Free Warlock by Dean Koontz Page B

was returning to the west, and it drew Mace inexorably onward toward the apprentice Gregor.
        
        “He won't make it,” Richter told the Shaker. “I'm not one for glorying in bad news, but neither am I one for coloring the truth to make it prettier.”
        
        “Perhaps he won't,” the Shaker said. “Then again, perhaps he will. You do not know Mace as well as I, and if you did you might have more hope than you do.”
        
        Unsatisfied with the rate of progression of the line, Mace added to his speed by going hand-over-hand along the upper-most rope even as it drew him toward Gregor. Before leaving the cliffside, he had shed his gloves, and now his hands took the brutal burning of that moving, jerking rope as he slid along it. The lower rope, taut and speeding the opposite direction, whistled against his leather coat, snapped sharply against him now and then though he seemed hardly to notice it.
        
        Gregor lost his grip with his left hand and hung seven hundred feet above disaster by the power of his right hand alone.
        
        Mace was now little more than fifty feet away from the apprentice, coming fast toward him, trying not to jar the lower rope and thereby add woe to the young man' already perilous situation.
        
        Gregor floundered about ungracefully, swinging more wildly back and forth now as he attempted to reach up and clutch the lost rope with his left hand. He made a valiant effort of it, but his movements seemed improperly coordinated, and he could not find the line.
        
        “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 sturdy 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