by Hugh Cook
So thinking, Guest retreated to the very end of the cave, to the rainbow wall which the wizards knew as the Veils of Fire.
"Guest!" yelled Nol, as rainbow-weaving coils of cold fire began to weave around Guest Gulkan's limbs. "Guest! Guest! Come out of there!"
But, instead, Guest took a single step backwards.
And vanished right through the Veils of Fire.
"Blood of a goat," said Ontario Nol in disbelief. "Now I've seen everything."
Those wizards who had been quick enough in the recovery of their courage to have witnessed Guest Gulkan's departure joined him in his disbelief.
Then one, at last accepting the evidence of his eyes, hawked, and spat, and said:
"Well. It's over. He's dead of a certainty."
And, the destruction of Guest Gulkan, Sken-Pitilkin, Shabble and the bottle now being entirely assured, nothing remained for the wizards but to pack up and make their return to Drangsturm – and there to report the death of the inscrutable Shabble and the terminal disposition of the renegade wizard Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Warp: the rift in reality into which apprentice wizards venture to pact with creatures of the World Beyond. All such apprentices know there is one thing they must never do: they must never ever tread beyond the Veils of Fire. What lies beyond the Veils of Fire, nobody knows, but this much is for certain: nobody has ever returned alive from an inspection of its mysteries.
With all the insouciant ease of a drunken man stepping off the top of a cliff, Guest Gulkan stepped backwards through the Veils of Fire. Cold-burning rainbow leapt around the Weaponmaster as he stepped backwards. On the third step of his retreat, his back bumped against a wall.
Since he was safely out of sight of the wizards – there was nothing to be seen in front of him but veil upon veil of impetuous rainbow – Guest turned to face the wall. It was a dark, velvety, purple-black wall which yielded slightly beneath his touch. Guest, being the Yarglat barbarian he was, responded to this mystery by subjecting it to an exercise of brute force. He pushed.
Hard. And shouldered right through that purple-black wall.
The world plunged to black.
The world plunged to black as Guest's feet plunged to water, with something fragile smashing and shifting underfoot as he sought for his balance.
He was -
He was standing ankle-deep in cold water in a place which was very dark, very cold and very quiet. He could no longer see the slightest trace of rainbow fire. In fact, he could hardly see anything at all. The largest sound was his own harsh breathing.
Since he was temporarily blind, or near enough to blind, Guest stood absolutely still and listened. As he listened – hearing nothing of consequence – he closed his eyes. A long moment later, he opened them.
Then looked around.
As Guest's eyes began to acclimatize to the gloom, he began to see
… shapes. What kind of shapes? Not ghouls, ghosts, werewolf, vampires, sorcerers or necromancers. Not armored marauders armed with weighted lead and bloody iron. No. These were strange shapes – and their totally unprecedented nature told Guest Gulkan that he was very much out of his depth.
In the dim and half-formed netherworld which confronted the Weaponmaster, he saw fluid obfuscations of liquid dark, saw glowing hoops and senile suns, saw twisted helix-shapes and toroidal follies. At first blush, it looked like the kind of place that would in the very nature of things be singularly unproductive of beds and bawds, of horses and kitchens, or anything else which would make it a worthy refuge for an emperor in exile.
"Grief of a bitch," said Guest. "What have I got myself into now?"
For once, the Weaponmaster thought he might have gone a little bit too far. Having seen what was here, he quite wished he could go back where he came from.
But where was the wall through which he had pushed? Guest turned, looked back, and saw no wall. Instead, he saw a prospect of – of -
He groped for words, then decided he was looking at dimly shadowed free-floating versions of some of the more abstract paperwork creations which Shabble had taught Eljuk to conjure to life. Certainly there was no sign of any kind of wall, door, or other exitway which would take him back to the Cave of the Warp – a cave for which he now felt a considerable nostalgia.
Meantime, he was standing in water, and the water was leaking into his boots, and his feet were getting exceedingly cold. A faint trace of violet light gentled round Guest Gulkan's feet as the current teased around his battered leather. Guest shuddered.
