Shaker Sandow sat with Commander Richter, separated from the other members of the Banibaleer party not by geography so much as by mood. The rest of the men were, if not jubilant, at least relieved and pleased that Mace had spotted the mouth of this cave system where they were now spending the night. It was not exactly warm in the caves, but at least the cutting whip of the wind was killed and a man could finally draw his breath in some fashion close to normal. Richter, on the other hand, was morose. He was so dejected and defeated that his face had taken on more deep lines and his flesh had lost most of its color, so that he seemed ten years older than when he had begun this journey but a few days ago.
For an hour, ever since they had settled into this cold-walled place, the Shaker had been trying to tip the heavy urn of the commander"s emotions, to spill the sorrow there and get him to talk, to break his dumb silence. He thought it very likely that they might not survive this trip without the leadership of this tough and wizened officer. Thus far, the men had followed him, despite rumors of hideous dimensions, and despite reality of some hideousness itself. They had shrugged off disaster and a.s.sa.s.sins to follow. No one else in the party had that quality: not Crowler nor Mace nor, G.o.ds knew, the Shaker. But talking to Richter now was like speaking to stone rather than to flesh and blood.
He had one more tact. He tried it.
"Commander," Sandow said with more than a trace of loathing and more than a bit of brutality, "I"m sorry that you"ve deserted your men and that you care so little for them that you would see them die. I"m sorry I took you for a good officer when you were not. But I can"t waste more time with you, for I have to help Crowler pull some things together." It was blunt, certainly cruel, but it worked. The Shaker was well aware that the commander looked upon his men with a special fondness and that the old man respected the calling of duty to the enlisted men more, perhaps, than the powers of any G.o.d.
"Stay!" Richter said, grasping the Shaker"s arm as the magician rose to leave him there in the corner of the second cavern, in shadows and disgrace.
"I have no time to humor old women," Shaker Sandow said, hating himself for his att.i.tude, even while he realized it was the only att.i.tude he had left to use.
"I"m all right now," he said. "I"ll take command again. But first, sit with me. Understand me. I must have your trust and confidence in this awful trek, or all will be lost."
The Shaker sat again, though he kept his face an expressionless mask.
"Before I left the capital, back in the Darklands, some three months before this venture, I was given a special duty by General Dark-whom I"ve known ever since the wars to liberate the southern regions of Oragonia some forty years ago. He entrusted me with his only son; the General has four wives, and but one of them has borne him other than healthy, lovely girls. The General told me I was the only man he could entrust with the job of making his son into a man. I accepted, for more reasons than to please my friend and General."
"I fail to see your point yet, unless!"
"Exactly," Commander Richter said. "Jan Belmondo was not his name. Our dead Captain was Jamie Dark, son of the General we both owe our freedom and our limited democracy to."
The Shaker shook his head sadly. Candles flamed up in various drafts in the caverns, sending skittering shadows across the walls. "But he was such a cowardly boy," the Shaker said.
"The General did not wish to admit that to himself," Richter said, "though he knew it deep inside. He thought, perhaps, I could succeed in giving the boy courage where others had failed. And so Jamie came under my auspices under a false name. He would have come as an enlisted man, except he refused that and forced his father into giving him rank."
"And now you will be in trouble for his death?" the Shaker asked.
"No," Richter said. "The General and I are too close for that. He will know it was inevitable. I will be saddened terribly in reporting this news to the General, for it may mean that he will have no successor to his t.i.tle. Surely, he cannot live long enough to foster another son and have him grown in time to take the reins of state. It is a bad sign for all of the Darklands, not just for the General."
"It is a great sadness, yes," the Shaker said. "But we will survive it, and as we have survived greater moments of tragedy. And, too, one must reason that if the boy would never become a man, it is as well that he has not survived to take those reins."
"Perhaps," the commander said. "But there is more and worse to my situation."
The Shaker waited. A candle guttered out across the cavern, leaving one group of men in darkness. Someone went to pull another tallow from the supplies, and in a moment there was softly shimmering orange light against that wall again. Someone laughed, and the brightly illuminated group huddled over some joke or other.
