The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

by Hugh Cook

  Thus Guest was hard at work in the green bottle when that treasure of treasures was stolen from Elkor Alish by a sneak-thief named Togura Poulaan; and Guest was still helplessly imprisoned in the same bottle when that Poulaan carried it away from the Greater Teeth in a small boat which was shortly struck by storm.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Togura Poulaan: a would-be questing hero from Sung who became one of Sken-Pitilkin's proteges at a time when Sken-Pitilkin was living alone on Drum (Guest Gulkan having disappeared through a Door in the Old City of Penvash).

  Now Guest Gulkan was a questing hero, a survivor of encounters with Crabs and with therapists, a mighty swordsman whose daring had defeated both the murkbeast and the crocodile.

  Yet being such a person is no defense against ignominious disaster, for the world's greatest warlord may yet step by accident in a dogturd, or have a chamber pot emptied on his head by a careless chambermaid at work in the upper storeys of a building which overshadows the route of his promenade.

  So it was that Guest, he who had confronted the dreaded Ethnologists in their lair yet had lived to tell the tale, he who had suborned the imperial strength of Plandruk Qinplaqus to his service, he who had dueled with the Great God Jocasta and had survived the treachery of the demon Italis, fell victim to the lowest and meanest specimen of scuttling cowardice to be found west of Galsh Ebrek and east of Chi'ash-lan.

  The vile and villainous Togura Poulaan, a native of the pork- eating nation of Sung, stole the bottle in which Guest was hard at work on his self-interrogation; and, by the time Poulaan had managed to carry the bottle home to his lair in Sung, he had succeeded in damaging the bottle so badly by long abuse that it ultimately broke, liberating Guest Gulkan from its interior.

  That, at least, is the story as told by the Weaponmaster. It must be admitted that the above-mentioned Poulaan has given a different account of the matter, and claims that Guest destroyed the bottle from within by incontinently tampering with a subtle wizardly mechanism he found in its depths.

  Be that as it may, the outcome was that Guest Gulkan was carried north of the Greaters to Sung, a barbarous province of the Ravlish Lands. In some quarters, it is alleged that he did not leave Sung before committing a number of murders. Indeed, Poulaan is said to have blamed the Weaponmaster for the death of his much- beloved brother Cromarty, who was put to death in the town of Keep in a singularly sanguinary manner.

  Whatever the truth of the matter, it is certain that Guest, having been abstracted from the Greater Teeth by the villainous Poulaan, ended up in Sung, a dismal land of bogs and rockdumps in Ravlish East, where peasants with provincial mudpuddle minds dedicate themselves to the practice of obscure yet hideous abominations. The inhabitants of this depraved place eat offal (in addition to pork), rape sheep, commit vile abominations with toads, and abominate themselves also with liquid dung. Nor is this the limit of their delinquencies, for the people of Sung have disgraced themselves down through the generations by systematic inhospitality, the worst manifestation of which is that they frequently mistake wandering scholars for lepers and endeavor to stone them to death. They further display their debased iniquity by giving houseroom to the skavamareen, an instrument of aural obscenity which has long been outlawed in every civilized nation from Tang to Chi'ash-lan. It must also be said that a debasement equal to that of their morals has from time to time afflicted their coinage; and from this great injury has been suffered by innocent persons.

  The capital of Sung is Keep, which has been mentioned above as the site of the alleged murder of Cromarty, and Keep is notable inasmuch as it is a town much undermined by gemrock tunnelling, to the point where its very existence has been for some time threatened. One has read that anciently great civilizations were destroyed by the very processes which produced their wealth; and, while Sung is neither great nor (properly speaking) an abode of civilization, one foresees that its destruction will ultimately befall it thanks to a similar dynamic.

  However, despite the sundry derelictions of Keep, of Sung, and of the people of Sung, Guest Gulkan escaped from that barbarous province with skin and foreskin yet intact, and got himself down to the coast.

  He then headed toward D'Waith.

  D'Waith is the seaport at the easternmost end of the Ravlish Lands, and hence is the port which is handiest to Drum. One might therefore have presumed Guest Gulkan to be making for the island of Drum, intent on discovering whether the sagacious Sken-Pitilkin yet survived on that island; and intent, too, on recruiting Sken-Pitilkin's power, might, wisdom and all-round sagacity to his cause.

