Spell of Fate | Page 4

so bad if Jurtan's music sense didn't seem to agree with Max. Well, it might be as bad physically, but at least he wouldn't have to accept the fact that his own body was in league against him too. He didn't care at this stage if something was good for him or not. So what if he actually did feel better than before he'd met up with Max and Shaa? Great, he was in touch with his body, he had muscles and supple joints, his coordination had improved and he had a new repertoire of skills. All this had done was give him a new appreciation of the under-recognized appeal of sloth as a lifestyle.
A flugelhorn honked querulously at him from the back of his head. That was another thing - what was the good of an extra sense that spent most of its time editorializing? Anybody who had a conscience had to be used to having it tell its owner what it thought of them, but Shaa (who was supposed to know about things like that) had never heard of one that orchestrated its critical commentary with multi-part harmony and a comprehensive palette of tonal colors.
Of course, the standard wisdom on consciences was that they concentrated on reactions to issues of right and wrong, weighing in with a compulsion to do right and feelings of guilt if you violated a previously recognized ethical principle. What a conscience wasn't supposed to do was step out proactively, jumping in with helpful hints and suggestions of its own when it hadn't been asked to do anything more than shut up. In fact, shutting up was the one thing Jurtan's sense had thus far refused to do.
On the other hand, Jurtan wasn't complaining, especially now that he'd reached an accommodation with his resident talent. In the old days of all of several months ago, his musical accompaniment had been jealous to a fault. Back then, as soon as Jurtan had heard music from outside his head - music that someone else was actually playing - his eyes would glaze and his mind would grind to a useless stop. Eventually he'd come back to consciousness with a blank gaze and no idea where he was. Sometimes he'd even be jerking and kicking, too, or worse. It had been pretty embarrassing, and sometimes kind of dangerous as well. After all the training and the practicing, though, that didn't happen anymore.
Max finally called a halt. Jurtan felt tingly and fully wrung out, but of course the day was really just starting. Back in the grove of trees and parallel to the road was a stream. The horses eyed Jurtan suspiciously as he eased down to the water; they hadn't quite forgiven either Jurtan or Max for their experience in the swamp. Max had been eyeing the horses back. For Max's own part, the look on his face implied he'd been considering whether he was going to continue viewing the horses as part of the team, rather than as a source of ready cash or, in a so-far unexperienced emergency, as dinner or lunch. The horses and Max had for the moment fish-eyed each other to a standstill.
Nothing snapped at Jurtan out of the water, and a quick splash took some of the edge out of his own snappish mood. He was almost back to their small camp when he saw the strange device standing near to the shoulder of the road at the edge of the treeline thirty paces or so west, in the direction of Peridol.
"What's that?" said Jurtan. It certainly wasn't another signpost, unless it was pointing the way to a place you couldn't get to on a horse, and not a place merely across the ocean either. One of the trees, a small sapling really, had been stripped of its side branches, leaving little more than a wooden rod protruding upward from the ground to the height of Jurtan's head, a rod with a prominent root system still anchoring it to the ground. A carved icon had been strapped to the top of the tree facing the road and was doubly secured there with a peg. Jurtan couldn't make out any details of the carving since a wisp of ground fog was still clinging to the icon in a soft glow.
"Better stay away from it in that state of mind," Max called over.
"Stay away from what?" muttered Jurtan. "I'm not a kid." Ignoring the sudden blare of discordant brass and the familiar snare-drum roll that usually warned him when something worth paying attention to was about to happen, he aimed a kick at the pole. Without quite knowing how it had happened, Jurtan found himself for a brief instant hanging upside down in the air, where he had been dragged when something that