ow a Shaker's heritage was as simple a thing as the heritage of black hair or blue eyes . . .
    He heard Mace shift in the sleeping bag next to him.
    Gregor was already asleep.
    Guards huddled by the campfires, listening to the wind shriek, too puny to compete with its voice.
    He slept . . .
    
    Near morning, with light finally tipping the clouds and sending smeared fingers down into their encampment, Mace was wakened—not by Gregor who now posted watch—by a sound he could not immediately identify. The severe cold and the depth of his exhausted sleep had claimed some of his justly renowned speed of reaction. He sat up, listening more alertly for what he had heard.
    “You heard it?” Gregor asked.
    “Yes. What was it?”
    “A scream,” the neophyte Shaker said.
    Just   then,   they   heard   another:   loud,   long,   terrified . . .
    

    
13



The windbreakers had been partially re-positioned, a length of them turned perpendicular to the side of the mountain, and now divided the camp area into two distinct halves. This was done at Mace's suggestion. Also at the giant's insistence, all the men—except himself, Gregor, Shaker Sandow, Commander Richter and the Coedone Gypsy named Zito Tanisha—had been put on the windward side of the canvas. They huddled there now, caught in the malevolent hammer of the wind, in the stinging bite of the furiously whipping snow.
    It was not that Mace desired those enlisted men to suffer. He was thinking of their welfare more than anything else as he made these arrangements. But to do the work that must be done, all those whose loyalty was not certain must be segregated beyond the canvas, and Mace and these few with him must have the quietest side to work on. In that lot beyond the canvas, the killers waited. Mace was certain of the Shaker and Gregor. The commander did not seem to be a killer—and he could not have possessed the enlisted man's dagger which had done the evil work of this night just passed, the work Blodivar's scream had summoned them to discover. The commander vouched for Zito, and no one would ever question the faithfulness of a Coedone who had given his bloodied kerchief, as the dark Tanisha had given his to Richter. So the enlisted men suffered the cold and the wind—while those on the leeward side of the canvas suffered tension and split nerves.
    The scream which had awakened Mace had come from a short, quick-mannered man named Blodivar who had risen to discover that the other four sleeping men in his canvas-wrapped unit were not sleeping at all but were quite dead instead: their throats were slit from ear to ear in a secondary, grinning mouth. As the others woke, more discoveries were made. In five separate sleeping units, the same scene obtained: all dead but one man. Twenty-two corpses, and in each cluster of them, a single man had been spared. When two guards were found, kneeling by their campfires, knifed in the back, it was seen how such slaughter had been achieved.
    It was this touch of sadistic ghoulery, though, that made the murders worse. Now a man not only needed to fear death himself, but he must live in terror of spending a night locked in the cold arms of gashed and lifeless comrades, their blank white and sightless faces staring at him when he woke in the morning . . .
    And though it seemed like the ploy of a madman, Mace could see that it was not. The psychological weapon the assassins had devised here was more effective than the imminent scythe could ever be. For the first time, the men talked openly and unabashedly about returning to the Darklands and abandoning this quest. For the first time, mutual distrust of comrade for comrade was out in the open, manifested in a hundred little signs of fear and hostility. If they did not return but continued on under these circumstances, there would be a mutiny or a bloody siege of in-fighting in the manner of witch hunting.
    But the killers—one of them, anyway—had made a mistake, had left a clue. If they were clever enough and quick enough, they might cut the opposition's numbers in half, at least.
    “Zito,” Commander Richter said, “you will hold a drawn arrow in the notch of my bow, and you will stand eight paces from this spot.” He marked an X in the snow. “Mace will be standing behind each man we bring in, five steps behind the X. The moment one of our suspects turns vicious and tries anything, you will attempt to skewer him with an arrow in some spot that is not deadly. If you should miss—hardly a possibility at such a range—Mace will subdue the killer by whatever means he decides best.”
    “Bu' wa' is it tha' we look fo', commanda?” Zito asked. He looked quite capable, standing there, holding the weapon as if it had been in his hands from the moment he was born.
    Richter held up a curled ornament of metal no larger than the nail of his little finger. “This is from the hilt flange of an enlisted man's dagger. There is one to either side of the blade. Mace here discovered this embedded in the wound of one of Blodivar's mates. Apparently, it snapped off when the assassin drove the blade into the man's throat, and hopefully its absence has not been noted by the guilty' party.”
    “Ah. An' tha' is why ya' wanted ta' look at ma' knife!”
