by Hugh Cook
"We will kill Khmar," said Guest Gulkan.
"You can hardly defeat Khmar if you must come as beggars to the Safrak Islands."
"If this is a beggar's life," said Guest, complacently sated,
"I wish I'd turned beggar before."
"So begging is enough. Or have you plans for our islands?"
"Plans?" said Guest, mystified.
"Plans for conquest."
"Conquest?" said Guest, so surprised he almost felt sober.
"Us, to conquer Safrak? With what? Our tongues and teeth, perhaps.
Not swords, for certain. Our swords were all surrendered."
"I think he truths," said the woman Damsel, rising from the bed. "They are no more than the fools they seem."
"Who?" said Guest in bewilderment.
As Guest was gaping for meaning, men came crashing through paperwork screens, their advent teaching him the identity of at least one of the fools to whom Damsel had referred. Guest lurched from the bed. Liquor betrayed him. He was too slow to stop the first fist which slammed him, and was swiftly battered into submission by knuckles and elbows.
"So this is death," said Guest, a blood-thickened voice speaking through thickened lips.
He tried to be strong, to be staunch – but found this difficult since he was naked. Staunchness in the face of death requires the dignity of sword and shield, or of armor, or of leathers and rags at a minimum.
"This is not yet death," said one of Guest's captors, as the still-naked Weaponmaster was dragged through rockwall corridors.
"So you will sport with me first."
"We play no sport with merchandise."
"Merchandise?"
"Khmar will pay highly for you. Surely."
At that, young Guest struggled like a very hurricane trying to fight its way out of a leather sack. Fates worse than death! He screamed and he fought. But his best efforts availed not against his attackers, and, panting with effort, he was flung into a dour rockwall prison. Guest Gulkan was flung so hard that he would have bruised himself grievously against rock had the prison not been generously padded with flesh. A small and guttering lamp lit the scene with enough light to allow that flesh to be identified. Young Guest untangled himself in a hurry from Bao Gahai.
"Wa!" said Guest.
To be seized and imprisoned was bad enough. But to be locked up with the dralkosh Bao Gahai – that was intolerable!
There was a long and uncomfortable silence.
Then:
"Are you hurt?" said Bao Gahai, her bearded voice husky in the gloom.
"Who knows?" said Guest. "Who cares?"
"I care," said Bao Gahai softly.
"You!" said Guest. "Why?"
Bao Gahai hesitated. Then thought:
– What does it matter?
"I care," said Bao Gahai, "because – "
But Bao Gahai never explicated her "because", for the door burst open. Guest promptly made a break for freedom, but armed men jabbed at him with spears of a size fit for the harpooning of the very Great Mink itself. Once the belligerent Weaponmaster had been forced back against the far wall, other prisoners were hustled into the cell. The dralkosh Zelafona, and her dwarf-son Glambrax.
The slow-witted Morsh Bataar. The scholarly Sken-Pitilkin. The master chef Pelagius Zozimus. A fine scooping, this!
With the door slammed shut and locked against escape, Guest looked around the cell, scanning all by lantern light. As best he could, he feigned the staunch self-control of a hero, concealing his extreme embarrassment at his own nakedness. The Yarglat do not uncover themselves in public, and while Guest had done as much at his father's command on the washing-pool island, he would never voluntarily have done as much in the cells of the mainrock
Pinnacle, for, leaving aside all questions of taboos and embarrassments, the place was abominably cold. The cell was frigid and freezing, for all that there was so much flesh stuffed into it.
"So," said Guest, when he had summed the faces. "Our own have not betrayed us."
"Bravely said," said Morsh Bataar.
Then Morsh took off his over-length weather jacket, a fleecelined item of apparel which he had bought second-hand from one of his father's league riders many, many days ago in far-off Gendormargensis, and handed that jacket to Guest. Who took it in wordless gratitude. The wool was warm, and snugged down to his thighs.
Then, since nobody else seemed disposed to do it, Guest began testing the weaknesses of their place of dungeon, first trying the window. The window, which led to the outer world, was guarded with iron bars. The bars admitted great draughts of air for the cooling of overheated tempers, but would not admit a human.
"Still," said Guest, giving the iron a slap. "It is but brute matter. We can gnaw it through in less than a year with teeth and fingernails alone."
Lightly he spoke, but had already deduced that even a rupture of the iron bars would secure them only the liberty to crawl out onto the sheer cliffside high above the waters. Unless they searched for sudden death, this liberty was not likely to be advantageous.
The young Weaponmaster then turned his attention to the stones of the cell, and soon determined that they could be hollowed out by tunneling, though it would probably take four or five decades for a tunnel of any significance to be made through rock so hard.
"The door," said Guest, deciding. "It has to be the door.
