Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Fate

Jurtan rolled back out from under the dangling corner of the net and staggered to his feet as the steerhorn sounded again. Something swooshed past his ear - an arrow! Whoever was up there was going to hang back behind the ridge above and try to pick them off. But what if Jurtan just tried to run away? He heard a crunch, a clatter, and a loud grunt from his left, in the direction they’d just come from, and turned to see a heavily built man with a wild black beard and a broadsword getting his balance on the path; a spill of earth showed where he had jumped and slid down into the gully.

Max landed inverted at the bottom of the pit, in a handstand, his arms tangled in leaves and netting. The horse with its broken legs was sliding in after him. Max let himself fall carefully backward. Something narrow, scratchy, and tall pressed up against his back, yielded, and then snapped with a crack. There were spikes, but obviously not enough of them to carpet the hole. Max kicked another spike over out of the way and sprang backward onto his feet, then leaned forward to press himself against the side of the pit. Next to him, the horse finished collapsing into the pit, impaling itself on the spikes. An arrow thonked superfluously into its flesh.

There would be at least four of them, Jurtan thought. The hefty guy guarding the path with his sword, the archer, the one with the steerhorn, and probably another swordsman to watch the path on the other side of the pit. Max had been tutoring him in swordwork, but even after Max’s usual intensive crash-course Jurtan didn’t think he could take down all of them with his blade, especially considering the tactical situation the terrain put them into. The blade was scarcely the only weapon at hand, though.

The music in his head left Jurtan an opening. Drawing his own sword, he hurled himself forward at the hefty man, yelling out “Heda!” in tune with the music.

A blare of internal trumpets matched him. The edge of Jurtan’s vision swam, but with the last month’s practice behind him his concentration locked solidly into place and held his consciousness together. Instead, the man ahead of him reacted slowly, as though he’d fallen into a sudden daydream, his eyes vague and sluggish as he began to adjust his stance and bring up his sword.

Max and Jurtan had determined that vocalization wasn’t nearly as effective in projecting paralysis as the flute in Jurtan’s pack or the harmonica in his pocket. On the other hand, his voice was close to hand and left both arms free. Jurtan slid past the man’s guard and whacked him on the side of the head with the flat of his blade. Music stabbed at him; without thinking, Jurtan leapt back. Another arrow flashed in front of him through the space he’d just left and punctured the falling man’s chest.

Max vaulted over the thrashing horse before it could crush him against the wall and rolled upward out of the pit. Not pausing, he pushed out of the roll and sprang up the side of the gully. Just above of him sticking over the edge an arrow was being slapped into a bow. Max snatched at an exposed root just below the lip, pulled himself closer, grabbed the bow with his other hand, then let go of his grip on the root. As he fell backward he pushed off with his feet and yanked. With a crazed howl a man appeared in the air above Max, still holding his bow. The man twisted over Max and followed his bow head-first into the pit.

Two sets of footsteps crashed above, retreating rapidly into the trees. Max was scrambling back up the embankment to give chase when the charging footsteps stopped and were replaced by first a whinny and then a gallop. The path beyond the pit jogged to the left; presumably it snaked around to the spot where the ambushers had their horses hidden. Max dropped to the floor of the gully next to his own horse. “What?” Max demanded of it.

The horse had its head cocked to one side and was giving him a reproachful look from beneath its weighted net. The horse hadn’t moved a foot throughout the entire affair. “Be that way, then,” Max told it.

“Are you all right?” said Jurtan, from a location safely beyond Max’s reach.

“No thanks to you. Next time take better care of your horse.”

Jurtan was relieved to note that Max’s tone of voice was relatively mild, for Max. “I don’t think anyone’s going to be taking too much care of that particular horse in 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.”