The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

by Hugh Cook

  Upon which the venerable Plandruk Qinplaqus indulgently declared that he would choose out a wife for the boy Guest.

  "A wife!" said Guest in alarm. "I said nothing about getting married!"

  "But you were talking of a woman, were you not?" said Plandruk Qinplaqus.

  "Why, yes," said Guest. "But a woman is not a wife, or need not be. Get me a woman, that's all that I want."

  "Am I a pimp, that I should get you a whore?" said Plandruk

  Qinplaqus.

  "As I am the son of an emperor," said Guest warmly, "it should be an honor for you to pimp for me."

  At which sally, Qinplaqus shook with laughter until his belly almost burst; for it had been several centuries since the venerable Ashdan had encountered anyone with Guest's degree of impudence.

  And after some negotiation it was at last agreed between them that Qinplaqus would not pimp out a whore for young Guest, since pimping was beneath the dignity of an emperor; but that Qinplaqus would diligently quest out a wife for Guest, and (with luck) find him a woman who would be happy to take him to bed even though his arms were but buds peeping from stumps.

  A tall order, one might think!

  But Plandruk Qinplaqus was great in power and knowledge, and knew his people well, and already had a wifely candidate in mind.

  Chapter Thirty

  Name: Penelope Flute.

  Birthplace: Dalar ken Halvar.

  Occupation: priestess of an Evolutionary cult.

  Status: large-scale debtor.

  Description: woman of Frangoni race, built to a truly magnificent scale.

  Hobby: macrame Quote: "Why do men always get the good things?"

  During his sojourn inside the minor mountain of Cap Foz Para Lash, Guest Gulkan was often in contact with the demon which ran the place, the demon which went by the name of Paraban Senk. This demon never manifested itself in the flesh, preferring to restrict its manifestations to a face on a screen.

  While the Weaponmaster Guest Gulkan was in no great hurry to learn the Secret of Secrets and the Wisdom of Wisdom from a face on a screen which called itself Paraban Senk, the wizard Sken-Pitilkin was much more forward in having dealings with this entity. Sken-Pitilkin was long in discourse with Paraban Senk; allowed himself to be interrogated by Senk; and did some intense and detailed questioning of his own. To Sken-Pitilkin, Paraban Senk explained many things, including the secret of the Chasm Gates and the nature of the Nexus; though most of what Senk said was so frankly incredible that Sken-Pitilkin gave it precious little credence.

  Nevertheless, while Sken-Pitilkin thought Senk to be for the most part a deluded confabulator, the wizard of Skatzabratzumon still thought it worthwhile to appraise Paraban Senk of a suggestion once made by the Great God Jocasta - namely, that airflight could be made a possibility through management of the sustained destruction of abnormal artefacts exposed to the normalizing effects of the universe.Sken-Pitilkin then told Senk of the long and danger-fraught process of experimentation which had resulted from this suggestion.

  "So you actually got airborne?" said Senk.

  "Twice," said Sken-Pitilkin.

  "And lived to tell the tale?" said Senk in amazement.

  "Unless I died and was casually reincarnated without noticing the fact," said Sken-Pitilkin.

  "Tell me the details," said Senk.

  "The first flight was from the island of Ema-Urk," said Sken-Pitilkin. "That's an island in the Swelaway Sea. We flew to the mountains of Ibsen-Iktus, where Guest's brother Eljuk Zala met the wizard Ontario Nol, to whom he is now apprenticed."

  "And the second?"

  "The second flight was from Locontareth," said Sken-Pitilkin.

  "We didn't get as far that time. I levitated the roof of a hall and flew it to the outskirts of the city where I, ah, landed it.

  Crashed it, to be honest."

  Then Senk took Sken-Pitilkin through a jolt-by-jolt recapitulation of those flights, after which Senk did a great many calculations, ultimately working out how Sken-Pitilkin could harness the powers of destructive magic to make a functional airship.

  "This is how," said Paraban Senk, at last displaying upon a screen an illustration of something that looked like an overgrown bird's nest.

  "Why," said Sken-Pitilkin, "it looks like a bird's nest."

