Hugh Cook - The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

Alish did not have the hope of eventually making an alliance with gigantic and invulnerable jade-green demons like Ko of Chi'ash-lan and Italis of Alozay.

So Guest Gulkan began to plan an expedition into Penvash on his own account, and to this end he renewed his acquaintance with Rolf Thelemite, and tried to meet and covertly interrogate all those who had been in Penvash when the star-globe was lost to the river. For Guest had already realized that the difficulties of finding a small star-globe in a large river could well be extreme; and that he could easily exhaust his life in futile search unless he could pin down the location of loss with some degree of exactitude.

In the end, Guest realized that research would not be sufficient in itself. To have any hope of success, he would have to take Rolf Thelemite or one of Thelemite's companions to Penvash, together with several hundred people equipped to rigorously search whatever stretch of river Thelemite indicated as the site of star-globe's loss.

To this end, Guest Gulkan began to sound out the temper of some of the other chieftains on the Greaters, concentrating in particular on the most lordly of the pirates.

When Guest was not thus engaged, he spent much of his time in a green bottle which had fallen to Elkor Alish's possession. In the secrecy of that bottle – the commanding ring of which was retained in Alish's possession – Guest spent most of his time writing a detailed account of the fortifications of Drangsturm, and of the Castle of Controlling Power in particular. Since Guest had studied those fortifications in detail, he was well-equipped for the task; and, since he still held a grudge against the Confederation, and against its ethnologists in particular, he had no hesitation in honorably discharging that duty.

Thus Guest was hard at work in the green bottle when that treasure of treasures was stolen from Elkor Alish by a sneak-thief named Togura Poulaan; and Guest was still helplessly imprisoned in the same bottle when that Poulaan carried it away from the Greater Teeth in a small boat which was shortly struck by storm.

Togura Poulaan: a would-be questing hero from Sung who became one of Sken-Pitilkin's proteges at a time when Sken-Pitilkin was living alone on Drum (Guest Gulkan having disappeared through a Door in the Old City of Penvash).

Now Guest Gulkan was a questing hero, a survivor of encounters with Crabs and with therapists, a mighty swordsman whose daring had defeated both the murkbeast and the crocodile.

Yet being such a person is no defense against ignominious disaster, for the world's greatest warlord may yet step by accident in a dogturd, or have a chamber pot emptied on his head by a careless chambermaid at work in the upper storeys of a building which overshadows the route of his promenade.

So it was that Guest, he who had confronted the dreaded Ethnologists in their lair yet had lived to tell the tale, he who had suborned the imperial strength of Plandruk Qinplaqus to his service, he who had dueled with the Great God Jocasta and had survived the treachery of the demon Italis, fell victim to the lowest and meanest specimen of scuttling cowardice to be found west of Galsh Ebrek and east of Chi'ash-lan.

The vile and villainous Togura Poulaan, a native of the porkeating nation of Sung, stole the bottle in which Guest was hard at work on his self-interrogation; and, by the time Poulaan had managed to carry the bottle home to his lair in Sung, he had succeeded in damaging the bottle so badly by long abuse that it ultimately broke, liberating Guest Gulkan from its interior.

That, at least, is the story as told by the Weaponmaster. It must be admitted that the above-mentioned Poulaan has given a different account of the matter, and claims that Guest destroyed the bottle from within by incontinently tampering with a subtle wizardly mechanism he found in its depths.

Be that as it may, the outcome was that Guest Gulkan was carried north of the Greaters to Sung, a barbarous province of the Ravlish Lands. In some quarters, it is alleged that he did not leave Sung before committing a number of murders. Indeed, Poulaan is said to have blamed the Weaponmaster for the death of his much- beloved brother Cromarty, who was put to death in the town of Keep in a singularly sanguinary manner.

Whatever the truth of the matter, it is certain that Guest, having been abstracted from the Greater Teeth by the villainous Poulaan, ended up in Sung, a dismal land of bogs and rockdumps in Ravlish East, where peasants with provincial mudpuddle minds dedicate themselves to the practice of obscure yet hideous abominations. The inhabitants of this depraved place eat offal (in addition to pork), rape sheep, commit vile abominations with toads, and abominate themselves also with liquid dung. Nor is this the limit of their delinquencies, for the people of Sung have disgraced themselves down through the generations by systematic inhospitality, the worst manifestation of which is that they frequently mistake wandering scholars for lepers and endeavor to stone them to death. They further display their debased iniquity by giving houseroom to the skavamareen, an instrument of aural obscenity which has long been outlawed in every civilized nation from Tang to Chi'ash-lan. It must also be said that a debasement equal to that of their morals has from time to time afflicted their coinage; and from this great injury has been suffered by innocent persons.

The capital of Sung is Keep, which has been mentioned above as the site of the alleged murder of Cromarty, and Keep is notable inasmuch as it is a town much undermined by gemrock tunnelling, to the point where its very existence has been for some time threatened. One has read that anciently great civilizations were destroyed by the very processes which produced their wealth; and, while Sung is neither great nor (properly speaking) an abode of civilization, one foresees that its destruction will ultimately befall it thanks to a similar dynamic.

However, despite the sundry derelictions of Keep, of Sung, and of the people of Sung, Guest Gulkan escaped from that barbarous province with skin and foreskin yet intact, and got himself down to the coast.

He then headed toward D'Waith.

D'Waith is the seaport at the easternmost end of the Ravlish Lands, and hence is the port which is handiest to Drum. One might therefore have presumed Guest Gulkan to be making for the island of Drum, intent on discovering whether the sagacious Sken-Pitilkin yet survived on that island; and intent, too, on recruiting Sken-Pitilkin's power, might, wisdom and all-round sagacity to his cause.

But – not a bit of it!

Though Guest Gulkan had reached the full years of his maturity, he had yet to acquire wisdom; and the proof of this is that he had no thought of seeking the help of his tutelary wizard, but planned instead to get transport from D'Waith to the Greaters, and there to present himself once again to Elkor Alish, and this time to make a full confession of the existence of the Circle of the Partnership Banks. Guest had been grievously shaken by his kidnapping. Having been swept to Sung by the villainous Togura Poulaan, he had been forced to acknowledge that the slow, elegant ballet of carefully choreographed politicking in which he had been engaged on the Greaters was fatuous. For Guest was not living in any great Age of Peace in which slow measures might yet win the day. Instead, he was living in an Age of Darkness, which favored the roughness of the fist and the sharpness of the swordblade.

So Guest, who had previously been working on intricate plans for the confidential recovery of the star-globe from the rivers of Penvash, planned to now abandon subtlety and secrecy altogether, and to confront Elkor Alish with the truth.