  But - not a bit of it!

  Though Guest Gulkan had reached the full years of his maturity, he had yet to acquire wisdom; and the proof of this is that he had no thought of seeking the help of his tutelary wizard, but planned instead to get transport from D'Waith to the Greaters, and there to present himself once again to Elkor Alish, and this time to make a full confession of the existence of the Circle of the Partnership Banks.Guest had been grievously shaken by his kidnapping. Having been swept to Sung by the villainous Togura Poulaan, he had been forced to acknowledge that the slow, elegant ballet of carefully choreographed politicking in which he had been engaged on the Greaters was fatuous. For Guest was not living in any great Age of Peace in which slow measures might yet win the day. Instead, he was living in an Age of Darkness, which favored the roughness of the fist and the sharpness of the swordblade.

  So Guest, who had previously been working on intricate plans for the confidential recovery of the star-globe from the rivers of Penvash, planned to now abandon subtlety and secrecy altogether, and to confront Elkor Alish with the truth.

  This is what he would say:-

  "Just south of here, a short voyage distant from the Greaters, a Door awaits us on the island of Stokos. It is the Door of the Stokos Bank, a Door which is linked to similar Banks in places as far afield as Chi'ash-lan and Dalar ken Halvar. Command of this Circle of Banks would answer your most crying need: possession of a source of wealth equal to the demands of financing your war against the Confederation of Wizards. If you will but give me an army, a small one, then I will wrest from the waters of Penvash the device which commands these Doors, and place both the device and myself at your service."

  This was what Guest planned to say, for he had been compelled to an acknowledgement of his own limits, of the uncertainties of his previous elaborate scheming, and of the need to cut his ambitions down to size, so his capacities would be equal to those ambitions. Thus, whereas the Weaponmaster had previously set his heart on mastering the Circle of the Partnership Banks in his own right, now he was prepared to compromise, to make an alliance with Elkor Alish, and to accept a subordinate role in any conquest of that Circle.

  But he was too late!

  For, on reaching D'Waith, Guest found that a ship from Androlmarphos was in port, and the news which had been brought by the ship had already infected the whole town.

  Drangsturm had fallen.

  Words cannot encompass the enormity of this disaster.

  Drangsturm, of course, was the trench of flame which the wizards of the Confederation had built to guard the north of Argan from the monsters of the south.

  In earlier discussion with Elkor Alish, Guest Gulkan had asked the Rovac warrior how he planned to master the defense of the continent once he had overthrown the Confederation of Wizards.

  To this, the black-bearded Rovac warrior had given a two-part answer. First, he planned initially to compel a certain number of wizards to serve him as his slaves, and to maintain the flames of Drangsturm against invasion by the monsters of the Swarms. Second, he intended to later quest to the heartland of the terror-lands of the Deep South, and there to overthrow the Skull, the entity which commanded the Swarms.

  Such was the hubris of Elkor Alish, he who is said to have been ultimately overpowered and slaughtered by certain of the monsters of the Swarms - for, if rumor is to be believed, Alish was killed by one of the Neversh while attemptin
g to stem the invasion of the monsters which forced their way to the north after the destruction of Drangsturm.

  When Guest Gulkan first heard the news of Drangsturm's fall,

  Elkor Alish yet lived. But Guest did not think for a moment that Alish, or any other warrior, could hold the Swarms in battle.

  During his earlier adventuring round the Circle that began in the Old City of Penvash, Guest had gone through a Door which opened onto the wrong side of Drangsturm, the southern side, that side which had always been the province of the monsters of the Swarms.

  There he had encountered huge centipedes, from which he and his companions of the moment had fled.

  And Guest knew, in his heart of hearts, that there was little to be done in the face of the Swarms except to run.

  So, when Guest heard that Drangsturm had fallen, and that the Confederation of Wizards had destroyed itself in a civil war which had set one wizard against another, he realized that all of Argan was doomed. Words could not encompass the enormity of this disaster. The cities of Narba, Voice, Veda, Selzirk, Androlmarphos and Runcorn lay open to the onslaught of the worst of mindless marauding monsters - mindless monsters which were commanded by the malign intelligence of the Skull of the Deep South.

