Aldarch the Third: the Mutilator of Yestron, he who by genius
of terror won the vicious civil war known as Talonsklavara. His
joy is to supervise the scourging of the Izdimir Empire, which he
governs from the province of Ang in the heartland of the continent
of Yestron. His capital city is Obooloo, where he resides in the
palace known as Ubazakura, which affords him a splendid view over
Lake Kak.

                                                 * * *

        As Midsummer's Day approached, Guest Gulkan was dragged from
the dismal depths of his imprisonment. The tangled matting of his
long-grown hair was shaved to a hedgehog's prickling. He was
bathed; and scrubbed; and deloused; and perfumed. His rags were
burnt - sending up a thick and oily smoke to the heavens - and
he was dressed in a loincloth and openweave sandals.
        Then, on a hot day near the summer's uttermost height, the
loincloth-clad Weaponmaster was escorted to the palace of
Ubazakura. This monument to power stood upon Obooloo's heights,
and was the home of Aldarch the Third, Mutilator of Yestron and
ruler of most of it.
        The Mutilator's reign was by then near the end of its Second
Year of Peace. The year Peace 2 in the Izdimir Empire was the year
Khmar 7 in the Collosnon Empire. Guest Gulkan's birthday had been
and gone; he had already attained to the great and ancient age of
24; and shortly it would be Midsummer's Day again, and the Third
Year of Peace would begin, and with that beginning the eighth year
of the rule of the Emperor Khmar would likewise commence.
        In the long darkness of his imprisonment, Guest Gulkan had
steeled himself for his confrontation with Aldarch the Third. It
is a mark of his upbringing that Guest had seen this confrontation
to have been inevitable since the moment of his capture - for
Guest was the son of an emperor, was he not? Hence he had never
expected death through anonymous execution, but, rather, had
braced himself for an edge-to-edge face-off with the very lord of
the Izdimir Empire himself.
        Now the long-expected showdown was at hand, and so Guest
expected to be led into realms of patent doom, of screaming
shadows and blood-reek dungeons. He expected to be confronted with
assorted tableaux of gaping corpses and truncated torsos, of
gibbering victims and crawling wreckage bloody in its writhings.
        But no signs of any such provincial barbarism were to be seen
as the young Guest Gulkan was escorted into the palace of
Ubazakura. The Izdimir Empire can be called many things, but by no
stretch of the imagination can it rightly be called provincial;
and Aldarch the Third, the ruler of that empire, was one of the
most civilized and highly cultivated rulers in all the world.
        Hence the palace of Ubazakura was no gross place of wreckage
and threat. Rather, it was typified by peace, grace and balance.
It was a home to the arts and a monument to interior design.
        Guest was led through a courtyard where diamond-gilled
catfish whiskered through a lily pond which was deep - deep as
drowning. The Weaponmaster slowed and lingered, lingered in the
sun, lingered under the beating sky. He was conscious of the
delicacy of the moment, of the fragility of his own existence. He
felt the blood sifting through the smallest and most intimate sacs
of his lungs. He felt the cobwebbed construction of his bones and
the subtle dance of the very particles of air which wafted in and
out through the great wings of his nose.
        In those moments of heightened consciousness, the
Weaponmaster heard a woman begin to sing. Her song echoed through
the sprawling bat-wings of his ears, and, making its way through
the tubes of flesh to which his ears gave access, caused the small
and delicate bones deep inside his ear to thump out a message
suitable for interpretation by his brain.
        The beauty of the song suggested to Guest that a beautiful
woman was responsible for its generation. This was not the case.
Rather, the day was bright with the golden song of one of the
imperial dragons of Yestron - creatures of gentle nature and
spectacular musical talent.
        "Who is the woman?" said Guest, hearing the dragon, and
thinking from its song that it must be a woman at least as
beautiful as his long-lost Yerzerdayla.
        "Hush," said the translator who accompanied him. "We are
entering the Presence."
