So Guest pursued, leading his men with a certainty which the ignorant attributed to precognitive powers – powers which came, or so said a wild rumor, from the fact that he had been mothered by a witch.
But, as they drew nearer and nearer the Yolantarath, Guest allowed the pace to slacken; and Sken-Pitilkin, deducing from this slackening a lessening of Guest's wrathfulness, ventured to open a conversation.
'You remember this,' said Sken-Pitilkin, opening a conversation with the Weaponmaster in the hope of later being able to raise the matter of his execution of the men who had betrayed his father.
'Perhaps,' said Guest carelessly. 'Or perhaps I dreamt of it. Have you ever thought this might be a dream, and you but a dream in a dream?'
It goes without saying that Sken-Pitilkin had heard of this tired old philosophical conceit some twice times ten thousand times in the past.
'A dream has a purpose,' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'It's purpose is the cleansing of the mind. Having a purpose, it is simple. Since life is both complex and disordered, we can say of a certainty that it has no purpose, hence is no dream.'
'So you say,' said Guest, 'but your philosophy opens you to deception. If the world were a dream, perhaps it might have been designed for your own deceiving, in which case it would have been purposely designed to be complex and confusing, in order to convince you that it had no purpose.'
Thus argued Guest Gulkan and his erstwhile tutor as they made their way down toward the Yolantarath River. Sken-Pitilkin, naturally, was able to easily and adroitly defeat his every argument; but Guest in his ignorance was unable to realize that he had been defeated, and repeatedly declared that a world undreamlike might yet be a dream, assuming it to have been designed for deception.
'That much you've said some three times already,' said Sken-Pitilkin, when Guest had said it for the seventh time.
'Which makes it true,' said Guest.
'No, not at all,' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'A thing said thrice is no more true than a thing said once, and to propose otherwise is a nonsense.'
'On the contrary,' said Guest Gulkan. 'Words are the shaping of the world. You told me that yourself. It follows that to say is to shape, and a thing thrice-said gains truth by repetition.'
This is typical of the Weaponmaster's erratic style of debate, which, for all it owed to formal logic and systematic learning, resembled nothing so much as an energetic washerwoman trying to hammer home a nail by flailing at it with a wet eel.
'You are confounding a theorem of Practical Politics with a theorem of Axiomatic Philosophy,' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'And thus it is proved that you are talking nonsense, whether you know it or not.'
'Knowledge is unitary,' said Guest. 'You told me so yourself.'
Knowledge is unitary. What does that mean? Guest Gulkan was not sure. But his tutor had often used this grand-sounding phrase to win their debates (or at least bring them to a conclusion) and Guest thought there was no harm in trying it.
'Knowledge is unitary, yes,' said Sken-Pitilkin, 'but even so, books are not fishes, songs are not sums, and politics is not philosophy, nor did I ever tell you it was.'
'On the contrary,' said Guest. 'You have several times named philosophy as the very heart of politics, which is a nonsense, but is still what you told me.'
'The nonsense is not mine but yours,' said Sken-Pitilkin, striving with imperfect success to preserve an amiable tolerance in the face of such intellectual folly. 'Political method is not philosophical truth, and I never said it was.'
'The heart,' said Guest, stubborn in dissent. 'You claimed philosophy to be the heart of politics.'
'One thing becomes not another simply by being placed inside it, whether at the heart or elsewhere,' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'A stone ditched in the river does not become water. Likewise, your sword would win no degree of equinity by being thrust the fullness of its length into the flesh of a horse, even if it should penetrate to the very heart.'
'But that heart itself would be horse,' persisted Guest.
'Heart, kernel, pith, gist, essence. The heart of a thing is the essence of a thing, and you claimed philosophy as the heart of politics.'
'That is sophistry, and you know it, or should know it, or will know it by the time I'm finished with you,' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'In any case, I never said that philosophy is at the heart of politics, merely that it should be, which is quite a different matter entirely. I am a philosopher. Am I ruling Tameran? Am I so much as listened to when I venture political advice?'
'You'll be listened to ardently,' said Guest, 'if you can tell me how to make a peace with my father.'
'If we are in luck,' said Sken-Pitilkin, 'then your father will out-distance you, and you will have no need to worry about either war or peace.'
So spoke Sken-Pitilkin, for he was sure by now that Guest was deliberately easing off the pace of the pursuit in the hope that his father would run, and would make his escape, and would not force father and son to a final confrontation.
But, when Guest and his forces eventually reached the Yolantarath, there was Lord Onosh, braced for a final stand. And as for the course of that final stand – why, we have seen that already.
Years earlier, when Guest had been but a boy, the Witchlord Onosh had hunted bandits from the hills, and had encompassed their slaughter on the banks of the Yolantarath. As Lord Onosh had hunted, so he now was doomed to be hunted in his turn.
The Witchlord Onosh was possessed of the Gift of Seeing, and though it was a small gift, and one which was erratic in operation, he had been right in thinking himself doomed to die, and had been right in thinking his son Guest Gulkan was the man who would encompass his death.
And so our history comes full circle, and we end as we began, with a battle by the river, and with a death. But, of course, between the first battle and the last, the world has changed entirely; and I cannot read the future, or know where the changes will end. I know only that one Age is finished, and we are launched into an uncertain future, the perplexities of which are beyond the foresight of man, or woman, or wizard.
