by Hugh Cook
Thus the Weaponmaster fell to the forces of the Izdimir Empire. He was returned to the city of Injiltaprajura, there to endure a weary confinement, a muchness of interrogation, several beatings and a wastefulness of impossible requests. To Guest's dismay, rumor had marked him as a wizard, and so he found himself asked to serve his new masters with his wizardry, and beaten anew in consequence of his failure to serve.
With the Mutilator's men at last convinced that Guest was no wizard, and convinced that he would be of no further use to them on the island of Untunchilamon, he was consigned to a ship that was traveling eastwards, and so was conveyed across the vastness of the oceans as a prisoner in the company of other prisoners.
Thus the Weaponmaster Guest Gulkan voyaged to the continent of Yestron as a prisoner.
Since his ship was no seagull's wing, it was a long time before Guest was landed at Bolfrigalaskaptiko, that city which lies upon the shores of the river Ka, just upstream from the great lagoon of Manamalargo. From there, he was taken inland to the mountainous region of Ang, where he arrived at last at Obooloo, capital city of the Izdimir Empire and home of Aldarch the Third.
Such were the rigors of this journey that Guest was suffering from both dengue fever and dysentery by the time he was brought into the notorious prison known as the Fulch, and his condition was such that it was a full six months before he was in a fit state to be presented to Aldarch the Third, the Mutilator of Yestron.
The day before Guest was due to be so presented, a kindly jailor who spoke a little Toxteth exercised his skills in that language to advise the Weaponmaster that it would be best advised to commit suicide rather than to endure such presentation. But Guest distrusted the jailor, and so rejected this perfectly sound advice, and so on the morrow was conveyed uphill to the knoll which sustained the Mutilator's palace, that building known as Ubazakura. Guest was checked through the gates of Ubazakura, and thus passed from the world of men, entering the lair of a demon-beast best fitted for a life in an otherworld hell.
But, as yet, the Weaponmaster was still far from despair.
For, as yet, the Weaponmaster Guest Gulkan had not met the Mutilator, and so was inclined to discount nine tenths of that which rumor had conveyed to his ears - whereas the truth of the matter was that Guest, rather than discounting rumor, should rightly have amplified it.
As he was soon to find out.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Aldarch the Third: the Mutilator of Yestron, he who by genius of terror won the vicious civil war known as Talonsklavara. His joy is to supervise the scourging of the Izdimir Empire, which he governs from the province of Ang in the heartland of the continent of Yestron. His capital city is Obooloo, where he resides in the palace known as Ubazakura, which affords him a splendid view over Lake Kak.
As Midsummer's Day approached, Guest Gulkan was dragged from the dismal depths of his imprisonment. The tangled matting of his long-grown hair was shaved to a hedgehog's prickling. He was bathed; and scrubbed; and deloused; and perfumed. His rags were burnt - sending up a thick and oily smoke to the heavens - and he was dressed in a loincloth and openweave sandals.
Then, on a hot day near the summer's uttermost height, the loincloth-clad Weaponmaster was escorted to the palace of Ubazakura. This monument to power stood upon Obooloo's heights, and was the home of Aldarch the Third, Mutilator of Yestron and ruler of most of it.
The Mutilator's reign was by then near the end of its Second Year of Peace. The year Peace 2 in the Izdimir Empire was the year Khmar 7 in the Collosnon Empire. Guest Gulkan's birthday had been and gone; he had already attained to the great and ancient age of 24; and shortly it would be Midsummer's Day again, and the Third Year of Peace would begin, and with that beginning the eighth year of the rule of the Emperor Khmar would likewise commence.
In the long darkness of his imprisonment, Guest Gulkan had steeled himself for his confrontation with Aldarch the Third. It is a mark of his upbringing that Guest had seen this confrontation to have been inevitable since the moment of his capture - for Guest was the son of an emperor, was he not? Hence he had never expected death through anonymous execution, but, rather, had braced himself for an edge-to-edge face-off with the very lord of the Izdimir Empire himself.
