Warlock. Part 5

'Hold on!' Mace called urgently. He was no mon than thirty feet from the boy now, his large face strained and flushed, even though most of his abnormal strength and will power was as yet untapped.

Gregor looked up at his step-brother, his face a mask of stupidity. He was, Mace could see, like a drunken man on the verge of stupor. His face was slack, his eyes heavily lidded. His mouth hung open as if his jaw had been unhinged, and curls of steaming breath rose dumbly through his lips, like smoke snakes in the cold air. He shook himself, aware of the danger, but the sleepiness remained.

Fifteen feet now.

Mace's hands burned with the pain of torn skin.

Ten feet.

At that moment, Mace was suddenly aware of what was happening to the fingers of Gregor's right hand, his last hold on safety: the fingers were loosening their grip uncurling!

The apprentice would drop in but an instant, in the blink of an eye, and that would be the end of it.

The giant thought quickly and wasted no time at all in pressing those thoughts into definite action. He released his hold on the highest line as he reached the inward point of his wind-blown arc. Flailing blindly for the bottom, east-bound rope with one arm, he used his other hand to reach out and dig long, strong fingers into the bulky clothing the apprentice wore, found a belt and gripped it.

No sooner had Mace's fingers taken the younger man's weight than Gregor lost consciousness altogether and released his last tenuous hold on the pulley line. But for the larger man, he would have finished his life at that instant of time.

Mace's other arm caught the lower line and wrapped desperately around it. Now the giant hung with the line cutting through the inner crease of his elbow joint. If he had not been wearing a st.u.r.dy mountain coat, the rope would have torn his flesh with a vengeance. Even so, it was going to be difficult to maintain such a precarious hold all the way back to the eastern ledge, even though he was more than halfway there by this time.

Or at least he supposed he was.

He dared not turn his head over his shoulder to look, for such an action might send them both plummeting downward. He faced the western side of the gorge, where only six men manned the pulley rope and the platform.

Though it seemed that his leap from the top line to the bottom one and his rescue of Gregor had taken centuries, little more than two or three seconds had transpired. And now as he felt the worst moments had pa.s.sed, he saw that such was not the case. Calamity struck again.

On the western side of the chasm, the added weight of Mace at the same drag-point as Gregor-combined with the sudden snap of his weight being dropped from the top to the bottom rope-became too much for the four anchor men who were trying to hold the pulley platform down. The device bucked, skidded across granite, ten feet closer to the precipice. One of the anchor men fell struck his head on a pulley stanchion and rolled the last five feet to the brow of the cliff, fell over and away to the hard death below.

'Just fine,' Mace muttered. 'Just wonderful.'

The three remaining anchor men were fighting a losing battle with the rollicking platform. It tossed like a ship on rough seas and began coming apart at its temporary seams. In desperation, the two men on the pulley ropes left their post and flung themselves onto the platform. The device ceased its frantic skittering and was still no more than a yard from the sharp edge of the cliff.

The pulley ropes ceased their thrumming, and some pressure was taken off Mace's tortured arm.

Now there was only one team reeling in the two men suspended near the center of the line, and the pace of the retrieval operation abruptly slowed. A lesser man than Mace might have given up in despair at the feel of that sudden slacking, but the giant clung stubbornly, gripping Gregor below him, and waited it out.

There was no thought in Mace's mind to correspond with: 'I may die!' But there was a thought, a deep fear which verbalized as: 'Gregor may die!'

There was an almost graveyard silence in the air. He could not hear the voices of the men on the east side; everyone there seemed stunned into silence. He was too far from the west brink to hear the labored breathing of the men there.

It was not many more seconds before he began to feel the pain in his left arm as the lower pulley line's pressure made itself felt even through his bulky coat. A dull ache had spread up his shoulder and as far down his arm as his wrist. His hand and his fingers were totally numb- and that frightened him more than the pain. He could withstand pain, but if he lost all feeling in that arm, he could no longer maintain enough muscle control to keep them safe.

Yet he could not shift and grasp the line with his hand, for his position was so awkward that the slightest relaxation in that clenched arm would spell the end of this adventure. All the spell songs of all Shakers would do nothing for their bloodied corpses.

He could hear the creak of the pulley wheels, which meant the eastern bank could not be terribly far from them.

He wished he could look.

But he couldn't.

The fingers clutching Gregor by the belt of his coat were shot full of needles which were tipped with acid. Or so they seemed. And already, paralysis was affecting his grip.

The lower rope slipped out of the elbow joint crease as he lost some of the pressure he had at first been able to apply. Desperately, he jerked his arm against his body, forced the sliding, tight line back to the nook where it had been.

'Not long, Gregor. Not long at all,' Mace said, but he was speaking for his own benefit, and no one else's.

