Warlock

touched keel to shore, there was a place not worth traveling to; otherwise, they had been everywhere. But being people of the sea, they never ventured far inland. Open land frightened them, just as endless miles of water frightened men of the land. And so the heart of the continent, of the east, lay unexplored. And somewhere in it was contained a store of knowledge from the Blank. The Oragonians had proved that. Dynamite, aircraft, horseless vehicles…
        
        Yet it was not gadgets that the Shaker sought, but understanding. He had not been so fortunate as Gregor; his mother had kept no diary, and all she had left him were the tales other people could tell of her. It was little to go on, little to know her by. And all his life he had wondered after her, never grasping the illusive ghost of that long dead woman. Perhaps he would not find an understanding of her in the east; but he might very well come to understand the nature of a Shaker and his heritage, might be at last able to shrug loose of his remaining guilt. He was certain his mother had not died as punishment for delivering a Shaker into the world. He believed all such superstitions were absurd. And yet… And yet it would help so very much to know a Shaker's heritage was as simple a thing as the heritage of black hair or blue eyes…
        
        He heard Mace shift in the sleeping bag next to him.
        
        Gregor was already asleep.
        
        Guards huddled by the campfires, listening to the wind shriek, too puny to compete with its voice.
        
        He slept…
        
        
        Near morning, with light finally tipping the clouds and sending smeared fingers down into their encampment, Mace was wakened-not by Gregor who now posted watch-by a sound he could not immediately identify. The severe cold and the depth of his exhausted sleep had claimed some of his justly renowned speed of reaction. He sat up, listening more alertly for what he had heard.
        
        “You heard it?” Gregor asked.
        
        “Yes. What was it?”
        
        “A scream,” the neophyte Shaker said.
        
        Just then, they heard another: loud, long, terrified…
        

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    13
        
        
        
        The windbreakers had been partially re-positioned, a length of them turned perpendicular to the side of the mountain, and now divided the camp area into two distinct halves. This was done at Mace's suggestion. Also at the giant's insistence, all the men-except himself, Gregor, Shaker Sandow, Commander Richter and the Coedone Gypsy named Zito Tanisha-had been put on the windward side of the canvas. They huddled there now, caught in the malevolent hammer of the wind, in the stinging bite of the furiously whipping snow.
        
        It was not that Mace desired those enlisted men to suffer. He was thinking of their welfare more than anything else as he made these arrangements. But to do the work that must be done, all those whose loyalty was not certain must be segregated beyond the canvas, and Mace and these few with him must have the quietest side to work on. In that lot beyond the canvas, the killers waited. Mace was certain of the Shaker and Gregor. The commander did not seem to be a killer-and he could not have possessed the enlisted man's dagger which had done the evil work of this night just passed, the work Blodivar's scream had summoned them to discover. The commander vouched for Zito, and no one would ever question the faithfulness of a Coedone who had given his bloodied kerchief, as the dark Tanisha had given his to Richter. So the enlisted men suffered the cold and the wind-while those on the leeward side of the canvas suffered tension and split nerves.
        
        The scream which had awakened Mace had come from a short, quick-mannered man named Blodivar who had risen to discover that the other four sleeping men in his canvas-wrapped unit were not sleeping at all but were quite dead instead: their throats were slit from ear to ear in a secondary, grinning mouth. As the others woke, more discoveries were made. In five separate sleeping units, the same scene obtained: all dead but one man. Twenty-two corpses, and in each cluster of them, a single man had been spared. When two guards were found, kneeling by their campfires, knifed in the back, it was seen how such slaughter had been achieved.
        
        It was this touch of sadistic ghoulery, though, that