"Jamie was the son of a woman named Minalwa, a dark and beautiful woman with large eyes, long hair, and high, full b.r.e.a.s.t.s, with a laugh like that of birds and a voice that was a whisper. The General and I both were in love with her at one time. Perhaps I should have contested his claim. He never realized how I felt, and I"m certain he would have relinquished her if he had understood. But in those days, I worshipped him-still do-as we all did for delivering us from the string of Oragonian tyrants that had made life so terribly miserable for us all. I could not trespa.s.s on his wants. And I lost the woman. In time, however, I discovered that she felt much the same about me, and because our mutual affections led us to foolishness, I got her with child. He was a boy, and his name was Jamie Dark, for his father thought it best to leave the General under the impression Minalwa"s baby was his own. Besides saving ill blood, I thought my boy would one day rule the Darklands, which was more of a heritage than I could ever give him. But he became what he was, a coward, and my adultery was punished by the G.o.ds.
"Now, you see, I must cope with the sadness of my lifelong friend, the General. I must cope with my own sadness over the death of my own son. And I must live with the knowledge that I once sinned and that my sinning led to the death of Jamie in the end."
"One can blame himself too much for things which are beyond the control of men. Sometimes, simple acceptance is all we have."
"True enough. But sometimes, acceptance requires a bit of time. Will you stay with me, at least in spirit, until this night has given me that time?"
The Shaker said that he would. In the two great caverns, relatively warm for the first time in days, the Banibaleers curled and slept, their bellies freshly filled with warm broth, stale bread, and dried beef.
Outside, the storm grew in fury, into impossible peaks of howling, thundering wind and impenetrable curtains of snow!
12.
They reached the pa.s.s late the next afternoon.
Before making camp, they had descended a good two thousand feet of the eastern slopes. Even standing on the brink of the pa.s.s, so far above the valley where Perdune lay, they could not see the tops of the gigantic mountains around them. Clouds obscured the towering peaks and gave the illusion that there really was no stopping place for them. Two thousand feet down, they found an overhang which sheltered a piece of land from the wind and from the worst of the driving sheets of snow which had become so dense as to almost bar their progress.
The cold had been unbelievable for the last several hours, dropping to forty-one degrees below zero, so that frostbite was a constant danger. The commander would have preferred to move down at least another five thousand feet where it might be as much as thirty and surely no less than twenty degrees warmer. But the men, sapped by the day-long battle with the wind and the cold and the snow which nearly blinded them, could not have managed the descent. There would have been more deaths, and no one wanted to risk that. When the overhang was found, the old man made the decision to remain there, using up all their stores of fuel in the hopes of making it far enough down the next day to be able to survive the following night without fuel.
Fires were built, and special duty rosters were established to take care of them. The windbreakers were strung across the front of the overhang, attached to the jutting rock above and driven into the stone below. The heat was held in where the men huddled, but even so it would be a chilly night indeed.
Commander Richter stopped by the spot where the Shaker and his boys sat bundled together, eating the plentiful meal that Daborot had prepared for them. "It seems like the last meal before the execution," the Shaker said.
"I should hope it isn"t," the commander said. "How are you? The men complain of great tiredness. Tomorrow may take us down most of the way if we don"t despair too much."
"If they let themselves grow weary," Mace said, "I"ll carry them. I never despair."
"Yes, a sorrow that we don"t all have your foolish cheerfulness in times like this," Gregor said, grinning at his step-brother.
"I"m pa.s.sing an order that all men will sleep in groups of five or six during the night," the commander said. "Each man in his sleeping bag, and each group further wrapped in a length of canvas. We will need all the warmth we have to pa.s.s the night alive."
"The three of us will be all right together," Mace said.
"I had thought you would not want anyone else in your wrappings," Richter said. "It is just as well. I think the other men may be safer this way, since only two of any five or six could be the a.s.sa.s.sins. And even if they get into the same group, they will be outnumbered."
