Warlock

springs from a hunger for understanding, for information, for knowledge. Perhaps I feel it to a much smaller degree than you, but it is there nonetheless.”
        
         And may your hunger be satisfied.
        
        “And may your hunger never be satisfied,” the Shaker said, exhibiting, in that strange well-wishing, his complete understanding of at least one angle of what immortality must be like.
        
        “Forming up here, Shaker Sandow,” the commander called from the front line of the men.
        
        He went to take his place before his assistant, Mace.
        
        They left that forest of glowing, polished trees, of crystal men and crystal tigers. And they walked forth toward the other wonders of this forgotten land…
        

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    18
        
        
        
        The following three days presented them with a great many strange sights and new fears. The only one of them who seemed not to be frightened of the eerie spectacles they discovered was the Shaker. Indeed, he exhibited the same almost childlike fascination with every new wonder they came upon, without regard to life or limb. After a while, many of the others began to think the old magician had the right attitude, for-though the rest of them feared the land-none of them had died or been wounded. Perhaps their bad luck was behind them and only good fortune waited in the ways ahead.
        
        Though a few of them came close to death and injury, the narrow escapes seemed things to laugh upon, good jokes-especially when they thought of what had happened to less fortunate members of their party on the slopes of the Cloud Range.
        
        They passed out of the jungle and found themselves in fields of stunted grasses where gnarled, rugged trees found footholds in the shallow soil and in the thick strata of rock just beneath. All the copses of trees leaned toward the mountains, in the direction of the wind, and afforded the only shelter from possible aircraft surveys of the land.
        
        Twice, glittering silver circles passed above them, humming slightly like a flight of bees. Both times, they were fortunate enough to be near concealment when the sound first came to them, and they escaped detection.
        
        In time, the fields gave way to a stretch of cold desert, flat sands the color of ashes, gray and barren of life. They skirted this area for a while, striking east some eighty miles along its southern reaches until it became obvious that there was no soon end to the wastes. Here, though, they seemed to be free of the air patrols which searched for them nearer the mountains, and when they finally stepped onto the soft gray sands and began the trek north, it was with a degree of assurance they would not have had closer to the Cloud Range.
        
        Although there was no life upon the desert, it was here that they met the next great hazard of their journey. Suddenly, without warning and-it seemed-without reason, towering geysers of sand would spout upward from the flat surface, a hundred, two hundred, even three hundred feet into the air. The earth would shake with some unknown movement beneath it, and the sun would be obscured by a haze of powdery soil that choked the lungs and made the skin dark and greasy. Several times, the booming ejaculations of earth nearly erupted under their feet, and they were sent in scattering panic to avoid being tossed into the sky and abraided to the bones by the steaming columns of sand. But always they were lucky, missed by miles or inches, and they progressed.
        
        And on the morning of the fourth day, they left the lifeless flats and gained ground where scrubby brush struggled for existence. Here, there were scorpion creatures as large as a man's arm, but the rattle of their claws upon the ground always gave warning of their approach, and no one was bitten, save Crowler, and his bite damaged nothing but his boot.
        
        Here, in the land of scorpions and mutated, scraggly brush that only barely sustained its existence, the first signs of civilization began to appear. At first, there was nothing more than an occasional thrust of refined metal from the bosom of the earth, like a broken blade stabbing the ground. It was always rusted or otherwise pitted with age, as the beams had been which the Shaker had seen in the forest, but it was something, at least, to indicate that they might be on the right