The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster coaaod-9

by Hugh Cook

  "Then what is it?" said the Witchlord Onosh.

  His query was voiced in the Yarglat tongue, but the Lord of the Silver Pelican responded in the Galish, with Sken-Pitilkin again providing the translation.

  "My lord," said Ulix of the Drum, "this is a Door. It opens unto foreign realms, as a door of ordinary make opens from one room to another." Guest, still standing astride the plinth, cast a sharp glance in Sod's direction. Banker Sod's yellow teeth were bared, and he looked very much the carnivore, and a hungry carnivore at that.

  "Have a care for Sod," said Guest, warning his father. "For his temper is up, and he may do something foolish in a moment."

  "Has he a weapon?" said Lord Onosh.

  "He has not so much as a pin about his person," said Glambrax. "Unless he can kill with his hands, he is harmless."

  "If he attempts such a killing," said Lord Onosh, "then he will die on my sword. Perhaps he will. For a great and perhaps contagious foolishness seems on the loose today. This business of a door – is that not foolishness? What we have here is plain. It is plain, it is clear to the touch and the eye. There's no door here. There's only an arch."

  "The arch, my lord, is the door," said Ulix of the Drum. "For when it is opened, one may then step through from this room to a far and foreign country."

  "And step back again?" said Lord Onosh.

  "In a manner of speaking, my lord," said Ulix. "One must travel in a great circle, stepping from city to city, from nation to nation. But the journey can be accomplished in less time than a dog requires for its mating, and I have made that journey myself, many times."

  "Really," said Lord Onosh, making no attempt to conceal his disbelief. "Then if this be a door to escape, then – why, man, the door is yours! If the world lies but a step from this chamber, then go make that step – and vanish, if your choice is such."

  "Ah, my lord," said Ulix, "but the door is not yet open. At the moment, the door is closed."

  "Then open it!" said Lord Onosh.

  "Ah," said Ulix of the Drum, "but to do that I must have in my possession a certain globe of stars, which I do not see kept here anywhere."

  "Then we will find it," said Lord Onosh. "Sod! Have you hidden a star, a constellation or a cloudy galaxy in your blankets?"

  "I have not," said Sod. "And it is only a madman who would talk such nonsense of stars. For the stars belong to the sky. Only a child would think to trap them down to earth, far less to snare them in a globe of glass."

  "A globe of glass, is it!" said Lord Onosh.

  "I presume that is what this Ulix-thing is trying to describe," said Sod stiffly. "For if his conceit is a globe of stars, then surely the globe must be of glass for those stars to be visible. But he is mad, plainly, so it may as likely be that he has a globe of wood in mind, or a globe of stone. You might ask him that question, if you wish to indulge him in his madness."

  "It is a globe of glass," said Ulix of the Drum. "And," said he, pointing his pelican in the general direction of the Banker's heart, "Sod knows as much, and has doubtless fondled it into some secret privacy. Sken-Pitilkin! Have your prize student slit Sod's wrists! If he tells before he bleeds to death, why then, we'll bind his wounds and let him live. If not, why – there's plenty of other Bankers fit for interrogation."Sken-Pitilkin thought this a little harsh, but Guest had heard. Thinking it a most excellent suggestion, the Weaponmaster jumped down from the plinth unbidden.

  "Enough!" said Sod, backing away from a knife-bearing Guest Gulkan. "I'll tell! It's Italis, Iva-Italis, I gave it to the demon. The globe, the stars, the demon's got it."

  "Nonsense!" said Guest. "The demon's mine, sworn in alliance, my creature. It wants my help, it needs it. You're a liar, Sod!"

  But Sod protested that he was no liar, and that the globe of stars in question truly had been given into the keeping of the demon Icaria Scaria Iva-Italis. So it was that that whole party went to interrogate the demon.

  In truth, the demon of Safrak did have the star-globe in its possession. But did not want to give it up! For the demon was not yet sure of the worthiness of Guest Gulkan's oath to rescue the Great God Jocasta, and had hoped to keep the star-globe for a while, using possession of the thing to guide and control the Weaponmaster for a while.

