Hugh Cook - The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

After all, as far as the Weaponmaster was concerned, he was being most magnanimously hospitable in victory. Apart from the symbolic imposition of golden chains, young Guest had done his father no harm, and thought himself a very great man to be letting his father enjoy the unhindered possession of such superfluous luxuries as two eyes and a nose. After all, what had Lord Onosh ever done for young Guest? Nothing. He had never offered him anything in the way of power, authority or prestige. It was the purple-birthmarked Eljuk who had been groomed to inherit the empire, whereas poor Guest had ever been told that he would inherit precisely nothing.

Yet surely he deserved to inherit!

As far as Guest was concerned, he was a mighty warrior who in the days of his earliest youth had repeatedly fought for his father against bandits, who had once risked his own life to save his brother Eljuk from the river, and who had brought great credit to the imperial family by defeating the Rovac warrior Thodric Jarl in fair combat in Enskandalon Square in Gendormargensis.

All this Guest had done, yet his father had repaid him with theft and exile. His father had denied him access to Yerzerdayla, the prize he had won through combat with Thodric Jarl, and in Guest Gulkan's eyes this denial constituted an act of positive theft. This wrong had been compounded by the fact that his father had meanly and unfairly exiled him from the imperial capital and all its pleasures, sending him into exile in far-off Safrak where he had been denied all of life's consolations excepting the company of the irregular verbs. Guest Gulkan had almost died on the journey to that island, for the boat which had taken him across the Swelaway Sea had been rotten, and had almost sunk. And on arrival – why, on the cruel and loveless island of Alozay, the exiled Guest had endured the horrors of a plague of influenza. There, too, he had been confronted by a demonic demon, the notorious Icaria Scaria Iva-Italis, Demon By Appointment to the Great God Jocasta. Then he had been forced to fight his way free from the island; and to escape across the Swelaway Sea in another death-trap of a boat; and then to risk a terrifying sky-hurtling journey across the mountains.

And then, in the mountains themselves, he had almost died on account of the effects of a sudden ascent to great altitude.

And it was all his father's fault!

To Guest, then, it was entirely right, logical and just that he should have thrown in his lot with the tax revolutionaries led by Sham Cham, for Guest had grievances to avenge, grievances which were well worth killing for. The theft of the flesh of the woman Yerzerdayla, for example! Not to mention such matters as the inheritance of the empire.

Consequently, Guest prided himself on the magnanimous greatness of heart which he showed by not killing his father, or torturing him either, or spitting in his face, or cutting off his hair, or grinding his nose into the mud, or doing any of those other things which the ingenious Rolf Thelemite suggested with such unrestrained enthusiasm.

So when Guest looked on his father, he thought:

"Here is the foolish old man who cheated me of my woman, who exiled me unfairly, who waged war against me rather than share his manure with Locontareth, and who is living proof of my own greatness of heart, for I have almost forgiven him, in proof of which I have greeted him with the full abundance of this mountain palace of mine, and have extended to him the use of all things which are good in this my mountain kingdom."

Thus Guest thought, for as far as he was concerned he had conquered the valley of Ul-donlok by the simple expedient of marching his small army into it; and, as the wizard Ontario Nol wisely offered Guest everything in the valley which was there for the taking, the valley was indeed a kingdom, at least for the practical purposes of the moment.

Thus Guest.

But the Witchlord Onosh inhabited a different world entirely – a situation which has plenty of precedent, for parents and children are often so remote from each other as to be, in effect, members of different tribes, or different races, or different species altogether. Hence there is often more love, trust and mutual understanding between a man and his dog than a man and his son.

As far as Lord Onosh was concerned, Guest Gulkan was a wild and witless boy who had disgraced himself and had brought the imperial family into disrepute by quarreling with a low-born foreign mercenary over the possession of a woman. After attempting the unjust seizure of the woman, the boy had then risked his life against the mercenary, and had almost got himself killed.

Lord Onosh knew full well that Thodric Jarl would have killed Guest in Enskandalon Square had Lord Onosh not intervened by persuading the wizard Sken-Pitilkin to use his magic to trick Jarl out of his balance. After saving his son, the Witchlord had thereafter demonstrated his concerned love for the boy by sending him to safety in the Safrak Islands, which were renowned as a zone of peace and tranquility.

Furthermore, Lord Onosh had deprived himself of the benefits of the cooking of Pelagius Zozimus, the greatest chef in the Collosnon Empire, for the Witchlord Onosh had sent the wizard-chef Zozimus to Safrak to provide extra security for his son. Meantime,

Lord Onosh had tried hard to put down the tax revolt based on Locontareth, to secure the empire which was surely destined to be Guest's inheritance.

So when Lord Onosh looked at Guest, he thought:

"Here is the wicked, witless, mindless, stubborn, stupid, ungrateful, scheming, treacherous boy whom I have tried for so long to preserve, protect and educate so that he might one day be fit to govern the empire which I have ever expected to fall inevitably to his possession. To protect him in battle, I have risked losing the loyalty of my greatest bodyguard; and I have deprived myself of the services of my greatest chef in order to help preserve and protect his worthless life, and for all this he has proved entirely ungrateful."

Thus the son was confused and the father bitter; and, in the extremity of his bitterness, Lord Onosh began to reconfigure the past, without realizing that he was doing so.

Lord Onosh had always seen that his own death would be followed by murder. Eljuk Zala Gulkan lacked the strength to hold an empire as his own. Therefore, on the Witchlord's death, Guest Gulkan must necessarily murder Eljuk, slaughtering down his brother then mastering the Collosnon Empire to his own will. This Lord Onosh had always seen.

But now, rather than attributing Eljuk's inevitable fate to Eljuk's deficiencies, Lord Onosh convinced himself that the certainty of Eljuk's destruction was a consequence of the demonic evil of the boy Guest.

So when Eljuk unexpectedly announced that he was going to stay in the mountains with the wizard Ontario Nol, Lord Onosh was convinced that Guest had terrorized poor Eljuk, and had threatened him with murder or worse.

"What has he said to you?" said Lord Onosh.

"He has said," said Eljuk, "that he will make me his apprentice."

"No," said Lord Onosh irritably. "Not the wizard. It's Guest, Guest I'm talking about. What has Guest said to you? About staying, I mean?"

"Why," said Eljuk, "he said that Nol wanted me, asked for me.

And he says, ah, it's a good idea, that's what he says."

"You mean he threatened you?"

"Threatened?" said Eljuk, looking puzzled. "Why should he threaten me?"

"Because he wants the empire."

"Well," said Eljuk, "if I'm going to be a wizard, then he can have it."

"But you can't be a wizard!" said Lord Onosh. "You're of the Yarglat, and no man of the Yarglat was ever a wizard! It's foreign stuff, stuff for the people of Toxteth and places like that."

Eljuk Zala, resisting the temptation to remind his father that Toxteth was not a place but a language, reminded him instead that Ontario Nol was of the Yarglat.