Hugh Cook - The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

Then the wizard of Itch pointed at Sken-Pitilkin's map. He pointed at the south-west of Tameran. He pointed at a tongue of land which sprinted out into the sea, terminating in a bulb of rock. He pointed at the bulb itself "There," said Ontario Nol, softly. "The bubble will not seek us there."

"There!?" said Sken-Pitilkin, in patent alarm.

While thoughts of venturing to Gendormargensis had made Sken-Pitilkin uneasy, this new suggestion made him positively alarmed.

"What place is that?" said Guest Gulkan. Sken-Pitilkin looked around, then said, albeit with some reluctance:

"We will not speak its name. Not here. But Nol is right. It is a good destination."

So Sken-Pitilkin flew his stickbird to Lex Chalis, a place of caverns where the rock is fluid and warm beneath the touch. It is a place of ghosts, a place of hallucinatory dreams and waking delusions. Do you wish to hear more? Then you must seek elsewhere for the telling. For Lex Chalis awakens things which the mind has deliberately put to sleep. It stirs the old things to life, cracks the inner coffers of the psyche, incarnates the dead.

Worse, in the caverns of Lex Chalis, the thoughts of one person's mind create half-perceived shadows in the minds of that person's companions. Assume, then, that you are in Lex Chalis in the company of Guest Gulkan, he who was once mauled by the Great Mink in an arena in Chi'ash-lan. Assume that Guest is asleep, and dreaming, and that you are dreaming too. Can you imagine what your condition will be when you finally wake, heart pounding, eyes bulging, skin drenched with sweat?

In the great days of the Empire of Wizards, when all of Argan was ruled by the eight orders of the Confederation, then many wizards ventured north to Tameran, and dared their way to the caverns of Lex Chalis. But it is not recorded that any of them had any profit from such venture. For the place is beyond the understanding of wizardry; and, as far as history can tell, there has never been anything made of flesh or blood or stone or steel which has been able to grapple with its mysteries.

During the season in which the travelers sojourned in Lex Chalis, Ontario Nol was once moved to theorize on the nature of the caverns of Lex Chalis. He claimed those caverns to be the work of a theoretical breed of Experimenters.

"It is said by those who claim to know," said Ontario Nol,

"that Probability is a single sheet of fabric pockmarked here and there by those patches of embroidery which mortal creatures know as the Realms of Time.

"It is further said that Probability is the great Enablement which permits the existence of the gods. Enabled by Probability, a god such as the Horn may master a small patch of this great fabric to its own purposes, just as a woman may master a small patch of a great bedsheet for her own embroidery."

Listening to this theorizing, Guest Gulkan thought it disgraceful that a Yarglat male as mighty as Ontario Nol should use reference to a woman's work to describe things so weighty.

Nevertheless, he followed the metaphor.

"If the gods, then, are those who embroider worlds on the raw fabric of Probability," said Ontario Nol, "then the Experimenters are those who move from patch to patch to rearrange each piece of embroidery to something closer to their own liking."

At which, Guest Gulkan began to lose track of Nol's explanation, finding the metaphor to be growing obscure. So Nol switched metaphors.

"Supposing we talk of the soil as a great Enablement which permits life," said Nol. "Suppose we then think of a god as an entity which can create a seed – an entity which can create life.

This is a mighty act, and it takes a god to do it. But what then do we call the farmer who takes the seed and breeds it down through the generations to a plant reshaped to his own requirements. Is the farmer a god? No. He is but a technician, albeit great in his field. And those who claim to know of such things construe their theoretical Experimenters as just such a breed of technicians."Guest Gulkan had difficulty following this metaphor, too, since it was an agricultural metaphor, and the Yarglat have precious little understanding of farming. So Ontario Nol was put to the labor of explaining that farmers can selectively breed plants to reshape them to their own requirements – a datum which was new to Guest, and one which he was inclined to regard with great scepticism.

Yet that was the best metaphor which Ontario Nol could provide, so, whether Guest could understand it or not, he had to put up with it.

"We have, then," said Ontario Nol, "three levels of Power.

There is the original Enablement, which some call Probability.

Then there are the gods, the creators-of-life, those who shape spheres of existence from raw Probability. Then there are the technicians, those who do but remold that which the gods have created."

"What of demons?" said Guest. "And ghosts?"

"They are the creatures of the sub-categories," said Nol, using one of those airy generalizations which a teacher employs when he is in no mood to plunge into complexities. "Let us not bother with sub-categories. Let us stick to our main division, which is the Enablement, the gods and the technicians. The Experimenters, then, are a theoretical race of technicians much given to wholesale remolding."

"And," said Guest, "you claim these caverns of Lex Chalis to be a part of their work?"

"I claim nothing," said Ontario Nol. "I merely retail the theories of others. Those others claim the very configuration of our world to be the result of a wholesale remolding undertaken by the Experimenters. It is said by these theorists that Lex Chalis is a communicator of sorts – an artefact which the Experimenters once used to communicate from world to world."

So said Ontario Nol.

But it must be clearly stated that there are well over a thousand different theories which purport to explain Lex Chalis, and that all of these theories are in conflict. The only thing which all theories are agreed upon is that Lex Chalis is a singularly unpleasant place in which to take up residence.

In that singularly unpleasant place, Sken-Pitilkin and his companions passed the winter season, grubbing a living from the seashore and studying the irregular verbs. Yes! Let it be stated as a fact! Before that season had run its course, Guest Gulkan had grown so desperately bored by the tedium of his refugee existence that he had permitted Sken-Pitilkin to tutor him in one or two of the milder of the foreign irregular verbs.

So passed a season of hardship, in which the refugees often Shabble searching the continents for their shadows, interrogating the buttercups of X-zox Kalada and the humming birds in the southern jungles, bathing in the red dust of Dalar ken Halvar or rolling in the snows of Chi'ash-lan Then, in the spring, Sken-Pitilkin at last declared that he was ready to fly them to Drum.

"Will that be any improvement?" said Guest, who knew of Sken-Pitilkin's island only that it was rocky and infested by sea dragons.

"A great improvement," said Sken-Pitilkin. "For we will be able to sleep in peace, without alien intrusions vexing our nights."

"You mean, then," said Guest, "that your island has no ghosts."

"That is not all I meant, but it is part of it," said Sken-Pitilkin. "Yes, take it from me, there are no ghosts on Drum."

That was a lie, for Drum was haunted by a number of ghosts, and Sken-Pitilkin knew at least seven of them by name. But, since their visitations were infrequent, Sken-Pitilkin thought he could get away with this lie.

Then Sod declared that, ghosts or no ghosts, he was in no mood to fly to Drum, and thought it would be far better for them to make for Chi'ash-lan.

"Impossible," said Sken-Pitilkin flatly. "For once you have been in Chi'ash-lan for a day or less, the demon Ko will know of it. And once Ko knows of it, then so too will every other such demon, and Shabble may well be in alliance with these demons by now even if Shabble was not in alliance with them before."