Hugh Cook - The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

But there was more to come: "I have conferred with the Great God Jocasta," said Italis.

"That was quick!" said Guest.

"It is over a year since you stole the star-globe from the Morgrim Bank," said Italis. "We have had a full thirteen moons to consider the possibilities. Where would you come to if not to here? We have had a year to talk this matter out in full – and to discuss it with Shabble."

At that, Guest and Sken-Pitilkin exchanged glances. It is significant that Sken-Pitilkin should look to his former tutor rather than to his father. Despite the rapturous reception which Lord Onosh had given his long-lost son, the plain fact was that Guest had spent much more of his adult life in Sken-Pitilkin's company than he had in his father's house, and wizard and Weaponmaster knew each other to a nicety, whereas Guest had inevitably become something of a stranger to his father.

"What are you talking about?" said Lord Onosh, addressing his question to Italis. "What's this about Shabble?"Guest and Sken-Pitilkin had already realized what Italis was going to propose, and had acknowledged the realization to each other by no more than a wordless glance. But then, both Guest and Sken-Pitilkin had endured long and deep acquaintance with Shabble, who had been to Lord Onosh but a transitory phenomenon briefly encountered and thereafter unknown.

"We feel," said Italis, "and here by we I mean both the Great God Jocasta and the conference of demons which serves that god – we feel we need an immediate deity under which the Circle can be united."

"Shabble, you mean?" said Lord Onosh. "If that's how you feel, why do you come by the notion now? Now and not formerly?"

"Formerly," said Italis, "we did not have the pleasure of Shabble's company. Shabble has only kept us company for the last year or so. It is Shabble who now forms the focus of our plans.

Let me make it clear that your offer of dynastic support for the Great God Jocasta is not sufficient to tempt us to support you in a conquest of the Circle."

Translation: you are mortal, we are not. You will be gone in a hundred years, whereas we will be here in a thousand.

"In addition to your dynastic support," said Italis, "we feel we need an immediate deity. The peoples of the Circle are wedded to the superstitious worship of that which they can see, touch, hear and feel. They are not yet ready to bow down and worship Jocasta, who is distant, and wounded, and temporarily unavailable to worshippers. We need a god."

"The Yarglat have gods," said Lord Onosh. "There is the horse god, Noth. Would Noth suit hour purposes?"

"I have another god in mind," said Iva-Italis. "This god was born upon Untunchilamon."Guest knew what was coming. But, fearing his father was going to make a fool of himself by an undue display of ignorance, Guest intervened with a preemptive question.

"You're not talking about, uh, a certain Cockroach, are you?" said Guest.

"But what else?" said Italis. "What else would I be talking about? You know it, you know it all, even if your father does not."

By that response, Icaria Scaria Iva-Italis, demon of Safrak, showed the intimacy with which it knew Guest Gulkan. The thing had divined the reason for his slow-on-the-uptake question. Just as Guest and Sken-Pitilkin could confirm shared perceptions with no more than a glance, so too the demon Italis could as good as read Guest Gulkan's mind.

Intimacy was the key to this skill. Sken-Pitilkin, Italis, Guest Gulkan – they had shared so much of the recent years that they had no secrets from each other. Guest certainly had very few secrets from the demon Italis, for, while formerly incarcerated in the yellow bottle with Shabble, Guest had shared many intimacies with that ever-talkative bubble, and the demons of the Circle had had a full year and more extract the history of those intimacies from Shabble.

In a way, Guest Gulkan could not help but be gratified by the manner in which the demon Italis understood him. For Guest, the mainrock Pinnacle had become a place of stability, and his easy familiarity with the demon Italis was an index of that stability.

The demon had prevailed, unmoved, unchanging, while the rest of existence had shifted beyond recognition.

One of the terrors of human existence is that, as we get older, the world loses the solidity and stability which it possessed of during childhood, when the existing order seemed absolute. Indeed, to a wizard, the world seems at times a sheer phantasmagoria, in which empires shift, deform, and melt like fog in the sun, and in which the very gods themselves change the faces which they show to humanity as they endure their evolution.

While Guest had yet to suffer that terror which a wizard suffers when he first realizes that all of living creation, saving he alone, has forgotten the names and genesis of his parents, he had nevertheless seen so much change, evolve or perish that he had lost any confidence in the stability of the existing order.

In many ways, the demon Italis had become a foundation stone of Guest's existence; and, though he half-hated the thing, and feared it more than a fraction, he nevertheless felt an inevitable dependency upon it. For if the demon Italis were to cease to exist, then who but for Sken-Pitilkin would truly know, recognize and understand the Weaponmaster?

"The demon," said Lord Onosh, taking Guest by the shoulder.

"It says you know something. What is it you know?"

"You remember Shabble," said Guest.

"Of course," said Lord Onosh. "Of course I remember. Shabble, the Cockroach, that rabble of piratical filibusters – how could I forget?"

"Well," said Guest, "our good friend Iva-Italis has plans for Shabble, and for that Cockroach."

By this stage, Guest Gulkan, Sken-Pitilkin and the demon Italis understood exactly what was on the agenda, but to bring the Witchlord Onosh to the same state of understanding was the work of a full week.

Lord Onosh, like a diligent student of the higher peevishness, seemed perversely reluctant to understand the obvious; and Guest, his mind sharpened by matching wits with Crabs and inquisitors, with wizards and ethnologists, with Great Gods and demons, and with the very Lobos itself.

Despite the Witchlord's reluctance to concede that he understood, the facts were simple. After long millennia of imprisonment, the Great God Jocasta had at last been liberated from the Temple of Blood in Obooloo: and, even though the Great God was temporarily recuperating from battle-damage inside a mountain in Dalar ken Halvar, Jocasta would eventually be able to sally out to assume the rule of the world.

To prepare the way for the Great God, the demons of the Circle of the Partnership Banks were willing to help Guest Gulkan seize control of that Circle – if he would pledge to use it for the benefit of the Great God.

As Guest would probably be dead of old age by the time the Great God completed its recuperation, he was more or less prepared to assent to such a deal. But there was a hitch. The demons wished to enslave the populations of the cities of the Circle by imposing upon them a new god: the Holy Cockroach. In the name of the Cult of Cockroach, the peoples of the Circle would build the new technologies which the Great God Jocasta would (in the fullness of times) painlessly inherit.

At last Lord Onosh conceded his understanding, after which he debated the matter with Guest and Sken-Pitilkin.

It was Guest who was given the task of delivering their decision to the demon Italis.

"We thought about your proposition," said Guest, "and we have decided that your notion of inflicting this Cult of Cockroach upon the world is intolerable."

"But," said Italis, "you will surely need our help if you are to conquer the Circle. Mere possession of a single Door and a single star-globe is nothing in itself."