Warlock

Shaker.
        
        “That's what I have been wondering,” Sandow said. “That's the same nasty thought I've just had: we might all remain here like this tiger if we don't break out quickly…”
        

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    17
        
        
        
        With amber head and green body, crimson hands expressing his emotions better than his words did, fingers moving in quick flight before him, Commander Richter considered the danger they might all be in, and he tried to weigh it all correctly before taking any action that might be adverse rather than helpful.
        
        Multi-colored, his men listened and watched.
        
        There eyes were kaleidoscopes.
        
        They were still flesh, but the light from the prisms which so gayly colored them made them feel as if the first taint of the crystal blight had already gotten within their blood. Perhaps, already, minims of gem structures swirled through their blood…
        
        “But would we not already have changed?” Richter asked the Shaker, hands flitting, face melting honey.
        
        “I have no way of knowing that, But the fact remains that we assumed that only the plants had been transformed-when it was the animals, too, that were stricken, all living things.”
        
        They had found a dozen birds perched rigidly and eternally upon the glittering branches of the trees. Their colorful plumage was even brighter in the death than it could ever have been while they lived and flew. They watched the assembled men with hard, shining eyes that saw nothing at all.
        
        There was a snake, too. It had been found alongside the little clearing in which they now stood. It looked like nothing so much as a diamond walking stick.
        
        “If we take the gems with us and manage to escape with our flesh intact,” Richter mused, “will the jewels we carry away be deadly? Will they, at some later time, transmit this disease to us and bring about our destruction? And perhaps the destruction of the Darklands where we will take them when our mission's done?”
        
        “Again,” the Shaker said, “we can only guess.”
        
        “Then we shall not risk it,” Richter said, though he clearly loathed breaking his promise that all the men would know some wealth when they returned across the mountains.
        
         That will not be necessary…
        
        They turned, in all different directions, seeking the source of the words all of them had heard. In the fantasmagorical fountain of jewels, there was no one but themselves.
        
        “Who spoke?” Mace asked, his hand upon the hilt of his knife, his eyes shifting about through the trees.
        
         I have no name to give you, the voice said. In a thousand years, you see, one loses the need for a name and soon forgets who he was…
        
        “There is a real voice,” Richter said. “We are hearing a Shaker's tongue inside our heads.”
        
        “Not a Shaker,” Sandow said. “It is too smooth, too assured, too easily performed telepathy for a Shaker. Alas, we are not so well-talented as our visitor.”
        
        “If you have no voice and no name,” Richter said to the air around them, “perhaps you have no form, either. But if you should have features like other men, show them to us so that we may rest easy that we don't speak to demons.”
        
         Above you, the stranger said.
        
        They looked overhead in time to see the face forming on the fronds of the glazed palm trees, spread over an area of six feet, the face of a minor god looking down on them, from some equally minor heaven. It was an indistinct face in some ways, chiseled by the sharp edges of the crystalline structures. But they could make out this much about it: the eyes were very blue and deepset beneath a broad forehead and above a strong, patrician nose; the chin was square and strong and set with a dimple; the lips between the nose and the chin were very thin and not the least bit sensuous; it was a man, a young man with a flowing mane of yellow hair which curled down the nape of his neck and concealed his ears.
        
        His lips did not move as he said: I hope this is better. I had forgotten that men still of the flesh expect to view those to whom they speak.
        
        “You said something about the jewels we see around us,” Richter reminded the spectral visage. “Are