by Hugh Cook
And as for Guest, why, he found himself a prisoner in the House of Conceded Sacrifice, which offered refugees sanctuary for only as long as they could afford to pay for their keep.
Once the adventurers had exhausted their supply of ready cash, they would be dissected, this dissection counting as a sacrifice in honor of the Experimental Frog, the deity to whom the House of Conceded Sacrifice was dedicated.
The priests of the House of Conceded Sacrifice provided the adventurers with a list of temple charges. After consulting with the other adventurers, Guest pronounced the prices reasonable, and announced that he and his companions would stay for twenty-nine days then prepare themselves for dissection by drinking themselves into insensibility. Guest made this announcement in Toxteth, which was the only language he had in common with any of the priests of the House of Conceded Sacrifice. He made the announcement directly to the High Priest of that House, since Guest and his companions had stirred up so much trouble in the city that no lesser dignitary dared to deal with them.
"I have heard," said Guest, "that there is a spirit of great potency distilled from the crushings of the sugar cane."
"There is," said the High Priest gravely. "It is called rum."
"Very well," said Guest. "On the thirtieth day, we'll drink down a barrel of this - this rum. A barrel between four. Will that suffice?"
"My lord," said the High Priest, "a barrel would suffice for the suicide of thirty. We do not wish you dead."
"I am of the Yarglat," said Guest staunchly. "I will still be fit enough to scream, even should I drink the whole of this barrel to myself. I have but one request. After I have been dissected, I wish my body to be burnt of a pyre of my own making. My companions wish likewise."
The High Priest had no objection to this, so Guest Gulkan and his companions spent twenty-nine days building such a pyre, configuring it in the form of a gigantic bird's nest, and at dawn on the thirtieth day they all four of them piled into this stickbird and took to the heavens.
Up, up, up and away they whirled!Guest whooped with exhilaration as he looked down upon Obooloo. Then he spat.
Unfortunately, Guest's spittle fell into Lake Kak, a body of water so thoroughly polluted that no act by any human agency could possibly damage it further. Still, this gesture of defiance buoyed up the Weaponmaster; and, thus buoyed, he settled himself down to endure the rigors of air-flight.
From Obooloo they flew to Manamalargo, a lagoon on the seawashed shores of Yestron, the seas of the washing being none other than the waters of the Great Ocean, that bulk of salinity otherwise known as Moana, or (to give its name as do the Yarglat) as the Sea of Salt.
Once all were rested - to the extent that rest is possible on the shores of Manamalargo, a region beset by stench-hole snakes and pestilential mosquitoes - the four took to the air once more, intending to search out the fabled island of Untunchilamon.
However, the navigational difficulties of airflight being greater than the groundsman might suppose, their quest for Untunchilamon proved fruitless.
It also proved exceedingly dangerous.
The stickbird was held aloft and velocitated through the air by energies generated by a conflict between its abnormal components and the normalizing forces of the universe. Yet the whole arrangement was so intrinsically unstable that Sken-Pitilkin was taxed to the limit by the demands of managing his unruly instrument. Given the slightest mismanagement, the stickbird would shake itself to pieces, or - quite possibly - explode with force sufficient to rupture the sky from horizon to horizon. Sken-Pitilkin, then, was subjected to such extreme degrees of physical and psychic stress that he was more than once tempted to deliberately crash his creation, and thus bring his agonies to an end.
In the course of his flyforth across bewilderments of sea and sky, Sken-Pitilkin five times rested and renewed his strength on nameless chunks of coral and rock lost somewhere in the vastness of Moana. Then, his strength almost being exhausted for a sixth time, Sken-Pitilkin at last found something to which he could put a name.
But it was not the island of Untunchilamon.
It was, rather, the continent of Argan.
A sizeable discovery, you might think, but not the kind of thing one can claim by right of salvage and stuff into a spare pocket; and Sken-Pitilkin was not entirely glad to have found it.
Down from the clouds came Sken-Pitilkin and his passengers, hurtling toward the shores of the above-mentioned and above-named continent of Argan.
"Brace!" yelled Sken-Pitilkin, as his stickbird went skimming across the waves.
All braced.
