by Hugh Cook
"Then do but consent to hold your tongue," said Guest, "and with that I will be content."
Thus spoke the Weaponmaster, speaking roughly out of habit, though he was heartened by the dwarf's recovered powers of the tongue. Having spoken, Guest Gulkan scraped his feet to remove any last traces of blood - though blood would surely have dried during his prolonged prevarications - and then with his sword at the ready he ventured forward.
In his venturing, Guest kept to the center of the hall, the part which was darkest since it was furthest from the wallside lanterns - for he favored the dark like a fugitive. A central course also kept him clear of the deep embrasures and the time pods, and hence guarded him against ambush.
With such caution, Guest dared himself some ninety paces through the gloom of the Hall of Time, halting some ten paces short of the green-glowing menace of Icaria Scaria Iva-Italis,
Demon of Safrak.Guest had expected this monolithic chunk of jade-green stone to recognize him, and to acknowledge him. But it did not. It stood there in square-cut continence, formidable in implicit rebuff, rising in looming silence to twice his own height. Beyond it, he could see the single flight of stairs.Guest Gulkan now stood on the floor of the Hall of Time, the single chamber which dominated Zi Obo, the Pod Stratum of the mainrock Pinnacle. If he could dare his way past the Demon of Safrak, then he could ascend the stairs which would take him to Jezel Obo. And Jezel Obo was the Sky Stratum, the topmost level of the mainrock Pinnacle, and home to its Inner Sanctum, the abditorial holy of holies to which none could penetrate but by the demon's leave.
But Guest had no thoughts of penetrating to Safrak's abditory. He had not come here to plumb for secrets. He had come to seek for help in war - help which he must have lest he die. And the demon's silence, rather than intriguing him, irritated him intensely.
"Italis!" barked Guest. "It's me!"
Then, getting no response, he elaborated:
"It is me! Guest Gulkan! The Weaponmaster! I was here before, remember? You told me about Jocasta, the Great God. A prisoner.
Well. If you can help, I'd, I would have helped before, but I've been busy. There were wars. Fighting and such. But, uh, if you could help me with wizardry, powers of a wizard, then your Great God, well, I'd surely rescue it."Guest paused, realizing he was handling this badly. In witless badinage with trifling fellows such as Glambrax or Rolf Thelemite, his tongue was ever nimbly fluent, because words were worth nothing and so could be spent freely. But now he was face to face with a brute which might well be the greatest Power of his acquaintance. And, because he had anticipated this encounter for so long, and was driven by great urgencies of battle, each word was so important that its mere enunciation was a struggle in itself.
"Italis," said Guest, "I, I'd, I'm sorry I didn't come here before. It was Pitilkin, you see. Sken-Pitilkin. He doesn't like you, not much, and - "Guest broke off, hearing someone boot-thumping down the stairs. Moments later, a warrior stumbled down those stairs into the green-spill light of the Demon of Safrak. The warrior was Hrothgar! Yes, Hrothgar, the Guardian who had befriended Guest Gulkan on his earlier visit to Alozay!
"Hrothgar!" said Guest.
"Guest!" said Hrothgar. "Catch!"
Then, to Guest's bewilderment, the Guardian Hrothgar flung something in his direction. But the demon snapped at the flying thing with an outflux of green liquidity which moved too fast for the eye to follow. Whatever Hrothgar had thrown, the demon caught it, and swallowed it.
Hrothgar swore.
Moments later, another man came pounding down the stairs. It was Banker Sod, the Governor of the Safrak Bank, the ruler of Alozay, the master of the mainrock Pinnacle. Sod was flushed with battle, and a sword was in his hand.
"Where is it?" said Sod, challenging Hrothgar in fury. "Where is it? What did you do with it?"
"I threw it from a window," said Hrothgar, matching the challenge of Sod's sword with his own.
"Then what good will that do you?" said Sod.
"I had to try," said Hrothgar.
"Had to!" said Sod, in apoplectic fury. "For what reason?"
"Ambition," said Hrothgar, in frank confession.
Now Guest had followed action and speech well enough to realize that Hrothgar had stolen something from the abditory above. As a Guardian, a mercenary soldier in the service of the Safrak Bank, Hrothgar's rewards in life had been to eat, drink and sleep, and to bed with his wife in their ramshackle home in Molothair, the colony at the foot of the mainrock Pinnacle.
