Inner Sanctum: the most secret of all the abditories of the
Safrak Bank. The Sanctum lies upstairs from the Hall of Time, and
the sole approach to the Sanctum is guarded by Icaria Scaria Iva-
Italis, the Keeper of the Inner Sanctum. Its contents - so far as
Witchlord and Weaponmaster have been able to discover - are
restricted to an uninteresting marble plinth sustaining an
inscrutable steel archway.

                                                 * * *

        "Where's my blanket?" said Sod, when Witchlord and
Weaponmaster made their return to Jezel Obo, the Sky Stratum,
topmost level of the mainrock Pinnacle.
        "Yes," said Glambrax, "and his chamber pot. I have need of
one, and so does he."
        "There is the living rock outside," said Ulix of the Drum,
waving at one of the floor-to-ceiling windows with his pelican-
headed walking stick.
        "Then let Sod loose," said Lord Onosh, "and let him dung upon
the living rock of the heights of the Pinnacle."
        Sod was released, and his example proved inspirational, for
the whole company took itself outside.
        The uttermost top of the mainrock was a perilous place.
The rock fell away steeply from the southern and northern windows
of the weirding room which held plinth and arch, and none but a
mountaineer in his folly could have ventured such steepness. To
east and west, the crested rock was narrow, and rough.
        In his weariness, Guest was uneasy to be out and about on
such a perilous height, and was glad once they were back inside,
back in the uppermost chamber of the mainrock Pinnacle.
        That chamber was as it had been previously - a big room of
disappointing emptiness, its airiness housing nothing of worth,
not even a clipped coin, a bent pearl or a slightly despoiled
virgin. It was devoted to the sheltering of plinth and arch.
        "Sod has been telling me of this plinth and arch," said
Glambrax.
        "Really," said Guest. "And what has he told you?"
        "He has told me," said Glambrax, "that this archway is the
eye of the Sacred Needle, and is symbolic of the pattern which the
moon weaves through the sky, which pattern is matched by that of
the shoaling of the fish which swim in the Swelaway Sea. That at
least is what Sod says. He claims, then, that this Eye is a sacred
monument, an altar of his religion. Nothing more and nothing
less."
        Glambrax voiced this in the Eparget of the Yarglat, and Sken-
Pitilkin kept up a running translation in the Galish. Ulix of the
Drum spoke many languages, as Sken-Pitilkin knew well, but the
servile Thayer Levant was monolingual. So, out of pity for Levant's
crippled condition, the wizard of Skatzabratzumon translated all
into Levant's native Galish.
        With the account of Sod's claims translated, Ulix of the Drum
laughed, then said, using the Galish for the purpose:
        "There is more to this thing than there appears to be."
        So saying, Ulix gestured at the steel archway with his
pelican-headed walking stick.
        "More?" said Guest. "But what? Is it hollow? Is there gold
and jewels and stuff inside?"
        "Investigate," said Ulix. "Investigate, and find out."
        Given that invitation, Guest Gulkan jumped up onto the marble
plinth, walked round the steel archway, walked through that
archway, kicked it, put his ear to it and listened to it, then
said in decisive conclusion:
        "I know what this is. It is art. I have heard about art.
Sken-Pitilkin has tutored me in its intricacies. Art, or so he
says, is great lumps of metal twisted beyond utility, then set
upon marble for the general admiration of an uncomprehending
public. This fits the description, does it not? This then is art,
without a doubt - high art, like unto the works which are held
within the tubework halls of the fair city of Veda."
        "There is art within Veda, true," said Ulix of the Drum,
impressed with Guest's knowledge - though he would have been less
impressed had he known that Guest was incapable of placing the
city of Veda upon any map, even though Sken-Pitilkin had told him
of its wonders some five thousand times at least. "But this, my
young friend, this is not art."
        "Then what is it?" said the Witchlord Onosh.
        His query was voiced in the Yarglat tongue, but the Lord of
the Silver Pelican responded in the Galish, with Sken-Pitilkin
again providing the translation.