        With that, they left the courtyard's sun behind them,
venturing into the airy shadows of a series of chambers
interconnected by arched doorways. They walked across hexagonal
tiles, each of which was decorated with a representation of one of
the body's internal organs. By contrast, the tapestries which
adorned the walls were devoted to abstraction, to interweaving
glyphs and helixes utterly removed from all realities of the
flesh.
        While passing through these chambers, Guest smelt camphor.
Camphor. What did that remind him of? It reminded him of the
tunnel which had led him into the depths of Obooloo's Temple of
Blood. He had smelt camphor there, along with other things.
        But -
        There was some other memory, older, deeper, more compelling.
It was - it was -
        Camphor, camphor and the bright spires of golden song ... a
supremely evocative combination ... so evocative that, somehow,
Guest was certain that he had been here before. Here! In these
very same chambers! Walking over these very same tiles! But this
was his first visit to this palace. Surely.
        Guest Gulkan had no absolute index to his past, for his
memory had been jumbled by the many shocks of his life, by his
rending at the hands of the Great Mink, by the displacements of
war and exile, and by the sheer complexity of the press of ever-
changing faces which had been a feature of his journeying. Yet,
even though he could not unscramble every detail of his past with
any certainty, Guest Gulkan was sure that this was his very first
visit to the palace of Ubazakura.
        And yet ....
        And yet!
        The golden song of the imperial dragon soared skywards with
increasing passion, and again Guest Gulkan was assailed by the
smell of camphor. Smells are the great memory-triggers, for smell
is the most primitive of all the senses, the sense which is
closest to animal existence.
        Camphor.
        Camphor!
        Guest halted, for his skin prickled, and his very hair stood
on end. He shuddered, and his heart pounded, and hot blood flushed
through his veins.
        For he remembered!
        The Weaponmaster remembered a distant day on which he and his
father had conquered the mainrock Pinnacle, and had secured
admission to the abditory which housed the Door of the Safrak
Bank. Plandruk Qinplaqus, the Silver Emperor of Dalar ken Halvar,
he who had then been concealing his true identity by calling
himself Ulix of the Drum, had told Witchlord and Weaponmaster that
a globe of stars must be procured if that Door in the mainrock
Pinnacle was to be open.
        Suspecting that Banker Sod had fed just such an artefact to
Icaria Scaria Iva-Italis, Guest Gulkan had challenged the demon
Italis, at last persuading it to give him the star-globe.
        But on taking that globe into his possession, Guest Gulkan
had been plunged into a visionary world in which he had heard a
woman's soaring song, in which he had smelt camphor, and in which
he had met a man who had back-knuckled him across the face. That
back-knuckling had precipitated Guest's return to the Hall of
Time, where he had then been put to the trouble of staunching a
nose made bloody by the back-knuckle blow delivered to him during
his visionary adventuring.
        "Come on!" said the Janjuladoola interpreter who had been
assigned to Guest Gulkan. "Come on! We've no time to linger!"
        But Guest still stood, staring at all around him, taking in
the details with a heightened awareness close to that of
hallucination. This was the very place! He was sure of it! This
was the very place to which his vision had taken him when he had
first seized control of the star-globe!
        In the time since that visionary experience, Guest had
deliberately strived to forget all that unsettling displacement,
for he had been truly terrified by that displacement, and so had
sought to suppress all memories relating to it.
        But -
        Here he was!
        Here he was in a place identical to that which he had seen in
that long-ago vision which he had endured in the mainrock
Pinnacle!
        "You," said his Janjuladoola interpreter, poking him.
"Weren't you listening? Come on!"
        On being poked, Guest at last bestirred himself, and allowed
himself to be hurried into the next chamber, where the interpreter
encouraged him to kneel.
        Guest was a little slow in reacting to the encouragement.
        "I said kneel!" said the interpreter, who was starting to get
flustered. "Now! Now! I say it again! Kneel! Kneel! Down on your
knees!"
        "Why?" said Guest. "Is this my execution?"
        "It will be, if you don't find your manners, and fast. He's
almost upon us!"
