Part 6 (2/2)

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 relations.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+vered 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+ft 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-'

<script>