Now the long-expected showdown was at hand, and so Guest expected to be led into realms of patent doom, of screaming shadows and blood-reek dungeons. He expected to be confronted with assorted tableaux of gaping corpses and truncated torsos, of gibbering victims and crawling wreckage bloody in its writhings.
But no signs of any such provincial barbarism were to be seen as the young Guest Gulkan was escorted into the palace of Ubazakura. The Izdimir Empire can be called many things, but by no stretch of the imagination can it rightly be called provincial; and Aldarch the Third, the ruler of that empire, was one of the most civilized and highly cultivated rulers in all the world.
Hence the palace of Ubazakura was no gross place of wreckage and threat. Rather, it was typified by peace, grace and balance.
It was a home to the arts and a monument to interior design.Guest was led through a courtyard where diamond-gilled catfish whiskered through a lily pond which was deep - deep as drowning. The Weaponmaster slowed and lingered, lingered in the sun, lingered under the beating sky. He was conscious of the delicacy of the moment, of the fragility of his own existence. He felt the blood sifting through the smallest and most intimate sacs of his lungs. He felt the cobwebbed construction of his bones and the subtle dance of the very particles of air which wafted in and out through the great wings of his nose.
In those moments of heightened consciousness, the Weaponmaster heard a woman begin to sing. Her song echoed through the sprawling bat-wings of his ears, and, making its way through the tubes of flesh to which his ears gave access, caused the small and delicate bones deep inside his ear to thump out a message suitable for interpretation by his brain.
The beauty of the song suggested to Guest that a beautiful woman was responsible for its generation. This was not the case.
Rather, the day was bright with the golden song of one of the imperial dragons of Yestron - creatures of gentle nature and spectacular musical talent.
"Who is the woman?" said Guest, hearing the dragon, and thinking from its song that it must be a woman at least as beautiful as his long-lost Yerzerdayla.
"Hush," said the translator who accompanied him. "We are entering the Presence."
With that, they left the courtyard's sun behind them, venturing into the airy shadows of a series of chambers interconnected by arched doorways. They walked across hexagonal tiles, each of which was decorated with a representation of one of the body's internal organs. By contrast, the tapestries which adorned the walls were devoted to abstraction, to interweaving glyphs and helixes utterly removed from all realities of the flesh.
While passing through these chambers, Guest smelt camphor.
Camphor. What did that remind him of? It reminded him of the tunnel which had led him into the depths of Obooloo's Temple of Blood. He had smelt camphor there, along with other things.
But -
There was some other memory, older, deeper, more compelling.
It was - it was -
Camphor, camphor and the bright spires of golden song ... a supremely evocative combination ... so evocative that, somehow, Guest was certain that he had been here before. Here! In these very same chambers! Walking over these very same tiles! But this was his first visit to this palace. Surely.Guest Gulkan had no absolute index to his past, for his memory had been jumbled by the many shocks of his life, by his rending at the hands of the Great Mink, by the displacements of war and exile, and by the sheer complexity of the press of ever- changing faces which had been a feature of his journeying. Yet, even though he could not unscramble every detail of his past with any certainty, Guest Gulkan was sure that this was his very first visit to the palace of Ubazakura.
And yet ....
And yet!
The golden song of the imperial dragon soared s
kywards with increasing passion, and again Guest Gulkan was assailed by the smell of camphor. Smells are the great memory-triggers, for smell is the most primitive of all the senses, the sense which is closest to animal existence.
Camphor.
Camphor!Guest halted, for his skin prickled, and his very hair stood on end. He shuddered, and his heart pounded, and hot blood flushed through his veins.
For he remembered!
The Weaponmaster remembered a distant day on which he and his father had conquered the mainrock Pinnacle, and had secured admission to the abditory which housed the Door of the Safrak
Bank. Plandruk Qinplaqus, the Silver Emperor of Dalar ken Halvar, he who had then been concealing his true identity by calling himself Ulix of the Drum, had told Witchlord and Weaponmaster that a globe of stars must be procured if that Door in the mainrock
Pinnacle was to be open.
