by Hugh Cook
"Tomorrow?" said the quokka. "Why wait for tomorrow? What's the matter? Come in! Come in! There are good things to eat!"
"Then, little thing, " said Guest, watching the animal closely, "pray be so kind enough as to fetch me a small portion of one of those good things."
The quokka hesitated. Its nose twitched nervously. Guest detected this petit betrayal and knew the thing to be a liar.
"We know what this is," said Guest.
"It's a feast," said the quokka.
"No it isn't," said Guest.
"It is, it is!" said the quokka, with insistent fervor.
"No," said Guest, stamping the word with definitive negativeness. "It's not a banquet. It's a therapist."
"A therapist?" said the quokka innocently. "What on earth is a therapist?"
"Come here," said Guest. "Come to my clutches, and I'll show you exactly what a therapist is!"
At that, the quokka ventured forward. In the most affecting manner imaginable, it ventured to place its very paw upon Guest Gulkan's mud-clad shin.
"Will you starve yourself for suspicion?" said the quokka.
"As I trust you, won't you trust me?"
The animal was so trusting, and so surpassingly cute, that it was enough to make the heart melt. Any civilized person would have trusted it immediately. But Guest was a barbarian, a Yarglat barbarian, and one who had lately been terrorized by a murkbeast, and so was in no mood to be merciful. He snatched at the quokka, seized it and shook it - his hand at its throat! - then squeezed it so hard that it squealed. Red blood stained its teeth.
At which, a voice of moiling thunder spoke, a voice underwritten with subsonic threat:
"Let it go!"Guest did not such thing, but turned to view the banqueting chamber. The banquet had entirely disappeared. In its place stood a towering conglomeration of slowly-evolving windmills, of spindling bones and twirling tapes of metal, of skeletal steel and huge beams around which spheres and cones went twining.
"Wah!" said Lord Onosh, taken aback. "What is it?"
"I am a Great God," said the dull-roar voice. "You have displeased me! Fall down on your knees and repent!"
Now when one is confronted by a Great God, and a Great God which is manifestly some ten thousand times larger than an elephant, then one's natural reaction is to do what it says. So Lord Onosh quite naturally went down on its knees.
But Guest Gulkan - who had had far more to do with gods and demons of all descriptions than had his father - gripped his father by his muddy black hair and wrenched him to his feet. Then Guest spat on the floor. Lord Onosh expected that the Great God would retaliate by obliterating them on the spot, but it did no such thing. Guest Gulkan then addressed the apparition in front of him.
"You are no god," said Guest. "You are but a wretched therapist, a torturing machine, and once I get out of here then all the world will know of you."
Then, as the therapist roared with anger, and thrashed at the Weaponmaster with every spike, prong, hook and tentacle at its disposal - finding him, however, some several paces beyond its grasp - Guest retreated, taking the quokka with him.
Once Guest and his father were safe in the main tunnel, Lord Onosh asked the obvious question.
"That thing," said Lord Onosh. "How did you know what it was?"
"Because," said Guest, "I met a great family of such things on the island of Untunchilamon. They breed there in their thousands, as do huge crabs some ten times the height of a man, and the flying bubbles which men call shabbles."
Then, having delivered himself of that geographical information, Guest Gulkan set about interrogating the quokka.
"Thing," said Guest, "I suspect that the therapist bred you."
To this, the quokka made no answer.
"In nature," said Guest, "there are no such things as talking animals. It follows that you speak through some resource of the therapist. Either you are an extension of the very therapist itself, or else it has somehow tutored your animal brain to enhance it to the point where speech is one of its capabilities."
Lord Onosh could not quite follow this argument. This is hardly surprising. For Lord Onosh was but poorly educated, whereas his son had long been tutored by Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin, most excellent and sagacious of all the wizards of Skatzabratzumon.
Furthermore, Guest Gulkan had resided for four years in the halls of Cap Foz Para Lash, where he had been introduced to many notions which were alien to his father - such as the idea that a machine of sufficient subtlety could insinuate its processes into the brain of an animal then animate that animal as a puppet.
