by Hugh Cook
"If I am to be firewood," said Guest, "then burn away."
In answer, Shabble stung the Weaponmaster with a bolt of singing fire. It burnt a smoking hole in his skin. The stench of burnt flesh and singed hairs rose hot to his nostrils. For a moment, Guest gaped at his wound. Then the pain hit hard, driving him into the sea. But all the waters of Moana were not sufficient to quench the pain of that wound. As Guest soaked it, Shabble hummed round his head like a mutant wasp. The buzzing globe of malevolence bobbed and bounced, hitting the water repeatedly, sending stinging spray in all directions.
But Guest paid no heed to Shabble because his pain was so great. Indeed, the Weaponmaster was in such palpable agony that Shabble backed off somewhat. Guest, divining that the bubble might have realized it had gone further than it truly wanted to, began to recover a degree of self-possession. As he began to master his pain, he took advantage of his recovering self-possession to stage deliberate theatricals of ever-intensifying agony.
"Are you hurt?" said Shabble anxiously.Guest responded with groans, as if the Great Mink itself was in the process of tearing off his toes one by one.
"Are you really really hurt?" said Shabble.Guest fell to sand and thrashed in an agony which was nine- tenths simulated. All the while he watched Shabble covertly from the corner of his eye.
The response surprised even the Weaponmaster For, after a bare ten breaths and a heartbeat, Shabble lost interest in the Weaponmaster's prolonged suffering, and went to investigate the sea, disappearing from sight beneath the waters.
This stunned Guest, who did not quite follow Shabble's reasoning. Shabble saw that Guest appeared to be in grievous pain; and, knowing humans in such condition were no fun at all, Shabble had gone to look at the coral and play with the fishes. Shabble's earlier anxiety had not been feigned. But Guest had been wrong to assume that anxiety to be symptomatic of vast reserves of empathy.
Shabble had been designed and built as a toy, and so had the emotional resources appropriate to the nursery rather than those befitting grand opera.
While Guest did not quite realize how and why his tactics had failed, he did see that his operatic performance was getting him nowhere. So he gave up his groaning and sat on the sand clutching his arm - which still hurt like hell.
Then Guest waited.
He waited for Shabble to emerge from the waters.
But Shabble did not emerge.Guest was profoundly puzzled by this, for Shabble's behavior was contrary to human experience. A human, on arriving abruptly on a coral island in the company of a grievously wounded companion, does not proceed immediately to extended underwater tourism. But, again, Shabble's performance would not have been out of place in the nursery, for Shabble had been made as a toy for children, not as a replacement for a parent.
In the absence of any mature adult concern from Shabble - who surface briefly once or twice, but immediately splashed down under the water again - Guest at last got to his feet and sauntered over to the door. In the white coral sand - sand whiter than eggshell, whiter than bone - he saw only one single set of footprints. They were his own.Guest confronted the Door.
"Open!" said Guest, in his most commanding voice.
But the Door remained firmly closed.
With some difficulty - his arm was grievously sore, and hampered his movements - Guest climbed onto the plinth and examined the Door in detail. He was careful not to let any part of his person intersect the plane of the arch, since he had no wish to lose head or hand to a sudden reopening of the Door.
On a whim, Guest took the heavy mazadath from around his neck, and displayed it to the Door, and tried to command it again:
"Open!"
But, as he had expected, nothing happened. He slung the mazadath round his neck once again, feeling its heavy silver glissade across his sweat-slick skin. The use of the thing, it seemed, was to preserve his life in the realms of the World Beyond which lay beyond the Veils of Fire in the Cave of the Warp in the Shackle Mountains; and Guest, not for the first time, was intensely irritated that a thing which he had carried so far and for so many years should be possessed of such a specialized use - and was totally useless in his present circumstances.
The lancing sunlight blicked sharps of light from the scattering of sand on the marble of the plinth. On impulse, Guest Gulkan touched his lips to the outer metal of the arch, finding it strangely cool. He licked it. Tasted salt. The arch had been salted by the tropical sea.
As far as Guest could tell, the arch and the island alike showed no sign of prior use.
