Togura Poulaan: a would-be questing hero from Sung who became
one of Sken-Pitilkin's proteges at a time when Sken-Pitilkin was
living alone on Drum (Guest Gulkan having disappeared through a
Door in the Old City of Penvash).* * *
Now Guest Gulkan was a questing hero, a survivor of
encounters with Crabs and with therapists, a mighty swordsman
whose daring had defeated both the murkbeast and the crocodile.
Yet being such a person is no defense against ignominious
disaster, for the world's greatest warlord may yet step by
accident in a dogturd, or have a chamber pot emptied on his head
by a careless chambermaid at work in the upper storeys of a
building which overshadows the route of his promenade.
So it was that Guest, he who had confronted the dreaded
Ethnologists in their lair yet had lived to tell the tale, he who
had suborned the imperial strength of Plandruk Qinplaqus to his
service, he who had dueled with the Great God Jocasta and had
survived the treachery of the demon Italis, fell victim to the
lowest and meanest specimen of scuttling cowardice to be found
west of Galsh Ebrek and east of Chi'ash-lan.
The vile and villainous Togura Poulaan, a native of the pork-
eating nation of Sung, stole the bottle in which Guest was hard at
work on his self-interrogation; and, by the time Poulaan had
managed to carry the bottle home to his lair in Sung, he had
succeeded in damaging the bottle so badly by long abuse that it
ultimately broke, liberating Guest Gulkan from its interior.
That, at least, is the story as told by the Weaponmaster. It
must be admitted that the above-mentioned Poulaan has given a
different account of the matter, and claims that Guest destroyed
the bottle from within by incontinently tampering with a subtle
wizardly mechanism he found in its depths.
Be that as it may, the outcome was that Guest Gulkan was
carried north of the Greaters to Sung, a barbarous province of the
Ravlish Lands. In some quarters, it is alleged that he did not
leave Sung before committing a number of murders. Indeed, Poulaan
is said to have blamed the Weaponmaster for the death of his much-
beloved brother Cromarty, who was put to death in the town of Keep
in a singularly sanguinary manner.
Whatever the truth of the matter, it is certain that Guest,
having been abstracted from the Greater Teeth by the villainous
Poulaan, ended up in Sung, a dismal land of bogs and rockdumps in
Ravlish East, where peasants with provincial mudpuddle minds
dedicate themselves to the practice of obscure yet hideous
abominations. The inhabitants of this depraved place eat offal (in
addition to pork), rape sheep, commit vile abominations with
toads, and abominate themselves also with liquid dung. Nor is this
the limit of their delinquencies, for the people of Sung have
disgraced themselves down through the generations by systematic
inhospitality, the worst manifestation of which is that they
frequently mistake wandering scholars for lepers and endeavor to
stone them to death. They further display their debased iniquity
by giving houseroom to the skavamareen, an instrument of aural
obscenity which has long been outlawed in every civilized nation
from Tang to Chi'ash-lan. It must also be said that a debasement
equal to that of their morals has from time to time afflicted
their coinage; and from this great injury has been suffered by
innocent persons.
The capital of Sung is Keep, which has been mentioned above
as the site of the alleged murder of Cromarty, and Keep is notable
inasmuch as it is a town much undermined by gemrock tunnelling, to
the point where its very existence has been for some time
threatened. One has read that anciently great civilizations were
destroyed by the very processes which produced their wealth; and,
while Sung is neither great nor (properly speaking) an abode of
civilization, one foresees that its destruction will ultimately
befall it thanks to a similar dynamic.
However, despite the sundry derelictions of Keep, of Sung,
and of the people of Sung, Guest Gulkan escaped from that
barbarous province with skin and foreskin yet intact, and got
himself down to the coast.
He then headed toward D'Waith.
D'Waith is the seaport at the easternmost end of the Ravlish
Lands, and hence is the port which is handiest to Drum. One might
therefore have presumed Guest Gulkan to be making for the island
of Drum, intent on discovering whether the sagacious Sken-Pitilkin
yet survived on that island; and intent, too, on recruiting Sken-
Pitilkin's power, might, wisdom and all-round sagacity to his
cause.
But - not a bit of it!
Though Guest Gulkan had reached the full years of his
maturity, he had yet to acquire wisdom; and the proof of this is
that he had no thought of seeking the help of his tutelary wizard,
but planned instead to get transport from D'Waith to the Greaters,
and there to present himself once again to Elkor Alish, and this
time to make a full confession of the existence of the Circle of
the Partnership Banks.
Guest had been grievously shaken by his kidnapping. Having
been swept to Sung by the villainous Togura Poulaan, he had been
forced to acknowledge that the slow, elegant ballet of carefully
choreographed politicking in which he had been engaged on the
Greaters was fatuous. For Guest was not living in any great Age of
Peace in which slow measures might yet win the day. Instead, he
was living in an Age of Darkness, which favored the roughness of
the fist and the sharpness of the swordblade.
