Warlock

than ever. What a fool he had been! What a fool to risk everything to charge blindly into an alien land where the rules by which he was used to playing did not exist! He had risked both their lives as well as his own, and he saw now that the old have no rights whatsoever to ask the young to fight their wars for them.
        
        “Shaker? Where are you?” It was Mace's voice. He was certain of that, and with that certainty, he felt as if twenty years of life had been lifted from his shoulders.
        
        “Stay where you are!” Shaker Sandow shouted. “If you move, the reeds above will move, and they'll have something to shoot at.”
        
        “I've already seen that,” Mace said.
        
        Of course, he would have, Sandow thought. “Where is Gregor, Mace? Have you seen him?”
        
        “Beside me,” Mace said. “He was beside me out there, and I fair carried him in here.”
        
        “Fair killed me in the process, too!” Gregor called.
        
        The Shaker realized he was crying, and he wiped the tears from his cheeks and pretended he was too old for such behavior. The best thing was not that Mace and Gregor were alive and unharmed-though that was a godly gift indeed. The best thing was that, even now, they were jousting with words in the same good humor they always had.
        
        When the flesh dies before the spirit, Sandow thought, it is only a sorrow. But when the spirit dies before the flesh and apathy and cowardice set in, then it is a tragedy.
        
        The pilot dived, firing.
        
        Bullets snapped through the bamboo.
        
        Directly before the Shaker, someone screamed, and the reeds parted, admitted a pale, gangling youth with blood smeared all over his face and chest. He looked at Sandow who reached a hand for him. He took the Shaker's slim fingers, made a few inches on his knees, then fell over, his face shoved into the soft earth, and was done.
        
        The silence returned, then the screams and the moans of agony from the wounded and the dying. But one sound did not return: the hum of the aircraft. It had left them, at least for the moment.
        
        “This is the commander!” Richter shouted from somewhere closer the edge of the field. “We may not have much time, so listen carefully. We'll group at the edge of the bamboo, where we entered. If you see a wounded man as you come out, see if you can bring him with you. If you see dead men, note their names until you can tell me who they were. Now, hurry! The devil may be coming back with reinforcements!”
        
        The Shaker pushed to his feet, separated the reeds before himself and struggled through to the open where Richter waited ten feet along the wall of grass. He had not seen any wounded men himself, but others had. In five minutes, a list of dead had been prepared. There were sixteen men who would not continue the journey. Of the twenty-six who remained, five were wounded. Crowler had a shoulder wound that had already begun to clot; the bullet had torn clear through. Three enlisted men suffered varying degrees of injury: Daborot had a creased skull, from which blood poured freely, though it did not appear to be a serious condition; a boy named Halbersly had lost a thumb, but a tourniquet and bandages had already stopped the bleeding; Barrister, the soldier who had monitored the first climbing party that had met with disaster, was in the worst shape of all, for he had three bullets inside him-one in his right hip, one in his right side which had sliced through a good bit of meat, and the last in the biceps of his right arm. All the wounds bled, and all of them looked ugly. Fortunately, he was unconscious. And the last of the five injured was Gregor. There was a bullet through his left foot, and he could not stand on that leg at all.
        
        Mace seemed in worse condition than the apprentice “There was nothing I could do, Shaker!” he said, almost pitifully, his great, broad face deeply lined, etched with fear and anger.
        
        “I know that Mace.”
        
        “Perhaps I should have stretched upon him-”
        
        “And crushed… me to death… in the bargain,” Gregor said, grinning at his brother. They were brothers now, if they had never been by birth. Hardship had removed the “step” from their relationship.
        
        “How do you feel?” the Shaker asked the