"You have," the Shaker said, "made plans to separate Cartier from Barrister. And look to Fremlin, the Squealer master, with a sanguine eye as well."
"You have reason-"
"No reason," the Shaker said. "I just trust no one these days."
"Just as well," the commander said. Then he excused himself to take a tour of the men. He walked the length and breadth of the camp, missing no one and speaking to everyone on a first name basis. He stopped by each gathering of men for a few words, maybe to exchange a smile or to inquire into the seriousness of a man"s frostbite. He spoke with the dignity of his office, though this was tempered with a sense of friendship and mutual dependency as well. In every case, he came to depressed men not anxious to face the morrow, and he went away leaving men the better for his pa.s.sage.
He was tired, worn and unhealthy looking. His face was quite drawn, and his lips were ashen. There was a look of infinite weariness in his eyes, but his lips smiled and his hands were firm as they gripped shoulders and hands in signs of affection and genuine interest and concern. And when he was gone, men were ashamed of their momentary longing for oblivion. If the old man could do it, they could do it. It would be almost sacrilegious to let the old man down after he had brought them all this way. He was risking his life with theirs, and his withered and exhausted frame was no longer young, less able to recuperate than their own bodies. He was tired, worn and unhealthy looking-but he possessed courage that forced his men to live up to the picture he had painted of them.
"He must feel the tons of burden that should be distributed among all of us," Gregor said. "With every step, he must feel worse."
"And conversely," the Shaker said, "he feels mentally lighter with each man he consoles. The commander will be able to go as long as his mind is at ease about his men -even after his own body has failed him."
As the wind swept over the snug threesome, and as the bitter cold of the earth crept inexorably upward through the outer wrapping of canvas through the sleeping bag and finally through his clothes to chill his flesh, Gregor thought about Shaker Sandow, about Mace, and about the future. But thinking about the future engendered thoughts of the past, and he was drawn down long-vacated avenues of his life, like a spirit returning to watch over living friends it has left behind.
His mother had died in childbirth as the mothers of all Shakers did, her pretty face lined with creases and filmed with tears. It was the one great regret of his short life, thus far, that he had never known his mother. Even in the earliest days of his precocious childhood, he had tried to mollify that emptiness by reading through the diary she had kept every day of her life. The pages were crisp and thin, and you could see the writing of the next through the surface of this one, the sum total being a sense of antiquity and the exotic. Those pages held a fascination for him that most children found only in the discovery of what adults called common place, in the discovery of snow and sunrises and storybooks. But he had accepted the common quite early, before other children even noticed it, and had immediately gone on to the more complex. Through the diary, he came to know and love his mother.
And, sadly, to loathe his father by comparison. Jim, his old man, had early settled on the boy as the cause of his wife"s death, and he had not once exhibited a moment of fondness or love for the child. Where other men might have doted on the boy as the last vestige of the dead woman, he looked upon Gregor as a curse.
And when he caught Gregor one day, levitating a pencil from the top of a table, holding it there without hands, he exploded in fury. A demon, he called his boy. A sorcerer who had spelled the mother"s death nine months before the birth. He battered the boy severely, knocked him against the kitchen door. In terror, Gregor had lunged for the door, gotten through and outside. Jim had chased him, drunk and cursing, and had presented a s.p.a.ctacle for the entire town.
If they had not chanced across the Shaker Sandow in their mad chase, Gregor might well have been killed. He had always been a frail boy, and his body was now bruised and bleeding from even the light cuffing the old man had given him. But the Shaker had been there, had seen, and somehow had understood. Whether Jim had skidded over the edge of Market Street and into the abyss by accident, or whether the mild Shaker had propelled him with some quick but forceful piece of magic, no one ever knew for certain, though there was a great deal of speculation in the years to come.
And he had gone to the great house of the Shaker, with its books and magic implements. Mace had been there, some six years older than his three, and the strange relationship of brotherhood had built between them, though they were not brothers at all.