At least he still had the yellow bottle. Inside that bottle was food, bedding, shelter, comfort. Sken-Pitilkin was inside that bottle. And Thayer Levant. And Shabble.
Well.
Was that really a matter for comfort?
Were the companions of his death to be a mad wizard addicted to opium and the irregular verbs, a servant lately grown sullen, and a childish bubble which played with equal happiness with cockroaches and bits of folding paper?
Still, he did have the bottle. He did have the ring. The ring was comforting in its rigidity. And the bottle – best to make the bottle safe.
So thinking, Guest tied the bottle to his belt with a thong designed for the secure retention of scalps – a moligok, to use a word from the Eparget.
Now.
Where was he?
At second and third blush, the place to which the Weaponmaster had ventured looked ever bit as uncomfortable and uncomforting as it had from the start. It was a cold place, a quiet place, a place without smells. Bone would be at home here.
Rock would be content. But a Yarglat barbarian? Guest was more and more inclined to think he had made an irretrievable mistake, for the place looked uncommonly like a prison, and a prison from which escape was likely to prove impossible. It was cold; it was gloomy; and there was nothing to eat, not even a mushroom or a lump of fungus or such. The crunchy things underfoot were snail shells. Were they edible? They glowed faintly – glowed variously red and green.
While there is nothing written in the Book of Survival concerning the edibility of things that glow in the dark, Guest was inclined to the opinion that the consumption of such things is unadvisable. He presumed, therefore, that he was going to starve, or die from eating poisoned monstrosities. After all, even if he retreated to the yellow bottle, the food inside that bottle was bound to run out in due course, and probably sooner rather than later.
All in all, the hole to which he had fled was a singularly useless place, good for no purpose whatsoever, unless one wished to retire from life for a couple of thousand years to study the intricacies of the irregular verbs – something impossible for Guest, who as ever was traveling without the companionship of a copy of Strogloth's Compendium of Delights.
"But," muttered Guest, "Sken-Pitilkin will surely have such a book."
Then he checked himself.
Verbs? Irregular verbs? He must be growing mad to think of reducing his life to the study of such!
"I am the Weaponmaster," said Guest, more to cheer himself up than anything else. "An emperor in exile! Rightful lord of the Collosnon Empire!"
So said Guest, then felt uncommonly silly for having said it, for this was a place where the greatest of his pretensions was likely to count for absolutely nothing.
Meantime, his feet were growing ever more chill thanks to the cold water which was leaking into his boots. As he was slowly beginning to recover from the shock of his abrupt precipitation into this den of strangeness, he was ready to do something sensible, and so began to wade toward the nearest rock. Guest Gulkan had almost reached the safety of the rock when someone spoke to him. Someone spoke to him, using the High Speech of wizards.
Once he had assured himself that he had not actually leapt right out of his skin, Guest cleared his throat – which was exceedingly dry – and spoke into the darkness.
"Who's that?" said Guest, using the Galish.
Nobody answered, so Guest presumed the voice to h
ave been but a figment of his imagination. He made as if to sit on the rock.
But the voice forestalled him, saying – and this time it used the Galish -
"You're not going to sit on me, are you?"
It was the rock that was talking.
Now the Weaponmaster Guest was in no mood to be lectured by a rock. He had been tramping through the mountains for an unconscionable length of time, enduring all manner of hardship as a consequence of geology's heaping up of great stoneworks, and saw no reason why he should suffer a lecture on top of the other insults and injuries done to him by rock, stone and mountain.
"Sit on you?" said Guest, with a boldness which suggested that holding converse with rocks was nothing but a commonplace of life, "why shouldn't I sit on you?"
"You should not sit on me," said the rock, with a sorrowful heaviness, "because I would be upset if you were to prove yourself so thoroughly impertinent."
"And what do you do when upset?" said Guest. "Do you bite?"
"No," said the rock. "I do not bite. But I do get unhappy.
You would not like me if I were to be unhappy."
