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 scraped 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 impassable, 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 chore 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 snatched 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 identity of the pair of assassins. 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 assassins and their last victims. Richter agreed with the Shaker that the four deaths on the wall had not been in the assassins' 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 quantities 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 sturdy 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



Shaker Sandow sat with Commander Richter, separated from the other members of the Banibaleer party not by geography so much as by mood. The rest of the men were, if not jubilant, at least relieved and pleased that Mace had spotted the mouth of this cave system where they were now spending the night. It was not exactly warm in the caves, but at least the cutting whip of the wind was killed and a man could finally draw his breath in some fashion close to normal. Richter, on the other hand, was morose. He was so dejected and defeated that his face had taken on more deep lines and his flesh had lost most of its color, so that he seemed ten years older than when he had begun this journey but a few days ago.
    For an hour, ever since they had settled into this cold-walled place, the Shaker had been trying to tip the heavy urn of the commander's emotions, to spill the sorrow there and get him to talk, to break his dumb silence. He thought it very likely that they might not survive this trip without the leadership of this tough and wizened officer. Thus far, the men had followed him, despite rumors of hideous dimensions, and despite reality of some hideousness itself. They had shrugged off disaster and assassins to follow. No one else in the party had that quality: not Crowler nor Mace nor, gods knew, the Shaker. But talking to Richter now was like speaking to stone rather than to flesh and blood.
    He had one more tact. He tried it.
    “Commander,” Sandow said with more than a trace of loathing and more than a bit of brutality, “I'm sorry that you've deserted your men and that you care so little for them that you would see them die. I'm sorry I took you for a good officer when you were not. But I can't waste more time with you, for I have to help Crowler pull some things together.” It was blunt, certainly cruel, but it worked. The Shaker was well aware that the commander looked upon his men with a special fondness and that the old man respected the calling of duty to the enlisted men more, perhaps, than the powers of any god.
    “Stay!” Richter said, grasping the Shaker's arm as the magician rose to leave him there in the corner of the second cavern, in shadows and disgrace.
    “I have no time to humor old women,” Shaker Sandow said, hating himself for his attitude, even while he realized it was the only attitude he had left to use.
    “I'm all right now,” he said. “I'll take command again. But first, sit with me. Understand me. I must have your trust and confidence in this awful trek, or all will be lost.”
    The Shaker sat again, though he kept his face an expressionless mask.
    “Before I left the capital, back in the Darklands, some three months before this venture, I was given a special duty by General Dark—whom I've known ever since the wars to liberate the southern regions of Oragonia some forty years ago. He entrusted me with his only son; the General has four wives, and but one of them has borne him other than healthy, lovely girls. The General told me I was the only man he could entrust with the job of making his son into a man. I accepted, for more reasons than to please my friend and General.”
    “I fail to see your point yet, unless . . .”
    “Exactly,” Commander Richter said. “Jan Belmondo was not his name. Our dead Captain was Jamie Dark, son of the General we both owe our freedom and our limited democracy to.”
    The Shaker shook his head sadly. Candles flamed up in various drafts in the caverns, sending skittering shadows across the walls. “But he was such a cowardly boy,” the Shaker said.
    “The General did not wish to admit that to himself,” Richter said, “though he knew it deep inside. He thought, perhaps, I could succeed in giving the boy courage where others had failed. And so Jamie came under my auspices under a false name. He would have come as an enlisted man, except he refused that and forced his father into giving him rank.”
    “And now you will be in trouble for his death?” the Shaker asked.
    “No,” Richter said. “The General and I are too close for that. He will know it was inevitable. I will be saddened terribly in reporting this news to the General, for it may mean that he will have no successor to his title. Surely, he cannot live long enough to foster another son and have him grown in time to take the reins of state. It is a bad sign for all of the Darklands, not just for the General.”
    “It is a great sadness, yes,” the Shaker said. “But we will survive it, and as we have survived greater moments of tragedy. And, too, one must reason that if the boy would never become a man, it is as well that he has not survived to take those reins.”
    “Perhaps,” the commander said. “But there is more and worse to my situation.”
    The Shaker waited. A candle guttered out across the cavern, leaving one group of men in darkness. Someone went to pull another tallow from the supplies, and in a moment there was softly shimmering orange light against that wall again. Someone laughed, and the brightly illuminated group huddled over some joke or other.
    “Jamie was the son of a woman named Minalwa, a dark and beautiful woman with large eyes, long hair, and high, full breasts, with a laugh like that of birds and a voice that was a whisper. The General and I both were in love with her at one time. Perhaps I should have contested his claim. He never realized how I felt, and I'm certain he would have relinquished her if he had understood. But in those days, I worshipped him—still do—as we all did for delivering us from the string of Oragonian tyrants that had made life so terribly miserable for us all. I could not trespass on his wants. And I lost the woman. In time, however, I discovered that she felt much the same about me, and because our mutual affections led us to foolishness, I got her with child.  He was  a boy, and his name was Jamie Dark, for his father thought it best to leave the General under the impression Minalwa's baby was his own. Besides saving ill blood, I thought my boy would one day rule the Darklands, which was more of a heritage than I could ever give him. But he became what he was, a coward, and my adultery was punished by the gods.
    “Now, you see, I must cope with the sadness of my lifelong friend, the General. I must cope with my own sadness over the death of my own son. And I must live with the knowledge that I once sinned and that my sinning led to the death of Jamie in the end.”
    “One can blame himself too much for things which are beyond the control of men. Sometimes, simple acceptance is all we have.”
    “True enough. But sometimes, acceptance requires a bit of time. Will you stay with me, at least in spirit, until this night has given me that time?”
    The Shaker said that he would. In the two great caverns, relatively warm for the first time in days, the Banibaleers curled and slept, their bellies freshly filled with warm broth, stale bread, and dried beef.
    Outside, the storm grew in fury, into impossible peaks of howling, thundering wind and impenetrable curtains of snow . . .
    

