Warlock. Part 13

Shaker Sandow had pushed to the edge of his chair and held his gla.s.s somewhat tightly, though he had not stood up. In his years as a sorcerer, working for men of power and wealth, he had learned to accept all sorts of news with an equanimity that some men greatly admired, and which other men thought was nothing more than a sign of apathy. He had early discovered that the body wears better and the mind rests easier when news is handled as something ephemeral. If word comes that the villains triumph today-tomorrow will most a.s.suredly bring news that the heroes have won a battle somewhere else. The world rests most easily upon those who refuse to see it as much of a burden.

'Why should I lie?' Berlarak told him.

'But how could you know what transpires those hundreds of miles from here, across the Cloud Range and the Banibals?' The Shaker could see that Richter did believe, even though he did not wish to. The old man had set his teeth to hear the reply from the white mutant.

'You have seen my radio here. It works within the city only. But there are other, more powerful sets whose signals are received from satellites which orbit our world. The aircraft the Oragonians are using against the Darklands have transmitted this news which has eventually reached the enemy who inhabits the upper levels of our city. And we have overheard.'

'So now we have no choice,' Richter said.

'And the weight of the decision has been taken from you,' Berlarak amplified. 'Now, your men should be brought to the sleep-teach machines, four at a time, to receive instruction in the handling of the weapons which they will be using upstairs. I have also prepared a tape which will outline the plan that I expect to use.'

'More men will die,' Richter said, his shoulders slumped, his face empty and dead, 'A few,' Berlarak confirmed. 'But not many. We will have the advantage of surprise, and of the weapons they do not yet understand.'

'Not much surprise,' Shaker Sandow said, 'The fire in the cane field must be out by now. The Oragonians will have discovered that we did not die there.'

Berlarak grinned. 'We carried some bones from the wrecked train and deposited them in the cane field while a pall of smoke still covered our movements. We placed bits and pieces of your supplies there as well, smeared everything with ashes. They will be satisfied.'

At the disclosure of this piece of chicanery, Richter seemed to brighten. 'Perhaps, Shaker, we have aligned ourselves with winners, though I would have thought not'

'And you are winners too,' Berlarak said. 'We will all be rich in more ways than one.'

'Will you open the city to research by Darklanders, by myself?' Shaker Sandow asked.

'It will be opened to you, Shaker. Though the question that haunts you the most can be answered now. Your powers are not magics, just as you have long suspected, but something more common than that. Your powers are hidden within the minds of all men, though only a few are born with the ability to use them. Your abilities were once called 'extrasensory-perception' and were studied on many worlds, in many universities. A thousand years before the Blank, before men had even gone outward to the stars and met the Scopta'-mimas, there was a great war among the nations of the earth. Because of the radiation from that war, the after-effects of the weapons which were used, mutants were born. Some were changed in physical ways, into monsters which men put mercifully to death, while others were changed only inside, where it could not show, in the mind. You are a descendant of one of those whose mind was liberated, enlarged, changed. Yours is an inherited ability, more often than not. Your mother's death was none of your own doing, but the result of her own and your father's genes, as inevitable as the rising and the setting of the sun. And her death was, as you have surmised, caused by the transmission of your own birth pangs to her mind.'

Though a number of the words were strange to him and he could not fathom what they represented, Shaker Sandow understood the gist of what Berlarak had said. Here, in an almost casual conversation, without fanfare or publicity, the one great question of his life had been answered. The doubt which had driven him to cross the Cloud Range, to risk his life and the life of his boys, this single doubt was erased in but a moment, unexpectedly, miraculously. And to this mutant, the knowledge was no mystery, but a commonly understood bit of business.

The Shaker felt a mixture of sadness and joy that confused him and made him feel the slightest bit dizzy.

'Whom do you cry for?' Commander Richter asked. He sat down once again, drawing his chair close to the Shaker, and took the magician's hand to offer solace.

'I cry for myself,' Sandow said. 'I'm crying because of all the years that I have slept so lightly. Did you know that I wake at but the drop of a pin? And the reason, though I would never admit it to myself, was that I feared dreams of my mother. I had such dreams as a boy, nightmares where she came accusingly and took me to task for causing her death, for letting the demons s.n.a.t.c.h her up to h.e.l.l as punishment for her giving birth to a Shaker. And now I know that all of that was worthless, all of that guilt and doubt.'