If they died, what Mace would regret the most was letting Shaker down. The sorcerer had done so much for a small, orphaned child named Mace-so much then and so much in the intervening twenty years. To repay all that kindness and goodwill with failure was despicable.

Suddenly, he felt himself pulled loose of the line, felt his weight slipping. He tried to flail out to save them before he realized that his weight was being taken by two brawny Banibaleers on the eastern ledge. His shoulder and back had grown so numb under the wracking exertion he had forced his body to, that he had not felt the pressure of their hands on him.

He gave himself over to the solicitous rescuers and finally permitted himself to pa.s.s out.

10.

When Mace had come around some five minutes after his faint, he loudly proclaimed his fidelity and subservience to a variety of G.o.ds, major and minor, and he confided to everyone cl.u.s.tered about him that his safety and the safety of the apprentice Gregor was purely the result of an air sprite's whim. He explained that the fairies of the atmosphere favored those who had lived their lives in high elevations, as both he and Gregor had, nestled in the mountainous village of Perdune.

Aside, Commander Richter said, 'I was not aware that the great barbarian there was such a religious man.'

'The last time I saw him in such a mood was six years ago-when he lit a candle for a dead friend's soul.' The Shaker was barely able to suppress a smile, and the lingering traces of it curled the corners of his thin mouth.

'Then why does he-' Richter began.

At that moment, a group of five enlisted men returned from the giant. One of them was entertaining the others, and as they pa.s.sed, he could be heard to say: '! how a great, simple lummox like that could have done it! It was the sheerest luck-unless his air sprites are more substantial than the air from the giant's mouth!' Those around him broke into pleasant laughter.

'I see,' Richter said. He looked at Mace with more admiration than before. 'He plays his role even more completely than I had thought. Or perhaps he plays it so well that I had forgotten his true nature.'

'He is a complex lad,' the Shaker said. Then he turned from his boys and faced the old officer next to him. 'Tell me, how will we discover what caused those accidents? If accidents they were. Two men dead and almost a third-that seems like the carefully planned sort of accident, does it not?'

The commander nodded to the far side of the chasm where the other pulley had by now been dismantled and was being packed away in its component parts. 'When those five men reach us, we'll question them. Perhaps they know something, and perhaps-if our two a.s.sa.s.sins are in that group-the villains will have brought about their own end this time, by narrowing down our field of suspicions.'

'There's Gregor as well,' the Shaker reminded the commander.

'That there is. When he comes to, perhaps he will be able to shed some light upon this latest mystery.'

It was simple enough to trace the source of the treachery once everyone had been questioned. To find the man or men who had perpetrated that treachery, however, was nigh onto impossible. The agents of Oragonia worked quietly, cleverly, and without clue; the treason lay in a bottle of brandy without label or mark of ownership!

Hastings, Immanuli and Gregor had all taken healthy swigs of the potent brew before embarking on the hazardous journey across the gulf. A careful taste check and a comparison of odors between this brandy and a bottle of the commander's own, proved that what they had drunk was adulterated, perhaps with some sleeping potion of more than a small degree of efficiency.

No one could remember where the bottle had come from. Apparently, someone had given it to Hastings with the suggestion that he drink of it before crossing the gorge, to steel his nerves, for Hastings had been notoriously terrified by the pulley arrangement, though other rigors of mountain-climbing did not bother him at all. Immanuli, after watching Hastings to go his death on the rocks, might have thought he too required a draw on the liquor before following in deadly footsteps. Likewise, Gregor, after he had witnessed not one but two tragic and violent deaths, wanted something to warm his gut and stop the shuddering spasms that shook his thin body. But Hastings had mentioned no names. And no one would admit, of course, to having possessed the bottle at one time. Finally, no one could even recall having seen the bottle in anyone else's belongings.

Two more men were dead, and nothing gained for it.

'And we cannot even eliminate the five men on the western cliff,' Richter said to the Shaker. 'It could as easily have been one of them as someone over here.'

'I think it looks like snow,' Sandow said, indicating the leaden clouds that sc.r.a.ped by close overhead. Sometimes, he knew, the mind welcomed a change from one catastrophe to another, merely to be able to stop thinking about the first for even a moment.

Richter surveyed the sky. 'Aye, and we best be moving. At least we can get in two more hours of march before camp.' He snorted in disgust. 'I wish we could progress without being afraid to turn our backs on each other. That, more than anything, will sap our strength.'

They tied up in groups as before and started off on another steep but none too dangerous stretch of ground.

And the snow came!

In wintertime in Perdune, the citizens lived in a state of siege, walled from the rest of the world by drifting ramparts of white. The spring, summer, and short autumn were employed to store away the necessities of life through the long and bitter winter months. Storehouses were stacked high with fuel wood and blocked, dried mosses from the marshlands by the sea, beyond the Banibals. Every housekeeper had a larder packed to the beams, and the merchants made certain that their own salable foodstuffs were well crated to endure until the last month or two of winter-for if the season were longer than usual, they would turn quite a business at a decent enough profit. There were always those who prepared for the average winter, without thought to a late thaw.