        "My lord," said Ulix of the Drum, "this is a Door. It opens
unto foreign realms, as a door of ordinary make opens from one
room to another."
        Guest, still standing astride the plinth, cast a sharp glance
in Sod's direction. Banker Sod's yellow teeth were bared, and he
looked very much the carnivore, and a hungry carnivore at that.
        "Have a care for Sod," said Guest, warning his father. "For
his temper is up, and he may do something foolish in a moment."
        "Has he a weapon?" said Lord Onosh.
        "He has not so much as a pin about his person," said
Glambrax. "Unless he can kill with his hands, he is harmless."
        "If he attempts such a killing," said Lord Onosh, "then he
will die on my sword. Perhaps he will. For a great and perhaps
contagious foolishness seems on the loose today. This business of
a door - is that not foolishness? What we have here is plain. It
is plain, it is clear to the touch and the eye. There's no door
here. There's only an arch."
        "The arch, my lord, is the door," said Ulix of the Drum. "For
when it is opened, one may then step through from this room to a
far and foreign country."
        "And step back again?" said Lord Onosh.
        "In a manner of speaking, my lord," said Ulix. "One must
travel in a great circle, stepping from city to city, from nation
to nation. But the journey can be accomplished in less time than a
dog requires for its mating, and I have made that journey myself,
many times."
        "Really," said Lord Onosh, making no attempt to conceal his
disbelief. "Then if this be a door to escape, then - why, man, the
door is yours! If the world lies but a step from this chamber,
then go make that step - and vanish, if your choice is such."
        "Ah, my lord," said Ulix, "but the door is not yet open. At
the moment, the door is closed."
        "Then open it!" said Lord Onosh.
        "Ah," said Ulix of the Drum, "but to do that I must have in
my possession a certain globe of stars, which I do not see kept
here anywhere."
        "Then we will find it," said Lord Onosh. "Sod! Have you
hidden a star, a constellation or a cloudy galaxy in your
blankets?"
        "I have not," said Sod. "And it is only a madman who would
talk such nonsense of stars. For the stars belong to the sky. Only
a child would think to trap them down to earth, far less to snare
them in a globe of glass."
        "A globe of glass, is it!" said Lord Onosh.
        "I presume that is what this Ulix-thing is trying to
describe," said Sod stiffly. "For if his conceit is a globe of
stars, then surely the globe must be of glass for those stars to
be visible. But he is mad, plainly, so it may as likely be that he
has a globe of wood in mind, or a globe of stone. You might ask
him that question, if you wish to indulge him in his madness."
        "It is a globe of glass," said Ulix of the Drum. "And," said
he, pointing his pelican in the general direction of the Banker's
heart, "Sod knows as much, and has doubtless fondled it into some
secret privacy. Sken-Pitilkin! Have your prize student slit Sod's
wrists! If he tells before he bleeds to death, why then, we'll
bind his wounds and let him live. If not, why - there's plenty of
other Bankers fit for interrogation."
        Sken-Pitilkin thought this a little harsh, but Guest had
heard. Thinking it a most excellent suggestion, the Weaponmaster
jumped down from the plinth unbidden.
        "Enough!" said Sod, backing away from a knife-bearing Guest
Gulkan. "I'll tell! It's Italis, Iva-Italis, I gave it to the
demon. The globe, the stars, the demon's got it."
        "Nonsense!" said Guest. "The demon's mine, sworn in alliance,
my creature. It wants my help, it needs it. You're a liar, Sod!"
        But Sod protested that he was no liar, and that the globe of
stars in question truly had been given into the keeping of the
demon Icaria Scaria Iva-Italis. So it was that that whole party
went to interrogate the demon.
        In truth, the demon of Safrak did have the star-globe in its
possession. But did not want to give it up! For the demon was not
yet sure of the worthiness of Guest Gulkan's oath to rescue the
Great God Jocasta, and had hoped to keep the star-globe for a
while, using possession of the thing to guide and control the
Weaponmaster for a while.
        But on seeing that Guest was of such a temper that he was
currently neither guidable nor controllable, the demon at last
admitted to the possession of the star-globe, which it disgorged
with reluctance.