The stickbird clipped a wave, spun skywards, plunged, hit the sea with a shatter-splash, bounced, hit the sands, scuffed up the beach with a great flurry of fractured silicon and shell, then skidded. Then flipped. The passengers went sprawling to the sands, from which they picked themselves up - all except Sken-Pitilkin.
"Cousin," said Zozimus. "Are you hurt?"
"Mortally," said Sken-Pitilkin weakly.
Then collapsed into the silence of utter exhaustion, which elicited no sympathy whatsoever from those whom he had so grievously misled across the ocean.
"Dogs and cats!" said Thayer Levant, giving voice to one of the mightiest oaths of Chi'ash-lan. "Where are we?"
"We are now," said Pelagius Zozimus, scrutinizing the beach of their landing, "on the Chameleon's Tongue."
"Tongue?" said Guest Gulkan. "This is a tongue?"
"Indeed it is," said Zozimus. "We are on the Tongue of a certainty. To be precise, we are at the Elbow."
"The Elbow?" said Guest. "Only a moment ago you called it a tongue. What will you have it next? A kneecap?"
"No," said Zozimus, "for the Kneecap is elsewhere."
Then Zozimus detailed out the location of the Kneecap, and having thus indulged himself in an entirely gratuitous display of geographical superiority, he suggested that they climb the conical knoll which he identified as the Elbow so they might confirm that they were on the beach known as the Tongue.
Thereupon all but the collapsed Sken-Pitilkin climbed the knoll, and Zozimus confirmed that they were truly on the Tongue, the white-heat beaches of which stretched away for league upon league to north and to west. Out to sea lay the Teardrop Islands, and inland rose the heights of the Lizard Crest Rises.
"It is true of a certainty," said Zozimus. "That fool Sken-Pitilkin has flown us clean across the ocean."
Later, when finally roused from the sleep of his exhaustion, Sken-Pitilkin confessed as much.
"We have," said that wizard of Skatzabratzumon, "but one option."
"And that is?" said his companions.
"To fly back across Moana," answered Sken-Pitilkin, with swift-reviving enthusiasm for further adventures in flight. "Fly back again in quest for Untunchilamon."
His companions however averred that they had several alternative options, some of which were starting to look increasingly palatable. The roasting of Sken-Pitilkin, for instance; or the boiling of him, bones and ungutted flesh together; or the braining of him with heavy rocks; or the feeding of his intellect to a pit of dragons; or the delivery of his walking corpse to the slaveyards of Lesser Narglash.
"Furthermore," said Zozimus, "that does not exhaust our choices. For we have yet another option. We could walk from here to Drangsturm, then book passage on a ship and get to Untunchilamon the fast way."
"The fast way!" said Sken-Pitilkin. "A ship would take months!"
"Months!" said Zozimus. "It would take months, would it?
Well, with you stitching your way back and forth across the ocean in the derelictions of your confidence, we look to waste out a lifetime in futility."
As the two wizards argued it out, Guest took himself off into the hinterland, returning much later with a dead lizard. In the evening, that lizard made a meal, once it had been supplemented by fish caught by Sken-Pitilkin and clams dug from the seasands by a reluctant Thayer Levant working under the remorseless supervision of Pelagius Zozimus.
/> That night, Guest Gulkan dreamt his way through the plunging darkness of blue seas and green, through the kraken depths of the northern wastes and the shallows of the Green Sea.
The Weaponmaster woke from his dreams to find it was late at night, and cold, and dark. A desolate wind blew in from the sea. Guest got up on his four limbs and crouched on the beach, watching the sea suspiciously. Watching. Listening. Waiting. For what? He knew not, but felt fearfully vulnerable.
"There is nothing," he muttered.
Then took a piss. The head of his penis was furry with smegma, and the smell got on Guest's fingers, and he sniffed at the smell, and was comforted by it on this strange and darkened beach. Nothing is more intimately consoling than one's own scent, just as few things can be so repulsive as the smell of a stranger.
But the transitory comfort of Guest's private indulgence was not enough to guard him against the dark, for Guest began to be convinced that he knew what had wakened him. That he knew what was out there. It was the Great Mink. He was sure of it. He could see it! He could see its hulking shadow! Guest was convinced that he was deluding himself. He was in a land too warm for the Great Mink, a land far removed from ice and snow. Nevertheless, while logic told him that there could not possibly be any such monster lurking in the night, he was simultaneously gripped by the unshakable belief that just such an animal was out there - and that he could see it.