It had not proved sufficient.
So, when war swept the mainrock, Hrothgar had rebelled against his masters, and had dared a theft. Of what? Guest could not say. But the thief had been caught - and Sod, who had caught him, was determined to inflict the death penalty. Sod leapt at Hrothgar. Sword clashed with sword. Hrothgar stumbled, recovered himself, then hacked at Sod. But to Guest's dismay, it was Sod who prevailed. Hrothgar was driven back - and the demon grabbed him. Clutched him. Dragged him in! Hrothgar could be seen inside the demon's monolithic cube of green. His mouth gaped in dismay. Then his body started to spin. As it span, its arms and legs disintegrated into a blur of blood.
This process was utterly silent.
That was the hideous thing. The whole whirling, blurring, bleeding, chopping, disintegrating process made not a single sound. The dying Hrothgar was cut off from the world entirely, locked into a nightmare on his own.
The slug-chef Pelagius Zozimus once proposed constructing a machine with highly-sharpened steel blades which would whirl round and round and round (driven by a slave tramping on a treadmill, or, alternatively, by a water wheel). Such a machine - he proposed calling it a food blender - would be used to effortlessly finechop a mix of apples, steaks and celery for the making of hamburgers.
Hrothgar looked as if he had fallen into a gigantic version of just such a food blender, and his disintegration was proceeding apace.
Even as Guest watched, the top of Hrothgar's skull was trimmed off, and his brains began to spill out. He whirled in screaming silence, then disappeared in a clouding blur of blood and bile and macerated flesh.
Then, abruptly -
A splurging outsurge of the finechopped corpse-mix hosed from the demon at pressure, accurately targeting Guest Gulkan's face.
Blood-blinded, the Weaponmaster ducked, but the hosing found him nonetheless. He turned, tried to run, slipped on the weltering blood, recovered himself -
And was hard-slammed by Sod.
Struck by Sod's body weight, the Weaponmaster fell. His sword went flying, and Sod kicked him.
At the far end of the Hall of Time, the dwarf Glambrax saw what had happened, and charged with a cry of fury, hoping to cover a hundred paces before Sod could do Guest Gulkan a fatal injury.
Even as Glambrax charged, the Witchlord Onosh came panting upstairs from the depths below, panting into the Hall of Time with the staunchest of his warriors around him as a bodyguard.
Downstairs, others were fighting a delaying action against a great wedge-mass of almost-victorious Guardians, who were triumphant in the certainty of victory, and who were baying for blood and slaughter.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Lord Onosh: a Yarglat barbarian whose bat-wing ears indicate his close genetic relationship to Guest Gulkan. "It's a wise man who knows his own father," or so say the wise, but, even in the folly of his youth, Guest has but to glance at the Witchlord's ears to know the truth of his fathering.
Lord Onosh was fatigued beyond his age. In the dying lantern light, sweat slid redshining down the furrows in his slanted forehead. He gave an overwhelming impression of weariness. He had been defeated once too often, and his resources of courage were almost exhausted.
With the Witchlord were the wizards Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin and Pelagius Zozimus. They too were similarly wearied, for they had exerted themselves to the full while trying to fight a way through to the Palace Docks.
They had failed.
Wizards and warriors alike, they had
been defeated. The Guardians were too many. So the Witchlord Onosh, in company with his wizards and his other retainers, had been forced to retreat upwards into the less-populated areas of the mainrock Pinnacle.
On winning his way upward to the Hall of Time, Lord Onosh summed it with the briefest of glimpses. He saw the dwarf Glambrax scuttling away toward the green lightblock at the far end of the hall, saw one or two people scuffling near that lightblock, and saw other than that pretty much what he had expected. As far as he was concerned, the Hall of Time was just one more hole in the night. A hole where he planned to rest, at least for a few moments.
Thinking thus, Lord Onosh slumped against the nearest wall, and closed his eyes. Such was his weariness that he sagged immediately into sleep - but he had slept for scarcely moments when he was shaken awake.
"What is it?" said Lord Onosh, opening his eyes to see that it was Bao Gahai who was rousing him.
"It is Rolf Thelemite," said Bao Gahai. "He has news."
Lord Onosh hauled himself to his feet and confronted Rolf Thelemite, who had previously been with those who had been fighting a rearguard action downstairs.