Or did it?
Toward one end of the island, a bare stone's throw distant, was the turtle-hump of a rowing boat, which Guest had not noticed at all in the first startlement of his shocked arrival and Shabble's subsequent attack.
Now, Guest jumped down to the sand and strode toward the rowing boat. He was conscious of the heat, which brought back memories of Untunchilamon and Injiltaprajura. But Injiltaprajura had been lush with sprinting water, alive with monkeys and tropical birds, aswarm with cockroaches and mosquitoes. This island, by comparison, was tiny. Bare as a picked bone.Guest reached the overturned rowing boat. A few streaks of blistered ochre paint had yet to be elementally stripped from the weathered gray of its planking. Guest lifted it, flipped it over, and revealed bare bones and a broken oar. Guest estimated the bones. Skull, vertebrae, ribs, pelvis, thigh bone and shank bone, carpals and teeth. A man had died here, and Guest was uncomfortably reminded of the possibility that he might die likewise. Guest stood in the sunblind quiet, taking stock. The shit- brown mud of the Old City was still smeared on his shins, though it was wet no longer, for it had dried and hardened swiftly in the heat. Guest stood stork-like on one leg, brushed at the mud, and peeled away a leaf. It was a mottled brown and yellow, its substance frayed, its skeleton showing through its flesh.
"Grief of a bitch," muttered Guest.
Then kicked away the bones, used the broken oar to prop up the rowing boat - there was nothing else by way of shade on the island - and took shelter. He still had the yellow bottle, and still had the ring which commanded it, so it would have been the easiest thing in the world to take refuge within. But Guest was waiting for Shabble.
After an unconscionable delay, Shabble grew bored with exploring the island's coral reef, and came to see how the Weaponmaster was faring.
"How are you?" said Shabble.
"What would you care?" said Guest.
It was not at all what he had planned to say, but the words came out anyway. His burnt arm felt like a continuous branding operation was in progress, and Guest was hard-put to ignore the pain. It brought back uncomfortable memories which he had done his best to rigorously suppress - starting with the spiking of his foot in the Battle of Babaroth and working through to some of the more life-threatening of the beatings he had suffered at the hands of the soldiers of the Mutilator.
"I'm your friend," said Shabble. "Of course I care."
"My friend!" said Guest.
"Why, of course," said Shabble. "I came to Alozay in friendship, didn't I?"
"You could have fooled me!" said Guest, thinking the bubble quite mad in its delinquency.
But, as Shabble's story began to emerge in full detail, Guest slowly started to understand.
Shabble and Guest had first met on Untunchilamon, during the Weaponmaster's wild adventures on that island. Guest's days on Untunchilamon had been so confused, so hectic, so full of turmoil, that he these days found it hard to connect their scattered fragments in any coherent fashion. To the Weaponmaster, Shabble had been just one more of the many spectacles of that island, something to rank alongside the Crab, the wealth fountains, the analytical engine, the therapist Schoptomov, the bullman Log Jaris, the flying claws, the demon Binchinminfin, and the pink- eyed albino who had been such a mighty sorcerer.
Yet Shabble, it seemed, still remembered in detail every moment of that long-ago encounter, and thought that the deeds in which they had been involved (they had, for example, raide
d the Pink Palace of Injiltaprajura together, seeking to put an end to the transitory rule of the demon Binchinminfin) made them comrades in arms.
Later, Guest and Shabble had been incarcerated in the yellow bottle during their transit from Drum to Drangsturm. On that journey, Guest had spent a great many days in exhaustive conversation with Shabble. Guest had simply been passing the time, but Shabble had been doing something entirely different. Shabble, it transpired, had been nourishing the development of a beautiful friendship.
As Shabble's tale unfolded, Guest began to understand how the jade-green monsters of the Circle of the Partnership Banks had been able to suborn Shabble to their will. They had not discovered a new method of torturing or coercing Shabble. No. They had got to the bubble through its weakest point - its need for friends and friendship.
