the road, holding a hand to his thigh. Blood had pooled in the cracked earth around his leg. Another man lay face-down a few feet away, with a crossbow bolt sticking out of his back. A thin crowd had gathered in a circle around them. Karzt immediately leapt off the wagon and darted through the crowd.
He knelt beside the man with the bleeding leg wound and saw a sheriff's star on his chest. There was a knife sticking out of his thigh, and a discarded crossbow a few feet away. “Get this fuckin' knife out of me,” he said, as Karzt examined him for other wounds. He spoke without a hint of accent – this man was no Ouroloan, with his fair skin and wispy blonde hair. Like Karzt, he was a transplant from some other part of the Imperium. Unlike Karzt, he was green, perhaps only twenty-years-old. The hangman wondered how this young man had become sheriff here.
“Hold on there, sheriff,” Karzt said. “There a doctor in these parts?”
“Already sent Johnny-boy to go get 'im. Either get this fuckin' knife out of me or I'll do it myself, whoever the fuck you are.” He went to grab the blade's handle, and Karzt held him down.
“You don't want to do that. Just calm down, son. Wait for the doc to get here with his kit. I pull this knife now, yer gonna bleed out fer sure.”
Karzt kept pressure on the wound until the wiry old doctor arrived. Afterwards, Karzt helped him carry the young sheriff to the ramshackle wooden house that served as the town's infirmary. There, the knife was removed and the wound was stitched up. It was clear that the young man wouldn't be able to walk for weeks as his body mended itself. Lying in the bed, he gestured weakly in Karzt's direction. “Hey, you there. I didn't catch your name,” he said. The fire was gone from his voice.
“Aye. The name's H.M. Taker, licensed Frontier Agent. You the one that put a bolt through that poor bastard in the street?”
The young sheriff explained the situation. The night before the mess in the thoroughfare, a local tough had put a knife in the neck of the former sheriff during a poker game. The foulmouthed young man in the bed – whose named turned out to be Hardan – had been the old sheriff's deputy before the murder. When he heard the news in the morning, the young new sheriff immediately moved to arrest the tough. He caught a knife in the leg for his trouble and ended up putting a crossbow bolt through his would-be killer's heart.
The sheriff had not been speaking for long before it became clear he was growing delirious from the pain. Sweating heavily, he began to mumble something about “dealing with the orcs” before passing out. The doctor assured Karzt that the young sheriff merely needed time to rest and heal. He asked if the hangman would be willing to stick around during the sheriff's convalescence and help them with their issues; otherwise, they would be left without a single lawman in the town and their many problems would only get worse.
Karzt signed off with his caravan that day, deciding that he might indeed be able to do some good here. He arranged for a room upstairs in the local inn. It was a worn down, grubby little pub in the main thoroughfare called Aktar's Big Sip. Aktar himself was a fat Ouroloan who charged too much for drinks, and it was here, amongst Aktar's half-drunken patrons, that Karzt learned of the problems facing this town.
The knife-wielding miscreant who had murdered the old sheriff and stabbed his deputy had been a known menace. He wouldn't be causing any more trouble for the town – not with a crossbow bolt through his heart – but there were more issues to be resolved. The first and foremost was a posse of punks and bandits who had recently moved into an old, abandoned bar at the edge of town. Most of them were dusky skinned and tusked to varying degrees; in other words, the orcish descent was clear. Their leader was a huge halfbreed man named Tarkakur, who indeed had a pair of fearsomely huge tusks jutting out of his mouth. It was suspected that he had more orcish than human blood, but none of the townsfolk would dare to say that to his face.
Miscegenation was deemed illegal in the Imperium. The children of the illicit inter-species trysts were, more often than not, actually rapes performed by orcish raiders. Wild orcs, lusting for flesh as much as blood, would strike from out of the deep desert or from within caverns beneath the Peril mountains. The offspring of such events were considered an abomination against Virtue itself and were put to death whenever discovered; unlike pureblood orcs, they would never be allowed to live within the Imperium as thralls. Anyone found to have willingly participated in miscegenation was guilty of one of the highest crimes in the Imperium. Their punishment was to be treated as a demihuman and given the Outsiders' Choice.
There was a growing population of halfbreeds in the Ourolo, born to human mothers who raised them in secret out of some innate sense of mother's love. In the desert, they were not hunted as they would have been in the main hubs of the Imperium. Ouroloans were technically Imperial citizens but did not share the same zeal for enforcing certain Imperium laws; as a result, halfbreeds were often tolerated by the bearded desert men so long as they did not cause too much trouble.
Unfortunately, the spawn of orcs and humans regularly fell into the grubby life of banditry. A few found work as caravan guards with the more open-minded Ouroloans, but the orc-bloods rarely exhibited a temperament for much more than rabble-rousing and troublemaking. The gang in Windswept was no exception, and the previous sheriff had been unable to put a stop to them. During the day, they had horse races in the thoroughfare and harassed the local women; at night, they played poker and drunkenly fought amongst themselves and the rougher Ouroloans of the town. There had even been a string of late-night robberies that had been attributed to them.
