by Hugh Cook
Here Guest Gulkan was true to his Yarglat heritage. The Yarglat are capable of subsisting on the most parsimonious of diets when necessity demands; and when at war will content themselves at need with a single cup of fresh hot blood tapped from a vein in a living horse. But their indulgences are in keeping with their deprivations; and what they eat, and the quantities in which they eat it, is scarcely believable even to those who have seen such feats repeated thrice or thirty times; and their drinking matches their eating.
Never have the Yarglat been able to hold any great banquet without one person at least dying simply from overdrinking. The uninitiated may think this an exaggeration - but death from abuse of liquor has ever been a leading cause of death amongst the heroes of the northern horsetribes. Furthermore, history can name of a certainty at least four rulers of the Collosnon Empire who died of over-drinking, and a further three who expired through sheer gluttony: Dobdask, who expired while trying to eat an entire horse to win a bet with one of his generals; Henza, who collapsed while eating one of his generals; and Yeldanov Ax, who died as a consequence of disembowelling a whale and eating a considerable portion of the gut, an eccentricity which tends to support those rumors which claim him to have been somewhat deranged.
So Guest Gulkan indulged himself as the Yarglat will, and in what was left of the night he tried to digest that which he had ingested.Guest's attempts at digestion were not entirely successful, and in the gray light of the morrow's dawn he looked rather queasy. The chip-chop motion of the Swelaway Sea was making him uneasy: he had to avert his eyes lest it make him positively sick.
Nevertheless, he joined his fellow air-adventurers; and, once all had made their wills and had handed these into the care and keeping of Lord Alagrace, they bravely climbed aboard the airship.
All but Rolf Thelemite.
"Climb aboard, three-nipples," said Thodric Jarl, all gray- bearded harshness in the gray dawn.
Three-nipples? What kind of nickname was that?
As the other travelers were still wondering, Jarl disembarked, caught Rolf by the single gold-snake earring which hung from his left ear, and dragged him aboard the boat.
"Sit!" said Jarl, compressing a lifetime's scorn into the single word.
Rolf Thelemite sat. His lower lip was trembling. It communicated its anxiety to the lip above it. Rolf's eyes blinked, so fast and so fiercely that at last he had to close them altogether. Jarl said something to him in the Rovac tongue, and he bit his lower lip. Hard. Drawing blood.
"All ready?" said Sken-Pitilkin. "Very well! Brace yourselves! And hold on tight!" Sken-Pitilkin said a Word, and -
The ship rotated violently, and slammed itself into the sky.
It whipped itself toward the heavens like a cartwheel driven by demons, and undigested food in matching cartwheels came spurting from Guest Gulkan's lips.
Up, up, up, up, up went the airship.
Slammed through the sky, they skipped marches in moments.
Mere eagles or dragons would have been left creaking in their wake like so many inconsequential toothpicks awash in the boil of a racing sloop. As the waddle of a ducking is to the speed of a galloping stallion, so was the stasis of all lesser forms of transport when compared to the compressed delirium of that airship in flight.
The heavens themselves screamed. The heavens screamed as the very sky was torn asunder by the assault of that ship. As lightning launches itself in javelins of fire, as thunder cracks its discus, in such a manner did that ship hurtle itself through the blue empyrean.
And, all the time, the remains of the banquet shot from Guest Gulkan's gaping mouth in spuming cartwheels, so it looked for all the world as if the boy had been transformed into one of those octopus things which goes whirlygigging round on a stick, one of those hectic fireworks which are so much the fashion in Tang.
Thus flew Sken-Pitilkin's airship.
As for the master of that ship -
Why, Sken-Pitilkin found himself unable to control the vessel, for it was spinning so quickly that he was pinned against the planks by centrifugal force. He managed to wrench his head sideways, and wished he had not. For on turning his head, Sken-Pitilkin found he could see through a gap in the planks. Through that gap he saw the sea, then hills, hills buckling away in nightmarish cascades of onslaughting rotational energy. Then the shocked and air-shattered wizard almost lost an eyeball to a passing mountain peak. Almost, but not quite - for the airship cleared the mountaintop by half a handspan.
