Spell of Intrigue by Brenner Mayer Alan

Author:Brenner, Mayer Alan [Brenner, Mayer Alan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction
Publisher: Feedbooks
Published: 1990-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

IN THE AIR

THE SUN HAD YET TO MAKE ITS APPEARANCE, but the sky had lightened enough with its advance-guard radiance for Jurtan and Max to get to work. “Have you ever seen anything like this before?” asked Jurtan, craning his neck upward and squinting his eyes at different angles in a vain attempt to catch a solid glimpse of the object hanging invisibly overhead.

“Not enough like this, no.” Max was back at the edge of the low island in the middle of the swamp, holding his thumb up at the end of his outstretched arm and sighting past it in various directions. “That has to be an internal refraction unit up there; nothing else makes sense. There was a case once where a cache of something-or-other was hidden by a refraction setup, only that one was slung by a cable from the underside of an overhanging cliff. Once you’d figured it out and managed to get to the top of the cliff, you could theoretically slide down the cable to the thing and get into it from there.”

“Couldn’t you use the cable to pull it up? Or just cut the cable and catch it from underneath?”

“Sure,” Max said, “if you wanted to set it off. Of course you couldn’t see the cable itself either. There was about a thousand-foot drop down the face of the cliff, too, as I remember, and you had to hack your way to the top through the ice while hanging from pitons.”

“Why would anyone be crazy enough to hide something that way in the first place?”

“So it wouldn’t get found; what do you think? Or do you mean why would they put themselves through all the overhead they’d need to actually put it there?” Max began to stroll clockwise around the island, shoving his way through the tall grass. “A lot of the problems go away if you can fly.”

“People can fly?”

“Not usually,” Max admitted. “You’ve got your levitation spells and so forth, but there you’re talking truly exorbitant energy costs, and you’ve got more ways to do them wrong than you can - well let’s just say there are good reasons they’re not very popular.” He reached the first of the island’s gnarled mangroves, its roots trailing off into the water, bent over for a close look at its bark, carved a small scraping off with his knife, and launched himself up the trunk. He disappeared into the maze of branches. The tree shuddered, twigs and leaves cascaded down, and then Jurtan saw Max’s head pop up out of the top of the canopy. After glancing around, he disappeared again, only to quickly reemerge at the bottom in the midst of another cloud of leaves. He set off for the next tree. “The person who set it up doesn’t have to be the one who does the flying, of course,” he remarked.

“Like that big bird of Karlini’s, right?” Jurtan said. “You think that’s how you’re supposed to reach this one?”

“It’s a possibility. If

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