Free Weapon of Flesh by Chris A. Jackson Page B

Twailin.  Jax and I will take your horse as a spare and head east.  I doubt that the weapon is in that direction, but my instructions were to travel all the way to Krakengul keep unless we found what we were looking for.”
    The door creaked, and the maid entered with a huge platter of food and a pitcher of ale.  An hour later, Mya rode out of town to the west astride a leggy gelding, her senses sharp as a needle and her ears ringing from the effect of the potion.  Targus and Jax would leave Thistledown to the east in the morning.

    Lad bent to the watering trough and drank deeply.  The downhill slope had allowed him to make very good time from the logging camp.  He had left that morning and the night was at its deepest now, perhaps a quarter day before sunrise.  He tore off a hand-sized piece of hard tack and chewed one corner, looking down first the road to the west, then the road to the south.  He chewed and thought.
    When the piece of bread was gone and he’d had another drink, he turned to the west.  There was no solid reason that west was better than south, but there seemed to be a few more rutted tracks in that direction, coming from both the southern and the logging camp roads.  Traffic meant people, and he knew that his destiny had something to do with people.  It seemed reasonable, since his lifetime of training had been concerned solely with how to most efficiently kill them.
    His gait stretched out into the conservative pace to which he’d grown accustomed and his mind wandered into meandering thoughts concerning his destiny.  As yet, he had no inkling that the very people in whose hands his destiny lay were presently hunting him.

    The gelding’s hooves dug twin furrows in the road’s hard-packed surface, a grunt of displeasure escaping the horse’s nostrils with a cloud of steamy breath.  Mya jerked the rein smartly, bringing the willful horse into line.  She’d been riding hard all night, but had kept her pace well within both her and her mount’s limits.  The last thing she needed was a dead horse a day out from Twailin.  But now she rubbed her eyes and wondered if she were pushing herself too hard.  Maybe the elixir that Targus had given her was making her see things.  She blinked hard and refocused, squinting through the bright sunshine.
    “Well, I’ll be damned,” she muttered to herself, sure now that she was actually seeing what had caused her to rein in her mount so sharply.  A boy, skinny and dressed in peasant garb, stood in the middle of the road less than a furlong ahead, looking back at her.  She could see no detail from this distance, but thought immediately of their quarry.  Her mind raced with options as she sat astride her fidgeting horse, watching him watch her.  There was no way from this distance that she could tell for sure that this was the one they sought, so she would have to get closer, perhaps within killing range, to find out.  She had no idea how violent the boy was, or if he only killed when threatened or told to do so.  She could not hope to subdue him, but perhaps there was another way, a less dangerous way, to get him to Twailin and to the Grandfather.
    She kicked her mount into a trot, making a show of taking a long drink from her water skin, and nibbling on some trail rations from her bag.  While doing so, she carefully loosened the lacings of her tunic.  Perhaps her best weapon against such a boy was the one he would never know hit him.  The boy turned away and continued walking at a brisk pace as she came upon him and prudently guided her horse to keep a respectful distance between them.
    “Hello there,” she said, trying for her most amiable tone, friendly without being too familiar.  “You headed for Twailin?”
    “Hello.”  His voice was a pleasing tenor, totally without fear, or any other emotion that she could detect.  “What is ‘Twailin’?”
    “Twailin’s a city.”  She tried not to sound incredulous.  “It’s the