Hugh Cook - The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

A little more wood-wrenching, and a gap large enough for escape had been wrenched in the door. The prisoners accordingly made their exit.

"Why, my son," said Lord Onosh. "You're naked below the knee, and most of the way above it!"

"It is the fashion," said Guest.

"Not if I have anything to do with it," said Lord Onosh. "Ho!

You! The key! You have it? No? Then – come here! Your clothes, man. Your clothes beneath the navel!"

Thus Guest gained borrowed clothes, though they were far too small for him, and he split several seams in the process of making himself decent.

"So," said Lord Onosh. "I have my son. Right. Now we can fight to the docks, and be gone."

"Be gone!" said Guest, in dismay.

"Yes," said Lord Onosh. "What else?"

"I thought us surely to fight for Alozay," said Guest.

"There are too many of them," said Lord Onosh. "They are too strong. The best we can hope for is to escape. If the boats which brought us to the island are still at the docks, we – "

But then the Witchlord broke off, hearing renewed shouting in the distance.

"Ho, men!" cried Lord Onosh. "War!"

And, nothing more needing saying, the Witchlord went pounding toward the outcry.

"A sword!" cried Guest. "A sword! A sword! My kingdom for a sword!"

As the young Weaponmaster at that stage possessed no kingdom, this advertisement attracted no swords to his possession. But someone thrust a small reaping sickle into his hands, and, seeing that this was all the armament he was likely to instantly procure, the Weaponmaster Guest gave chase to his father. Guest caught his father at the head of a stairway which led downward. Weaponmaster grabbed Witchlord.

"Father," said Guest.

"My son," said the Witchlord.

"These stairs," said Guest, "they go upwards. Upstairs there's a demon, it can make you a wizard, there's a Great God in the temple, the Temple of Blood, Obooloo, that's what the demon said, and the Great God's a prisoner."

Lord Onosh looked at his son in astonishment.

"What are you on about?" said Lord Onosh.

"My lord," said Sken-Pitilkin, alarmed to hear Guest babbling about demons and Great Gods. "You son was ill when he was last on Alozay. He had a fever, and hallucinations from the fever. He – "

"It's true!" said Guest.

Then discourse came to an end, for a squad of Alozay's resident Guardians came storming up the stairs. Those mercenary warriors were outnumbered by the Witchlord's men, but they attacked savagely regardless. All was briefly a whirl of battle, and when it was over -

"Guest!" said Lord Onosh, looking around. "Where are you?"

"The boy has gone upstairs," said Sken-Pitilkin.

"Then he is quite mad," said Lord Onosh.

And, as the Weaponmaster Guest Gulkan went upwards toward Safrak's Hall of Time, the Witchlord led his forces downwards – abandoning Guest to the uncertainties of whatever fate awaited him.

Grand Palace of Alozay: headquarters of the Safrak Bank. In multiple levels hollowed from the mainrock Pinnacle, it rises above the adjacent city of Molothair. Access to the Grand Palace is via the winch-baskets which allow one to be raised or lowered from or to the Palace Docks. If graced with the power of flight, one could also win the palace from the air, since several of its levels are fenestrated with windows adequate for the entry of a winged horse or similar.

There was blood on the stairs, and the blood had been tracked upward in a series of fragmented bootprints. Belatedly, Guest realized he was tracking through that blood himself, leaving a series of bare-toe footprints in his wake. He scraped his feet against the roughness of the living rock of the mainrock Pinnacle, then started upwards again.

Then stopped.

For he could hear breathing.

It was heavy breathing, the gasping of a hard-laboring athlete, the wrenching air-spasming of a mountaineer enduring high-altitude duress. A pregnant woman heavily into her labor might make such a sound – as might a man locked in a death-wrestle with a crocodile.

Till now, Guest had been carrying the weight of his sword's nakedness on his shoulder, for the weight of the weapon made it uncomfortable to carry at the challenge. But the ominous, indecipherable threat of that breathing jolted his heart to a stammering run. As the blood-spring impetus of fear shocked his heart to fresh endeavor, he handled his sword as adroitly as if it were no more than a dagger.

With that sword poised like a knife – held low, with the blade slanting upwards, ready to spear through latticed ribs to the sweat-thump heart – Guest took the darkened stairs at a barefooted sprint.

Red fire flashed on his blade as he jolted into a lantern's arc. He crashed to the step-stones, and his blood-red blade went flying to a clattering clang-fall. A moment later, the fallen Weaponmaster realized he must have slipped. On what? On nothing.

It was the sheer impetuosity of his upward assault which had slammed him downwards. Guest recovered himself, regained his weapon, then scuttled upwards, fleeing from the lamplight as a cockroach flees domestic flame. For light was peril.

He halted in darkness, panting, listening, taking stock. The heavy breathing was closer, now. Closer, and more labored yet. It brought back fragmented memories of battle, murder, ambush, war.

It was the breathing of -

Yes, Guest knew what that breathing signified.

Alone in the dark, he hesitated. The man who lay on the stairs above, the man who was surely laboring through his death, why, that man was no threat. But in the shadow of those labors an assassin might be waiting. And Guest, by slipping and falling, by racketing the night with the clatter of his sword, would have alerted any such assassin to his approach.

The Weaponmaster hesitated, half-minded to retreat to the mainrock's lower levels, and there to join his father in the attempt to fight through to the docks.

He listened.

From far below came the whimpering moth-faint echoes of distant discords – sounds of battle and barrat near-drowned by the gasping labors of the dying man who lay so close above. Those faint hoarse-clash clues from below told Guest that battle was being waged. He thought his father doomed to lose such a battle.

For, after all, this was the mainrock Pinnacle, the mighty stronghold of the Safrak Bank. It was packed with the Bank's mercenary Guardians, and the Bankers themselves would might ably enough when put to the challenge. The Witchlord's men were few, and so Guest doubted his father able to win his way to freedom, not even with the assistance of two wizards and a pair of witches.

But – above!

Thinking of what lay above, Guest overcame his hesitation and barefooted it up the stairs. A dozen steps took him into the light of the next oil lantern. Sprawled on the stone flags directly beneath that guttering source of semi-illumination lay a – a man?

No.

A woman.

A washerwoman.

Yes, it was one of the mighty washerwomen of the mainrock

Pinnacle, one of those whose muscular labors helped winch people up and down from the Palace Docks. And, as Guest had deduced from her breathing, she was sorely wounded.

She was dying.

It is hard, this business of battlefield death. The flesh sweats, and gasps, each breath a clutching. One might think the dying would yield. But they do not. They fight. The closer the death, the greater the battle. Will, identity, awareness – all is reduced to the groaning swoop of this ingasping. Air! Air!

The dying woman did not know where she was, or why. She was unaware of Guest Gulkan standing there. Did not hear him, did not see him, did not imagine him. Her world was the laboring of her dying, no more, no less.

And Guest, standing in the lamplight, momentarily forgot himself and his own predicament. Moved by pity for the woman – this unintended casualty, no enemy of him or his – he wished there was some way to help her. But help was not in his gift.