Suspecting that Banker Sod had fed just such an artefact to Icaria Scaria Iva-Italis, Guest Gulkan had challenged the demon Italis, at last persuading it to give him the star-globe.
But on taking that globe into his possession, Guest Gulkan had been plunged into a visionary world in which he had heard a woman's soaring song, in which he had smelt camphor, and in which he had met a man who had back-knuckled him across the face. That back-knuckling had precipitated Guest's return to the Hall of Time, where he had then been put to the trouble of staunching a nose made bloody by the back-knuckle blow delivered to him during his visionary adventuring.
"Come on!" said the Janjuladoola interpreter who had been assigned to Guest Gulkan. "Come on! We've no time to linger!"
But Guest still stood, staring at all around him, taking in the details with a heightened awareness close to that of hallucination. This was the very place! He was sure of it! This was the very place to which his vision had taken him when he had first seized control of the star-globe!
In the time since that visionary experience, Guest had deliberately strived to forget all that unsettling displacement, for he had been truly terrified by that displacement, and so had sought to suppress all memories relating to it.
But -
Here he was!
Here he was in a place identical to that which he had seen in that long-ago vision which he had endured in the mainrock
Pinnacle!
"You," said his Janjuladoola interpreter, poking him.
"Weren't you listening? Come on!"
On being poked, Guest at last bestirred himself, and allowed himself to be hurried into the next chamber, where the interpreter encouraged him to kneel. Guest was a little slow in reacting to the encouragement.
"I said kneel!" said the interpreter, who was starting to get flustered. "Now! Now! I say it again! Kneel! Kneel! Down on your knees!"
"Why?" said Guest. "Is this my execution?"
"It will be, if you don't find your manners, and fast. He's almost upon us!"
The interpreter's panic managed to communicate a sense of urgency to Guest, and so the Yarglat barbarian went down on his knees, and had no sooner got down on those frugally padded lumps of bone when Aldarch the Third entered upon the audience chamber.
Aldarch proved to be a small man of the Skin who increased his apparent height by wearing shoes with platform soles. It is traditional for the emperors of Yestron to walk on stilts, thus demonstrating their social superiority in an even more pronounced fashion. But Aldarch had been methodically tortured by his father while he was still a child, and the damage then done to his legs made it unwise for him to attempt any feats of stilt-walking as an adult.
Aldarch spoke; Guest's translator interpreted; and Guest, in conformity with the Mutilator's orders, seated himself in the visitor's well. This square-cut recess in the floor contained a stool padded with a goose-feather cushion, and when seated upon that cushion Guest found nothing but his head and shoulders above floor level. The Mutilator took his own seat upon a modest throne set back from the visitor's well, and the dignity of this throne set the Mutilator's knees at a height greater than that of Guest's head.
This cunning arrangement neatly indicated the social gap between Mutilator and prisoner, while making it virtually impossible for Guest to launch a surprise attack upon his captor.
"You have lately come from Untunchilamon, I hear," said
Aldarch the Third.
"It is so," said Guest.
"You know," said Aldarch, "I have heard that they were walking on stilts." Guest Gulkan, who did not know precisely how he was supposed to respond to this intelligence, assumed a grave demeanor.
"Well?" said Aldarch. "Is it true, or is it not? I have heard that the one called Pokrov was particularly noticeable for getting above himself."
"For getting above himself?" said Guest.
"For elevating himself above the height appropriate to his class!" said the translator to Guest. "For walking on stilts!"
"Well," said Guest, who was properly confused by now, "it may have happened. I can't say that it didn't."
"What does he say?" said Aldarch.
"My lord," said the translator to Aldarch, "He confesses that with his own eyes he saw such people as Pokrov walking on stilts."
"You saw," said Aldarch, "yet you made no move to stop it?"
This accusation was translated to Guest. The Yarglat barbarian was so ignorant of the customs of the civilized world that he had not yet absorbed the full import of this business of stilt-walking, yet even to such a limited soul as Guest Gulkan it was obvious that something of importance was at foot, so in puzzled confusion he responded to the Mutilator by saying:
"I, ah ... as a foreigner, I ...."
