Hugh Cook - The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

"Are you hurt?" said Shabble anxiously. Guest responded with groans, as if the Great Mink itself was in the process of tearing off his toes one by one.

"Are you really really hurt?" said Shabble. Guest fell to sand and thrashed in an agony which was nine- tenths simulated. All the while he watched Shabble covertly from the corner of his eye.

The response surprised even the Weaponmaster For, after a bare ten breaths and a heartbeat, Shabble lost interest in the Weaponmaster's prolonged suffering, and went to investigate the sea, disappearing from sight beneath the waters.

This stunned Guest, who did not quite follow Shabble's reasoning. Shabble saw that Guest appeared to be in grievous pain; and, knowing humans in such condition were no fun at all, Shabble had gone to look at the coral and play with the fishes. Shabble's earlier anxiety had not been feigned. But Guest had been wrong to assume that anxiety to be symptomatic of vast reserves of empathy.

Shabble had been designed and built as a toy, and so had the emotional resources appropriate to the nursery rather than those befitting grand opera.

While Guest did not quite realize how and why his tactics had failed, he did see that his operatic performance was getting him nowhere. So he gave up his groaning and sat on the sand clutching his arm – which still hurt like hell.

Then Guest waited.

He waited for Shabble to emerge from the waters.

But Shabble did not emerge. Guest was profoundly puzzled by this, for Shabble's behavior was contrary to human experience. A human, on arriving abruptly on a coral island in the company of a grievously wounded companion, does not proceed immediately to extended underwater tourism. But, again, Shabble's performance would not have been out of place in the nursery, for Shabble had been made as a toy for children, not as a replacement for a parent.

In the absence of any mature adult concern from Shabble – who surface briefly once or twice, but immediately splashed down under the water again – Guest at last got to his feet and sauntered over to the door. In the white coral sand – sand whiter than eggshell, whiter than bone – he saw only one single set of footprints. They were his own. Guest confronted the Door.

"Open!" said Guest, in his most commanding voice.

But the Door remained firmly closed.

With some difficulty – his arm was grievously sore, and hampered his movements – Guest climbed onto the plinth and examined the Door in detail. He was careful not to let any part of his person intersect the plane of the arch, since he had no wish to lose head or hand to a sudden reopening of the Door.

On a whim, Guest took the heavy mazadath from around his neck, and displayed it to the Door, and tried to command it again:

"Open!"

But, as he had expected, nothing happened. He slung the mazadath round his neck once again, feeling its heavy silver glissade across his sweat-slick skin. The use of the thing, it seemed, was to preserve his life in the realms of the World Beyond which lay beyond the Veils of Fire in the Cave of the Warp in the Shackle Mountains; and Guest, not for the first time, was intensely irritated that a thing which he had carried so far and for so many years should be possessed of such a specialized use – and was totally useless in his present circumstances.

The lancing sunlight blicked sharps of light from the scattering of sand on the marble of the plinth. On impulse, Guest Gulkan touched his lips to the outer metal of the arch, finding it strangely cool. He licked it. Tasted salt. The arch had been salted by the tropical sea.

As far as Guest could tell, the arch and the island alike showed no sign of prior use.

Or did it?

Toward one end of the island, a bare stone's throw distant, was the turtle-hump of a rowing boat, which Guest had not noticed at all in the first startlement of his shocked arrival and Shabble's subsequent attack.

Now, Guest jumped down to the sand and strode toward the rowing boat. He was conscious of the heat, which brought back memories of Untunchilamon and Injiltaprajura. But Injiltaprajura had been lush with sprinting water, alive with monkeys and tropical birds, aswarm with cockroaches and mosquitoes. This island, by comparison, was tiny. Bare as a picked bone. Guest reached the overturned rowing boat. A few streaks of blistered ochre paint had yet to be elementally stripped from the weathered gray of its planking. Guest lifted it, flipped it over, and revealed bare bones and a broken oar. Guest estimated the bones. Skull, vertebrae, ribs, pelvis, thigh bone and shank bone, carpals and teeth. A man had died here, and Guest was uncomfortably reminded of the possibility that he might die likewise. Guest stood in the sunblind quiet, taking stock. The shit- brown mud of the Old City was still smeared on his shins, though it was wet no longer, for it had dried and hardened swiftly in the heat. Guest stood stork-like on one leg, brushed at the mud, and peeled away a leaf. It was a mottled brown and yellow, its substance frayed, its skeleton showing through its flesh.

"Grief of a bitch," muttered Guest.

Then kicked away the bones, used the broken oar to prop up the rowing boat – there was nothing else by way of shade on the island – and took shelter. He still had the yellow bottle, and still had the ring which commanded it, so it would have been the easiest thing in the world to take refuge within. But Guest was waiting for Shabble.

After an unconscionable delay, Shabble grew bored with exploring the island's coral reef, and came to see how the Weaponmaster was faring.

"How are you?" said Shabble.

"What would you care?" said Guest.

It was not at all what he had planned to say, but the words came out anyway. His burnt arm felt like a continuous branding operation was in progress, and Guest was hard-put to ignore the pain. It brought back uncomfortable memories which he had done his best to rigorously suppress – starting with the spiking of his foot in the Battle of Babaroth and working through to some of the more life-threatening of the beatings he had suffered at the hands of the soldiers of the Mutilator.

"I'm your friend," said Shabble. "Of course I care."

"My friend!" said Guest.

"Why, of course," said Shabble. "I came to Alozay in friendship, didn't I?"

"You could have fooled me!" said Guest, thinking the bubble quite mad in its delinquency.

But, as Shabble's story began to emerge in full detail, Guest slowly started to understand.

Shabble and Guest had first met on Untunchilamon, during the Weaponmaster's wild adventures on that island. Guest's days on Untunchilamon had been so confused, so hectic, so full of turmoil, that he these days found it hard to connect their scattered fragments in any coherent fashion. To the Weaponmaster, Shabble had been just one more of the many spectacles of that island, something to rank alongside the Crab, the wealth fountains, the analytical engine, the therapist Schoptomov, the bullman Log Jaris, the flying claws, the demon Binchinminfin, and the pink- eyed albino who had been such a mighty sorcerer.

Yet Shabble, it seemed, still remembered in detail every moment of that long-ago encounter, and thought that the deeds in which they had been involved (they had, for example, raided the Pink Palace of Injiltaprajura together, seeking to put an end to the transitory rule of the demon Binchinminfin) made them comrades in arms.

Later, Guest and Shabble had been incarcerated in the yellow bottle during their transit from Drum to Drangsturm. On that journey, Guest had spent a great many days in exhaustive conversation with Shabble. Guest had simply been passing the time, but Shabble had been doing something entirely different. Shabble, it transpired, had been nourishing the development of a beautiful friendship.