Warlock

surprise behind him, and he whirled to see one of the brutish creatures no more than ten feet away. It had seen everyone down and obviously expected everyone to stay there. It raised the weapon it carried, pulled the trigger.
        
        Up close, like this, Sandow could hear what little noise the gun made. It was like air hissing between a man's teeth in the sign of anger.
        
        Nothing more.
        
        Then he was bitten by half a dozen needles, and he went down on the floor with his comrades where darkness took him to its bosom…
        

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    22
        
        
        
        The eldest of the white-furred creatures was named Berlarak, and he sat now in a chair too small for him, holding a glass too ridiculously tiny to have been designed for his hands. He was attempting to make Shaker Sandow and Commander Richter feel more at ease. His voice was too thundering, too powerful, too gruff to set a man totally at peace, however. And the sight of that wizened, large-mouthed face peering from the fringe of white fur that encircled it-a human face and yet not a human face-contributed to a sense of unreality and of danger. Danger lay in anything one could not be sure of, and even the Shaker-more eager than most to accept the unknown-did not feel at ease with the towering apelike men.
        
        “It was necessary that we shoot you first and question later,” the creature said. “We could not know for certain whether or not you were with those who command the levels above this one.”
        
        “I assure you that we aren't-” Commander Richter began.
        
        Berlarak held up a huge hand for silence. “As I have said, we know exactly what your intentions were. We know who each of you is and everything that has happened to you on your way here.”
        
        “The scanner which you mentioned-it told you all of this?” Sandow asked. Only now was he beginning to assimilate what few things the white creature had told him in the first moments of his revival.
        
        “Yes,” Berlarak said. “It told us everything that we wished to know about you and your men. Rather like your own power, Shaker. Except that it must be attached to the skull in order to work, whereas your own powers can work at a distance.”
        
        “And it was from these scanners that you learned how to speak our language?” Shaker Sandow asked.
        
        “We had learned that earlier,” Berlarak said. He frowned, and the expression was truly frightening on that face. “We learned it from one of the first Oragonians we captured some weeks ago. We speak the same tongue ourselves, though with different inflections, with a handful of words you do not have, without some words you have acquired, but essentially the same. From that captured Oragonian, we made a sleep-teach tape on the scanners and learned the types of inflections which you people from beyond the mountains employ.”
        
        They were sitting in a small, wood-paneled room whose walls were lined with what appeared to be books bound in plastic, though the Shaker could not be certain if they were books at all. There was an odd chair in the far right corner of the chamber with a hovering cap of machinery whose purpose was unfathomable. On the desk behind which Berlarak sat, there were dozens of studs and buttons. They had already witnessed that, when Berlarak threw the topmost of the blue toggles, he could talk to others of his kind stationed in other rooms of this lowest level of the city. Wonders stacked on wonders, just as the Shaker had predicted.
        
        “And now you know our circumstances,” Sandow said. “But you have us at an unfair advantage.” He sipped his purple liquor and watched the white-rimmed face, not certain whether he would trust every word that Berlarak told him. The great creature obviously lumped all men from beyond the mountains into one category, whether they were from Oragonia or from the Darklands. Perhaps Berlarak considered them unutterably primitive and looked upon them more with scorn and disdain than with hatred. Either way, though, caution would be the best route to follow.
        
        Berlarak considered for a moment before he spoke. “I can see that it will only antagonize you to leave you in the dark. And since we wish your cooperation in things that I will mention later, it is best that I tell you all I can. In places, that will not be