'But that's over,' Richter said. 'Now is the time to accept the truth and rejoice in it.'

'So it is,' the Shaker said, drying his eyes and smiling, letting the last of sixty years of anguish drain from him.

'And there is much ahead,' Richter promised. 'For all of us. More than we ever could have expected.'

But Sandow no longer required rea.s.surances, for he had control of himself once more. 'Remember,' he asked, 'that I told you how each of us has learned something about the other on this trip? Well, I have also learned something new about myself, I had always thought that I held no claim on any superst.i.tion, as other Shakers do, that I was above such childish faiths. Yet, deep inside me somewhere, I had secretly nourished superst.i.tions. Secretly, I half believed my mother had been s.n.a.t.c.hed away by demons or condemned by angels. All the while that I professed to enlightened judgment, I harbored primitive fears. But that thread, at last, has been snapped. And because of this journey, I know myself better than I ever have.'

Berlarak poured more wine.

It was drunk.

'And now,' the white-furred giant said, 'we must prepare ourselves for the battles ahead. We will spend the day resting, learning about each other, and planning our attack. When darkness settles over the upper reaches of the city and the lights are automatically lowered in most corridors, it will be time for us to take the holdings of the enemy and to cast him out.'

'To tonight,' Richter said, toasting them with the last droplets of his liquor.

They repeated the toast, and then they fell to serious deliberations.

24.

Berlarak had removed the heavy metal grate which covered the accessway to the air-conditioning system on this lowest floor of the great metropolis. Inside, there was darkness and the almost inaudible hum of powerful machinery; the air was somewhat stale here in the midst of the machines which made it cool everywhere else. They went inside the walls, using electric torches which they had charged on wall outlets earlier. Dark, inscrutable machinery cluttered the walk s.p.a.ces here, humping up like queer animals, great snails with many appendages. On all sides, gleaming pipes disappeared through part.i.tions, so clean and unpitted that they looked as if they had been installed no earlier than a week ago; wide, hollow ducts which carried fresh, cool air into the chambers and corridors which they had just departed boomed as they accidentally stumbled against them while squeezing through places that had not been well designed to permit pa.s.sage. The only sign of life here was a single spider which hung before them on a silken thread, halfway finished with the ch.o.r.e of spinning itself a new web; it started at their light and movement, its fat body quivering in the flat air, then scampered up its own silk cord, disappearing in the impenetrable shadows overhead.

'The architects did not design much comfort into the access walks, because they expected the machinery to go on running smoothly for as long as was foreseeable. And they were correct. It still runs as it did in the early days, with but a few exceptions.' Berlarak's voice was low, whispered, yet contained that rumbling strength the Darklanders had come to expect of it.

In time, they found the stairs which Berlarak said were there. These were not moving risers like those in the main corridors which were now sealed off with rubble, but stairs not unlike those in Shaker Sandows own house in Perdune, though constructed of concrete rather than wood. They had been tucked into a dark corner of a dead-end walkway, further proof that the architects had never expected them to be used. Here, there was dust for the first time, half an inch of grayish powder on the stairs, the only proof of the centuries which had pa.s.sed since their construction. Their feet made senseless patterns on top of the patterns made by the white-furred mutants when they had escaped downward in flight from the Oragonians.

Two landings later, they left the stairs and worked through another level of air-conditioning equipment, of softly thrumming lines of power (and two more spiders), Half an hour after they had begun, they reached another access grill facing a second level corridor.

Berlarak switched on his hip-slung radio and spoke his name.

'Clear,' the voice from the bottom level answered. It was Karstanul, another mutant who had been left behind to monitor the city from the great television network in police headquarters on the lowest level. He had just informed them that the second level still contained no Oragonians.

'Cutting torch forward,' Berlarak whispered.

Two more mutants carried a tank of some combustible gas the Shaker could not identify. The nozzle of the cutting tool was lighted, and in moments the grill was cut loose from inside. They went through and headed quickly for the armory whose position all of them now knew-the sleep-teach machines having worked wonders for their coordination as a unit.