"This implies," said Guest, "that you think yourself happy right now."
"Of course I am," said the rock. "Nobody is sitting on me, therefore I am happy."
It struck Guest that the rock was uncommonly easy to satisfy.
Naturally, Guest himself was unhappy when someone was sitting on him, or standing on his head, or jumping up and down on his ribcage, as the case might be. But for positive happiness he required rather more than mere freedom from unwelcome encumbrance.
"Some people," said Guest, hinting heavily, "increase their own happiness considerably by helping others. I'm standing in the water, and the water is exceedingly cold."
"Then the cold," said the rock, "is something you will just have to endure."
"Who are you to tell me what I will or won't?" said Guest, starting to become a trifle truculent.
"I," said the rock, "am the Lobos."
"Then know that I am Guest Gulkan, the Weaponmaster in person, lord of war and rightful heir to the mastery of the Collosnon Empire and the rule of Tameran."
"You are a young thing, then," said the Lobos.
"Young?" said Guest. "I'm – I'm – "
But, to his dismay, the Weaponmaster found he had quite lost track of his birthdays. He was shocked. How could he possibly have come to such a pass? Obviously the world had rejected him, had ignored him, had overlooked his needs, his celebrations, his festivals.
So thinking, Guest began to feel very sorry for himself. But he was not willing to confess to a rock either his distress or the source of that distress.
"I'm old enough," said Guest. "I've reached a, an age of maturity."
"Maturity!" said the rock, positively snorting with derisive amusement. "Why, you are but a toothpick to a tree, a lump of last year's ice boasting to the mountain of its antiquity."
"You are older, then," said Guest.
"Older!" said the Lobos. "Why, I was here before the Experimenters!"
Here Guest was at a loss, for he had forgotten what he had been told at Lex Chalis. Had Guest Gulkan been in the possession of a disciplined and scholarly memory, then he would have recalled that the Experimenters are a hypothetical race of creatures, lesser than gods but greater than anything human, who are thought by some to have influenced the shaping and the populating of worlds.
"So you're old," said Guest, accepting this assertion without proof since he saw no point in arguing about it. "Even so, old man, you should acknowledge authority when you find it. You stand in the presence of Guest Gulkan, the Weaponmaster himself, the conqueror of Safrak, the lord of the Collosnon Empire!"
This was the windiest of all possible rant, and, as the sound of his own voice died away to nothing, Guest became uncomfortably aware of that fact. For once, he felt embarrassed by his own empty boastfulness.
"So," said the Lobos, speaking into the silence. "You are like all of your kind. You are a most vulgar race of trivial creatures. A vulgar race of murderers."
"Murder!" said Guest, seizing upon this unjust accusation.
"You speak of murder, do you? Well, know this. It was me who almost got murdered! It was wizards, you see, they were set to kill me. That's why I ran."
"So," said the Lobos. "You came here for the most vulgar of all possible purposes. To preserve your miserable skin."
"Why else would I come here?" said Guest.
"Most people," said the Lobos heavily, "come here in search of wisdom. Usually they have deep questions to ask of me. I do my best to answer them before they die."Guest did not like this talk of death at all. He was about to ask how the rock's inquisitive visitors usually met their deaths, and why. But the rock was still talking.
"Even though you have proved yourself a vulgar and ignorant barbarian," said the Lobos, "I will still extend to you the customary courtesy. All is known to me. All things in the earth and under the earth. If you wish to know, then ask!"Guest Gulkan thought about it. He was not sure that there was really any question he needed to have answered. He had learnt much from his own experience; Sken-Pitilkin had ever been at pains to teach him more than he really wanted to know; and encounters with such knowledgeable creatures as Paraban Senk and Shabble had allowed him to answer just about every question he really wanted to have answered.
"Well?" said the Lobos. "Do you have a question?"
"Okay," said Guest, "let's try this for size. I've got this ambition, a big one. I want to stage an orgy, okay, with, let's see, maybe a thousand women, men to match, some horses, and a few dead sheep for those who are truly perverted. I can see my way clear to getting hold of the flesh, but there's just one complication. I want the whole thing to take place in a big bowl of strawberries and cream. How do I go about that?"
