Warlock

lullaby.
        
        The cold dulled the senses.
        
        Soon, they slept.
        
        Morning came too soon, and no one's spirits rose with the dawn, for the storm had increased. The wind was a wild, screaming banshee that howled above them snatched at them with strong fingers, flung them forward when they wished to go right, drove them backward when the only hope of safety was ahead.
        
        It was almost as if the wind and the snow and the cold had aligned themselves with Oragonia.
        
        There was no longer any opportunity for reverie, any chance to spend time in an attempt to discover the identity of the pair of assassins. They not only had to struggle with the killers and the terrain now, but with the weather as well. Every waking moment was another battle in a war that it seemed impossible to win.
        
        The following morning was spent in negotiating eight hundred feet of featureless, icy stone. There was no way around the verticle impediment, for it broke into an even more unmanageable chasm to the right and fell away into nothingness to the left. Once above it, it seemed they could make use of a chimney of stone which would protect them from the elements for another fifteen hundred feet. Yet no one permitted himself to consider such a heavenly possibility, lest it prove false and shatter all the hopes built for it.
        
        They scaled the face in teams of three and four in order to diminish the dimensions of any possible disaster. The ninth group that started up the wall was struck by an almost consciously malicious wind of such a degree of viciousness as to almost insure their deaths. On the top of the cliff, men grabbed for pitons which were jammed into the thick ice crust. At the base, men were blown from their feet, sent tumbling along in the snow until they could find something to grasp and hold to. But out there on the blank face, strung together by a pitiful rope, cringing to the toothpick handholds of their pitons, the four-man climbing team could hardly hope to last for long.
        
        And did not…
        
        The second man from the top was ripped loose by the wind, slammed against the stone, then flung outward over nothingness. Yet he was still safe enough, held to his stable comrades by the team line. How long the others could accept his weight and still cope with the storm was a question no man could answer. As it turned out, they did not have to struggle much longer. The last man's foot slipped from his piton, and he dropped, taking up slack in the team line, his sudden jerky slip pulling his upper hand piton loose as well. When the jarring tug of that fall reached the others, the final two men were ripped from their desperate holds to the cliff face, and all four of them went flying outward and down as the wind flung them over the heads of the men below, took them to the left and over the side into the bottomless cleft in the earth where mists and swirling clouds of snow eventually obscured them and blotted out their faint-hearted screams.
        
        Sixty-four enlisted men, three officers, and the Shaker and his boys. Soon, the killers would be easily found, for there would be no one left but assassins and their last victims. Richter agreed with the Shaker that the four deaths on the wall had not been in the assassins' plans but were genuine accidents. They both voiced hopes that both the killers had been in that party. But neither believed his own wishful thinking.
        
        Indeed, there was a fifteen hundred-foot verticle flue of stone above the cliff, and for a time they were sheltered from the wind, though the loud whistling of it across the top of the chimney almost deafened the men climbing inside.
        
        The afternoon stretched on toward evening.
        
        The snow was up to the knee now, deeper at places where drifts had built up.
        
        Ice packed the coats and britches of the climbers as the wind drove the hard grains of snow against them. Richter had early advised Shaker Sandow, Mace, and Gregor not to break the crusted ice loose from them-selves, for it added a layer of protection against the fierce wind-no matter what its added weight might do to their pace and their sense of comfort. Comfort hardly mattered when even the preservation of life was in doubt.
        
        Everyone wore tightly knitted masks of wool with eye slits and a gash