Spell of Fate | Page 9

the infrared detector. It would have found the ambushers if he'd had a line of sight to them, but of course he hadn't. "It could have been worse," Max said. After all, they did have the one horse, and the Iskendarian papers. The ambushers might have tossed down a torch.
Jurtan was standing over the man on the ground beyond the pit, the one he'd hit over the head, but who'd then been shot by the archer when Jurtan had moved out of the way. "They're ... dead," Jurtan said.
"Yes. Yes," said Max, "they're dead, all three of them." Max noted that Jurtan was now looking off into the air, studiously avoiding the sight of the body lying in front of him in its heap of leaves splashed red with blood, and the other man and the horse behind him in the pit, and in fact Max himself. Max made no move to approach Jurtan. If you were going to live with violence you had to deal with this situation eventually.
"I, ah, never killed anybody before," said Jurtan. "I mean, I didn't even mean to kill him."
"Well, you didn't kill him, either. His friend did."
"But if I hadn't hit him the way I did - if I hadn't moved away when I did ..."
"Yeah?" said Max after a minute.
" ... Then either he would have killed me or the arrow would have," Jurtan said heavily. "Right? But it still - I mean, they were people, they had lives, and all of a sudden -"
"They might even have had mothers, too," Max said, "but it's still worth remembering that they were the ones trying to ambush us. You didn't see them trying to run away; they took the job, no one was forcing them."
Well, Jurtan thought, at least I haven't thrown up. "I'm just glad my father isn't around," he muttered. "He'd probably want to see me drinking their blood instead of standing around talking."
"If we ever see your father again," Max said, "I won't tell him about it if you don't want me to. Keep in mind that your father is not exactly typical when it comes to these things."
Now Jurtan was looking down. It wasn't really that bad, except for all the blood. The scene would probably only give his father an appetite, and the satisfaction of a job done well. His father was weird.
But Shaa and Max had been teaching Jurtan to be professional, and there was nothing weird about that that he could he think of. What would be a professional thing to focus on? "Was this The Hand again?" asked Jurtan.
"No," said Max.
"So you don't know who it was?"
"I didn't say that, did I?"
"Well, who was it then?"
"I didn't get much of a look, thanks to you, but the main guy could have been Homar Kalifa."
"Another friend of yours? Is he someone else who's after you?"
Max closed one eye and squinted up at the sky. "Kalifa's a third-rater, strictly small-scale; more of a tough-for-hire than a decent adventurer. A riffraffy sort, but he does like to carry a steerhorn. Not too many steerhorns around these days, either. Now that I think about it, I seem to recall crossing him up once, dropped him out a mid-story window into an ornamental pond, it might have been."
"So this could have been just a not-so-friendly hello for old times' sake."
"Maybe," Max said dubiously. "Even if the pond did have something nasty in it; eels, maybe. Doesn't seem very likely to be Kalifa, but it's not totally implausible. Kalifa's the sort who could easily wash up in a spot like this. It's quiet countryside, he could ease back and terrorize soft locals or dumb travelers."
"Really?" said Jurtan. "You think this was just random violence? I thought you were the most suspicious person on the continent."
"There's no real way to tell, kid. It could have been a robbery. Anyway, you've got to remember it's Knitting season. A Knitting always kicks things loose; everybody's out taking care of any business they can think of." Max glanced into the pit, then looked away down the path. "Whether or not someone sicced Kalifa on us, could be there's more of this stuff up ahead."
CHAPTER 2
IT WAS EARLY MORNING, AND THESE WERE THE HIGH SEAS. Actually, the sun had cleared the headlands, which meant it couldn't be all that early, and since the headlands above the seasonally fog-shrouded coast were in easy sight off the starboard beam the seas couldn't be all that high themselves. Zalzyn Shaa had appropriated his accustomed morning-watch position on the quarterdeck of the Not Unreasonable Profit, and, with his sea legs long since thoroughly entrenched, was balancing easily against the coastal swells with a steaming mug of herb-brew tea in his grasp. This fine if slightly foggy morning, Shaa was reflecting