"How- What-?" he stammered."Magic, and magic." I replied reaching out and placing the index finger of my left hand over his heart.

​

As I touched him, he stopped trying vainly to crawl away and the color drained from his face. I could practically smell the terror coming from him now. Unfortunately, the fear in him would probably not be enough to get me the answers I wanted, so I began to speak.

​

"Did you know that with less effort than it takes to move a finger, a single blood vessel in the brain can be pinched off? Death is nearly instantaneous, and the magic is so subtle that blocking it requires full body warding."

​

The bandit swallowed hard, and I could feel his body tensing as he prepared to run, I could almost see the electrical impulses travel along his nerves to his muscles. The look of confused fear on his face when he didn't take a swing at me and run would have been comical if I was the type of person who enjoyed killing.

​

"I'm sure that you were never taught this in whatever school of hard knocks you attended." I said softly. "But the human body runs off electricity, which is the same stuff that lightning bolts are made of, only much much weaker. A very simple spell can disrupt the signals coming from your brain to your muscles, you can tell yourself to punch me in the face all you want, but your fist will never hear the message while you are in my power."

​

The faint smell of urine touched my nostrils. Great, well, that was probably the cue to start asking questions.

​

"Who are you after?" I asked quietly enough that no one could overhear, not that anyone from the caravan was likely to willingly come near me now.

​

The bandit swallowed again, looking queasy. "We was supposed to git this fancy bird-" I held back a grimace at the butchery the man was making of the language. "'is some sort'a lordling, what is supposed to inherit or summtin'."

​

Parsing that sentence took me a second, their target was likely a noble heir, probably female, though that was less certain. I was pretty sure that Carvallian inheritance laws allowed for daughters to inherit, though there was some stipulations that I couldn't bring to mind at the moment. In my defense, I had intended NOT to get involved with the nobility during my stay here.

​

Oh well, in for a Pent... or however that saying went. I was certain that I would not get an answer to my next question, but I had to ask it anyway. "Who hired you?" I asked, again, keeping my voice low.

​

The man's jaw slammed shut with such force that I'm sure he would have cracked teeth if he had any remaining. With the magic circulating through my eyes, I could make out the Geas swirling around his neck, breaking that spell was well outside of my expertise.

​

I sighed and tapped him lightly on the chest, his eyes rolled back into his head and he slumped backwards, unconscious.

​

As I turned to tend to the caravan master, I gestured at the bandit while addressing the two guards, who had recovered their weapons from the ground.

​

"Bind him securely and load him on one of the wagons." I said curtly, "I'm sure that someone in the capital would like to question him."

​

As the two men jumped to obey, my eyes found two of the merchants who had joined this caravan, a man and a woman, the man was covertly stowing something distinctly sword-shaped under his robe, and the woman was looking at me with the kind of hard eyed look I associated with nobility.

​

Well, that wasn't hard to figure out.

​

I ignored the noblewoman and her guard as I knelt next to the caravan master, whose name I still couldn't remember. Luckily the sword hadn't hit the heart, or the man would have been dead before I could do anything.

​

Instead the blade had only pierced a lung, the wound was clean enough, in the sense that it was a single cut that wasn't particularly ragged. I doubted the bandit's sword was particularly sanitary.

​

Stitching the wound was a matter of a few minutes concentration, and cleansing any potential infection took another couple of seconds.

​

In that time the patrol of guards I had been half expecting rode up and demanded to know what had happened. The guards were no doubt there to "discover" the dead noblewoman so that whoever wanted her dead could capitalize on it right away. But finding a distinctly not dead caravan threw a wrench into the plan.

​

I'm not the best at reading people, but I was pretty sure that the leader of the patrol was the only one who expected to find us, the rest of the group seemed to react normally.

As we set off under the protection of the patrol, I could practically feel the eyes of the noblewoman fixed on me the entire way into the capitol.

So much for staying out of politics I guess.