  "So it does, so it does," said Senk. "But I think it will work regardless."

  Then, acting on Senk's detailed instructions, the sagacious wizard Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin began to build a functional airship on some flat land by the Yamoda River.

  While Sken-Pitilkin went to work on the airship problem,

  Plandruk Qinplaqus was exerting his talents to resolve Guest Gulkan's woman shortage, with the result that the Frangoni warrior Asodo Hatch shortly introduced his sister Penelope to young Guest, and suggested that they would make a good match in marriage.

  Since the woman Penelope was a handsome wench built to generous specifications Guest promptly agreed that marriage would be a very good idea.

  So it was that Guest Gulkan was wed to Penelope Flute, to the general satisfaction of all concerned.

  Some women might have had reservations about marrying a man whose arms and legs were currently no larger than those of a baby, but Asodo Hatch explained to his sister that Guest Gulkan's condition was due to the fact that he had been born as a fish, and had only lately begun to evolve into a human being. Since Penelope was a dedicated Evolutionist, she believed this without reservation, and was excited and fascinated to be presented with living proof of the Evolutionary theory which had long been preached to her by her personal guru.

  Of course the story of Guest Gulkan's fish-to-man transition was a patent tissue of nonsense, as indeed is the whole of the Evolutionary heresy. As everyone with the faintest acquaintance with human history knows full well, there has never been any firm historical evidence to indicate that spontaneous organic transmogrification takes place, for all that tens of thousands of Evolutionists believe in it fervently. In the whole of human history there has never been so much as one single Evolutionist who has ever been able to produce either a grandparent or a grandchild or any other relative who has spontaneously made the transformation to fish, lizard, dog, cat, cow or budgerigar.

  Furthermore, it can be stated with confidence that no Evolutionist ever will be able to thus match proof to theory.

  Admittedly, a change in organic form can be effected by the application of sufficient Power, and this can be done by either occult resource or by sophisticated machinery. But this is difficult. Very difficult. So difficult that the idea of a species-to-species shift occurring naturally must surely be seen as the absurdity it is.

  Despite the passion with which Evolutionists defend their ideas, the whole basis of Evolutionary theory is irredeemably flawed, for the world we live in is simply not possessed of the massive instability which would be necessary for Evolutionary processes to take place.

  The truth of the matter is that Evolution never takes place in our day-to-day world, but instead is restricted to the World Beyond, those realms of almost infinitely flexible improbability where gods, demons and devils have their existence. Unlike us, the entities of the World Beyond are not bound to brute matter and the mundane flesh, and hence they are capable of evolving, and do so on a regular basis, and with alarming regularity.

  Again, the proof of this is to be found in human history, for the same history which demonstrates that humans have never evolved also serves to demonstrate that the gods are in a state of constant flux. There is not one god known to the human race which has remained stable in its form for so short a time as recorded history; and many are the gods which have radically altered their shapes, powers and attributes in a generation or less.

  While the World Beyond is doubtless the site of the most promiscuously fevered Evolution imaginable, Penelope Flute was in error when she believed Evolutionary instability to be a property of the world in which she lived. However, Guest made no attempt to argue her out of her
ridiculous beliefs - for the simple and sufficient reason that they had no language in common.

  For want of the language of the tongue, Guest and Penelope had to rely much on the language of the flesh, and here they came to swift agreement, so that the buxom Penelope was often to be found sitting astride her champion, thrashing and screaming as she soared toward the crest of her pleasure. Guest had never before met a woman who thrashed and screamed, for the females with whom he had previously mated had lacked

  Penelope's taste for melodrama; and he was flattered by the whole performance, quite failing to recognize that a full nine tenths of it was pure theater.

  But, though Guest and his beloved were satisfied in bed, and though they did not argue, it would not be true to say that their marital relationship was entirely harmonious. For one thing, Guest disliked the uninhibited manner in which Penelope would grab hold of his ears in the course of her physical raptures. Not only did she grab them: she was inclined to haul upon them as she forgot herself in her climax, as if anchoring herself to these prominent aspects of reality lest ecstasy claim her forever. Her fingernails were inclined to bite into the flesh as she hauled on it, and the combined effect of all this abuse was that Guest, in his hours of detumescence, usually felt as if he had been attacked by a pack of homicidal man-eating crabs. Guest also wished that sometimes, just sometimes, he could have been left alone with his thoughts, for as their relationship progressed it seemed that Penelope spent virtually the entire course of every day and night at his bedside.