So Guest, who had previously been working on intricate plans
for the confidential recovery of the star-globe from the rivers of
Penvash, planned to now abandon subtlety and secrecy altogether,
and to confront Elkor Alish with the truth.
This is what he would say:-
"Just south of here, a short voyage distant from the
Greaters, a Door awaits us on the island of Stokos. It is the Door
of the Stokos Bank, a Door which is linked to similar Banks in
places as far afield as Chi'ash-lan and Dalar ken Halvar. Command
of this Circle of Banks would answer your most crying need:
possession of a source of wealth equal to the demands of financing
your war against the Confederation of Wizards. If you will but
give me an army, a small one, then I will wrest from the waters of
Penvash the device which commands these Doors, and place both the
device and myself at your service."
This was what Guest planned to say, for he had been compelled
to an acknowledgement of his own limits, of the uncertainties of
his previous elaborate scheming, and of the need to cut his
ambitions down to size, so his capacities would be equal to those
ambitions. Thus, whereas the Weaponmaster had previously set his
heart on mastering the Circle of the Partnership Banks in his own
right, now he was prepared to compromise, to make an alliance with
Elkor Alish, and to accept a subordinate role in any conquest of
that Circle.
But he was too late!
For, on reaching D'Waith, Guest found that a ship from
Androlmarphos was in port, and the news which had been brought by
the ship had already infected the whole town.
Drangsturm had fallen.
Words cannot encompass the enormity of this disaster.
Drangsturm, of course, was the trench of flame which the
wizards of the Confederation had built to guard the north of Argan
from the monsters of the south.
In earlier discussion with Elkor Alish, Guest Gulkan had
asked the Rovac warrior how he planned to master the defense of
the continent once he had overthrown the Confederation of Wizards.
To this, the black-bearded Rovac warrior had given a two-part
answer. First, he planned initially to compel a certain number of
wizards to serve him as his slaves, and to maintain the flames of
Drangsturm against invasion by the monsters of the Swarms. Second,
he intended to later quest to the heartland of the terror-lands of
the Deep South, and there to overthrow the Skull, the entity which
commanded the Swarms.
Such was the hubris of Elkor Alish, he who is said to have
been ultimately overpowered and slaughtered by certain of the
monsters of the Swarms - for, if rumor is to be believed, Alish
was killed by one of the Neversh while attempting to stem the
invasion of the monsters which forced their way to the north after
the destruction of Drangsturm.
When Guest Gulkan first heard the news of Drangsturm's fall,
Elkor Alish yet lived. But Guest did not think for a moment that
Alish, or any other warrior, could hold the Swarms in battle.
During his earlier adventuring round the Circle that began in the
Old City of Penvash, Guest had gone through a Door which opened
onto the wrong side of Drangsturm, the southern side, that side
which had always been the province of the monsters of the Swarms.
There he had encountered huge centipedes, from which he and his
companions of the moment had fled.
And Guest knew, in his heart of hearts, that there was little
to be done in the face of the Swarms except to run.
So, when Guest heard that Drangsturm had fallen, and that the
Confederation of Wizards had destroyed itself in a civil war which
had set one wizard against another, he realized that all of Argan
was doomed. Words could not encompass the enormity of this
disaster. The cities of Narba, Voice, Veda, Selzirk, Androlmarphos
and Runcorn lay open to the onslaught of the worst of mindless
marauding monsters - mindless monsters which were commanded by the
malign intelligence of the Skull of the Deep South.
So Guest knew then - and rightly knew - that all would
perish. The hotlands of the Far South would be overwhelmed. The
ricelands and the wheatlands, all would go. The forests of the
Chenameg Kingdom, the horselands of the Lezconcarnau Plains, the
walls of Selzirk the Fair and the boulevards of Voice - all would
fall to the forces of living death.
For three days, Guest Gulkan lingered in D'Waith, until he
had exhaustively researched the news of Drangsturm's fall.
Meantime, discrete enquiry established that Sken-Pitilkin yet
lived, and lived on Drum.
With news gathered, and with nothing of use yet left to do in
D'Waith, Guest Gulkan persuaded a fisherman to dare the ugly
waters of the Penvash Strait, that body of water which lies
between the Ravlish Lands and the continent of Argan. It is
toothed with rocks, haunted by sea serpents, and frequently beset
by storms of great severity - all of which threaten to drown the
mariner, or to wreck him upon shores where he will surely fall
victim to the savagery of the harp seal (or so it is said, though,
despite their bloodthirsty reputation, even harp seals have their
occasional defenders).
