Hugh Cook - The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

"No," said Guest.

A shameful confession, this! But, thanks to the derelictions of his scholarship, the young Weaponmaster was uncommonly ignorant of many things which apt to take for granted.

The ignorance of one's associates is not always painful, particularly not to those who derive a delicious sense of superiority by indulging in the act of enlightenment. Being enamoured of such indulgence, Aldarch the Third lectured Guest Gulkan at length, telling him all about the cornucopia, the horn of plenty which had for so long been lost in the Stench Caves of Logthok Norgos. The tale took quite some time, particularly as the Mutilator dwelt in detail upon the horrors that some unsuccessful questing heroes had spoken of as they died. The tale began -

But the reader is surely familiar with the tale of the cornucopia of Logthok Norgos, for that story is a part of everyone's basic education, and the sagacious Sken-Pitilkin had told it at least thrice to Guest Gulkan when the pair of them were respectively tutor and student back in the city of Gendormargensis.

Still, the Mutilator told the story in something close to its full detail, for the story was one of his favorites.

"You understand?" said the Mutilator, when he was done with telling his tale.

"My lord has been very clear," said Guest. "I understand."

"Then know your duty," said Aldarch. "You will liberate your father from the time pod. Then you will quest to the Stench Caves in his company, and retrieve for me the cornucopia."

"My lord," said Guest, "I cannot free my father since – there is a ring, and it is lost. I had a ring, but I lost it, and without the ring I can't open the pod."

"If… if you speak the truth," said Aldarch, "then you… you may regret your limitations hereafter. Come. Bring your skin and your scalp to my bathroom, and I will… I will show you the something which will interest you."

This was said very calmly, which disturbed Guest, who had expected to be ranted at, and had prepared himself accordingly. In absence of all rant, the Mutilator abandoned his throne and limped through the palace with Guest and his ever-shadowing interpreter trailing along behind.

The Mutilator led the way to his bathroom. This was not by any means a narrow chamber. No, it was a room so extensive that one could comfortably have drilled a company of armed men within its confines. It was a spacious chamber of bright-bathing light which played upon white marble bare of ornament. The light came in through the windows, which were open, and which afforded a view of the high mountains. Those mountains were white with snow, as they were all through the year, and upon their heights -

But let us not be distracted by scenery. Let us attend to those matters to which Guest attended. He attended first of all to the bath, which sat in one corner of the bathroom. It was an entirely regular and unremarkable bath made of three or four ox- weights of solid gold; and it was daily filled with warm water so that the Mutilator might perform his ablutions.

In the center of the room, however, was something not quite so conventional. It was not particularly startling, but it was odd. Under the circumstances, Guest Gulkan found anything odd to be ominous. The thing which had attracted his attention was a shallow rectangular well, square-cut, and of no great depth – for had it been filled with water (or with blood, or milk, or liquid honey) then Guest could have jumped into it without getting wet above the knees. For the moment, though, the well was entirely empty of all fluids, so Guest was able to see that its floor was pierced by many drainage holes.

In the center of that well there stood a brazier, which was lit; and above the brazier hung what appeared to be a coffin, suspended from the roof on metal chains. The coffin had the milky whiteness of porcelain.

"We have a man in the coffin," said Aldarch.

"So," said Guest, affecting a calm which he did not quite feel. "So you're boiling him alive."

"Oh no," said the Mutilator. "The brazier is… it's for his health, you could say. This room gets cold, especially at night.

If he wasn't kept warm then he'd die. Shall we look at him?"

"By all means," said Guest.

The Mutilator took Guest Gulkan by the elbow in a companionable manner and guided him forward till they both stood on the edge of the well, where they were able to look down upon the coffin and observe its contents.

Might there perhaps be snakes in the coffin?

No, there were no snakes.

Instead, there was a man.

A modest opening in the coffin allowed for an inspection of the man's face. The man's nose stuck through the gridwork bars, and the bridge of that nose had gone septic where the skin had been chafed away by the unprotected iron. The man's complexion was olive; his pores big; his eyebrows black; his lips full and sensual. Guest absorbed all these details as he looked down on the man. There seemed to be no hurry. Aldarch the Third seemed prepared to stand here all day. The more Guest stood there, the more… the more he was disturbed. Something… something was not quite right.

A fluid of dire darkness, a fluid filthy with bodyscum, a fluid hinting of oil and eels, bathed the man with the quiescent menace of a quicksand swamp, and bathed him so generously that it almost swallowed his face.

With a little more fluid…

If a little more fluid were to be poured into the coffin then the man would surely drown. Now Guest saw the nature of the torture. The man was kept here for many days, and each day a little more fluid was added. In the end, someone would pour in one last jar, and the victim would be helplessly choked. The horror would be to wait for day after day, trapped, helpless and immobile, knowing the nature of the death that was to come.

"How long has he been here?" said Guest.

The moment he asked, he knew the question was a mistake.

Because Aldarch smiled. The smile was thin but satisfied. Aldarch knew that Guest had begun to appreciate the horror of the victim's situation.

"He has been here for forty days," said Aldarch. "He has fed well. We have fed him upon figs and we have fed him upon almonds.

That is sufficient."

"Figs, nuts… and… and water? Do you feed him water? Is he lying in his urine?"

"What makes you think that?"

"It would be a way to drown a man," said Guest, making an incontinent confession of the workings of his mind. "Trap him in a coffin like this, then… he has to piss, and in the end he drowns of it."

Aldarch snorted with laughter.

"What a mind!" said the Mutilator. "But, no. We do nothing so crude. From the first day, the coffin is filled to the level you see now. The bathroom attendants adjust the level as necessary.

The fluid, of course, is sesame oil." As this was translated, the Mutilator watched his prisoner's face. When Guest did not react, the Mutilator said, softly: "So. So you really don't know. You really don't understand. Very well."

The Mutilator raised his hand and gave an order – an order which was not translated. Guest Gulkan listened in confusion to the slick-sliding vocables of Aldarch the Third's Janjuladoola. He could not even guess what was going to happen next. But obviously something was going to happen, and Guest feared that -Guest wished he was elsewhere.

While Guest was still wishing, a girl-slave with symbolic chains dangling from her wrists stepped forward to remove the brazier. Once she had exited with her burden, an executioner approached, bearing a sledgehammer. He looked at the Mutilator.

"Proceed," said Aldarch Three.

The executioner tapped the coffin with his sledgehammer. The ceramic coffin cracked. The executioner hit it again. The coffin shattered. Down came the coffin in a bursting of fragments, a leapage of filth. In the middle of this downburst flopped the prisoner, who hit the marble, clawed at it spasmodically, then lay still in the accumulated slime of forty days of his own filth. Guest flinched, and slashed at his own face with the flat of his hand, abolishing a splash of filth which had landed there.