Spell of Fate | Page 3

ages. Of course, his standards had grown significantly more lax since being on the road, but even so you could scarcely deny -
Again, a boot tried to separate his ribs. Again? Jurtan Mont tried to think back into the immediate past. Something must have roused him far enough out of sleep to kick his mind into gear. Could it have been the same foot? And if so, whose foot was it?
"Come on, get up already."
The voice was unfamiliar. Jurtan cracked an eye and craned his neck around. The shaggy figure with its unkempt beard that loomed over him in the predawn murk was not one he recognized either. But his warning sense hadn't given him an alarm, and he hadn't been robbed and strung up in his sleep. "Who are you?" Jurtan said.
"Who do you think I am?" the unfamiliar figure said irritably. "Shoulda slipped a knife through your belly instead of just a friendly boot. That might sharpen one thing about you once and for all, since I've just about given up on your mind."
The figure might be new, but Jurtan was well and fully intimate with the irritation. "Max?"
Maximillian the Vaguely Disreputable, looking more than ever like his sobriquet, grunted down at him. "Five minutes, then we exercise."
Jurtan piled out of his bedroll. It was chilly out in the air, but at least the dew hadn't frosted over on his face. "How long do we have to keep doing this for? How long until we get somewhere?"
"Never fails, does it," Max muttered. "Awake for ten seconds and the first thing he does is start to complain."
"But we aren't just going to keep traveling forever, are we? When do we get to someplace we want to be?"
"We are someplace."
"No, I mean -"
"So do I." Max raised an eyebrow and directed his gaze meaningfully over Jurtan's shoulder. When they'd stopped after dark the previous evening they'd gone just beyond the line of trees that marked the margin of the road before settling themselves down. During the night, Jurtan had rolled up against what he'd thought, in the gloom of sleep, was a hard tree. It wasn't a tree. It was a low cairn of stones, with a small signpost on top. He went around to the front and squinted at it. The arrow-end of the sign pointed ahead down the road in the direction they had been traveling. The legend on the sign read "PERIDOL."
Jurtan grunted. "It doesn't say how far." It did seem like they'd been traveling forever. "How long has it been since we slept in a bed?"
"Day before yesterday."
"Really?" Well, okay, maybe. Still, it had to be more than two weeks since they'd made it out of the swamp; maybe as much as a month. If Jurtan had had anything to say about it, they'd never have gone into the swamp in the first place, especially since all they had to show for it was a sack of moldy papers neither one of them could read. Of course, if Jurtan had anything to say about anything, he'd be anywhere at the moment but out at five-thirty in the morning on some nameless road in some useless countryside on the way to somewhere he had not the slightest interest in arriving at. With a maniacal self-improvement freak. Jurtan was still surprised Max didn't make the horses do calisthenics right along with the two of them.
To his credit, if you were in a positive frame of mind, you could note that Max never sat on the sidelines just calling instructions to Jurtan. Jurtan scowled at his own thought as he laced his fingers together behind his back and began his first ten-count of creaking his way over backward. That wasn't a positive at all; all it meant was that Max pushed both of them as hard as he pushed himself. "What do you think you're glaring at?" Max said, finishing his own back-bend, holding it, and then moving his upper body up and over in a slow lithe curl that culminated with his nose touching his thighs and his arms pointing straight ahead of him behind his inverted back.
"Why do we have to do this every day?" Jurtan grunted a moment later, coming back upright and pausing before doing the whole thing over again. "We're already in shape. Okay, maybe I wasn't when we left Roosing Oolvaya but I am now, so -"
"You're in shape now? Good, then we can go on to the next level. There's no standing still in this outfit." Max tilted backward again and Jurtan reluctantly followed.
Max had already told him that standing still meant going back; that was aphorism number ten-thousand thirty-three. Thirty-four? If Max tossed him another Rule to Live By today Jurtan thought he'd ... well, it wouldn't be pretty.
It wouldn't be