        The interpreter's panic managed to communicate a sense of
urgency to Guest, and so the Yarglat barbarian went down on his
knees, and had no sooner got down on those frugally padded lumps
of bone when Aldarch the Third entered upon the audience chamber.
Aldarch proved to be a small man of the Skin who increased
his apparent height by wearing shoes with platform soles. It is
traditional for the emperors of Yestron to walk on stilts, thus
demonstrating their social superiority in an even more pronounced
fashion. But Aldarch had been methodically tortured by his father
while he was still a child, and the damage then done to his legs
made it unwise for him to attempt any feats of stilt-walking as an
adult.
        Aldarch spoke; Guest's translator interpreted; and Guest, in
conformity with the Mutilator's orders, seated himself in the
visitor's well. This square-cut recess in the floor contained a
stool padded with a goose-feather cushion, and when seated upon
that cushion Guest found nothing but his head and shoulders above
floor level. The Mutilator took his own seat upon a modest throne
set back from the visitor's well, and the dignity of this throne
set the Mutilator's knees at a height greater than that of Guest's
head.
        This cunning arrangement neatly indicated the social gap
between Mutilator and prisoner, while making it virtually
impossible for Guest to launch a surprise attack upon his captor.
        "You have lately come from Untunchilamon, I hear," said
Aldarch the Third.
        "It is so," said Guest.
        "You know," said Aldarch, "I have heard that they were
walking on stilts."
        Guest Gulkan, who did not know precisely how he was supposed
to respond to this intelligence, assumed a grave demeanor.
        "Well?" said Aldarch. "Is it true, or is it not? I have heard
that the one called Pokrov was particularly noticeable for getting
above himself."
        "For getting above himself?" said Guest.
        "For elevating himself above the height appropriate to his
class!" said the translator to Guest. "For walking on stilts!"
        "Well," said Guest, who was properly confused by now, "it may
have happened. I can't say that it didn't."
        "What does he say?" said Aldarch.
        "My lord," said the translator to Aldarch, "He confesses that
with his own eyes he saw such people as Pokrov walking on stilts."
        "You saw," said Aldarch, "yet you made no move to stop it?"
        This accusation was translated to Guest. The Yarglat
barbarian was so ignorant of the customs of the civilized world
that he had not yet absorbed the full import of this business of
stilt-walking, yet even to such a limited soul as Guest Gulkan it
was obvious that something of importance was at foot, so in
puzzled confusion he responded to the Mutilator by saying:
        "I, ah ... as a foreigner, I ...."
        "He says, my lord," said the interpreter to Aldarch, "that as
a poor and ignorant foreign-born barbarian he did not see it fit
to interfere in the internal affairs of the Izdimir Empire, hence
did not murder the stilt-walkers for their impertinence. He
further says that he thought such acts of murder would be to you a
pleasure, and he had no wish to cheat you of such pleasure."
        "Well," said Aldarch, who was pleased to receive this news,
"that was well-spoken. Suppose we pause for a moment to indulge
ourselves in a lesser pleasure?"
        The interpreter not demurring, Al'three gave a command; a
woman entered with a tray; and cups from this tray were served to
Mutilator, interpreter and prisoner. The cups were of bone china
and in them was the warmth of a greenish fluid which Guest Gulkan
tentatively identified as tea.
        "You are familiar with this drink?" said the Mutilator.
        Aldarch the Third once again spoke through the interpreter,
since Weaponmaster and Mutilator had no language in common. Guest
Gulkan was no linguist, and hence had not the slightest competence
in any truly scholarly language. He could make himself known as
Ordhar, the command language of the armies of the Collosnon
Empire; he could speak Eparget, the native tongue of the Yarglat;
and apart from that he could only use Toxteth and the Galish
Trading Tongue. The various barbarous and primitive languages
which were at the command of Guest Gulkan's tongue were virtually
useless in the heartland of the Izdimir Empire. As for the
Mutilator, why, he was a scholar great in learning, but his wisdom
was exclusively restricted to Janjuladoola, the infinitely subtle
and fiendishly complicated language of Yestron's master race.