  He often wondered why she never went out into the city.

  The reason why Penelope never went out into the city was that her life would have been endangered had she wandered the streets of Dalar ken Halvar, for the Nexus religion known as Nu-chala-nuth was in the ascendant in that city, and its ascendancy was accompanied by the systematic slaughter of every Evolutionist who could be caught.

  Since the Frangoni warrior Asodo Hatch was a priest of Nu- chala-nuth, he should by rights have murdered his sister himself, but instead he had chosen to bury her in the Combat College.

  While thus buried alive inside the minor mountain of Cap Foz Para Lash, Penelope had nothing to do except sit with her husband and watch entertainment shows sourced in the Nexus, which played endlessly on a screen which took up one whole wall of Guest Gulkan's room.

  The shows Guest Gulkan favored were those featuring the Wild Tribes, a set of barbaric peoples whose lives were a non-stop drama of war, conquest, killing, fighting, looting, pillage, rape, torture, arson and orgies. Guest was particularly interested in the orgies, and found that he had much to learn. The Yarglat had a very high opinion of themselves, and Guest had always been very proud of himself and his people, but soon he realized that the Yarglat were a dull and conservative people compared to the Wild Tribes. One of the Wild Tribes was given to staging huge orgies in which ten thousand people at a time grappled promiscuously in a gigantic vat of ripe strawberries while cheering spectators pelted them with handfuls of rose petals.

  Once Guest's baby-sized hand was strong enough and skilled enough to manipulate the bedside controls which commanded the entertainment screen, he replayed this particular orgy repeatedly, and vowed that he would strive to match this achievement of the Wild Tribes as soon as he had mastered the Collosnon Empire to his will.

  Yes, Guest still hoped to be emperor.

  He hoped to defeat Khmar, to conquer Gendormargensis, to install himself on the ruling throne of Tameran, and to establish a dynasty that would rule the Collosnon Empire for generations.

  While the difficulties of conquering the Collosnon Empire from a bed based in Dalar ken Halvar proved insuperable, Guest thought he should at least be able to set about producing a dynasty. It is said amongst the Yarglat that a warrior needs ten sons and an emperor needs twenty; and Guest, knowing that his planned war against Khmar might well be long and bloody, suspected that twenty might be barely sufficient for his purposes.

  Hence he put his soul into his bedtime efforts - but his woman never became pregnant.

  For, unbeknownst to Guest, Penelope had no plans to hatch children, and the demon had obliged her by arranging for its medical facilities to bury in her buttocks a pair of slow-release contraceptive pellets which would guarantee her infertility for a decade.

  As soon as Penelope had mastered enough of Guest's native Eparget to her tongue for basic communication to be possible, she learnt that he wanted sons to fight with him in his great war against Khmar, though she was not by any means clear as to who "Khmar" might be. But the purple-skinned Frangoni beauty was not inclined to co-operate with this plan, for she believed it to be sheer folly. Penelope believed that a great Flood was imminent, and that this Flood would swamp the entire world, precipitating a mass Evolution of humans to fishes.

  Once Guest and Penelope were united in piscatorial bliss it would be very nice to have a pair of child-fishes to keep them company, but there was no point in idly breeding human children to fight in a war which would never happen. So thought Penelope - and felt guiltless at frustrating Guest's intent.

  By the end of his second year in the minor mountain of Cap Foz Para Lash, Guest Gulkan had arms and legs - of a sort. They were not sufficient for his support, but they were adequate for his propulsion. Daily, the Weaponmaster was carried from his mountain cave to Dalar ken Halvar's river, and there he played fish the whole morning through, strengthening his limbs for war by endless labors of swimming. When he was not swimming, he was resting; or was renewing his efforts to establish a dynasty; or was eating, for he found himself possessed of a ravenous appetite.

