CHAPTER ONE
It seemed like the first decent sleep he’d had in ages. Of course, his standards had grown significantly more lax since being on the road, but even so you could scarcely deny -
Again, a boot tried to separate his ribs. Again? Jurtan Mont tried to think back into the immediate past. Something must have roused him far enough out of sleep to kick his mind into gear. Could it have been the same foot? And if so, whose foot was it?
“Come on, get up already.”
The voice was unfamiliar. Jurtan cracked an eye and craned his neck around. The shaggy figure with its unkempt beard that loomed over him in the predawn murk was not one he recognized either. But his warning sense hadn’t given him an alarm, and he hadn’t been robbed and strung up in his sleep. “Who are you?” Jurtan said.
“Who do you think I am?” the unfamiliar figure said irritably. “Shoulda slipped a knife through your belly instead of just a friendly boot. That might sharpen one thing about you once and for all, since I’ve just about given up on your mind.”
The figure might be new, but Jurtan was well and fully intimate with the irritation. “Max?”
Maximillian the Vaguely Disreputable, looking more than ever like his sobriquet, grunted down at him. “Five minutes, then we exercise.”
Jurtan piled out of his bedroll. It was chilly out in the air, but at least the dew hadn’t frosted over on his face. “How long do we have to keep doing this for? How long until we get somewhere?”
“Never fails, does it,” Max muttered. “Awake for ten seconds and the first thing he does is start to complain.”
“But we aren’t just going to keep traveling forever, are we? When do we get to someplace we want to be?”
“We are someplace.”
“No, I mean -”
“So do I.” Max raised an eyebrow and directed his gaze meaningfully over Jurtan’s shoulder. When they’d stopped after dark the previous evening they’d gone just beyond the line of trees that marked the margin of the road before settling themselves down. During the night, Jurtan had rolled up against what he’d thought, in the gloom of sleep, was a hard tree. It wasn’t a tree. It was a low cairn of stones, with a small signpost on top. He went around to the front and squinted at it. The arrow-end of the sign pointed ahead down the road in the direction they had been traveling. The legend on the sign read “PERIDOL.”
Jurtan grunted. “It doesn’t say how far.” It did seem like they’d been traveling forever. “How long has it been since we slept in a bed?”
“Day before yesterday.”
“Really?” Well, okay, maybe. Still, it had to be more than two weeks since they’d made it out of the swamp; maybe as much as a month. If Jurtan had had anything to say about it, they’d never have gone into the swamp in the first place, especially since all they had to show for it was a sack of moldy papers neither one of them could read. Of course, if Jurtan had anything to say about anything, he’d be anywhere at the moment but out at five-thirty in the morning on some nameless road in some useless countryside on the way to somewhere he had not the slightest interest in arriving at. With a maniacal self-improvement freak. Jurtan was still surprised Max didn’t make the horses do calisthenics right along with the two of them.
To his credit, if you were in a positive frame of mind, you could note that Max never sat on the sidelines just calling instructions to Jurtan. Jurtan scowled at his own thought as he laced his fingers together behind his back and began his first ten-count of creaking his way over backward. That wasn’t a positive at all; all it meant was that Max pushed both of them as hard as he pushed himself. “What do you think you’re glaring at?” Max said, finishing his own back-bend, holding it, and then moving his upper body up and over in a slow lithe curl that culminated with his nose touching his thighs and his arms pointing straight ahead of him behind his inverted back.
“Why do we have to do this every day?” Jurtan grunted a moment later, coming back upright and pausing before doing the whole thing over again. “We’re already in shape. Okay, maybe I wasn’t when we left Roosing Oolvaya but I am now, so -”
“You’re in shape now? Good, then we can go on to the next level. There’s no standing still in this outfit.” Max tilted backward again and Jurtan reluctantly followed.
Max had already told him that standing still meant going back; that was aphorism number ten-thousand thirty-three. Thirty-four? If Max tossed him another Rule to Live By today Jurtan thought he’d ... well, it wouldn’t be pretty.
It wouldn’t be so bad if Jurtan’s music sense didn’t seem to agree with Max. Well, it might be as bad physically, but at least he wouldn’t have to accept the fact that his own body was in league against him too. He didn’t care at this stage if something was good for him or not. So what if he actually did feel better than before he’d met up with Max and Shaa? Great, he was in touch with his body, he had muscles and supple joints, his coordination had improved and he had a new repertoire of skills. All this had done was give him a new appreciation of the under-recognized appeal of sloth as a lifestyle.
A flugelhorn honked querulously at him from the back of his head. That was another thing - what was the good of an extra sense that spent most of its time editorializing? Anybody who had a conscience had to be used to having it tell its owner what it thought of them, but Shaa (who was supposed to know about things like that) had never heard of one that orchestrated its critical commentary with multi-part harmony and a comprehensive palette of tonal colors.
Of course, the standard wisdom on consciences was that they concentrated on reactions to issues of right and wrong, weighing in with a compulsion to do right and feelings of guilt if you violated a previously recognized ethical principle. What a conscience wasn’t supposed to do was step out proactively, jumping in with helpful hints and suggestions of its own when it hadn’t been asked to do anything more than shut up. In fact, shutting up was the one thing Jurtan’s sense had thus far refused to do.
On the other hand, Jurtan wasn’t complaining, especially now that he’d reached an accommodation with his resident talent. In the old days of all of several months ago, his musical accompaniment had been jealous to a fault. Back then, as soon as Jurtan had heard music from outside his head - music that someone else was actually playing - his eyes would glaze and his mind would grind to a useless stop. Eventually he’d come back to consciousness with a blank gaze and no idea where he was. Sometimes he’d even be jerking and kicking, too, or worse. It had been pretty embarrassing, and sometimes kind of dangerous as well. After all the training and the practicing, though, that didn’t happen anymore.