A moment later, there was a loud bang - BANG! - and the ship lost power.
Cartwheeling still, it plummeted through the air, slowing, sliding, losing momentum and -
And falling!
"Grief of gods!" cried Zozimus, clutching at a rope.
He might as well have clutched at the sky itself, or a handful of cloud, for there was nothing which could save them now.
The ship was most definitely falling. Count one! It was falling still! Count two! Most definitely falling! Count three! Sken-Pitilkin waited for his life to start to flash before his eyes, but for some unaccountable reason the only thing he could think of was a baked hedgehog. Sken-Pitilkin was still trying to decipher the import of this visionary hedgehog when his airship impacted with the most enormous crash. Ice and snow flew shattering upward, for the ship had fallen with full force upon the uppermost reaches of an upland glacier.
"We're down!" cried Glambrax.
Upon which the ship began to slide, suggesting that there yet lay ahead of them a great deal in the way of down, downwards and doom. This was swiftly confirmed as the ship gathered speed, sliding down that glacier with precipitous velocity.
"Aaaagh!" said Zozimus.
"Waaaah!" said Sken-Pitilkin.
"Gaaaa!" cried Guest Gulkan.
But before anyone else could find breath sufficient to join this chorus, the airship slam-crashed into a crevasse, bounced, flipped, rolled over and over, and came to rest in ruins at the foot of the glacier.
There were a few groans from the ship's settling timbers, then all was silent but for a tiny chink, chink, chink. The sound was from the golden serpent which hung from Rolf Thelemite's left ear. It was swaying still from the violence imparted to it by its aerial adventure, and was knocking against a rusted bolthead.
The earring chinked itself to silence.
With the ceasing of that sound, every sound in the audible universe seemed to have ceased.
There was a long, long silence.
Then a groan.
Then, bit by bit, the travelers began to pick themselves up.
"We've been wrecked," said the dwarf Glambrax.
"Air-wrecked," said Rolf Thelemite.
"Wrecked with a crash," said Guest Gulkan. "We crashed."
"Crashed," said Sken-Pitilkin. "That's a good word for it. Is anybody hurt?"
Nobody was, excepting Thodric Jarl, and his injuries appeared to be limited to a couple of broken ribs.
"Very well," said Sken-Pitilkin. "Let us be making our way to that building."
And he pointed out the building he meant, which was the one dominant human-made feature of an otherwise bleak and desolate landscape.Sken-Pitilkin's airship had crashed in a valley which was deep and narrow. This bare and barren upland valley ran from east to west, and the heroes of the airship had been airwrecked (or, to use Sken-Pitilkin's parlance, "crashed") upon the southern heights of that valley.
The building to which Sken-Pitilkin had pointed stood on the northern slopes of the valley. It was huge. From the distance, the travelers could see no windows in that building, nor could they clearly make out its color. Guest Gulkan declared it to be not a building but a block-built mud heap.
"Then since we have a mud beetle in our ranks," said Thodric Jarl, "let us be making for it."Guest thought it best not to ask which of them was the mud beetle, and in the wisdom of his silence the party began to navigate toward that far-distant goal. This required the air- crashed aeronauts to descend into the depths of the valley be
fore scaling the opposing slope.
So they began the descent.
At these heights, the air was thin, and to walk was a labor.
Even though they were going downhill, they found they must necessarily stop every four or five paces to rest for a trifle; and it seemed that each of them at each halt discovered more and more bruises, scrapes, cracks and cuts which had previously gone unnoticed in the excitement of their air-escapade.
"Grief of a dog!" said Rolf, picking his way downhill. "I'd not see fit to bury a dead beetle in a place as miserable as this!"
In truth, the Rovac warrior Rolf Thelemite was an apt judge of landscape.
For the valley through which they labored was a singularly uninspiring realm of shattered rock and smashed stone. The wedgework of the weather had split huge rafts of scree from the disintegrating mountains. There was nothing whatsoever in that blasted landscape to hold the eye, unless one was attracted by the great lumps of stone which reared up on the skyline, where the sun blazed down from a sky as blue as an ice-maiden's eye.