So Guest sat for a frozen eternity, until at last the slow lightbirth of dawn revealed the hulking shadow to be no more than a tree trunk.
And in the relief of the morning, Guest told his companions of his plan for finding Untunchilamon, a plan he had got from brooding on his dream of the night.
"We ride the line of the green," said Guest Gulkan.
"The green?" said Zozimus.
"The green of the Green Sea," said Guest.
Then he explained.
In the course of his flight across Moana, Guest had observed that the shallow waters round islands and reefs appear from the air to be uncommonly green, and are clearly demarked from the blue-black of the deeper waters. It was known that the southern waters of Moana, those waters known as the Green Sea, were uncommonly shallow; and it was consequently obvious that they should be a literal green.
"Furthermore," said Guest, "it is known that the island of
Untunchilamon lies on the line of demarcation which separates the depths from the shallows. Therefore, if we do but follow the line of green, then we must necessarily find Untunchilamon."
This sounded so suspiciously like commonsense that Sken-Pitilkin was sure there had to be a thousand things wrong with it.
And, apart from all other reservations - since when had Guest Gulkan been a geographer?!
But at last Sken-Pitilkin and the others were persuaded to Guest Gulkan's enterprise. So to the air they took, and found their way to the line of the Green Ocean, and followed that line as best they could, until one day Guest Gulkan espied great upthrusts of red rock in the distance.
"Red rocks ahead!" said Guest, announcing the oncoming cliffs.
"The bloodstone of Untunchilamon," said Sken-Pitilkin.
And turned his stickbird north.
"Cousin," said Zozimus, "we seek the city of Injiltaprajura, which lies at Untunchilamon's southernmost point."
"So we do, so we do," said Sken-Pitilkin, "but I hope to make a discreet entry to the island, so let us land a little to the north of the city."
In accordance with this strategy, Sken-Pitilkin brought his stickbird over the coast of the island of Untunchilamon some distance to the north of Injiltaprajura, its one and only city.
His stickbird passed over the briskwater surf of the fringing reef at altitude, then over those cliffs of bloodstone. An updraft hit them, flinging the stickbird high to the heavens.
"Wa!" cried Guest, alarmed.
"Pitilkin!" cried Zozimus.
"No danger, no danger," said Sken-Pitilkin, skewing the stickbird across the lurching sky. "Sit back! Relax! Enjoy the view!"
A good view it was, too, for the deserts of Zolabrik were laid out beneath them.
"If this be Untunchilamon," said Guest, "then where be its dragons?"
Even from great altitude, the smallest details of the ground are easily espied from the air. But there were no dragons to be seen in Untunchilamon's desert. There was no sign of life in the desert at all.
"Relax," said Sken-Pitilkin. "Dragons you'll see in plenty when we get to Injiltaprajura."
Injiltaprajura was and is the port which lies at the southern extremity of Untunchilamon; and it was and is the sole concentration of human life on that island. The rest of that rockbeast is an extensiveness of sun-parched desolation interspersed with pits, craters and sundry ruins.
"What's down there?" said Guest, scanning the wastelands below.
"Nothing that need trouble us," said Sken-Pitilkin.
"A city!" cried Guest, making out an extensive configuration of square-walled rock in the desert. "It's a city!"
"It is but ruins," said Sken-Pitilkin, "as you can see from here. Ruins abandoned for millennia. We've no call to go landing there."
In fact, on Sken-Pitilkin's first visit to Untunchilamon it was the very red-dusted ruins which Guest had espied which had brought the sage to something very perilously close to disaster.
Those ruins had lured him - not through exercise of magic but simply by existing. For Sken-Pitilkin had been young then, in comparative terms if not in terms absolute; and such had been the foolishness of his (comparative) youth that he had dared himself to those ruins on a whim, and had been lucky to escape from their dangers with his life.
"Maybe we can go to the ruins on the trip home," said Guest, watching them recede in the distance.
"Maybe, maybe," said Sken-Pitilkin, sending his stickbird speeding southward, and hunting the horizon to the south for some sign of Injiltaprajura.
