Guest Gulkan: the Yarglat barbarian otherwise known as the
Weaponmaster. He dueled his father for possession of the Collosnon
Empire - this civil war so weakening that empire that it was
conquered by the interloper Khmar. Guest Gulkan then united with
his father to fight Khmar - but lost.
        Retreating in defeat, father and son sought refuge on the
island of Alozay, which they were constrained to conquer. Conquest
of Alozay made them masters of one of the Doors of the Circle of
the Partnership Banks, embroiling them in an unrelenting struggle
for the mastery of that Circle.
        The latest entity to enter this struggle is Shabble, the
miniature sun which has lately made an alliance with those demons
which serve the Great God Jocasta. Shabble itself is a servant of
the Holy Cockroach, is determined to conquer the world for that
Cockroach, and wishes to use the Circle of the Partnership Banks
to expedite this conquest.

                                  * * *

        For Guest Gulkan, the flight from Drum to the Old City was
terrifying. He was bucked across the sky without the slightest
hope of controlling his own destiny, and in hot pursuit was the
outraged Shabble.
        The Old City came into sight below them. Sken-Pitilkin sent
his stickbird hurtling down out of the skies. As they slammed into
the earth, Guest Gulkan threw himself out of the stickbird and
raced for the Door. He slammed the star-globe into the socket of
the marble plinth on which stood the steel arch of the Door. The
archway filled with humming mercury.
        Guest Gulkan bounded up onto the plinth, drew his sword, then
leapt through the Door, with his sword braced to strike down
whatever enemy confronted him. He found himself alone in a hot and
insect-humming eucalyptus forest. Without tarrying for further
inspection, he dared his way through the Door again.
        Of course he did not return to the Old City, for the Door was
not like one which opens into a bar or a brothel. Rather, it is
best construed as a series of one-way valves arranged in a Circle,
and by bearing this model in mind one can easily understand the
Weaponmaster's progress.
        On leaping through that Door a second time, leaving the
eucalyptus forest behind him, Guest emerged onto a sunstruck
desolation of sand. He mistook it for desert - then blinked at the
sundazzling sea, and realized it was beach. Beach? A quick scan
proved it to be an island.
        Guest Gulkan had time for no more than that one quick scan,
for Shabble came bursting through the humming screen of the Door
before he could engage in a more elaborate survey of his
surroundings.
        "Maraka daga dok?" said the seething Shabble.
        Guest knew Shabble to be fast-striking, able to outpace a
human in any martial endeavor. Yet if he could somehow distract
the impetuous bubble of wrath, then perhaps he could plunge back
through the Door and made his escape.
        As Guest was so thinking, that Door snapped out of existence.
The shimmering silver screen in the metal archway vanished, and
was replaced with hot and cloudless sky.
        "Daga!" demanded Shabble. "Daga dok!"
        "What?" said Guest, afraid for his life and so striving
mightily for comprehension.
        "I said," said Shabble, reverting to Toxteth, "Where is my
toy?"
        Guest Gulkan was quite out of the habit of speaking Toxteth,
so it took him a disconcerting interval to comprehend even this
simplicity. But with comprehension achieved, Guest gladly
explained that the star-globe was - most naturally! - back in the
Old City of Penvash.
        "And you," said Guest, "should be heading for that Old City
immediately, for obviously the globe has been taken out of its
pocket, and every moment you waste here sees the thing slip
further from your grasp."
        "I can still spare a moment to burn you alive!" said the
wrathful Shabble.
        "If I am to be firewood," said Guest, "then burn away."
        In answer, Shabble stung the Weaponmaster with a bolt of
singing fire. It burnt a smoking hole in his skin. The stench of
burnt flesh and singed hairs rose hot to his nostrils. For a
moment, Guest gaped at his wound. Then the pain hit hard, driving
him into the sea. But all the waters of Moana were not sufficient
to quench the pain of that wound. As Guest soaked it, Shabble
hummed round his head like a mutant wasp. The buzzing globe of
malevolence bobbed and bounced, hitting the water repeatedly,
sending stinging spray in all directions.