    “And you're safe, Zito. I am sorry if my suspicious mind insulted your heritage.”
    “Na", na'! Ya' must be sure! Ya' ha' na' choice about it!”
    Richter slapped the dark gypsy's back, then nodded to Gregor who walked to the slit in the canvas, pulled it open, and called the first of the men in from the other side: Sergeant Crowler.
    “May I see your dagger?” Richter asked, holding out his hand for the surrender of the weapon.
    “What for?” Crowler asked. He looked carefully around from man to man, licking his lips and steeling himself for something.
    Mace stepped closer in behind him.
    Zito Tanisha raised the bow and held it level with the burly sergeant's chest
    “I am ordering you to surrender it,” Richter said.
    “What does he have that bow on me for?” Crowler asked, nodding to Zito. “What is all this? You know I been a loyal man of yours for ten years now, and—”
    “Zito,” Richeter said, “if he does not surrender his dagger to me in the next ten seconds, put an arrow in him.”
    Crowler blanched, drew his knife and placed it in Richter's open palm.
    The commander examined it briskly and returned it to the squat non-com. “I'm sorry, Crowler. But we have a clue to the killer, and we aren't trusting anyone. And you were acting mighty suspicious there.”
    Crowler sheathed the dagger. “Only because I thought maybe you—maybe all of you were the killers!”
    “Call the next man,” Richter said.
    Gregor did the commander's bidding again and again, ushering one potential killer after another through the slit in the canvas where the ritual of the knife examination was repeated.
    His name was Cartier, and he had been the last man on that seven-man team which had met with disaster on the first day of their climb. The commander had said that only a madman would have tried to kill the six men above him on a climbing situation like that. Cartier was not a madman, but he was not merely a man, either.
    “May I see your dagger?” Richter asked, pronouncing the words in a monotone by this time. Of the forty men who had been waiting on the windward side of the canvas, thirty-two had already been checked. By this time, Richter operated almost like an automaton. In all of them, despair had replaced tension. It was possible, of course, that the killer waited in those last eight to be checked, but doubtful. Instead, it seemed more likely— considering the craftiness of their adversaries—that he had somehow managed to slip by them. This despair was also evident in the commander's tone.
    “My dagger?” Cartier asked. As with all the others, he did not know what would be asked him until the words had been spoken.
    “Yes,” Richter said.
    But Cartier made no move for it.
    “That's an order,” Richter said.
    “How am I to know that you're not all—”
    “Zito,” the commander said. To Cartier, he said: “If you do not surrender your dagger now, Zito will place an arrow in you to make certain you offer no resistance to Mace there.”
    Cartier looked about himself, at Mace and at the Coedone who stared back at him with a coolly murderous look that belied the strength in the dark hands that held the bow and arrow. He seemed like a cornered rat, and he hissed between his teeth.
    Richter stepped backward. “You have nothing to fear if you aren't the killer. Just hand over your knife—”
    In the instant, Cartier had the dagger in his hand and had leaped for the commander, snarling like some mad dog, his face expressionless but for the twisted sneer of his lips.
    Zito's arrow twanged. It caught the assassin in the neck and sent him sprawling at Richter's feet, blood pumping out over the virgin white of the snow, spreading around the gagging, twisting corpse like a burial shroud.
    Richter bent to the corpse, went to touch it, then drew back suddenly as snaking lengths of glistening wire rose through the clothes of the man. They waved in the breeze like the seeking lengths of cobras, bending toward the body warmth of the men close by, growing longer, dancing, singing in the slight breeze that washed them.
    “What is this?” the Shaker asked, moving in to look. Behind him, the other men moved in as well, staring with fascination at the corpse that was not just a corpse.
    “Be careful there!” Mace said, drawing the Shaker back. “I think those wires would spear your flesh and make you into another of whatever this Cartier was.”
    A murmur of agreement went through the ranks of the Banibaleers who looked on.
    Mace kicked the body over with his booted foot, danced backward as the swaying wire tendrils grasped at his leather footwear and sought to breach it in its quest for flesh.
    Wires sprouted from the front of the dead Cartier, just as they did from the back, thousands of them. He seemed to be a man covered with a wind-stirred mat of coppery fur.
    His eyes were pulped and gone. Wires rose out of them.
    His nostrils spewed forth curling lengths of shimmering metal which grew toward his lips like tiny streams of oddly colored blood.
    In his mouth: copper.
    His lips split open, and pieces of machinery, little tubes and gears, spilled out and down his chin.
    Bits of glass glistened inside his throat which hung open to their view.
    “Demons,” someone whispered.
