Warlock

madman, but he was not merely a man, either.
        
        “May I see your dagger?” Richter asked, pronouncing the words in a monotone by this time. Of the forty men who had been waiting on the windward side of the canvas, thirty-two had already been checked. By this time, Richter operated almost like an automaton. In all of them, despair had replaced tension. It was possible, of course, that the killer waited in those last eight to be checked, but doubtful. Instead, it seemed more likely- considering the craftiness of their adversaries-that he had somehow managed to slip by them. This despair was also evident in the commander's tone.
        
        “My dagger?” Cartier asked. As with all the others, he did not know what would be asked him until the words had been spoken.
        
        “Yes,” Richter said.
        
        But Cartier made no move for it.
        
        “That's an order,” Richter said.
        
        “How am I to know that you're not all-”
        
        “Zito,” the commander said. To Cartier, he said: “If you do not surrender your dagger now, Zito will place an arrow in you to make certain you offer no resistance to Mace there.”
        
        Cartier looked about himself, at Mace and at the Coedone who stared back at him with a coolly murderous look that belied the strength in the dark hands that held the bow and arrow. He seemed like a cornered rat, and he hissed between his teeth.
        
        Richter stepped backward. “You have nothing to fear if you aren't the killer. Just hand over your knife-”
        
        In the instant, Cartier had the dagger in his hand and had leaped for the commander, snarling like some mad dog, his face expressionless but for the twisted sneer of his lips.
        
        Zito's arrow twanged. It caught the assassin in the neck and sent him sprawling at Richter's feet, blood pumping out over the virgin white of the snow, spreading around the gagging, twisting corpse like a burial shroud.
        
        Richter bent to the corpse, went to touch it, then drew back suddenly as snaking lengths of glistening wire rose through the clothes of the man. They waved in the breeze like the seeking lengths of cobras, bending toward the body warmth of the men close by, growing longer, dancing, singing in the slight breeze that washed them.
        
        “What is this?” the Shaker asked, moving in to look. Behind him, the other men moved in as well, staring with fascination at the corpse that was not just a corpse.
        
        “Be careful there!” Mace said, drawing the Shaker back. “I think those wires would spear your flesh and make you into another of whatever this Cartier was.”
        
        A murmur of agreement went through the ranks of the Banibaleers who looked on.
        
        Mace kicked the body over with his booted foot, danced backward as the swaying wire tendrils grasped at his leather footwear and sought to breach it in its quest for flesh.
        
        Wires sprouted from the front of the dead Cartier, just as they did from the back, thousands of them. He seemed to be a man covered with a wind-stirred mat of coppery fur.
        
        His eyes were pulped and gone. Wires rose out of them.
        
        His nostrils spewed forth curling lengths of shimmering metal which grew toward his lips like tiny streams of oddly colored blood.
        
        In his mouth: copper.
        
        His lips split open, and pieces of machinery, little tubes and gears, spilled out and down his chin.
        
        Bits of glass glistened inside his throat which hung open to their view.
        
        “Demons,” someone whispered.
        
        “No,” the Shaker said, almost absent-mindedly. “This is something from the Blank, a lost invention.”
        
        “But I knew Cartier since childhood!” someone protested.
        
        “And Oragonian spies reached him and used the science from gone days, from the Blank, and made him into whatever he is here.”
        
        Cartier's face split open.
        
        Desperately, the living machinery within him attempted to find another host.
        
        There was no more blood.
        
        The wires began to tangle with each other, snarled, weaved one another, collapsed, fizzing, dying…
        
        Smoke rose from the corpse, as if the machinery had used his blood for