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while a Shaker does their work, they will soon become dispirited and ill.”
        
        “Have no fear,” the Shaker said. “And remember that, even if I should have the energy and time for a reading, the power in me does not always work. Sometimes the picture is unclear. Other times, there is no picture whatsoever.”
        
        The bird master seemed to relax a little. “It is with you as all other Shakers, then. I have heard of your power, and feared there would be no limitations on it at all.”
        
        Shaker Sandow bent to the cage before him, touched a finger to the wicker bars. “What say you, friends?”
        
        The two creatures inside danced along the perching rungs and came close to him, cocked their heads to engage him with one large black eye each. But neither of them spoke.
        
        “I had hoped to hear them,” he said to Fremlin.
        
        “Not on your first meeting,” the bird master explained. “They must come to trust you before they will speak. And even then, you would not understand their language.”
        
        “I've been given to understand,” Sandow said, “that as their trainer picks up the Squealer tongue, they begin to use our tongue.”
        
        “That they do. But little of it. Their mouths are not made for complicated tongues. It is more than mimickry, however, for they use the words correctly and with some sense of humor.”
        
        “Mounting now!” Commander Richter called back the line. “Mounting now!”
        
        “I hope to see you later and to hear your birds,” the Shaker said, nodding to Fremlin and turning for his own horse.
        
        “All is packed well yet,” Gregor said from his own horse ahead of the Shaker.
        
        Behind the Shaker, Mace reported: “Commander Richter neither saw nor heard anything suspicious. As we thought.”
        
        “As we thought,” Shaker Sandow agreed. And then the train was moving forward again.
        
        As they joggled along the hilly countryside, climbing steadily higher on a double-back trail, Sandow carefully considered the bird master, Fremlin. Could he possibly be one of the killers, that rather timid man who went to such care to conceal the size and the power of his musculature beneath ill-fitting garments and also, beneath the air of fragile boyishness he wore? Was his concern for the birds nothing more than a ruse, and would he, before they were finished with this trek, have the blood of more men on his hands?
        
        Or what of the others? Could the deadly pair even be Commander Richter and Belmondo? No, that seemed improbable. If they had lolled the twenty-four soldiers in the hotel, the commander could have used that as an excuse to turn back. Instead, he forged ahead, more determined than ever. Yet… yet, if the two officers were the guilty parties, what would it matter if they went ahead? They could insure the destruction of the party anywhere along the way, or even at the end of the journey, thus wasting more of General Dark's time before a second expedition could be dispatched. Yes, both those men were still suspect.
        
        Sergeant Crowler? His rage at the murders, Mace had said, seemed quite genuine and deep. And yet, wouldn't such a man, such a master of espionage, also be a good actor? And if it was the sergeant, who might his partner be? No, the sergeant must be removed from the list. His partner would have to be an enlisted man or someone who had slept with a mate in the inn, for the sergeant had slept alone-and everyone had vowed for his mate, which meant the killers had roomed together. Unless, perhaps, there were three of them: the sergeant and two enlisted men.
        
        The Shaker gave up on that, for it led nowhere but to paranoia, to seeing killers and demons everywhere. Demons? Yes, something strange, indeed. What were those two creatures, posing as men, which he had