        Guest caught the globe as the demon spat it out like a well-
sucked skull.
        From the weight of it, the globe was stone rather than glass.
Heavy, heavy. Holding it, Guest felt his body become weightless.
His own flesh weighed nothing. color drained from the world. Sod,
Sken-Pitilkin, Ulix, Zozimus, Lord Onosh, Levant - they were
shadows, one and all. Sounds flattened, shallowed, then skipped
into silence.
        Guest tried to drop the stone.
        His fingers opened, but slowly, slowly. The world was utterly
dark, now. But for the stone. Which hung in the air. Motionless.
Unsupported. A green sheen of cold underwater light hung around it
in a halo. Then that light blinked out to nothingness, and Guest
was left in darkness.
        He tried to move, to speak, to cry out, to reach for help, to
run. But he could not move. His body was a darkness in darkness, a
shadow in shadow, a spiral falling through a waveform torus, a
point bent on squaring a circle. He was split, fractionated,
divided into geometries. His geometry was music, was gold upon
silver, was amber sliding liquid upon the liquidity of pearls, was
ice forging copper.
        Copper.
        Weaving wires of copper.
        Which were splicing themselves to sand, and to shadows. The
shadows were those of the claws of a crab.
        The crab was huge, and it stood in a weavework of titanium,
crunching the heads of dragons in its claws, while bats sang from
golden bells, and a penguin transformed itself to a grampus before
Guest Gulkan's very eyes.
        Then the visionary chaos steadied, sharpened, hardened,
gained weight, and painted itself with color. Guest found himself
standing in his true flesh in an unfamiliar building which was
fragrant with the smell of camphor. Somewhere in that building a
woman was singing, her voice a pleasure of gold upon silk.
Guest looked around. He was standing in a cool and airy
chamber, a large room connected to similar rooms by arched
doorways. The room was hung by tapestries worked in abstract
motifs, but the hexagonal tiles underfoot were devoted to
representational art, for each was devoted to the depiction of one
of the body's internal organs. Guest recognized the heart, the
liver, the kidney - and was that a pancreas? He thought it was.
        As Guest was still trying to decipher out the tiles - which
he saw with hallucinatory clarity - a man entered the room.
The man was short, and gray of skin. To Guest, that grayness
suggested illness, but the man seemed in good form as he came
striding toward the Weaponmaster. He did however have a slight
limp. Despite the limp, and despite the platform shoes which he
was wearing - presumably to amplify his height - he crossed the
tiles nimbly enough, and as he did so he addressed the
Weaponmaster in a foreign tongue.
        When Guest did not respond, the stranger reached out sharply
and knuckled Guest with the back of his hand. The blow stung.
Before Guest could react, the gray-skinned man whipped out a
knife, a wickedly hooked device with a curious blob of bluish-
green porcelain on the end of its blade. The lame little man
jabbed at Guest with this blade, catching him a glancing blow with
the porcelain blob.
        A lacerating pain seared through Guest's chest, and he fell
backwards, fell -
        And fell -
        Through darkness, now -
        Fell backwards into light, and found himself falling still,
and went down hard on the bones of his buttocks.
        "Wah!" said Guest, as the stone globe popped from his fingers
and fell heavily to the stone floor.
        "What happened?" said his father
        Guest shook himself, looked around, and saw he was once more
back in the familiar Hall of Time, back in the mainrock Pinnacle,
back on the island of Alozay. But he was in pain still from the
blow he had just been struck, and his nose -
        The Weaponmaster touched his nose gingerly, and found it was
bleeding from the back-knuckle blow which he had been struck by
the gray-skinned stranger, who was nowhere in sight. Bleeding? The
blood was pouring out!
        "Lean forward, boy," said Sken-Pitilkin, his bony fingers
pinching hard at the bridge of Guest's wide-spreading nose.
        Guest, sorely shaken by his encounter with a world of
visions, expected the sympathy and concern of his companions, but
got not a jot of it.
        "Come on," said Lord Onosh, recovering the globe of stars
from the floor where it had fallen. "Let's go upstairs. Come on,
Guest! It's only a nosebleed!"
