Halflord: Thief

Chapter 3

The blow to my head didn't entirely knock me out, but it did leave me woozy, and much of what happened after that faded into a blur. I remember being lifted off the ground and carried by two large men, and happily seeing Riose dragged along a few paces behind me, unconscious. I think I tried to say something at the time, only to be smacked across the face, but the strange part is that I have no memory of actually getting hit. I saw the hand come at me, but there's nothing after that moment. Not until we reached the camp.

A short burst of strange whistles announced our arrival, and a half-dozen men emerged from the forest to watch us being dragged into camp. I tried to stay alert and take in as much as possible before my captors threw me into a tent, or worse, a hole. I needed to know how to get out when I escaped. Because I would. But it was still dark, my head throbbed, and I couldn't focus on anything besides my insatiable desire for revenge on everyone who had conspired to bring me to this state.

Riose had been telling the truth about Hagrim, and I had no doubt we'd been taken to him. His camp was a built into a clearing in the woods - well, a clearing for this part of the woods. The Anahal Forest was essentially the southernmost tip of the Great Forest, the maddeningly thick and maze-like home of the elves, only without the protective magic and the traps that could kill you if you didn't know what to look for. So any patch of woods where trees and brush weren't suffocating you was considered a clearing. Not many men were up and around this early, but the ones that were watched us carefully. About thirty or forty tents were scattered about, but that count wasn't completely trustworthy at the time because I may have been seeing double.

You can't spend any amount of time in Raven's Crest without hearing about Jon Hagrim, the man who'd raided its border towns for nearly thirty years now. Not consistently, of course, and not always as the bandit-king he was now. There were enough rumors about the man to make one crazy trying to reconcile them all, but some of them told the same stories, so those were the ones we chose to believe as true. According to legend, he started off as a lieutenant under the previous bandit-king in these woods, a man named Sladek. Sladek either died or retired - no one knows for sure - leaving a brutish man named Connel in charge. Connel nearly ruined the entire bandit army with his brutality and lack of cunning, so Hagrim challenged him for leadership and won. They fought using only weapons fashioned from the woods around them, and according to the story, while Connel fashioned a spear, Hagrim was much more creative. He used dirt and mud to blind Connel, vines to trip him up, and rocks to beat the man senseless. The rumors also say that Hagrim didn't want Connel dead, at least not by his hands, and instead sent him off to the nearby town of Sowhagen, where he was imprisoned for his crimes and then hung.

However he came to have control of this army, Hagrim made effective use of them. Once he raided a town, or a village, or a convoy, he moved as far away from the crime as he could. He had no regular base, he never used the same camp twice, and when he did leave a camp, he left no trace that he'd ever been there. Once, some men from Raven's Crest boasted that they'd found the remnants of a Hagrim camp, looking to claim a reward, but when soldiers followed them back out, they said the clearing was so meticulously cleaned that they couldn't discern any difference from the rest of the woods surrounding it. The men received no reward, and from that day on, everyone in Raven's Crest referred to the reward as the 'Fools Gold'.

He rarely left behind any witnesses to his crimes, but that didn't mean he killed them. The best stories had him bathing in his victim's blood after a successful raid, but according to those who knew a little more about him, he rarely killed his captives, preferring instead to sell them off as slaves to faraway lands. It was an excellent strategy. Selling his captives not only made him money, but the lack of survivors from his raids made people assume the worst, building up his reputation and people's fear of him. And sending the slaves across the world meant that even if they did escape, they likely wouldn't make it back anyway.