The Lobos gave a very heavy sigh. Its every prejudice had been confirmed. Guest was just the barbarian he seemed to be.
"If you really wish to stage such an orgy," said the Lobos,
"then you must begin by recruiting a caterer."
"A what?" said Guest.
"A caterer," said the Lobos. "Don't you understand the word?
A caterer is someone whose profession is the provisioning of parties." Guest Gulkan grappled with this concept, which was a new one to him. So far, the Weaponmaster had gone through his entire life without meeting a caterer, an interior designer or a hairdresser.
But the Lobos was quite patient, and explained the business of catering in detail.
"But," said Guest, when he understood, "there's a problem.
We, ah, we don't have caterers, not in Gendormargensis. Not that we're short of people, it's a big city, a hundred thousand people or more."
"A hundred thousand," said the Lobos. "Is that your biggest city?"
"It's the biggest I know of," said Guest.
"Then," said the Lobos, "if you are in search of that material wealth which a civilization requires to sustain a vigorous catering industry, I would earnestly suggest that you increase your population base."
"Get more people, you mean," said Guest.
"Yes."
"How would I do that?"
"To begin with," said the Lobos, "make sure that all your people boil all their water and wash their hands every time they go to the toilet." Guest Gulkan considered this eccentric advice, but was quite unable to make the connection between washing one's hands and staging a mass orgy with cream and strawberries. He concluded that the rock was quite mad.
"Is there anything else you want to know?" said the Lobos.
"Well," said Guest, "what do people usually ask?"
"They commonly ask how they can come by great wealth," said the Lobos.
"That's easy," said Guest. "I can pick up my sword and take it."
"You do not seem to be in possession of a sword," said the Lobos.
"A temporary problem," said Guest. "What else do they ask?"
"They ask the secret of satisfactio
n," said the Lobos.
"That's easy," said Guest. "Any pimp can help you."
"For a wizard," said the Lobos, "things are not quite so – so impromptu."
"I'm not a wizard," said Guest.
"So I'd noticed," said the Lobos. "Most wizards ask after the secret of immortality."
"Oh!" said Guest, "Immortality! Well, now you mention it, what is the secret of immortality?"
"There is no true immortality," said the Lobos. "This is because of the inevitability of entropy. Do you wish me to explain entropy for you?"
"Not if it will delay my next meal unduly," said Guest.
"It might delay your next meal considerably," said the Lobos.
"If we leave aside the question of entropy in the interests of your stomach, know that you can make yourself temporarily immortal by putting yourself through an organic rectifier. That is a machine which can extend life indefinitely by inserting self- correcting codes into the genetic material. That is how you make yourself immortal. Of course, you would not have the slightest idea what an organic rectifier is, or where to find one."Guest Gulkan, rather offended to have a rock speak to him in tones of insufferable intellectual superiority, was quick to rebut this claim.
"Yes I would," said Guest. "There was an organic rectifier on Untunchilamon."
"There was?" said the Lobos dubiously.
"There was!" said Guest. "It rectified a Crab."
"A crab?" said the Lobos.
"Yes, yes, a crab," said Guest. "You know, one of those things that lives by the sea, it's got two claws and six legs, no, eight legs, eight legs and a pair of pinchers, there was a big one of Untunchilamon but the organic rectifier made it into an Ashdan, it called itself Codlugarthia."
"You," said the Lobos, on hearing this disjointed story, "are quite mad."
And the more Guest told, the more the Lobos thought him to be quite insane.
"Mad and a murderer," said the Lobos sadly.
"A murderer?" said Guest. "How so?"
"Why," said the Lobos, "the evidence of the murder is at your neck."
Then Guest was moved to put a hand to his neck. He felt the dry warmth of his own skin, the lumpiness of his thyroid cartilage, and the thin chain which sustained the weight of the amulet he wore.