Before such sign was espied, Thayer Levant cried in his native garble:
"Ware! Ware! A claw! A claw!"
"A claw?" said Sken-Pitilkin, addressing Levant in his native Galish. "Enough of your nonsense. Look! That rim of rock! See the glitter-flash? That's the topmost building of Injiltaprajura, for sure. The pink palace. Pokra Ridge."
"Sken-Pitilkin," said Zozimus quietly, or as quietly as the buffeting winds of airflight would allow. "There are two claws in pursuit. I suggest you turn and give them the benefit of your attention."
"Claws?" said Sken-Pitilkin. "Nonsense!"
But then Guest Gulkan took the sage by the shoulders and physically forced him to a confrontation with the pair of levitating claws fast approaching from the rear.
"Claws!" said Sken-Pitilkin in astonishment.
The claws were of a luminously explosive orange. Each was thrice the length of your average rowboat, and each had as many wings as a stickbird - which is to say, none.
"Hold tight!" cried Sken-Pitilkin.
"Why?" said Zozimus. "Pitilkin, you're not thinking of - "
But the brave Sken-Pitilkin was not thinking at all. Rather, he was acting.
As a brawny slave, seeking to free himself from a mine ruined by rockfall, lifts a huge weight at the risk of crushing vertebrae or splitting his spine clean down the middle, so Sken-Pitilkin jerk-thrust the stickbird upward, sending it soaring into the sky.
Up up up up they burst -
Winning a view of Untunchilamon, spread out for league upon league of redness beneath them. In that vastness, Sken-Pitilkin spied a great pit - a pit of such vastness that Sken-Pitilkin was reminded of Argan's notorious dry pit.
"The claws!" cried Zozimus in alarm.
The claws were pursuing.
So Sken-Pitilkin slammed the stickbird down in a spiral which took it plunging into the pit. At the bottom, Sken-Pitilkin braked their fall with levitating energies, looked up and saw -
"Out!" yelled Sken-Pitilkin.
One and all abandoned ship, and moments later the claws fell upon that ship and sundere
d it, while the adventurers sheltered in a niche in the side of the pit.
When the claws had torn the stickbird to pieces, they did their best to likewise tear the adventurers. But the questing heroes were safe in their niche, which was large enough to accommodate a few humans, but too small to admit the enormity of the claws. So, being frustrated in their destructive whims, the claws began to ascend toward the heights - and were torn to pieces by Something invisible which disintegrated them in flame and sundering thunder.
"Grief of gods!" said Guest.
"Can you think of nothing original to say in the face of such a distinctly original encounter?" said Sken-Pitilkin, dusting himself down.
"Original!" said Guest. "I think there to be nothing original about someone or something trying to tear me to pieces! Rather, I think it to be the story of my life, and probably the story of my death as well! Now, how do we get out of here?"
"We climb," said Zozimus, optimistically.
"Climb?" said Sken-Pitilkin, kicking through the wreckage of his stickbird in search of his country crook.
"Why not?" said Zozimus. "Or maybe you could levitate us."
"I will be doing no levitating today," said Sken-Pitilkin, recovering his country crook.
"Why not?" said Guest.
"Because," said Sken-Pitilkin, "even if I were to levitate us to the heights, supposing that feat to be within my power, we would be lost in a waterless desert, and doomed to die in consequence of the strength of the sun."
So spoke Sken-Pitilkin, who, in his youth, had almost died from thirst in that very same desert. But Guest was not convinced.
"You will levitate us!" said the Weaponmaster, threatening Sken-Pitilkin with his sword.
"I will levitate your weapon, and promptly, unless you lower it," said Sken-Pitilkin. "Remember! You have not an army at your back! Not this time! This is no repeat of Ibsen-Iktus!"
Thus admonished, Guest lowered his sword, declaring that he would climb the walls anyway, and risk death from thirst in the sun, whatever Sken-Pitilkin said about it.
But the walls of the pit were quite unclimbable, leaving the adventurers with two distinctly unpalatable options. One was to sit where they were and shortly die of thirst. The other was to exit from the pit by a shoulder-width hole which looked as if it would make an ideal lair for a large spider of bloody disposition and anthropophagous habits.