Hugh Cook - The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

"For after having been once betrayed and imprisoned, he cannot bring himself to trust the Banks. He blames the Partnership Banks as a whole for Sod's delinquencies, and will assist us against them."

"What are we planning?" said Guest. "War?"

"We are seeking leverage," said Sken-Pitilkin. "And once we have it, we will see how much of the Circle we can win. We already rule the Door at Alozay, and Plandruk Qinplaqus is our ally here in Dalar ken Halvar. If we could but win Chi'ash-lan, then we would be well placed to coerce the Partnership Banks as a whole to obedience to our will."

This was a new Sken-Pitilkin, a Sken-Pitilkin whom Guest Gulkan had not previously seen. The Sken-Pitilkin who had been the companion of Guest's childhood had been a broken-down exponent of the irregular verbs, a ragged refugee scraping his living in exile, an irascible master of the classroom.

But Sken-Pitilkin's true history was far greater and grander than anything Guest had guessed at. Sken-Pitilkin had known power; and fame; and glory; and mightiness; and mastery; and the appetite for such things had been rekindled during the long manoeuverings of the past four years.

While Guest had been concerning himself with the exercise of his limbs, the eating of his meals and the rigors of his marital bed, Sken-Pitilkin had been exercising himself mightily in politics, embroiling himself in the affairs of the Witchlord Onosh and the Partnership Banks, acting as translator, as advisor, as diplomat, as interrogator, and as a professional practitioner of international law.

So it was that, for four long years, as Guest had turned inward in the manner of the invalid, his world shrinking till it took account of little outside his own skin, Sken-Pitilkin's world had been enlarging to a point where its complexity could not be compressed into anything less than a volume of ten thousand pages or more.

(Oh, Time! Strength! Cash! Patience!)

So Guest was uncommonly sluggish in responding to Sken-Pitilkin's enraptured enthusiasm for the embroilments of a quest and its consequences. Sken-Pitilkin perceived this sluggishness, but, presuming it would be transitory, he said:

"We were talking of the x-x-zix. The subject of our quest.

Have you by chance heard of this device?"

Then Guest Gulkan thought, and by a miracle of memory he recalled an early mention of the thing. (In truth, Sken-Pitilkin must have spoken of the x-x-zix a thousand times in Guest Gulkan's youth, but the Yarglat barbarian was such a poor scholar that it was a very miracle that he remembered so much as a single of these mentions).

"The Untunchilamons!" said Guest. "That was it! The Untunchilamons! When you were young, you quested for the x-x-zix.

You quested on all twenty-six of the Untunchilamon, and you – "

"There is but one Untunchilamon," said Sken-Pitilkin.

"No," said Guest. "There are twenty-six. I remember that distinctly. If you told me that once you told it to me a hundred times."

"No, no," said Sken-Pitilkin, who had long been out of the habit of tutoring young Guest, and so had started to forget how difficult it was. "It was you who told me the number twenty-six, which you got from confusing Untunchilamon with the islands of

Rovac. There is but one Untunchilamon, and I can state it as a certainty since I have been there."

"In your youth."

"Yes, in my youth."

"Questing," said Guest Gulkan.

"Verily," said Sken-Pitilkin.

"And now," said Guest Gulkan, "as you launch yourself upon the years of your senility, you wish to take up that quest again."

"Of senility I know not," said Sken-Pitilkin. "But my resolve is certain, and certainly a quest is a part of it."

Then Sken-Pitilkin explained the nature of the x-x-zix, which was a device capable of controlling the Breathings of the Cold West, which were the ancient weather machines which made that region so abominably cold.

"Our good friend Plandruk Qinplaqus desires the use of the xx-zix also," said Sken-Pitilkin, "and long has he sought it, for Dalar ken Halvar has Breathings of its own, these Breathings being those which make the climate hereabouts so infernally hot."

Then Sken-Pitilkin tutored Guest Gulkan further, explaining that use of the x-x-zix would allow the climates of both Dalar ken Halvar and Chi'ash-lan to be moderated to something close enough to the sensible.

Therefore Sken-Pitilkin proposed that Guest Gulkan join him in questing to Untunchilamon in alliance with the wizard Zozimus, then return with that treasure to Dalar ken Halvar. There the wizard Plandruk Qinplaqus, he who was otherwise known as Ulix of the Drum, would make use of the x-x-zix to remedy the climate of his own city.

"And then," said Sken-Pitilkin, "he will help us bring the Circle of the Partnership Banks to heel."

"How?" said Guest.

"Why, it is obvious," said Sken-Pitilkin. "The Banks exist to make money, and a greening of the icelands of Chi'ash-lan would make more money than you could shake a stick at. If you have the strength of the x-x-zix in your hand and the wisdom of wizards to support you, then you can make yourself master of the Circle of the Partnership Banks. Or so I believe."

"It would help me also," said Guest, shaking off his sluggishness with a rapidity which was consequent upon his upbringing in the household of a ruling warlord, "if I could make myself a wizard in my own right."

"Why, doubtless it would so help you," said Sken-Pitilkin.

"But to make you a wizard would take a lifetime."

"Not so," said Guest. "For there is in the city of Obooloo the Great God Jocasta, who has sworn to make me a wizard, powerful and immortal, if I do but liberate the thing from cruel imprisonment at the hands of one Anaconda Stogirov, priestess of the Temple of Blood."

"So you have told me you have been told," said Sken-Pitilkin,

"but it is a nonsense."

And it was a nonsense.

Of this Sken-Pitilkin was certain.

Nevertheless, the sagacious wizard of Skatzabratzumon was hard put to dissuade the Emperor in Exile from this folly, and so called for assistance from Paraban Senk, the Teacher of Control who ruled the Combat College in which Guest had been so long a patient.

"Is this going to be a short lecture or a long one?" said Guest, once he was settled with Sken-Pitilkin in front of one of the screens which Senk used to communicate with mere mortals such as wizards and warriors.

"That depends on you," said Paraban Senk, manifesting his chosen face upon the screen. "Tell me, Guest Gulkan, what on earth has persuaded you to this foolishness."

"Foolishness?" said Guest. "What foolishness?"

"Your intended quest to Obooloo," said the olive-skinned Teacher of Control. "That is what I refer to when I speak of foolishness. Explain yourself!"

By now, Guest had long been accustomed to treating this faceon-a-screen with the dignity due to a person-in-the-flesh, and so responded to this command with due gravity.

"When I was 14," said Guest, "My father went hunting bandits in the mountains near Gendormargensis."

This was ever the Yarglat way of telling a tale – to start way back in the distant past with the egg of its genesis. The Teacher of Control was lucky that the Yarglat barbarian had not started earlier still – with a detailed account of his family's genealogy, say, or with a founding reference to the Yarglat creation myths.

"I asked nothing about you at the age of 14," said Senk, who came from a culture which lacked all fireside patience, and thus restricted its storytelling to an account of proximate cause, crisis and consequence.

By brute interrogation, Paraban Senk extracted the meat of Guest Gulkan's story in record time. In a time of crisis, a time when Witchlord and Weaponmaster were fighting for their lives on Safrak, Guest Gulkan had parleyed with the Great God Jocasta through the mediumship of the demon Icaria Scaria Iva-Italis, had won a victory against his enemies thanks to the Great God's intervention, and so was bound to fulfill his pledge to the Great God.