by Hugh Cook
Yet the difficulties of the journey did not depress the Weaponmaster. Rather, Guest Gulkan began to lighten up, his mood becoming buoyant - then weightless. The elevation of his spirits was scarcely surprising when one considers the claustrophobic tensions the boy had long endured in the imperial court of Gendormargensis.
The family history was not a happy one.
To seize power and secure it, the Witchlord Onosh had been put to the trouble of killing his father, his mother, his paternal grandfather, his twin sisters and his solitary brother, two uncles, four cousins, an aunt and five imperial concubines; and he had also secured the death of a nephew and the nephew's favorite horse.
All this was par for the course as far as the Yarglat were concerned - except for the gratuitous murder of the horse, which was generally considered to be excessive, and indicative of a streak of mean-spirited vindictiveness unbecoming in a warrior.
But Guest -
Perhaps there was an unexpected streak of mercy in Guest Gulkan's soul, for he had long been troubled by the possibility that he might one day be forced to inherit his father's bloody responsibilities, and to secure the empire yet again with a fresh set of blood-slaughter murders.
The journey the Weaponmaster was presently making was steadily taking him away from all possibility of any such conflicts, and so he was full of jokes and levity as he and his companions traveled up the Pig, arriving at last at the village of Ink on the shores of the Swelaway Sea.
There Guest gazed to his full upon the Swelaway Sea. He took so long about it that you might have thought him busy trying to drink it entire, rather than merely look at it.
At last he knelt by the waters, tasted them, then rose with a regretful sigh.
"What is it?" said Rolf Thelemite.
"It is but water," said Guest regretfully. "If only it were liquor, then there might be some use for it."Guest was trying to deny the obvious effect that the sight of this massive body of water had had on him. For Guest at that age was very full of himself, and held in very poor esteem those minor parts of the universe which lay outside his own hard-striving corpus. Yet the Swelaway Sea, by the very act of its own existence, indicated by its vast indifference that there was more to the cosmic order than the blood and bones of one Guest Gulkan, and was uncomfortably suggestive of the possibility that the boy Guest might ultimately be but one utterly trifling and inconsequential part of a larger whole too vast to be comfortably contemplated.
With the Swelaway Sea having thus been encountered (yes, and do you remember the first time that you in your own person encountered the immensity of the sea, whether salt sea or fresh?) the travelers walked into Ink and addressed themselves to the question of the acquisition of a boat.
At Ink, a place much to be noted for the barking of its dogs and the smell of its dead fish, for the multiplicity of its turds and the squaloring of its five billion trouserless children, the adventurers were (this at least was the plan) to trade their sleigh, their fur-dogs and their gold for a small fishing boat.
The Witchlord Onosh in his mercy and his wisdom had provided the travelers with gold in plenty - certainly enough, in combination with their other discardable possessions, to buy them a boat for the passage to Safrak. Unfortunately, Rolf Thelemite persuaded the Weaponmaster Guest to join him in the pursuit of a bargain and save their cash for pleasure rather than transit.
Fortunately, the sagacious Sken-Pitilkin vetoed the purchase of any bargain, and they spent their gold on an expensive but seaworthy boat.
The boat, which was named the Lathmish, was sold to them by a man named Umbilskimp, an old man who suffered bitterly from chilblains and emphysema. It came with a money-back warranty which guaranteed it to be good for five years or fifty return trips across the Swelaway Sea. Both Zozimus and Sken-Pitilkin checked the wording of the warranty, and checked it closely - and, on being satisfied, they herded Guest and Rolf aboard the boat, and set to sea.
But when the travelers were well launched upon the cold gray chop of the Swelaway Sea, the boat began to leak; and before they were so much as half-way to Alozay they found their craft was leaking like a fish hacked open by a landing hook.
Fortunately, the travelers managed to get their leaking wreck of a boat as far as the island of Ema-Urk before it actually sank. Once the thing had been grounded, an inspection of the hull proved it to be one spongy mass of sodden rot, which the boat salesman must have known.
"He is a murderer!" said Guest, denouncing the venial Umbilskimp. "And if I get him in my power then I will hang him!"
