Warlock

no sorrows to dull the edge of his normally sharp mind.
        
        “It seems to me,” Sandow said, turning his thoughts again to the earth and the jungle, “that there is a heat source of some kind beneath the ground here which supports the tropical plants and animals, even through the winter months-though the top-most branches of the trees probably get frostbitten, wilt and die.”
        
        “Artificial?” Richter asked.
        
        “Perhaps. Or maybe natural conditions. One mystery would be as great as the other.”
        
        “Do you think it would be of interest to us to attempt to unearth this heat source?” Richter asked, brushing at the rich, black soil beneath the ferns.
        
        “Even if it were possible,” Sandow said, “I doubt that it would be worth our time. It was just an incongruity which I thought would-”
        
        At that moment, the Squealer keeper, Fremlin, approached them and interrupted the quiet conversation. He looked keyed-up, his eyes bright, and his slim but powerful hands busy in each other, his fingers locking and unlocking, pulling at one another with his overabundance of nervous energy.
        
        “Yes, Fremlin?” the commander asked.
        
        “The Squealers, sir. I've already eaten, and I've had time to speak with them, to give them their orders. Do you think I could turn them loose now and set them about their work?”
        
        “I suppose they're anxious, eh?”
        
        “Aye, that they are, Commander. They're cursing at me with some of the words they've learned off the men, because they want to be gone.”
        
        “Very well,” Richter said.
        
        “Thank you, sir!” Fremlin said, turning and walking off toward the cages where the four black mites waited, making strange, low chortling sounds among themselves.
        
        “Wait there!” Shaker Sandow called to the fair, well-muscled bird master. “Could I come along to watch?”
        
        Fremlin was glad for an audience and nodded approval as he continued on toward the birds.
        
        At the cages, the Squealer master knelt and cooed to his charges in soft, pleasant tones that reminded the Shaker of wind blowing against the open ends of bottles or of long, hollow pipes.
        
        “How many will you send?” he asked Fremlin.
        
        “Just two,” Fremlin replied. “I never risk them all at once. Besides, two will do sufficiently.”
        
        He opened the wicker cage to his left, and the two black creatures hopped out, scratched at the earth with their three-toed feet, fluffed their feathers and shook themselves, as if getting accustomed to the world outside the cage. At some unseen and unheard direction from their master, they leaped onto his arms, one perched on each wrist, and clung there as he turned to the jungle and issued some last word of advice. Then they were gone in a flapping, brilliant display of smooth aerodynamics, up, up and over the roof of the rain forest, away from the eyes of the men below.
        
        Fremlin watched even after there was nothing to see, then returned to the two birds in the other cage and spoke with them, consoling them for the necessity of sending only two and not all four.
        
        When he came to the Shaker, he said, “They hate the cages. It worries my heart to keep them there. Yet they were safer there in the mountains than they would have been on their own in those turbulent high altitude air streams. And down here… Well, who knows what sort of predator might lurk in those trees? Again, the cage is better. At home, beyond the Banibals in the Darklands, I let them fly loose by the cliffs, along the sea, and that makes them ever so much happier.”
        
        “What will those two do now that you've released them?” Sandow asked.
        
        “The commander wants to know how far the jungle extends to the north, how long it will offer cover to our march. They'll fly over the top of the trees, unless it seems to be too long a stretch. If they do not see some sort of end to it in short order, they'll fly high enough to look down and make an estimate of its size. Higher than we were when we came out of the mists on the Cloud Range.”
        
        “May I stay to hear them speak of it when they return?” The Shaker had spent some time with Fremlin and the birds on the first leg of the trek,