In Chi'ash-lan, the jade-green monster which named itself the demon Ko had indoctrinated Shabble. The demon Ko had told the bubble of bounce that the star-globe had been restored to the island of Alozay (which was true), that Guest and Sken-Pitilkin planned to seek the control of the Circle (which was also true), and that they were eagerly waiting for Shabble to assist them by bringing the Cult of Cockroach to the populations of the lands of the Doors.
The demon Ko and its colleagues had obviously miscalculated.
They must have thought that Shabble would arrive on Alozay, hot with enthusiasm for missionary work, and that the combination of Shabble's eagerness and flame-throwing abilities would leave Guest and Sken-Pitilkin with no choice but to co-operate.
But of course, by the time Shabble reached Alozay, Guest and Sken-Pitilkin had fled with the star-globe. This had been the bitterest of all possible disappointments for Shabble. The bubble had precious little use for power, or gold, or women, or opium, or any of the other things men commonly fight for. But Shabble wanted friendship. Needed it. Valued it above all else. And Shabble, having been told that friends awaited on Alozay, was furious to realize it had been victimized by lies.
"You realized the demons had been lying to you?" said Guest.
"Of course," said Shabble.
"So what did you do?"
"I blasted the demon!" said Shabble, positively squeaking with excitement. "I blasted that thing Italis! I blasted it!"
"Really?" said Guest.
"Really and truly," said Shabble.
"So it's dead."
"Well," said Shabble, guardedly. "Not exactly."
"What do you mean, not exactly? What happened? What happened when you blasted it?"
"Well," said Shabble, "what happened was that it laughed."
"It laughed?"
"Yes," said Shabble, sounding mightily crestfallen. "It laughed at me. It told me to go bounce."
"So what did you do then?"
"I blasted it again. But it didn't make much difference."
"So then you chased me," said Guest. "That wasn't very fair, was it? To get angry with the demon then go chasing after me on that account?"
Shabble tried to avoid the question, but Guest pressed the bubble hard, and in the end it had to concede that it had been naughty.
"Naughty!" said Guest. "You were rather more than naughty!
I'm stuck here on this hellhole of an island, and there's no way off that I can see!"
"You've got the Door," said Shabble.
"But it's closed!" said Guest.
"Well," said Shabble, "there's, uh, there's this boat."
"This rowing boat?" said Guest. "Are you mad? It's got cracks in it which I could just about crawl through."
"Well, someone came here in it," said Shabble.
"From a sinking ship, maybe," said Guest. "Or maybe they were marooned. But judging by the evidence, they didn't get much further!"
With that, Guest indicated the bones which he had found beneath the rowing boat.
"Well, I don't see what you're so worried about," said Shabble. "You've got the bottle, you've got the ring, there's food, there's water, they told me that on Alozay."
"Who told you?" said Guest.
"The one with big ears," said Shabble. "Your father."
"Neither of us has big ears," said Guest. "We have normal ears. Everyone else has an undersized issue."
"If you say so," said Shabble. "But you've still got food, you've stood got water, what else do you need?"
"All kinds of things!" said Guest. "Women, to start with."
"Oh," said Shabble, crestfallen.
Shabble knew that men liked women, and had a theoretical knowledge of the reasons why, but Shabble remained unconvinced of the validity of the theories. Shabble had once maintained a small harem, but many nights of sleeping with women and exploring their intimacies had convinced the bubble that the whole experience was grotesquely overrated. Shabble much preferred sleeping amidst the flames of a fire (for fire was pretty, and gave Shabble melodious dreams), or sleeping with a balloon (for Shabble thought balloons were happy creatures), or sleeping alongside a billiard ball (which gave Shabble the comforting illusion of having the company of one of its own kind).
"You wouldn't understand," said Guest moodily.
"Oh, I understand," said Shabble. "You miss your Yerzerdayla."
"Yerzerdayla?" said Guest.
"The woman," said Shabble. "You know! She was locked in a pod, you were all set to rescue her!"
"Oh," said Guest. "Yes, yes, so I was."
But the truth was that the Weaponmaster had long ago forsaken Yerzerdayla. She was a figure from his adolescence, and in these the years of his maturity he had almost forgotten her. The woman
Penelope meant much more to him, for it was Penelope who had comforted him during the four years of his convalescence in Dalar ken Halvar - but even Penelope, it seemed, was lost to him.
