'He wished to murder me!' said Lord Onosh.
Then the Witchlord Onosh told the wizard Sken-Pitilkin of his own precognitive vision. While hunting bandits in the high ground near Gendormargensis, the lord of the Collosnon Empire had endured a vision.
'It was death,' said Lord Onosh. 'My own death. Death by water. A death to take me, thrust me, haul me, suck me. Down in the quench, the smother, the groping slime, the dark. I was drinking, mind. Morsh and me, we had words in the old manner. Then Guest said, he mocked at Morsh and at me, and I knew.'
'What did you know?' said Sken-Pitilkin.
'Why,' said Lord Onosh, as if it should have been obvious, 'I knew he was going to drown me, of course! Right there and then, I knew it! That's why he went into the river, you see. He thought it was me. He meant to drown me, Pitilkin!'
'But it wasn't you,' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'It was Eljuk. And when Guest saved Eljuk, why, he thought you should give him something.'
'But I did!' said Lord Onosh. 'I gave him leave to ask for a gift, and he asked. The title. Weaponmaster.'
'But that was a trifle,' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'Another word for nothing. He let you satisfy your obligations with a trifle.
That left you free to give him the larger things out of love.'
'The larger things?' said Lord Onosh, with renewed irritability. 'What are you talking about?'
'You could have spared him his duel with Thodric Jarl,' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'You could have given him the woman Yerzerdayla.'
'But the boy had just tried to kill me!' said the Witchlord.
Now here was a pretty pickle! On the basis of a fleeting vision of the future, Guest Gulkan thought he should be honored as his father's would-be rescuer. But, on the basis of another precognitive vision, Lord Onosh thought his son should be damned as a would-be murderer!
All of which made Sken-Pitilkin very glad that he himself did not personally suffer visions, whether precognitive visions or otherwise.
'My lord,' said Sken-Pitilkin, attempting to feign a degree of diffidence. 'It may well be that the men of your line have some talent to see the future.'
'It is a proven fact,' said Lord Onosh.
'Well, perhaps,' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'But plain logic proves the vision wrong. For, though you saw yourself drowning in the Yolantarath, the fact is that you remain undrowned.'
'But Guest meant to drown me!' said Lord Onosh. 'You see? You understand?'
'No, I don't,' said Sken-Pitilkin, in frank confession.
'These are meant to be visions of the future.'
'Or visions of intent,' said Lord Onosh. 'One can see the future's facts or see the future's intent. Guest went to the river. That proves he had intent!' Sken-Pitilkin was amazed that Lord Onosh, who had judged the case of the boat sellers of Ink with such dispassionate acumen, could become so entangled in the coils of illogic when he confronted the affairs of his own family. Of course, every standard text on ethnology makes note of the vexed complexity of family affairs. And as an ethnological scholar, Sken-Pitilkin had long ago absorbed the lessons of such texts. But even so!
'You are uncommonly silent, Pitilkin,' said Lord Onosh. 'Have you run out of argument?'
'My lord,' said Sken-Pitilkin, 'it is a great many years since I was any man's son, and I have never been a father, so – but, ah! This looks to be Babaroth!'
And Babaroth it was indeed, and arrival at that settlement terminated the discourse between wizard and Witchlord.
As Witchlord and Weaponmaster entered Babaroth from the south, they were disconcerted to be met by disheveled riders coming from the north. Some were wounded, all were weary, and they moved with the emphasis of men driven by urgent necessity. Know you this emphasis? All courtesy leaves a man. He becomes direct in his speech, as if every word were paid for in hammered gold. His speech is charged with import, as is that of a condemned man pleading a court for mercy.
Such were the men who entered Babaroth from the north, and Witchlord and Weaponmaster immediately knew – before they had heard so much as a word of the tale of these men – that something dreadful had happened in the north.
When those men addressed Witchlord and Weaponmaster, they did so in Ordhar, not in Eparget. And this was another bad sign. The worst of signs! For Ordhar was the command language used by the Yarglat's subject peoples, whereas the Yarglat themselves spoke Eparget. Looking over that ragged band from the north, Witchlord and Weaponmaster saw none of the Yarglat.
'What is this?' said Guest, fearing that there had been a revolution by the underpeople. 'Are you in arms against the empire?'
'My lord,' said one of the Ordhar-speaking underpeople, 'we are the empire! It is the Yarglat who have been making war upon us!'
Then both Witchlord and Weaponmaster began to understand what had happened.
Thanks to their disappearance into the mountains of Ibsen-Iktus, both Witchlord and Weaponmaster had now been gone from their empire for some time. As far as the Collosnon Empire was concerned, the Witchlord Onosh had disappeared from the realms of the visible creation during the summer, and had not been seen or heard of since; and it was now autumn.
Both Witchlord and Weaponmaster had presumed that the affairs of the empire had been, as it were, placed on ice during their absence, but this proved not to be the case.
For that small and tattered force of warriors which came riding into Babaroth from the north was the advance guard of a small and tattered army led by Bao Gahai, the Witchlord's dralkosh, who was retreating to the south in fear of her life. By nightfall, Bao Gahai herself was in Babaroth, and Witchlord and Weaponmaster had confirmation of her tale from her own lips.
A grim tale was Bao Gahai's.
As Witchlord and Weaponmaster pursued their civil war in the south, Gendormargensis had fallen to Khmar, a notorious marauder from the Yarglat homelands of the north. Khmar had taken advantage of the empire's disorders to invade from the north, and had conquered Gendormargensis without meeting with any substantial resistance at all.
'Now he comes south,' said Bao Gahai, 'and he will sweep us all the way to Stranagor, then cast us into the sea.'
Here there is a hint that Bao Gahai may have spent some considerable part of her life in or around the seaport city of Stranagor. For, as has already been remarked, the casting of great numbers of the defeated into the sea has ever been a feature of Stranagor's iconography of war, whereas no such image features in the native idiom of the Yarglat.
'I take it,' said the Witchlord Onosh, 'that all of the Yarglat have thrown in their lot with Khmar.'
'No,' said Bao Gahai. 'Not all. For a few of the Yarglat figure in the ranks of your own army here in Babaroth.'
'It is not my army,' said Lord Onosh, glancing at his son.
'It is Guest's.'
'So you have told me,' said Bao Gahai. 'But Khmar will kill the pair of you unless you make a peace between you.'
'A peace!' said Lord Onosh. 'How can we possibly make a peace? One must serve the other, and I would rather die than serve this – this thing with the ears of an ogre!'
'The ears are your own,' said Bao Gahai. 'The ears are your own, as the sperm was your own. Have you forgotten?'
Then Bao Gahai looked long and hard upon the Witchlord Onosh, and, to Sken-Pitilkin's amazement, the Witchlord bowed to Bao Gahai's judgment.
So it was that, in the face of the threat from Khmar, father and son made a peace, with the father agreeing to serve as a loyal subordinate to the son, and the pair of them withdraw to Locontareth with all their forces, arriving there late in the autumn.
Witchlord and Weaponmaster arrived in Locontareth just in time to save the dralkosh Zelafona and her