  But on seeing that Guest was of such a temper that he was currently neither guidable nor controllable, the demon at last admitted to the possession of the star-globe, which it disgorged with reluctance. Guest caught the globe as the demon spat it out like a well- sucked skull.

  From the weight of it, the globe was stone rather than glass.

  Heavy, heavy. Holding it, Guest felt his body become weightless.

  His own flesh weighed nothing. color drained from the world. Sod, Sken-Pitilkin, Ulix, Zozimus, Lord Onosh, Levant – they were shadows, one and all. Sounds flattened, shallowed, then skipped into silence. Guest tried to drop the stone.

  His fingers opened, but slowly, slowly. The world was utterly dark, now. But for the stone. Which hung in the air. Motionless.

  Unsupported. A green sheen of cold underwater light hung around it in a halo. Then that light blinked out to nothingness, and Guest was left in darkness.

  He tried to move, to speak, to cry out, to reach for help, to run. But he could not move. His body was a darkness in darkness, a shadow in shadow, a spiral falling through a waveform torus, a point bent on squaring a circle. He was split, fractionated, divided into geometries. His geometry was music, was gold upon silver, was amber sliding liquid upon the liquidity of pearls, was ice forging copper.

  Copper.

  Weaving wires of copper.

  Which were splicing themselves to sand, and to shadows. The shadows were those of the claws of a crab.

  The crab was huge, and it stood in a weavework of titanium, crunching the heads of dragons in its claws, while bats sang from golden bells, and a penguin transformed itself to a grampus before Guest Gulkan's very eyes.

  Then the visionary chaos steadied, sharpened, hardened, gained weight, and painted itself with color. Guest found himself standing in his true flesh in an unfamiliar building which was fragrant with the smell of camphor. Somewhere in that building a woman was singing, her voice a pleasure of gold upon silk. Guest looked around. He was standing in a cool and airy chamber, a large room connected to similar rooms by arched doorways. The room was hung by tapestries worked in abstract motifs, but the hexagonal tiles underfoot were devoted to representational art, for each was devoted to the depiction of one of the body's internal organs. Guest recognized the heart, the liver, the kidney – and was that a pancreas? He thought it was.

  As Guest was still trying to decipher out the tiles – which he saw with hallucinatory clarity – a man entered the room.

  The man was short, and gray of skin. To Guest, that grayness suggested illness, but the man seemed in good form as he came striding toward the Weaponmaster. He did however have a slight limp. Despite the limp, and despite the platform shoes which he was wearing – presumably to amplify his height – he crossed the tiles nimbly enough, and as he did so he addressed the Weaponmaster in a foreign tongue.

  When Guest did not respond, the stranger reached out sharply and knuckled Guest with the back of his hand. The blow stung.

  Before Guest could react, the gray-skinned man whipped out a knife, a wickedly hooked device with a curious blob of bluish- green porcelain on the end of its blade. The lame little man jabbed at Guest with this blade, catching him a glancing blow with the porcelain blob.

  A lacerating pain seared through Guest's chest, and he fell backwards, fell -

  And fell -

  Through darkness, now -

  Fell backwards into light, and found himself falling still, and went down hard on the bones of his buttocks.

  "Wah!" said Guest, as the stone globe popped from his fingers and fell heavily to the stone floor.

  "What happened?" said his fatherGuest shook himself, looked around, and saw he was once more back in the familiar Hall of Time
, back in the mainrock Pinnacle, back on the island of Alozay. But he was in pain still from the blow he had just been struck, and his nose

  The Weaponmaster touched his nose gingerly, and found it was bleeding from the back-knuckle blow which he had been struck by the gray-skinned stranger, who was nowhere in sight. Bleeding? The blood was pouring out!

  "Lean forward, boy," said Sken-Pitilkin, his bony fingers pinching hard at the bridge of Guest's wide-spreading nose. Guest, sorely shaken by his encounter with a world of visions, expected the sympathy and concern of his companions, but got not a jot of it.

  "Come on," said Lord Onosh, recovering the globe of stars from the floor where it had fallen. "Let's go upstairs. Come on, Guest! It's only a nosebleed!"

