Warlock

rooms on either side of the corridor, and the first four on either side presented sleepy men reacting to the rise and dress order with a mixture of surprise and agitation. The other six rooms on either side, containing a total of twenty-four men, yielded something altogether different and altogether unsettling.
        
        “Commander!” Crowler called as he returned from the fifth room on the right. “Here immediately, sir!”
        
        There was an urgency in the squat man's voice that drew the others back from the end of the hall where they were on their way to wake the men on the third floor of the inn.
        
        “What is it?” Richter asked as they reached the now shaken, pale-faced Crowler.
        
        “In there, sir. Two dead men.”
        
        On the beds, two corpses lay wide-eyed, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. In the flickering illumination provided by the lamp which Crowler had lighted, the copious amounts of blood looked strangely black instead of red.
        
        “Throats slit, sir,” Crowler said. “Some stinking scum cut them open while they slept!” There was absolute murder in the sergeant's voice. His hands gripped the back of a desk chair so harshly that the spindly wood began to snap and splinter.
        
        “The other rooms,” Richter said, returning to the corridor.
        
        The four of them split up at that suggestion and checked the remaining eleven rooms on that floor. In every case, there were two dead men in each room, lying in their sheet, gouts of blood spilled across the mattresses, splattered on the walls behind them.
        
        When they regrouped in the corridor, Belmondo was trembling, his face drawn, his mouth loose, on the verge of being terribly ill. The rest of them were angry, but not ready to collapse from such a sight, being harder men by nature. Both Richter and Mace were possessed of a cold and even fury of the kind which is all but invisible on the surface but which spells death to the man against whom it is directed. Sergeant Crowler was of a different nature, loudly furious, the sort of man to rend things, to curse and kick his anger out on inanimate objects. His face was frightfully red.
        
        “But why didn't he kill everyone on this floor?” Richter asked.
        
        “Perhaps he heard you coming,” Crowler said. “Such a man would have a good ear. It comes with his profession.”
        
        “We had better wake those above,” the commander said. “Then we'll find out who has left his room tonight. Surely his mate will know and tell.”
        
        “Not surely,” Mace said. “There were quite obviously two assassins. Needless to say, they will have shared a room and will vow for each other.”
        
        “Why two?” Sergeant Growler asked.
        
        “All the dead were still in their beds,” Mace said. “One killer could not have knifed one man-in every case- without waking the soldier in the second bed in the process. Two men entered each room and struck simultaneously. They have a fine sense of precision.”
        
        Half an hour later, all the men had been assembled in the public lobby, and each man had vowed for his mate. Richter was furious at such perfidy but finally separated the remaining seventy-six enlisted men into two groups, one to bunk in the lobby and the other in the dining room. Sergeant Crowler and two randomly selected privates were to guard the lobby. Three men whom the commander most trusted were selected for duty in the dining hall
        
        “Thank your master for the warning,” Richter said. “And tell him that we wish to consult with him inside the hour. If he could, perhaps, perform a reading of our troops, he could uncover the villains in this affair.”
        
        “I will tell him, within the hour,” Mace said. “But a word or two with you, privately.”
        
        Richter raised his eyebrows, then excused himself from Belmondo and took Mace to a pantry. Back among the sacks of flour and the boxes of dried fruits, the old officer looked inquiringly at the giant. “What bothers you?”
        
        “If we reject the notion that the assassins did not finish their skullduggery on the second floor because we interrupted them, there is another possibility that arises.”
        
        “Yes?” In the confines of the musty room, the old man's voice seemed abnormally loud,