Zozimus! Sken-Pitilkin! Have done with this door!"
So spoke the Weaponmaster, for he was determined to get out of that cell that very night.
"If the door were a corpse then I could do with it," said Zozimus. "But as a mere necromancer, I can do nothing with brute wooden timbers."
"And I," said Sken-Pitilkin, "can scarcely make the thing fly, for it is fixed in position."
"Then you could jiggle it," said Guest. "You could jiggle it till it burst."
"I cannot," said Sken-Pitilkin, "for I have been drinking strong liquor, and the exercise of wizardry is unwise in combination with drink. Besides, if I burst the thing, then shattered wood might fly inwards as likely as outwards."
Actually, Sken-Pitilkin had been very conservative in his banqueting, and thought the exercise of wizardry safe in itself.
But could he truly use his powers of levitation to shake the door till it burst? He did not know, for he had no way of computing the door's strength.
It occurred to the sagacious wizard of Skatzabratzumon that he might conceivably be able to use his powers to manipulate the very locking mechanism of the door itself. But he said nothing of that to Guest, for to escape from the prison cell would be to find themselves at war with the armed strength of Alozay – and Sken-Pitilkin thought such war likely to end in their deaths.
Through long generations of experience, the wizards of Argan's Confederation have learnt that the powers of a lawyer are ultimately greater than those of a warrior. So, rather than brute it out with every sword in Alozay, Sken-Pitilkin planned to rest, and later to use his lawyerly skills to find a way out of his present predicament by negotiation.
But Guest had not the lawyer's temperament.
"Shoulders!" said Guest.
And Morsh Bataar joined him in rigorously bruising that portion of the human anatomy against unbruisable timbers.
"Yunch!" said Guest, giving vent to one of the choice Yarglat obscenities. "The thing will not give."
"What did you expect?" said Zozimus. "This is no bridal suite, you know."
"Nor I a virgin eager for penetration," said Guest. "Have you about you perhaps a tinder box, master chef?"
"I have," said Zozimus, who was seldom without such an article.
"Then evidence your skills with it," said Guest. "The hell with brute force and battery! We'll burn our way out!"
Obviously Guest was severely drunk, or brain-damaged by the bruising he had suffered at the hands of his enemies, else would have realized that fire could easily be started with the cell's slow-burning lamp. But nobody chose to remind him of this, thinking th
at wisdom lay in silence.
"Zozimus!" said Guest imperiously. "Your tinder box, man!
Get to it! Get to it, and burn!"
Now Zozimus was not wise, not in comparison with a true master of the intellect like Hostaja Torsen Sken-Pitilkin, yet the slug-chef possessed sense enough not to argue with an ox of a boy when the worst temper in that boy was bent upon works of wreckage.
So, even though Zozimus knew full well that what Guest proposed was impossible, he yet consented to kindle fire. However, as Guest soon proved to his own dissatisfaction by experiment, nothing is so reluctant to burn as a big burly door chunked out of planks thicker than a wrestler's thigh.
It is a commonplace error to think that wood burns easily. It does not. Wooden houses burn of a regularity, but the prior combustion of curtains clothes carpets wickerwork and children's toys is necessary to set walls and roof alight. Wooden forests not uncommonly perish in flame, but grass and undergrowth must be well alight before the shafting timbers of the trees themselves catch fire. Ships of wood likewise succumb to conflagration, but it is in ropes, rubbish, sails and paint lockers that the chief danger lies. The ardors of your very household fire must be carefully conjured into life with handfuls of pine needles and sticks of fine-split kindling – and must not the wood be dry? And a ventilating draught provided for its enlivenment?
State it as a certainty: a bulky chunk of timber untainted by oils and paints will stand staunch against all but the greatest efforts to set it alight. Even when it burns, thick wood does not burn through quickly; not does it easily lose its strength, even though the surface be charred. Hence, as most doors are timber in bulk, your most learned experts in incendiarism advise that, should you be trapped in a burning building, your survival will be prolonged by closing the door against the blaze and mugging all cracks with damp cloth to ward against the infiltrations of smoke.
So it is next to useless to try to escape by burning a hole through a wooden door.
But Guest had forgotten this, or, like a starving man trying to keep himself alive by eating his shirt, had hoped that reality would alter its nature to accommodate his needs.
It did not.
By the time the prisoners had exhausted their small stock of expendable burnables (Bao Gahai's handkerchief, clogged with moist deposits of green and yellow snot; three packets of dried herbs extorted from Zozimus by threat; and a Book of Verbs which Guest Gulkan extracted from Sken-Pitilkin's possession after violent argument and then burnt with an expression of what looked suspiciously like satisfaction), the door manifested no conspicuous sign of injury, though its surface had been liberally smeared with soot.