        "The drink," said Guest, half-sure of its nature yet wary of
committing himself to an error, "the drink is ... ah, something
from Chay, perhaps?"
        "No," said the Mutilator. "It is jade tea. The jade tea of
Obooloo, much sought after both here and in foreign parts."
        Guest did not think it healthy to be consuming hot drinks on
such a sultry day, but drank without arguing about it.
        "So," said Aldarch, when Guest had drunk. "You have been
adventuring on Untunchilamon."
        "I have," said Guest, who hoped they were not going to get
back to the subject of stilts, because he could not in the least
understand it. "Would you like to hear more of it?"
        "My interrogators did their work well," said the Mutilator.
"And you have not been the only person to be interrogated.
Consequently, you have no secrets from me and mine."
        Guest wondered if this meant that Thayer Levant had been
caught and questioned. But he did not dare to ask. Simply to ask
that question would be to betray Levant, who - if he was still at
liberty - might still be trying to make his way back to Obooloo
and escape to Dalar ken Halvar by way of the Door of the Bondsmans
Guild. In any case, the Mutilator was still speaking.
        "We know what you did in Injiltaprajura," said the Mutilator.
"We know it in detail. Likewise, we know what you did earlier in
this city of mine. You raided the Temple of Blood, and your father
lies there yet, sheltered in a time pod to which we have no
access."
        Guest's interpreter had a little difficulty placing the words
"time pod" into the Toxteth tongue, but did the trick by calling
it "the egg which does not change". Upon puzzling out the meaning
of this phrase, Guest remembered the time pod, and remembered the
day of the raid, and the ring of ever-ice which had fallen to the
oily waters of the innermost sanctum of the Temple of Blood. He
deduced that the ring had not been found.
        Since the whereabouts of the ring had not been betrayed, this
meant - surely - that the demon in the Temple of Blood had kept
silent about it. So the demon Ungular Scarth was Guest's ally! This
thought heartened the Weaponmaster greatly.
        "It is true," said Guest, "that I came to the Temple. There
is a Great God held prisoner in the Temple, a - "
        "A demon," said Aldarch. "There are two things in the Temple,
and both are demons. Both are old, old things, and dangerous. One
is too big to move. The other - only a fool would seek its
liberation. The high priestess of the Temple is Anaconda Stogirov.
She is - she is my friend. My only friend. She tells me much, and
she has told me all about those demons."
        "Then," said Guest, carefully, "I congratulate you on the
possession of such a knowledgeable friend."
        "Anaconda Stogirov has also confirmed to me the nature of the
cornucopia, that device which features so largely in legend. Do
you know of the cornucopia?"
        "No," said Guest.
        A shameful confession, this! But, thanks to the derelictions
of his scholarship, the young Weaponmaster was uncommonly ignorant
of many things which apt to take for granted.
        The ignorance of one's associates is not always painful,
particularly not to those who derive a delicious sense of
superiority by indulging in the act of enlightenment. Being
enamoured of such indulgence, Aldarch the Third lectured Guest
Gulkan at length, telling him all about the cornucopia, the horn
of plenty which had for so long been lost in the Stench Caves of
Logthok Norgos. The tale took quite some time, particularly as the
Mutilator dwelt in detail upon the horrors that some unsuccessful
questing heroes had spoken of as they died. The tale began -
        But the reader is surely familiar with the tale of the
cornucopia of Logthok Norgos, for that story is a part of
everyone's basic education, and the sagacious Sken-Pitilkin had
told it at least thrice to Guest Gulkan when the pair of them were
respectively tutor and student back in the city of
Gendormargensis.
        Still, the Mutilator told the story in something close to its
full detail, for the story was one of his favorites.
        "You understand?" said the Mutilator, when he was done with
telling his tale.
        "My lord has been very clear," said Guest. "I understand."
