by Hugh Cook
Then:
A skrittling-scratching, as if some creature with murderous talons was clawing the bulking timbers of the jailcell door.
"Guest!" said the hoarse voice of Bao Gahai.
"What?" said Guest Gulkan.
"I don't know what you're doing or what you hope to accomplish by it," said Bao Gahai, "but I adjure you to stop."
"You adjure me, do you?" said Guest Gulkan, rigorously unimpressed. "And who are you to adjure anything?"
"I am Bao Gahai," said she venomously. "You will not trifle with me. I am Bao Gahai, birthed nine thousand years before your daylight. I am Bao Gahai, Lord of Shadow, Commander of Darkness,
Invoker of Doom."
"Very impressive," said Guest, still unimpressed. "How kind of you to coop together here with us ordinary mortals."
Then he resumed his attack on the door. Scritch scritch!
Scratch scratch!
"Guest!" said Bao Gahai savagely.
"Yes?" said Guest.
"Stop it. Or else."
"Or else what?" said Guest, for all the world like a small child daring its mother.
No answer came.
So:
Scritch scritch scratch scratch.
"Guest!"
"Yes?"
"If you don't stop that, right now, I'll - "
"You'll what?"
There was a pause, then Bao Gahai said, very slowly, very clearly, and with the vehemence of murderous intent:
"Guest, if I have any more trouble from you tonight, I will shit in my hand and rub the result from your chin to your eyebrows."Guest thought about it.
Then scritched and scratched again.
Once.
Twice.
Thrice.
While those yet awake in the cell - meaning everyone but the slumberous Zozimus - waited for mayhem to be unleashed.
Fortunately, having scritched and scratched at the door those three last times, Guest decided that honor had been satisfied, and settled himself to sleep. Soon he too was snoring, only somewhat more loudly than Zozimus. Bao Gahai stayed awake a little longer, as if assuring herself that Guest was really asleep. Then she too dropped off, and the lurching discords of her saw-voiced snore began to rip the air.
With all this snoring going on, the scholarly Sken-Pitilkin found sleep impossible. Instead, he sat lamenting his fate. Once he had been the commander of a great empire. Once he had ruled in unimaginable power. In later years, he had lived quite comfortably as a lord of dragons and master of the island of Drum, until his peace had been disturbed when Zozimus, Zelafona and Glambrax had sought refuge on that island, bringing killers from the Confederation of Wizards in their wake.
And now he was a fugitive, a renegade displaced from his castle, accursed of the Confederation, unwelcome in his homeland and hunted by his peers. He had sheltered as best he could on the unhospitable earth of Tameran, doing what he must to secure his survival - even stooping to tutoring when that proved the only way for him to win his bread! But now he was doomed to come to a wretched end, unless he could by his wizardry or his lawmongery secure his release from Alozay.
And even if he could secure his release, what then?
Where would he go?
And what would he do?
So brooded Sken-Pitilkin, until his peace was shattered as the door cracked and splintered with a bursting roar. And what a roar! It boomed and burst like a dragon in its rages, or like one of Pelagius Zozimus's experimental steam cookers exploding into fragments, or like a great heap of Tang's percussive toys all simultaneously erupting into flash and thunder.
That roar, and the splintering of the door which accompanied it, brought Zozimus abrupting from sleep.
"Dragons!" cried Zozimus.
But it was not dragons but men, as a moment's listening made plain. For, through the shattered door there came the sounds of murder, the killing-clash of steel, the bellows of battle.
"The door!" said Guest, wrenching at the fractured timbers.
"The door, the door! Help me!"
But only Morsh Bataar joined him in his onslaught on that barrier. Without, the enemy was surely slaughtering off those of the Witchlord's men whom they had not been able to take by surprise and overcome by stealth. By escaping into such battle, unarmed and unarmored, Guest Gulkan would only add his own corpse to the slaughter heap.
"Glut!" said Morsh, swearing. "The door holds!"
At which there was another shattering explosion. The blast slammed through the shattered door and dumped the would-be heroes on their backsides.
"Blood's grief!" said Guest, raising himself to his elbows.
"Am I alive, or what?"
