Part 5 (1/2)

'Hold on!' Mace called urgently. He was no mon than thirty feet from the boy now, his large face strained and flushed, even though most of his abnormal strength and will power was as yet untapped.

Gregor looked up at his step-brother, his face a mask of stupidity. He was, Mace could see, like a drunken man on the verge of stupor. His face was slack, his eyes heavily lidded. His mouth hung open as if his jaw had been unhinged, and curls of steaming breath rose dumbly through his lips, like smoke snakes in the cold air. He shook himself, aware of the danger, but the sleepiness remained.

Fifteen feet now.

Mace's hands burned with the pain of torn skin.

Ten feet.

At that moment, Mace was suddenly aware of what was happening to the fingers of Gregor's right hand, his last hold on safety: the fingers were loosening their grip uncurling!

The apprentice would drop in but an instant, in the blink of an eye, and that would be the end of it.

The giant thought quickly and wasted no time at all in pressing those thoughts into definite action. He released his hold on the highest line as he reached the inward point of his wind-blown arc. Flailing blindly for the bottom, east-bound rope with one arm, he used his other hand to reach out and dig long, strong fingers into the bulky clothing the apprentice wore, found a belt and gripped it.

No sooner had Mace's fingers taken the younger man's weight than Gregor lost consciousness altogether and released his last tenuous hold on the pulley line. But for the larger man, he would have finished his life at that instant of time.

Mace's other arm caught the lower line and wrapped desperately around it. Now the giant hung with the line cutting through the inner crease of his elbow joint. If he had not been wearing a st.u.r.dy mountain coat, the rope would have torn his flesh with a vengeance. Even so, it was going to be difficult to maintain such a precarious hold all the way back to the eastern ledge, even though he was more than halfway there by this time.

Or at least he supposed he was.

He dared not turn his head over his shoulder to look, for such an action might send them both plummeting downward. He faced the western side of the gorge, where only six men manned the pulley rope and the platform.

Though it seemed that his leap from the top line to the bottom one and his rescue of Gregor had taken centuries, little more than two or three seconds had transpired. And now as he felt the worst moments had pa.s.sed, he saw that such was not the case. Calamity struck again.

On the western side of the chasm, the added weight of Mace at the same drag-point as Gregor-combined with the sudden snap of his weight being dropped from the top to the bottom rope-became too much for the four anchor men who were trying to hold the pulley platform down. The device bucked, skidded across granite, ten feet closer to the precipice. One of the anchor men fell struck his head on a pulley stanchion and rolled the last five feet to the brow of the cliff, fell over and away to the hard death below.

'Just fine,' Mace muttered. 'Just wonderful.'

The three remaining anchor men were fighting a losing battle with the rollicking platform. It tossed like a s.h.i.+p on rough seas and began coming apart at its temporary seams. In desperation, the two men on the pulley ropes left their post and flung themselves onto the platform. The device ceased its frantic skittering and was still no more than a yard from the sharp edge of the cliff.

The pulley ropes ceased their thrumming, and some pressure was taken off Mace's tortured arm.

Now there was only one team reeling in the two men suspended near the center of the line, and the pace of the retrieval operation abruptly slowed. A lesser man than Mace might have given up in despair at the feel of that sudden slacking, but the giant clung stubbornly, gripping Gregor below him, and waited it out.

There was no thought in Mace's mind to correspond with: 'I may die!' But there was a thought, a deep fear which verbalized as: 'Gregor may die!'

There was an almost graveyard silence in the air. He could not hear the voices of the men on the east side; everyone there seemed stunned into silence. He was too far from the west brink to hear the labored breathing of the men there.

It was not many more seconds before he began to feel the pain in his left arm as the lower pulley line's pressure made itself felt even through his bulky coat. A dull ache had spread up his shoulder and as far down his arm as his wrist. His hand and his fingers were totally numb- and that frightened him more than the pain. He could withstand pain, but if he lost all feeling in that arm, he could no longer maintain enough muscle control to keep them safe.

Yet he could not s.h.i.+ft and grasp the line with his hand, for his position was so awkward that the slightest relaxation in that clenched arm would spell the end of this adventure. All the spell songs of all Shakers would do nothing for their bloodied corpses.

He could hear the creak of the pulley wheels, which meant the eastern bank could not be terribly far from them.

