His gaiety returned. “No, the real problem here is with Benvenuti. It’s his part in the play I’m concerned about. You’ll need nerves of steel, my boy! And I hope you’ve as good a hand with a whip as you have with a sword. The whole thing will have to look real, you know?”
I took a breath. “I’m actually better with a whip.”
“Oh, good!” cried Wolfgang. “Oh, that’s very good!” He coughed, chuckled. “Actually, I’d say your life may depend on it.”
Looking at Gwendolyn, I had no doubt of it. Even before—as if by an involuntary reflex—the cleaver appeared in her huge hand.
“If that whip so much as scratches me!” It was amazing, really, how deep her voice was.
“If it does,” she continued, “when we reach the forest, I’ll gut you like a pig.”
PROLOGUE.
In Which, Our Prelude Passed, We Acquaint the Gentle Reader with the Heroes of Our Tale, The Sorcerer Zulkeh and His Stupid But Loyal Apprentice Shelyid. Accompanied By Some Brief and Modest Notes Introducing Your Narrator, Alfred CCLXXIX, and My Noble Clan of Chroniclers.
The times were most rank. For the Old Geister brooded alone and disconsolate far away in the bowels of his cloud-shrouded citadel, taking scant heed of the affairs of men. Meanwhile eons passed, millennium upon millennium, and the world fell into corruption. Skepticism and unreason swept across the land, even as the wench’s oestrus inflames the pubert’s loins. Yet the Old Geister acted not, for his rancor was overcome by melancholia.
Worse than the damage to human morals was the damage to human minds. Men began to doubt, then question, then snigger at, then openly scorn, the once revered mysteries of old. Soon it was apparent that humanity preferred natural acts to unnatural lore. Thus, as generation followed upon generation, the candle of the old knowledge flickered out, and expired in the common memory of mankind.
Yet, as we approach the time of our tale, there remained abroad in the world a few score scholars devoted to the retrieval of lost arts and philosophies. They could be found scratching among the rubble of ruined libraries and ancient temples, hoping thereby to unearth fragments of old writ. Each believed that there was to be discovered by the perusal of old scrolls and tablets, and the cunning exegesis thereof, the deepest secrets of the powers of the universe.
Their lot was hard. As a result, their numbers, never great, declined steadily as the time of our tale draws near. Many factors contributed to this end. Some were martyrs to their own experiments, falling victim to spells ill-cast, demons misconjured, potions botched, talismans malwrought. Others were undone by the perils of the itinerant life attendant upon their pursuit of wisdom: the cholers of nature, the intemperance of wild beasts, the deprivations of disease, and the like. Still others, and these the most numerous of all, fell prey to the brutish acts of their fellow humans—for these latter are, as is well known, an unruly lot, given to sudden tempers and disputes. Hence the popular aphorism: “He who lives by reason, dies by the sword.”
The survivor of these happenstances would yearn at length for a sanctum, some refuge wherein to contemplate the mysteries of Truth, unhampered by the pogroms of man and nature. Perforce they would forego, for a time, the peripatetic life and repair to some town or city, therein to peruse at leisure whatever ancient pearl of wisdom might have been acquired in their travels.
To support a domicile for these scholarly pursuits, the sorcerer would typically apply his or her learning as a scrivener, teacher, lecturer, tutor, or healer of incurable maladies. Of these, of the mere handful of wizards populating the earth now at the time when our tale is ripe for the telling, we note that the least notable was a certain Zulkeh of Goimr, physician.
* * *
The ancient city of Goimr is located on the underbelly of the great sub-continent of Grotum, at the place where the river Moyle joins the sea. Here, in a vast old abandoned death house, replete with many strange vaulted chambers connected by dark and crumbling passageways winding convolutedly like so many intestines deep into the bowels of the earth, down ever downward, into small niche-pocked vaults filled with damp worm-eaten caskets, many askew and half-opened crypts of the long dead, urns of dust, and the scattered bones of dogs and man, here, chose Zulkeh to rest and ponder his wealth of artifacts and relics, his scrolls and tablets, his talismans and tomes, the fruit gathered of his many journeys.