The door to the armory was also cut open, beads of metal falling to the floor, there hardening and glistening like gems. The weapons inside were rifled in search of the most effective devices. Everyone was armed with the strange and deadly artifacts from another era, things designed to kill the Scopta'-mimas but also deadly enough when directed against men. Within ten minutes, they had returned to the secret pa.s.sages of the air-conditioning s.p.a.ces, and the violated grill had been pulled back into place. It would pa.s.s a casual examination from the other side, but not a careful inspection.

But the Oragonians were not going to have time for inspecting anything!

Enc.u.mbered by their weapons, they found the going even more difficult than before, but they soon reached the stairs and continued their ascent. Four floors later, on the sixth level of the city, the first floor above ground, One Squad was detached and sent off to the grill, there to make their way through and surprise the Oragonians who went about their plundering with little concern.

This first squad consisted of Shaker Sandow, Gregor, Mace and Sergeant Crowler. Two mutants, detailed to cut open the grill for them, accompanied them, burned through the metal latches, then wished the four men luck and returned to the stairs to join the rest of the force for the journey to the higher levels. Since only Crowler was a trained fighter, this group had been given the level which contained the fewest Oragonians. There were but fifteen of the enemy established here, the television monitors reported, and such should be easy game for four men armed as these were.

They were to wait here until word came through from Berlarak, on the radio which Crowler carried on his hip, that all the units were in position and that the strike could begin. That might be as much as an hour from now. In the time that they had to wait, reduced to silence lest they draw the attention of an enemy soldier and expose themselves and the plan they embodied, Shaker Sandow had ample time to consider the men with him and to speculate on them in the light of the new things he had learned on this long trek.

Gregor was healed. The autodocs, those marvelous thinking machines, had swallowed him on a silver tray, had held him for three hours, and had spat him out in perfect health. There was not even a scar where his foot had been punctured, and he swore he felt no pain whatsoever. Yet, physically healed, his mental body was still wounded. He had never been so mortally hurt in his life, not even as his father had chased him with a mind to killing him when he was still a youth. Perhaps, in the years he had spent in the quietude of the Shaker's house, he had come to think of himself too specially. Perhaps he had begun to think that a magician's apprentice, soon to be a magician himself, was not vulnerable to the whims of fate. Now, having nearly perished, he understood differently. The scars of that rude awakening would require time to heal. He might lose some of that boyish streak of his, but he would gain a touch of manhood in its place. And that could only help. An immature Shaker does no one good, but plays pranks with his powers. Sandow had known one or two of those.

He turned his gaze away from the boy and looked at the dimly outlined ruggedness of Mace.

One time, not long ago, the Shaker would have said that he loved both Gregor and Mace but that, in the final a.n.a.lysis, perhaps he loved the young apprentice just a bit more than the hulking giant. He would have felt bad about such an admission, but he would have been honest in the making of it. Now, things had changed. There was no question in his mind that he loved Mace with every bit of his heart, fully as much as he could love Gregor, and perhaps more. In this long journey, Mace's clownishness had taken a back seat, and his manhood, his formidable strength and cunning, had come to the fore. Yet it was not only this show of adulthood and capability which made him more lovable in the Shaker's eyes: it was his obvious emotion and his limitless love for both his master and his step-brother. Though his power was super-human, he had stretched even that to the breaking point to rescue Gregor from the pulley. He had carried his brother on his back for some long while, never once complaining. And when Berlarak had a.s.sured him that the autodoc was bound to deliver up a healthy Gregor, he had still refused to go to sleep until his brother was safe before his eyes, laughing again and ready to joust with words as they always had. As a result, the giant had been the last to sleep-and still the first to wake, worried about the enemy above them.

He looked weary, sitting here behind the grill, within minutes of striking at the enemy. But his weariness and his travails on this journey would not change his personality. For the first time, the Shaker realized that Mace had long ago come to understand the meaning of death and the way of the world, unlike Gregor. He had learned nothing new about himself on this trip, unless it was the fantastic limits of his endurance. Mace would always be Mace, weary or rested, a granite resting place for the both of them in times of turmoil.

Crowler's shoulder wound was completely healed, and the feisty sergeant was more eager than any of them to be done with the battle ahead. He had no doubts about their winning it, seemed even more certain of the ultimate outcome than Berlarak was. All afternoon, during the training periods and the briefings, he was on the move, cajoling a man here, offering a word of praise there, acting as if he commanded the unit instead of Richter. And one day he will, the Shaker thought. He is the sort of man the commander is, just younger. When his day comes, he will be as good an officer as any man can be.

