Warlock

indeed.
        
        Commander Richter stopped by the spot where the Shaker and his boys sat bundled together, eating the plentiful meal that Daborot had prepared for them. “It seems like the last meal before the execution,” the Shaker said.
        
        “I should hope it isn't,” the commander said. “How are you? The men complain of great tiredness. Tomorrow may take us down most of the way if we don't despair too much.”
        
        “If they let themselves grow weary,” Mace said, “I'll carry them. I never despair.”
        
        “Yes, a sorrow that we don't all have your foolish cheerfulness in times like this,” Gregor said, grinning at his step-brother.
        
        “I'm passing an order that all men will sleep in groups of five or six during the night,” the commander said. “Each man in his sleeping bag, and each group further wrapped in a length of canvas. We will need all the warmth we have to pass the night alive.”
        
        “The three of us will be all right together,” Mace said.
        
        “I had thought you would not want anyone else in your wrappings,” Richter said. “It is just as well. I think the other men may be safer this way, since only two of any five or six could be the assassins. And even if they get into the same group, they will be outnumbered.”
        
        “You have,” the Shaker said, “made plans to separate Cartier from Barrister. And look to Fremlin, the Squealer master, with a sanguine eye as well.”
        
        “You have reason-”
        
        “No reason,” the Shaker said. “I just trust no one these days.”
        
        “Just as well,” the commander said. Then he excused himself to take a tour of the men. He walked the length and breadth of the camp, missing no one and speaking to everyone on a first name basis. He stopped by each gathering of men for a few words, maybe to exchange a smile or to inquire into the seriousness of a man's frostbite. He spoke with the dignity of his office, though this was tempered with a sense of friendship and mutual dependency as well. In every case, he came to depressed men not anxious to face the morrow, and he went away leaving men the better for his passage.
        
        He was tired, worn and unhealthy looking. His face was quite drawn, and his lips were ashen. There was a look of infinite weariness in his eyes, but his lips smiled and his hands were firm as they gripped shoulders and hands in signs of affection and genuine interest and concern. And when he was gone, men were ashamed of their momentary longing for oblivion. If the old man could do it, they could do it. It would be almost sacrilegious to let the old man down after he had brought them all this way. He was risking his life with theirs, and his withered and exhausted frame was no longer young, less able to recuperate than their own bodies. He was tired, worn and unhealthy looking-but he possessed courage that forced his men to live up to the picture he had painted of them.
        
        “He must feel the tons of burden that should be distributed among all of us,” Gregor said. “With every step, he must feel worse.”
        
        “And conversely,” the Shaker said, “he feels mentally lighter with each man he consoles. The commander will be able to go as long as his mind is at ease about his men -even after his own body has failed him.”
        
        
        As the wind swept over the snug threesome, and as the bitter cold of the earth crept inexorably upward through the outer wrapping of canvas through the sleeping bag and finally through his clothes to chill his flesh, Gregor thought about Shaker Sandow, about Mace, and about the future. But thinking about the future engendered thoughts of the past, and he was drawn down long-vacated avenues of his life, like a spirit returning to watch over living friends it has left behind.
        
        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