Babaroth: a town some two leagues (4,000 paces) north of the
confluence of the Pig and the Yolantarath. The "Battle of
Babaroth," as it is commonly known, took place at the Pig itself.
In that battle, the Witchlord Onosh defeated his enemies with the
help of his Rovac-born general Thodric Jarl. The revolutionary
leader Sham Cham, chiefest of the Witchlord's enemies, died when
an arrow took him in the eye, whereupon the Weaponmaster Guest
Gulkan led the revolutionary forces in a vigorous retreat.

                                                 * * *

        By the next day, Guest Gulkan had fully recovered from his
waking nightmare. Indeed, he disclaimed all knowledge of any such
nightmare, claiming that a good night's sleep had obliterated his
memories of the trauma of the previous evening.
        Guest celebrated his full recovery from nightmare's claims by
holding a little ceremony in honor of the Battle of Babaroth. In
that battle, Witchlord had defeated Weaponmaster; but, Guest
Gulkan having made himself his father's master, the Witchlord
Onosh was forced to kneel upon the earth -
        And to eat a small portion of that earth as a token of his
son's supremacy.
        Shortly thereafter, as Guest Gulkan's army marched through
the stretch of trees which lay between the Pig and the settlement
of Babaroth, Sken-Pitilkin was audacious enough to question Guest
Gulkan's wisdom.
        "Your father's fate lies in your hand," said Sken-Pitilkin.
"You have a choice of how you dispose of him. Is your choice to
murder him?"
        "I have no thought of murder in mind," said Guest.
        "Then," said Sken-Pitilkin, "for the life of me, I cannot
imagine what possessed you to make your father eat mud."
        "Why shouldn't I?" said Guest. "I have defeated him, and he
should acknowledge as much."
        "Yes," said Sken-Pitilkin. "But the manner in which you
compel his acknowledgement is likely to make it impossible for the
two of you to live in peace. If you push him too far, then he will
rise against you, even if his resistance serves merely to ensure
his own execution."
        "How should I treat him, then?" said Guest.
        "With affection," said Sken-Pitilkin. "With love. He is your
father, after all."
        "Love!" said Guest bitterly. "What love has he ever shown me?
I saved his life, yet even then he showed me no love."
        "You spared him," said Sken-Pitilkin. "Yet sparing a prisoner
is but a casual convention of war. It is hardly love."
        "No!" said Guest, with violence. "I save him! In the river,
the Yolantarath! Years ago!"
        Sken-Pitilkin was taken aback by the Weaponmaster's
vehemence. Was the young man losing his mind?
        "Guest," said Sken-Pitilkin, "you forget yourself. It was not
your father you saved. It was Eljuk. Your brother Eljuk."
        "Eljuk!" said Guest. "No, it was my father. I saw the future,
you see. There was my father, in the river, in the Yolantarath. He
was drowning, Pitilkin. That's why I went into the water. I
thought it was my father."
        "But it wasn't," said Sken-Pitilkin.
        "But I thought it was!" said Guest.
        Sken-Pitilkin absorbed this, thought about it, then said:
        "Well, Guest, whoever you thought you were saving, it was
Eljuk you saved. And, anyway, your father offered you a reward for
the saving. He was obligated. You could have asked for anything.
But you chose to ask for a ridiculous trifle, a bauble of a title.
You chose to be the Weaponmaster, which makes you a living joke,
for all the world knows you to be the master of no weapon."
        Thus did Sken-Pitilkin vent his scorn upon the Weaponmaster,
hoping to break the young man out of his mood of bitter self-pity.
For surely honest anger was preferable to such self-pity. But such
was Guest's distress that he absorbed Sken-Pitilkin's dire and
unpardonable insult without so much as the flicker of an eyelash.
        "I chose the title," said Guest, "because it was an ornament,
a bauble, a trifle, a toy. But as for the larger things, like my
life, say, like the woman Yerzerdayla - my father should have
given these for love."
        Now Sken-Pitilkin began to understand the depths of Guest's
suffering. After saving his brother Eljuk, the boy Guest had not
asked for any great thing by way of payment for services rendered,
for he thought his father should give him the great things out of
love. But his father had given him nothing.
        Now that he knew as much, Sken-Pitilkin exchanged Guest
Gulkan's company for that of his father.
        "My lord," said Sken-Pitilkin.