  As they climbed to the mainrock's highest room, Guest tried to simultaneously lean forward, to keep his nose pinched hard against bleeding, and to tell his story.

  "A likely nonsense!" said his father, on hearing Guest's tale.

  "But it happened," said Guest emphatically. "Why won't you believe me?"

  "It's Eljuk who sees visions!" said Lord Onosh angrily.

  "What?" said Guest.

  He was startled, for here was a whole subject of which he was ignorant. His brother Eljuk, now apprenticed to the wizard Ontario Nol, had long been an object of Guest's jealousy – but the Weaponmaster had never till now received the slightest hint of Eljuk's dreams and visions, his night terrors and his waking apparitions.

  "Eljuk, that's what!" said Lord Onosh. "He sees visions! But one such lunatic in the family is quite enough!"

  "It wasn't a – a vision!" protested Guest. "I went somewhere!

  I'm telling you! I did, really I did. There was this woman, she was singing, she must have been beautiful, I'd pay gold to hear that song twice over. And a man, this funny little man on these weird shoes, and he, he – he hit me!"

  "Not you too!" said Lord Onosh.

  "But he did!" said Guest, seeing that he was disbelieved. "My blood, the nose, I mean – "

  Helplessly, Guest held up his hand, which was streaked by the blood of his bleeding.

  "So his nose bursts and he thinks himself gone," muttered his father. Then, angrily: "It's the mother! That's what's wrong!"

  "Mother?" said Guest in bewilderment.

  "Yes," said Lord Onosh, with increased anger. "It's your mother, it's her fault! Your mother, just as she – "

  Then the Witchlord stopped himself. But he had said enough to leave Guest more bewildered than ever. The young Weaponmaster did not know who his mother was, hence could not guess what she might have done wrong. And what was the import of this waking dream he had just endured? Had his mother endured such dreams? Did Eljuk endure them still? And did Eljuk get bloody noses from some dreams of his? Guest tried to think back to the years of his childhood.

  Eljuk had got bloody noses in childhood often enough, for sure – but all of those bloodspills could be traced easily and directly to the impact of Guest's feet, knees, fists and elbows.

  They had now entered upon the mainrock's uppermost room, so, with their climb done, Lord Onosh tried to hand the star-globe to his son.

  "Here," said Lord Onosh. "Take it again. Try it again. See what it does for you this time!" Guest made as if to take the star-globe, then thought better of it, and let it fall.

  "It's – it's too dangerous," said Guest.

  "Is it?" said Lord Onosh, kicking the star-globe.

  In response, the elderly Ashdan named Ulix of the Drum bent down, picked up the globe of stars, examined it carefully then offered it to Guest.

  "Take it, boy," said the Ashdan. "It's perfectly safe."

  "But," said Guest, fearfully, "I, I, it…"

  "You expected the unexpected," said the Ashdan. "You opened yourself to the new thing. So you… you…"

  "What happened to me?" said Guest, with sudden anger. "You know, don't you! What was it!"

  The Ashdan hesitated, then said:

  "It is a Power."Guest absorbed that as best he could, then said, slowly, slowly:

  "Like – like something of wizards?"

  "No," said the Ashdan flatly. "Like something of witches."

  "What are you talking about?" said Guest, frightened to hear such a strange thing said, and said about him.

  "Ask your father," said the Ashdan. "He knows."

  Then Guest looked at Lord Onosh, who was silent, confessing no secrets. Guest looked back to the Ashdan. As if in a dream, Guest reached out and took the globe of stars from Ulix of the Drum. The star-globe was cold, cold and heavy. He held it. Held it firmly. The world remained unwavering.

  "It doesn't change me," said Guest softly, wondering at the stability of the world, the firmness of the stones beneath his feet. "Not this time."

  "It never did change you," said the Ashdan. "You changed yourself. As I said. You opened yourself to the new thing, the new experience."

  "So this, this rock," said Guest, hefting the star-globe,

  "it's not dangerous. To me, I mean."

  "You experienced the exercise of Power," said the Ashdan.

  "But the means for the exercise of that Power are sourced within you. That Power is not conjured by rocks, globes, talismans or charms. It's inside you."