        As they climbed to the mainrock's highest room, Guest tried
to simultaneously lean forward, to keep his nose pinched hard
against bleeding, and to tell his story.
        "A likely nonsense!" said his father, on hearing Guest's
tale.
        "But it happened," said Guest emphatically. "Why won't you
believe me?"
        "It's Eljuk who sees visions!" said Lord Onosh angrily.
        "What?" said Guest.
        He was startled, for here was a whole subject of which he was
ignorant. His brother Eljuk, now apprenticed to the wizard Ontario
Nol, had long been an object of Guest's jealousy - but the
Weaponmaster had never till now received the slightest hint of
Eljuk's dreams and visions, his night terrors and his waking
apparitions.
        "Eljuk, that's what!" said Lord Onosh. "He sees visions! But
one such lunatic in the family is quite enough!"
        "It wasn't a - a vision!" protested Guest. "I went somewhere!
I'm telling you! I did, really I did. There was this woman, she
was singing, she must have been beautiful, I'd pay gold to hear
that song twice over. And a man, this funny little man on these
weird shoes, and he, he - he hit me!"
        "Not you too!" said Lord Onosh.
        "But he did!" said Guest, seeing that he was disbelieved. "My
blood, the nose, I mean - "
        Helplessly, Guest held up his hand, which was streaked by the
blood of his bleeding.
        "So his nose bursts and he thinks himself gone," muttered his
father. Then, angrily: "It's the mother! That's what's wrong!"
        "Mother?" said Guest in bewilderment.
        "Yes," said Lord Onosh, with increased anger. "It's your
mother, it's her fault! Your mother, just as she - "
        Then the Witchlord stopped himself. But he had said enough to
leave Guest more bewildered than ever. The young Weaponmaster did
not know who his mother was, hence could not guess what she might
have done wrong. And what was the import of this waking dream he
had just endured? Had his mother endured such dreams? Did Eljuk
endure them still? And did Eljuk get bloody noses from some dreams
of his?
        Guest tried to think back to the years of his childhood.
        Eljuk had got bloody noses in childhood often enough, for sure -
but all of those bloodspills could be traced easily and directly
to the impact of Guest's feet, knees, fists and elbows.
        They had now entered upon the mainrock's uppermost room, so,
with their climb done, Lord Onosh tried to hand the star-globe to
his son.
        "Here," said Lord Onosh. "Take it again. Try it again. See
what it does for you this time!"
        Guest made as if to take the star-globe, then thought better
of it, and let it fall.
        "It's - it's too dangerous," said Guest.
        "Is it?" said Lord Onosh, kicking the star-globe.
        In response, the elderly Ashdan named Ulix of the Drum bent
down, picked up the globe of stars, examined it carefully then
offered it to Guest.
        "Take it, boy," said the Ashdan. "It's perfectly safe."
        "But," said Guest, fearfully, "I, I, it ...."
        "You expected the unexpected," said the Ashdan. "You opened
yourself to the new thing. So you ... you ...."
        "What happened to me?" said Guest, with sudden anger. "You
know, don't you! What was it!"
        The Ashdan hesitated, then said:
        "It is a Power."
        Guest absorbed that as best he could, then said, slowly,
slowly:
        "Like - like something of wizards?"
        "No," said the Ashdan flatly. "Like something of witches."
        "What are you talking about?" said Guest, frightened to hear
such a strange thing said, and said about him.
        "Ask your father," said the Ashdan. "He knows."
        Then Guest looked at Lord Onosh, who was silent, confessing
no secrets. Guest looked back to the Ashdan. As if in a dream,
Guest reached out and took the globe of stars from Ulix of the
Drum. The star-globe was cold, cold and heavy. He held it. Held it
firmly. The world remained unwavering.
        "It doesn't change me," said Guest softly, wondering at the
stability of the world, the firmness of the stones beneath his
feet. "Not this time."
        "It never did change you," said the Ashdan. "You changed
yourself. As I said. You opened yourself to the new thing, the
new experience."