Now the mountain. And the east beyond. He had little hope that they would survive the entire trek, but he would never verbalize such thoughts to Shaker Sandow. His life was his master"s life, and he would go anywhere the older man deigned they should. His own l.u.s.t for knowledge from the east was small; but he understood Sandow"s l.u.s.t, and he was willing to help the Shaker gain his understanding.
Nestled between a father and a brother better than any he might really have possessed, Gregor drifted into sleep, to conserve the heat energy in him against the bitter, sapping strength of the Cloud Range night!
Shaker Sandow looked through the slits of his weather mask, at the swirling snow, at the flickering flames of the campfires, at the odd shadows and the odder brightnesses. He wanted to stay awake all night, though he knew he was no longer young enough for that. He supposed Mace would wake Gregor at the proper time to finish the night"s watch, although the giant could not be trusted. He might take the entire night"s watch upon himself if he felt fit for it. And that could not be allowed. Tomorrow, Mace would need his strength to survive, for the downward slopes might be every bit as treacherous as the other side they had finally scaled. Snow swept from left to right in a thick sheet; flames danced before it; the shadows changed, moved, as if they were alive, and the brightnesses offered hope that tomorrow would be met with success.
Have I been a fool? the Shaker asked himself. Have I lead myself and my loved ones into a maze of traps, a puzzle of disasters?
And for what?
The wind howled.
The cold had reached his bones, and he shivered a little with it even while he perspired under the weight of all their coverings.
As he wondered over his foolishness or lack of it, his mind was drawn to what might lie beyond the Cloud Range, out there in the darkness where the Darklands and Oragonia had never extended land claims. Far, far to the east, the ships of the Salamanthe nation had docked on the distant sh.o.r.e of this great continent, to be sure. The Salamanthes, living as they did in a cl.u.s.ter of a thousand islands, had long ago learned the vagaries of the sea well enough to ride it with impunity; where the Salamanthe"s sailors had not touched keel to sh.o.r.e, there was a place not worth traveling to; otherwise, they had been everywhere. But being people of the sea, they never ventured far inland. Open land frightened them, just as endless miles of water frightened men of the land. And so the heart of the continent, of the east, lay unexplored. And somewhere in it was contained a store of knowledge from the Blank. The Oragonians had proved that. Dynamite, aircraft, horseless vehicles!
Yet it was not gadgets that the Shaker sought, but understanding. He had not been so fortunate as Gregor; his mother had kept no diary, and all she had left him were the tales other people could tell of her. It was little to go on, little to know her by. And all his life he had wondered after her, never grasping the illusive ghost of that long dead woman. Perhaps he would not find an understanding of her in the east; but he might very well come to understand the nature of a Shaker and his heritage, might be at last able to shrug loose of his remaining guilt. He was certain his mother had not died as punishment for delivering a Shaker into the world. He believed all such superst.i.tions were absurd. And yet! And yet it would help so very much to know a Shaker"s heritage was as simple a thing as the heritage of black hair or blue eyes!
He heard Mace shift in the sleeping bag next to him.
Gregor was already asleep.
Guards huddled by the campfires, listening to the wind shriek, too puny to compete with its voice.
He slept!
Near morning, with light finally tipping the clouds and sending smeared fingers down into their encampment, Mace was wakened-not by Gregor who now posted watch-by a sound he could not immediately identify. The severe cold and the depth of his exhausted sleep had claimed some of his justly renowned speed of reaction. He sat up, listening more alertly for what he had heard.
"You heard it?" Gregor asked.
"Yes. What was it?"
"A scream," the neophyte Shaker said.
Just then, they heard another: loud, long, terrified!
13.
The windbreakers had been partially re-positioned, a length of them turned perpendicular to the side of the mountain, and now divided the camp area into two distinct halves. This was done at Mace"s suggestion. Also at the giant"s insistence, all the men-except himself, Gregor, Shaker Sandow, Commander Richter and the Coedone Gypsy named Zito Tanisha-had been put on the windward side of the canvas. They huddled there now, caught in the malevolent hammer of the wind, in the stinging bite of the furiously whipping snow.
