Hugh Cook - The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

"Then we will find it," said Lord Onosh. "Sod! Have you hidden a star, a constellation or a cloudy galaxy in your blankets?"

"I have not," said Sod. "And it is only a madman who would talk such nonsense of stars. For the stars belong to the sky. Only a child would think to trap them down to earth, far less to snare them in a globe of glass."

"A globe of glass, is it!" said Lord Onosh.

"I presume that is what this Ulix-thing is trying to describe," said Sod stiffly. "For if his conceit is a globe of stars, then surely the globe must be of glass for those stars to be visible. But he is mad, plainly, so it may as likely be that he has a globe of wood in mind, or a globe of stone. You might ask him that question, if you wish to indulge him in his madness."

"It is a globe of glass," said Ulix of the Drum. "And," said he, pointing his pelican in the general direction of the Banker's heart, "Sod knows as much, and has doubtless fondled it into some secret privacy. Sken-Pitilkin! Have your prize student slit Sod's wrists! If he tells before he bleeds to death, why then, we'll bind his wounds and let him live. If not, why – there's plenty of other Bankers fit for interrogation."Sken-Pitilkin thought this a little harsh, but Guest had heard. Thinking it a most excellent suggestion, the Weaponmaster jumped down from the plinth unbidden.

"Enough!" said Sod, backing away from a knife-bearing Guest Gulkan. "I'll tell! It's Italis, Iva-Italis, I gave it to the demon. The globe, the stars, the demon's got it."

"Nonsense!" said Guest. "The demon's mine, sworn in alliance, my creature. It wants my help, it needs it. You're a liar, Sod!"

But Sod protested that he was no liar, and that the globe of stars in question truly had been given into the keeping of the demon Icaria Scaria Iva-Italis. So it was that that whole party went to interrogate the demon.

In truth, the demon of Safrak did have the star-globe in its possession. But did not want to give it up! For the demon was not yet sure of the worthiness of Guest Gulkan's oath to rescue the Great God Jocasta, and had hoped to keep the star-globe for a while, using possession of the thing to guide and control the Weaponmaster for a while.

But on seeing that Guest was of such a temper that he was currently neither guidable nor controllable, the demon at last admitted to the possession of the star-globe, which it disgorged with reluctance. Guest caught the globe as the demon spat it out like a well- sucked skull.

From the weight of it, the globe was stone rather than glass.

Heavy, heavy. Holding it, Guest felt his body become weightless.

His own flesh weighed nothing. color drained from the world. Sod, Sken-Pitilkin, Ulix, Zozimus, Lord Onosh, Levant – they were shadows, one and all. Sounds flattened, shallowed, then skipped into silence. Guest tried to drop the stone.

His fingers opened, but slowly, slowly. The world was utterly dark, now. But for the stone. Which hung in the air. Motionless.

Unsupported. A green sheen of cold underwater light hung around it in a halo. Then that light blinked out to nothingness, and Guest was left in darkness.

He tried to move, to speak, to cry out, to reach for help, to run. But he could not move. His body was a darkness in darkness, a shadow in shadow, a spiral falling through a waveform torus, a point bent on squaring a circle. He was split, fractionated, divided into geometries. His geometry was music, was gold upon silver, was amber sliding liquid upon the liquidity of pearls, was ice forging copper.

Copper.

Weaving wires of copper.

Which were splicing themselves to sand, and to shadows. The shadows were those of the claws of a crab.

The crab was huge, and it stood in a weavework of titanium, crunching the heads of dragons in its claws, while bats sang from golden bells, and a penguin transformed itself to a grampus before Guest Gulkan's very eyes.

Then the visionary chaos steadied, sharpened, hardened, gained weight, and painted itself with color. Guest found himself standing in his true flesh in an unfamiliar building which was fragrant with the smell of camphor. Somewhere in that building a woman was singing, her voice a pleasure of gold upon silk. Guest looked around. He was standing in a cool and airy chamber, a large room connected to similar rooms by arched doorways. The room was hung by tapestries worked in abstract motifs, but the hexagonal tiles underfoot were devoted to representational art, for each was devoted to the depiction of one of the body's internal organs. Guest recognized the heart, the liver, the kidney – and was that a pancreas? He thought it was.

As Guest was still trying to decipher out the tiles – which he saw with hallucinatory clarity – a man entered the room.

The man was short, and gray of skin. To Guest, that grayness suggested illness, but the man seemed in good form as he came striding toward the Weaponmaster. He did however have a slight limp. Despite the limp, and despite the platform shoes which he was wearing – presumably to amplify his height – he crossed the tiles nimbly enough, and as he did so he addressed the Weaponmaster in a foreign tongue.

When Guest did not respond, the stranger reached out sharply and knuckled Guest with the back of his hand. The blow stung.

Before Guest could react, the gray-skinned man whipped out a knife, a wickedly hooked device with a curious blob of bluish- green porcelain on the end of its blade. The lame little man jabbed at Guest with this blade, catching him a glancing blow with the porcelain blob.

A lacerating pain seared through Guest's chest, and he fell backwards, fell -

And fell -

Through darkness, now -

Fell backwards into light, and found himself falling still, and went down hard on the bones of his buttocks.

"Wah!" said Guest, as the stone globe popped from his fingers and fell heavily to the stone floor.

"What happened?" said his fatherGuest shook himself, looked around, and saw he was once more back in the familiar Hall of Time, back in the mainrock Pinnacle, back on the island of Alozay. But he was in pain still from the blow he had just been struck, and his nose

The Weaponmaster touched his nose gingerly, and found it was bleeding from the back-knuckle blow which he had been struck by the gray-skinned stranger, who was nowhere in sight. Bleeding? The blood was pouring out!

"Lean forward, boy," said Sken-Pitilkin, his bony fingers pinching hard at the bridge of Guest's wide-spreading nose. Guest, sorely shaken by his encounter with a world of visions, expected the sympathy and concern of his companions, but got not a jot of it.

"Come on," said Lord Onosh, recovering the globe of stars from the floor where it had fallen. "Let's go upstairs. Come on, Guest! It's only a nosebleed!"

As they climbed to the mainrock's highest room, Guest tried to simultaneously lean forward, to keep his nose pinched hard against bleeding, and to tell his story.

"A likely nonsense!" said his father, on hearing Guest's tale.

"But it happened," said Guest emphatically. "Why won't you believe me?"

"It's Eljuk who sees visions!" said Lord Onosh angrily.

"What?" said Guest.

He was startled, for here was a whole subject of which he was ignorant. His brother Eljuk, now apprenticed to the wizard Ontario Nol, had long been an object of Guest's jealousy – but the Weaponmaster had never till now received the slightest hint of Eljuk's dreams and visions, his night terrors and his waking apparitions.

"Eljuk, that's what!" said Lord Onosh. "He sees visions! But one such lunatic in the family is quite enough!"

"It wasn't a – a vision!" protested Guest. "I went somewhere!

I'm telling you! I did, really I did. There was this woman, she was singing, she must have been beautiful, I'd pay gold to hear that song twice over. And a man, this funny little man on these weird shoes, and he, he – he hit me!"