        "So this, this rock," said Guest, hefting the star-globe,
"it's not dangerous. To me, I mean."
        "You experienced the exercise of Power," said the Ashdan.
"But the means for the exercise of that Power are sourced within
you. That Power is not conjured by rocks, globes, talismans or
charms. It's inside you."
        "Inside me!" said Guest, in frank alarm. "If that's meant as
reassurance, then I'd hate to see you let loose on a threat!"
        By now, Guest half-understood that he had inherited something
from his mother. But what? He was far from sure that he wanted to
find out! The more he thought about his waking vision, the more it
was frightening him. And to think that Eljuk had such visions, and
that his father obviously feared them - why, that was more
frightening still! And his mother - there was something wrong with
his mother, was there? Well.
        Guest had always believed his mother to have been a worthless
slave woman long ago buried, her name buried along with her. But
obviously she was still very bright in his father's memory.
        "My lord," said Guest, addressing his father with due
formality, conscious of the fact that they were talking in the
presence of strangers such as Banker Sod and Ulix of the Drum.
"May we talk later about - about my mother?"
        "No!" said Lord Onosh.
        A flat denial, this. But Guest had learnt enough already to
realize that some dreadful secret surrounded his genesis.
        This shook Guest more than any of the reversals of fortune
which he had endured to date. The reversals of war - well, those
he had been trained to cope with. After all, the young Yarglat
barbarian had been born into a warlord's household, and hence had
lived always with the knowledge that he might well suffer death,
defeat, exile, pain, hunger, torture and mutilation before his
life was out.
        Hence Guest had remained comparatively calm through the
vicissitudes of civil war and the alarums of the struggle for
Safrak. Like a professional firefighter in the midst of a
conflagration, or like a bear-wrestler engaged in one of his
public duels, the Weaponmaster had, by and large, kept his head in
even the worst moments of those conflicts.
        But this - !
        It was a dreadful and totally unexpected shock to be
suddenly, profoundly and obscurely betrayed by his ancestry.
Obviously he had inherited from his mother some kind of flaw, a
split in the brain, a breakage of the mind, a witch-warp of some
description - and quite obviously his father feared for the
consequences of this unexplained and inexplicable flaw.
        A shock to the basic stability of the family background is
always traumatic, even when the family concerned is an imperial
family, and therefore intrinsically more unstable than most.
Hence Guest was suffering dreadfully, just as one suffers in
the aftermath of the dreadful moment when a parent reveals that
there are werewolves in the family; or that grandfather used to
rape dogs for a hobby; or that grandmother routinely preached the
evolutionary heresy; or that mummy is actually a man concealed in a
woman's weeds.
        "Very well," said Guest, reluctant to challenge his father
further in the presence of strangers. "Let us pay no mind to
visions. Let us try instead this precious door with this precious
bit of rock."
        So saying, Guest advanced upon the marble plinth which
supported the steel arch.
        As Guest advanced, he held the star-globe in front of him. It
gleamed with a steady inner light, and its heaviness again made
him think it more like stone than glass. It was transparent, its
interior fogged with a motionless smoke of underseas mystery, and
in the green of that fog there hung the motionless firefly sparks
of stars of all colors, some inspired in their solitude, others
hanging close in their massed groupings of their galaxies.
        "Where do I put it?" said Guest.
        "There is a pocket of sorts in the marble base," said the
Ashdan ancient, Ulix of the Drum. "See it?"
        "Yes," said Guest.
        The "pocket" was a gilded hole about twice the size of the
star-globe.
        "Put the globe into the pocket," said Ulix. "Do that, and you
will open the Door."
        Gingerly, Guest eased the globe into the pocket. And let it
go. It rolled home with a slight clunk. Immediately, the steel
archway filled with a humming curtain of silver-gray, which looked
to Guest like a vertical sheet of that slippery metal known as
mercury.
        "There," said Ulix. "It is open. Now you can go through it,
if you dare."
        At which Banker Sod swore at Ulix, swore fluently and
potently in Galish. Ulix ignored the captive Banker, as did the
others.