"If you are but an extension of the therapist," said Guest, in a conversational tone of voice, "then doubtless your death will mean nothing, for you are but a fingernail."
"Quokka," said the quokka, getting that word out in defiance of Guest's choking pressure.
"I was speaking by way of analogy," said Guest. "You know the analogies? My good tutor Sken-Pitilkin was very big on the analogies, though I must say I never saw their use till today."
Ah!
Take note!
It is said that, as we go through life, we slowly accumulate wisdom. In Guest Gulkan's life there had so far been precious little sign of this process - till now! On this day of days, he had saved his own life by arguing by analogy, and had saved the life of his father too. Had Guest not been adroit with his analogies, then both Witchlord and Weaponmaster would surely have already been dangling upside down while a chortling therapist gouged out their eyes.
Let us then open the Book of Morals, and record in that Book the supremacy of the philosophies, for it was the application of philosophy had saved Guest Gulkan's life, saving him from a doom against which the strength of his sword would have availed him not (even presuming him to have had a sword, and of course he had none, having lost his steel to the murkbeast).
Doubtless, had Guest been philosopher sufficient, he could have resolved all his other difficulties with equal ease, sliding past the murkbeast without getting so much as the smallest splattering of mud upon his hide, discovering the cornucopia and then securing his exit from the Stench Caves.
But, since Guest's wisdom had yet to reach its full flowering, he had solve his remaining problems by using a non- philosophical mode of operation. This he did by further squeezing the quokka.
"Quokka," repeated the quokka.
"A quokka, are you?" said Guest. "Then I tell you this. You will very shortly be a dead quokka unless you bind yourself to my service. I once hung three men. In the village of Ink, that's where it was. I hung them high in a consequence of the damage they did to me and mine. They brought our lives into peril by selling us rotten boats. Just as I hung those men, so I will hang you, for I think you a menace as great, if not greater."
"Quokka," said the quokka.
"Are you pretending to be imbecile?" said Guest. "Well, if you are, then you will die as an imbecile. Father! A bootlace! I will hang this thing, and now!"
Then Lord Onosh consented to free one of his bootlaces, something not easily done, for the thing had tightened after getting wet, and the Witchlord broke two fingernails getting it free. But with the bootlace free, Guest Gulkan made a hangman's knot - he had learnt that art from Thodric Jarl - and placed the noose around the quokka's neck.
At which the animal broke down entirely, and began to cry.
Have you seen a rat cry? No? Then imagine it. It is the most lugubrious of sights. But it left Guest Gulkan entirely unmoved.
"Since you weep," said Guest, "then I presume you to be a creature in your own right, presumably one tutored beyond its natural temperament by injection of nanotechnological manipulators."
By this phrase "nanotechnological manipulators", Guest Gulkan meant "very small insect-like working-things made of steel". To say this, he did not use the Eparget of the Yarglat, for the Yarglat have little use for nanotechnology. Instead, Guest inserted into his conversation a fragment of alien nomenclature which he had absorbed in the halls of Cap Foz Para L
ash in the city of Dalar ken Halvar.
On hearing the words "nanotechnological manipulators" phrased in that alien nomenclature, the quokka flinched as if burnt.
"Aha!" said Guest. "It confesses its nature, does it?"
"I confess nothing," said the quokka sullenly.
"Then I will hang you," said Guest.
"If you hang me," said the quokka, "then you'll die. You can't get out of here alone."
"Well then," said Guest, "if I must die, I'll at least having the satisfaction of having one last meal before I do die."
With that, the Weaponmaster rose to his full height, and raised the bootlace. The quokka was dragged upwards onto the tips of its toes. It squealed as the noose tightened. Guest eased off the pressure - just a trifle.
"All right, all right!" said the quokka. "I'll show you, I'll show you! I'll show you the way out! But. But. You have to promise me. You have to promise not to kill me."
"You have my word," said Guest. "I give you my oath upon it.