  Before coming to Dalar ken Halvar, Guest Gulkan had known nothing of swimming, and invariably associated water with drowning. But, as his limbs were initially of an uncommonly light weight, he learnt the art easily, for he found himself naturally buoyant.

  Later, as his legs lengthened and strengthened, their weight of ever-growing bone and muscle weighed him down, and to stay afloat became harder. But by then he had entirely mastered the art of swimming down to a fine, and sustained himself in the water as if born to it.

  Two years of swimming brought Guest to the end of his fourth year of exile in Dalar ken Halvar, by which time Sken-Pitilkin had wrecked his seventy-seventh experimental airship - and had just succeeded in making the seventy-eighth fly.

  And Guest was cordially invited to join Sken-Pitilkin on the second test-flight of that amazing device.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Jocasta: an alleged Great God held prisoner in Obooloo by Anaconda Stogirov, high priestess of the Temple of Blood. This entity has faithfully promised to make the Weaponmaster Guest Gulkan a wizard should Guest secure its liberation.

  Now during his time inside Cap Foz Para Lash, Guest Gulkan had heard from the demon Paraban Senk many wild and wonderful tales of the worlds which were alleged to exist in other universes. He had heard of the rollercoaster, and the bungi jump, both devices of terror unimaginable to anyone who had led the sheltered life of a Yarglat barbarian.

  Though Guest was no scholar, he had been trained in ethnology by Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin, and so had diligently set himself the task of discovering whether the rollercoaster and the bungi jump had been instituted as initiation rites - fearsome tests of manhood to be undertaken as part of the rites of passage marking the transition from childhood - or whether these outrageous forms of horrorshock were looked upon as a form of fun.

  After long research, Guest concluded that the peoples of the high civilizations known to Paraban Senk routinely plunged down artificial mountains in rickety carts, or hurled themselves from the heights with elasticated ropes tied to their ankles, purely for their own pleasure. He was most frightfully glad that he had not been born into any world where pleasure itself had the taste of torture, and looked upon Sken-Pitilkin's airship as a device better fit for such a world than for his own.

  Ever since the precipitous flight which had seen Guest and his companions flung from the Swelaway Sea to an a
ir-wrecking in the Ibsen-Iktus mountains, Guest had entirely ceased to envy the birds; and it was only with the greatest reluctance imaginable that he allowed himself to be cajoled into Sken-Pitilkin's airship to partake of its second flight.

  In the end, thinking himself doomed to reduced to a mess of fractured chicken bones, Guest Gulkan climbed into the gigantic nest of sticks which Sken-Pitilkin declared to be an airship.

  To his amazement, it flew.

  And Guest, dazzled and bewildered by the wonders of controlled flight (which was entirely different from the absolutely uncontrolled flights which he had previously endured), was returned to the ground in one piece, amazed to find his skull and skeleton intact.

  "Now," said Sken-Pitilkin, "since you have recovered your strength, and since I have a functional airship, we can start to plan our campaign."

  "Our campaign?" said Guest.

  "Our quest," said Sken-Pitilkin.

  "Quest?"

  "For the x-x-zix," said Sken-Pitilkin.

  "It would seem," said Guest, "that I have a lot to learn."

  "So you have," said Sken-Pitilkin. "So you have. Very well!

  Let us start the explanations!"

  Then, in tedious detail, Sken-Pitilkin took Guest Gulkan through the tortuous details of the Witchlord's slow and painful negotiations with the Partnership Banks. Since Lord Onosh had suffered so badly from the Banks' deceits, he had not easily been able to bring himself to trust Sod.

  But Banker Sod had been given great incentive to make agreement with Lord Onosh, for the Partnership Banks as a whole were unhappy with Sod. It was agreed amongst the Banks that Sod should never have incarcerated Ulix of the Drum in his timeprison; and the Banks were alarmed at the ambition Sod had shown by arranging this incarceration, for it appeared that Sod had imprisoned the rightful ruler of Dalar ken Halvar because he had entertained notions of seizing that city and ruling it himself.