None answered, until Bao Gahai chose to answer thus:
"Hush, child. Hush, child, and sleep."
Sleep! To advise such was lunacy. For none could so much as close their eyes. Surely Bao Gahai was quite deranged! As for Guest, he had not the slightest thought of sleep. He was waiting with the others. One and all, they were waiting for another explosion, all sure that a third such would kill them.
"What raises such thunder from living rock?" wondered Morsh Bataar, not seriously expecting an answer.
"There are oils which your anatomist can dissect out of the living flesh of dragons," said Zozimus grimly. "Such oils, abused for purposes of war, can conjure explosion, albeit at great expense."
Then none spoke further, for outside were screams of anguished murder. The wreckage of the door shook as someone crashed against it. There was a howl of blood-pumping fury. Iron smashed iron. Flesh wrenched itself in agony's outcry. Then came a groan, a guttering gasp, a death-moan.
"Had we but weapons!" said Guest, with clench-fist frustration.
The ultimate weapon is the warrior, yet a warrior unweaponed is but a poor thing, and a washerwoman with an axe can overcome him. Surely the Witchlord's people were putting up a fight; yet, just as surely, they must be being killed out, for without weapons they could not prevail against their enemies.
At last the sounds of killing diminished down to nothing.
"Blood," said Guest.
Contemplating his prospects.
His father dead. He himself a prisoner, trapped on Safrak.
His enemies meaning to sell him to Khmar.
"If die I must then now I'll die," said Guest, seizing one of the shattered timbers of the door and wrenching. "Now! Not later!"
His efforts provoked a wrenching scream of wood - an agony as great as that of one of the men so lately killed. The door did not yield, but its protest was heard by someone outside. Iron-shod boots rang on rock, approaching the door.
"Who's there?" cried a burly voice.
The voice spoke Eparget!
"Here!" shouted Guest, answering in that same Yarglat tongue.
"Here! Here! Within!"
"Who?" said the battle-booted voice, now outside the shattered door.
"Why, the Weaponmaster Guest Gulkan," said that same self- boasting young man. "Unloose me!"
"Unloose you? Why?"
"Unloose me, that I may fight."
"Fight?" said the warrior without. "Fight? Fighting is the least and last of things we need. I'll not let you out if fighting is your creed."
"You bloodpoxed box of sheep shit!" roared Guest. "Unloose me, or I'll rip your brains out!"
And he tore at the ragged door, though still it held.
Outside, the war-booted warrior laughed uproariously, encouraging Guest yet further in his fury. Then there were shouts, their import indistinguishable to the prisoners in the cell.
"It's Guest, my lord!" said the war-booted warrior.
Tramping footsteps echoed from stone to stone.
Then:
"Guest?"
It was Lord Onosh, the Witchlord himself, deep-voiced, with a note of bloodstained victory in the triumph of his voice.
"It's him," said Bao Gahai. "And me."
"Love of the gods!" said the Witchlord Onosh, speaking fervently. "I thought
the pair of you perished!"
"And I likewise thought you dead," said Guest, speaking from the cell-murk. "How live you?"
"Through the grace of weapons," said Lord Onosh. "A key! A key! Who's got the key? You - a key for this cell. What? What's that you say? How in the five hells would I know! Well, look for it, man! Don't just stand there! Strolth! Hurry yourself, you son of a gaplax! Or will it take cold iron in your arse to move you?"
This last was said at a full-pitched roar, suggesting that the object of the Witchlord's wrath had almost hurried out of earshot, gone to look for the key to the cell of imprisonment.
"Weapons," said Guest, when no further outburst followed.
"Whence came weapons? We had none."
"We had many," said Lord Onosh, by way of contradiction.
"Where?" said Guest.
"In the treasure chests," said Lord Onosh, levering at door timbers with his broadbladed battle-sword. "We brought ten chests of treasure to Safrak. Ten chests of iron and steel."
"But," said Guest, bewildered, "those chests held gold, and diamonds. They were checked! I saw the Bankers check them!"
"Checked once, and not again," said Lord Onosh, wood giving way before the cunning leverage of his steel. "Deep water took the greater part of the treasure, and we replaced that greater part with steel made for war. Here, you, pass me the lamp. Guest - take this!"
