Warlock by Dean Koontz

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