Hugh Cook: The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

The wizard Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin shortly came to see Guest Gulkan and counseled him to flee the city.

"Why in the name of a dog's green vomit should I do a thing like that?" said Guest. Guest had then lately entered upon a phase where he spent a great deal of his spare time in devising new and especially barbarous oaths, and "a dog's greem vomit" is typical of these. Sken-Pitilkin resisted the temptation to abrade the boy on account of his uncouth neologisms, and instead dedicated himself to giving good counsel.

"You must flee from Gendormargensis," said Sken-Pitilkin,

"because, unless you flee the city, you'll have to hack it out face to face with Thodric Jarl."

"I should worry?" said Guest.

"Of course you should worry!"

"Why?" said Guest. "Because I'll get blood on my clothes?"

"Because the blood will be your own," said Sken-Pitilkin.

"You have a choice. Bribe up big to buy off Jarl. Or flee. That's the limit of the choices you have at your own disposal, though Bao Gahai may have others."

This Bao Gahai was a dralkosh, a witch, whose devices had helped the Witchlord Onosh secure power and keep it. Rumor had it that Bao Gahai's strength was faltering, but many feared her still.

"Bao Gahai?" said Guest. "I'll not be seeking help from her."

"Yet she may give it," said Sken-Pitilkin. "She desires your presence, now, today, and to tell you as much is the greater part of my reason for coming here. Well. Are you ready to go?"

"I'm not going to see her!" said Guest.

But Sken-Pitilkin was persistent, and told the boy that Lord Onosh himself wished Guest to consult with Bao Gahai. So at length the young Weaponmaster allowed himself to be persuaded into the presence of the dralkosh who for so long had aided and counseled his father.

The audience took place in Bao Gahai's bedroom, which smelt of camphor, of cats, and of antiquity. Bao Gahai was sitting up in bed with a cheeseboard on her knees. On the cheeseboard was an assortment of nuts – she never ate cheese, for she was allergic to it, just as she was allergic to catmeat and the eggs of seagulls – and throughout the audience she occupied herself by opening those nuts with the aid of a hammer, a chisel and an autoptical brain-hook. By profession she was a pathologist, and though she no longer dissected dead flesh – excitement always got the better of her, and she invariably moved from the dead to the living – she was still possessed by the scarcely controllable urge to dissect something. Hence the nuts.

"As a mark of my favor," said Bao Gahai, once she was alone with the young Weaponmaster, "I have persuaded your father to let the Rovac warrior Rolf Thelemite remain as your bodyguard, for all that he has recently led you into folly by the way of gambling."

"As a mark of your favor, if I truly have your favor," said Guest, astonished by his own boldness even as he spoke, "you might see to the cancellation of my gambling debts – and Rolf's."

"It's the cancellation of your life that should concern you," said Bao Gahai. "Not the cancellation of debt."

"You think me dead at the hand of Thodric Jarl?" said Guest, alluding to the duel to which he was doomed.

"I think that a strong likelihood, unless you leave the city," said Bao Gahai. "I suggest an extended journey of exploration in the Eastern Marches."

"That would be one way of thwarting Jarl's bloodlust," agreed Guest, with an entirely unwonted cheerfullness.

"You're not thinking of poisoning him, are you?" said Bao Gahai sharply.

"No," said Guest. "Of fighting him merely. Of killing him."

"You," said Bao Gahai, flicking a piece of walnut shell in Guest's direction, "have been taking opium."

"Opium?" said Guest.

"Yes, yes," said Bao Gahai. "You have been taking opium. Or else you have a fever."

"A fever? No? Why would you think so?"

"Because," said Bao Gahai, "there is never any way under any of the seventy suns of the fifty thousand hells of Bancharoth that you will ever kill Thodric Jarl in single combat."

"My sword has slaughtered down a multiple of men in combat," said the Weaponmaster staunchly, "and I have trained long and hard since my last slaughter."

"You?" said Bao Gahai, with a laugh barely to be distinguished from the sound of nutshells snappling. "You? You have trained? With whom? With Rolf Thelemite, maybe?"

"The very man," said Guest. "And he is a Rovac warrior, is he not?"

"For sure," said Bao Gahai. "Rolf Thelemite is a warrior, as a sparrow is a bird. But I think the gray-bearded Jarl to be a very eagle in his pride, and I think the sharpness of his talons a fit complement to that pride."

Then Bao Gahai started to laugh.

She laughed and she laughed. Her full-fledged throttling was hideous, sounding for all the world like a man being strangled. Guest Gulkan took Bao Gahai's laughter as a cue to leave, and swiftly made his escape. But Bao Gahai sent Sken-Pitilkin to persecute young Guest with books, and with papers, and with irregular verbs; and to divine his intentions if this should prove remotely possible. The dralkosh did not believe for one moment that Guest actually intended dueling Jarl, so presumed he had a secret plan in hatching.

But Sken-Pitilkin found no hint of the existence of any such plan; and found, too, that the boy Guest was decidedly reluctant to settle to his lessons, for his sword seemed to have fascinated him like a bewitching love.

A date for Guest Gulkan's duel with Thodric Jarl had been fixed, and on morning before that day of destiny – to be precise, on a morning some ten days after the Weaponmaster's return to Gendormargensis – Sken-Pitilkin came to Guest's quarters and found the boy busily sharpening the long razorblade of his sword's cutting edge.

"It is written," said Sken-Pitilkin, shivering in the unheated coldness of Guest Gulkan's room, "that an icicle is but a poor room-mate. Blood, boy! Why don't you heat the room?"

"I am hardening myself body and soul," said Guest, with a studied seriousness which appeared devoid of any hint of irony. "I am hardening myself to meet with Thodric Jarl. Besides, the exercise of the sword warms me to a sufficiency."

"But I am old," said Sken-Pitilkin, "and my bones chilled with my age. It is written that the old should not suffer from the folly of the young."

"Where is that written?" said Guest. "In a book?"

"Where else?" said Sken-Pitilkin.

"Books truth nothing," said Guest, studying his swordblade by the winterlight which shivered through the open window. "Anyone can write anything in a book."

"So they can," said Sken-Pitilkin, settling himself of a chair and pulling Guest's best solskin horseblanket around him.

"The date of your death, for example. In the books of the city's best bookmakers, that date is written as tomorrow. But there are other things well-written in the books of the world. Irregular verbs, for instance. What say you leave that sword, and make some verbs mere chopmeat with the razor of your intellect."

As scholars have always known, languages should ever be the first learning of the man who may be destined to hold great power. recognizing this truth, the unscholarly Lord Onosh had ordered Sken-Pitilkin to labor young Guest into a linguist. But Guest hated the foreign tongues, their hookworm alphabets and their irregular verbs; and, failing to recognize their imposition as a sign of his father's love for him, he reacted as if Lord Onosh had personally invented all foreign syllabaries for the express purpose of torturing an unscholarly boy.

"Your passion for verbs is obscene," said Guest, momentarily laying aside his sword.

"Obscene?" said Sken-Pitilkin.

"Surely," said Guest, sliding shut the translucent paper screens designed to exclude the winter air from his quarters.