I swear by my honor. I will not kill you, nor do you any other harm. But - but! This oath is conditional. To be honored with your life, you must find us the cornucopia."
"The cornucopia?" said the quokka scornfully. "There's no such thing."
"Then," said Guest, again tightening the bootlace, "you will very shortly find yourself equally non-existent."
At that, the quokka was at last persuaded, and, with uncommonly little fuss and difficulty, it guided them first to the cornucopia - which was hidden in a the heart of a three- dimensional maze which would have perplexed the intellect of any five dozen mathematicians put together - then led them to a gnarled flight of derelict stone stairs which led upward.
"Your liberty is at the top of these stairs," said the quokka. "But as for me - this is as far as I go."
"Very well," said Guest. "Father mine, it is time for you to hang this quokka."
"Hang me!" said the quokka, in great distress. "But you swore to preserve me!"
"I swore to do you no harm," said Guest, demonstrating his rapidly advancing philosophical prowess by a strict application of logic. "That is not the same as preserving you. I will be true to my oath. I will do you no harm. It is my father who will do you harm."
"I doubt it," said the Witchlord.
"What?" said Guest, startled.
"You may amuse yourself by hanging this rat, if you wish," said Lord Onosh, "but I think it beneath my dignity."
"Dignity!" said Guest. "We're not talking dignity! We're talking of law! This thing has led men to its deaths, I'm sure of it. Are we to let it free to lead more men to destruction?"
Here Guest had a point. It was undeniably true that the quokka had tried to lead both Witchlord and Weaponmaster to their deaths; and, in all probability, if released it would encompass the death of anyone else who found their way into the Stench Caves. So it was necessary to hang it. Hanging is an ugly business, and in an ordered society there would be no need for it, since in an ordered society, there would be no need for it, since an ordered society would have an Inspector of Boats to regulate the sale of boats and an Inspector of Caves to regulate the governance of Stench Caves.
But as Guest Gulkan lived in a singularly disordered age, a great age of darkness in which competent Inspectors and other regulatory bureaucrats were singularly thin on the ground, he must necessarily be put to the trouble of undertaking the singularly brutal business of hanging in order to serve the ends of justice and preserve the lives of the unwary.
So the quokka was duly hung; and, having been hung, it was eaten. Raw. For Witchlord and Weaponmaster did not have a tinderbox between them; and, besides, they were in no mood to waste time on unnecessary cookery.
Having eaten the quokka - not all of it, for they were not hungry enough to trouble themselves with the guts, and they discarded the fur and the bones - Witchlord and Weaponmaster ventured up the stairs.
At the top of the stairs, the two Yarglat barbarians found themselves at the bottom of a huge pit. Honest sunlight beamed down on them from the top of the pit - it was by Guest's reckoning late afternoon - but the walls of the pit were quite unclimbable.
Witchlord and Weaponmaster climbed to the small mound of rubble in the middle of the pit, a mound made of rocks and of bones, of stones and of dirt, of the droppings of bats and the feathers of vultures. Guest saw something which he thought he recognized. He picked it up. It was a skull.
"So much for that!" said Guest, tossing the skull away.
The quokka had betrayed them!
Realizing this, Guest greatly regretted having persuaded his father to hang the brute. He had discovered one of the great drawbacks of hanging, which is this: supposing you hang a person, and that person then proves to have been a greater criminal than you thought, why, it is impossible to recall them so you can escalate their punishment. This is why, under many of those regimes which do practice hanging, convicted criminals are kept under lock and key for as much as ten or twenty years, to allow the authorities time to prove out any greater crimes of which they may be guilty.
"We have at least the cornucopia," said the Witchlord, trying to be encouraging.
"So we do," said Guest. "So we do."
But he thought of the possession of this magical device as a totally inadequate compensation for being marooned at the bottom of an unclimbable pit somewhere in the Stench Caves of Logthok
Norgos.
So thinking, Guest let the cornucopia fall, then kicked it as it fell. It flopped into the air then sprawled flat on the ground.