        "So," said Lord Onosh, looking speculatively at the door. He
was starting to realize that this thing was no ordinary door but a
Door of major significance. "A Door, is it? Then where does it go
to?"
        Guest was of the opinion that the lord of the pelican had
explained all this already. And so he had! But Guest was more
ready to absorb explanation than was his father, since Guest had
been rigorously tutored by the wizard Sken-Pitilkin since the age
of five, whereas it is doubtful whether Lord Onosh was ever
tutored by anyone in his entire life.
        Ulix of the Drum, who knew that Lord Onosh was but a poor and
ignorant Yarglat barbarian, ventured on a further full and
complete explanation.
        "Enough!" said Lord Onosh, when he thought his head had
suffered injury sufficient for a single day. "This thing cannot be
understood, that much I see clearly. But what it does, ah, that's
simple enough. With a Door like this - well, enough of that! The
important thing is to keep this secret, is it not? For with this
- with this we can conquer the world, if we go about it softly."
        "Softly, yes," said Guest, "for we would not wish to spoil
our chances. I think to use this to conquer the world indeed, then
to win back my empire in Tameran from Khmar."
        "Your empire?" said Lord Onosh in astonishment.
        "Why, yes," said Guest. "The demon made the Guardians swear
their fealty to me, did it not? Does it not therefore follow that
I am their lord? And does it not equally follow that the mainrock
is mine, yes, and Alozay as a whole, and the Safrak Islands
likewise mind?"
        "You have an enormous and arrogant conceit about you today,"
said Lord Onosh coldly. "That you happened to accept the surrender
of some prisoners, why, that is but one of the commonplace
incidents of war."
        "Commonplace incidents!" said Guest, with explosive force.
        "Yes!" said Lord Onosh. "A commonplace! A nothing!"
        Now all this time, Banker Sod had been keenly watching
Witchlord and Weaponmaster, and eyeing the disposition of the
others. As father and son squared up to each other, looking as if
they would be hacking at each other in moments, Sod abruptly
moved.
        Sod grabbed the dwarf Glambrax.
        And threw him.
        It may be that Sod had previously had some opportunity to
practice the ancient and noble art of dwarf-tossing, for he threw
Glambrax with uncommon force and accuracy, skittling both
Witchlord and Weaponmaster. Then Sod threw himself onto the
plinth, flung himself into a forward roll, and vanished through
the Door.
        Hot with rage, Guest scrambled up from the floor and leapt
onto the plinth.
        "No!" cried Ulix. "You - "
        But it was too late.
        For Guest plunged through the Door in hot pursuit of Banker
Sod.
        "My son!" cried Lord Onosh, in anguish. "My son!"
        And with that cry the Witchlord drew his sword, as if
intending to immediately revenge himself for the loss of his son.
Fearing the temper of this stranger, Thayer Levant nimbled onto
the plinth and bolted toward the Door.
        "Levant!" said Ulix of the Drum. "You - "
        But Levant was gone.
        "Get him back!" said Lord Onosh. "Now! Now! You! Zozimus!
Sken-Pitilkin! My son! He's - "
        Then Lord Onosh broke off, for a barrage of fighting men came
shouldering through the Door. They were men dressed in the most
sinister suits of black, their faces masked so that nothing showed
but the whites of their eyes. They were Zenjingu killers, and they
were bent on murder.
        Immediately, Ulix of the Drum grabbed for the star-globe,
yanking it from its socket. The Door closed. As the Door scissored
shut, one of the Zenjingu killers was sliced clean in half by its
abrupt closure.
        "Cha-thara!" cried Ulix of the Drum, raising his pelican-
headed walking stick.
        At this Word, the Zenjingu killers began to stumble in blind
disorientation, for Ulix of the Drum had neatly disabled their
sanity. The Lord of the Silver Pelican was a wizard of Ebber, and
his were powers over the mind.
        Taking advantage of the disorientation of his enemies, Lord
Onosh hacked and cut, slaughtering every last one of them. But
that did not alter the facts. Guest Gulkan was gone, missing,
vanished, wandering amidst the perils of some unknown foreign
land, and there was no way for his father to get him back.