his mind.
'You won't,' said Guest grimly, recovering his fallen sword and getting to his feet. 'You can't.'
But before Guest Gulkan could mount yet another fatuous attack on the Great god Jocasta, Yubi Das Finger came out of the Bralsh. A striking figure was Yubi Das Finger! For this Banker was dressed in motley, with the motley being rigorously littered with shiny ceramic animals, his whole outfit being topped off by a damaged face and a golden skullcap fringed with tiny glass beads.
Yet Guest spared him only the briefest of glances – for he had encountered the man before in his various sparse yet informative dealings with the Banks. Rather, Guest concentrated his attention on those who were following on behind Yubi.
The honorable Das Finger was leading a dozen sweating slaves who were carrying a huge black cauldron, a cauldron which looked to be one of the orking pots of Galsh Ebrek. On Yubi's command, they upended the pot and dropped it over the Great God.
'We have it,' said Yubi, with satisfaction. Guest gaped.
It had never occurred to the Weaponmaster that something as mighty as a Great God could be secured and imprisoned by any expedient so simple as dropping a pot on top of it. But of course the Great God Jocasta had been direly injured by the firebolt weapon so generously employed against it by Anaconda Stogirov, and Yubi Das Finger's tactic appeared to be working.
For Jocasta strove against the pot, trying to lift it directly upwards. But the Great God could not raise it from the ground by more than a fingerlength. Next, Jocasta tried to burn a hole in the black iron. The metal grew red hot, but it did not melt or yield.
Yubi Das Finger spat on the glowing iron. His saliva sizzled into silence.
'Let me out!' roared Jocasta, using the Galish Trading Tongue.
Yubi knew that language, but made no reply. Instead, the scar-faced Banker giggled manically.
Thwarted, Jocasta lifted the iron pot clear of the ground – only a fingerlength clear, but a fingerlength was sufficient – and began to carry that burden on an erratic course of retreat which sent the iron pot caroming into a succession of ox carts and bamboo huts.
'It's getting away!' said Guest in alarm.
'Yes, my friend,' said Yubi Das Finger. 'The thing is getting away from us. So tell us, little friend – what is it, exactly? A friend of yours? You brought it through the Door, didn't you?'
Yubi Das Finger had spoken of the Door! Admittedly, he had spoken in the Galish, which few people in Dalar ken Halvar were likely to know. But even so! A Banker does not speak of Doors or of Circles in public, and Yubi was a Banker born and bred. The error was a measure of the extreme stress of the moment.
'The – the thing is a god,' said Guest. 'A Great God, that's, that's what it says, it alleges. But we didn't bring it here, it, it followed us!'
'A god, is it?' said Yubi dubiously.
Yubi Das Finger was no theologian, but he thought it most unlikely that any god of any description could be confined under an upturned orking pot for even as short a time as half a heartbeat. He presumed, therefore, that the thing under the pot was an artefact of some description, possibly a weapon of war left over from the Days of Wrath or from some conflict more ancient yet. That then was how Yubi described it to the public.
'It's a mad machine,' said Yubi, to all who wanted to know.
'A mad machine, which we'll have to destroy.'
Whereupon assorted heroes did their best to kill the thing, or at least to disconcert it. They beat its iron pot with the butts of spears, setting up a great racket. The pot lurched, crushing a soldier against an ox cart. As he screamed piteously, the pot continued on its way, navigating hazard by hazard through the streets of Childa Go.
Childa Go, Dalar ken Halvar's fishing-shack quarter, was heavy with the smell of drying fish. As Guest plodded along behind the iron pot, keeping at a respectful distance – for he had no wish to be burnt or crushed himself – the smells awakened strong memories of his past adventures in Dalar ken Halvar. He heard a sharp explosion as a piece of bamboo burst in a cooking fire, and remembered the excited hubbub of Dog Day festivities, when the city was one uproarious turmoil of competitive confusion.
He remembered other things, too.
His legs kept remembering the injuries they had suffered on that terrible day in Chi'ash-lan: the day of the Great Mink. Those memories were idle folly, for Guest's legs were new legs, grown for him in the minor mountain known as Cap Foz Para Lash. Still, he remembered what he remember. He could not deny it.
The procession of people trooping after the Great God steadily swelled. Guest realized they were skirting the slopes of Cap Ogo Botch, the minor mountain atop which stood the palace of Na Sashimoko. The imperial palace – for Dalar ken Halvar was the capital of the Empire of Greater Parengarenga. Who ruled now in Dalar ken Halvar? Thanks to his embroilment in the affairs of Untunchilamon and Obooloo, Guest's knowledge of current affairs was years out of date – a failing which could be potentially fatal.
As Guest was worrying about it, the Great God Jocasta slipped through the streets, making its way between the Grand Arena and Cap Uba. It gained Scuffling Road. The broad avenue was just as Guest remembered it – still lined for the most part with the impoverished bamboo buildings which typified Dalar ken Halvar. It was still unpaved, surfaced with the soft red dust of the Plain of Jars. Guest remembered often, often making his way through red dust rutted with cart tracks, going on crutches to the Yamoda River or to Lake Shalasheen to swim, back in those long-ago days when his new-growing legs had been too weak to sustain him.
In those years, his home base had been the underground stronghold within the minor mountain known as Cap Foz Para Lash, so after his swim he had always returned to that place. And Guest realized that – whether by accident or design – the Great God Jocasta was making a similar journey.
At the end of Scuffling Road was the kinema, the natural amphitheater outside the lockway. The lockway, with its twin doors of kaleidoscope, guarded the way into Cap Foz Para Lash. Guest had the uneasy suspicion that the Great God knew where it was going, and intended to link up with Paraban Senk, the formidable demon who ruled the depths Cap Foz Para Lash.
Was Senk then a friend of Jocasta?
Certainly the demons of Guest's acquaintance seemed to have the ability to talk to each other at a distance, silently communicating across oceans and continents. The demon Iva-Italis on Alozay maintained relationships with Lob in Obooloo and Ko in Chi'ash-lan. So – was Paraban Senk a member of this strange and long-enduring partnership?
By now, a very considerable procession was trailing after the Great God Jocasta. It was joined by a company of armed and armored men moving at a pace which had them gasping in the heat of the day. The leader of those men was a Frangoni giant who challenged the Weaponmaster by name:
'Guest Gulkan!'
'My lord,' said Guest, speaking in the Galish.
Yubi Das Finger, who had been keeping pace with Guest, translated and elaborated that courtesy.
Meantime, Guest summed the stranger, who had muscles of a hugeness indicative of a fondness for pumping iron rather than water, who wore robes of flowing purple, and whose uncut hair was most curiously heaped on top of his head to further amplify his height. A Frangoni warrior. A tall, big, purple-skinned Frangoni warrior. An impressive figure, certainly, but to Guest they all looked alike, these Frangoni.
Then the Frangoni warrior said – and Yubi Das Finger translated, for Guest and the purple-skinned stranger had no language in common:
'What's going on here?'
'My lord,' said Guest. 'We're chasing a Great God.'
This Yubi Das Finger translated, deadpan.
The Frangoni was more learned in theology than was Guest Gulkan, and so, like others before him, the purple-skinned warrior decided that whatever was lurching along under the iron orking pot was most definitely not a god. Possibly it was a turtle, or a large crab, or an injured Shabble, or a low-powered Sword, or a bad- tempered dwarf of prodigious strength. But a god? Never!
'Stop it!' said the Frangoni.
In response to his order, his men surrounded the orking pot, and braced their shields against it, and tried to sweat it to a halt in a scrum. While they sweated and strained, Guest used his Galish to ask a discrete question of