"An excellent sentiment," said Sken-Pitilkin, who usually deplored violence, but who on this occasion found himself in total agreement with Guest's vow of vengeance. "Let us report the man as soon as we get to Alozay, and perhaps they will have the grace to give us satisfaction."
And when a passing boat had at length given them passage to Alozay, they did just that - reporting the delinquent Umbilskimp to Banker Sod himself.
But Vernon Brigadoon Sod, the man of iceman race who headed the Safrak Bank and dominated the island of Alozay, declared the affairs of Ink to be no concern of his.
"In Safrak," said Sod, "we see our law as being concerned with the rule of the Safrak Islands. No more, no less."
"Then who rules Ink?" said Guest.
"Nobody," said Sod. "Ink is a free village, just as Port Domax is a free city. If you must have vengeance upon this fellow Um - Umbik - "
"Umbilskimp," supplied Guest, who had vowed never to forget the man until the man was dead.
"If you must have your vengeance," said Sod, "then you must secure it for yourself, and you will not be securing it while you are resident upon Alozay."
So Guest arrived upon Alozay, Safrak's ruling island and the site of the capital city of Molothair, and his arrival was marred by the fact that he was cheated of his legitimate revenge upon the salesman who had almost encompassed his murder.
He vowed again that he would not forget the fellow.
Meantime, back in Gendormargensis, the Witchlord Onosh sat closeted with Thodric Jarl and Eljuk Zala, trying to work out how to deal with the problems in Locontareth.
The city of Locontareth had long been a c entre of unrest, and there were rumors which suggested that one Sham Cham of that city was exercising his talents in stirring up a tax revolt. Acting on Thodric Jarl's suggestion, Lord Onosh had tried to dispose of the matter with the minimum of fuss, by sending killers to ensure that Sham Cham passed away quietly in his sleep.
Lord Onosh had just lately received news that the killers had been killed in their turn, and that a very lively and decidedly unkilled Sham Cham now slept with half a dozen man-eating guard dogs in his room.
"It looks," said Lord Onosh gloomily, "as if this will be Stranagor all over again."
"Stranagor?" said Eljuk Zala. "What's that got to do with it?"
"My, ah, my - how did I phrase it? - my Provision for the Permanent Abolition of Riverside Vermin," said the Witchlord Onosh. "That was it. The vermin being the Geflung. It was a revolt, a tax revolt. You don't remember?"
Eljuk Zala confessed that he had no recollection of ever reading or hearing about any such revolt.
This disturbed the Witchlord greatly, for nobody could be ignorant of the late and lamentable tax revolt in Stranagor unless they were ignorant of the affairs of the empire as a whole, and such ignorance was dangerous in the empire's anointed heir.
Nevertheless, the Witchlord Onosh did his best to conceal his disappointment as he explained.
"In the country around Stranagor," said Lord Onosh, "live the Geflung, who - "
As the Witchlord began to explain things to Eljuk Zala,
Thodric Jarl turned his own attention to a map of the Collosnon Empire and began planning a war against Locontareth, something he was sure the empire would find itself engaged in before too terribly long - if not in the coming year, then in the year after.
Chapter Four
Safrak Bank: organization which rules th
e Safrak Islands of the Swelaway Sea. Its ostensible business is to fatten on trade passing between Port Domax and the heartland of Tameran.
Guest Gulkan's birthday was in spring, and it was in spring of Alliance 4305 that he turned 15. His birthday was ill-omened, for it found him afflicted by influenza.
While leprosy, cholera and bubonic plague have names to rival nightmare, for swift and sudden devastation nothing can match the more lethal strains of influenza. This epidemic had claimed a tenth of Safrak's population in barely thirty days, and looked fit to claim Guest as well. He was fevered and awash with sweat, so weak in his ague's anguish that he lacked the strength to crack a flee.
In the end, the boy only survived because a guardian named Hrothgar took him home to his wife Una, who had just lost her baby to the epidemic, and so was able to wetnurse the patient. Guest was far too sick to derive any erotic satisfaction from this privilege, but Una's help saw him through his crisis, and shortly he was tottering around in the spring sunshine, feeling more like a ghost of himself than an actual boy of flesh and blood.