In Perdune, by mid-winter, the streets were all but impa.s.sable, narrowed to walks by the packed, mounting drifts. Houses at some locations were swept across by snow-bearing winds until, at last, they were completely concealed from the eye, but for the constantly maintained channel from front door to street. Snowshoed teams of armed men patroled the drifted town, walking at roof level, looking for wolves. There were always some of them who did not leave the valley for the western slopes of the Banibals during the last weeks of autumn. Some stayed behind, their instincts failing them this once, and when they found themselves without food in a cold wasteland, they prowled the drift-packed village, growing emaciated, shivering with the cold, eyes red and weeping tears. Children were most often kept indoors during the hardest weeks of winter; in the beginning, when the snow had only begun to fall and mount, they went out to play and enjoy themselves, well aware of the isolation that came with later days; by January, the wolves and the fierce winds confined all but the stoutest citizens to their warm homes.

The residents of Perdune grew accustomed to this period of the year, and even seemed to look forward to it, despite all the complaints and the jokes about eternal winter and lost spring. It was a time to read, to forget commerce and enjoy leisure. It was a time when warmth and coziness seemed unbelievably precious and wonderful, by comparison to the world outside. It was a time for family games, for baking sessions in sweet-smelling kitchens, a time for games of a frosty night, played around a stone fireplace on the warmed bricks of the hearth, a time for quilts and warm chocolate in bed. When it was gone, when the snows began to melt off, a melancholy settled upon the residents, despite their proclamations of relief and joy in seeing spring approach.

But even a resident of Perdune, the Shaker thought, would flee in terror at the fierce weather the climbers had encountered far up the slopes of the Cloud Range. No sooner than half an hour after he had predicted the snow last night, it began: gentle at first, even pretty- later growing harsh and thick and difficult.

They had made camp at the bottom of a sheer wall which they would have to scale the following morning. Sheets of canvas were brought out from the supplies, and specially trained teams set to work driving the iron braces of the windbreakers into the earth. Even where there was ground instead of solid rock, the earth contained eighteen inches of frost through which the sharpened spikes had to be driven to insure safety. The ch.o.r.e was not a small one, and not without an accompanying rush of curses from every man so employed.

But even when the flapping, whispering breakers had been erected around the close-grouped climbers, some wind managed to reach them. It tore through the camp, sent columns of fine, dry snowflakes whirling like tornadoes It made them huddle over their hot soup and cured, salted beef, made them suck greedily at their steaming coffee and their private bottles of warming rum and brandy. There was no urge to conversation, and all but the guards were soon drawn deeply into their sleeping bags, scarfs wrapped about their heads, hoods of leather coats drawn up and pulled tight with the tie strings about their necks.

The wind was an ululating lullaby.

The cold dulled the senses.

Soon, they slept.

Morning came too soon, and no one's spirits rose with the dawn, for the storm had increased. The wind was a wild, screaming banshee that howled above them s.n.a.t.c.hed at them with strong fingers, flung them forward when they wished to go right, drove them backward when the only hope of safety was ahead.

It was almost as if the wind and the snow and the cold had aligned themselves with Oragonia.

There was no longer any opportunity for reverie, any chance to spend time in an attempt to discover the ident.i.ty of the pair of a.s.sa.s.sins. They not only had to struggle with the killers and the terrain now, but with the weather as well. Every waking moment was another battle in a war that it seemed impossible to win.

The following morning was spent in negotiating eight hundred feet of featureless, icy stone. There was no way around the verticle impediment, for it broke into an even more unmanageable chasm to the right and fell away into nothingness to the left. Once above it, it seemed they could make use of a chimney of stone which would protect them from the elements for another fifteen hundred feet. Yet no one permitted himself to consider such a heavenly possibility, lest it prove false and shatter all the hopes built for it.

They scaled the face in teams of three and four in order to diminish the dimensions of any possible disaster. The ninth group that started up the wall was struck by an almost consciously malicious wind of such a degree of viciousness as to almost insure their deaths. On the top of the cliff, men grabbed for pitons which were jammed into the thick ice crust. At the base, men were blown from their feet, sent tumbling along in the snow until they could find something to grasp and hold to. But out there on the blank face, strung together by a pitiful rope, cringing to the toothpick handholds of their pitons, the four-man climbing team could hardly hope to last for long.

And did not!

