Warlock

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 ship 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 shift 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 pass out.
        

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    10
        
        
        
        When Mace had come around some five minutes after his faint, he loudly proclaimed his fidelity and subservience to a variety of gods, major and minor, and he confided to everyone clustered 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