They waited.

The silence seemed interminable.

And then there was a crackling noise on the radio against Crowler's hip, and they strained forward, listening.

'In place,' the radio said. 'Move out.'

25.

They proceeded according to Berlarak's plan, lacking open the ventilation grill. It fell backward and crashed loudly against the floor, echoes ringing along the corridors like poorly cast bell resonances. The noise had no sooner settled than voices rose down the hall, growing nearer. When he judged the enemy was as close as he should be permitted to get, Sergeant Crowler rolled out of the air-conditioning crawl s.p.a.ce, onto the grate, and brough his weapon to bear.

He wore a harness of heavy black leather which cut him under the arms, across the chest and back. This affair held two light metal braces across his shoulders. Attached to the braces and curved out around his head, leaving the back open but the front enclosed, was a half-cup of some coppery metal whose front curve was studded with three conelike k.n.o.bs, the narrow ends of these projecting several inches beyond Crowler's forehead. A flexible metal cord led downward from this coppery section to a small packet which the sergeant held in his left hand. There were two b.u.t.tons on that controls package: the first fired the strange gun as long as it was depressed; the second stayed down when pushed and kept the gun firing until the first b.u.t.ton had been touched again, thus freeing the gunner's hands for close infighting while the braced weapon directed its charge at more distant targets.

Crowler depressed the first b.u.t.ton, using his head as a positioning instrument for the shoulder-mounted device.

There was no sound, no light, no show of projectiles having been launched. But Berlarak had called it a vibra-rifle, a sound weapon that worked with directional waves placed above the range of human hearing.

The four men fell, almost as a single creature, groped about them for the invisible enemy that a.s.sailed them.

The other three men of One Squad followed Crowler into the corridor, but did not augment his fire with their own weapons. That was clearly not necessary.

The Oragonians were pressing their hands to their ears, but to no avail. The vibra-rifle did not merely affect the eardrum, but cut through every cell of the body, interfering with neural control. That soon became obvious as the enemy floundered about on the floor, jerking spasmodically, legs twitching, flailing at their own bodies, jiggling like puppets on snarled strings.

Crowler kept the weapon bearing on them.

'G.o.ds, why don't they die!' Gregor asked, vocalizing the disgust the others felt at the nature of the weapon and what it had done to healthy men in so short a s.p.a.ce of time.

As if in response to this plea, the four soldiers stopped fighting the sound and lay still. Blood ran from their ears. Their bodies were contorted in impossible positions. Dead!

A bubble of digestive gases escaped one corpse's stomach, rippled upward through the dead flesh making the ghastly form stir slightly, and erupted in the corridor with a harsh bark, like the croak of some very large frog, a cold and unpleasant sound indeed.

Crowler rose to his feet, all the blood drained from his face at the sight of his victims, his nostrils flared and his eyes widened just a bit. 'Please,' he said, turning to the others, his tone almost desperate. 'If it's at all possible, I pray that you will use your weapons first-so that I don't have to employ this hideous device again.'

There were nods of agreement Crowler wiped beads of sweat from his chalky forehead.

The hall was quiet again. No one else had come out to investigate the crash of the ventilation grill, and no one had been attracted by the sounds of dying, for that death had been a quiet one.

'Let's move,' Mace said, taking charge of the unit in the face of Sergeant Crowler's momentary indecision.

Almost in the instant, however, the burly officer snapped out of his mood of despondency and was himself again, capable and ready. 'Yes,' he said. There are but four men here, leaving eleven others which we must find. According to our last data from the monitoring system, there should be five men working in a large chamber to the far end of this stretch of corridor. We'll take them next.'

They moved off, stepped over the corpses and boarded the pedways, the long rubbery belts embedded in the floor which served as a major form of transportation on this as on all other levels.

They were whisked away from the dead men on a pedway that rolled toward their next encounter at approximately ten miles an hour.

The Shaker felt uncomfortable with the burden of the rifle in his arms-like a wh.o.r.e in a cathedral, or like a priest in a brothel. Deadly things were not his metier. Perhaps, though, he could steel his mind to perform things which seemed impossible, just as he had forced his frail body into great endurance on the trek from Perdune.