        "Then know your duty," said Aldarch. "You will liberate your
father from the time pod. Then you will quest to the Stench Caves
in his company, and retrieve for me the cornucopia."
        "My lord," said Guest, "I cannot free my father since - there
is a ring, and it is lost. I had a ring, but I lost it, and
without the ring I can't open the pod."
        "If ... if you speak the truth," said Aldarch, "then you ...
you may regret your limitations hereafter. Come. Bring your skin
and your scalp to my bathroom, and I will ... I will show you the
something which will interest you."
        This was said very calmly, which disturbed Guest, who had
expected to be ranted at, and had prepared himself accordingly. In
absence of all rant, the Mutilator abandoned his throne and limped
through the palace with Guest and his ever-shadowing interpreter
trailing along behind.
        The Mutilator led the way to his bathroom. This was not by
any means a narrow chamber. No, it was a room so extensive that
one could comfortably have drilled a company of armed men within
its confines. It was a spacious chamber of bright-bathing light
which played upon white marble bare of ornament. The light came in
through the windows, which were open, and which afforded a view of
the high mountains. Those mountains were white with snow, as they
were all through the year, and upon their heights -
        But let us not be distracted by scenery. Let us attend to
those matters to which Guest attended. He attended first of all to
the bath, which sat in one corner of the bathroom. It was an
entirely regular and unremarkable bath made of three or four ox-
weights of solid gold; and it was daily filled with warm water so
that the Mutilator might perform his ablutions.
        In the center of the room, however, was something not quite
so conventional. It was not particularly startling, but it was
odd. Under the circumstances, Guest Gulkan found anything odd to be
ominous. The thing which had attracted his attention was a shallow
rectangular well, square-cut, and of no great depth - for had it
been filled with water (or with blood, or milk, or liquid honey)
then Guest could have jumped into it without getting wet above the
knees. For the moment, though, the well was entirely empty of all
fluids, so Guest was able to see that its floor was pierced by
many drainage holes.
        In the center of that well there stood a brazier, which was
lit; and above the brazier hung what appeared to be a coffin,
suspended from the roof on metal chains. The coffin had the milky
whiteness of porcelain.
        "We have a man in the coffin," said Aldarch.
        "So," said Guest, affecting a calm which he did not quite
feel. "So you're boiling him alive."
        "Oh no," said the Mutilator. "The brazier is ... it's for his
health, you could say. This room gets cold, especially at night.
If he wasn't kept warm then he'd die. Shall we look at him?"
        "By all means," said Guest.
        The Mutilator took Guest Gulkan by the elbow in a
companionable manner and guided him forward till they both stood
on the edge of the well, where they were able to look down upon
the coffin and observe its contents.
        Might there perhaps be snakes in the coffin?
        No, there were no snakes.
        Instead, there was a man.
        A modest opening in the coffin allowed for an inspection of
the man's face. The man's nose stuck through the gridwork bars,
and the bridge of that nose had gone septic where the skin had
been chafed away by the unprotected iron. The man's complexion was
olive; his pores big; his eyebrows black; his lips full and
sensual.
        Guest absorbed all these details as he looked down on the
man. There seemed to be no hurry. Aldarch the Third seemed
prepared to stand here all day. The more Guest stood there, the
more ... the more he was disturbed. Something ... something was
not quite right.
        A fluid of dire darkness, a fluid filthy with bodyscum, a
fluid hinting of oil and eels, bathed the man with the quiescent
menace of a quicksand swamp, and bathed him so generously that it
almost swallowed his face.
        With a little more fluid ....
        If a little more fluid were to be poured into the coffin then
the man would surely drown. Now Guest saw the nature of the
torture. The man was kept here for many days, and each day a
little more fluid was added. In the end, someone would pour in one
last jar, and the victim would be helplessly choked. The horror
would be to wait for day after day, trapped, helpless and immobile,
knowing the nature of the death that was to come.
        "How long has he been here?" said Guest.
        The moment he asked, he knew the question was a mistake.
Because Aldarch smiled. The smile was thin but satisfied. Aldarch
knew that Guest had begun to appreciate the horror of the victim's
situation.