        But Guest paid no heed to Shabble because his pain was so
great. Indeed, the Weaponmaster was in such palpable agony that
Shabble backed off somewhat. Guest, divining that the bubble might
have realized it had gone further than it truly wanted to, began
to recover a degree of self-possession. As he began to master his
pain, he took advantage of his recovering self-possession to stage
deliberate theatricals of ever-intensifying agony.
        "Are you hurt?" said Shabble anxiously.
        Guest responded with groans, as if the Great Mink itself was
in the process of tearing off his toes one by one.
        "Are you really really hurt?" said Shabble.
        Guest fell to sand and thrashed in an agony which was nine-
tenths simulated. All the while he watched Shabble covertly from
the corner of his eye.
        The response surprised even the Weaponmaster
        For, after a bare ten breaths and a heartbeat, Shabble lost
interest in the Weaponmaster's prolonged suffering, and went to
investigate the sea, disappearing from sight beneath the waters.
        This stunned Guest, who did not quite follow Shabble's
reasoning. Shabble saw that Guest appeared to be in grievous pain;
and, knowing humans in such condition were no fun at all, Shabble
had gone to look at the coral and play with the fishes. Shabble's
earlier anxiety had not been feigned. But Guest had been wrong to
assume that anxiety to be symptomatic of vast reserves of empathy.
Shabble had been designed and built as a toy, and so had the
emotional resources appropriate to the nursery rather than those
befitting grand opera.
        While Guest did not quite realize how and why his tactics had
failed, he did see that his operatic performance was getting him
nowhere. So he gave up his groaning and sat on the sand clutching
his arm - which still hurt like hell.
        Then Guest waited.
        He waited for Shabble to emerge from the waters.
        But Shabble did not emerge.
        Guest was profoundly puzzled by this, for Shabble's behavior
was contrary to human experience. A human, on arriving abruptly on
a coral island in the company of a grievously wounded companion,
does not proceed immediately to extended underwater tourism. But,
again, Shabble's performance would not have been out of place in
the nursery, for Shabble had been made as a toy for children, not
as a replacement for a parent.
        In the absence of any mature adult concern from Shabble - who
surface briefly once or twice, but immediately splashed down under
the water again - Guest at last got to his feet and sauntered over
to the door. In the white coral sand - sand whiter than eggshell,
whiter than bone - he saw only one single set of footprints. They
were his own.
        Guest confronted the Door.
        "Open!" said Guest, in his most commanding voice.
        But the Door remained firmly closed.
        With some difficulty - his arm was grievously sore, and
hampered his movements - Guest climbed onto the plinth and
examined the Door in detail. He was careful not to let any part of
his person intersect the plane of the arch, since he had no wish
to lose head or hand to a sudden reopening of the Door.
On a whim, Guest took the heavy mazadath from around his
neck, and displayed it to the Door, and tried to command it again:
        "Open!"
        But, as he had expected, nothing happened. He slung the
mazadath round his neck once again, feeling its heavy silver
glissade across his sweat-slick skin. The use of the thing, it
seemed, was to preserve his life in the realms of the World Beyond
which lay beyond the Veils of Fire in the Cave of the Warp in the
Shackle Mountains; and Guest, not for the first time, was
intensely irritated that a thing which he had carried so far and
for so many years should be possessed of such a specialized use -
and was totally useless in his present circumstances.
        The lancing sunlight blicked sharps of light from the
scattering of sand on the marble of the plinth. On impulse, Guest
Gulkan touched his lips to the outer metal of the arch, finding it
strangely cool. He licked it. Tasted salt. The arch had been
salted by the tropical sea.
        As far as Guest could tell, the arch and the island alike
showed no sign of prior use.
        Or did it?
        Toward one end of the island, a bare stone's throw distant,
was the turtle-hump of a rowing boat, which Guest had not noticed
at all in the first startlement of his shocked arrival and
Shabble's subsequent attack.
        Now, Guest jumped down to the sand and strode toward the
rowing boat. He was conscious of the heat, which brought back
memories of Untunchilamon and Injiltaprajura. But Injiltaprajura
had been lush with sprinting water, alive with monkeys and
tropical birds, aswarm with cockroaches and mosquitoes. This
island, by comparison, was tiny. Bare as a picked bone.
