Hugh Cook - The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

The quokka hesitated. Its nose twitched nervously. Guest detected this petit betrayal and knew the thing to be a liar.

"We know what this is," said Guest.

"It's a feast," said the quokka.

"No it isn't," said Guest.

"It is, it is!" said the quokka, with insistent fervor.

"No," said Guest, stamping the word with definitive negativeness. "It's not a banquet. It's a therapist."

"A therapist?" said the quokka innocently. "What on earth is a therapist?"

"Come here," said Guest. "Come to my clutches, and I'll show you exactly what a therapist is!"

At that, the quokka ventured forward. In the most affecting manner imaginable, it ventured to place its very paw upon Guest Gulkan's mud-clad shin.

"Will you starve yourself for suspicion?" said the quokka.

"As I trust you, won't you trust me?"

The animal was so trusting, and so surpassingly cute, that it was enough to make the heart melt. Any civilized person would have trusted it immediately. But Guest was a barbarian, a Yarglat barbarian, and one who had lately been terrorized by a murkbeast, and so was in no mood to be merciful. He snatched at the quokka, seized it and shook it – his hand at its throat! – then squeezed it so hard that it squealed. Red blood stained its teeth.

At which, a voice of moiling thunder spoke, a voice underwritten with subsonic threat:

"Let it go!"Guest did not such thing, but turned to view the banqueting chamber. The banquet had entirely disappeared. In its place stood a towering conglomeration of slowly-evolving windmills, of spindling bones and twirling tapes of metal, of skeletal steel and huge beams around which spheres and cones went twining.

"Wah!" said Lord Onosh, taken aback. "What is it?"

"I am a Great God," said the dull-roar voice. "You have displeased me! Fall down on your knees and repent!"

Now when one is confronted by a Great God, and a Great God which is manifestly some ten thousand times larger than an elephant, then one's natural reaction is to do what it says. So Lord Onosh quite naturally went down on its knees.

But Guest Gulkan – who had had far more to do with gods and demons of all descriptions than had his father – gripped his father by his muddy black hair and wrenched him to his feet. Then Guest spat on the floor. Lord Onosh expected that the Great God would retaliate by obliterating them on the spot, but it did no such thing. Guest Gulkan then addressed the apparition in front of him.

"You are no god," said Guest. "You are but a wretched therapist, a torturing machine, and once I get out of here then all the world will know of you."

Then, as the therapist roared with anger, and thrashed at the Weaponmaster with every spike, prong, hook and tentacle at its disposal – finding him, however, some several paces beyond its grasp – Guest retreated, taking the quokka with him.

Once Guest and his father were safe in the main tunnel, Lord Onosh asked the obvious question.

"That thing," said Lord Onosh. "How did you know what it was?"

"Because," said Guest, "I met a great family of such things on the island of Untunchilamon. They breed there in their thousands, as do huge crabs some ten times the height of a man, and the flying bubbles which men call shabbles."

Then, having delivered himself of that geographical information, Guest Gulkan set about interrogating the quokka.

"Thing," said Guest, "I suspect that the therapist bred you."

To this, the quokka made no answer.

"In nature," said Guest, "there are no such things as talking animals. It follows that you speak through some resource of the therapist. Either you are an extension of the very therapist itself, or else it has somehow tutored your animal brain to enhance it to the point where speech is one of its capabilities."

Lord Onosh could not quite follow this argument. This is hardly surprising. For Lord Onosh was but poorly educated, whereas his son had long been tutored by Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin, most excellent and sagacious of all the wizards of Skatzabratzumon.

Furthermore, Guest Gulkan had resided for four years in the halls of Cap Foz Para Lash, where he had been introduced to many notions which were alien to his father – such as the idea that a machine of sufficient subtlety could insinuate its processes into the brain of an animal then animate that animal as a puppet.

"If you are but an extension of the therapist," said Guest, in a conversational tone of voice, "then doubtless your death will mean nothing, for you are but a fingernail."

"Quokka," said the quokka, getting that word out in defiance of Guest's choking pressure.

"I was speaking by way of analogy," said Guest. "You know the analogies? My good tutor Sken-Pitilkin was very big on the analogies, though I must say I never saw their use till today."

Ah!

Take note!

It is said that, as we go through life, we slowly accumulate wisdom. In Guest Gulkan's life there had so far been precious little sign of this process – till now! On this day of days, he had saved his own life by arguing by analogy, and had saved the life of his father too. Had Guest not been adroit with his analogies, then both Witchlord and Weaponmaster would surely have already been dangling upside down while a chortling therapist gouged out their eyes.

Let us then open the Book of Morals, and record in that Book the supremacy of the philosophies, for it was the application of philosophy had saved Guest Gulkan's life, saving him from a doom against which the strength of his sword would have availed him not (even presuming him to have had a sword, and of course he had none, having lost his steel to the murkbeast).

Doubtless, had Guest been philosopher sufficient, he could have resolved all his other difficulties with equal ease, sliding past the murkbeast without getting so much as the smallest splattering of mud upon his hide, discovering the cornucopia and then securing his exit from the Stench Caves.

But, since Guest's wisdom had yet to reach its full flowering, he had solve his remaining problems by using a non- philosophical mode of operation. This he did by further squeezing the quokka.

"Quokka," repeated the quokka.

"A quokka, are you?" said Guest. "Then I tell you this. You will very shortly be a dead quokka unless you bind yourself to my service. I once hung three men. In the village of Ink, that's where it was. I hung them high in a consequence of the damage they did to me and mine. They brought our lives into peril by selling us rotten boats. Just as I hung those men, so I will hang you, for I think you a menace as great, if not greater."

"Quokka," said the quokka.

"Are you pretending to be imbecile?" said Guest. "Well, if you are, then you will die as an imbecile. Father! A bootlace! I will hang this thing, and now!"

Then Lord Onosh consented to free one of his bootlaces, something not easily done, for the thing had tightened after getting wet, and the Witchlord broke two fingernails getting it free. But with the bootlace free, Guest Gulkan made a hangman's knot – he had learnt that art from Thodric Jarl – and placed the noose around the quokka's neck.

At which the animal broke down entirely, and began to cry.

Have you seen a rat cry? No? Then imagine it. It is the most lugubrious of sights. But it left Guest Gulkan entirely unmoved.

"Since you weep," said Guest, "then I presume you to be a creature in your own right, presumably one tutored beyond its natural temperament by injection of nanotechnological manipulators."

By this phrase "nanotechnological manipulators", Guest Gulkan meant "very small insect-like working-things made of steel". To say this, he did not use the Eparget of the Yarglat, for the Yarglat have little use for nanotechnology. Instead, Guest inserted into his conversation a fragment of alien nomenclature which he had absorbed in the halls of Cap Foz Para Lash in the city of Dalar ken Halvar.