Spell of Fate | Page 9

the future."
The kid was right. The horse in the pit had had one last thrash in it, and
it had expended this by rolling over onto the bowman. Most likely the
guy had broken his neck anyway, but that still left no one to interrogate.
Max picked up his hat, which Jurtan's horse had demolished by falling
on it, then tossed it into the pit. So much for a field test of 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