It was not that Mace desired those enlisted men to suffer. He was thinking of their welfare more than anything else as he made these arrangements. But to do the work that must be done, all those whose loyalty was not certain must be segregated beyond the canvas, and Mace and these few with him must have the quietest side to work on. In that lot beyond the canvas, the killers waited. Mace was certain of the Shaker and Gregor. The commander did not seem to be a killer-and he could not have possessed the enlisted man"s dagger which had done the evil work of this night just pa.s.sed, the work Blodivar"s scream had summoned them to discover. The commander vouched for Zito, and no one would ever question the faithfulness of a Coedone who had given his bloodied kerchief, as the dark Tanisha had given his to Richter. So the enlisted men suffered the cold and the wind-while those on the leeward side of the canvas suffered tension and split nerves.
The scream which had awakened Mace had come from a short, quick-mannered man named Blodivar who had risen to discover that the other four sleeping men in his canvas-wrapped unit were not sleeping at all but were quite dead instead: their throats were slit from ear to ear in a secondary, grinning mouth. As the others woke, more discoveries were made. In five separate sleeping units, the same scene obtained: all dead but one man. Twenty-two corpses, and in each cl.u.s.ter of them, a single man had been spared. When two guards were found, kneeling by their campfires, knifed in the back, it was seen how such slaughter had been achieved.
It was this touch of s.a.d.i.s.tic ghoulery, though, that made the murders worse. Now a man not only needed to fear death himself, but he must live in terror of spending a night locked in the cold arms of gashed and lifeless comrades, their blank white and sightless faces staring at him when he woke in the morning!
And though it seemed like the ploy of a madman, Mace could see that it was not. The psychological weapon the a.s.sa.s.sins had devised here was more effective than the imminent scythe could ever be. For the first time, the men talked openly and unabashedly about returning to the Darklands and abandoning this quest. For the first time, mutual distrust of comrade for comrade was out in the open, manifested in a hundred little signs of fear and hostility. If they did not return but continued on under these circ.u.mstances, there would be a mutiny or a b.l.o.o.d.y siege of in-fighting in the manner of witch hunting.
But the killers-one of them, anyway-had made a mistake, had left a clue. If they were clever enough and quick enough, they might cut the opposition"s numbers in half, at least.
"Zito," Commander Richter said, "you will hold a drawn arrow in the notch of my bow, and you will stand eight paces from this spot." He marked an X in the snow. "Mace will be standing behind each man we bring in, five steps behind the X. The moment one of our suspects turns vicious and tries anything, you will attempt to skewer him with an arrow in some spot that is not deadly. If you should miss-hardly a possibility at such a range-Mace will subdue the killer by whatever means he decides best."
"Bu" wa" is it tha" we look fo", commanda?" Zito asked. He looked quite capable, standing there, holding the weapon as if it had been in his hands from the moment he was born.
Richter held up a curled ornament of metal no larger than the nail of his little finger. "This is from the hilt f.l.a.n.g.e of an enlisted man"s dagger. There is one to either side of the blade. Mace here discovered this embedded in the wound of one of Blodivar"s mates. Apparently, it snapped off when the a.s.sa.s.sin drove the blade into the man"s throat, and hopefully its absence has not been noted by the guilty" party."
"Ah. An" tha" is why ya" wanted ta" look at ma" knife!"
"And you"re safe, Zito. I am sorry if my suspicious mind insulted your heritage."
"Na", na"! Ya" must be sure! Ya" ha" na" choice about it!"
Richter slapped the dark gypsy"s back, then nodded to Gregor who walked to the slit in the canvas, pulled it open, and called the first of the men in from the other side: Sergeant Crowler.
"May I see your dagger?" Richter asked, holding out his hand for the surrender of the weapon.
"What for?" Crowler asked. He looked carefully around from man to man, licking his lips and steeling himself for something.
Mace stepped closer in behind him.
Zito Tanisha raised the bow and held it level with the burly sergeant"s chest "I am ordering you to surrender it," Richter said.
"What does he have that bow on me for?" Crowler asked, nodding to Zito. "What is all this? You know I been a loyal man of yours for ten years now, and-"