Hugh Cook - The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

It was then deep winter, and on most days the cold and blighting winds were sweeping the Swelaway Sea with the bitterness of sleet, yet the winter weather was fine and blue when the Witchlord Onosh and his company came to the hotspring waters of Spradley Rock, and those hotspring waters were unstinting in their welcome. Green were the pools of those waters, green fringed with iron-brown and yellow, and the smell of sulphur was heavy on the air as luxuriating steam uprose in clouds so plentiful that they suggested the island to be in the process of volcanic eruption.

The witches Zelafona and Bao Gahai were allowed a small and isolated pool of their own, while the men piled into the greater waters, where they washed away the blood of battles, the muck of the horseplains, fishscales and cockroaches, beetles and slugs.

Bulked huge within their heapings of wool, of furs, and of sundry rags, the men had looked like great bears, but once stripped down to their skins they proved painfully thin and meager.

Now the Yarglat do not usually take baths, considering the womb's nine-month bloodbath to be washing sufficient to last any man for a lifetime; and, furthermore, there is amongst the Yarglat a strenuous taboo which forbids one man to be seen naked by another. Yet when the Witchlord Onosh commanded universal bathing, he was not disobeyed; for the Yarglat had largely deserted his army, leaving him with a force comprised of the Rovac, of the Sharla, and of representatives of sundry other peoples.

Besides, the men of that company were so far from their former lives that they might as well have found themselves in a different world entirely, and so they adapted to new customs with the ease of those who have been killed and reincarnated.

Many strange things were revealed in those pools, such as scars, and boils, and ulcers, and Rolf Thelemite's third nipple, and the fact that Morsh Bataar had not one omphalos but two.

Revealed too were a great many tatoos, most of them being of uncompromising obscenity. But the most obscene and grotesque sight you ever did see in your life was Pelagius Zozimus, he of the withered neck and the spindly shanks, he with the skin clinging close to his ribs and a revolting little slug-pot of a beer belly bulging from his abdomen, he with his stick-thin arms from which the muscles stood out like knobbly tumors.

In the deepest and hottest of the pools of Spradley Rock, Guest Gulkan scrubbed his father's back with sand, while listening to the cackling laughter from the pool where the two witches soaked themselves. From somewhere came a shout of male outrage followed by the evil chuckle of the dwarf Glambrax – then by a riotous whooping pursuit, and then at length a very cold splash as expedient justice was administer to a delinquent mannikin.

Then arose a very strange sound, much like a drunken dog serenading in competition with a wildcat. This curious sound was that of Pelagius Zozimus in the act of singing. At least, Zozimus thought he was singing: though in that he was doubtlessly in a minority of one. This bravura performance by the slug-chef Zozimus can only be compared to that of the skavamareen; and if you know not what a skavamareen might be, then please note that it is best compared to a wizard of Xluzu in his musical passages.

An army of Yarglat barbarians would have lynched Zozimus immediately, but lesser peoples such as the Sharla and the Rovac are more tolerant. While Zozimus was thus caterwauling not one word of singe word of complaint came from anywhere amongst that whale-lazy multitude of simmering barbarians; and from this it may be known of a certainty that the Witchlord's army had entirely lost its fighting spirit.

Though he was of Yarglat birth, Guest Gulkan shared in this general tolerance, and so instead of rushing for his sword and decapitating the delinquent Zozimus, Guest kneaded the bones of his father's vertebrae with handfuls of sand, while the bloodflush heat soothed away the rigors of the long retreat from Locontareth.

Thus it was that the last rigors of the winter-weather retreat were eased away on Spradley Rock. On that island, a great langour came upon the Witchlord's warriors as they relaxed in the balm of the great heat, while clouds of steam ascended to those greater clouds of white which hung suspended in the clear and limitless blue of a clearwind winter's day.

Yet, as Guest soothed away the horrors of the past and prepared for the future, he could not suppress a certain unease about that future. For, under the terms which Safrak had imposed upon Lord Onosh, his company must surrender its weapons before taking itself and its treasure to the mainrock Pinnacle to indulge in the banquet which would precede the signing of a treaty and the handing over of that treasure; and Guest did not at all like the idea of being without his sword.

Still.

With bathing done, he got out from the water and dressed himself in the clean linen which Safrak had so kindly provided for the Witchlord and his men. How Safrak had come up with clothing for so many at such short notice was a mystery, but the feat had been managed.

As Guest and the other warriors rose from their bath, the sagacious wizard Sken-Pitilkin descended to the waters, hoping to have a private bath in the luxury of undisturbed peace. Only now did he realize that, by waiting, he had made a grievous error – for it would be quite some time before the fair island of Spradley recovered from this invasion. The pools which had formerly been clear and clean were now stewpots of murk topped with generous heapings of foaming scum, and layered at the bottom with a thick sediment of dead lice, parboiled fleas and other wildlife. Indeed, the water had turned the most putridly bilious mix of blue and green, for all the world as if a battalion of drunkards had taken turns at vomiting into it.

Nevertheless, Hostaja Torsen Sken-Pitilkin made the best of it, and washed his pallor (natural to one born in Galsh Ebrek, where the Yudonic Knights tend to be pale in the absence of sun, their native color being if anything the pink of their blood), and found himself flushed to an uncommon red by the heat of the water, for all the world as if he were a very Ebrell Islander in his breeding.

Then Sken-Pitilkin joined the others in putting on clean linen. He found the company changed to a truly imperial splendor.

Each of its members looking a good ten years younger now that the muck, filth and stale battle-sweat had at last been washed from their faces.

Then that great company took itself off to the island of Alozay in a fleet of boats, most of which had been provided by the Safrak Bank. When they reached that island, they ascended the mainrock Pinnacle by great winch-baskets of creaking wickerwork, which were hauled up from the docks by ropes.

Lord Onosh had found five mountaineers to survey the mainrock

Pinnacle, though he had found them with difficulty, for the sport of mountaineering had long been outlawed in the Collosnon Empire as a reckless abomination – and quite rightly so, for it is entirely unnatural, this business of crawling like a beetle up great mounds of rock, and kicking down boulders to bash in the skulls of one's fellows (which amusement is one of the principal attractions of mountain climbing as practiced by the Yarglat, for they climb in a competitive fashion, and count themselves unsatisfied if they finish their mountain without nine in ten of their number having met their deaths upon its slopes). The mountaineers pronounced the approach to the mainrock Pinnacle to be difficult in the extreme, for the heights overhung the docks, and there were no chimneys by means of which a climber could easily ascend to those heights.

Lord Onosh chose to be winched upwards in the company of his mountaineers, so their reports were delivered to him privily while he and his climbers were safe in the isolation of their creaking wickerwork.