Hugh Cook: The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

With much labor, Guest tried to explain all this, but Brother Fern Feathers plainly thought him wildly deluded in entertaining any notion so improbable.

"So," said Fern Feathers, when Guest was finished, "our Yarglat general is prepared to put his trust in the unifying onslaught of religious war. I think this a very dangerous strategy. True, we must have an army, but why not seek alliance with the army which is on our very doorstep? In the Greaters, in the Lessers, in Estar, in Garabatoon, in Androlmarphos and in Stokos, a great alliance is forming, uniting for invasion. We have heard of this Morgan Hearst, of this Watashi, of the woman Ampadara and the child Monogail. Since they are arming for invasion, why not match our airpower to their swordpower?"

This was so patently logical that the proposal was met with a smattering of applause. But Guest flatly declared: "I do not trust them."

This was but the smallest fragment of a great and terrifying truth to which Guest did not dare give voice. There were two parts to this truth, one small, one great. The small and secret revelation was that Guest, in his own right, did not have power sufficient to match the potential treachery of the demon Italis and its kin. As for the great revelation -

What Guest did not, could not, would not say was that forces of change were being liberated in Dalar ken Halvar – forces so enormous that all powers of wizardry would be an irrelevance beside them. Guest had seen machines. He had seen two therapists in their might. He had met with a dorgi in its rampaging wrath. He had seen Shabble. And Shabble, though a mere toy to its makers, could fly, and spit fire, and sing, and calculate income tax, and imitate demons, and tell jokes, and do a dozen other things besides. Guest knew that a machine culture was on the rise in Dalar ken Halvar. In that city, Asodo Hatch had long been at work, supervising a machine which could command the x-x-zix which Guest had won from Untunchilamon. Guest knew that things would not stop there. The old order was passing, and the rule of wizards was but a passing quirk of the old order.

This Guest knew.

Unlike any wizard, Guest Gulkan had the advantage of having endured four years of convalescence in the tunnels of Cap Foz Para Lash, in the heart of Dalar ken Halvar, where he had enjoyed the company of Paraban Senk, a thing versed in the ways of an anciently powerful machine culture. Later, he had had long acquaintance of Shabble, sharing incarceration with Shabble in a yellow bottle which had been taken by a laborious route from Drum to Drangsturm. Adding stories of the past to his own experience, Guest believed he could see something of the future, though he saw through a glass darkly. Guest had praised Sken-Pitilkin, the master of the skies. But a machine culture would bring machines which could out-perform a wizard a thousand times over, so that Sken-Pitilkin's stickbird would seem but a ludicrous eccentricity beside the huge ships of the air which circumnavigated the planet, which flew between planets, and which crossed the gulfs between the very stars himself.

So thinking, Guest realized Sken-Pitilkin was watching him.

"There is much which Guest is leaving unsaid," said Sken Pitilkin. "In Dalar ken Halvar, they have – potentially – the power to unlock the greatest secrets of the past."

"You mean," ventured Brother Fern Feathers, "to subject us to a repeat performance of the wars of the Days of Wrath?"

"That is part of it," said Sken-Pitilkin, making no attempt to shy away from that possibility. "But what is the alternative?

Are we to bow to the Swarms and thus to condemn all unborn generations to a life of skulking terror? And even if we somehow defeat the Swarms by our own devices, what then? The world is a place comfortable enough for wizards, but is it paradise? Perhaps more power will simply see us better armed for our own destruction, but are we on that basis to deliberately choose to see ourselves defeated by the Swarms? With the Swarms upon our borders, I think it reasonable for us to make an alliance with Dalar ken Halvar, and use first its militant religion and later its more secret strengths to right the world to something closer to our hearts' desire."

"We can right the world by making an alliance with these people to the south of us," said Brother Fern Feathers. "With this

Rovac warrior Morgan Hearst and his cohorts."

"Yes," said Sken-Pitilkin. "We can do that, but in two or three generations a greater power will arise in Dalar ken Halvar and sweep away everything we have made."

So said Sken-Pitilkin.

There then followed a full three days of sometimes disorderly debate, during which Guest wished most heartily that he had had Shabble to aid him. The bubble was but a toy, but it had actually lived through the years of the Nexus. It had seen at first hand the wonders of a machine civilization, and it could be most persuasive in describing wonders of which Guest could give but faltering second-hand accounts.

However, at the end of three days of debate, it was formally agreed that Sken-Pitilkin and Guest Gulkan could take themselves off to Dalar ken Halvar to seek an alliance with Plandruk

Qinplaqus and the militant religion of Nu-chala-nuth – the purpose of this alliance being to reopen the Circle of the Doors of the Partnership Banks and wage a destructive war against the Swarms.

So, this having been decided, Sken-Pitilkin set forth for Dalar ken Halvar, with the Weaponmaster as his sole companion – and with the rest of the wizards more than half-convinced that these two would get themselves killed either during the journey or shortly after their arrival in Parengarenga.

The Swarms: diverse breeds of monsters which were confined to the south of Argan until the destruction of the flame trench Drangsturm. The Swarms are controlled by an entity known as the Skull of the Deep South. The unfortunate truth is that wizards once awakened the enmity of the Skull when they made an ill- advised and abortive attempt to enslave it; and, in the thousands of years since then, the Skull has harbored a deep-seated hatred of humankind.

At this juncture, the lowlands of Argan's western coast had fallen almost entirely to the occupation of the Swarms. Pockets of exception included Androlmarphos, Hok and Estar.

The seaport city of Androlmarphos, defended by tidal marshlands and by a webwork of rivers, as yet preserved its integrity, and had become home to many wizards. In the mountains of Hok, the former rulers of the Harvest Plains had taken refuge, together with some of their people. In the north of Argan, the province of Estar was guarded by mountains, and a refugee army had mounted a sturdy defense of those mountains, and had so far defeated the Swarms. The defense of Estar automatically protected the uplands of Penvash.

But, by and large, the entire western seaboard of Argan was dominated by the Swarms. On his previous flight to Dalar ken Halvar, that flight which he had made with the Weaponmaster to recover the yellow bottle from Dalar ken Halvar, Sken-Pitilkin had dared a transit due south from Drum, and had overflown the wreckage of Drangsturm, thus crossing Argan at its narrowest point. But he thought the Neversh to be too numerous by now for him to dare a repeat performance of this feat; and he was well aware that the conscious malignity of the Skull of the Deep South had to be added to the sheer numbers of the Neversh when one sought to calculate their danger.

In the center of the continent, the mountainous wastelands were as yet free from the monsters. But that high and desolate continental hinterland was the preserve of dragons. Here we are not talking about sea dragons, those idle and talkative creatures who inhabited Sken-Pitilkin's home island of Drum. No, we are talking about land dragons, those crude and hideous beasts of infinite malignity which have so haunted the imagination of humanity.