A breach having been opened in the door, a lamp was passed inside the cell.It showed weary faces, the ashes of incinerated herbs, the sad remains of a charcoaled Book of Verbs, the blackened fibers of a handkerchief, and much scattered rust.
A little more wood-wrenching, and a gap large enough for escape had been wrenched in the door. The prisoners accordingly made their exit.
"Why, my son," said Lord Onosh. "You're naked below the knee, and most of the way above it!"
"It is the fashion," said Guest.
"Not if I have anything to do with it," said Lord Onosh. "Ho!
You! The key! You have it? No? Then - come here! Your clothes, man. Your clothes beneath the navel!"
Thus Guest gained borrowed clothes, though they were far too small for him, and he split several seams in the process of making himself decent.
"So," said Lord Onosh. "I have my son. Right. Now we can fight to the docks, and be gone."
"Be gone!" said Guest, in dismay.
"Yes," said Lord Onosh. "What else?"
"I thought us surely to fight for Alozay," said Guest.
"There are too many of them," said Lord Onosh. "They are too strong. The best we can hope for is to escape. If the boats which brought us to the island are still at the docks, we - "
But then the Witchlord broke off, hearing renewed shouting in the distance.
"Ho, men!" cried Lord Onosh. "War!"
And, nothing more needing saying, the Witchlord went pounding toward the outcry.
"A sword!" cried Guest. "A sword! A sword! My kingdom for a sword!"
As the young Weaponmaster at that stage possessed no kingdom, this advertisement attracted no swords to his possession. But someone thrust a small reaping sickle into his hands, and, seeing that this was all the armament he was likely to instantly procure, the Weaponmaster Guest gave chase to his father.Guest caught his father at the head of a stairway which led downward. Weaponmaster grabbed Witchlord.
"Father," said Guest.
"My son," said the Witchlord.
"These stairs," said Guest, "they go upwards. Upstairs there's a demon, it can make you a wizard, there's a Great God in the temple, the Temple of Blood, Obooloo, that's what the demon said, and the Great God's a prisoner."
Lord Onosh looked at his son in astonishment.
"What are you on about?" said Lord Onosh.
"My lord," said Sken-Pitilkin, alarmed to hear Guest babbling about demons and Great Gods. "You son was ill when he was last on Alozay. He had a fever, and hallucinations from the fever. He - "
"It's true!" said Guest.
Then discourse came to an end, for a squad of Alozay's resident Guardians came storming up the stairs. Those mercenary warriors were outnumbered by the Witchlord's men, but they attacked savagely regardless. All was briefly a whirl of battle, and when it was over -
"Guest!" said Lord Onosh, looking around. "Where are you?"
"The boy has gone upstairs," said Sken-Pitilkin.
"Then he is quite mad," said Lord Onosh.
And, as the Weaponmaster Guest Gulkan went upwards toward Safrak's Hall of Time, the Witchlord led his forces downwards - abandoning Guest to the uncertainties of whatever fate awaited him.
Chapter Twenty-One
Grand Palace of Alozay: headquarters of the Safrak Bank. In multiple levels hollowed from the mainrock Pinnacle, it rises above the adjacent city of Molothair. Access to the Grand Palace is via the winch-baskets which allow one to be raised or lowered from or to the Palace Docks. If graced with the power of flight, one could also win the palace from the air, since several of its levels are fenestrated with windows adequate for the entry of a winged horse or similar.
There was blood on the stairs, and the blood had been tracked upward in a series of fragmented bootprints. Belatedly, Guest realized he was tracking through that blood himself, leaving a series of bare-toe footprints in his wake. He scraped his feet against the roughness of the living rock of the mainrock Pinnacle, then started upwards again.
Then stopped.
For he could hear breathing.
It was heavy breathing, the gasping of a hard-laboring athlete, the wrenching air-spasming of a mountaineer enduring high-altitude duress. A pregnant woman heavily into her labor might make such a sound - as might a man locked in a death-wrestle with a crocodile.