    
12



They reached the pass late the next afternoon.
    Before making camp, they had descended a good two thousand feet of the eastern slopes. Even standing on the brink of the pass, so far above the valley where Perdune lay, they could not see the tops of the gigantic mountains around them. Clouds obscured the towering peaks and gave the illusion that there really was no stopping place for them. Two thousand feet down, they found an overhang which sheltered a piece of land from the wind and from the worst of the driving sheets of snow which had become so dense as to almost bar their progress.
    The cold had been unbelievable for the last several hours, dropping to forty-one degrees below zero, so that frostbite was a constant danger. The commander would have preferred to move down at least another five thousand feet where it might be as much as thirty and surely no less than twenty degrees warmer. But the men, sapped by the day-long battle with the wind and the cold and the snow which nearly blinded them, could not have managed the descent. There would have been more deaths, and no one wanted to risk that. When the overhang was found, the old man made the decision to remain there, using up all their stores of fuel in the hopes of making it far enough down the next day to be able to survive the following night without fuel.
    Fires were built, and special duty rosters were established to take care of them. The windbreakers were strung across the front of the overhang, attached to the jutting rock above and driven into the stone below. The heat was held in where the men huddled, but even so it would be a chilly night indeed.
    Commander Richter stopped by the spot where the Shaker and his boys sat bundled together, eating the plentiful meal that Daborot had prepared for them. “It seems like the last meal before the execution,” the Shaker said.
    “I should hope it isn't,” the commander said. “How are you? The men complain of great tiredness. Tomorrow may take us down most of the way if we don't despair too much.”
    “If they let themselves grow weary,” Mace said, “I'll carry them. I never despair.”
    “Yes, a sorrow that we don't all have your foolish cheerfulness in times like this,” Gregor said, grinning at his step-brother.
    “I'm passing an order that all men will sleep in groups of five or six during the night,” the commander said. “Each man in his sleeping bag, and each group further wrapped in a length of canvas. We will need all the warmth we have to pass the night alive.”
    “The three of us will be all right together,” Mace said.
    “I had thought you would not want anyone else in your wrappings,” Richter said. “It is just as well. I think the other men may be safer this way, since only two of any five or six could be the assassins. And even if they get into the same group, they will be outnumbered.”
    “You have,” the Shaker said, “made plans to separate Cartier from Barrister. And look to Fremlin, the Squealer master, with a sanguine eye as well.”
    “You have reason—”
    “No reason,” the Shaker said. “I just trust no one these days.”
    “Just as well,” the commander said. Then he excused himself to take a tour of the men. He walked the length and breadth of the camp, missing no one and speaking to everyone on a first name basis. He stopped by each gathering of men for a few words, maybe to exchange a smile or to inquire into the seriousness of a man's frostbite. He spoke with the dignity of his office, though this was tempered with a sense of friendship and mutual dependency as well. In every case, he came to depressed men not anxious to face the morrow, and he went away leaving men the better for his passage.
    He was tired, worn and unhealthy looking. His face was quite drawn, and his lips were ashen. There was a look of infinite weariness in his eyes, but his lips smiled and his hands were firm as they gripped shoulders and hands in signs of affection and genuine interest and concern. And when he was gone, men were ashamed of their momentary longing for oblivion. If the old man could do it, they could do it. It would be almost sacrilegious to let the old man down after he had brought them all this way. He was risking his life with theirs, and his withered and exhausted frame was no longer young, less able to recuperate than their own bodies. He was tired, worn and unhealthy looking—but he possessed courage that forced his men to live up to the picture he had painted of them.
    “He must feel the tons of burden that should be distributed among all of us,” Gregor said. “With every step, he must feel worse.”
    “And conversely,” the Shaker said, “he feels mentally lighter with each man he consoles. The commander will be able to go as long as his mind is at ease about his men —even after his own body has failed him.”
    