        "He has been here for forty days," said Aldarch. "He has fed
well. We have fed him upon figs and we have fed him upon almonds.
That is sufficient."
        "Figs, nuts ... and ... and water? Do you feed him water? Is
he lying in his urine?"
        "What makes you think that?"
        "It would be a way to drown a man," said Guest, making an
incontinent confession of the workings of his mind. "Trap him in a
coffin like this, then ... he has to piss, and in the end he
drowns of it."
        Aldarch snorted with laughter.
        "What a mind!" said the Mutilator. "But, no. We do nothing so
crude. From the first day, the coffin is filled to the level you
see now. The bathroom attendants adjust the level as necessary.
The fluid, of course, is sesame oil." As this was translated, the
Mutilator watched his prisoner's face. When Guest did not react,
the Mutilator said, softly: "So. So you really don't know. You
really don't understand. Very well."
        The Mutilator raised his hand and gave an order - an order
which was not translated. Guest Gulkan listened in confusion to
the slick-sliding vocables of Aldarch the Third's Janjuladoola. He
could not even guess what was going to happen next. But obviously
something was going to happen, and Guest feared that -
        Guest wished he was elsewhere.
        While Guest was still wishing, a girl-slave with symbolic
chains dangling from her wrists stepped forward to remove the
brazier. Once she had exited with her burden, an executioner
approached, bearing a sledgehammer. He looked at the Mutilator.
        "Proceed," said Aldarch Three.
        The executioner tapped the coffin with his sledgehammer. The
ceramic coffin cracked. The executioner hit it again. The coffin
shattered. Down came the coffin in a bursting of fragments, a
leapage of filth. In the middle of this downburst flopped the
prisoner, who hit the marble, clawed at it spasmodically, then lay
still in the accumulated slime of forty days of his own filth.
        Guest flinched, and slashed at his own face with the flat of
his hand, abolishing a splash of filth which had landed there.
        "Watch," said the Mutilator. "You will find this very
interesting."
        At first it seemed that nothing was happening. Guest raised
his eyes to the blue sky and the high mountains, to the impeccable
white of the distant snow. He had a great yearning to be free from
this place of self-important steel and degrading spectacle, to be
free to walk in those mountains and to leave his footprints in
those snows. He remembered the far-distant mountains of Ibsen-
Iktus, remembered the blackrock razorblade of those uppermost
heights, remembered the high-altitude winds which had stripped
away the snows in pluming streams which -
        "Watch," said the Mutilator, with something of the corkscrew
in his voice.
        Guest, called back to the filthy spectacle before him, forced
himself to study the wretched thing which lay before him in the
crippled eloquence of its squalor. It lay on its belly. He could
see its ribs moving with the lizard-quick panting of its
breathing. It was going nowhere, yet it was exhausted by the
rigors of the journey.
        Guest caught a whiff of the stench from the slime-coated
body, and he almost gagged.
        He controlled himself.
        He struggled to understand.
        What was the true import of this spectacle? What was the
significance of bathing a man in his own filth? Was this some
insult to the pride of the Janjuladoola? Some insult based on the
transgression of protocols and the breach of taboos? Was this the
ultimate punishment of the Izdimir Empire? To be made to lie
helplessly for day after day in the putrid stench of one's own
dung and urine?
        Aldarch the Third, who had been covertly watching the
Weaponmaster, grunted with satisfaction. He gave an order. This
time the translator rendered it into Toxteth for Guest's benefit:
        "Wash the man."
        A bevy of slave girls approached, each bearing a wooden
bucket brimming with water. Aldarch dipped his fingers into each
bucket in turn, then signified his approval. The buckets were
emptied over the man, were emptied one by one, and as the downpour
washed away the slime it became possible to see, and as it became
possible to see -
        "Watch," said Aldarch softly, as Guest Gulkan looked away.
"Watch. Look closely. Watch and learn."