He wished he could look.

But he couldn't.

The fingers clutching Gregor by the belt of his coat were shot full of needles which were tipped with acid. Or so they seemed. And already, paralysis was affecting his grip.

The lower rope slipped out of the elbow joint crease as he lost some of the pressure he had at first been able to apply. Desperately, he jerked his arm against his body, forced the sliding, tight line back to the nook where it had been.

'Not long, Gregor. Not long at all,' Mace said, but he was speaking for his own benefit, and no one else's.

If they died, what Mace would regret the most was letting Shaker down. The sorcerer had done so much for a small, orphaned child named Mace-so much then and so much in the intervening twenty years. To repay all that kindness and goodwill with failure was despicable.

Suddenly, he felt himself pulled loose of the line, felt his weight slipping. He tried to flail out to save them before he realized that his weight was being taken by two brawny Banibaleers on the eastern ledge. His shoulder and back had grown so numb under the wracking exertion he had forced his body to, that he had not felt the pressure of their hands on him.

He gave himself over to the solicitous rescuers and finally permitted himself to pa.s.s out.

10.

When Mace had come around some five minutes after his faint, he loudly proclaimed his fidelity and subservience to a variety of G.o.ds, major and minor, and he confided to everyone cl.u.s.tered about him that his safety and the safety of the apprentice Gregor was purely the result of an air sprite's whim. He explained that the fairies of the atmosphere favored those who had lived their lives in high elevations, as both he and Gregor had, nestled in the mountainous village of Perdune.

Aside, Commander Richter said, 'I was not aware that the great barbarian there was such a religious man.'

'The last time I saw him in such a mood was six years ago-when he lit a candle for a dead friend's soul.' The Shaker was barely able to suppress a smile, and the lingering traces of it curled the corners of his thin mouth.

'Then why does he-' Richter began.

At that moment, a group of five enlisted men returned from the giant. One of them was entertaining the others, and as they pa.s.sed, he could be heard to say: '! how a great, simple lummox like that could have done it! It was the sheerest luck-unless his air sprites are more substantial than the air from the giant's mouth!' Those around him broke into pleasant laughter.

'I see,' Richter said. He looked at Mace with more admiration than before. 'He plays his role even more completely than I had thought. Or perhaps he plays it so well that I had forgotten his true nature.'

'He is a complex lad,' the Shaker said. Then he turned from his boys and faced the old officer next to him. 'Tell me, how will we discover what caused those accidents? If accidents they were. Two men dead and almost a third-that seems like the carefully planned sort of accident, does it not?'

The commander nodded to the far side of the chasm where the other pulley had by now been dismantled and was being packed away in its component parts. 'When those five men reach us, we'll question them. Perhaps they know something, and perhaps-if our two a.s.sa.s.sins are in that group-the villains will have brought about their own end this time, by narrowing down our field of suspicions.'

'There's Gregor as well,' the Shaker reminded the commander.

'That there is. When he comes to, perhaps he will be able to shed some light upon this latest mystery.'

It was simple enough to trace the source of the treachery once everyone had been questioned. To find the man or men who had perpetrated that treachery, however, was nigh onto impossible. The agents of Oragonia worked quietly, cleverly, and without clue; the treason lay in a bottle of brandy without label or mark of owners.h.i.+p!

Hastings, Immanuli and Gregor had all taken healthy swigs of the potent brew before embarking on the hazardous journey across the gulf. A careful taste check and a comparison of odors between this brandy and a bottle of the commander's own, proved that what they had drunk was adulterated, perhaps with some sleeping potion of more than a small degree of efficiency.

No one could remember where the bottle had come from. Apparently, someone had given it to Hastings with the suggestion that he drink of it before crossing the gorge, to steel his nerves, for Hastings had been notoriously terrified by the pulley arrangement, though other rigors of mountain-climbing did not bother him at all. Immanuli, after watching Hastings to go his death on the rocks, might have thought he too required a draw on the liquor before following in deadly footsteps. Likewise, Gregor, after he had witnessed not one but two tragic and violent deaths, wanted something to warm his gut and stop the shuddering spasms that shook his thin body. But Hastings had mentioned no names. And no one would admit, of course, to having possessed the bottle at one time. Finally, no one could even recall having seen the bottle in anyone else's belongings.

Two more men were dead, and nothing gained for it.