'I'm not sure you have wit enough to hide these things from the search which will surely befall us,' said Guest. 'There are plenty of men in this fleet who know me to be possessed of these toys, and nine in ten of those men will surely be ready to betray my possession to the Mutilator's soldiers. So. We will be searched.'
'Then you must show the world you have already hidden the things,' said Levant, 'and hidden them where nobody can find them.'
'What are you talking about?' said Guest, who had ever been irritated by riddling.
In response, Thayer Levant smiled, and gestured at the sea.
'What are you on about?' said Guest.
'Come down below decks,' said Levant, 'and I'll tell you.'
So the Weaponmaster and his servant disappeared below decks.
When Guest Gulkan shortly thereafter manifested himself on deck, he was possessed of a purposeful air. After glancing at the oncoming fleet of ships which was loyal to the Mutilator, Guest Gulkan dived to the waters of the sea.
This sparked an uproar on the ship he had quit. For that ship had hove to as an act of submission, thus declaring its loyalty to the Mutilator. Hence Guest's rebellion was not to the taste of the ship's crew, which promptly launched a boat and pursued him.
But Guest Gulkan, after the long exercise which had marked his years of convalescence in Dalar ken Halvar, could swim with the fluency of a fish. Indeed, swimming was now as natural to him as the act of riding (an act which is ever far more natural to a Yarglat barbarian than the tedious business of walking). So Guest had gained the shores of Untunchilamon before he was caught.
Thus it was that Guest Gulkan was taken prisoner by a fleet of ships loyal to the Mutilator of Yestron, a fleet of ships which had been sent to return the rebellious island of Untunchilamon to the Izdimir Empire. In due course, Guest was interrogated; and confessed himself to be the Guest Gulkan who was notorious for having stolen the wishstone from Injiltaprajura's treasury during a riot; and confessed further that he had ditched this treasure in Untunchilamon's reef-waters when pursuit was close upon him.
As to what really might have happened to the wishstone and to the mazadath – why, since Guest was parted from Thayer Levant, and had no news of him, he had no way of telling whether that shifty master of devices had successfully concealed these treasures, and no way of telling whether Levant might ultimately make good his promise to deliver those things to Dalar ken Halvar.
Thus the Weaponmaster fell to the forces of the Izdimir Empire. He was returned to the city of Injiltaprajura, there to endure a weary confinement, a muchness of interrogation, several beatings and a wastefulness of impossible requests. To Guest's dismay, rumor had marked him as a wizard, and so he found himself asked to serve his new masters with his wizardry, and beaten anew in consequence of his failure to serve.
With the Mutilator's men at last convinced that Guest was no wizard, and convinced that he would be of no further use to them on the island of Untunchilamon, he was consigned to a ship that was traveling eastwards, and so was conveyed across the vastness of the oceans as a prisoner in the company of other prisoners.
Thus the Weaponmaster Guest Gulkan voyaged to the continent of Yestron as a prisoner.
Since his ship was no seagull's wing, it was a long time before Guest was landed at Bolfrigalaskaptiko, that city which lies upon the shores of the river Ka, just upstream from the great lagoon of Manamalargo. From there, he was taken inland to the mountainous region of Ang, where he arrived at last at Obooloo, capital city of the Izdimir Empire and home of Aldarch the Third.
Such were the rigors of this journey that Guest was suffering from both dengue fever and dysentery by the time he was brought into the notorious prison known as the Fulch, and his condition was such that it was a full six months before he was in a fit state to be presented to Aldarch the Third, the Mutilator of Yestron.
The day before Guest was due to be so presented, a kindly jailor who spoke a little Toxteth exercised his skills in that language to advise the Weaponmaster that it would be best advised to commit suicide rather than to endure such presentation. But Guest distrusted the jailor, and so rejected this perfectly sound advice, and so on the morrow was conveyed uphill to the knoll which sustained the Mutilator's palace, that building known as Ubazakura. Guest was checked through the gates of Ubazakura, and thus passed from the world of men, entering the lair of a demon-beast best fitted for a life in an otherworld hell.
But, as yet, the Weaponmaster was still far from despair.
For, as yet, the Weaponmaster Guest Gulkan had not met the Mutilator, and so was inclined to discount nine tenths of that which rumor had conveyed to his ears – whereas the truth of the matter was that Guest, rather than discounting rumor, should rightly have amplified it.
As he was soon to find out.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Aldarch the Third: the Mutilator of Yestron, he who by genius of terror won the vicious civil war known as Talonsklavara. His joy is to supervise the scourging of the Izdimir Empire, which he governs from the province of Ang in the heartland of the continent of Yestron. His capital city is Obooloo, where he resides in the palace known as Ubazakura, which affords him a splendid view over Lake Kak.
As Midsummer's Day approached, Guest Gulkan was dragged from the dismal depths of his imprisonment. The tangled matting of his long-grown hair was shaved to a hedgehog's prickling. He was bathed; and scrubbed; and deloused; and perfumed. His rags were burnt – sending up a thick and oily smoke to the heavens – and he was dressed in a loincloth and openweave sandals.
Then, on a hot day near the summer's uttermost height, the loincloth-clad Weaponmaster was escorted to the palace of Ubazakura. This monument to power stood upon Obooloo's heights, and was the home of Aldarch the Third, Mutilator of Yestron and ruler of most of it.
The Mutilator's reign was by then near the end of its Second Year of Peace. The year Peace 2 in the Izdimir Empire was the year Khmar 7 in the Collosnon Empire. Guest Gulkan's birthday had been and gone; he had already attained to the great and ancient age of 24; and shortly it would be Midsummer's Day again, and the Third Year of Peace would begin, and with that beginning the eighth year of the rule of the Emperor Khmar would likewise commence.
In the long darkness of his imprisonment, Guest Gulkan had steeled himself for his confrontation with Aldarch the Third. It is a mark of his upbringing that Guest had seen this confrontation to have been inevitable since the moment of his capture – for Guest was the son of an emperor, was he not? Hence he had never expected death through anonymous execution, but, rather, had braced himself for an edge-to-edge face-off with the very lord of the Izdimir Empire himself.
Now the long-expected showdown was at hand, and so Guest expected to be led into realms of patent doom, of screaming shadows and blood-reek dungeons. He expected to be confronted with assorted tableaux of gaping corpses and truncated torsos, of gibbering victims and crawling wreckage bloody in its writhings.
But no signs of any such provincial barbarism were to be seen as the young Guest Gulkan was escorted into the palace of Ubazakura. The Izdimir Empire can be called many things, but by no stretch of the imagination can it rightly be called provincial; and Aldarch the Third, the ruler of that empire, was one of the most civilized and highly cultivated rulers in all the world.
Hence the palace of Ubazakura was no gross place of wreckage and threat. Rather, it was typified by peace, grace and balance.
It was a home to the arts and a monument to interior design. Guest was led through a courtyard where diamond-gilled catfish whiskered through a lily pond which was deep – deep as drowning. The Weaponmaster slowed and lingered, lingered in the sun, lingered under the beating sky. He was conscious of the delicacy of the moment, of the fragility of his own existence. He felt the blood sifting through the smallest and most intimate sacs of his lungs. He felt the cobwebbed construction of his bones and the subtle dance of the very particles of air which wafted in and out through the great wings of his nose.
In those moments of heightened consciousness, the Weaponmaster heard a woman begin to sing. Her song echoed through the sprawling bat-wings of his ears, and, making its way through the tubes of flesh to which his ears gave access, caused the small and delicate bones deep inside his ear to thump out a message suitable for
