Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Intrigue

Any closer and Jurtan knew Max would hear him. He had the feeling Max and the other were starting to wrap up anyway. Jurtan eased gingerly back toward the campsite, trying to keep from casting too many glances over his shoulder in the direction of the stream. Just short of his bedroll, he checked behind him again. The second figure was gone - he’d had a quick impression of something like a sheet shaking itself out where the other had been, but it must have been his imagination; there was clearly nothing there but rocks and trees.

Max had said nothing the next day to indicate he realized Jurtan had been eavesdropping, but still Jurtan wondered. Jurtan had learned enough from Shaa not to want to be caught underestimating Max. If Max knew, though, why wasn’t he accusing him? Maybe he didn’t care. Or perhaps he didn’t want to risk giving Jurtan enough leverage to get him to reveal who the other one had been, and what the two of them had been discussing, by pulling the issue out into the open.

Jurtan had tried to file it away and forget it.

The only other episode of note had come the night after that. Max had been interrogating Jurtan about the symptoms of his music disorder. Jurtan had been through most of this already with Shaa and he’d said as much. “Since it’s my problem at the moment, not Shaa’s,” Max had told him, “I want to know I have the facts straight.”

“It’s my problem, too, and it’s going to stay my problem whether you or Shaa are around or not.” Jurtan had gotten testier as the day went on and his blisters had continued to break. In the middle of the afternoon he’d also been stung by a bee. Considering the state he was in, he didn’t really care at that moment what nasty thing Max would say back at him.

Not for the first time, Max took him by surprise. He had one eye closed and was looking up into the air with the other one while he chewed on the corner of his lower lip. “Why didn’t I think of this before?” he announced.

“Think of what?” Jurtan said nervously.

“Hold still.” Max sank down next to him and placed the outspread fingers of his left hand over Jurtan’s forehead, the thumb in front of his ear and the middle finger at the crown of his head. Something crackled between Max’s fingertips and Jurtan’s skin. “Don ‘t move! Are you hearing music now?”

“Uh, yes.” At the top of his vision, green curlicues were dancing. “Are you, uh, trying to read my mind?”

“Close your eyes. That’s better. No, full telepathy’s a pretty heavy deal; not my specialty either. Gotta match the impedances - huh!”

“What?”

“Can you make it louder? Yeah! - like a clarinet on top of a bunch of brass, is that what you’re hearing?”

“You mean you can hear it, too?”

“That’s not bad,” Max said appraisingly. “You could dance to that.”

Jurtan jerked his head back. With a snap-snaps-snap and a peppering of small shocks Max lost his contact. “Ow!” said Jurtan, rubbing his forehead. “You going to tell me what you were doing there?”

Max scowled at him. He was shaking his hand as though he’d just pulled it back from a hot oven. “An experiment, what did you think? It was getting somewhere, too, until you ruptured the interface.”

“Where was it getting? Into my thoughts ?”

“I already said this wasn’t telepathy, didn’t I? No, I was just trying to listen in.”

“On my thoughts!”

Max snorted. “No, not your thoughts , that’s what I keep trying to tell you, not that I’m sure they’re anything to write home about anyway. I don’t know what the hell is going on in that head of yours, but I’ve never heard of anything like it before. I don’t think anyone could read your mind if they were channeling the power of a volcano. All they’d hear is that music.”

The sound of slurping cut through Jurtan’s musings on the recent past. He looked down. The earth the horse was stepping into was moist; it placed its hoof again and water oozed out over it as though the beast had stamped on a sponge. “Max?” Jurtan said.

Jurtan had noted that the plain had been trending generally downward as they rode west and, Max had said, rather south. Now, Max had reined up in front of him ahead of a tongue of shallow, stagnant water broken with clumps of protruding grass and low mounds of earth. The grass had turned as much yellow as green in color; overall an unhealthy-looking tone. Jurtan had an uncomfortable feeling the stalks might glow in the dark, too. A smell of decayed vegetables tickled the air. And there were bugs. Max swung himself off the horse and strolled toward the edge of the water, stretching his back, his feet making squelching sounds in the soggy earth, gazing off across the water where a maze of sluggish channels began. “There,” said Max.

“There, what?” said Mont. “We’re looking at a swamp, that’s what’s there.”

“I think it’s more of a bog,” Max said, eyeing the terrain in a professional manner, “although you might go so far as to call it a marsh.”

“What does it matter what you call it? It’s wet, isn’t it, and the parts that aren’t totally wet are spongy.” An unpleasant thought had seized him. “You don’t really plan to go in there, do you?”

“Why do think we went out of our way to be here in the first place? Somewhere in there may be something we’ve come to find.”

Find? “I thought we were going to Peridol for the Knitting, I didn’t think we were out to ‘find’ anything.”

“Shows what you know, doesn’t it?” said Max. He had been probing the ground with the toe of his boot. Now, finding the surface of a low ridge that extended some way out into the water to be marginally more solid than the muck as a whole, he took first one and then another tentative step out along it, his horse reluctantly following. On his third step, the sole of his foot continued down through the surface. Mud sloshed over the top of his boot.

“That’s disgusting,” Jurtan said.

“Of course it’s disgusting. It’s a swamp.”

Mont had to admit that Max didn’t look terribly pleased, either, by the prospect of sloshing through the ooze. “If you’re so dead-set on going in there, why not use a boat? Why not use magic? For all we know, this stuff could go all the way to the coast.”

“For all you know,” Max muttered. “As far as I know, it’s not that far. If this was regular ground, we’d be across it in a day.”

“Have you been here before?”

“I had a reliable informant; at least I hope he was. You want to use a boat, go ahead, find a boat.”

“We could build a raft.”

“I’d love to build a raft. You want to tell me where you’re going to find wood?”

Mont looked around. The gentle rolling plain they’d followed to the edge of the swamp had been covered only with waving wild grain and the occasional low shrub. They’d seen a few stands of trees, true, but the last one had been an hour’s ride back, and nothing came to sight now as he scanned the horizon. He turned back to the water, eyed the mud with a resigned glance, flopped off his own horse, and stepped after Max. Then Jurtan realized he was wrong. There were some trees in sight, twisted gnarly things though they were. The problem with them was that they were deeper into the swamp. Well, it might be better than nothing; they weren’t that much deeper. “What about those trees?” he said. “Could we make a raft out of them ?”

“Which trees? The ones we’re heading toward?”

“Oh,” said Mont. “You mean you’ve been planning all along to check out those trees and maybe use them to build a raft, only you wanted to be sure to rub in again how dumb I am not to have understood it, right?”