    As the wind swept over the snug threesome, and as the bitter cold of the earth crept inexorably upward through the outer wrapping of canvas through the sleeping bag and finally through his clothes to chill his flesh, Gregor thought about Shaker Sandow, about Mace, and about the future. But thinking about the future engendered thoughts of the past, and he was drawn down long-vacated avenues of his life, like a spirit returning to watch over living friends it has left behind.
    His mother had died in childbirth as the mothers of all Shakers did, her pretty face lined with creases and filmed with tears. It was the one great regret of his short life, thus far, that he had never known his mother. Even in the earliest days of his precocious childhood, he had tried to mollify that emptiness by reading through the diary she had kept every day of her life. The pages were crisp and thin, and you could see the writing of the next through the surface of this one, the sum total being a sense of antiquity and the exotic. Those pages held a fascination for him that most children found only in the discovery of what adults called common place, in the discovery of snow and sunrises and storybooks. But he had accepted the common quite early, before other children even noticed it, and had immediately gone on to the more complex. Through the diary, he came to know and love his mother.
    And, sadly, to loathe his father by comparison. Jim, his old man, had early settled on the boy as the cause of his wife's death, and he had not once exhibited a moment of fondness or love for the child. Where other men might have doted on the boy as the last vestige of the dead woman, he looked upon Gregor as a curse.
    And when he caught Gregor one day, levitating a pencil from the top of a table, holding it there without hands, he exploded in fury. A demon, he called his boy. A sorcerer who had spelled the mother's death nine months before the birth. He battered the boy severely, knocked him against the kitchen door. In terror, Gregor had lunged for the door, gotten through and outside. Jim had chased him, drunk and cursing, and had presented a spactacle for the entire town.
    If they had not chanced across the Shaker Sandow in their mad chase, Gregor might well have been killed. He had always been a frail boy, and his body was now bruised and bleeding from even the light cuffing the old man had given him. But the Shaker had been there, had seen, and somehow had understood. Whether Jim had skidded over the edge of Market Street and into the abyss by accident, or whether the mild Shaker had propelled him with some quick but forceful piece of magic, no one ever knew for certain, though there was a great deal of speculation in the years to come.
    And he had gone to the great house of the Shaker, with its books and magic implements. Mace had been there, some six years older than his three, and the strange relationship of brotherhood had built between them, though they were not brothers at all.
    Now the mountain. And the east beyond. He had little hope that they would survive the entire trek, but he would never verbalize such thoughts to Shaker Sandow. His life was his master's life, and he would go anywhere the older man deigned they should. His own lust for knowledge from the east was small; but he understood Sandow's lust, and he was willing to help the Shaker gain his understanding.
    Nestled between a father and a brother better than any he might really have possessed, Gregor drifted into sleep, to conserve the heat energy in him against the bitter, sapping strength of the Cloud Range night . . .
    
    Shaker Sandow looked through the slits of his weather mask, at the swirling snow, at the flickering flames of the campfires, at the odd shadows and the odder brightnesses. He wanted to stay awake all night, though he knew he was no longer young enough for that. He supposed Mace would wake Gregor at the proper time to finish the night's watch, although the giant could not be trusted. He might take the entire night's watch upon himself if he felt fit for it. And that could not be allowed. Tomorrow, Mace would need his strength to survive, for the downward slopes might be every bit as treacherous as the other side they had finally scaled. Snow swept from left to right in a thick sheet; flames danced before it; the shadows changed, moved, as if they were alive, and the brightnesses offered hope that tomorrow would be met with success.
    Have I been a fool? the Shaker asked himself. Have I lead myself and my loved ones into a maze of traps, a puzzle of disasters?
    And for what?
    The wind howled.
    The cold had reached his bones, and he shivered a little with it even while he perspired under the weight of all their coverings.
    As he wondered over his foolishness or lack of it, his mind was drawn to what might lie beyond the Cloud Range, out there in the darkness where the Darklands and Oragonia had never extended land claims. Far, far to the east, the ships of the Salamanthe nation had docked on the distant shore of this great continent, to be sure. The Salamanthes, living as they did in a cluster of a thousand islands, had long ago learned the vagaries of the sea well enough to ride it with impunity; where the Salamanthe's sailors had not touched keel to shore, there was a place not worth traveling to; otherwise, they had been everywhere. But being people of the sea, they never ventured far inland. Open land frightened them, just as endless miles of water frightened men of the land. And so the heart of the continent, of the east, lay unexplored. And somewhere in it was contained a store of knowledge from the Blank. The Oragonians had proved that. Dynamite, aircraft, horseless vehicles . . .
    Yet it was not gadgets that the Shaker sought, but understanding. He had not been so fortunate as Gregor; his mother had kept no diary, and all she had left him were the tales other people could tell of her. It was little to go on, little to know her by. And all his life he had wondered after her, never grasping the illusive ghost of that long dead