  So Guest knew then - and rightly knew - that all would perish. The hotlands of the Far South would be overwhelmed. The ricelands and the wheatlands, all would go. The forests of the Chenameg Kingdom, the horselands of the Lezconcarnau Plains, the walls of Selzirk the Fair and the boulevards of Voice - all would fall to the forces of living death.

  For three days, Guest Gulkan lingered in D'Waith, until he had exhaustively researched the news of Drangsturm's fall.

  Meantime, discrete enquiry established that Sken-Pitilkin yet lived, and lived on Drum.

  With news gathered, and with nothing of use yet left to do in D'Waith, Guest Gulkan persuaded a fisherman to dare the ugly waters of the Penvash Strait, that body of water which lies between the Ravlish Lands and the continent of Argan. It is toothed with rocks, haunted by sea serpents, and frequently beset by storms of great severity - all of which threaten to drown the mariner, or to wreck him upon shores where he will surely fall victim to the savagery of the harp seal (or so it is said, though, despite their bloodthirsty reputation, even harp seals have their occasional defenders).

  This was the body of water which Guest Gulkan dared, and the dare brought him home to Drum, where the fisherman was rewarded by Sken-Pitilkin (and was rewarded, too, by being made guest of honor at a three-day poetry reading given by Sken-Pitilkin's sea dragons - though whether he was entirely appreciative of this compulsory honoring of his courage is debatable).

  And on arrival -

  On arrival in Drum, Guest Gulkan was seven days in conversation with Hostaja Torsen Sken-Pitilkin, the wizard of Skatzabratzumon who had been the tutor of his childhood and the guide of his later years.

  Now Sken-Pitilkin was a mighty wizard, the greatest wizard of the order of Skatzabratzumon, and the first wizard in the history of the world to have mastered the arts of controlled flight. But the sorry truth is that Sken-Pitilkin had no remedy for the misfortune which had befallen Argan. For he could not repair

  Drangsturm, nor could he see any way in which the Swarms could be prevented from sweeping north through Argan.Sken-Pitilkin's gloomy prognosis was predictive of events.

  For, in the months which followed, the Swarms completed the conquest of Argan's western seaboard. Only a tiny fraction of the populated flatlands held out against the monsters. This tiny fraction was the province of Estar, where mountainous defense, coupled with great force of arms, allowed the Swarms to be checked and held.

  For the moment.

  During these months of disaster, Guest Gulkan and Sken-Pitilkin were by no means inactive. Do not imagine that they sat idly on Drum while the world went down to disaster! No, they exerted themselves mightily, and a chronicle of their mutual exploits would fill an encyclopaedia.

  Their exploits began with a monumental air adventure which took them to the city of Dalar ken Halvar, where Guest recovered the cornucopia, and recovered too the yellow bottle which had been devoted to transporting crocodiles for the benefit of Parengarenga's entertainment industry.

  Armed with the bottle, and with the cornucopia, and aided by Sken-Pitilkin's mastery of airpower, the Weaponmaster and his wizard then made war upon the Swarms to the extent which they could.

  But the cornucopia proved a singulary ineffective weapon for use against the Swarms. Wizard and Weaponmaster had anticipated unleashing floods of black slime against the armies of the Swarms, but found these monsters scattered widely rather than bunched in tight formations like the armies of humankind. Protected by their very dispersion, the Swarms had no great concentrations which could be destroyed by human agency.

  Still, wizard and Weaponmaster did their best, until the very cornucopia expired from sheer over-use - shrivelling to a warped strip of something which looked like burnt black leather.

  Then the pair essayed what rescue they could with the aid of the yellow bottle. And one would think, given the enormous capacity of that bottle, and given Sken-Pitilkin's command of the air, that they should have been able to evacuate entire cities.

  But it was not so. For the human material which they were endeavoring to help was unruly in the extreme.

