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turned up during his reading in the dark hours of the morning?
        
        Overhead, thunder boomed along the low sky, and the shifting masses of gray clouds scudded faster to the west. It seemed as if the night's storm was about to return. And would it bring the night's carnage with it again?
        
        The Shaker decided that, this night, secretly, he and Gregor would again take a reading. They were going to need every scrap of advantage that they could dig up to combat the inhuman assassins loose among the ranks.
        

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    7
        
        
        
        By four o'clock in the afternoon, they had reached the middle of Shatoga Falls. Before them, the white eater smashed into a thick, jutting shelf of stone, bounced outwards, and continued downward for nearly three thousand feet to explode in the origin of the Shatoga River. Above, there was another three thousand feet of tumbling water until the point where the river spilled out of the mountains and began its descent. All that above them would have to be scaled by traditional mountaineering methods, for the horses could go no further. And even when they reached the top of the waterfall, they would be but a fraction of the way up the Cloud Range toward the cut they wished to use.
        
        It looked impossible.
        
        But no one wanted to think about that.
        
        They stood in the whirling rain, watching the tenders lead the horses down out of the steepest regions where they would tie them up for the night and complete the return to Perdune in the morning. When the last of the swaying beasts was out of sight, everyone was forced to return to the reality of the sheer stone walls ahead of them.
        
        A thousand feet above, the rock face was cleft eighty feet deep and more than a hundred long. A shelf of granite overhung this cleft, providing protection from the storm for the night ahead. Commander Richter had decided to get the party up there, despite the waning light and the driving force of the rain which would make the going more difficult
        
        Shatoga Falls had been tumbling out of the Cloud Range for some centuries, and it had worn its way deeper and deeper into the rock. It had cut a channel, like a great shaft, some twenty-five feet deep into the face of the mountain. The booming water occupied but ten feet of this depth, leaving open rock walls on either side of its plunge. These walls were shattered and rugged, made so by the constant vibration of the river as it beat its way down the mountain. Indeed, the roar of it was so loud that conversation became impossible, and what orders were given had to be delivered in a loud, forced shout. Close to this roar, and using the nearest of these shaft walls, the party was to ascend to the sheltered cleft a thousand feet overhead.
        
        A group of six men went first, roped together, their oiled leather coats streaming with water. Here, in the draft of the falls, it was impossible to distinguish between the rain and the thick mist splashed outward from the tumbling waters. Fog and mist combined with the slowly growing darkness to make the first party disappear from view when they had ascended some six hundred feet. The sound of their pitons being hammered into the stone to make supports for later teams, was lost in the first two hundred feet, so that now there was no way at all to judge their progress.
        
        Below, the men waited tensely for the sight of flailing, crashing bodies spinning downward, through the shaft, to end up eternities away, at the foot of the falls, crushed by the weight of the water or speared by the stones below or drowned in the vicious, surging currents of the Shatoga River.
        
        But, in time, a good sign came rather than a bad. The climbing rope dangled into view, sans its men, but with a red scarf tied to its end. They were all safe on the shelf above.
        
        The