Hugh Cook - The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

The guard who had been crushed was still groaning. As if annoyed by the noise he was making, the murkbeast swatted him with a tentacle. He screamed, and thrashed, and was slapped again.

Several times. Guest heard the crunch of breaking bones, a crunch like that of rock being quarried. Again, a tentacle slapped living flesh, making a sound like a canoe grounding itself on a coral reef.

And, thus slapped, the man screamed no more. Rather, he panted, his breath a matter of heaving gasps, a strenuous fighting. He was fighting for his life, and he was losing. Guest was reminded of a dying man he had once encountered on the stairs in the mainrock Pinnacle. That had been on a night of battle, the night on which Witchlord and Weaponmaster had wrested control of Alozay from Banker Sod. Guest had encountered a dying man, had paused to pity him, then – compelled by the necessities of war – had passed on. Ever since then, he had not once thought of that man. But now he remembered.

Half-thinking to help or comfort the man, Guest started from the muddy pit in which he was mired. But his father pulled him back.

"Wait," said the Witchlord. "Guards may come in search of their dead."

"We'd hear them," said Guest.

"Not if they were quiet," said his father. "Not while our friend out there is making such a racket."

So Guest, acknowledging the truth of this, subsided into the pit.

He waited.

At length, Lord Onosh grunted, the loudness of his grunt emphasizing the silence in the cavern – for the man who had so recently been dying was now dead.

"Time for us to be moving," said the Witchlord.

But by this time, Guest was in no mood to be moving. The wait had served to sap his courage, for the obvious and irrevocable truth of the green-glowering depths was that the Weaponmaster was way out of his depth. He was not equipped to wage war on a murkbeast – and that creature was the very first of the dangers encountered in those depths!

In this cold, wet, muddy place, there was nothing which was familiar. Guest had precious little to pad him against the cold, and was afforded no padding of habit or familiarity which could protect him against the full knowledge of the fragility of his own vulnerability. This was an alien place, a place which by no stretch of the imagination could be considered home, and it made him conscious of the pain, the death, the agony which was implicit in the configuration of his flesh and bones. Guest remembered squatting on a beach by night on the Chameleon's Tongue, on the shores of Argan, convinced that the Great Mink was on the loose in the night. He remembered comforting himself with his own familiar, personal, private smell. The gesture had served. But no such comfort would avail him here. For there was no denying that a monster waited in the dark, a murkbeast built for the rending of men.

"It will eat us," said Guest, trying to keep the fear from his voice.

"It has left one uneaten," said Lord Onosh, "therefore it has fed sufficiently. Come. Have you a knife?"

"Take this," said Guest, passing his father the weapon he had won from the Mutilator. "But be tender of the point."

"The edge will serve," said his father, starting to saw at the fastenings which bound his weapons to his swordbelt.

Then Lord Onosh passed the knife back to his son, who used it to liberate his own weapons. They were well-made and serviceable, though the possession of sword, knives, throwing stars, eye- gouging handscrews, darning needles and packets of pepper gave Guest no confidence in the face of the murkbeast. It did not look to be the kind of creature which would take much notice of weapons. So thinking, Guest discarded one of his knives, and used the buckle-down sheath thus freed as a repository for the blade which he had stolen from the Mutilator.

"You threw away a knife!" said his father, in tones of accusation.

"So I did," said Guest. "And it is a crime, yes, but I would do it again, and, what's more, I have done worst in the past and will do worse again in the future."Guest spoke with some heat, for fear was converting itself to anger. His fear was all of the murkbeast.

Though the murkbeast had been initially hidden in the mud, it had made no move to withdraw to that shelter. Its stalk was severely distended, suggesting that its glutting of itself had made such withdrawal a physical impossibility. Perhaps it would lie there for days, quiescent, digesting, its sprawled tentacles lying heedless in the muck.

Perhaps.

And then again…

"I'll go first," said Lord Onosh, when his son made no move to venture forward.

Then the Witchlord matched action to his words. Guest watched as his father stepped forward, moving carefully, keeping close to the walls of the cavern. The green light from above shone on the Witchlord's gouged and slanting forehead, lit his high Yarglat-bred cheekbones with a fever sheen, and emphasised the darkness of the shadows which pooled in the bigness of his ears. Moving thus, Lord Onosh looked more like a creature from myth than a man; and Guest felt fragile, incompetent and childish by comparison.

So the Witchlord ventured forward. He drew level with the murkbeast.

And -

And took another step.

And abruptly lurched, and fell.

"Father!" shrieked Guest.

The cry was torn from him, as if with hooks. The murkbeast had the Witchlord! Had him, had seized him!

And Guest, in shamed horror, found himself rooted to the spot, paralyzed by his own terror. He could not do the manly thing. He could not dare the forward step, even though his father was down, was -

Was -

Was getting up…

"Uh," said Lord Onosh, grunting.

Then he spat out mud.

Then he turned to Guest, and said: "There are little brutes in imitation of the big one. A little one grabbed me, but my hand was enough for its strangulation."Guest was still unable to speak, but grunted, hoping his grunt did not betray too much of his wet and shit-sliding terror.

"Come," said his father. "It's safe."

Obedient to this encouragement, Guest drew his sword and began to venture toward his father.

The mud in the cave was particularly sticky, or so it seemed to Guest. His boots bogged deep with every footstep, and it was a physical effort to pull each foot free from the morass.

"Slowly," said Lord Onosh, sensing or seeing Guest's distress. "Slowly does it. Slow and steady."

"Slow and steady," said Guest, his voice trembling involuntarily as he took up that refrain.

Even as he said it, a tentacle uncurled itself in lazy leisure and reached out in Guest's direction.

"Careful," said his father, thinking the tentacle was but feinting.

Then the heavy weight of the tentacle slammed itself down on Guest's shoulder, slapped home in a positively convivial manner, then abruptly whipped itself around his neck and started to tighten.

"Gah!" said Guest, with a choked cry barely a hair's-breadth from strangulation.

The tentacle was pulling on him. Not with any unduly monstrous force, but with a sufficiency of effort to shortly secure his death. Guest had been judged by the murkbeast, and condemned, and sentenced to death by hanging!

When he realized that, the Weaponmaster became icy calm. The worst had happened. The murkbeast had him.

So.

When a dog seizes upon your hand, you must not pull it away, for that is what the dog is expecting. Rather, you must plunge that hand fiercely down the dog's throat, and use the other hand to destroy the brute which has seized you.

So thinking, Guest ceased to resist. With a mighty lunge, he hurled himself at the murkbeast. Taken by surprise, its tentacle momentarily slackened. By rights, Guest should have used the slackening to attack the murkbeast. But – weakened by fear, and by long habit of irresolution – the Weaponmaster yielded to the entirely human impulse to free the slack of the tentacle from his neck.