Hugh Cook - The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

As Midsummer's Day approached, Guest Gulkan was dragged from the dismal depths of his imprisonment. The tangled matting of his long-grown hair was shaved to a hedgehog's prickling. He was bathed; and scrubbed; and deloused; and perfumed. His rags were burnt – sending up a thick and oily smoke to the heavens – and he was dressed in a loincloth and openweave sandals.

Then, on a hot day near the summer's uttermost height, the loincloth-clad Weaponmaster was escorted to the palace of Ubazakura. This monument to power stood upon Obooloo's heights, and was the home of Aldarch the Third, Mutilator of Yestron and ruler of most of it.

The Mutilator's reign was by then near the end of its Second Year of Peace. The year Peace 2 in the Izdimir Empire was the year Khmar 7 in the Collosnon Empire. Guest Gulkan's birthday had been and gone; he had already attained to the great and ancient age of 24; and shortly it would be Midsummer's Day again, and the Third Year of Peace would begin, and with that beginning the eighth year of the rule of the Emperor Khmar would likewise commence.

In the long darkness of his imprisonment, Guest Gulkan had steeled himself for his confrontation with Aldarch the Third. It is a mark of his upbringing that Guest had seen this confrontation to have been inevitable since the moment of his capture – for Guest was the son of an emperor, was he not? Hence he had never expected death through anonymous execution, but, rather, had braced himself for an edge-to-edge face-off with the very lord of the Izdimir Empire himself.

Now the long-expected showdown was at hand, and so Guest expected to be led into realms of patent doom, of screaming shadows and blood-reek dungeons. He expected to be confronted with assorted tableaux of gaping corpses and truncated torsos, of gibbering victims and crawling wreckage bloody in its writhings.

But no signs of any such provincial barbarism were to be seen as the young Guest Gulkan was escorted into the palace of Ubazakura. The Izdimir Empire can be called many things, but by no stretch of the imagination can it rightly be called provincial; and Aldarch the Third, the ruler of that empire, was one of the most civilized and highly cultivated rulers in all the world.

Hence the palace of Ubazakura was no gross place of wreckage and threat. Rather, it was typified by peace, grace and balance.

It was a home to the arts and a monument to interior design. Guest was led through a courtyard where diamond-gilled catfish whiskered through a lily pond which was deep – deep as drowning. The Weaponmaster slowed and lingered, lingered in the sun, lingered under the beating sky. He was conscious of the delicacy of the moment, of the fragility of his own existence. He felt the blood sifting through the smallest and most intimate sacs of his lungs. He felt the cobwebbed construction of his bones and the subtle dance of the very particles of air which wafted in and out through the great wings of his nose.

In those moments of heightened consciousness, the Weaponmaster heard a woman begin to sing. Her song echoed through the sprawling bat-wings of his ears, and, making its way through the tubes of flesh to which his ears gave access, caused the small and delicate bones deep inside his ear to thump out a message suitable for interpretation by his brain.

The beauty of the song suggested to Guest that a beautiful woman was responsible for its generation. This was not the case.

Rather, the day was bright with the golden song of one of the imperial dragons of Yestron – creatures of gentle nature and spectacular musical talent.

"Who is the woman?" said Guest, hearing the dragon, and thinking from its song that it must be a woman at least as beautiful as his long-lost Yerzerdayla.

"Hush," said the translator who accompanied him. "We are entering the Presence."

With that, they left the courtyard's sun behind them, venturing into the airy shadows of a series of chambers interconnected by arched doorways. They walked across hexagonal tiles, each of which was decorated with a representation of one of the body's internal organs. By contrast, the tapestries which adorned the walls were devoted to abstraction, to interweaving glyphs and helixes utterly removed from all realities of the flesh.

While passing through these chambers, Guest smelt camphor.

Camphor. What did that remind him of? It reminded him of the tunnel which had led him into the depths of Obooloo's Temple of Blood. He had smelt camphor there, along with other things.

But -

There was some other memory, older, deeper, more compelling.

It was – it was -

Camphor, camphor and the bright spires of golden song… a supremely evocative combination… so evocative that, somehow, Guest was certain that he had been here before. Here! In these very same chambers! Walking over these very same tiles! But this was his first visit to this palace. Surely. Guest Gulkan had no absolute index to his past, for his memory had been jumbled by the many shocks of his life, by his rending at the hands of the Great Mink, by the displacements of war and exile, and by the sheer complexity of the press of ever- changing faces which had been a feature of his journeying. Yet, even though he could not unscramble every detail of his past with any certainty, Guest Gulkan was sure that this was his very first visit to the palace of Ubazakura.

And yet…

And yet!

The golden song of the imperial dragon soared skywards with increasing passion, and again Guest Gulkan was assailed by the smell of camphor. Smells are the great memory-triggers, for smell is the most primitive of all the senses, the sense which is closest to animal existence.

Camphor.

Camphor! Guest halted, for his skin prickled, and his very hair stood on end. He shuddered, and his heart pounded, and hot blood flushed through his veins.

For he remembered!

The Weaponmaster remembered a distant day on which he and his father had conquered the mainrock Pinnacle, and had secured admission to the abditory which housed the Door of the Safrak

Bank. Plandruk Qinplaqus, the Silver Emperor of Dalar ken Halvar, he who had then been concealing his true identity by calling himself Ulix of the Drum, had told Witchlord and Weaponmaster that a globe of stars must be procured if that Door in the mainrock

Pinnacle was to be open.

Suspecting that Banker Sod had fed just such an artefact to Icaria Scaria Iva-Italis, Guest Gulkan had challenged the demon Italis, at last persuading it to give him the star-globe.

But on taking that globe into his possession, Guest Gulkan had been plunged into a visionary world in which he had heard a woman's soaring song, in which he had smelt camphor, and in which he had met a man who had back-knuckled him across the face. That back-knuckling had precipitated Guest's return to the Hall of Time, where he had then been put to the trouble of staunching a nose made bloody by the back-knuckle blow delivered to him during his visionary adventuring.

"Come on!" said the Janjuladoola interpreter who had been assigned to Guest Gulkan. "Come on! We've no time to linger!"

But Guest still stood, staring at all around him, taking in the details with a heightened awareness close to that of hallucination. This was the very place! He was sure of it! This was the very place to which his vision had taken him when he had first seized control of the star-globe!

In the time since that visionary experience, Guest had deliberately strived to forget all that unsettling displacement, for he had been truly terrified by that displacement, and so had sought to suppress all memories relating to it.

But -

Here he was!

Here he was in a place identical to that which he had seen in that long-ago vision which he had endured in the mainrock

Pinnacle!