Hugh Cook - The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

Then they were taken to one of the inner offices of the Morgrim Bank, where Guest Gulkan was brought before them.

"Know our price," said Banker Sod, speaking on behalf of the Partnership Banks. "We will let you have Guest if you will surrender to us the rule of Safrak."

"I cannot surrender Safrak," said Lord Onosh, "for I have already surrendered my empire to Khmar, hence have nowhere to go."

"You will be allowed to hold the island of Ema-Urk in fief," said Sod. "That will be your reward if you will only surrender."

"I was told on an earlier occasion that I would be allowed to hold the island of Im-skim-patorta in fief," said Lord Onosh.

"Solemn agreement to that affect was followed by your effort to murder me and mine."

"You call me murderer?" said Lord Sod. "You? When you smuggled weapons into the mainrock Pinnacle with murderous intent?"

"The weapons were solely for self-defense," said Lord Onosh.

"You must admit that not one blade was used against you until you had started to seize my men."

"But you intended murder," said Sod.

"Intent!" said Lord Onosh. "You speak for intent, do you?

Well, I speak for action!"

So the two men argued back and forth; and indeed argue was all they could do, for since each had betrayed the other once there was no firm basis on which they could come to an agreement.

But -

While Sod threatened and blustered, Guest Gulkan looked in such good health that Lord Onosh was hard put to credit any threat to his life. Surely – so thought the Witchlord – the Partnership Banks would have treated the Weaponmaster Guest harshly had they thought of him as anything other than a friend. Believing Guest to be in no serious danger, Lord Onosh decided to call the Bank's bluff.

"You cannot kill my young Weaponmaster," said the Witchlord Onosh to Banker Sod, "for if you kill the boy Guest then you will have no hostages left to barter with. I suggest that you hand him back and negotiate with me as equal to equal on terms of – well, friendship, if you could bring yourself to think of me as a friend."

"Kill him we will unless you come to your senses," said Banker Sod, "and we will give you an invitation to the killing."

Then the conference broke up, with the Witchlord Onosh returning to Alozay with Ontario Nol and Eljuk Zala, and with Guest being dragged away to the cell in which he was to languish until his death-day.

Very shortly, Lord Onosh was served with an invitation to that death-day, which he accepted, still thinking it a bluff.

As Guest Gulkan lay in the shadow-stink of a deathcell in Chi'ash-lan, he though himself forgotten and abandoned by the world. But in this he was deluded. For Guest Gulkan and the companions of his misfortune were a subject of intense discussion and speculation in places as far removed as Stokos and Tang.

"So he is to die in the arena," said Elch of Stokos, speaking of the young Guest Gulkan. "What does he think about that?"

"One doubts he does think," answered Ibstork. "He is after all a child of the Yarglat, and the Yarglat, if they have brains, have yet to demonstrate any of those behaviors which would prove it."

Elsewhere, in Quilth, Guest Gulkan was again the subject of discussion.

"His bowel motion was healthy," said Physician Floth of the Healer's Guild of Quilth.

He knew?

Of course he knew!

The most detailed bulletins of Guest Gulkan's health and conduct daily circulated through the realms of the Partnership Banks. Guest Gulkan was vitally important because he was the son of Lord Onosh, albeit a bastard son; and the Partnership Banks still thought that the Witchlord Onosh might intervene and concede the rule of Safrak in order to preserve his son's life.

But no such concession had been made when the day schedule for Guest Gulkan's death dawned.

On that day the Witchlord and a small party of observers and bodyguards came to Chi'ash-lan, and were escorted through its streets of snow to the arena of Chi'ash-lan.

It was then still summer in Safrak, so Lord Onosh was hard put to see how it could be winter in Chi'ash-lan. He asked of Sod the answer to this mystery, and was told that it was not winter in Chi'ash-lan but summer, but that the "Breathings" of the Cold West made it snow snow and ice ice even in the heartland of summer.

In the cold of that winter-frigid summer, Guest Gulkan sat in a cell, waiting to see what the lord of Safrak would do. Would the Witchlord Onosh surrender the rule of Alozay and liberate his much-beloved son? Or would he not?

Since the "not" was unthinkable, Guest Gulkan tended to concentrate on what he would do once he got back to Safrak.

He had been told that Thodric Jarl was gone. Good. That meant that Guest could make Yerzerdayla his forever. If he could find her.

Where was she, that woman of surpassing beauty? In Gendormargensis still – he presumed. Perhaps she could be bought from Khmar.

The young Weaponmaster focused on the image of Yerzerdayla, her breasts his bounty, her lips his pleasure, and her thighs -

His meditations came to an abrupt halt as the turnkey hammered on his cell door.

"Wake up, you in there!"Guest abrupted to his feet.

"Up against the wall!" said the turnkey, peering through the cell's spyhole. Guest flattened himself against the wall.

"Turn around!" yelled the turnkey. "Turn around! Turn and face the wall or I put a crossbow bolt through your backside!"

With some reluctance, Guest conceded his will to the voice.

Then the door was unlocked and thrown open, and muscle stormed forward and seized him.

"What's this, then?" said Guest, when he was out of the cell.

"What's happening? Where are we going?"

But nobody would answer him. Guest was beefed through the underground corridors by two guards, one a gigantic man whose shoulder overtopped Guest Gulkan's head, the other an iron-muscled dwarf with a grotesque acromegalic face. They brought him to the Door of Death and pushed him out into the snowlight. He fell, and went sprawling on the frozen dirt-curds of filthy snow which had hardened to ice.

Grazed and shaken, Guest Gulkan scrambled to his feet and looked around the arena of Chi'ash-lan, wincing at the brightpuzzle light of the sky. His enemy. Where was his enemy?

Nobody was waiting to fight. Instead the arena lay desolate under a low gray sky, scurfed with the sky's discards – heaps of snow and buckled ridges of ice. There must be an enemy here somewhere.

But where?

In the snow, of course! Guest Gulkan bootcrunched over frozen ice toward the most man-shaped of the snowdrifts and kicked at it. His boot uncovered a man, but the man was dead.

"To sword," said Guest, kicking the corpse.

The young Weaponmaster half-expected the corpse to rouse and resurrect, to haul itself up to the challenge and brute it out to the death. But the corpse remained in the snow, stolidly frozen.

This was the corpse of no gladiator but that of an alcoholic old man who had frozen to death after falling from the terraces.

Laughter from those terraces drew Guest Gulkan to survey his audience, which was paltry, for the terraces were almost empty.

The quantities of unswept snow which lay drifted on the stone ledges of the terraces indicated that they had been largely empty for days, if not for months; which is scarcely surprising, for the operation of a gladiatorial arena that even a place as rich as Chi'ash-lan can hardly hope to indulge in the more bloody forms of entertainment right through the year.

The Witchlord Onosh was up there, together with his entourage, but they were hidden behind the veils of the windows of a walled-in box, and Guest Gulkan could not see them, and was not aware of their presence.

"What's going on?" said Guest Gulkan, addressing his audience in the Galish, since that had been the language of his jailors.