They stepped from the pedway onto the right-hand walking ledge and crept forward to the front of the shop where the Oragonians worked. A sign above the entrance read WEAPONS FOR PRIVATE DEFENSE: BY G.o.dELMEISSER. Inside, the soldiers were collecting handguns to equip their brothers against the armies of the Darklands.

Mace stepped through the door, with Crowler behind in the event his own horrid weapon was required. The giant fired from the hip with the sleek, almost featureless weapon he carried. The three Oragonians there had only time enough to turn, startled, before they were knocked backward, against the racks of displayed weapons. They burst open like ripe fruits, staining the walls and the floor with their fluids, crashed onto the floor, nothing more than sacks of bones. The effect of this rifle had been even worse than that of Crowler's armament The three dead men were all but unidentifiable as human beings.

Three!

Abruptly, the Shaker was struck with the realization that two of the men who should have been in the room -according to their last data report from Karstanul-were gone. Then, to the left, a pair of Oragonian soldiers stepped from the entrance to another shop, talking intensely, almost unaware of the presence of the Darklanders.

Mace and Sergeant Crowler were within the gun shop and could never return in time to handle these two, Shaker Sandow realized that it was up to him and Gregor to handle the Oragonians and quickly.

Time! seemed! suddenly! to! flow! like! cold! syrup!

He had never been a violent man, the Shaker. It was said that the powers of a Shaker permitted long-distance murder if the Shaker was of such a mind and willing to expend the energy necessary for such a major task. Indeed, Sandow knew a sorcerer named Silbonna, a woman of some beauty and wit, who had been employed by one of the rival princes of the Salamanthe Islands to kill his strongest opponent in contention for the throne. It had been necessary for Silbonna to fast, to reach the edge of extreme hunger where all her perceptions were twice as swift, twice as nervously eager as before. Then, she had allowed herself a minimal diet of cheeses and wines and she had engaged in days of ritual chants to draw her powers down to a fine point; like the tip of a needle. And then she had thrust with that needle, had struck into the brain of the rival prince. For three days, with but one three-hour period a day for sleep, she worked that needle deeper, turning and twisting, until at last blood vessels burst inside the prince's head, and he was finished. What had her reward been? He could not remember. He just knew that his own personality would not have permitted such an act, no matter what the size and the quality of the payment Except once!

Once, he had used some of his Shaker's powers for a murder, when he had poured every ounce of his esp energy into sending Gregor's father over the wall and into the gorge by the streets of Perdune.

But even he had permitted the intervening years to color that incident a bit more pleasant than it truly was. Could it really have been his powers? he had asked himself. Surely not. A Shaker's powers could not work so quickly, without ritual, merely spurred by emotion and a sense of urgency. And yet! And yet he had never subscribed to the 'magic' theory, had always insisted it was something more concrete.

He! turned! and! glanced! at! Gregor!

Perhaps it would be best to wait, for the boy was already bringing up his weapon. Let Gregor fire the burst that would take down the two soldiers before them. Let Gregor do it and maybe he would grow a little more into a man than he now was.

He! looked! back! to! the! soldiers! who! were! just! beginning! to! notice! the! Darklanders!

No, Shaker Sandow suddenly realized, Gregor must not kill the men. It was he, Shaker Sandow, he could cope with b.l.o.o.d.y hands most easily. He and Mace could kill and somehow go on, recover. But the fair, fragile neophyte-Shaker was not cut out for it. Only within these last few days had he come to understand the true meaning of death and his own mortality. And it was a far larger step to murder another man. A step that might send the boy plunging over too great a drop.

Time suddenly speeded up, faster, faster, until it was moving at such an accelerated pace that it almost took away the sorcerer's breath.

He brought his rifle to bear.

He fired.

The Oragonians were flung backward, slammed against the floor, trembled for a few moments, and were still. Smoke rose from their charred bodies!

Well, Shaker Sandow thought, now I have truly come full circle in this life. I started out by killing my mother and have finally returned to death-dealing. I never saw her blood; I see theirs. But in both cases: death. The only difference is that I understand why death was necessary in this case, and I know exactly what my responsibilities are. And a man can cope with that Much easier than he can with demons and magic powers.

That's nine,' Crowler said. 'Six to go. Let's hurry before the rest of them get wise.'

And they continued on their mission. Wiser? No. More weary? Yes.