mainrock Pinnacle to be difficult in the extreme, for the heights overhung the docks, and there were no chimneys by means of which a climber could easily ascend to those heights.
Lord Onosh chose to be winched upwards in the company of his mountaineers, so their reports were delivered to him privily while he and his climbers were safe in the isolation of their creaking wickerwork.
Then they got to the top, and found that the great winch- baskets had been dragged to the heights by bluff and hearty washerwomen working a windlass. Lord Onosh was dismayed to realize that his life had been entrusted to something as weak as a woman.
But these women were like unto bears, for in truth the strength of your average washerwoman is nothing short of marvelous, for she spends all day thumping and pummelling, and hefting great burdens of wet and dripping wool. Thus some washerwomen of prodigious strength feature nobly in the myth-cycle concerning the ancient war between men and women, and the greatest of these washerwomen was Bilch.
According to legend, the washerwoman Bilch was of such great strength that she once split the skull of an apprentice boy with a single blow from her open hand, and split it with such violence that his eyes flew a full seventy paces in different directions, and his upper teeth were propelled downward into the rock where they buried themselves to the depth of a spear, and his upper teeth were hurled upwards with such a great velocity that they slaughtered a flight of sparrows, so that Bilch stood victorious over the apprentice boy with a great rain of dead birds falling all about her.
Whether this is true or not – one suspects some slight degree of exaggeration may have colored the facts – it is nevertheless a firm fact that the strength of washerwomen has become legendary for the best of all possible reasons. Each of them has the muscles of a very bear-wrestler, and a man may trust himself to the strength of those muscles in good conscience, whether in bed or out of it.
But we recall that Lord Onosh was but a Yarglat barbarian, and hence he was ignorant of the world's great literature, and in particular he was ignorant of the story of Bilch, and so was dismayed to find himself being hauled to the heights by mere women, and washerwomen at that.
Nevertheless, the Witchlord's anxieties passed once he reached those heights.
But the anxieties of his son were redoubled, for the Toxtethspeaking Guardians were everywhere, and their weapons were sharp, and Guest sensed them to be in a mood for war, and he was more uneasy than ever to find himself in such company with his own weapons lacking.
Still, all began well. Rooms had been prepared for the guests, including a big strongroom in which they could store their treasure chests. A guardroom adjoined that strongroom, so the Witchlord's most trusted boxers, wrestlers and bone-breakers could sit in guardianship of that treasure. With gold thus secured, the banquet began, and began well, and went along swimmingly till late into the night.
By which time Pelagius Zozimus had got very drunk, and was regaling all and sundry with a number of stories which he found intensely amusing, such as the tale of how he had once accidentally poisoned his companions with an ill-chosen fungus – a story which was not by any means amusing to those who had had to live through that near-catastrophe!
Nevertheless, the assembly received such stories in the best of all possible humors possible.
And, late in the night, as the banquet began to break up, all who were still sober enough to display any emotion whatsoever seemed still in excellent humor. Lord Onosh left early, saying he must check on his treasure then get to bed, for he was not as young as he used to be; but Guest sat long at the table with Zozimus and Sken-Pitilkin, and with the witches Zelafona and Bao Gahai.
And it seemed to Sken-Pitilkin – who had not joined the incautious Zozimus in overindulgence – that their hosts were uncommonly attentive in watching over wizards and witches alike, as if fearing that Lord Onosh might use these practitioners of power to make some move against the security of the mainrock
Pinnacle and the integrity of the Safrak Bank; and Sken-Pitilkin began to feel increasingly uneasy himself, and hoped that he would not find himself falling a victim to the paranoia of Bankers.
Chapter Twenty
Damsel: daughter of Banker Sod (the Governor of the Safrak
Bank). In appearance, she shares some of her father's attributes: pale skin heavily larded with white body- hair, golden eyes and golden teeth, a thicket of golden hair upon her head, and fingernails of jet black. But she has other attributes of her own which are most definitely female. Her perfume, for example, which suggests more the flesh than the flower. This comely lass is, in the Weaponmaster's estimation, seriously infatuated with the said Weaponmaster, and urgently desirous of making his erotic acquaintance.
Early in the evening, the young Weaponmaster Guest Gulkan was seated early in the evening with his brother Morsh Bataar on one side and the Rovac warrior Rolf Thelemite on the other. But Morsh made an early night of it, and Rolf drank so strenuously that he slid under the table at about the same time, and was removed by diligent servants.
In his loneliness, Guest was joined by Damsel, the daughter of Banker Sod. She he had seen from a distance during his earlier sojourn on Alozay, when she had been but newly nubile. Then, she had been rumored as a virgin; but her matured confidence made Guest disinclined to think her a virgin any longer.
Damsel was like her father Sod in that she was a pale-skinned person of iceman race, with black fingernails and thick white bodyhair, with the hair of her head bright in its gold, with her eyes yellow and her teeth being of a matching lustre. A strange combination! Yet, after long deprivation, Guest found her comely indeed.
These two lasted out the length of the banquet together, by which time Guest had come to the conclusion that Damsel was seriously infatuated with him, and was urgently desirous of making his erotic acquaintance. Therefore Guest did not resist too strenuously when at last Damsel of the buxom buttocks suggested he might like to take a break from his social exertions by resting himself on her bed.
Soon he was in her boudoir, testing the warm honey between her thighs. Perched upon his body, she oiled and oozed, gasped and clutched, and then – greatly to his disconcertment – squealed like a mouse in agony.
Had he hurt her? Apparently not, for she did not seek to dismount; and, once their wrestling was done, she proved an impeccable hostess. She fed him wine to follow that which he had drunk already at banquet, and listened with unstinting patience to his generously drunken boasts. For Guest, who had told Damsel of his past during the banquet, was now engaged in telling her his future.
'We will kill Khmar,' said Guest Gulkan.
'You can hardly defeat Khmar if you must come as beggars to the Safrak Islands.'
'If this is a beggar's life,' said Guest, complacently sated,
'I wish I'd turned beggar before.'
'So begging is enough. Or have you plans for our islands?'
'Plans?' said Guest, mystified.
'Plans for conquest.'
'Conquest?' said Guest, so surprised he almost felt sober.
'Us, to conquer Safrak? With what? Our tongues and teeth, perhaps.
Not swords, for certain. Our swords were all surrendered.'
'I think he truths,' said the woman Damsel, rising from the bed. 'They are no more than the fools they seem.'
'Who?' said Guest in bewilderment.
As Guest was gaping for meaning, men came crashing through paperwork screens, their advent teaching him the identity of at least one of the fools to whom Damsel had referred. Guest lurched from the bed. Liquor betrayed him. He was too slow to stop the first fist which slammed him, and was swiftly battered into submission by knuckles and elbows.
'So this is death,' said Guest, a blood-thickened voice speaking through thickened lips.
He tried to be strong, to be staunch – but found this difficult since he was naked. Staunchness in the face of death requires the dignity of sword and shield, or of armor, or of leathers and rags at a minimum.
'This is not yet death,' said one of Guest's captors, as the still-naked Weaponmaster was dragged through rockwall corridors.