"You're no ghost," said Una, pulling on one of his big ears.
"There's no ghost here! There's an elephant!" Guest, who had begun to grow infatuated with the gray-eyed Una, promptly lost all sympathy with the woman. If there was one thing the young Weaponmaster absolutely hated, it was a woman who pulled on his ears. And, sooner or later, every woman of his acquaintance seemed to end up doing exactly that. Those ears, it seemed, had a fatal attraction for the entire female sex.
With his infatuation thus abruptly terminated, Guest was glad to flee from Hrothgar's house - a ramshackle wooden building in the ramshackle city of Molothair - and return to his own quarters in the mainrock Pinnacle.
On his return to the mainrock, he was promptly nobbled for guard duty. He was weak in the aftermath of his sickness, but weakness was no disqualification for work at such a time. Guest Gulkan was technically resident upon Alozay as a hostage, but this was a mere legalism. The Safrak Bank trusted him - as much as it trusted any boy of 15 - and so readily employed his brutality. It set him to guard the time prison, a large hall with a series of transparent pods set around its walls.
Mark the layout of the Hall of Time!
The mainrock Pinnacle stands at the northern end of the long and narrow island of Alozay. It is a mighty upthrust of granite, a misshapen tube of rock which bulbs outward at its middlemost point.
To win admission to the mainrock, one must come to its docks, which lie in the cold and guttural shadows of the mainrock's wave-slapped northern shore. One is then hauled upwards to Gud Obo, the Winch Stratum, the lowest of the seven inhabited levels of the mainrock. Gud Obo houses the winch-works, the servant quarters, and the storerooms.
Multiple stairways connect Gud Obo with Dolce Obo, the Pillow Stratum. This is given over to the business of life, for it is a place of sleeping quarters, kitchens and eateries; and here one finds the mainrock's banqueting hall. Here Guest Gulkan and Sken-Pitilkin had their customary quarters, and a classroom in which they could prosecute the dissection of the irregular verbs.
A dozen stairways climb from Dolce Obo to Inic Obo, the Quill Stratum, which is given over to the offices of the Safrak Bank. A mighty stratum, this, for it dominates the bulbing middlemost girthswell of the mainrock Pinnacle.
Yet another dozen stairways lead upward to Brondon Obo, the Steel Stratum, the fourth level of the mainrock, which houses prisons, guardhouse and armories.
By now, the mainrock is starting to taper as it buffets upward toward the rough-hewn ridge which helmets its crest. In consequence of the tapering, only four stairways lead upward from the fourth level to the fifth, from Brondon Obo to Trilip Obo, the Archive Stratum.
The Archive Stratum is just that - dead rooms of silent paper, of ancient book-chests sealed with lead. As one goes upward in the mainrock, so the labor of supplying water from below becomes greater, and for this reason Trilip Obo was uninhabited by human flesh.
Only one stairway climbs upward from Trilip Obo to Zi Obo, the Pod Stratum, the sixth level of the mainrock Pinnacle. Zi Obo holds one single and solitary chamber, an oval hall a hundred paces in length and three dozen paces in width. This chamber is the Hall of Time, and it was in this hall that Guest Gulkan was to stand guard duty.
The single stairway from below enters the Hall of Time at its western end. From there, the hall stretches away for its full length of a hundred paces to the ascending stairway at its eastern end. When Guest was brought there to do guard duty, the entrance to that ascending stairway was guarded by a monumental block of jade-green stone.
"So," said Banker Sod, who had taken it upon himself to brief Guest Gulkan on his guard duties. "Where are we?" Guest looked around.
"We are in the Hall of Time," said Guest Gulkan, who had received a guided tour of the mainrock shortly after his first arrival on Alozay, and who remembered this room well. Set in niches around its northern and southern walls were many transparent pods, some empty, others holding Safrak's time prisoners. Between the niches were deep-cut slit windows, the northern ones looking out across the Swelaway Sea, the southern ones allowing a partial view of the longstretch of Alozay and the ramshackle city of Molothair.