As for Yerzerdayla - why, on his latest sojourn on Alozay, Guest had been so busy getting drunk and eating horse meat, or planning strategy and dealing with demons, that he had never thought of the woman for so much as a moment. Long ago, he had conceived the notion of rescuing her from the pod in the Hall of Time in which he had seen her last, but all such thoughts had long since passed from his head.
Still, Guest thought it unwise to confess as much to Shabble, for he feared the bubble might be a romantic. If so, then it would think less of Guest for his forgetfulness. So Guest put his head in his hands and moaned, in what he hoped was a convincing manner:
"Oh! Oh! My poor Yerzerdayla!"
Then much more of the same followed, until Shabble gallantly declared that it would fly back to the Old City in the Penvash Peninsular, and find the star-globe (wherever that might have got to) and reopen the Door so Guest could continue round this particular Circle.
"Or," said Shabble, "I could find Sken-Pitilkin and get him to fly here."
"But that's impossible," said Guest. "For a start, you don't know where we are to start with, and even if you did, you'd never be able to get here again."
"I know exactly where we are," said Shabble.
"How?" said Guest, wondering if Shabble perhaps had some anciently derived knowledge of the previously unexplored Circle into which Guest had so precipitately ventured.
"From the sun," said Shabble simply.
Then the bubble declared that they were some hundreds of leagues north-west of Untunchilamon; that it had calculated their position to a nicety; that its agility at celestial navigation would permit it a swift passage back to Penvash; and that it would have no trouble whatsoever in guiding Sken-Pitilkin back to Guest Gulkan's island. Guest then expected the bubble of bounce to go whistling up into the heavens, hastening with all possible force to the Old City. But Shabble did not. Shabble wanted to chat, to talk, to play some more in the water, to invent names for the fishes, to speculate on the size of the clouds. And Guest, realizing that he was dependent upon Shabble for his rescue, had no alternative but to play along with these games.
At last, after a full two days of play - an excessive indulgence, doubtless, but Shabble had been held prisoner by the de
mon Ko for upwards of a year, and so was in a mood to enjoy its liberty to the full - Shabble gave Guest a parting present. The parting present was a full-length massage of the Weaponmaster's back, and Guest had to admit that Shabble did it very well.
Then the bubble set forth.
It did not soar upwards, but, rather, went bouncing across the sea, skip by skip. On seeing Shabble adopt this slow and self- indulgent mode of transport, Guest groaned. He had a vision of the bubble slow-hop-skipping all the way across Moana, a process which would surely take days.
"Grief of gods!" said Guest.
Then made a moody promenade around his minuscule island, then withdrew - not for the first time - to the yellow bottle. With Shabble gone, Guest began to make a methodical assessment of his assets. He had food, including more siege dust than he could have eaten in a thousand years, and he had water. And, toward the end of his search, Guest realized he also had a book.
The book was a book of verbs.
To be precise, the book was Strogloth's Compendium of Delights, that hateful manual of irregularities which had vexed, perplexed and persecuted Guest's boyhood. Guest glared at the thing, then laid rough hands upon it, determined to rend it and tear it, to rough it and burn it.
Then he stopped himself.
He was all alone, marooned without women or companions, deserted by even Shabble. In this exile, nothing remained to him but the exercise of his sword and this one, single, solitary book.
"But," said Guest, "why did it have to be this book?"
Why not a pillow book, or a potentially useful Book of Maps, or a great Book of Battles, or (he had raw materials in plenty) a great Book of Cookery?
"I blame Sken-Pitilkin," muttered Guest.
For who else did he know who was in love with the verbs? Who else had the motive, the means and the opportunity to smuggle such a reprehensible object into the yellow bottle? But, regardless of who was to blame, the facts were the facts, and Guest was stuck with the facts. He was marooned on a desert island, and the sole companion of his maroonment was the most hateful book in all the world: Strogloth's monomaniacal compendium of the world's irregular verbs.