This was the body of water which Guest Gulkan dared, and the
dare brought him home to Drum, where the fisherman was rewarded by
Sken-Pitilkin (and was rewarded, too, by being made guest of
honor at a three-day poetry reading given by Sken-Pitilkin's sea
dragons - though whether he was entirely appreciative of this
compulsory honoring of his courage is debatable).
And on arrival -
On arrival in Drum, Guest Gulkan was seven days in
conversation with Hostaja Torsen Sken-Pitilkin, the wizard of
Skatzabratzumon who had been the tutor of his childhood and the
guide of his later years.
Now Sken-Pitilkin was a mighty wizard, the greatest wizard of
the order of Skatzabratzumon, and the first wizard in the history
of the world to have mastered the arts of controlled flight. But
the sorry truth is that Sken-Pitilkin had no remedy for the
misfortune which had befallen Argan. For he could not repair
Drangsturm, nor could he see any way in which the Swarms could be
prevented from sweeping north through Argan.
Sken-Pitilkin's gloomy prognosis was predictive of events.
For, in the months which followed, the Swarms completed the
conquest of Argan's western seaboard. Only a tiny fraction of the
populated flatlands held out against the monsters. This tiny
fraction was the province of Estar, where mountainous defense,
coupled with great force of arms, allowed the Swarms to be checked
and held.
For the moment.
During these months of disaster, Guest Gulkan and Sken-
Pitilkin were by no means inactive. Do not imagine that they sat
idly on Drum while the world went down to disaster! No, they
exerted themselves mightily, and a chronicle of their mutual
exploits would fill an encyclopaedia.
Their exploits began with a monumental air adventure which
took them to the city of Dalar ken Halvar, where Guest recovered
the cornucopia, and recovered too the yellow bottle which had been
devoted to transporting crocodiles for the benefit of
Parengarenga's entertainment industry.
Armed with the bottle, and with the cornucopia, and aided by
Sken-Pitilkin's mastery of airpower, the Weaponmaster and his
wizard then made war upon the Swarms to the extent which they
could.
But the cornucopia proved a singulary ineffective weapon for
use against the Swarms. Wizard and Weaponmaster had anticipated
unleashing floods of black slime against the armies of the Swarms,
but found these monsters scattered widely rather than bunched in
tight formations like the armies of humankind. Protected by their
very dispersion, the Swarms had no great concentrations which
could be destroyed by human agency.
Still, wizard and Weaponmaster did their best, until the very
cornucopia expired from sheer over-use - shrivelling to a warped
strip of something which looked like burnt black leather.
Then the pair essayed what rescue they could with the aid of
the yellow bottle. And one would think, given the enormous
capacity of that bottle, and given Sken-Pitilkin's command of the
air, that they should have been able to evacuate entire cities.
But it was not so. For the human material which they were
endeavoring to help was unruly in the extreme.
And here one is tempted to give a catalogue, that it may be
clearly understood by all of history that wizard and weaponmaster
did not shirk their duty when the world was in need. But such
self-defensive exculpatory cataloguing would fill many pages
needlessly, and add nothing to the body of wisdom. Let it merely
be recorded that, of the people whom wizard and Weaponmaster
saved, at least one in ten responded by trying to murder them in
an effort to win possession of the yellow bottle and its
commanding ring.
And inside the bottle itself - well, the behavior of the
refugees is better imagined than described. Like so many rats
trapped in a cage, they fought, they raped, they stole, they
murdered, and they waged warfare against each other. They fought
over religion, race and language. They came to blows over matters
concerning personal odours, and the food which one breed ate, and
the food which another breed didn't eat. Men killed each other in
fights over women and women killed each other in fights over men.
And when these refugees were set down on hard land - usually
in the Ravlish Lands - they were at the mercy of the sundry
bandits, warlords, slavers and professional murderers who made the
plunder of the helpless their speciality.
Furthermore, Sken-Pitilkin's stickbird began to be
increasingly menanced by the Neversh. The wizard of
Skatzabratzumon could outfly the Neversh, the lumbering winged
monsters which were the greatest of the Swarms, but they seemed to
be anticipating his movements. He would fly from one, only to find
his flight interesected by another at a distance of a hundred
leagues. As the danger increased, Sken-Pitilkin realized that the
Skull of the Deep South was distantly aware of the tiny stickbird
which was nimbling in and out of the lands of its conquest, and
was doing its best to destroy this adversary.
So Guest and Sken-Pitilkin were forced to become selective,
to plan their raids carefully, to limit their flights, and to fly
for the most part by night, when the Swarms did not fly.
It was then that Sken-Pitilkin began to hatch a grandiose
plan - which was, to gather in as many wizards as he could, and
base them upon Drum, and set up a new Confederation with himself
as its head.
