Warlock

drawing his dagger from the sheath on his hip. Although he was a big man, he could move with the speed of the slimmest, sleekest killer. Even the Shaker Sandow had not been able to follow the swiftness of the blade's release from its leather sheath.
        
        Into the sputtering yellow glow of the candle, Commander Richter walked, his hands filled with two deadly blades, both longer and more like shortened swords than knives. He looked from each of the three to the other, speculating on his next move. At last, his voice quite firm and quite wicked, he said, “Just what is going on here?”
        
        “A reading,” the Shaker said. “We wished to make it secretly so the assassins would not be prepared to blank it. But we did not take them by surprise, it seems.”
        
        “Another blank?
        
        “Exactly,” Gregor said.
        
        “I thought perhaps… perhaps it was the three of you… the assassins.” He let his swords drop to his sides as Mace sheathed his own weapon. “So you suspected me as well.”
        
        “One can never be too suspicious,” the Shaker affirmed.
        
        Mace chuckled, the only one who saw any humor here. “But you suspected us as well,” he said. “So the insults neatly cancel each other out”
        
        “One of my men reported seeing the three of you acting suspiciously,” the commander said. “And when I came to look for you, you were gone. Unless you had leaped from the ledge, there could be but one place else -some cave along the rear wall of the cleft. I found it after some moments.”
        
        The Shaker stood and Gregor followed after, gathering the paraphernalia of their magic. “We had best be returning,” the Shaker said.
        
        “You don't wear your robes,” Richter said. “I have always been under the impression that robes were essential to the exercise of a Shaker's powers.”
        
        “Many things that Shakers think are essential are really nothing more than tradition,” Sandow said. “Even the reading plate is not essential. A clear pond of water would have done as well, or a regular mirror. Many of the traditional chants can be shortened, though I find even I need some of them to put me in the proper frame of mind.”
        
        “But magic is an art which requires-”
        
        Sandow interrupted Richter with a raised hand. “Perhaps I am a very unorthodox Shaker indeed,” he said. “But I don't believe that what Shakers possess is necessarily a link to the spirit world, to the realms of magic. I believe, instead, that it is merely a random talent distributed by Nature, just as blue eyes and black hair, just as some people have acute hearing and some have olfactory senses beyond the realm of the normal. Further, I think that it was something which happened during the Blank, something from that period of our history which is shrouded in dead memories, which produced this Shaker talent within some families of men.”
        
        “There are Shakers who would have you burned for heresy,” Commander Richter said.
        
        “Surely, surely,” Sandow agreed. “And so it is that I live in a quiet, isolated village like Perdune and never attend conferences of Shakers or write letters to my brothers in the trade. Some day, my own beliefs will be borne out, as we discover more of the Blank and come to understand what took place during those dark centuries.”
        
        “And perhaps that is what drove you to accept such a hazardous commission as this?” the commander asked.
        
        “Perhaps,” Sandow replied, smiling. “And may I live long enough to see fruit from all this toil.”
        
        “By the gods' beards, may you,” old man Richter said. “May all of us…”
        

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    8
        
        
        
        With the Shatoga Falls roaring beneath them, plunging over the shattered edge of a cliff not a hundred yards below and to their right, the first phase of the Cloud Range climb was well behind them. Up here the air was not thick with mist and the ears were not threatened with deafness from the ever-present thunder of the plunging water. One could see more than five steps before him, for the crisp breezes were bell-clear and refreshing.
        
        But not all was good. For the first time, they had encountered frost as the temperatures dropped to the verge of freezing and went but a degree or two