Karzt was not wasting any time. In the morning, he was rudely awakened by a ruckus in the thoroughfare. Apparently, since the sheriff was now dead and his deputy out of commission, the gang thought that they had the run of the place. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, Karzt stepped out the front door of the Big Sip. He was greeted with the sight of a wagon being pulled by two horses which had been whipped into a frenzy.
Three pitch black orc-bloods were in the wagon, hooting and hollering and waving their axes around; a fourth sto
od above a terrified looking Ouroloan in the driver's seat. He was holding the man’s own khopesh to his neck and screaming for him to drive. Between his thick tongue and his deep voice, the word came out sounding more like “DRAAAAHVE! DRAAAHVE!” Their massive leader, Tarkakur, stood off to the side of the road, just across from Karzt. The tusked orc-blood was doubled over with laughter from the raucous display. He was shirtless, wearing only a simple pair of brown hide pants, and his body was incredibly muscular and covered in scars.
Karzt wasn't in the mood to play games with these people. He drew his revolver and took aim at the moving wagon, leading it with the sights. It only took two gunshots for Karzt to hollow out two of the criminals' skulls. The orc-blood that had been holding the driver hostage was among the fallen. As soon as the shots rang out, the Ouroloan panicked and dove into the street, jumping to safety as the wagon crashed and the two remaining orcs tumbled out. Both knocked their heads hard against a wooden wall, snapping their necks instantly. At this, the general hubbub and yelling was drowned out by the singular, ear-splitting roar of Tarkakur. He charged at the hangman and was blown away in a final thunder crack from the revolver. Just like that, Karzt had eliminated the entire gang. Spinning his smoking revolver in his hand, the hangman slid it back into the holster with a self-satisfied grin on his face. Getting rid of miscreants never failed to raise his spirits.
Whether the townsfolk and traders were grateful or took issue with Karzt's quick and simple brand of frontier justice, they didn't show it. Indeed, aside from the work of removing the bodies, few of them seemed to even acknowledge what had happened. The young sheriff alone thanked Karzt when he came to check up on him and asked that the hangman stay on a little while longer as his wound healed. Life went on as usual, and so did the nighttime robberies that had recently been plaguing the town. As it turned out, there was another ne'er-do-well in this place, and Karzt was determined to catch him.
Karzt had been at these nightly stakeouts for nearly a week. The hangman was always in the wrong place to catch his man, but now, on the sixth night, he believed he had figured out a pattern. The thief seemed to be a creature of peculiar habit. It only stole a particular type of thing on particular nights; first, it had been a case of ale, stolen from Aktar's Big Sip while Karzt himself slept in his room above. That had been an embarrassing night for the hangman. The next night, a chicken had gone missing. The night after, half of a young married couple's entire wardrobe. The local bank was hit the night after that; curiously, only a few hundred Golden Virtues had been taken. It was a generous sum, but still only enough to fill a small sack. Why would someone rob a bank and leave almost everything in it?
The night after that, Aktar's place was hit again, but Aktar himself was there this time, waiting up at the bar with a large stick in his hands. The fat man was half-asleep on a stool, but the sound of rustling bottles roused him and he shouted. In the dark he chased the assailant out of his place. The thief was apparently carrying a bottle of booze, which he dropped on the ground as he made his escape. Aktar slipped and fell in the mess, and by the time he got up, the culprit was long gone. The next day he described what happened to Karzt, who had been staking out the bank at the time. Apparently the thief was a short man, possibly even a midget, with an odd waddling gait.
Acting on his hunch about the thief's patterns, Karzt decided to stake out the farm at the edge of town. Now, in the hay, he studied his surroundings through the eerie green light of the goggles. He was in the corner of the largest barn, and a multitude of soundly sleeping chickens lay before him. The barn's main entrance, an eight-foot wide roll up door, was closed; the place had apparently been designed with larger animals in mind. While goats and camels were a common sight in Ourolo, there were only chickens here. There was a small side door in the opposite corner to Karzt, and it was slightly ajar. A sliver of moonlight crept in through this crack but did not disturb the peacefully sleeping chickens.
The hangman remained still in his hay camouflage for several hours. It had crossed his mind that his hunch might have been incorrect, but Karzt was nothing if not a determined, stubborn man. He would see this night through to the end, for better or for worse. Dawn was approaching when he spotted the sliver of moonlight widening and a small, trembling, clawed hand creep through the crack as the door was slowly pushed open. Karzt lay perfectly still as he watched and waited.
In crept the kobold, looking ridiculous in a man's leather longcoat. The coat dragged on the ground and did nothing to protect the creature's modesty; only its fat belly did that. He waddled in and began to pluck eggs off the ground. One-by-one he'd pick them up and throw them up into the air, then raise his head and let them fall into his mouth whole and unbroken. He'd say “yes!” or “delicious!” after swallowing each egg. Like most kobolds, his high-pitched voice trembled and always sounded like something might be stuck in his throat. His odd, shuffling gait took him deeper into the barn as Karzt observed and waited for the right moment to strike.
