Hugh Cook: The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

Stars of cold green – as cold and green as jade under water. Chips of blue opal. Lambent red and sullen-sulphur purple.

Those stars – Lord Onosh knelt to a pool of dark water by night, knelt to the stars, knelt to the bright gold and the needlework of liquid silver, to the bloodline-brightness of scarlet and the dull vulcanism of cooling lava. The shadow of his head blotted out the stars as he knelt, and the shadow was faceless, eyeless, noseless, and in that moment Lord Onosh knew.

– I am going to die.

As the Witchlord Onosh knelt to the water by night he realized that he was going to die. He was going to die, and die not far from here. A death by water would take him, thrust him under, haul him down and suck him under. He was going to drown, quenched by water, smothered, suffocated, gulping slime and groping for the light. He was doomed, dead, a dead man with but a day or so to breathe.

Carefully, trying to silence his terror, or at least to control it, Lord Onosh took the leather glove from his right hand and dipped his hand to the water. The water was so cold that it burnt his flesh – as if the flesh lacked skin. The Witchlord cupped water in his hand, then brought it to his mouth. It was cold, so cold that he expected it to brightspark pain from those few teeth which remained to him. But there was no pain.

Lord Onosh held the water in his mouth to let it warm before he swallowed. Then swallow he did, and rose, looking at the men who sat faceless on their horses in the shadows of the stars.

"How is the Blood of the Earth?" said Morsh Bataar, speaking from the height of his horse.

The Blood of the Earth. The old and formal term for water. It spoke of a learning of the Yarglat legends which Lord Onosh had not known his son to possess.

"It is as it should be," said Lord Onosh. Then, testing his son, he said: "The blood is the blood, and the earth is a horse for our horse."

"The wind is its voice, and the wind is the measure of our riding," answered Morsh, catching the legend-line reference and responding in kind.

Then Lord Onosh said:

"As the horse is ours, so the blood is ours."

It was an invitation to drink.

Now to this there was a response that could be lifted from the legend-lines of the Yarglat mythos. A young man ardent in his ambition could answer thus: "My father may drink from the blood of the horse, but I will drink blood." That line, savage in its implications, is amongst the Yarglat one of the traditional challenges of youth to age. But Morsh Bataar said:

"My lord is a great provider, and in the hunger of our victory I will eat."

That also was traditional, but of course it was not a challenge – rather, it was an acknowledgment of fealty.

"Sa-so!" said Guest, who had no learning of legends with which to trifle. "My brother is a horse and my father likewise, but the bandits escape us while we gossip."

Though many had already been brought to collapse by the wrenching rigors of the hunt, the arrogant impatience of Guest's aggression spoke of slaughter-strength confidence with strength yet to spare.

Hearing that shallow arrogance, that impatient slaughterstrength, Lord Onosh knew.

He knew it for a fact.

– This is the man who will kill me. Guest Gulkan was going to drown him, was going to press him under the waters and hold him there until he died, and so he would never get back to Gendormargensis alive. This could not be denied.

Lord Onosh had the Gift of Seeing. Lord Onosh knew his death.

– So what does it feel like, this death?

In the face of his death, Lord Onosh found himself angry. He was not ready to die. He was 43, no older. The prime of life! The prime of power! And – and Eljuk! Lord Onosh bitterly resented the thought of Eljuk's death, knowing that his favored son must surely die once Guest had accomplished the Witchlord's murder.

Lord Onosh stood in the dark, tasting his own anger, his rage at his own mortality.

"Does my lord want his sketch pad?" said Guest Gulkan, managing to pack supreme arrogance and insult into a single sentence, while conveying his impatience besides.

"The artists will have work to do," said Lord Onosh, "when they have a corpse to work on."

Lord Onosh hoped that Guest Gulkan would remember those words in times thereafter, and would know that the Witchlord had gone to his death knowingly.

Having delivered himself of these words, Lord Onosh mounted up and led the hunt on at starlight pace, which is slow yet remorseless, and guarantees the capture of any quarry which lingers to sleep by night. Guest Gulkan followed on behind his father, and as they picked their way through the dark, Guest had the strangest sensation… he felt himself half-immersed in a river, his father's head heavy in his hands. Then Guest knew. He had had such visions in the past, and always they had been reliably predictive of the future. The Witchlord Onosh was doomed to die near here, to die in the Yolantarath, drowned in its waters. He was doomed. He was as good as dead.

– So how does it feel, this death? Guest asked himself that question as he followed along behind his father.

He felt… confused. He did not think that he wished his father dead. But even so. His father had denied him so much, had denied him so often. And just that very day, why, anger had brought the two to the point of murder. If Lord Onosh survived this hunt, then Guest was doomed to fight his proxy in Gendormargensis.

– So better that he die.

Thus thought Guest. And the thought was cold, hard, inescapable. Cold as crystal. Cold as a diamond plucked from the heart of a witch. Let Lord Onosh die. Then Eljuk would become emperor. And Eljuk… for some reason, when Guest thought of Eljuk he thought of butter.

So they went on through the night. Lord Onosh knew himself doomed to die by drowning, and knew his son Guest to be his murderer. Guest Gulkan did not yet know that he was to be the instrument of his father's death, but he knew of a certainty that his father would drown, would be swallowed by the Yolantarath, would become mud and worms, a bloated corpse lost in the farrow- furrow toils of the river's filth.

So the Witchlord Onosh and his son the Weaponmaster hunted bandits through the mountains, both possessed of visionary knowledge of an unavoidable death, and at last in daylight they and their company ran the bandits to ground by the banks of the Yolantarath River.

By this time, the mighty hunting party which had left Gendormargensis was strung out over the better part of fifty leagues of wilderness, for only the young and the reckless had been able to keep up with the emperor on this madcap chase.

So it was that the odds were even when the imperial party met the bandits by the riverside.

Then fear fell away from the Witchlord. So he was to die, was he? Well, then it would be over soon, and quickly. The worst thing was the waiting, and the waiting was over.

"Pelagius, my good man," said the Witchlord Onosh, seeing that his master chef had kept pace with the leaders of the hunting party. "It is a good day to die."

Pelagius laughed.

"It is a good day, my lord," said Pelagius. "And I do not think either of us dead before the end of it."

Then Pelagius Zozimus unhooded the falcon which was bound to his wrist, kissed the bird, then loosed it, and laughed again as it rose to the blinding brightness of the sun. Lord Onosh laughed likewise, then the pair spurred their horses and charged, for both of these warriors had been seized of a sudden by a mad intoxication, the exhilaration of an all-or-nothing gamble.

"Hold, Eljuk!" cried Morsh Bataar, as Eljuk Zala spurred his own horse, grimly bent on following his father.

But Eljuk Zala paid no heed, for he was determined to go wherever his father did. So Morsh slashed the rope which restrained the one surviving spare horse which trailed along behind him, then rode in pursuit.