I suppose.'
'I have never mastered such a device,' said Guest, lying through his teeth.
A tinder box is a tricky thing to use, and by pleading ignorance Guest Gulkan got Sod to conjure the first lantern into life.
Then Sod picked up a rod of hardwood. A dozen short lengths of chain dangled from the rod, and each chain ended in a barbed hook.
'What is this?' said Sod. Guest squinted at the thing, then declared it to be an instrument of torture, or perhaps some device designed to be used in a fishing boat.
'No!' said Sod. 'It is a bablobrokmadorni stick.'
'A – a bab – baba – bablob?'
'A bablobrokmadorni stick,' said Sod. 'I thought you were a scholar!'
'Well,' said Guest. 'I study.'
'But obviously not hard enough,' said Sod. 'For a command of the Janjuladoola seems to be lacking from your tongue.'
'It is so,' conceded Guest.
'Then learn at least a word of it,' said Sod. 'This is a bablobrokmadorni stick, a device used in the Izdimir Empire for the carriage of lanterns. Look! You can put it on your shoulder and carry six lanterns without a risk of fire.'
'A lantern stick, then,' said Guest, making no attempt to pronounce the Janjuladoola name of the thing, since he feared that any such exercise in applied linguistics would precipitate the rupture of his jaw.
Then Sod showed him the water jug, which was half-full. The bread box, which held some lumps of black peasant bread so hard they could have been used as missiles for a catapult. The chamber pot – which was unclean, and smelt accordingly.
'Empty it from that northern window,' said Sod, gesturing at the nearest slit window. 'You'll find it by its smell, even if you can't find it otherwise.'
With these instructions given, Sod warned Guest not to leave his post before he was relieved at dawn. Then the Banker took himself off to his bed, descending the darkened stairs without bothering himself with a light – for Sod knew every shadow in the mainrock by its heights, its depth, its heat, its cold, its timbre or its smell.
Once left alone, Guest immediately busied himself with the lighting of lanterns. The boy Guest was not zealously industrious by nature, but night was setting in. The ominous darkness – scarcely relieved by the cold green glow which emanated from the distant flanks of the demon Icaria Scaria Iva-Italis – beset the boy with fears. This was a high place, a cold place, a barren place, and he did not like it.
Lanterns swayed from the chains of the bablobrokmadorni stick, sending a dozen shadows of Guest Gulkan lurching across the skull-pattern tiles of the Hall of Time. When hung by the time pods, they seemed merely to enlarge the darkness rather than to light the hall. The unlit gulf of the western staircase became a funnel descending into the nether depths, and Guest, made uneasy by that plunging chasm of blackness, placed his armchair up against the northern wall.
Yet even with the armchair so placed, Guest found it impossible to settle. Instead, he began to perambulate around the room, checking the oil levels in the lanterns, testing the room's acoustics by hawking and spitting, and amusing himself by examining the people so firmly frozen in the timestasis of the pods of the time prison. A motley bunch they were, those prisoners, a good many of them showing signs of extreme age, of disease, or of wounds or torture.
Rumor claimed – and Guest had heard the rumor, for ears as big as his were singularly well adapted for the capture of gossip – that time prisoners almost inevitably died upon release. The process of being frozen within a block of unchanging time was held to be harmless in itself, but the psychic shock of being displaced from one's own time by days, years or generations was held to be inevitably fatal.
Hence the Safrak Bank used the time pods as instruments of execution. After two or three generations of incarceration, a prisoner would be abruptly released into a future in which friends, lovers and relatives were dead, or reduced to decrepit spiderwebbed ghosts of their former selves, old-aged skeletons thinly cloaked by arthritic mottlestone flesh. From the prisoner's point of view, an eyeblink aged the world. The shock of such change was sufficient to kill – though one rumor claimed that a quick-acting poison was covertly administered to supplement that shock. Guest Gulkan, growing disturbed by the unblinking stares of those imprisoned in the time pods, ceased his scrutiny of the same. Though the hall was very large, it was nevertheless becoming increasingly claustrophobic. The shadows weighed heavily on Guest Gulkan's shoulders. He topped up the oil in each and every lantern, and trimmed the wicks to maxi mise their light-producing efficiency, yet the heavy burden of shadow seemed scarcely relieved.
As if seeking escape from the hall, Guest Gulkan eased himself into a north-facing slit window. It was easily tall enough to accommodate his height, but narrowed sharply, its sides arrowheading inward as the window pierced its way through the wall to the outer air. The outermost aperture of this defensive fenestra was just large enough for Guest to stick his head outside. He did so. He warped his head around to look up at the sharp-slash stars, then looked down at the sightless gulfs of the Swelaway Sea far below.
'Sa!' said Guest, pulling his head in, then rubbing his ears to warm them against the cold.
The young Yarglat barbarian jumped down from the slit window and returned to his armchair. But it was growing increasingly cold – far too cold for him to stay seated slumped and sleep. So he resumed his perambulations. Guest was far from the demon when he heard someone coming down the stairs. Guest geared himself up for action instantly. His blood began to pulse in his ears. A warm flush of battle-readiness surged through his body. Then – then Guest belatedly remembered that the stairs were not his concern. The stairs were guarded by the demon, or so Banker Sod most earnestly believed, and the guardianship of those stairs was the demon's concern, with Guest Gulkan's duty being merely to prevent interference with the prisoners of the time prison.
Down came a single person, who paused by the demon, who spoke – or appeared to speak, for Guest heard the whispering ghost of a comment across a distance greater than eighty paces – then tramped toward the downward stairway in the west.
Resting on the stranger's left shoulder was a bablobrokmadorni stick from which two lanterns depended, and these lit him as he approached. A remarkable figure! He was dressed in brightly-colored patchwork motley. A multitude of small ceramic animals were attacked to his trousers and his jacket. On his feet were slippers, which curved upward at the toes, terminating in pink pom-poms. He wore a golden skullcap fringed with tiny glass bells, which rang out in a rain of music as he stepped lightly, briskly, across the cracked and broken tiles of the Hall of Time.
A bright and briskful figure, this.
But the face!
As the man drew near, Guest Gulkan saw his face was hideously disfigured by burns. Twisted welts and lava- field fluxes had warped that face until its age and race were beyond determination.
On his right hand, the man wore a glove puppet in the form of a green-skinned dragon with red dewlaps. As he drew level with Guest, the man's right hand moved. The dragon snapped at Guest's ear. And it had teeth! Yes, there were miniature teeth built into the mouth of the glove puppet, teeth sharp as razors! Guest's hand went to his sword.
But the stranger laughed, laughed like a bell, laughed with such penetrating clarity that one might imagine him to be heard from one side of the Swelaway Sea to another. He had a singer's voice, trained to carry, and the laugh was a song of sorts, so penetrating that Guest felt its vibrations in his bones.
Disarmed and made dumbstruck by that laugh, Guest stood like a scarecrow, gawking at the stranger. Who sniffed him. Smelt him.
Sucked sweat, dust and dinner into his nostrils. Sampled him.
Memorized him. Then snorted, hummed, winked, and went tripping down the western stairs, the light of his lanterns swaying from the walls in a warmglow wash as he descended.
Such was Guest Gulkan's first encounter with Yubi Das Finger, a citizen of the Empire of Greater Parengarenga, and a resident of the far-distant city of Dalar ken Halvar.
Descending the stairs, the stranger began to sing. Abruptly, his song was cut off by a lurching cry. There was a pause. A scream! In panic, Guest sprinted to the head of the stairs, his sword already in his hand.
