Hugh Cook - The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

He remembered other things, too.

His legs kept remembering the injuries they had suffered on that terrible day in Chi'ash-lan: the day of the Great Mink. Those memories were idle folly, for Guest's legs were new legs, grown for him in the minor mountain known as Cap Foz Para Lash. Still, he remembered what he remember. He could not deny it.

The procession of people trooping after the Great God steadily swelled. Guest realized they were skirting the slopes of Cap Ogo Botch, the minor mountain atop which stood the palace of Na Sashimoko. The imperial palace – for Dalar ken Halvar was the capital of the Empire of Greater Parengarenga. Who ruled now in Dalar ken Halvar? Thanks to his embroilment in the affairs of Untunchilamon and Obooloo, Guest's knowledge of current affairs was years out of date – a failing which could be potentially fatal.

As Guest was worrying about it, the Great God Jocasta slipped through the streets, making its way between the Grand Arena and Cap Uba. It gained Scuffling Road. The broad avenue was just as Guest remembered it – still lined for the most part with the impoverished bamboo buildings which typified Dalar ken Halvar. It was still unpaved, surfaced with the soft red dust of the Plain of Jars. Guest remembered often, often making his way through red dust rutted with cart tracks, going on crutches to the Yamoda River or to Lake Shalasheen to swim, back in those long-ago days when his new-growing legs had been too weak to sustain him.

In those years, his home base had been the underground stronghold within the minor mountain known as Cap Foz Para Lash, so after his swim he had always returned to that place. And Guest realized that – whether by accident or design – the Great God Jocasta was making a similar journey.

At the end of Scuffling Road was the kinema, the natural amphitheater outside the lockway. The lockway, with its twin doors of kaleidoscope, guarded the way into Cap Foz Para Lash. Guest had the uneasy suspicion that the Great God knew where it was going, and intended to link up with Paraban Senk, the formidable demon who ruled the depths Cap Foz Para Lash.

Was Senk then a friend of Jocasta?

Certainly the demons of Guest's acquaintance seemed to have the ability to talk to each other at a distance, silently communicating across oceans and continents. The demon Iva-Italis on Alozay maintained relationships with Lob in Obooloo and Ko in Chi'ash-lan. So – was Paraban Senk a member of this strange and long-enduring partnership?

By now, a very considerable procession was trailing after the Great God Jocasta. It was joined by a company of armed and armored men moving at a pace which had them gasping in the heat of the day. The leader of those men was a Frangoni giant who challenged the Weaponmaster by name:

"Guest Gulkan!"

"My lord," said Guest, speaking in the Galish.

Yubi Das Finger, who had been keeping pace with Guest, translated and elaborated that courtesy.

Meantime, Guest summed the stranger, who had muscles of a hugeness indicative of a fondness for pumping iron rather than water, who wore robes of flowing purple, and whose uncut hair was most curiously heaped on top of his head to further amplify his height. A Frangoni warrior. A tall, big, purple-skinned Frangoni warrior. An impressive figure, certainly, but to Guest they all looked alike, these Frangoni.

Then the Frangoni warrior said – and Yubi Das Finger translated, for Guest and the purple-skinned stranger had no language in common:

"What's going on here?"

"My lord," said Guest. "We're chasing a Great God."

This Yubi Das Finger translated, deadpan.

The Frangoni was more learned in theology than was Guest Gulkan, and so, like others before him, the purple-skinned warrior decided that whatever was lurching along under the iron orking pot was most definitely not a god. Possibly it was a turtle, or a large crab, or an injured Shabble, or a low-powered Sword, or a bad-tempered dwarf of prodigious strength. But a god? Never!

"Stop it!" said the Frangoni.

In response to his order, his men surrounded the orking pot, and braced their shields against it, and tried to sweat it to a halt in a scrum. While they sweated and strained, Guest used his Galish to ask a discrete question of Yubi Das Finger:

"Who is the – the big one?"

"The big one, as you so nicely put it," said Yubi Das Finger,

"why, that is Asodo Hatch. If memory serves, you were once married to his sister Joma."

Now that Hatch had been named, Guest felt foolish for not having recognized him, for they had met often enough in the past. Guest's failure to recognize the Frangoni was surely an index of his fatigue, his disorientation, and the pounding he had suffered during his long wanderings. But Guest was not troubled by this hint of mental deterioration. Rather, he was troubled to hear Yubi say that he had been "once married". For was he not married now?

"Joma?" said Guest. "Why, I have a wife, big, yes, tall and purple, but her name – "

"Penelope," said Das Finger. "That was the other name. You may have known here as that, but now we call her Joma, for she – but never mind that."

"What?" said Guest. "Never mind what? Why? And – and where is she?" Guest was sorely alarmed, for during his entire absence – which had involved him in a trip to Alozay, a preliminary raid on Obooloo, a journey across Moana, prolonged difficulties on Untunchilamon, imprisonment in Obooloo and the hazards of his venture into the Stench Caves – he had imagined Penelope to be faithfully waiting for his return. It had never occurred to him that the woman might have an independent existence, a life which could be separated from his own wants and desires. So he was shocked to hear Yubi use a form of words which suggested the possibility that his long-anticipated reunification with his purple-skinned true-heart might not proceed with automatic ease.

"There is no time for the first question," said Das Finger, who was unwilling to waste time on lecturing Guest in ethnology.

"And as for the second question, why, I suspect it one better answered by Asodo Hatch himself."

But the Frangoni warrior Asodo Hatch was too busy to be free for such questions, since he was playing referee, overseeing the duel between his soldiers and the runaway orking pot. The pot, which had once more grown red-hot as Jocasta filled it with flames of wrath, was driven into a bamboo house. The house caught fire, and Hatch's men were driven back, leaving the pot to blunder blindly in the flames.

Asodo Hatch had the house surrounded. His men tore down its pitiful bamboo fence, giving access to the back yard. Guest Gulkan was close to the fore, and almost accidentally buried himself in the yard's copious rubbish pit, which was mired with festering unpleasantness.

As the burning house collapsed, the god-driven orking pot emerged from it uncertainly. Somewhere a woman was screaming. The pot wobbled, then thrust its way toward the waiting soldiers. They made a wall of shields and stood ready to receive the pot.

But the rubbish pit lay between the soldiers and the pot.

The pot hovered over the pit -

Then halted.

It settled.

It was half-over and half-off the rubbish pit.

The Great God Jocasta promptly dropped down into the bottom of the pit and escaped upward through the uncovered portion of that pit.

Asodo Hatch gave a curt order, and a hail of spears assailed the Great God. Most missed, and sent murder hurtling into the crowd of over-eager spectators. Some clanged home, bouncing off the Great God in a demonstration of futility.

The Great God hung in the air, humming.

Asodo Hatch held his ground, and challenged the thing in all the languages he spoke. Guest Gulkan understood none of them, and had to tug at Yubi Das Finger's sleeve to get a translation. Had the Weaponmaster been more diligent in his linguistic studies, he would have known most of those languages – such as the Code Seven of the Nexus.