        Guest reached the overturned rowing boat. A few streaks of
blistered ochre paint had yet to be elementally stripped from the
weathered gray of its planking. Guest lifted it, flipped it over,
and revealed bare bones and a broken oar. Guest estimated the
bones. Skull, vertebrae, ribs, pelvis, thigh bone and shank bone,
carpals and teeth. A man had died here, and Guest was
uncomfortably reminded of the possibility that he might die
likewise.
        Guest stood in the sunblind quiet, taking stock. The shit-
brown mud of the Old City was still smeared on his shins, though
it was wet no longer, for it had dried and hardened swiftly in the
heat. Guest stood stork-like on one leg, brushed at the mud, and
peeled away a leaf. It was a mottled brown and yellow, its
substance frayed, its skeleton showing through its flesh.
        "Grief of a bitch," muttered Guest.
        Then kicked away the bones, used the broken oar to prop up
the rowing boat - there was nothing else by way of shade on the
island - and took shelter. He still had the yellow bottle, and
still had the ring which commanded it, so it would have been the
easiest thing in the world to take refuge within. But Guest was
waiting for Shabble.
        After an unconscionable delay, Shabble grew bored with
exploring the island's coral reef, and came to see how the
Weaponmaster was faring.
        "How are you?" said Shabble.
        "What would you care?" said Guest.
        It was not at all what he had planned to say, but the words
came out anyway. His burnt arm felt like a continuous branding
operation was in progress, and Guest was hard-put to ignore the
pain. It brought back uncomfortable memories which he had done his
best to rigorously suppress - starting with the spiking of his
foot in the Battle of Babaroth and working through to some of the
more life-threatening of the beatings he had suffered at the hands
of the soldiers of the Mutilator.
        "I'm your friend," said Shabble. "Of course I care."
        "My friend!" said Guest.
        "Why, of course," said Shabble. "I came to Alozay in
friendship, didn't I?"
        "You could have fooled me!" said Guest, thinking the bubble
quite mad in its delinquency.
        But, as Shabble's story began to emerge in full detail, Guest
slowly started to understand.
        Shabble and Guest had first met on Untunchilamon, during the
Weaponmaster's wild adventures on that island. Guest's days on
Untunchilamon had been so confused, so hectic, so full of turmoil,
that he these days found it hard to connect their scattered
fragments in any coherent fashion. To the Weaponmaster, Shabble
had been just one more of the many spectacles of that island,
something to rank alongside the Crab, the wealth fountains, the
analytical engine, the therapist Schoptomov, the bullman Log
Jaris, the flying claws, the demon Binchinminfin, and the pink-
eyed albino who had been such a mighty sorcerer.
        Yet Shabble, it seemed, still remembered in detail every
moment of that long-ago encounter, and thought that the deeds in
which they had been involved (they had, for example, raided the
Pink Palace of Injiltaprajura together, seeking to put an end to
the transitory rule of the demon Binchinminfin) made them comrades
in arms.
        Later, Guest and Shabble had been incarcerated in the yellow
bottle during their transit from Drum to Drangsturm. On that
journey, Guest had spent a great many days in exhaustive
conversation with Shabble. Guest had simply been passing the time,
but Shabble had been doing something entirely different. Shabble,
it transpired, had been nourishing the development of a beautiful
friendship.
        As Shabble's tale unfolded, Guest began to understand how the
jade-green monsters of the Circle of the Partnership Banks had
been able to suborn Shabble to their will. They had not discovered
a new method of torturing or coercing Shabble. No. They had got to
the bubble through its weakest point - its need for friends and
friendship.
        In Chi'ash-lan, the jade-green monster which named itself the
demon Ko had indoctrinated Shabble. The demon Ko had told the
bubble of bounce that the star-globe had been restored to the
island of Alozay (which was true), that Guest and Sken-Pitilkin
planned to seek the control of the Circle (which was also true),
and that they were eagerly waiting for Shabble to assist them by
bringing the Cult of Cockroach to the populations of the lands of
the Doors.
        The demon Ko and its colleagues had obviously miscalculated.
