After all, what was there to lose?
'Guest,' said Iva-Italis, 'Guest Gulkan. Know this, and know that you walk from here as the only one who knows. All wizards know this, but none other knows it. The god of this creation is Ameeshoth.'
'The god you serve?' said Guest.
'No!' said Iva-Italis.
'I'm confused,' said Guest.
'And not for the first time,' said Sken-Pitilkin, beginning to recover some of his composure. 'Young Guest was made to swing swords and breed sword-swingers, and one suspects it might be beyond even the talents of a demon to lecture him effectively on the higher theology.'
'So speaks the wizard,' said Iva-Italis. 'Listen to him, Guest. He hold you in contempt, just as he holds in contempt all of created reality. And why? Because he has allied himself with something other.'
'Something other?' said Guest.
'Guest,' said Iva-Italis, seeking a way to make things of cosmic consequence intelligible in words small enough for even an uneducated sword-swinger to understand, 'Sken-Pitilkin is a wizard.'
'That much I'd noticed,' said Guest, with barely suppressed impatience.
'As a wizard,' said Iva-Italis, 'he has power.'
'That is the nature of the breed,' said Guest Gulkan, with emphatic and quite unsuppressed impatience.
'So where does the power come from?' said Iva-Italis.
'Why, from the Meditations,' said Guest, who had once asked Sken-Pitilkin that very question, and had experienced no trouble in getting an answer.
'So what are the Meditations?' said Iva-Italis.
'The Meditations,' said Guest, quoting from memory, 'are a species of mental discipline. There's the Meditations of Power, that's how wizards get power, and there's the Meditations of Balance, which is how they, ah, keep safe the lightning, that's the way it's sometimes put.'
'So say wizards,' said Iva-Italis.
'You mean it's not true?' said Guest.
'It is a truth which is less than the whole truth,' said Iva-Italis. 'The Meditations are a mental discipline, certainly. A discipline. A link. Through such discipline, wizards link themselves with the Mahendo Mahunduk. They link, Guest! They link themselves! That's how! That's how they win power! That's how they keep safe that power!'
There was a note of frenzy in the demon's voice, but Guest was confused – as confused as a young suitor who has been introduced to his sweetheart's mother for the first time, and who finds that mother enthusiastically explicating the interconnections of her family en masse, and expecting him to understand the links of blood and marriage between a multitude of strangers, not excluding a great regiment of second cousins thrice removed.
By such confusion was Guest beset, and, for all the sense the demon made, the thing might as well have been garbling away in an untranslated string of foreign irregular verbs.
'So,' said Guest, 'so who are the, ah, the Mah – the Mahduk?'
'The Mahendo Mahunduk,' said Iva-Italis. 'They are the minions of the Horn.'
'Ah!' said Guest, suddenly enlightened. 'Now I remember! Sken-Pitilkin told me once. About the Horn, I mean. The Horn was a god. A world of rocks. There was a battle. One god wrecked the other. The god who won, well, that god made this world.'
The amount that Guest Gulkan managed to forget was ever a source of amazement to Sken-Pitilkin, but sometimes what he chose to remember – and when – was just as much a shock to the system.
'Precisely,' said Iva-Italis. 'The god who lost was the Horn.
The god who won was Ameeshoth.'
'And the Mah – the Mahdo – '
'The Mahendo Mahunduk,' said Iva-Italis, 'are minions of the Horn. The Horn is dead, but they yet live. As yet they still survive, and their survival threatens the created reality in which we live, for ever they strive to destroy the works of Ameeshoth.
By way of wizards they have a link to this world of ours, for wizards draw their powers through a dark intercourse with these creatures of realms of diabolism.'
'So speaks a demon,' said Sken-Pitilkin, with the flat-voiced calm of a man who has just noticed that one of his arms has been amputated. 'So speaks a demon, but the demon is wrong.'
In point of fact, the demon was at least half-right. There had indeed been an Originating God known to the wisest of wizards as the Horn. And that god had indeed been overthrown by a Supplanting God known as Ameeshoth. And the created reality which sustained the existence of Sken-Pitilkin and Guest Gulkan alike was indeed the creation of Ameeshoth. But, as for the Mahendo
Mahunduk, why, they had nothing whatsoever to do with the Horn.
In truth, the Supplanting God known as Ameeshoth had been attacked and destroyed by a cabal of Revisionary Gods. The Mahendo Mahunduk, half-demon and half-deity, had served the Revisionary Gods as soldiers in that war of destruction. In the long ages since then, the Revisionary Gods had evolved, changing by slow degrees into the theological host of which modern-day humanity was intermittently and imperfectly aware.
But while the Revisionary Gods had evolved, the Mahendo Mahunduk had not. They remained half-demon, half-deity. And, since the Revisionary Gods had evolved to a state where they had no further use for the Mahendo Mahunduk, the Mahendo Mahunduk had found other ways to employ their abilities.
Still -
'I'd say it speaks the truth,' said Guest Gulkan, who had been quite positively convinced by the demon's half- truths. 'It upset you right enough, didn't it? You wouldn't be very popular if this got out, would you?'
'Ah,' said Sken-Pitilkin, as if he had just bitten hard upon a rotten tooth. 'The boy is apt in politics.'
'True,' said Iva-Italis.
Indeed, Guest Gulkan had got right to the meat of the matter in less than an eyeblink. By granting to wizards certain powers to act on the sustaining creation, the Mahendo Mahunduk were acting in defiance of all the gods half-known and half-worshipped by humanity. The Mahendo Mahunduk were old; and ominous; and dangerous; and hence a perfect focus for the hysterias of humanity. And while even Sken-Pitilkin did not pretend to understand every detail of the realms of theology, he knew the hysterias of humanity to a nicety.
The hysterias of humanity could be known to a nicety by anyone versed in the history of witch-hunt and pogrom. Wizards had once exploited the mechanics of hysteria to exterminate the witches who had for so long been their rivals in power; and, given the right leverage, anyone with sufficient political capacity could get rid of wizards by the same process.
'The Mahendo Mahunduk,' said Iva-Italis.
'The Mahendo Mahunduk,' said Guest Gulkan, repeating the words – and, from the way he said those words, Sken-Pitilkin knew the boy was committing them to memory.
'This is power I have given you tonight,' said Iva-Italis.
'What kind of power have I given you?'
'Leverage,' said Guest Gulkan promptly.
'Good!' said Iva-Italis. 'Good. I have given you leverage.
Leverage to use with your wizard, or else with the world. With such leverage, your wizard will help you win through to Obooloo.
When you win to Obooloo, you will rescue the Great God Jocasta.
Then the Great God will make you a wizard in your own right.'Guest Gulkan looked at Iva-Italis then looked at Sken-Pitilkin.
'Well?' said Guest Gulkan, with a note of challenge.
'I,' said Sken-Pitilkin, 'will have nothing whatsoever to do with this mad quest of demons and gods. Regardless of this – this leverage, so called. I will not be compelled.'
'You will not,' said Guest Gulkan, in a way which suggested that Sken-Pitilkin might be well advised to reconsider his opinion.
'I will not,' said Sken-Pitilkin.
He would not unsay it.
So -
