Hugh Cook: The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

"Your son is a dead man," said Zozimus bluntly. "There is not the skill in Gendormargensis to heal him."

"You are a wizard, are you not?" said Lord Onosh. "A worker of magic. A worker of miracles. Is the emperor to be denied a miracle on his request?"

"I am no god to undo what the gods have fated," said Zozimus.

"I have but some poor and wretched art of necromancy at my command. I have it at my power to have the corpses of this battlefield stumbling in their blood, their shambles but a parody of life. And that – and that is all."

"It cannot be all," said Lord Onosh.

"My lord," said Zozimus, "were wizardry an art of miracle, would I abandon wizardry for cookery? Not so. Yet such was my choice."

"Choice, choice," said Lord Onosh. "Look at me! What choice have I got? My son's life or my wizard's. He lives or dies, but if he dies then you die too."

"We must get him to Gendormargensis," said Guest, who was bent on seeing Morsh healed, and who associated healing with warm rooms and sickbeds.

"No!" said Zozimus sharply.

"You heard my father," said Guest, angered so much that he was almost ready to slaughter down the wizard on the spot. "His life or yours."

"Or both," said Zozimus. "I heard him. But we must not move the boy. To move him is to kill him."

"He can't stay here!" said Guest, looking around at the sprawling river, the blood-punctuated mud, the bleary sky, the horizon encumbered with mountainous hills, and the silent swordsmen now starting to shiver as their sweat cooled toward slime.

"Give him a chance," said Zozimus, speaking harshly from a throat still dry from battle. "Give Morsh a chance. If Morsh stays here then he does have a chance – albeit a slim one. But if you haul him back to Gendormargensis then he dies of a certainty, and I die with him."

"Then he stays," said Lord Onosh. "And I stay with him. To work, Zozimus! Get on with it!"

"A tent," said Zozimus. "I need a tent. Guest! Backtrack!

Along our track you'll find horses with tents. Morsh himself had one such last night, though it was not in his keeping this morning. Ride back and find such, for such is your brother's survival."

"I go," said Guest, bowing to Zozimus's imperative.

Thus Guest went, and Zozimus was much relieved to see him go, for there was no telling how much damage the boy might have done in his fear for his brother's life. Then Zozimus called for horseblankets; and firewood; and for dead horses to be heaped up as a temporary windbreak while shelter more permanent was sought.

When Guest had gone, Morsh Bataar said through the tears of his pain:

"The man's not as tough as he thought."

Here Morsh was speaking of himself. The Yarglat do not readily admit to pain, and only by thus referring to it in the third person could Morsh Bataar admit to the grief of his agony.

"We none of us are," said his father.

For the Witchlord Onosh had known pain and knew the truth of it: there is no thing worse.

Then:

"It hurts," said Morsh Bataar, in frank confession of his pain.

Then, unable to help himself, Morsh Bataar cried out, gasping with pain – gasping in the inarticulate agony of the flesh. Lord Onosh wiped the cold sweat from his son's forehead, and Pelagius Zozimus, unable to bear this sight for any longer, withdrew to the riverbank to think.

The gray-bearded Thodric Jarl went with him, hoping he would try to escape, for Jarl had a deep-felt hatred of wizards, and would welcome any excuse to murder him.

"The break is bad," said Zozimus, who usually shunned Jarl as if the man was death incarnate – as well he might prove if things took a turn for the worse.

"Very bad," said Jarl, with grim satisfaction.

"Still," said Zozimus, "men have lived through as much."

"No men that I know of," said Jarl.

"Then Morsh Bataar will be the first," said Zozimus, trying to pretend to a confidence which he did not actually feel.

Pelagius Zozimus was no healer, for he had never studied to be either bonesetter or pox doctor. Zozimus was a wizard of the order of Xluzu, a necromancer whose skills allowed him to animate the dead. This filthy and dispiriting work he had long ago abandoned in favor of cookery, for he disliked death. Equally, he disliked disease, injury, deformation, and every other debasement and degradation of the flesh.

Yet -

Zozimus had ever been a great scholar, and in the course of learning about death he had learnt much about life, for the study of death is necessarily the study of corpses and skeletons, which is an excellent way to learn about the living.

In the Castle of Ultimate Peace, a mighty fortress by the flame trench of Drangsturm, the order of Xluzu had long maintained great collection of skeletons, which included the bones of a sailor who had died of rabies after being bitten by his mother-in- law's dog. In youth, this sailor had broken his thighbone after falling from a mast, and had spent four months lying in his bunk while he recovered from the injury.

In the course of the sailor's cure, a huge bolus of bone had knitted together the fractured ends of his thighbone, which had been out of alignment by as much as the width of two fingers. The result had produced a very strange skeleton, but when healed the leg had been normal enough to facilitate the bestriding of decks and the kicking of dogs.

So Jarl's pessimism was not necessarily predictive.

If Morsh Bataar was lugged to Gendormargensis, he would doubtless die from the rigors of the journey, but if he could be kept just where he was, if he could be clothed and cleaned and warmed and fed, sheltered from the elements and -

"You know," said Jarl, "while you sit here, Morsh is dying."

"So you tell me," said Zozimus.

"He's dying of pain, you fool," said Jarl, unable to restrain himself any longer. "Pain is the breaking of men, and kills when wounds alone would not."

Jarl wanted to see Zozimus fail and die. But Jarl had ever liked Morsh Bataar for his steadiness and his leisured good humor, and did not want to see him die in a delirium of agony.

The relief of his pain would probably not save his life, but might at least ease his parting.

Zozimus took the hint.

"Opium!" said Zozimus, slapping his thigh as he named the best kind of pain relief he knew. Then: "Send to the city for Sken-Pitilkin!" said he, knowing his fellow wizard was never far away from a supply of the peace of the poppy. "Send for Sken-Pitilkin," said Zozimus, "and tell him to bring us his opium."

"Your word," said Jarl, "is my command."

And he turned to obey.

So Sken-Pitilkin was sent for, and brought as directed, arriving late in the afternoon of the following day after a ride so rigorous it had almost killed him. There was no problem in finding the campsite, for by now there were hundreds encamped by the river, with a steady steam of incoming stragglers filtering out of the hills. To feed this multitude, Lord Onosh had commandeered a string of barges which had been coming down the Yolantarath, deeply laden with some of the spoils of the autumn harvest in the east. Guest Gulkan himself greeted Sken-Pitilkin on his arrival, and led him to Pelagius Zozimus. No longer was Zozimus glorious, for his bright-shining armor had been mired by the splattering muck of the encampment, and the dervish wildness of his bloodshot eyes, combined with his unkempt condition, made him look three parts lunatic.

"What took you so long?" said Zozimus, when Sken-Pitilkin arrived.

For in all that time Zozimus had seldom strayed out of earshot from Morsh Bataar, and much which the sleepless wizard had heard while within earshot had been far from pleasant.

"What took me so long?" said Sken-Pitilkin. "Why, first I had to be born, and then – "

"That's nonsense enough," said Zozimus. "Have you brought the opium?"