Hugh Cook - The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

"In the mountains, my lord," said Thodric Jarl. "But these are not yet the mountains. These are only the hills."

"This is mountain enough to nearly defy the strength of a horse," said Lord Onosh. "If the heights above will deny also the sun, then I welcome them!"

Jarl thought this intemperate folly, but had given up arguing with his emperor. Instead, he was fully occupied by the labor of finding the true path to the high pass of Volvo Marp.

When Thodric Jarl had descended from the mountains to the hills in the days of spring, his mind had been initially clouded by the pain-killing drug fed to him by Ontario Nol. So Jarl's recollections of Volvo Marp were nothing but a foggy blur, and to find the way Jarl had to rely upon certain of the bargemen who had assisted Guest Gulkan in the great work of portage which had seen the Weaponmaster steal away the contents of his father's baggage train.

At last they entered into a ravaged valley with steeply canted sides, a valley of fractured stone and buckled erosion, of thornbush bastions and chikle-gikle streams still chill from the snows of their melt-water genesis.

"This valley, my lord," said Thodric Jarl to his emperor,

"leads us to the high pass of Volvo Marp."

"Valley!" said the Witchlord, eyeing the terrain dubiously.

"You call this a valley? The land is tilted like a stairway, and a steep stairway at that."

"As the mountains count land," said Jarl, "anything not a cliff is a valley."

"Then I think you still in error," said the Witchlord, surveying the steepness which lay ahead, "for I count this as a cliff!"

But regardless of how the Witchlord counted it, they had no choice but to climb it.

And as they climbed it grew cold; for on the heights the unyielding ice and snow persists the full year through. Worse, the steepness of the track was such that the greater number of the horses had to be abandoned. Thereafter, the Witchlord could not ride, but must necessarily walk.

And the nights!

Stripped to the lightness of their summer campaigning, the Witchlord's forces found the mountain nights near unendurable in their cold. True, they all knew the harshness of Tameran's winters, but they were always forewarned of those winters, and went into them heavily padded, in imitation of the bear.

Only Thodric Jarl's experience allowed them to survive the sudden weather-shock of the heights of Ibsen-Iktus. For Jarl had campaigned in the Cold West, and proved equal to the task of high- mountain survival. He counseled the mutual huddling of bodies at night; the improvisation of insulating pads from lightweight cloth stuffed with leaves; the making of fires; and the cunning practice of covering a half-burnt fire with a great heap of loose stones, and thereafter using those stones as a warm bed to assist with survival through the bitter frosts of night.

So the Witchlord and his Rovac general forced their army to the heights of Volvo Marp, the first of the great challenges of the mountains of Ibsen-Iktus.

And Guest Gulkan and his forces were waiting upon the heights of that pass – or seemed to be – in a position they had heavily fortified. Lord Onosh and Thodric Jarl could see banners flying from the fortifications; and men appearing at random; and the smoke of fires rising in the thin air. So the Witchlord and his Rovac-born general organized a slow-motion advance through the air of the heights, the air which was so bitterly thin and difficult to breathe; and Guest Gulkan sent an avalanche crashing down on them from above.

Down came the avalanche, a whale in its roiling, a dragon in its roar. Boulders bounced, some huge as houses, mulching the strength of the army.

A few survived.

Those few were the few who had been closest to Guest Gulkan's fortifications when the avalanche was launched. Naturally, those few were those who were greatest in courage, and most eager for battle – and these included the Rovac warrior Thodric Jarl and the Witchlord Onosh.

Jarl was unhurt, but for a slight wound inflicted by a splinter of ice which, sent shattering through the sky by the impact of a house-sized boulder, had driven through leather and chain mail to nick the Rovac warrior's back just beneath his left- sided shoulderbone. But a more serious blow had been delivered to his pride, for he had been defeated by Guest Gulkan, who was but a boy, albeit a boy protected and counseled by wizards.

Of course, the wizard Ontario Nol was as much to blame for Jarl's defeat as anyone, for it was Nol who had drugged Jarl into a state of stupefaction to keep him quiet on their earlier journey through the uplands of Ibsen-Iktus; and so it was that a clear- eyed Guest Gulkan had been able to scan the landscape for possibilities of ambush while Thodric Jarl had been concentrating on the difficult business of putting one foot in front of the other.

As for Lord Onosh, he was entirely unhurt, at least so far as flesh and bone was concerned, but he was so shattered in his wits that he could not speak for two days, and it was even longer before he had sufficient control of his hands to hold a cup in his hands. Because of course, to Lord Onosh, that avalanche had struck like the wrath of the gods themselves, precipitating grotesque outrages of death out of a clear sky.

An avalanche is such a terrible weapon of mass destruction that, in the past, the making of avalanches has often been explicitly outlawed in the treaties which civilized nations have made to regulate the conduct of their wars. But both Lord Onosh and his son Guest Gulkan were of the Yarglat, hence their actions owed nothing to civilized usage.

And so it was that the Weaponmaster smashed the Witchlord's army with the savagery of a landslide, and thus made himself the lord of the battlefield, and made prisoners out of both his father and his Rovac-born general.

Ul-donlok: valley in the mountains of Ibsen-Iktus. The upper part of this valley is ruled by Ontario Nol, a wizard of the order of Itch. Nearer the Swelaway Sea is the realm of King Igpatan, a monarch famous for his extensive collection of moths, and for the unpleasant nature of his frequent birthday celebrations.

So Lord Onosh was defeated at the high pass of Volvo Marp; and was led as a prisoner through the high and bitter valley of Yox; and was taken over Zomara Pass; and thus came in chains to the valley of Ul-donlok and the monastery of Qonsajara, home of the wizard Ontario Nol.

In chains?

Yes, for Guest had found a renegade goldsmith amongst his ranks, and had caused the man to make miniature chains of fine- link gold out of some jewelry taken from the dead; and, wearing these largely symbolic tokens of his defeat, the Witchlord Onosh came to the monastery of Qonsajara.

His son played tourist guide for the visit.

"This," said Guest, with a gesture in the direction of the vast decrepitude of the building's tiled facade, "was once consecrated to dorking, but those dedicated to that sport found the climate too cold for their nakedness."

Then Guest Gulkan gave the Witchlord a potted history of the many orgies of Qonsajara, showing off the place as if it was his own creation. Indeed, young Guest was greatly proud of the hugeness of this behemoth of a building, with its monumental frontage half a thousand paces in length, the whole of it adorned with obscenely ornate faded ceramic tiles dedicated to the liquidity of the hulakola, the heat of the yinx, the mystery of the omphalos, the snakings of limbs of passion and silk, the lividity of tongues, the yearning of muscles and the fondling of curves, the sensuality of all of which was amplified by the very harshness of the bleak and shattered upland landscape in which the building was set.

Just as the Witchlord Onosh took no pleasure in Guest Gulkan's building, so the Witchlord took no pleasure in being held captive, and this Guest found most strange.