They must have thought that Shabble would arrive on Alozay, hot
with enthusiasm for missionary work, and that the combination of
Shabble's eagerness and flame-throwing abilities would leave Guest
and Sken-Pitilkin with no choice but to co-operate.
        But of course, by the time Shabble reached Alozay, Guest and
Sken-Pitilkin had fled with the star-globe. This had been the
bitterest of all possible disappointments for Shabble. The bubble
had precious little use for power, or gold, or women, or opium, or
any of the other things men commonly fight for. But Shabble
wanted friendship. Needed it. Valued it above all else. And
Shabble, having been told that friends awaited on Alozay, was
furious to realize it had been victimized by lies.
        "You realized the demons had been lying to you?" said Guest.
        "Of course," said Shabble.
        "So what did you do?"
        "I blasted the demon!" said Shabble, positively squeaking
with excitement. "I blasted that thing Italis! I blasted it!"
        "Really?" said Guest.
        "Really and truly," said Shabble.
        "So it's dead."
        "Well," said Shabble, guardedly. "Not exactly."
        "What do you mean, not exactly? What happened? What happened
when you blasted it?"
        "Well," said Shabble, "what happened was that it laughed."
        "It laughed?"
        "Yes," said Shabble, sounding mightily crestfallen. "It
laughed at me. It told me to go bounce."
        "So what did you do then?"
        "I blasted it again. But it didn't make much difference."
        "So then you chased me," said Guest. "That wasn't very fair,
was it? To get angry with the demon then go chasing after me on
that account?"
        Shabble tried to avoid the question, but Guest pressed the
bubble hard, and in the end it had to concede that it had been
naughty.
        "Naughty!" said Guest. "You were rather more than naughty!
I'm stuck here on this hellhole of an island, and there's no way
off that I can see!"
        "You've got the Door," said Shabble.
        "But it's closed!" said Guest.
        "Well," said Shabble, "there's, uh, there's this boat."
        "This rowing boat?" said Guest. "Are you mad? It's got cracks
in it which I could just about crawl through."
        "Well, someone came here in it," said Shabble.
        "From a sinking ship, maybe," said Guest. "Or maybe they were
marooned. But judging by the evidence, they didn't get much
further!"
        With that, Guest indicated the bones which he had found
beneath the rowing boat.
        "Well, I don't see what you're so worried about," said
Shabble. "You've got the bottle, you've got the ring, there's
food, there's water, they told me that on Alozay."
        "Who told you?" said Guest.
        "The one with big ears," said Shabble. "Your father."
        "Neither of us has big ears," said Guest. "We have normal
ears. Everyone else has an undersized issue."
        "If you say so," said Shabble. "But you've still got food,
you've stood got water, what else do you need?"
        "All kinds of things!" said Guest. "Women, to start with."
        "Oh," said Shabble, crestfallen.
        Shabble knew that men liked women, and had a theoretical
knowledge of the reasons why, but Shabble remained unconvinced of
the validity of the theories. Shabble had once maintained a small
harem, but many nights of sleeping with women and exploring their
intimacies had convinced the bubble that the whole experience was
grotesquely overrated. Shabble much preferred sleeping amidst the
flames of a fire (for fire was pretty, and gave Shabble melodious
dreams), or sleeping with a balloon (for Shabble thought balloons
were happy creatures), or sleeping alongside a billiard ball
(which gave Shabble the comforting illusion of having the company
of one of its own kind).
        "You wouldn't understand," said Guest moodily.
        "Oh, I understand," said Shabble. "You miss your
Yerzerdayla."
        "Yerzerdayla?" said Guest.
        "The woman," said Shabble. "You know! She was locked in a
pod, you were all set to rescue her!"
        "Oh," said Guest. "Yes, yes, so I was."
        But the truth was that the Weaponmaster had long ago forsaken
Yerzerdayla. She was a figure from his adolescence, and in these
the years of his maturity he had almost forgotten her. The woman
Penelope meant much more to him, for it was Penelope who had
comforted him during the four years of his convalescence in Dalar
ken Halvar - but even Penelope, it seemed, was lost to him.