  And here one is tempted to give a catalogue, that it may be clearly understood by all of history that wizard and weaponmaster did not shirk their duty when the world was in need. But such self-defensive exculpatory cataloguing would fill many pages needlessly, and add nothing to the body of wisdom. Let it merely be recorded that, of the people whom wizard and Weaponmaster saved, at least one in ten responded by trying to murder them in an effort to win possession of the yellow bottle and its commanding ring.

  And inside the bottle itself - well, the behavior of the refugees is better imagined than described. Like so many rats trapped in a cage, they fought, they raped, they stole, they murdered, and they waged warfare against each other. They fought over religion, race and language. They came to blows over matters concerning personal odours, and the food which one breed ate, and the food which another breed didn't eat. Men killed each other in fights over women and women killed each other in fights over men.

  And when these refugees were set down on hard land - usually in the Ravlish Lands - they were at the mercy of the sundry bandits, warlords, slavers and professional murderers who made the plunder of the helpless their speciality.

  Furthermore, Sken-Pitilkin's stickbird began to be increasingly menanced by the Neversh. The wizard of Skatzabratzumon could outfly the Neversh, the lumbering winged monsters which were the greatest of the Swarms, but they seemed to be anticipating his movements. He would fly from one, only to find his flight interesected by another at a distance of a hundred leagues. As the danger increased, Sken-Pitilkin realized that the Skull of the Deep South was distantly aware of the tiny stickbird which was nimbling in and out of the lands of its conquest, and was doing its best to destroy this adversary.

  So Guest and Sken-Pitilkin were forced to become selective, to plan their raids carefully, to limit their flights, and to fly for the most part by night, when the Swarms did not fly.

  It was then that Sken-Pitilkin began to hatch a grandiose plan - which was, to gather in as many wizards as he could, and base them upon Drum, and set up a new Confederation with himself as its head.

  To the sagacious wizard of Skatzabratzumon, this seemed the most logical plan in all the world. The Swarms were conquering Argan, and were threatening the northern continent of Tameran and the eastern Ravlish Lands. It was therefore surely supremely logical that the surviving wizards of the Confederation should base themselves defensively upon Drum, a substantially fortified island set in a wild wash of water which was at or near the intersection of Argan, Tameran and the Ravlish Lands.

  But this scheme met with little success.

  One fraction of the Confederation, finding the
city of Androlmarphos to be defensible, had made that city its own, and declined to exchange its comforts for the windswept barrens of far-distant Drum. Others had fled east, taking ship, and voyaging across the Inner Waters and past the Stepping Stone Islands to the Ebrell Islands. They declared the Ebrells to be a base more logical than Drum, for it was closer to the Breach (and, therefore, closer to the Shackle Mountains and the all-important Cave of the Warp).

  And when Sken-Pitilkin did meet isolated wizards who had not thrown in their lot with the rival Confederations arising in Androlmarphos or on the Ebrells, why, he found that many bore a grudge against him for things he was alleged to have done in the past, and for crimes he was alleged to have committed against the Confederation; and more than one held Sken-Pitilkin to be personally responsible for the downfall of Drangsturm, and (though there was neither truth nor logic to any such accusation) tried to kill him on that account.

  In the end, Sken-Pitilkin was able to bring a bare one dozen wizards to Drum. That dozen included the ethnologist Brother Fern Feathers. Fortunately, Guest failed to recognized Fern Feathers; and Sken-Pitilkin, who was fully aware of Guest's attitude toward the scientific researches of wizards, warned the ethnologist that he should do his best to conceal the scholarly labors of his past. Therefore, when Guest asked Fern Feathers to declare his history, that wizard said he had long labored as a slug chef; and with this declaration Guest was contented.

  The dozen wizards brought to Drum also included (much to Guest's delight) the Yarglat wizard Ontario Nol; and (to Guest's yet greater delight) Eljuk Zala Gulkan. In the years in which Guest and Eljuk had been separated, Eljuk had attempted his Tests for a second time: and, in the Cave of the Warp, had succeeded in making the necessary alliance which made him a wizard in his own right.

  But what could a dozen wizards do against the Swarms? What could they do when they were refugees upon Drum, a bare and barren island which was hard-pushed to feed itself and its sea dragons?