Spell of Fate | Page 6

I could help," Jurtan volunteered.

"Oh, you could, could you?"
"What do you have against me, anyway?" Jurtan mumbled. "I thought
apprentices were entitled to some consideration."
"They probably are. Are you coming or not?" Max had led the other
horse onto the road. Jurtan grimaced and dragged his horse after him.
Something was up, though. Max wasn't usually quite this testy,
especially in the morning; he liked getting up early, and seemed to hit
his stride right around the time the sun came out. Maybe Max did need
practice. Max was always suspicious, but this morning he was
out-and-out on edge. Something was putting him especially on his
guard.
Max had produced a floppy, wide-brimmed hat of a piece with the rest
of his ratty disguise. It was ratty only in appearance, though, not in
effectiveness. If Jurtan met this fellow on the street he wouldn't give
him a second look, except perhaps to make sure there was enough of a
buffer space around to steer clear of him. As the trees thickened around
them and the amount of morning light reaching them through the
canopy of leaves declined, Jurtan thought he saw a pale pink glow
begin to peek from beneath the brim of Max's headpiece.
Max settled his hat more firmly. While his hand was in place next to
the brim, he slid his fingers underneath it and adjusted the control
matrix above his right ear. Camouflage, Max thought, camouflage and
subterfuge, always hiding one thing behind another; what a world. If
we didn't have all this magic running loose, struggles of power and
battles of will, it would probably be a much nicer place overall. But on
the other hand it probably wouldn't. People were people and power,
after all, was power. The enhancement disc in front of his right eye
firmed and Max's overlay-view of the scene ahead of them settled
down. Off to the left on the trunk of a tree was a squirrel. Between its
bark-colored fur and the gloom of the lighting level it was all but
invisible to the unaided eye, even once Max knew where to look. To
the disc, though, painting the squirrel's body heat in a glowing orange,
it might as well have been under a spotlight.

There were other animals out and about, too - a streak that could have
been a fox, an assortment of birds, a few more squirrels. No larger
game was in sight, though, and certainly nothing on two feet, unless
they were using countermeasures. Screening aural emanations was a
standard enough trick in the right circles, but heat signature suppression
was still largely unheard of. Infrared sensors were such an obvious idea,
too. Still, it was a fact that remote sensing never really seemed to catch
on, like so many facets of magical technology that were deliberately
subtle and designed to keep you out of trouble rather than blowing up
situations with flash and pyrotechnics. Most practitioners weren't
nearly as clever as they thought they were, and on top of that they'd
didn't much like to do research. Of course, Max thought, there's
research and there's research. Everybody liked to steal good stuff if
they could. Their problem was that they went after it the hardest way,
trying to lift the secrets of a living competitor, or reverse engineering
back to a piece of left-over stagecraft from its residual fallout. It was
safer all around and usually more productive to boot to mine where the
guardians were dead.
When you wanted certain kinds of answers, though, going through
ruins and books was nothing but a waste of time. Max glanced idly
around again. There was someone around here laying for them, he
could feel it. Beyond the matter of foiling whatever the somebody had
in mind, the larger question was whether they were just freebooters out
to waylay travelers in general or whether they had a particular target in
mind. The options weren't exclusive, of course, if you were going to be
logically comprehensive, since the kind of customers who'd ambush
someone in particular in a forest probably were the sort who wouldn't
mind an extra spot of fun and profit if someone else happened along
while they were waiting.
Until proven otherwise, you had to assume every plot was directed at
you personally. Even with this carefully cultivated paranoia, however,
Max had to acknowledge that the most likely scenario here was the old
scout-them-out-in-the-village, rip-them-off-in-the-forest routine, with
the innkeeper in league with a few of the local toughs.

After all the waiting, when it happened the whole thing was there and
over with almost as soon as it had started, in the typical disorganized
flurry and commotion.
Max had unbent enough in his didacticism to warn Jurtan to stay alert
and keep his eyes