"What is it?" said Lord Onosh.
"I have news," said Rolf.
"News?" said Lord Onosh. "Then spit it out!"
"Thodric Jarl says we have secured the stairs," said Rolf.
"At least for the moment."
"Then I could have slept for that moment!" said Lord Onosh, rightfully aggrieved at having been awakened to hear such absolutely superfluous information.
Then the Witchlord declared that he would sleep, and must not be disturbed. Having delivered himself of this pronouncement, he slumped again, and was asleep in moments.
But he was again awakened.
"What is it this time?" said Lord Onosh.
He felt as if he had only been asleep for moments - and quite rightly, for his sleep had been too short even for the quick- boiling of an egg in a pressure cooker.
"It is Glambrax," said Bao Gahai.
"Then spit him and cook him!" said Lord Onosh, who was ready to murder for the privilege of sleep. "Get Zozimus to cook him, and in a pressure cooker if possible."
"My lord," said Bao Gahai, "he says Sod has Guest as a prisoner."
Then Lord Onosh remembered what he had seen on first entering the Hall of Time. Glambrax sprinting for the green lightblock. Two people scuffling near that lightblock. The people scuffling must have been Guest and Sod.
"Glambrax!" said Lord Onosh.
"Here!" said the dwarf, who had been sheltering behind Bao Gahai.
"What are we up against?" said Lord Onosh.
"Sod," said Glambrax promptly. "Sod. And a demon."
"A demon?" said Lord Onosh, sceptically.
While the Witchlord Onosh had heard much of ghosts, gods and demons, he had never yet met one in the flesh, nor did he expect to.
"It is true," said Glambrax. "That green thing at the end of the hall, it's a demon."
"Then I will contend against it with my wizards," said Lord Onosh. "Zozimus! Zozimus, blast you! Where are you?"
Zozimus was discovered in the shadows, soundly asleep. Once he had been stirred awake by the application of Sken-Pitilkin's country crook, Lord Onosh commanded him to go downstairs and fetch a dozen or so corpses. The necromancer departed, returning shortly with eleven shambling corpses.
Then the Witchlord Onosh marched on the demon, taking with him his wizards, half a dozen living warriors and the eleven corpses animated by Zozimus. The dwarf Glambrax tagged along behind them.
"Far enough," said Sken-Pitilkin, when they were still a dozen paces short of the demon. "This thing bites."
"It bites?" said Lord Onosh, in bafflement. "Bites? Pitilkin, it is a rock!"
"It is a rock in its nature as a crocodile is a log," said Sken-Pitilkin.
The fame of the crocodile and its treachery had reached even as far as the lands of the Collosnon Empire. Therefore Lord Onosh knew full well that the crocodile was a vile animal which could configure itself as a log, changing instantly to a marauding man- eater when some unsuspecting unfortunate stepped on it.
"Have you seen this particular crocodile in action?" said Lord Onosh, indicating the green-burning monolith.
"I have seen men fed to the thing," said Sken-Pitilkin. "It tore them apart in moments."
This was untrue, but Sken-Pitilkin felt that some amplification of the demon's dangers was necessary to discourage Lord Onosh from hazarding his person in a foolhardy assault on the green-glowing monolith.
In front of the demon, a great deal of scuffled blood was smeared on the skull-pattern tiles of the Hall of Time. Behind the demon was a stairway - a stairway which led upward.
"Sod!" said Lord Onosh.
There was a pause. Then Sod came downstairs. The Banker came into view with Guest Gulkan as his hostage. Guest's hands had been bound behind his back, and Sod had a knife at Guest's throat. It was then that Lord Onosh realized he could have used an archer.
Should he send for Morsh Bataar, who was downstairs fighting alongside Thodric Jarl?
"Surrender," said Sod. "Surrender, and I'll give you a quick death."
"And if I don't surrender?" said Lord Onosh.
"Why," said Sod, "then I'll cut your son to pieces, here and now."
The meager terms which Sod offered, coupled with his uncompromising directness, told Lord Onosh that he had best not delay. Morsh might have been helpful, but it was too late to fetch him.
"Sken-Pitilkin," said Zozimus. "Get me my son."