    “No,” the Shaker said, almost absent-mindedly. “This is something from the Blank, a lost invention.”
    “But I knew Cartier since childhood!” someone protested.
    “And Oragonian spies reached him and used the science from gone days, from the Blank, and made him into whatever he is here.”
    Cartier's face split open.
    Desperately, the living machinery within him attempted to find another host.
    There was no more blood.
    The wires began to tangle with each other, snarled, weaved one another, collapsed, fizzing, dying . . .
    Smoke rose from the corpse, as if the machinery had used his blood for oil and was now grating against itself without lubrication.
    There was an angry noise as of bees swarming, then a strangled, ugly screech from Cartier's shattered throat as the inhuman machine tried to use his voicebox for some unknown purpose. Then the wires stopped moving and the smoke rose in a gush and the thing that had possessed him was finally dead beyond recall.
    They stood for a while, watching the smoke blow away from the corpse, listening to the howl of the wind, unable to cope with what they had seen.
    At last, it was Richter who turned the mood to one of determination. That is the sort of thing Oragonia would bring to bear upon the Darklands. If Jerry Matabain had his demonic way, your loved ones, your wives and children would be as those assassins which have stalked us: creations without souls, things more machine than man, with love and emotions gone from them and nothing but obedience to Jerry Matabain as their life's motivation!”
    “No!” someone called, furious at such a thought. And it had worked, this call to patriotism and to love of family, to fear that lies in all men—fear of losing their individuality. Other men began grumbling, angry at the treachery set loose among them and dedicated, as never before, to reaching the east and the stores of Blank era machinery waiting there.
    “But,” Richter said, “we are not yet free of this curse. There is another such creature loose among us. Does anyone here remember who Cartier spent his time with? Did he have a buddy, a companion he seemed to share secrets with?”
    The men talked among themselves, turned curious faces on each other, and in a few moments, the word came from several places at once, then was repeated everywhere: “Zito-Zito-Zito. Zito. Zito. Zito. Yes, it was Zito. It was Zito he was with!”
    The Coedone Gypsy stood where he had been, the bow in his hand. There had been but one arrow, and that was now embedded in the corpse of what had been Cartier.
    “It can't be so,” Richter said, staring at the dark gypsy. “You once gave me your kerchief. You swore eternal fidelity.”
    “An' it is na' true, either,” Zito said, approaching the commander with his tough hands spread to either side, as if he were as perplexed by these accusations as the old man was. “I wa' with him, tha' is sure. Bu' tha' does na' mean guilt! I am as loyal to tha' commanda' as—”
    He was no more than ten feet from the commander when a thrown knife buried itself to the hilt in the center of his chest, ripping cleanly through his bulky coat and spearing flesh. Eyes turned in the direction of the knife, stopped on Mace who stood in the position of a marksman. “He would have throttled you, Commander, or worse,” Mace said. “It was in his face, believe me.”
    Everyone turned to stare at Zito.
    The gypsy was looking stupidly down at the blade buried in his chest, swaying back and forth as his pierced heart labored to pretend that death was not present, and the machinery that shared his flesh worked to knit the torn artery inside of him.
    Mace spoke again, his voice self-assured, even though the dying man seemed only to be that and no more—certainly not a fiend whose body sheltered an alien life form. “You told him to do no more than wound the guilty man whenever we discovered who it was. Instead, he placed that arrow in Cartier's neck, a deadly shot.” Mace turned to Zito. “Were you frightened that what few traces of humanity remained in Cartier might turn on you and betray you if you only wounded him? Was it necessary to kill him so that he might not say the truth in his last moments?”
    “It is na' true,” Zito gasped.
    Blood bubbled up on his lips.
    He looked beseechingly around the group, and finally a man named Hankins stepped forward and went for the wounded gypsy.
    “No!” Mace shouted.
    But it was too late. As Hankins touched the dark Coedone, the gypsy snarled, clasped the man in a death embrace.
    Hankins screamed, fought to break loose.
    The Coedone's face split, spewed forth snaking wires which stung into Hankins, threaded his flesh and sought out the core of him, slowly turning him into whatever it was that Zito had been. The living machine shrieked in triumph, using Zito's vocal cords.
    From the ranks of the Banibaleers, four men threw their daggers. The weapons wobbled uncertainly, not made for throwing. But two of them found their mark in Hankins' back.
    The writhing figures dropped on the snow, rolled against each other like some grotesque pair of unearthly lovers. The wires grew over them both, using their flesh to support extensions, whining, swaying, seeking . . .
    In time, the machine was as dead as the men it had killed.
    

