Warlock

above them. Air was sheared apart above the submarine, and thin white vapor marked the trail of the first rocket for a hundred feet before darkness swallowed even that. The hissing came twice again in close succession, presenting two more wispy white tentacles that terminated in blackness.
        
        They waited.
        
        Time seemed to slow, almost as it had in the city when the Shaker had realized that he must kill in order to save young Gregor from that harsh burden of guilt
        
        The night remained black.
        
        The night remained quiet
        
        Then it turned white and red and made sounds like a herd of stampeding cattle running across the membrane of a huge drum.
        
        The grounds immediately below the castle walls burst with a bright orange flame as the implosion charges went off. Rapidly, the center of each spot was cored with a black blossom. The blossom spread, eating the fire, and left only the smoldering destruction, the slag of melted aircraft behind. The houses below were not on fire and appeared to be mostly undamaged.
        
        “Fire three,” Richter ordered. “And shift your sight fractionally this time, at discretion.”
        
        “Aye, sir.”
        
        The firing tubes whoofed again.
        
        Again: three white trails; silence in the guidance deck black and silent night; color and noise; the black blossoms, the consumed explosion, the rubble…
        
        “Raise your tubes another degree,” Richter directed Crowler. “We'll fire two rounds of three shells, then raise another degree. Then again until we have leveled everything on that slope.”
        
        The thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth shells struck the castle of Jerry Matabain, blew through the great stone walls and turned mortar and granite into component atoms which rose upward from the implosion areas in gusts of thick, gray ash. Men had run onto the ramparts, armed with hand guns and grenades, but could not find their enemy. The next three shells turned those men to gray ash, and made the summit of that hill as bare of life as it might have been upon the dawn of creation. If Jerry Matabain was in the castle, as was likely, there was no way he could possibly have escaped that holocaust.
        
        In the guidance deck, cheers rose from the men. They began chanting songs of a patriotic nature, slapping one another upon the back. For the first time since they had begun this long journey, there was genuine belly laughter. Not just chuckles, not just polite titters, but guffawing pleasure in what had suddenly happened to the man whom all of them had come to loathe since their youth, the tyrant Jerry Matabain.
        
        The Shaker rejoiced with the rest of them, although with a deal less heartiness. It had not seemed to occur to them, as it had to the sorcerer, that men had died under their hands just now. And not only men, but the wives and children of the castle staff and soldiers, innocent victims of a war they had not made.
        
        Richter had wine broken out, and goblets were soon filled with the purple fluid.
        
        The Shaker speculated on the impersonal war and what this new way of battle would mean to the world. Killing at long distance made killing so much more acceptable. It dehumanized the enemy, turned them into “things” rather than people, targets rather than men and women and children. Now, the Shaker realized why the Oragonian pilot who had killed so many Darklanders near the bamboo field could slaughter so ruthlessly and still call himself a human being. From his height in the silver craft, he was killing small, scurrying creatures, not other men. How much better for the world if war could be maintained on a personal level, when the soldier wielding only knives and arrows was forced to watch the blood gouting from his victims. If men were made to see the charred skin and the lopped heads, the shattered limbs and ripped bodies of their enemy, there would be fewer men-on every side of the issue-willing to take up arms. But now long-distance death had been resurrected, and the world could look forward to more of this. War would again become impersonal; man would play around with his weapons until he did again what he had done before: involve himself in a battle which he could never win, either against himself or other races in the distant reaches of the stars. How much