Finally reaching the middle of the barn, the kobold arrived at a sleeping chicken and casually lifted it off the ground. Rudely awakened from its rest, it began clucking loudly in protest. The kobold stuffed the chicken under his arm and started sneaking toward the exit. It was at this point that Karzt burst out of the hay, with a net in one hand and his trusty revolver in the other.
“Put down the chicken, kobold,” the hangman said, leveling his revolver at the creature through the darkness.
Koboldan, who had been badly startled, dropped the bird which then frantically scampered away. Bewildered and surprised, the kobold stammered nonsensically. “What... I.... you.... fuck yoooou!”
Karzt seized on the kobold's momentary confusion as an opportunity to unleash his net on the creature, and the kobold was trapped – struggling feebly to escape while making shrill, agitated noises. As Karzt approached to collect his prize, the kobold gathered himself and yelled out, “Let me go, you filthy human slave!”
As the hangman slung the wriggling netted creature onto his back like a bag of potatoes, he wondered to himself how anybody could honestly find such a creature endearing.
On Kobolds
by Cascadian Knight and Scholar Rafael Rockwall – Chapter Excerpt from A Study on the Species of Genesis
The voice of a kobold is difficult to describe. High pitched and full, it seems to originate from high in the throat. Most kobolds speak as though their mouths have been stuffed half-full, and the resulting sound has been known to be irritating for many humans and non-kobold demihumans alike. Despite this uniquely obnoxious quality, the kobold accent is relatively comprehensible. Unlike the speech of a bestial minotaur or foreign goblin, humans tend to have little trouble understanding a kobold's words. A human could even easily imitate one, if they chose to do so.
Kobolds have historically lived in warrens, deep caverns beneath the Peril mountains where they thrived in great numbers. They are expert miners, although there is a prevailing belief among them that they are above physical labor. Indeed, kobolds tend to think that the “lesser races” ought to do their bidding instead. These lesser races include just about anyone who isn't a kobold. Of course, given the kobolds' physical weakness and lack of any natural magical aptitude, finding a kobold who is master of anyone but himself is quite a rare thing indeed. If a tribe of kobolds does manage to keep slaves, they are usually goblins – another race of short, relatively weak creatures who the kobolds can therefore contend with. Dragons alone are exempt from the kobolds' typical condescension; instead, they are worshiped by the little, scaly creatures. The dragons, for their part, hardly notice this fact. These rare and powerful beings are far too proud to make time for something as small and feeble as a kobold.
Kobolds have a natural hatred for gnomes, despite the fact that gnomes do not seem to exist as anything other than a kobold’s fairy tale. Kobolds often tell angry, excited stories about these creatures; they insist that gnomes are species of devious little bearded midgets, fond of coni
cal red caps, trickster magic, and decidedly bad-natured mischief. Supposedly the little men are extremely foul and are fond of making an absolute mess of any home that they invade. The kobolds' folktales indicate that gnomes are uniquely vulnerable to “kobold talons” and will flee as soon as an enterprising kobold begins clawing at them. In modern times, the domesticated kobolds of the Imperium still give dire warnings to their human hosts about gnomish threats. They often promise to keep a house safe from the threat of gnomish invasion in exchange for kobold bits.
Kobolds are well-adapted to their original cavernous homes. Their ingenuity and cowardice are what keep them safe from the monstrous threats of the Peril mountains. While kobolds are not great combatants, they are expert trappers. Kobolds were forced to adapt such traps in order to protect themselves from the venomous giant spiders that would often wander into their warrens. Because of the traps, these spiders and other unfortunate creatures like them tend to end up well-cooked and devoured by hungry kobolds. The appetites of these creatures are legendary; they are naturally gluttonous and if given enough food they could easily become obese. In the Imperium, kobold-keepers often have to carefully ration out kobold bits so that their pets will not grow too indolent and bulky.
In the warrens, kobolds spent much of their time mining for gems and ore which they hoarded or traded amongst themselves. Kobolds, with the singular exception of building traps, are typically lousy craftsman. Sometimes, enterprising human traders from the Imperium would come to trade with the kobolds, as their gems were extremely valuable in the West. If they were able to sneak past the kobolds' traps, they would be greeted by excited kobolds who were more than willing to trade gems and ore in exchange for well-made tools, weapons, or food. The traveler would have a litany of nonsense forced upon them by the loquacious kobolds, usually concerning the dangers of gnomes or the glory of dragons. These men were never enslaved, as the kobolds did not wish to try their luck against anyone much larger than themselves. Nevertheless, the kobolds might openly refer to them as slaves. In successful kobold-human relations, it is crucial that the human overlook such slights; in the end, one must remember that this braggadocios tendency is a harmless quirk of their species.
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