Till now, Guest had been carrying the weight of his sword's nakedness on his shoulder, for the weight of the weapon made it uncomfortable to carry at the challenge. But the ominous, indecipherable threat of that breathing jolted his heart to a stammering run. As the blood-spring impetus of fear shocked his heart to fresh endeavor, he handled his sword as adroitly as if it were no more than a dagger.
With that sword poised like a knife - held low, with the blade slanting upwards, ready to spear through latticed ribs to the sweat-thump heart - Guest took the darkened stairs at a barefooted sprint.
Red fire flashed on his blade as he jolted into a lantern's arc. He crashed to the step-stones, and his blood-red blade went flying to a clattering clang-fall. A moment later, the fallen Weaponmaster realized he must have slipped. On what? On nothing.
It was the sheer impetuosity of his upward assault which had slammed him downwards. Guest recovered himself, regained his weapon, then scuttled upwards, fleeing from the lamplight as a cockroach flees domestic flame. For light was peril.
He halted in darkness, panting, listening, taking stock. The heavy breathing was closer, now. Closer, and more labored yet. It brought back fragmented memories of battle, murder, ambush, war.
It was the breathing of -
Yes, Guest knew what that breathing signified.
Alone in the dark, he hesitated. The man who lay on the stairs above, the man who was surely laboring through his death, why, that man was no threat. But in the shadow of those labors an assassin might be waiting. And Guest, by slipping and falling, by racketing the night with the clatter of his sword, would have alerted any such assassin to his approach.
The Weaponmaster hesitated, half-minded to retreat to the mainrock's lower levels, and there to join his father in the attempt to fight through to the docks.
He listened.
From far below came the whimpering moth-faint echoes of distant discords - sounds of battle and barrat near-drowned by the gasping labors of the dying man who lay so close above. Those faint hoarse-clash clues from below told Guest that battle was being waged. He thought his father doomed to lose such a battle.
For, after all, this was the mainrock Pinnacle, the mighty stronghold of the Safrak Bank. It was packed with the Bank's mercenary Guardians, and t
he Bankers themselves would might ably enough when put to the challenge. The Witchlord's men were few, and so Guest doubted his father able to win his way to freedom, not even with the assistance of two wizards and a pair of witches.
But - above!
Thinking of what lay above, Guest overcame his hesitation and barefooted it up the stairs. A dozen steps took him into the light of the next oil lantern. Sprawled on the stone flags directly beneath that guttering source of semi-illumination lay a - a man?
No.
A woman.
A washerwoman.
Yes, it was one of the mighty washerwomen of the mainrock
Pinnacle, one of those whose muscular labors helped winch people up and down from the Palace Docks. And, as Guest had deduced from her breathing, she was sorely wounded.
She was dying.
It is hard, this business of battlefield death. The flesh sweats, and gasps, each breath a clutching. One might think the dying would yield. But they do not. They fight. The closer the death, the greater the battle. Will, identity, awareness - all is reduced to the groaning swoop of this ingasping. Air! Air!
The dying woman did not know where she was, or why. She was unaware of Guest Gulkan standing there. Did not hear him, did not see him, did not imagine him. Her world was the laboring of her dying, no more, no less.
And Guest, standing in the lamplight, momentarily forgot himself and his own predicament. Moved by pity for the woman - this unintended casualty, no enemy of him or his - he wished there was some way to help her. But help was not in his gift.
Just as when his brother Morsh had suffered a broken leg, Guest was helpless, for he had made no study of the healing arts.
Of course, when Morsh had suffered his breakage, the wizard Sken-Pitilkin had been there to help. But where was Sken-Pitilkin now?
Downstairs, doubtless. Guest was half-moved to fetch him, but knew the thought immediately as madness. For the wizards Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin and Pelagius Zozimus would both be embroiled in battle, and no aid could be spared for a washerwoman when the lives of so many were in the balance.
So Guest could but gape uselessly at the turmoil of the woman's gaping-gasping, at her blood-moil clothing, at the red soakage darkening the shadows of her ribs. At 16 years of age, he knew his edged weapons, his tactics and his strategy; he knew the dynamics of patrolling and the logistic difficulties of provisioning an army on the march; he was fit to pillage, and plunder, and burn, and ravage; but in the face of the spillage of blood he was helpless.
