by J. S. Volpe
* * *
It was early evening when he got to Grazinwyr. After stealing a string of sausages and a potato pie from a vendor’s stall and devouring them in a few greedy bites, he made a circuit of the town, carefully scanning the crowds, finding only the usual assortment of farmers, laborers, watchmen, merchants, whores, and mercenaries. He saw no one from the group that had fled New Portland. It occurred to him as he roamed the manure-caked streets that perhaps the others in the group had agreed on a rendezvous point before he joined up with them. Or perhaps to them the place was obvious. He systematically checked everywhere that struck him as a logical location to meet: the run-down manor house that served as the seat of what passed for the town’s government; the small square around Grazinwyr’s only monument—an eroded granite statue of a buckskin-clad woman in a canoe; the market with its stalls of floppy lettuce, dirt-flecked carrots, and scrawny chickens in rickety wooden cages; the two inns; the five taverns.
It was in the last of these taverns that he overheard drunken talk of a man in the town of Slake who possessed a cache of working automatic weapons that he guarded with bloodthirsty zeal. This bore investigation. Reynard immediately set to work finding a horse that could cover the eight miles to Slake that very night. He was eager to find out if these weapons really existed, and if they did, how well guarded they really were. Not well enough to protect them from someone with Reynard’s skills and experience, he felt sure.
As he sped out of town on a horse stolen from the inn’s stable, he spared one last passing thought for Solace. He felt a twinge of regret that he hadn’t gotten to fuck her, but it didn’t matter that much. The world was full of fuckable girls.
Besides, who knew? Perhaps their paths would cross again someday.
2
Drell
926 A.C.