Though Guest had found but little to burn, the burning had generated smoke and fumes in prodigious quantities. Despite the generous draughts which circulated within the cell, the air was still filled with the sour reeking smoke which had issued from Sken-Pitilkin's incinerated verbs, with the variously pleasant and unpleasant stinks of Zozimus's herbs, and with the scabrous fumes released by the incineration of Bao Gahai's handkerchief. Bao Gahai and Zelafona were both coughing, and had become exceedingly irritable; and Guest Gulkan's own temper had been in no wise improved by this debacle.
"This failed," said Guest decisively. "But other schemes and stratagems will not. There must be a way out!"
"Yes," said Sken-Pitilkin wearily. "Through the door. They will open it, in time, and drag us out. Thus we escape."Sken-Pitilkin spoke for all, for everyone was in a mood to settle down and sleep. It was late; they were weary; and Guest Gulkan's prowlings were unsettling each and all to the point where they were quite unable to pretend to themselves that they were getting comfortable. But Guest, disregardful of his companions' comfort, decided to attack the bars guarding the sewer-hole built into the corner to the right of the window.
"Move aside," said Guest to Glambrax, for the dwarf had settled himself by the sewer in order to be spared from involvement in the Weaponmaster's frenetic escape attempts.
"You're mad," said Glambrax.
"Yes," said Guest, taking the dwarf by the ear, "and my madness oft expresses itself in the strangulation of dwarves."
Then, having hauled Glambrax out of the way, the Weaponmaster attacked the sewer bars. Those bars were old, and, by dint of prodigious wrenching which almost ruptured his gut, Guest tore the iron away from the anchoring stone.
"Free!" said Guest.
"Free to spit," said Sken-Pitilkin, "for there is no way we can crawl down a hole so small."
Nor could they, for it was far too small to admit a normal human frame.
"Glambrax!" said Guest.
"It's too small for me, too," said Glambrax.
And so it was. For Glambrax, though but a stumpy dwarf, had bulky shoulders and a full-sized head, and experiment soon proved that it was quite impossible for him to escape through such a hole even when he was being assisted by Guest Gulkan's boot. Besides, supposing he had, what then? The cold draught coming up from below suggested the sewer ran instantly out to the cliff-face, connecting with the limitless gulfs of the night air. Escape by sewer, like escape through the window, would offer nothing more than an improved view, or the chance of a brisk suicide.
"Still," said Guest, wielding one of the iron bars he had torn from its imprisoning stone, "we now have weapons."
To demonstrate his point, he strode to the door and struck it a vicious blow with this stumpy little cosh. Iron hit timber; timber grunted; and iron exploded in a shower of rust. Guest looked in astonishment at the disintegrated ruins of his iron bar.
"That is a famously dangerous weapon, brother," said Morsh Bataar, combing his fingers through his hair to remove fragments of rust, "for you strike at one and hit a thousand."
"I must have a weapon!" said Guest, throwing down the fragment of iron which yet remained in his fist.
"We have weapons in plenty," said Sken-Pitilkin wearily. "The weapons which we were born with. Teeth, nails, elbows, knees. All weapons in their way. But the greatest weapon in the human arsenal is intelligence. I suggest we use that greatest weapon now."
"How?" said Guest.
"By going to sleep!" retorted Sken-Pitilkin.
At which the cell's single guttering lamp voluntarily and without encouragement extinguished itself, leaving them in darkness.
"There is still the ceiling," said Guest.
"Yes, yes," said Sken-Pitilkin, with visions of Guest pulling down an avalanche of unseated rock, stone and masonry upon his hapless fellow captives, "and the ceiling will still be there on the morrow. Down, boy, and kennel!"
"You call me boy?" said Guest.
"I call you boy, dog, beast, fish, fowl and fool," said Sken-Pitilkin. "Now get to sleep! Lest the adults here loose patience with the frolics of your childhood."
"I am no boy," said Guest truculently. "I am a war leader, a commander of generals."
"A commander of generals, yes," said Sken-Pitilkin. "And a supervisor of their vomit-eating competitions. Zozimus! Will you not help me reason this boy to sense? Zozimus! Zozimus, pox you!
Beasts and bitches! The thing's asleep!"
"So might we be," said Bao Gahai acidly, "were it not for an overly loud-voiced old fool of a tutor, who has not even such a modest gift as cookery at his command."
One does not argue with a dralkosh. Not, at least, when one is caged with the thing in a small box of unescapable stone. So Hostaja Torsen Sken-Pitilkin settled himself on the stones of the cell and tried to go to sleep.
Silence, but for some smoke-inspired coughing from Glambrax and some snoring from Zozimus.
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.