Vladimir was a Bohemian, but he was no smuggler. He and his men were bait, followers of the players.
The real Bohemian smugglers had already been rounded up two days earlier by a patrol made up of Tax Bureau players, in the mountain forests roughly twenty kilometers outside Hegrande.
These smugglers were a band of highly capable hunters. With nothing but their own two feet, they had trekked over mountains and across ridges.
They had crossed the colossal mountain range separating the Bohemian Empire from the Minicia Kingdom... the Kaslo Mountains.
And they had not crossed alone, either. They had brought a whole herd of pigs with them. That was seriously impressive, and it proved they had found-or blazed themselves-a relatively safe mountain trail.
These were talented people.
The head of the Tax Bureau immediately decided to recruit these Bohemians.
A secure government job was a good thing, and the smugglers knew it too. Some of them, however, were less than willing. Their leader, for instance, might have been hostile toward Bagnia, or perhaps he believed it was better to rule in a small pond than serve in a big one.
In short, the smugglers' leader and his trusted men were somewhat resistant.
Then they died.
Make no mistake: the Tax Bureau players had not done it. They could not be bothered to kill people who refused to see sense. Since these foreigners had been smuggling, evading taxes, and illegally crossing the border, among other offenses, the charges were enough to put them to work in the mines for eight or ten years.
Over such a long sentence, perhaps not even two out of ten would survive to finish serving their time. Meanwhile, with no one maintaining the smuggling route they had opened for all those years, it would surely