would not have been out of place in the nursery, for Shabble had been made as a toy for children, not as a replacement for a parent.
In the absence of any mature adult concern from Shabble – who surface briefly once or twice, but immediately splashed down under the water again – Guest at last got to his feet and sauntered over to the door. In the white coral sand – sand whiter than eggshell, whiter than bone – he saw only one single set of footprints. They were his own. Guest confronted the Door.
'Open!' said Guest, in his most commanding voice.
But the Door remained firmly closed.
With some difficulty – his arm was grievously sore, and hampered his movements – Guest climbed onto the plinth and examined the Door in detail. He was careful not to let any part of his person intersect the plane of the arch, since he had no wish to lose head or hand to a sudden reopening of the Door.
On a whim, Guest took the heavy mazadath from around his neck, and displayed it to the Door, and tried to command it again:
'Open!'
But, as he had expected, nothing happened. He slung the mazadath round his neck once again, feeling its heavy silver glissade across his sweat-slick skin. The use of the thing, it seemed, was to preserve his life in the realms of the World Beyond which lay beyond the Veils of Fire in the Cave of the Warp in the Shackle Mountains; and Guest, not for the first time, was intensely irritated that a thing which he had carried so far and for so many years should be possessed of such a specialized use – and was totally useless in his present circumstances.
The lancing sunlight blicked sharps of light from the scattering of sand on the marble of the plinth. On impulse, Guest Gulkan touched his lips to the outer metal of the arch, finding it strangely cool. He licked it. Tasted salt. The arch had been salted by the tropical sea.
As far as Guest could tell, the arch and the island alike showed no sign of prior use.
Or did it?
Toward one end of the island, a bare stone's throw distant, was the turtle-hump of a rowing boat, which Guest had not noticed at all in the first startlement of his shocked arrival and Shabble's subsequent attack.
Now, Guest jumped down to the sand and strode toward the rowing boat. He was conscious of the heat, which brought back memories of Untunchilamon and Injiltaprajura. But Injiltaprajura had been lush with sprinting water, alive with monkeys and tropical birds, aswarm with cockroaches and mosquitoes. This island, by comparison, was tiny. Bare as a picked bone. Guest reached the overturned rowing boat. A few streaks of blistered ochre paint had yet to be elementally stripped from the weathered gray of its planking. Guest lifted it, flipped it over, and revealed bare bones and a broken oar. Guest estimated the bones. Skull, vertebrae, ribs, pelvis, thigh bone and shank bone, carpals and teeth. A man had died here, and Guest was uncomfortably reminded of the possibility that he might die likewise. Guest stood in the sunblind quiet, taking stock. The shit- brown mud of the Old City was still smeared on his shins, though it was wet no longer, for it had dried and hardened swiftly in the heat. Guest stood stork-like on one leg, brushed at the mud, and peeled away a leaf. It was a mottled brown and yellow, its substance frayed, its skeleton showing through its flesh.
'Grief of a bitch,' muttered Guest.
Then kicked away the bones, used the broken oar to prop up the rowing boat – there was nothing else by way of shade on the island – and took shelter. He still had the yellow bottle, and still had the ring which commanded it, so it would have been the easiest thing in the world to take refuge within. But Guest was waiting for Shabble.
After an unconscionable delay, Shabble grew bored with exploring the island's coral reef, and came to see how the Weaponmaster was faring.
'How are you?' said Shabble.
'What would you care?' said Guest.
It was not at all what he had planned to say, but the words came out anyway. His burnt arm felt like a continuous branding operation was in progress, and Guest was hard-put to ignore the pain. It brought back uncomfortable memories which he had done his best to rigorously suppress – starting with the spiking of his foot in the Battle of Babaroth and working through to some of the more life-threatening of the beatings he had suffered at the hands of the soldiers of the Mutilator.
'I'm your friend,' said Shabble. 'Of course I care.'
'My friend!' said Guest.
'Why, of course,' said Shabble. 'I came to Alozay in friendship, didn't I?'
'You could have fooled me!' said Guest, thinking the bubble quite mad in its delinquency.
But, as Shabble's story began to emerge in full detail, Guest slowly started to understand.
Shabble and Guest had first met on Untunchilamon, during the Weaponmaster's wild adventures on that island. Guest's days on Untunchilamon had been so confused, so hectic, so full of turmoil, that he these days found it hard to connect their scattered fragments in any coherent fashion. To the Weaponmaster, Shabble had been just one more of the many spectacles of that island, something to rank alongside the Crab, the wealth fountains, the analytical engine, the therapist Schoptomov, the bullman Log Jaris, the flying claws, the demon Binchinminfin, and the pink- eyed albino who had been such a mighty sorcerer.
Yet Shabble, it seemed, still remembered in detail every moment of that long-ago encounter, and thought that the deeds in which they had been involved (they had, for example, raided the Pink Palace of Injiltaprajura together, seeking to put an end to the transitory rule of the demon Binchinminfin) made them comrades in arms.
Later, Guest and Shabble had been incarcerated in the yellow bottle during their transit from Drum to Drangsturm. On that journey, Guest had spent a great many days in exhaustive conversation with Shabble. Guest had simply been passing the time, but Shabble had been doing something entirely different. Shabble, it transpired, had been nourishing the development of a beautiful friendship.
As Shabble's tale unfolded, Guest began to understand how the jade-green monsters of the Circle of the Partnership Banks had been able to suborn Shabble to their will. They had not discovered a new method of torturing or coercing Shabble. No. They had got to the bubble through its weakest point – its need for friends and friendship.
In Chi'ash-lan, the jade-green monster which named itself the demon Ko had indoctrinated Shabble. The demon Ko had told the bubble of bounce that the star-globe had been restored to the island of Alozay (which was true), that Guest and Sken-Pitilkin planned to seek the control of the Circle (which was also true), and that they were eagerly waiting for Shabble to assist them by bringing the Cult of Cockroach to the populations of the lands of the Doors.
The demon Ko and its colleagues had obviously miscalculated.
They must have thought that Shabble would arrive on Alozay, hot with enthusiasm for missionary work, and that the combination of Shabble's eagerness and flame-throwing abilities would leave Guest and Sken-Pitilkin with no choice but to co-operate.
But of course, by the time Shabble reached Alozay, Guest and Sken-Pitilkin had fled with the star-globe. This had been the bitterest of all possible disappointments for Shabble. The bubble had precious little use for power, or gold, or women, or opium, or any of the other things men commonly fight for. But Shabble wanted friendship. Needed it. Valued it above all else. And Shabble, having been told that friends awaited on Alozay, was furious to realize it had been victimized by lies.
'You realized the demons had been lying to you?' said Guest.
'Of course,' said Shabble.
'So what did you do?'
'I blasted the demon!' said Shabble, positively squeaking with excitement. 'I blasted that thing Italis! I blasted it!'
'Really?' said Guest.
'Really and truly,' said Shabble.
'So it's dead.'
'Well,' said Shabble, guardedly. 'Not exactly.'
'What do you mean, not exactly? What happened? What happened when you blasted it?'
'Well,' said Shabble, 'what happened was that it laughed.'
'It laughed?'