The wizard Sken-Pitilkin heard the command, and quailed, for he was fearfully weary, and his strength was close to spent. But he exerted himself wizardfully. He raised his country crook and he shouted a Word.
Caught by Sken-Pitilkin's power, Banker Sod and Guest Gulkan were simultaneously levitated and dragged toward the Witchlord and his men. Lord Onosh cried in triumph. But he cried too soon! For the demon lashed out with liquid green tentacles, secured the levitated pair, and dragged hard and home to its own green-shining flank.
"Shan scaba mach!" said Lord Onosh.
His mighty oath was consequent upon extreme provocation. For the demon's own mass now sheltered Sod and Guest from arrow-shot.
"Perhaps Sken-Pitilkin could shake the demon a bit," said Zozimus brightly.Sken-Pitilkin gave Zozimus a dirty look.
"An excellent suggestion!" said Lord Onosh. "Do it!"
"I will try, my lord," said Sken-Pitilkin.
But he had already guessed that the demon was so massive as to be quite unshakable. While the wizards of Skatzabratzumon can levitate a thing, they can also test the weight of a thing by tweaking it with a little leverage, and this is what Sken-Pitilkin did to the demon.
In response to Sken-Pitilkin's tweaking, the green-burning demon flashed purple, and gave a grumbling roar of discontent.
Encouraged by this, Sken-Pitilkin tweaked it again. But this time there was no response. And the weight of the thing! Having tweaked it, Sken-Pitilkin estimated its weight as that of ten elephants.
"I tried to lift it, my lord," said Sken-Pitilkin, panting heavily as he feigned the aftermath of great effort. "But it would not budge."
"So we saw," said Lord Onosh, who had been greatly impressed by that flash of purple, which he took as proof of great wizardly exertions. "Zozimus! Do your stuff!"
At which Pelagius Zozimus sent his eleven corpses into action. They thrashed forward in a puppet-jerk frenzy. And were ripped to pieces by the slice-striking lighting of the demon's green-slash tentacles.
"Pitilkin!" gasped Zozimus. "Loft!"
In response, Sken-Pitilkin lofted one corpse, sending it up and over. It almost made it. But one of its feet drooped as it soared over the demon, and the thing snared the foot, then hurled the corpse to splattering destruction against the stairs.
Zozimus turned pale.
As the living human body is a well-knit and sturdy piece of construction work, so too is a fresh-killed corpse. As a n
ecromancer, Pelagius Zozimus knew the hardiness of such a corpse, and was appalled at the demonic strength which could wreck such a thing beyond recognition.
"Give up!" yelled Sod.
"Give up?" said Lord Onosh. "How long do you think you can shelter there?"
"I can be up the stairs in moments," yelled Sod.
"Take one step from the shadow of that demon," said Lord Onosh, "and I'll split your skull with my battle axe."
As it happened, Lord Onosh did not have a battle axe in his possession. In any case, he was not one of those people who could throw an axe with any accuracy. But the point was made. Sod would be a target for swift-hurled swords and knives if he stepped from protection.
This raised an obvious question - could the demon deflect such missiles? Sken-Pitilkin thought it surely could, and thought that Sod would shortly realize as much.
"Zozimus!" said Lord Onosh.
"My lord," said Sken-Pitilkin.
"This demon-thing," said Lord Onosh. "It seems it favors Sod. It discriminates, does it?"Sken-Pitilkin was annoyed that the Witchlord had given a mere slug chef priority as a source of advice. So, before Zozimus could answer, Sken-Pitilkin said:
"It discriminates as does a dog. It knows its master."
"A dog, is it?" said Lord Onosh. "It doesn't look much of a dog to me."
"A sparrow," said Glambrax. "It looks like a sparrow. Or a cockroach, perhaps?"
"It is a demon," said Sken-Pitilkin. "It is Icaria Scaria Iva-Italis, demon of Safrak and Guardian Prime."
"This is no Guardian, Pitilkin," said Lord Onosh, who knew full well that the Guardians were the Toxteth-speaking mercenaries who served the Safrak Bank.
"Yet it is, my lord," said Sken-Pitilkin. "For this block of stone has long had lordship of all the armed men in the service of the Bank. Each and every Guardian has sworn a mighty oath of fealty to this particular block of stone. Therefore, if we could but win its allegiance, then we could likewise win the allegiance of the Guardians as a whole."