Warlock

even in a whisper.
        
        “Perhaps the killers did not finish on the second floor, simply because they are roomed there. It would look suspicious, to say the least, to find everyone dead down there but two men.”
        
        “Be damned!” Richter said, cursing himself.
        
        “Are any of the men you put on watch-are any of them from the second floor?”
        
        “One,” Richter said. “I will go relieve him immediately.”
        
        Mace turned to open the door, but was stopped by the commander's thin-fingered hand upon his healthy biceps.
        
        “One thing, Mace,” Richter said. “You play the role of the slow-witted buffoon with some deal of grace and wit But now that I know it is a role, I shall rely on you steadily for information. You understand?”
        
        Mace nodded. “Now I must go and tell the Shaker that you wish a reading. There are preparations to be made.”
        
        He left the hotel and took a less awkward route home, avoiding the steepest streets, using the pedestrian stairs whenever there was a hill that possessed them. Far off in the sky over the peaks of the Banibals, lightning played in great orange streaks down the velvet backdrop of the sky. The smell of rain was in the air, as if Nature wished to erase the lakes of blood spilled here this night
        

----

    5
        
        
        
        The night storm raged beyond the house of Shaker Sandow. Great drum rolls of thunder shook the firmament and rattled the study windows in their frames. Lightning bolts seared the fabric of the heavens and bathed the room in a strange, sporadic blue light that outlined the features of the men gathered there in such an eerie manner as to make them seem like statues carved in marble. The rain beat insistently against the windows, adding a steady hiss to the sound of the solemn chants performed by the Shaker.
        
        The center of attention was a large, oak table which had been worked into a circle. Its middle was set with a square of mirror-polished silver, and it was that silver which supplied the only illumination from within the room. The candles had long ago been snuffed; the lanterns remained unlighted. But the silver glowed with a soft white warmth that shone on the faces of the Shaker and of Gregor who were the only two seated round the reading table.
        
        Behind the Shaker and Gregor, respectful and somewhat frightened by these goings on, Richter and Belmondo stood in the impenetrable shadows, hardly daring to breathe.
        
        At the door, Mace leaned against the wall, fascinated more by the reaction of the two officers to these wonders than by the wonders themselves. Familiarity breeds boredom, even in the most exotic of professions.
        
        A particularly vicious explosion of thunder slammed down into the valley, like a mallet driven upon Perdune. Richter and Belmondo leaped in surprise-but the Shaker and his apprentice continued with their rituals, oblivious to everything.
        
        “I shall be glad when the lights come on again,” Belmondo whispered to Richter, but the commander merely ignored him.
        
        “Step here, Commander Richter,” the Shaker said. “We have something on the plate.”
        
        Both officers went forward, stared down into the glittering silver square. The mirror sheen had been replaced by the hazy outlines of two human faces. There were no discernable features to the visages, and they might have been any pair of men out of those who had escaped the killers' blades this night
        
        “That is all?” Richter asked, unable to conceal the bitter disappointment in his voice.
        
        “I am working my power to fuller perception,” the Shaker said. “But there is something curious about these two.”
        
        No one spoke, for it was only the Shaker's place to comment now at this penultimate moment of discovery.
        
        It had begun to hail outside, and nut-sized balls of ice pinged off the windows, rattled on the roof, like the feet of hundeds of dwarves performing some fairy dance.
        
        “There seem to be precious few personality traits to grasp. I find the sheen of their conscious minds, but to penetrate them is difficult. And when I do delve within, there seems to be precious little there.”
        
        The images on the silver plate remained