        As for Yerzerdayla - why, on his latest sojourn on Alozay,
Guest had been so busy getting drunk and eating horse meat, or
planning strategy and dealing with demons, that he had never
thought of the woman for so much as a moment. Long ago, he had
conceived the notion of rescuing her from the pod in the Hall of
Time in which he had seen her last, but all such thoughts had long
since passed from his head.
        Still, Guest thought it unwise to confess as much to Shabble,
for he feared the bubble might be a romantic. If so, then it would
think less of Guest for his forgetfulness. So Guest put his head
in his hands and moaned, in what he hoped was a convincing manner:
        "Oh! Oh! My poor Yerzerdayla!"
        Then much more of the same followed, until Shabble gallantly
declared that it would fly back to the Old City in the Penvash
Peninsular, and find the star-globe (wherever that might have got
to) and reopen the Door so Guest could continue round this
particular Circle.
        "Or," said Shabble, "I could find Sken-Pitilkin and get him
to fly here."
        "But that's impossible," said Guest. "For a start, you don't
know where we are to start with, and even if you did, you'd never
be able to get here again."
        "I know exactly where we are," said Shabble.
        "How?" said Guest, wondering if Shabble perhaps had some
anciently derived knowledge of the previously unexplored Circle
into which Guest had so precipitately ventured.
        "From the sun," said Shabble simply.
        Then the bubble declared that they were some hundreds of
leagues north-west of Untunchilamon; that it had calculated their
position to a nicety; that its agility at celestial navigation
would permit it a swift passage back to Penvash; and that it would
have no trouble whatsoever in guiding Sken-Pitilkin back to Guest
Gulkan's island.
        Guest then expected the bubble of bounce to go whistling up
into the heavens, hastening with all possible force to the Old
City. But Shabble did not. Shabble wanted to chat, to talk, to
play some more in the water, to invent names for the fishes, to
speculate on the size of the clouds. And Guest, realizing that he
was dependent upon Shabble for his rescue, had no alternative but
to play along with these games.
        At last, after a full two days of play - an excessive
indulgence, doubtless, but Shabble had been held prisoner by the
demon Ko for upwards of a year, and so was in a mood to enjoy its
liberty to the full - Shabble gave Guest a parting present. The
parting present was a full-length massage of the Weaponmaster's
back, and Guest had to admit that Shabble did it very well.
        Then the bubble set forth.
        It did not soar upwards, but, rather, went bouncing across
the sea, skip by skip. On seeing Shabble adopt this slow and self-
indulgent mode of transport, Guest groaned. He had a vision of the
bubble slow-hop-skipping all the way across Moana, a process which
would surely take days.
        "Grief of gods!" said Guest.
        Then made a moody promenade around his minuscule island, then
withdrew - not for the first time - to the yellow bottle. With
Shabble gone, Guest began to make a methodical assessment of his
assets. He had food, including more siege dust than he could have
eaten in a thousand years, and he had water. And, toward the end
of his search, Guest realized he also had a book.
        The book was a book of verbs.
        To be precise, the book was Strogloth's Compendium of
Delights, that hateful manual of irregularities which had vexed,
perplexed and persecuted Guest's boyhood. Guest glared at the
thing, then laid rough hands upon it, determined to rend it and
tear it, to rough it and burn it.
        Then he stopped himself.
        He was all alone, marooned without women or companions,
deserted by even Shabble. In this exile, nothing remained to him
but the exercise of his sword and this one, single, solitary book.
        "But," said Guest, "why did it have to be this book?"
        Why not a pillow book, or a potentially useful Book of Maps,
or a great Book of Battles, or (he had raw materials in plenty) a
great Book of Cookery?
        "I blame Sken-Pitilkin," muttered Guest.
        For who else did he know who was in love with the verbs? Who
else had the motive, the means and the opportunity to smuggle such
a reprehensible object into the yellow bottle? But, regardless of
who was to blame, the facts were the facts, and Guest was stuck
with the facts. He was marooned on a desert island, and the sole
companion of his maroonment was the most hateful book in all the
world: Strogloth's monomaniacal compendium of the world's
irregular verbs.
        Oh doom of dooms!
        Oh fates worse than death!
        Guest Gulkan saw the future, and he shuddered.