Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Fate

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 open. They had entered a section of forest where the path was both narrower and twistier than it really needed to be, and also happened to be snaking through a series of chest- and then head-high gullies. Reddening leaves covered the ground. It was, after all, fall, but it was still early in the season, and these were a lot more leaves than they’d seen anywhere else in the forest. It could be that this particular area had had a recent windstorm, Max was thinking, perhaps coupled with too little foot traffic to disturb the leaves since then. He’d seen the obvious trace of a wheel-rut in various places they’d already passed on the path, but Max knew he wasn’t a good enough tracker to tell how long ago the cart had gone through. Still, even with these plausible natural explanations, was it possible that someone had deliberately spread leaves out across the path?

Max looked around him at the forest on either side. Unfortunately, this was one of the spots where the banks of the gully were above his head. From the back of the horse, though, his vantage point would be significantly better. He raised his hand to tell Jurtan to stop and stepped up into the stirrup.

Following behind Max, Jurtan had been hearing an undulating, traveling string motive in a succession of major keys that he supposed was symbolic of forest murmurs or some such. For background accompaniment it was fairly pleasant, as his internal music ran; it was nicely tonal and more representational than conceptual. Jurtan was much fonder of melody than the atonal screeching stuff, which tended toward sour harmonics and sharp sudden squeals, but even now, with his greater level of control, he didn’t usually have a choice. Over the last few minutes, though, a menacing deep bass theme had gradually appeared behind the forest music, which itself had just modulated to minor. Jurtan was looking around himself too, trying to figure out which direction the menace might be coming from, and so he didn’t immediately see Max raising his hand and pausing his horse. As a result, when the loud harsh voice of a steerhorn opened up with a quivering blast from the edge of the gully just behind Jurtan’s head, spooking his horse and Jurtan both, Jurtan had no idea how close he had drawn to Max and his horse. In the process of leaping out of its skin, Jurtan’s horse only knocked him spinning off to the right and into the earthen bank, from whence he went sprawling toward the leaves, but it hit Max full on just as its stride lengthened and it really started to dig in.

Max separated from the stirrup and hurtled toward the ground just ahead of the charging horse’s front hooves. Jurtan, watching with slow-motion clarity and stunned fascination on his own trajectory toward the ground, could see that at the same moment as Max’s chest hit the path the horse was going to land on his back with its full galloping momentum and punch Max’s spine through his heart. Then, an instant later, Jurtan was equally sure that Max had pulled off some slick piece of sorcery and had teleported or dematerialized himself out of the way, since he had hit the layer of leaves and disappeared. An instant after that as the horse’s forelegs began to disappear as well and the horse lurched forward off balance, Jurtan realized that no magic had to be invoked after all. Just ahead of them the leaves had concealed a pit.

Max knew if there were spikes in the pit he was in trouble. He used the thump the horse had given his back to wind himself forward, spinning head-first down. Above him, Jurtan’s horse, still on solid ground beyond the edge of the pit, pushed off strongly with its hind legs, trying to use its momentum to clear the pit’s far rim, which was now visible since the net that had held up the leaves was collapsing under Max’s weight. Unfortunately, the front of the horse was already twisting downward after Max. The horse started to do a forward cartwheel and hit the far lip of the pit halfway along its forelegs.

Jurtan rolled over once in the leaves just short of the pit and came to rest facing upward, giving him a perfect view of another net with lead weights woven into its sides descending from the top of the gully straight toward him. Also centered in Jurtan’s field of view was the underside of Max’s horse, which Jurtan had fetched up next to in his roll. Max’s horse was tossing its head and stamping its legs nervously, but it hadn’t decided to take off like Jurtan’s. Accordingly, instead of draping itself over Jurtan the thrown net settled over the horse.