"He says, my lord," said the interpreter to Aldarch, "that as a poor and ignorant foreign-born barbarian he did not see it fit to interfere in the internal affairs of the Izdimir Empire, hence did not murder the stilt-walkers for their impertinence. He further says that he thought such acts of murder would be to you a pleasure, and he had no wish to cheat you of such pleasure."
"Well," said Aldarch, who was pleased to receive this news,
"that was well-spoken. Suppose we pause for a moment to indulge ourselves in a lesser pleasure?"
The interpreter not demurring, Al'three gave a command; a woman entered with a tray; and cups from this tray were served to Mutilator, interpreter and prisoner. The cups were of bone china and in them was the warmth of a greenish fluid which Guest Gulkan tentatively identified as tea.
"You are familiar with this drink?" said the Mutilator.
Aldarch the Third once again spoke through the interpreter, since Weaponmaster and Mutilator had no language in common. Guest Gulkan was no linguist, and hence had not the slightest competence in any truly scholarly language. He could make himself known as Ordhar, the command language of the armies of the Collosnon Empire; he could speak Eparget, the native tongue of the Yarglat; and apart from that he could only use Toxteth and the Galish Trading Tongue. The various barbarous and primitive languages which were at the command of Guest Gulkan's tongue were virtually useless in the heartland of the Izdimir Empire. As for the Mutilator, why, he was a scholar great in learning, but his wisdom was exclusively restricted to Janjuladoola, the infinitely subtle and fiendishly complicated language of Yestron's master race.
"The drink," said Guest, half-sure of its nature yet wary of committing himself to an error, "the drink is ... ah, something from Chay, perhaps?"
"No," said the Mutilator. "It is jade tea. The jade tea of Obooloo, much sought after both here and in foreign parts." Guest did not think it healthy to be consuming hot drinks on such a sultry day, but drank without arguing about it.
"So," said Aldarch, when Guest had drunk. "You have been adventuring on Untunchilamon."
"I have," said Guest, who hoped they were not going to get back to the subject of stilts, because he could not in the least understand it. "Would you like to hear more of it?"
"My interrogators did their work well," said the Mutilator.
"And you have no
t been the only person to be interrogated.
Consequently, you have no secrets from me and mine."Guest wondered if this meant that Thayer Levant had been caught and questioned. But he did not dare to ask. Simply to ask that question would be to betray Levant, who - if he was still at liberty - might still be trying to make his way back to Obooloo and escape to Dalar ken Halvar by way of the Door of the Bondsmans Guild. In any case, the Mutilator was still speaking.
"We know what you did in Injiltaprajura," said the Mutilator.
"We know it in detail. Likewise, we know what you did earlier in this city of mine. You raided the Temple of Blood, and your father lies there yet, sheltered in a time pod to which we have no access."Guest's interpreter had a little difficulty placing the words "time pod" into the Toxteth tongue, but did the trick by calling it "the egg which does not change". Upon puzzling out the meaning of this phrase, Guest remembered the time pod, and remembered the day of the raid, and the ring of ever-ice which had fallen to the oily waters of the innermost sanctum of the Temple of Blood. He deduced that the ring had not been found.
Since the whereabouts of the ring had not been betrayed, this meant - surely - that the demon in the Temple of Blood had kept silent about it. So the demon Ungular Scarth was Guest's ally! This thought heartened the Weaponmaster greatly.
"It is true," said Guest, "that I came to the Temple. There is a Great God held prisoner in the Temple, a - "
"A demon," said Aldarch. "There are two things in the Temple, and both are demons. Both are old, old things, and dangerous. One is too big to move. The other - only a fool would seek its liberation. The high priestess of the Temple is Anaconda Stogirov.
She is - she is my friend. My only friend. She tells me much, and she has told me all about those demons."
"Then," said Guest, carefully, "I congratulate you on the possession of such a knowledgeable friend."