To the sagacious wizard of Skatzabratzumon, this seemed the
most logical plan in all the world. The Swarms were conquering
Argan, and were threatening the northern continent of Tameran and
the eastern Ravlish Lands. It was therefore surely supremely
logical that the surviving wizards of the Confederation should
base themselves defensively upon Drum, a substantially fortified
island set in a wild wash of water which was at or near the
intersection of Argan, Tameran and the Ravlish Lands.
But this scheme met with little success.
One fraction of the Confederation, finding the city of
Androlmarphos to be defensible, had made that city its own, and
declined to exchange its comforts for the windswept barrens of
far-distant Drum. Others had fled east, taking ship, and
voyaging across the Inner Waters and past the Stepping Stone
Islands to the Ebrell Islands. They declared the Ebrells to be a
base more logical than Drum, for it was closer to the Breach (and,
therefore, closer to the Shackle Mountains and the all-important
Cave of the Warp).
And when Sken-Pitilkin did meet isolated wizards who had not
thrown in their lot with the rival Confederations arising in
Androlmarphos or on the Ebrells, why, he found that many bore a
grudge against him for things he was alleged to have done in the
past, and for crimes he was alleged to have committed against the
Confederation; and more than one held Sken-Pitilkin to be
personally responsible for the downfall of Drangsturm, and (though
there was neither truth nor logic to any such accusation) tried to
kill him on that account.
In the end, Sken-Pitilkin was able to bring a bare one dozen
wizards to Drum. That dozen included the ethnologist Brother Fern
Feathers. Fortunately, Guest failed to recognized Fern Feathers;
and Sken-Pitilkin, who was fully aware of Guest's attitude toward
the scientific researches of wizards, warned the ethnologist that
he should do his best to conceal the scholarly labors of his
past. Therefore, when Guest asked Fern Feathers to declare his
history, that wizard said he had long labored as a slug chef; and
with this declaration Guest was contented.
The dozen wizards brought to Drum also included (much to
Guest's delight) the Yarglat wizard Ontario Nol; and (to Guest's
yet greater delight) Eljuk Zala Gulkan. In the years in which
Guest and Eljuk had been separated, Eljuk had attempted his Tests
for a second time: and, in the Cave of the Warp, had succeeded in
making the necessary alliance which made him a wizard in his own
right.
But what could a dozen wizards do against the Swarms? What
could they do when they were refugees upon Drum, a bare and barren
island which was hard-pushed to feed itself and its sea dragons?
On their own, they were nothing.
Guest therefore bent his attention once more to the business
of recovering the star-globe, and to this purpose he dared the
hazards of the Old City of Penvash, and spent many days up to his
neck in the waters of the river which ran south from that Old
City. But, search as he might, Guest never managed to recover the
star-globe which could have opened the Doors of the Partnership
Banks - even though he coerced Sken-Pitilkin and his fellow-
wizards into assisting him in this hunt.
Concluding that the star-globe might well have been removed
from the river by an earlier treasure hunter, Guest then realized
the thing might be anywhere in the world. And how was he to find
it when the world was so vast, and in such disorder?
It was then that Guest, for the first time in his life, began
to make a systematic effort to exploit the Gift of Seeing which
was a part of his inheritance. But in these efforts he failed
absolutely.
For, whereas in early youth Guest had routinely had
premonitions, and had from time to time endured visions of the
future, and had seen things which were yet to be, and had seen too
those things which were distant, in his maturity this facility had
perished entirely.
There is nothing unusual in this.
For the Weaponmaster's life had been, in many ways, one long
exercise in selective amnesia. If he had not been able to suppress
the memory of the pain of his wounding at Babaroth, when his foot
had been cruelly wounded by a bamboo spike, how then would he have
been able to valorously prosecute his later battles? If he had not
been able to subdue the memories of a mighty avalanche which he
had used to crush, grind and pulverise his father's army during
the course of Tameran's civil war, how then would he have been
able to sleep at nights?
Guest had forced himself to suppress his memories of the
mauling he had endured in an arena of Chi'ash-lan, when the Great
Mink itself had shredded his arms and legs, sentencing him to four
long years of humiliating convalescence.
So.
To remember was terror. To be aware was to suffer. And, after
a lifetime of blunting self-awareness and suppressing memory,
Guest was entirely shut off from those wild and undeveloped Powers
which (given the tutelage of a shaman or similar) he might
potentially have developed into something useful.
So it was that that Guest was forced to fall back on routine
method for his interrogation of the world; and, year after year,
he was often to be found in D'Waith, or in Favanosin, or in Port
Domax, or in the other cities to which he persuaded Sken-Pitilkin
to fly him.
And, at last, Guest learnt of the location of the star-globe.
It had been uplifted from a river in Penvash by one Yen Olass
Ampadara, and was presently said to be on the island of Carawell.
And Carawell, the chiefest island of the Lesser Teeth, was
virtually on Guest Gulkan's doorstep.