        "I'm no lord of yours," said the Witchlord Onosh. "You've
thrown in your lot with my son. Will you be my executioner,
Pitilkin? He'll have me killed in Gendormargensis."
        "I've seen no sign of that," said Sken-Pitilkin.
        "No sign!" said Lord Onosh. "I'm marching under guard,
disarmed and dishonored. Is that no sign of impending execution?"
        "After war, my lord," said Sken-Pitilkin, cautiously, "a
peace is best enforced by the disarming of one party to the
conflict."
        "Peace!" said Lord Onosh. "You call this peace? I call it
defeat, yes, and bloody slavery."
        "Was it slavery to be a judge at Ink?" said Sken-Pitilkin.
        "Ink!" said the Witchlord. "The affair at Ink was a mere
charade, a charade of justice."
        "Was it?" said Sken-Pitilkin. "I think not. Rather, I think
your son did you honor by making you an honest judge of an honest
affair of law."
        "You think me ambitious to be chief justice?" said the
Witchlord irritably. "Don't toy with me, Pitilkin!"
        "I think the fate of your family no toy to play with," said
Sken-Pitilkin. "As you helped me in my time of need, so I - "
        "You'll help me, will you?" said Lord Onosh.
        "That is my wish," said Sken-Pitilkin, making a partial
retreat into formality in the face of the Witchlord's undisguised
anger.
        "Then," said Lord Onosh, "if you truly wish to help me, then
take that country crook of yours, and use your powers of
levitation to send the boy Guest hurtling through the air till his
head smacks crash against a treetrunk. Smash him, Pitilkin! Well.
Will you? No. You've not blood, meat or marrow enough for murder.
You are but a paltry pox doctor, and you bring me what every pox
doctor brings - advice! Well, get on with it! Advise, and be
gone!"
        "My lord is kind to permit me the honor of advising him,"
said Sken-Pitilkin. "Let me then advise my lord to think back to a
time when he went hunting bandits in the hills near
Gendormargensis."
        "They are not hills, Pitilkin. They are mountains."
        "Hills. Mountains. Whatever. My lord went hunting. His son,
his much-beloved Morsh Bataar, fell and broke his leg."
        "And?" said Lord Onosh. "What do you want? You want reward
for fixing the leg? If so, you've left it a little late in the
asking!"
        "It is Guest who won reward," said Sken-Pitilkin. "Though he
could not swim, the boy risked his life in the Yolantarath. He
risked his life to save his brother Eljuk."
        "And was rewarded for it," said Lord Onosh.
        "Yes, my lord," said Sken-Pitilkin. "But when you rewarded
him, when you gave him the title of Weaponmaster, there was one
thing you did not know."
        "And what was that?" said Lord Onosh.
        "When the boy went to the river," said Sken-Pitilkin, "he
thought he was saving you. The boy had endured a vision. A vision
in which you drowned. So when he saw a man in the river, he went
to the water to save you."
        "Save me!" said Lord Onosh, in rage.
        "Why, yes, my lord," said Sken-Pitilkin, taken aback by the
Witchlord's anger. "He wished to save you. What else would he
wish?"
        "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 dwarf-son Glambrax from
being lynched by an irate public, for that pair had become
notorious as commercial pirates. By their diligent commercialism,
the two of them had first cornered the market in brewed acorns and
roast rats; and by speculative enterprise they had then cornered
the market in barley; and by virtue of owning the spoils of the
autumn harvest they had made themselves masters of all the city's
bakeries; and then had doubled the price of bread, then doubled it
again.
        Overcome by the success of their own folly, this pair of
monopoly capitalists had then doubled the price of bread for one
last and fatal time, and had been about to meet their mutual doom
at the hands of a wrathful consuming public when rescued by
Witchlord and Weaponmaster.
        Having rescued this unrescueworthy pair, and having seized
all barley in the city, and having given the wizards Zozimus and
Sken-Pitilkin the responsibility for marketing both bread and
barley at a fixed and reasonable price, and having thus won the
love and affection of the people of Locontareth - or, more
accurately, the subdued and potentially mutinous compliance of
those people - the Witchlord and then Weaponmaster then settled
themselves in that southern city, intending to gather their
strength, and in the spring to attack Khmar and to reclaim the
rule of the city of Gendormargensis and the Collosnon Empire as a
whole.
        But, of course, it was not going to be that easy.