'Of what?' said Guest.
'Of his pain,' said Aldarch. 'He begs for his mother in her mercy. He begs. But. But if you ask – he can tell you the future if you ask.'
'This I – I don't need to know the future,' said Guest. 'I'll face the future when I come to it.'
'The man will die anyway,' said Aldarch. 'Since the man will die in any case, you might as well have the knowledge of his wisdom. I will ask your future for you.'
Then, abruptly, the Mutilator stepped down into the well.
Disregarding the stench and the filth, he straddled the writhing man. Then, to Guest's utter horror, the Mutilator seated himself on that appalling figure. The living corpse screamed in a high- pitched whistle. The Mutilator slapped it. Slapped it hard.
Splatters of filth flew in all directions. Then the Mutilator spoke to the thing, spoke with a snarling savagery, as if to a delinquent dog.
At which -
At which the man either did or did not begin to speak. Guest was not sure whether the dying man was speaking, but he knew for a certainty that he could hear a voice of some description, a withered voice which was warped with agony, a voice outgulping words in gouts, words of terrible import.
Then the voice fell silent.
Aldarch the Third rose from his victim, who had ceased to move. The Mutilator scrambled out of the shallow well. He looked uncommonly ungainly as he climbed out of that pit, but his ungainliness did not detract from his dignity.
A slave girl approached, bearing a canary-yellow handcloth which steamed slightly. Aldarch took it, wiped his face, cleaned his hands, then tossed it into the pit. Despite this token cleansing, the Mutilator was still besmeared with filth. He stank.
But he did not seem to mind. He looked the Weaponmaster in the face, and he said:
'He says you will kill your father.'Guest shuddered.
For it was hard to deny the likelihood of any prediction by such a terrible.
'That is what he says,' continued the Mutilator. 'He says that you will kill your father. And I say this – if you cannot or will not liberate your father from the time pod in the Temple of Blood, then you will most certainly be the death of your father.
For I will put that pod in a fire then heat it until it bursts.'
As Guest absorbed this threat, the Mutilator enhanced it with one last statement: 'I have done as much before.'Guest shuddered.
And, with that, the Mutilator exited, leaving the Weaponmaster to contemplate the final twitchings of the man who lay dying at his feet.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Stench Caves: complex of caverns from whence that thin and putrid flux known as the Nijidith River outflows and courses west to Lake Kak. The Nijidith River affords pigs and such with a constant source of nourishment, and was the original attraction which caused Obooloo to be founded on the shores of Lake Kak.
Choosing to quest to the Stench Caves and thus save his father from incineration, Guest Gulkan confessed to the location of the ring of ever-ice which had the power to open and close the time pods in the Temple of Blood.
Once Guest had confessed, the sewer-flavored waters in the Temple of Blood were siphoned dry, and the muck at the bottom of the octagonal chamber which housed the Great God Jocasta and the demon Ungular Scarth was sieved until the ring was found.
Then Aldarch the Third used that ring to open the time pod which held the Witchlord, and the man fell from that pod, and was received by the Mutilator's healers. Thereafter, the Mutilator wore the ring of ever-ice on his own hand.
Now since Lord Onosh had been sorely wounded when Guest had first consigned him to the safety of a time pod, and since no time whatsoever had passed for Lord Onosh since then, he proved grievously wounded when liberated, and was some months recovering.
But, with the Witchlord Onosh being finally recovered, and reconciled to joining the quest for the cornucopia to which his son had pledged himself, Witchlord and Weaponmaster left the palace of Ubazakura, accompanied by the Mutilator and a great host of his people.
They went on foot, this being the traditional manner in which the Stench Caves are approached from Obooloo, since those caves are holy, and therefore to approach those caves is to undertake a kind of pilgrimage.
While they pilgrimaged, Aldarch the Third led that multitude in a holy chant. His voice was not so melodious as that of one of his imperial dragons, but his power and status compelled Guest Gulkan to attend to him with such concentration that the Weaponmaster soon began to feel that he had never heard a more affecting plaint in all his days.
Even so, Guest did not feel very much like a pilgrim. On the night before, the Mutilator had honored Witchlord and Weaponmaster with a feast, and Guest's head was aching from all the wine he had drunk, for liquor of all descriptions had become unfamiliar to his flesh during his days of imprisonment. Yes, despite Guest Gulkan's great constitutional strength, the stress of imprisonment had weakened him bitterly, and today he felt his weakness in the length of the road, the sharpness of the light, the invincibility of the sun.
The day was hot, and in its heat the greenflies of Ang were at their pestilential worst. A hot shimmer of dragonflies flickered between the processioning pilgrims and went winging out over the Nijidith River – a slow and oozing flux of filth in which pigs were diligently rooting for their sustenance. The pigs were not by any means alone, for keeping them company were ducks which went filleting through the muck with their beaks; and, ignoring both pigs and ducks, multitudes of barefoot peasants stood up to their knees in the rivermud, and sieved it for unimaginable treasures (fish? bugs? worms? eggs? tadpoles? gemstones? coinage? bones?).
It might have been thought that the Weaponmaster would have occupied himself on that journey by making plans for resistance or escape. But he did not. The fight had gone out of him, for he had suffered too many setbacks and defeats – starting with the tearing of his arms and legs in an arena in Chi'ash-lan. That had marked him. The demon of Cap Foz Para Lash had repaired the damage done to his flesh, but his psyche had been deeply damaged. He knew his own vulnerability, and knew it too well, for all that he tried to deny that knowledge. And, having found all that all his resources of strength had failed him in Chi'ash-lan, he was less sure of those resources than he had been on that foolish day of youthful bravura when he had faced the Rovac warrior Thodric Jarl in a duel in Enskandalon Square.
Consequently, though Guest had functioned well enough when questing in the company of the wizards Pelagius Zozimus and Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin, he had found it harder to play the hero without them. So when endeavoring to escape from Injiltaprajura, and finding his escape ship confronted by a fleet loyal to the Mutilator, he had found himself entirely lacking in initiative and resource; and it had only been the intervention of his servant Thayer Levant which had saved him from tamely surrendering the x- x-zix and the mazadath to the Mutilator's forces.
Since then, imprisonment and threat had further sapped Guest's confidence; and, of course, he was nursing a dragon, as the cognoscenti of Obooloo term a hangover. He was further depressed by the fact that his new boots – a personal gift from the Mutilator – were giving him blisters. Therefore he made no plans for mayhem, and he attempted no touristic appreciation of the novel sights and scenes which greeted him on the way to the Stench Gates, though he did take note of a young woman breast- feeding a piglet, which (much to the Weaponmaster's envy) nuzzled against her flesh in an utter contentment of gluttony.
As the procession drew nearer to the Stench Gates, the river became more obviously polluted – for nuggets of floating filth and lengths of what looked like intestines came floating downstream on its oily waters. These delicacies were salvaged by the bucketload by industrious peasants, who carted much away for their own use, yielding up token portions to be burnt as offerings at the several temples of the God of Bounty.
The God of Bounty, a minor god who had Zoz the Ancestral as his patron, was worshipped by the banks of the