Max finally called a halt. Jurtan felt tingly and fully wrung out, but of course the day was really just starting. Back in the grove of trees and parallel to the road was a stream. The horses eyed Jurtan suspiciously as he eased down to the water; they hadn’t quite forgiven either Jurtan or Max for their experience in the swamp. Max had been eyeing the horses back. For Max’s own part, the look on his face implied he’d been considering whether he was going to continue viewing the horses as part of the team, rather than as a source of ready cash or, in a so-far unexperienced emergency, as dinner or lunch. The horses and Max had for the moment fish-eyed each other to a standstill.
Nothing snapped at Jurtan out of the water, and a quick splash took some of the edge out of his own snappish mood. He was almost back to their small camp when he saw the strange device standing near to the shoulder of the road at the edge of the treeline thirty paces or so west, in the direction of Peridol.
“What’s that?” said Jurtan. It certainly wasn’t another signpost, unless it was pointing the way to a place you couldn’t get to on a horse, and not a place merely across the ocean either. One of the trees, a small sapling really, had been stripped of its side branches, leaving little more than a wooden rod protruding upward from the ground to the height of Jurtan’s head, a rod with a prominent root system still anchoring it to the ground. A carved icon had been strapped to the top of the tree facing the road and was doubly secured there with a peg. Jurtan couldn’t make out any details of the carving since a wisp of ground fog was still clinging to the icon in a soft glow.
“Better stay away from it in that state of mind,” Max called over.
“Stay away from what?” muttered Jurtan. “I’m not a kid.” Ignoring the sudden blare of discordant brass and the familiar snare-drum roll that usually warned him when something worth paying attention to was about to happen, he aimed a kick at the pole. Without quite knowing how it had happened, Jurtan found himself for a brief instant hanging upside down in the air, where he had been dragged when something that felt like an enraged beehive had latched onto his foot and lashed it up over his head. Then he was sprawled out on the dirt fifteen feet away, at the end of a five-foot furrow, with his face covered with mud and his leg throbbing and tingling as though Max had had him exercising for three days straight without a rest break. Jurtan got an elbow under him, wiped dirt out of his eyes with an equally filthy hand, and spit loam out of his mouth.
Max was standing nearby looking the shrine over with a professional eye, but from a prudent distance. “What did you think was going to happen?” Max said. “It’s an active offering to an active god, looks like the Protector of Nature. Whoever set it up obviously had the concept a little vague, since they mutilated a tree to do it instead of just honoring something green in its natural state, but I guess the Protector wasn’t being too picky that day either, or maybe she was just hungry. You’re just lucky it didn’t call an enforcer.”
Jurtan dragged his head free of the dirt and sprawled up to a sitting position. “You wouldn’t have let me get near it if it would have set off something real bad.”
“Oh, you think so,” said Max, “do you.”
“Not if it would have called attention to you, no I don’t.”
The kid was probably right but that didn’t mean Max had to let him know he knew it. Give him an inch and, well, who knew where you’d end up. Max gave Jurtan a hand instead and pulled him to his feet. “Get yourself put together again while I finish breakfast. We still have some eggs from that last village.”
Even in his newly reinstated morose mood, Jurtan had to admit that one of Max’s other talents was knowing how to make the most of cuisine on the road. With some decent food inside of him and after his second bath of the morning, Jurtan was also more willing to take a longer view of his situation. He was prepared to acknowledge that the pace Max had been setting since Iskendarian’s swamp was by no means a killing one even if it wasn’t downright leisurely. They’d been in and out of several countries and city-states since then, wasting a fair amount of time talking and hobnobbing in towns and farms. They’d even made a few outright side trips to check out local legends or hot spots, and in one case to visit a ruined castle where Max had climbed a toppled mound of wall-stones festooned with moss and trailing ivy to declaim several stanzas of ancient poetry. Far too many stanzas, if you asked Jurtan, who had never been a big fan of high literature. When you added it up, though, you had to conclude that they’d been staying on back roads and avoiding the larger thoroughfares. On the more traveled routes there would have been more people who might have remembered them, Jurtan figured, but there would also have been more excursionists to lose themselves among. On the other hand, the smaller towns they’d been through wouldn’t see ten visitors in a year, so they’d most likely remember the two of them if anyone asked.
How much did Max really want to shake The Hand off their trail?
Something else Jurtan had learned was how to think and work at the same time. While he’d been mulling Max’s plans and intentions back and forth he’d succeeded in getting the area cleaned up and the horses packed; more skills Jurtan couldn’t recall wishing he possessed. At least sitting on a horse all day was no longer a more drawn-out form of one of Max’s tortures. Jurtan was almost at a stage where he could say he felt comfortable with riding.
“No,” said Max.
Jurtan paused, one foot in its stirrup and halfway into the saddle. “What?”
“We’ve been pushing the horses enough. Let’s give them a break today.” Jurtan let himself down to the ground. They hadn’t been pushing the horses, they’d been virtually coddling them. What was Max up to? This bit with the horses wasn’t the only strange thing this morning, either. “Why are you wearing that beard and that grubby disguise?”
“Practice. “ If there was anything else Max didn’t need, it was practice in deception or dissimulation, which meant his answer this time had meant about as much as any of Max’s answers ever did. “If you told me what was going on 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 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.
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.”
“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.”