        By an effort of great self-control, Guest forced himself to
watch, forced himself to look closely, and forced himself to see,
to learn, and to understand.
        The forty days of immersion in sesame oil had caused the skin
to be eaten away from the body, exposing the bare flesh and the
blood vessels. Little remained of the face except those parts which
had been free from the fluid. The rest was gone. As for the head,
why, the sesame oil had eaten away the skin of the scalp. The
bald bones of the skull were bare, their sutures clearly visible.
Across the bare bone there laced a webwork of arteries.
        "Soon," said the Mutilator. "Soon it will begin. As the water
dries, so it will begin. He is tender after his long confinement,
and the air is painful."
        "The air?" said Guest, not quite understanding.
        "As you see," said Aldarch, indicating the specimen on the
floor in front of them.
        Even as Guest watched, the anatomical specimen before him
began to tremble as if shivering. Then it began to move, warping
in slow-motion agony. Guest was reminded of a spider crumpling in
a flame. But this was a slow, slow fire. This fire did not quickly
consume the flesh.
        The man on the floor jerked in spasms. His wet slithering
spasms reminded Guest obscenely of orgasms. Aldarch the Third
watched with intense interest. Even for him, this was a special
thing. He did not see this every day. The Mutilator's attendants
were, one and all, frozen into a hieratic stillness.
        "It hurts him," said Aldarch, speaking with a softness which
the interpreter translated in a bare whisper. "He is burning. It
hurts him to breathe. It hurts him to be."
        As if in response, the writhing man began to mutter, speaking
in choked intakes, speaking in the language of drowning, speaking
of pain, of strangulation, of the unutterable.
        "Always," said Aldarch, intently. "Always. It always happens
this way. He is speaking."
        "Of what?" said Guest.
        "Of his pain," said Aldarch. "He begs for his mother in her
mercy. He begs. But. But if you ask - he can tell you the future
if you ask."
        "This I - I don't need to know the future," said Guest. "I'll
face the future when I come to it."
        "The man will die anyway," said Aldarch. "Since the man will
die in any case, you might as well have the knowledge of his
wisdom. I will ask your future for you."
        Then, abruptly, the Mutilator stepped down into the well.
Disregarding the stench and the filth, he straddled the writhing
man. Then, to Guest's utter horror, the Mutilator seated himself
on that appalling figure. The living corpse screamed in a high-
pitched whistle. The Mutilator slapped it. Slapped it hard.
Splatters of filth flew in all directions. Then the Mutilator
spoke to the thing, spoke with a snarling savagery, as if to a
delinquent dog.
        At which -
        At which the man either did or did not begin to speak.
        Guest was not sure whether the dying man was speaking, but he
knew for a certainty that he could hear a voice of some
description, a withered voice which was warped with agony, a voice
outgulping words in gouts, words of terrible import.
        Then the voice fell silent.
        Aldarch the Third rose from his victim, who had ceased to
move. The Mutilator scrambled out of the shallow well. He looked
uncommonly ungainly as he climbed out of that pit, but his
ungainliness did not detract from his dignity.
        A slave girl approached, bearing a canary-yellow handcloth
which steamed slightly. Aldarch took it, wiped his face, cleaned
his hands, then tossed it into the pit. Despite this token
cleansing, the Mutilator was still besmeared with filth. He stank.
But he did not seem to mind. He looked the Weaponmaster in the
face, and he said:
        "He says you will kill your father."
        Guest shuddered.
        For it was hard to deny the likelihood of any prediction
by such a terrible.
        "That is what he says," continued the Mutilator. "He says
that you will kill your father. And I say this - if you cannot or
will not liberate your father from the time pod in the Temple of
Blood, then you will most certainly be the death of your father.
For I will put that pod in a fire then heat it until it bursts."
        As Guest absorbed this threat, the Mutilator enhanced it with
one last statement:-
        "I have done as much before."
        Guest shuddered.
        And, with that, the Mutilator exited, leaving the
Weaponmaster to contemplate the final twitchings of the man who
lay dying at his feet.