    
14



The windbreakers were taken down and packed away.
    A party was detailed to scoop out hollows in the snow, while a second party dropped twenty-four human corpses into the depressions and scooped loose snow over them. In time, they would be encased in ice, as fitting a grave for a mountaineer as any.
    The huddled, nightmare forms of Cartier, Zito and Hankins were left untouched.
    At Daborot's insistence, the men were fed, though no one had much of an appetite that morning. A bit of bread, some coffee, a little cheese, and a healthy dollop of brandy was the average lunch. No one, for some reason only partially understood, wished to partake of the salted beef jerky.
    Commander Richter pulled on the tough bread and looked down into the swirling mists and snow through which they must travel in the hours ahead of them.
    The Shaker said: “Eternal fidelity cannot exist, of course.”
    Richter said: “Of course.”
    The Shaker: “No man is eternal.”
    Richter: “Sometimes, I feel that I am.”
    
    
    
The Shaker: “And circumstances affect fidelity.”
    Richter: “Perhaps the knowledge of the Blank—perhaps it was not meant for us.”
    The Shaker: “For Jerry Matabain, then? You see, nothing matters more than knowledge.”
    Richter: “Love, family, children, freedom, peace.”
    The Shaker: “Ah, but all of them fall victim to the man with a little knowledge. With knowledge, he can take your woman from you. With knowledge, he can destroy your family and leave only ashes. With knowledge, your children can become his slaves, your freedom can become the product of his whim, and your peace will be shattered by his lust for war.”
    Richter: “You make me pessimistic.”
    The Shaker: “Not I. The world.”
    And then they went down, hand-over-hand, piton-by-piton, foot-by-foot, into warmer climes where they spent a night without terror. And on the evening of the following day, they passed the frost line and changed into cooler clothes as the mysterious lands of the continent's heart opened to receive them . . .
    

    
BOOK TWO


The East . . .