As they descended, the dralkosh Zelafona began to stumble.
She did not complain, but the subdued silence of her dwarf-son Glambrax was sufficient to warn Sken-Pitilkin that the mother was in trouble.
"Here," said Sken-Pitilkin, passing his country-crook to Zelafona. "Lean on this."
She took it without a word, enduring the gift as if it were an insult. But she stumbled less thereafter - though Sken-Pitilkin stumbled more, and began to repent of the folly which had led him to pass his mainstaff support to a witch. He regretted being over- generous with Zelafona. For, after all, the witch and her dwarf- son were largely to blame for Sken-Pitilkin's present predicament.
Had it not been for the recklessness of their avaricious folly, the Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin would still have been safely ensconced on his home island of Drum, rather than mucking about in a wilderness of mountains.
In this lies a tale.
In the romantic folly of his former years, Hostaja Torsen Sken-Pitilkin had set himself against the Confederation of Wizards, seeking with the propaganda of his tongue and by the moral force of his generous example to oppose that Confederation's despotic oppression of witches. Like other immature idealists before him, Sken-Pitilkin had found both propaganda and moral example to be inefficient against vested financial interests; and those of the Confederation who had set themselves to break up the Sisterhood's mighty Credit Union soon set themselves the task of breaking up Sken-Pitilkin.
Thus Sken-Pitilkin had become an outlawed renegade with a price on his head; and for long years he had wandered, with none but the irregular verbs as his companions, until at last he invaded Drum (an easy invasion, this, the island being uninhabited at the time) and (armed with a large sack of flea powder and a dozen rat traps) secured possession of Drum's ruling castle.
For long generations thereafter, Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin lorded it over the island of Drum as the absolute master of all he surveyed. True, most of what he surveyed was bits and pieces of the wrath-wracked waters of the Penvash Channel, that strategically important strait which separates the continent of Argan from the Ravlish Lands; but of that at least he had unopposed suzerainty.
Then came disaster.
Disaster came to Sken-Pitilkin's castle in the form of the witch Zelafona and her dwarf-son Glambrax. These two (in conjunction with Pelagius Zozimus, who surely should have known better!) had been embroiled in a complicated conspiracy to steal from one of the libraries of the Confederation of Wizards a complete and detailed history of the Credit Union once run by the Sisterhood of Witches.
That at least is the story which Zelafona retailed to Sken-Pitilkin. Pelagius Zozimus cheerfully confirmed the story, though Zozimus was ever an adroit master of deception. Sken-Pitilkin darkly suspected that a lot was being left unsaid, for whatever wickedness the would-be thieves had perpetrated in the south, they had roused the Confederation to a wrathfullness never seen before or since, and it is hard to imagine that the attempted theft of a History could have inspired such anger.
The Confederation had pursued all three thieves - Zelafona,
Glambrax and Pelagius Zozimus - and had pursued them with such ferocity that pursuit was not close behind when the malefactors sought refuge on the island of Drum. The evil ones did not come to Drum by accident. No, they knew Sken-Pitilkin to be in residence upon that island.
When these refugees arrived, Sken-Pitilkin found he had no option but the help them. After all, Zozimus was his cousin.
Furthermore, Sken-Pitilkin owed a great debt of honor to a powerful witch known as Bao Gahai, who had thrice saved his life in earlier centuries. So Sken-Pitilkin found himself honor-bound to help Zelafona, for the witch Zelafona was Bao Gahai's sister.
Here let it be known that honor does not lie in the sole possession of the warriors. For, while your bloodstained barbarian will boast much of "the honor of his sword", honor has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the hacking off of heads or the dissection of the liver. Sken-Pitilkin was honorable; and, in his honor, he assisted all three refugees to elude their pursuers. Which, of course, made Sken-Pitilkin himself a target for that very pursuit.
Consequently, the renegade wizard of Skatzabratzumon joined the refugees in their flight into the northern continent of Gendormargensis, where they sought shelter from the great and honorable Bao Gahai, the advisor (some said: the consort) of Lord Onosh, Lord Onosh being the father of Guest Gulkan and the ruler of the Collosnon Empire.