"Which level is this?" said Sod.
"The fifth," said Guest. "No, the sixth, that's it. The sixth. There's one more. The seventh."
"Jezel Obo," said Sod, naming it. "The Sky Stratum. What lies in the sky, boy?"
"It is a sacred place," said Guest. "A shrine denied to all but the initiated. It's called, uh, a sanctum. The Inner Sanctum."
"That is so," said Sod. "Jezel Obo, the Sky Stratum, is the site of the Inner Sanctum, the holy of holies of the Safrak Bank.
Are you a priest, boy?"
"No," said Guest.
"Do you have any ambition to be a priest?"
"No."
"Then don't worry your head about sacred places. Understood?"
"Understood," said Guest, who, thanks to his studies in ethnology with Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin, knew that many peoples did not like to have the secrets of their faith questioned.
"Well then," said Sod, "if that's understood, then let us go and meet the demon."
With that, Banker Sod led the Yarglat barbarian Guest Gulkan from the western end of the Hall of Time to the stairway at its eastern end.
It was then evening, and the light was dying in the Hall of Time. Sod and Guest cast no shadows as they walked through that gray light toward the jade-green block of stone at the far end of the hall. Their boots clicked over the skull-pattern tiles - many of which were broken - which paved the native granite of the hall.
The roof was high above, and the sound of their boots was cold and sharp in the vaulting emptiness.
An odd pair they made, for Banker Sod, the Governor of the Safrak Bank, was a pale-skinned male of iceman race, with the black fingernails and thick white bodyhair so typical of that breed. His hair was bright gold, his eyes yellow and his teeth of like color.
Upon Sod's ringfinger there was a steel ring in which there was set a gemstone. That stone was of ever-ice, and in the gathering gloom of evening a ghost-cloud of light surrounded it. Guest knew that chipstone of ever-ice to be the key which opened and closed the pods of the time prison.
They halted at the eastern end of the Hall of Time. They halted in the presence of the hall's resident demon - the jade- green block of stone which guarded the single stairway which led upwards to the seventh and highest level of the mainrock Pinnacle.
Though Sod was accustomed to do business in the Galish Trading Tongue, and though Guest had learnt Galish from Sken-
Pitilkin, the language of the briefing was Guest's native tongue, the Eparget of the Yarglat, in which Sod was uncommonly fluent.
Apparently the demon understood the same language, for Sod still spoke in Eparget when addressing that dignitary directly.
"Iva-Italis," said Banker Sod. "This is Guest Gulkan, the son of the emperor of Tameran, and
a student of the wizard Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin."
The demon received this news in silence. It was a monolithic block of green stone which was twice Guest Gulkan's height; and, like the other rocks of the world, it seemed singularly indisposed to entertaining mere humans in conversation.
"Does the demon speak?" said Guest.
"When it chooses to," said Sod. "It is the head of our force of mercenaries, those men who belong to that body we call the Guardians. If you were to join the Guardians then Iva-Italis would be your master."
"Ha-hmm," said Guest, pretending that this was new to him, and that he was absorbing this information with the greatest of interest.
In fact, Guest already knew all about Safrak's Guardians, the Toxteth-speaking mercenaries recruited from Port Domax and Wen Endex. Guest had even struck up a dice-and-beer friendship with some few of those worthy warriors - most notably the mighty Hrothgar - and had a little of their native argot at the command of his tongue. Surely Banker Sod had been appraised of the development of these relationships - but, if so, then the rigors of influenza had stripped that knowledge from the Banker's mind.
"Iva-Italis guards these stairs," said Banker Sod, continuing his lecture about Safrak's guardian demon. "No unauthorized person can come up or down the stairway - and that means you. If any unauthorized person tries to pass, then the demon will eat them."
"Eat them?" said Guest. "But it has no mouth, and - well, claws, arms, tentacles, things to grab with. Besides, the stairs are wide."
"When it eats, it eats," said Sod. "So don't worry about the stairs. The time prison is your concern. You know about it?"
