Spirit Walker by David Farland Page A

shadows of a pine tree onto the redwood bridge. He was tall, nearly seven feet, and willowy slender, as legend said all men were in the days of the old Starfaring race. His skin was blue, the color of a robin’s egg.
    His face looked eternally young, like that of a twenty year old. He wore a knee-length breechcloth made of buckskin, and his naked chest was crisscrossed with heavy leather straps and bangles—a strap for his quiver, a strap for the long narrow sword sheathed on his back, a strap for his packsack. In his right hand he carried a bow of onyx-black dragon horn.
    He wore a necklace with pale silver medallions on it, each made from glowing metal unlike anything native to the metal-poor planet Anee. He had no hair on his head or chest, nor on his arms. He could have been a salamander his skin was so smooth.
    Wisteria began running toward him, but the blue man raised his hand to ward people back, and the entire town seemed to stop at once. The blue man eyed the mayor’s pet stegosaur, and everyone in town watched to see what Phylomon would do.
    The mayor’s stegosaur had wandered down from feeding in the hills and walked underneath someone’s clothes line. The bony plates running the length of the stegosaur’s back had snagged a dark green dress, and it waved in the breeze like a flag. The stegosaur stood in the roadway scratching its belly by rubbing against the wheel of a wagon. A cowbird fluttered above the stegosaur’s back, as if angered at being pushed off so comfortable a resting place.
    The dinosaur was only three years old, no heavier than a huge bull. The wagon it scratched against creaked as if it would shatter.
    Ancient laws made it illegal for the creature to be here.
    But Mayor Goodman had eight brothers, and people in town had long since learned to look the other way when the mayor’s pet monster tore up a wagon or accidentally speared a dog on its tail. “Someday that thing will grow up and trample a child!” all the women in the neighborhood would say. “And then it will have to go!” But, so far, the children had managed to keep from under the stegosaur’s feet, and no one dared to demand that the mayor get rid of the dangerous beast.
    The mayor’s hounds began barking, and the stegosaur quit scratching its belly. Many people opened their windows and doors to see the last Starfarer, for the blue man had not visited this part of the world for fifty years. Yet, strangely, few people spoke. There was a hush over the crowd, rife with expectation.
    Phylomon walked softly across the redwood bridge and up the dirt road toward the stegosaur. The beast turned its side toward the blue man, began twitching its spiked tail in warning, and pulled its head beneath the bony plates along its back.
    Phylomon reached into his quiver, drew out an arrow, fitted it to the string of his bow. He studied the stegosaur a moment. Wisteria had often heard men tell of their exploits to Hotland. They all said it was hard to kill a stegosaur. The stegosaur’s skull is very thick, making the walnut-sized brain a poor target. Besides, even if the blue man were to hit it, it is the hind-brain on the stegosaur—a thickened portion of the spine—that controls the lashing of its deadly tail, and the hind brain was hidden beneath heavy hide and armor plating. Phylomon crouched and fired an arrow into the monster’s throat, severing the carotid artery.
    The stegosaur jerked twice and its tail whipped to the side, striking the wagon’s front wheel. The wheel splintered, and the wagon dropped. The stegosaur’s tail lashed back and forth. For a moment it looked as if the spikes would bury themselves in the planks of the wagon bed, but the planks shattered instead.
    The monster opened its mouth at an extreme angle, and blood pumped from its throat in great gushes. Its eyes glazed over almost instantly.
    The tail seemed to be working on it own, striking again and again at the wagon, as if glad to have a target. Blood spouted