  "Inside me!" said Guest, in frank alarm. "If that's meant as reassurance, then I'd hate to see you let loose on a threat!"

  By now, Guest half-understood that he had inherited something from his mother. But what? He was far from sure that he wanted to find out! The more he thought about his waking vision, the more it was frightening him. And to think that Eljuk had such visions, and that his father obviously feared them – why, that was more frightening still! And his mother – there was something wrong with his mother, was there? Well. Guest had always believed his mother to have been a worthless slave woman long ago buried, her name buried along with her. But obviously she was still very bright in his father's memory.

  "My lord," said Guest, addressing his father with due formality, conscious of the fact that they were talking in the presence of strangers such as Banker Sod and Ulix of the Drum.

  "May we talk later about – about my mother?"

  "No!" said Lord Onosh.

  A flat denial, this. But Guest had learnt enough already to realize that some dreadful secret surrounded his genesis.

  This shook Guest more than any of the reversals of fortune which he had endured to date. The reversals of war – well, those he had been trained to cope with. After all, the young Yarglat barbarian had been born into a warlord's household, and hence had lived always with the knowledge that he might well suffer death, defeat, exile, pain, hunger, torture and mutilation before his life was out.

  Hence Guest had remained comparatively calm through the vicissitudes of civil war and the alarums of the struggle for Safrak. Like a professional firefighter in the midst of a conflagration, or like a bear-wrestler engaged in one of his public duels, the Weaponmaster had, by and large, kept his head in even the worst moments of those conflicts.

  But this -!

  It was a dreadful and totally unexpected shock to be suddenly, profoundly and obscurely betrayed by his ancestry.

  Obviously he had inherited from his mother some kind of flaw, a split in the brain, a breakage of the mind, a witch-warp of some description – and quite obviously his father feared for the consequences of this unexplained and inexplicable flaw.

  A shock to the basic stability of the family background is always traumatic, even when the family concerned is an imperial family, and therefore intrinsically more unstable than most.

  Hence Guest was suffering dreadfully, just as one suffers in the aftermath of the dreadful moment when a parent reveals that there are werewolves in the family; or that grandfather used to rape dogs for a hobby; or that grandmother routinely preached the evolutionary heresy; or that mummy is actually a man concealed in a woman's weeds.

  "Very well," said Guest, reluctant to challenge his father further in the presence of strangers. "Let
us pay no mind to visions. Let us try instead this precious door with this precious bit of rock."

  So saying, Guest advanced upon the marble plinth which supported the steel arch.

  As Guest advanced, he held the star-globe in front of him. It gleamed with a steady inner light, and its heaviness again made him think it more like stone than glass. It was transparent, its interior fogged with a motionless smoke of underseas mystery, and in the green of that fog there hung the motionless firefly sparks of stars of all colors, some inspired in their solitude, others hanging close in their massed groupings of their galaxies.

  "Where do I put it?" said Guest.

  "There is a pocket of sorts in the marble base," said the Ashdan ancient, Ulix of the Drum. "See it?"

  "Yes," said Guest.

  The "pocket" was a gilded hole about twice the size of the star-globe.

  "Put the globe into the pocket," said Ulix. "Do that, and you will open the Door."

  Gingerly, Guest eased the globe into the pocket. And let it go. It rolled home with a slight clunk. Immediately, the steel archway filled with a humming curtain of silver-gray, which looked to Guest like a vertical sheet of that slippery metal known as mercury.

  "There," said Ulix. "It is open. Now you can go through it, if you dare."

  At which Banker Sod swore at Ulix, swore fluently and potently in Galish. Ulix ignored the captive Banker, as did the others.

  "So," said Lord Onosh, looking speculatively at the door. He was starting to realize that this thing was no ordinary door but a Door of major significance. "A Door, is it? Then where does it go to?"Guest was of the opinion that the lord of the pelican had explained all this already. And so he had! But Guest was more ready to absorb explanation than was his father, since Guest had been rigorously tutored by the wizard Sken-Pitilkin since the age of five, whereas it is doubtful whether Lord Onosh was ever tutored by anyone in his entire life.