The cornucopia was a piece of wrinkled green leather the length of Guest's forearm. It was shaped like a hollow cone, and nothing could be seen within it except a voluminous blackness. It was flexible, and could be comfortably folded up and stuck in one's pocket, and it worked as advertised - that is to say, it duplicated anything which might be put into it. Guest had already tested it by spitting into it and getting it to duplicate his dribble in a constant stream.
"Since we've got time on our hands," said the Witchlord, "you might make use of that thing to make me a ring."
"A ring?" said Guest.
"Yes," said his father. "A ring of ever-ice. Or are we to fight over the one you're wearing on your finger?"
"That's a thought," said Guest.
So he took the ring from his father, sucked on it to remove all crusted mud, spat out the mud, picked up the cornucopia, held it upright, then popped the ring of ever-ice into the voluminous darkness.
Then Guest turned the cornucopia upside down.
Out fell the ring of ever-ice.
Followed by a twin of itself.
Then a triplet.
Then, in a cascading rush, some seven or eight thousand rings came pouring from the cornucopia, piling up around their ankles in a clickering chittering turbulence.
"Whoa!" cried the Witchlord in alarm.Guest jerked the cornucopia to the upright, thus cutting off the flow of rings.
"Wah!" he said.
Then stooped to inspect the hoard at his feet.
"Why," said Guest in disgust, picking up a handful of rings,
"they're rusted!"
And it was true.
The rings were rotten rounds of rust, each with a glob of rust where the original had displayed a chip of ever-ice. But where was the original?
"Where is my ring?" said Guest.
"It was probably the first to fall out," said his father. "It fell at your feet, so - don't move!"
Then Guest stooped to the scrapmetal nightmare at his feet, and rummaged through it with an avaricious diligence. Not all of the rings proved rusty, and some were tolerable counterfeits of the original. But Guest eventually located the one true ring of ever-ice, which could be told from all the others because only the true ring shone with its own inner light.
"Gods!" said Guest, kicking his way clear of the trash-dump rubbish heap. "What a let down!"
And so it was.
"Have you a coin about you?" said Guest.
But Guest had already guessed that the cornucopia would not prove an adequate counterfeiter of coinage.
"Time for us to be going," said the Witchlord.
"Where?" said his son.
"If we presume that this treacherous quokka has done its best to defeat our escape," said Lord Onosh, "then our best bet is to go back the way we came."
"If we can remember it," said Guest. "Well then! Lead on! I'm ready!"
But Lord Onosh chose to take a piss before leading on, making Guest realize that it was time for him to do the same himself.
Obedient to nature's necessities, Guest pissed ... and was childish enough to try to fill the cornucopia with his outflow.
"What are you doing?" said Lord Onosh, when he turned to see Guest at play with a pissing cornucopia.
"I am - "Guest was about to come up with some justification for his behavior, but did not, for the trickle of urine which was exiting from the cornucopia in his hands suddenly abrupted into a vomiting outflow which made the cornucopia plunge and buck, so that it took all his strength to hold the thing.
The outflow knocked the Witchlord off his feet, and he went rolling away for a dozen paces before he recovered himself and stood. Lord Onosh tried to find words for his rage:
"You - you - you - "
The Witchlord was so profoundly angry he was quite speechless. And Guest -
"Gods!" said Guest, half-shocked, half-intrigued by the strength with which the flux of fluid was bolting from the cornucopia. "It's increasing!"
Indeed, the force of the outsurge from the cornucopia was increasing to such an extent that dirt, stones and entire rocks were blown away where the yellow flux impacted.
"Guest!" said Lord Onosh. "Will you stop that!"
"I will not!" yelled Guest.
"Then if you don't - "
"Yes!" said Guest. "Tell me what happens if I don't!"
"If you don't," said Lord Onosh, raising his voice to make himself heard over the pounding shock-splatter of the cornucopia's high-pressure vomiting, "then I'll - I'll - "
Then the Witchlord fell silent.