15



Forty-two men and four dark-feathered Squealers constituted all the living creatures within the Darklands expeditionary force as Commander Richter brought them, at last, to the dense jungles which they had observed ever since they had come out of the mists on the eastern side of the Cloud Range. They crossed more than a mile of open, stony ground where rocks thrust up like fragments of broken urns and shattered bottles, and at last they reached the almost impenetrable, steamy richness of the rain forest. All of this was accomplished at double the average marching pace, for the commander feared that the Oragonians might be running patrols of the no-man's land between jungle and mountains in their aircraft. They might have a contingency plan in operation to cover the eventuality of their assassins—Cartier and Zito Tanisha—meeting with failure. Forty-two men and four birds would be easy targets in open country for men riding in aircraft.
    In the winding vines and ropy, exposed roots of the towering, interlocking trees, they huddled in the dense blue shadows and broke open the mess supplies for a meal of chocolate, dried beef and dried fruit, coffee and some brandy.
    It was two hours early for supper, but the commander had decided that appetites came second to the safety of his men. The way ahead looked rugged, and he wanted them to be full and energized for the next leg of the trek. Also, he hoped to make a good many miles before camp, even if it meant marching until darkness barred any further progress.
    And darkness came early here, in the shadow of the great mountains to the west.
    It was not that he was in such a hurry to find the place to the north—two hundred miles east of the Oragonia High Cut—where the enemy was mining the treasures of the Blank, though he certainly did wish to fulfill his mission. No, what plagued him more was the urgency to be gone from this open ground, to be secreted as deeply as possible in these thickly growing trees and ferns, these vines and flowers that barred their way but would part before them. If a patrol plane cruised over their exit point from the Cloud Range, found their path, trackers might be set upon their trail; the more jungle between the Oragonian hunters and themselves, the better their chances of survival.
    And now that he had lost more than half his men, now that his own and—figuratively—the General's son had died under his command, only the eventual success of his mission could redeem him. And even that would not erase the screams he had heard these last days. Even that would not erase from his memory the sight of the men falling from that rope across the chasm, the sight of slit throats and dead men whom he had known as friends and almost as sons. Those things would remain with him; he could only accept them and go on if he had eventual success with General Dark's plan.
    The world, as Shaker Sandow had said, had made him pessimistic. Maybe he could force it to give him his optimism back.
    Shaker Sandow sat down on the cool carpet of ferns before Richter, looked around at the verdant landscape. “A geographic impossibility, wouldn't you say?” he asked.
    Richter noticed how the old Shaker's fatigue seemed to have disappeared. Out of the mountains and the cold, finally in the east where knowledge waited, Sandow was almost young again. “I hadn't noticed,” he said.
    “Here we are but a short distance from the frost line of the Cloud Range, from a climate of snow and wind and ice. Less than half a day's travel, even by foot. And yet we find ourselves in a tropical world of palm trees and what appear to be orchids. I have only seen pictures in old books and stories about the flowers of the Salamanthe Islands, but I would say this is much like the land about the equator: humid, heavily grown, with its own breed of animals and insects. Geographically, such a closeness of opposite climes is impossible.”
    “Yet it's here,” Richter pointed out.
    “Aye, and I've been attempting to discover why.”
    “And what have you found?”
    In the jungle, strange birds called in ululating lullabies to each other while others squealed atonally and rustled in the high branches.
    Sandow placed the palm of his hand against the earth after brushing away the ferns that obscured it. Richter followed suit, looked perplexed a moment. “It feels warm. But should that be unusual in a warm place such as this?”
    “It is unusual,” Sandow said, “when you compare it to the earth only ten feet farther on—there where nothing grows but a few mutant ferns that haven't adapted.”
    “What is the difference?” Richter asked.
    “There,” Sandow said, “the earth is cool, almost chilly. I traced the temperature change and found a precise line where the warmth ceases altogether and where the cold begins. There is no melding space at all.”
    “And what do you make of that?” the commander asked, genuinely interested.
    Almost too interested, Sandow thought, in such a minor mystery as this. To the Shaker, the old officer's motives were plainly obvious. In his desperation to forget the dead they had left behind them—the slit-throat boys buried in the snow and all the others back to Stanton's Inn where it had begun—Richter grasped at any diversion in order to remove the memories from the fore of his mind. It was a standard method of overcoming grief, of forgetting tragedy. If it should continue more than a day or two, however, it could swiftly become a psychosis that would endanger all the men in the expedition; Richter needed to be awake and alert with no regrets and no sorrows to dull the edge of his normally sharp mind.
    “It seems to me,” Sandow said, turning his thoughts again to the earth and the jungle, “that there is a heat source of some kind beneath the ground here which supports the tropical plants and animals, even through the winter months—though the top-most branches of the trees probably get frostbitten, wilt and die.”
    “Artificial?” Richter asked.
    “Perhaps. Or maybe natural conditions. One mystery would be as great as the other.”
    “Do you think it would be of interest to us to attempt to unearth this heat source?” Richter asked, brushing at the rich, black soil beneath the ferns.
    “Even if it were possible,” Sandow said, “I doubt that it would be worth our time. It was just an incongruity which I thought would—”
    At that moment, the Squealer keeper, Fremlin, approached them and interrupted the quiet conversation. He looked keyed-up, his eyes bright, and his slim but powerful hands busy in each other, his fingers locking and unlocking, pulling at one another with his overabundance of nervous energy.
    “Yes, Fremlin?” the commander asked.
    “The Squealers, sir. I've already eaten, and I've had time to speak with them, to give them their orders. Do you think I could turn them loose now and set them about their work?”
    “I suppose they're anxious, eh?”
    “Aye, that they are, Commander. They're cursing at me with some of the words they've learned off the men, because they want to be gone.”
    “Very well,” Richter said.
    “Thank you, sir!” Fremlin said, turning and walking off toward the cages where the four black mites waited,