The second man from the top was ripped loose by the wind, slammed against the stone, then flung outward over nothingness. Yet he was still safe enough, held to his stable comrades by the team line. How long the others could accept his weight and still cope with the storm was a question no man could answer. As it turned out, they did not have to struggle much longer. The last man's foot slipped from his piton, and he dropped, taking up slack in the team line, his sudden jerky slip pulling his upper hand piton loose as well. When the jarring tug of that fall reached the others, the final two men were ripped from their desperate holds to the cliff face, and all four of them went flying outward and down as the wind flung them over the heads of the men below, took them to the left and over the side into the bottomless cleft in the earth where mists and swirling clouds of snow eventually obscured them and blotted out their faint-hearted screams.

Sixty-four enlisted men, three officers, and the Shaker and his boys. Soon, the killers would be easily found, for there would be no one left but a.s.sa.s.sins and their last victims. Richter agreed with the Shaker that the four deaths on the wall had not been in the a.s.sa.s.sins' plans but were genuine accidents. They both voiced hopes that both the killers had been in that party. But neither believed his own wishful thinking.

Indeed, there was a fifteen hundred-foot verticle flue of stone above the cliff, and for a time they were sheltered from the wind, though the loud whistling of it across the top of the chimney almost deafened the men climbing inside.

The afternoon stretched on toward evening.

The snow was up to the knee now, deeper at places where drifts had built up.

Ice packed the coats and britches of the climbers as the wind drove the hard grains of snow against them. Richter had early advised Shaker Sandow, Mace, and Gregor not to break the crusted ice loose from them-selves, for it added a layer of protection against the fierce wind-no matter what its added weight might do to their pace and their sense of comfort. Comfort hardly mattered when even the preservation of life was in doubt.

Everyone wore tightly knitted masks of wool with eye slits and a gash across the mouth for breath to be drawn more easily. Still, it was best to close the eyes as often as possible, even if only for a few seconds at a time. The temperature had dropped so low that tears froze on the skin even beneath the woolen climbing masks. One was also forced to breathe shallowly lest the lungs freeze with the gulping intake of great quant.i.ties of sub-zero air. There were fifty-two degrees of frost, Sergeant Crowler said-twenty degrees below zero-and the tender tissue of the lung collapsed under that if it was taken in too heartily. The slower breathing also slowed their pace, but Richter refused to call a halt until he had found some place better than open ground for the making of camp.

'In the open,' the tough old officer had told Mace, 'we will all surely freeze to death this night!' He had given Mace the duty of keeping his eyes open for the sign of a cave which might be all but drifted shut with snow. He trusted the giant's eyes more than even his own, and he was known for his hawklike vision.

Even under the fur-lined hoods of their coats, their ears grew cold and enflamed.

Even through the thickness of two pair of gloves, their fingers became frost-bitten, and they had to exercise their hands, slap them against their thighs as they walked.

It was almost five-thirty with darkness closing in around them, when young Captain Belmondo died.

Not ten minutes earlier, he had taken half an hour duty in the lead, testing for snow bridges which had now become an ever-present danger. Whistling sheets of snow could drift outward from two opposing cliffs and form a crust across a narrow gorge perhaps as wide as twenty feet in these high winds. The way would appear as safe as any, but the unwary climber would be setting foot on cotton and would plummet through to destruction.

Belmondo walked carefully, almost cowardly. Since he had taken the advance position, the pace had slowed by half, even though the weather had already slowed them considerably. He never moved a foot without first testing for solid ground again and again. That was why it was such a shock to everyone when, suddenly, he found himself in the middle of a snow bridge that was giving way beneath him.

He turned, scrambling back toward Richter who was reaching for him. But the crust cracked, shivered, fell and he was gone, his face so terror-stricken and his mind so dumbfounded by the realization of his own death, that he had no chance at all to scream.

Immediately, Commander Richter ordered all the Banibaleers onto their hands and knees so as to distribute their weight over four points rather than two. They also eased away from one another, for there was no way of telling how many of them had strayed onto the shaky bridge of snow that was now the only thing barring them from oblivion.

Also on their hands and knees, Richter and Crowler crept forward to the hole Belmondo had made. Looking down, they saw the battered corpse two hundred feet below, wedged in snow-swirled rocks. It was easy to see what had happened. Once the bridge had been formed, the wind had continued to whistle underneath, packed more and more snow on, blowing harder and harder until the bottom layers began to turn to ice. Perhaps two inches of clear, hard ice bottomed the snow bridge. It was this hard surface which Belmondo had felt with his probe and which he had taken to be solid earth. He had been trained to distinguish the sound of an ice sub-structure, but he had either never learned it properly or had forgotten.

And now he was dead because of it.

'It should be st.u.r.dy enough to support the men until they get off, don't you think?' Crowler asked Richter did not answer.

'Sir?'

Richter stared down the hole.

'Sir, the men?'

Richter stared at the body.

Slowly, his mask pulled back from his face to give him a better view, Richter began to weep. The tears froze on his cheeks!

11.