Thus Sken-Pitilkin was exiled from his home island of Drum; and was forced to earn his living as a mere tutor; and became unconscionably embroiled in the affairs of the Yarglat; and found himself on a stumblestone mountainside somewhere in the northern continent of Tameran, with the witch Zelafona availing herself of his country crook for her own support.
"Chala?" said Glambrax, speaking anxiously to Zelafona.
"I'm all right, sugarlump," said she, though the manifest strain of the statement gave the lie to her own pronouncement.
Chala? Sugarlump!?
Pet names, doubtless, and proof of a tenderness of relationship which Sken-Pitilkin had never thought to exist between the dwarf and his mother.
On that journey down the mountainside, Sken-Pitilkin began to suspect that the greater part of Glambrax's habitual brawling, joking, hard-drinking delinquency was insulation - a layer of hard-working diversion designed to cut the dwarf off from the rawness of the painful realities of his own life. For, after all,
Glambrax was as much an exile as Sken-Pitilkin. A hard necessity had driven the dwarf to Tameran, and doubtless in his private moments he suffered from the driving, as did Sken-Pitilkin.
So.
In the unconscious wisdom of his habits, the dwarf Glambrax had configured his life in such a way that he seldom had to endure so much as a single solitary moment of personal reflection from sun-dawn to dusk.
But on these stony, steep-descending slopes, there was no opportunity for brawling distractions. There was instead the coldness of unfeeling reality, the uncompromising solidity of stone, the randomness of scree, and the sharp-beak threats of hunger, thirst and entropy.
Like so many broken cockroaches, the air-wrecked aeronauts stumbled stone by stone down the rockside, mite-made creatures of bony flesh pinpricking their way across the rumplings of geology, their significance dwarfed and denied by the razor-blade heights of hostility which etched the skies above them.
Up on those stone-slice heights - high, high above the rock slopes and scree drifts where the travelers labored - lay white snow-slice eternities of cold. A high wind was scouring a mist of snow from one knife-edge peak, but this was so far above and beyond the travelers that they could not hear so much as a whisper of the crisping and keening of the ferocity of that bright-sun wind. Rather, they labored in stillness, a stillness loud with their harsh-panting breathing, the creaking of their knee joints, the squiff-pulse labors of their hearts.
At the bottom of the slo
pe, when all downlabor was done and their uplabor was about to be commenced, there was a stream which ran toward the east. From which Sken-Pitilkin, learned in geography, deduced that in all probability this valley would ultimately provide them with an escape to the Swelaway Sea, should they choose to follow that stream to the east.
There was no need to ford the stream, since it was bridged. A path came up the valley from out of the east, crossed the stream by way of the bridge, then climbed toward the block-built building up above.
"What now?" asked Guest Gulkan, he who in the folly of his youth still possessed strength sufficient for senseless questions.Guest Gulkan's traveling companions, who were one and all exhausted by the rigors of the mountain heights, wasted no breath on useless reply.
Pelagius Zozimus took the lead.
Pelagius Zozimus, still wearing his elf-bright fish-scale armor, crossed the bridge, then began to mountain-climb upwards, one trudge at a time. After him went Thodric Jarl, mouth agape in a constant, unconscious, almost inaudible lisp of pain - for Jarl was suffering grievously from his broken ribs. Then went Zelafona, leaning on Sken-Pitilkin's country crook. Glambrax dogged his mother's heels, and Sken-Pitilkin followed, half-hoping that Zelafona would drop dead. For if she died then Sken-Pitilkin would be able to recover his country crook, and his journey would be that much easier. Naturally, the wizard had far too much pride to ask for the voluntary return of that instrument.
After Sken-Pitilkin came Guest Gulkan. The boy had long since drawn his sword, and had been abusing that instrument shamelessly, using it as a walking stick.
The Rovac warrior Rolf Thelemite had been bravely trying to resist Guest's example. For Rolf was - he was, wasn't he? - a mighty killer of men. A conqueror of dragons. A slaughterer of kings and emperors. A killer of orcs, ghouls, ghosts and necromancers. As such, he could scarcely abuse the pride of his steel by using it as a walking stick. Could he?