by Hugh Cook
He was starting to think.
The Witchlord stared with wild surmise at the ever- intensifying torrent which was blasting from the cornucopia. A veritable stream of urine was pounding away, trying to escape from the nearest tunnel, and already it was plain that the tunnel would be hard put to drain the flux if it increased any further.
There then followed a long and very tedious siege of automated pissing, as father and son took turns at holding the cornucopia, keeping it pointing downwards so it would continue to output its surges.
Sitting atop the small mound in the center of the great pit, father and son worked the evening through, and maintained this great labor of hosing all through the following night. But when dawn came, they at last admitted defeat, and raised the cornucopia to the vertical, thus cutting off the flow of urine.
"It is no good," said Guest, sadly folding up the cornucopia.
"There are too many holes in this pit."
So there were, so there were.
Though the whole pit was one reeking yellowish pool of piss, in which the central mound was a small and forlorn island, there was no hope of the flood filling the pit as a whole and thus floating Witchlord and Weaponmaster to freedom. Even as they watched, the piss-level began to drop by perceptible degrees.
"It is escaping," said Guest.
"Yes," said his father. "But where?"
"All waters from the Stench Caves drain from the Nijidith River," said Guest. "Or so I was told."
"I was briefed likewise," said his father. "So, if there is but one outlet from this hell-hole, then the waters will surely lead us out of it."
"A man would have to be very brave to venture this flood," said Guest speculatively, looking at the sinuous lines of strength which marked the currents generated by the swift-draining urine.
"A man would have to be braver yet to stay here and starve," said his father. "I am thirsty, and I have not drunk. I am hungry, and I have not eaten. I am tired, and I have not slept, nor do I expect to sleep in a pit which stinks as much as this one."
"You are right," said Guest, conceding his own hunger, thirst and fatigue. "We'd best be going, and now."
There were three things which Guest wished to preserve in the journey ahead. One was the ring of ever-ice, which should be safe enough on his finger. The second was the knife he had stolen from
Aldarch the Third, which ... well, it was in a buckle-down sheath, and if that was not good enough then there was no way Guest could improve its security.
But what of the cornucopia?
How was he going to keep that safe?
"I'll keep that in my boot," said Lord Onosh, seeing Guest looking speculatively at the cornucopia.Guest was most reluctant to surrender the thing, but could not think of a safer way to manage its transit. So he handed it over to his father, who took off his right boot. On his right foot,
Lord Onosh was wearing two pairs of woollen socks. In their own lands, the Yarglat are accustomed to prepare the foot for the boot by winding a long bandage around it, but such foot-bindings were not the fashion in the Izdimir Empire, and it was that Empire which had equipped the Witchlord for this particular mission.
Lord Onosh took off his own socks, then forced his foot into the cornucopia. Guest thought this a most unwise procedure, but his father came to no harm from it.
With the cornucopia acting as a singularly odd and ill- fitting sock, Lord Onosh crammed his foot back into his boot - not without difficulty! - and laced up that boot with the very same bootlace which had recently been used to hang a quokka.
Then father and son plunged into the swirling waters - they both of them tried most strenuously to think of the flux which faced them as being a flux of water - and began a journey into nightmare. Down they went, sucked away by the swirling currents of drainage, plummeted down a huge sewerpipe where darkness ground darkness in a throttling cacophony of buffeting backspray and jolting collision. Skleetering rats screamed and clawed in the frothing upswirl which rammed them against the roofs of caverns then slammed them down drop-pipes, floated them through caverns loud with the guttural glorp of sideline discharges, then sent them screaming over impromptu waterfalls.
Sometimes Guest saw - or thought he saw - his father's green- sheened face. But sometimes he saw nothing, for sometimes the hot flux plunged him into a roaring darkness where breathing was an intermittent luxury, where rocks rubbled him, where rapids tried to kick him to bits with a billion boots, and where Things with leathery wings went screeching overhead - for all the world as if Guest Gulkan's ears had liberated themselves and, each taking flight from its perch, multiplied themselves in flight until their strength was legion.
After awhile, Guest Gulkan no longer knew whether he was alive or dead, awake or awrath in nightmare. He was swept from one passage of temporary strangulation to the next, was boiled, vomited, plunged, purged, gobleted, zorded, rambleskinned and rumped, was battered by the slurping outpour of a million billion bowls of soup, was shocked by the sundering waves of five oceans and a dozen seas, was -
Was shocked at last to the daylight, was vomited out from the dark, was plunged down the boiling thrash of the Nijidith River, and then was swashed away downstream in the company of shattered bits of tables, chairs, doors, gates, gods and shrines, dead kittens and half-chewed cockroaches, dishrags and begging bowls, the underwear of drowned priests and the straw sandals of doomed peasants.
Floating on his back, Guest was slewed around by the sun, cartwheeled by the hallucinatory daylight, overawed by skies of a blue so wide it was beyond his imagination.
Was this life?
It seemed it was.
But -
What a world! And what a life!
The banks of the river were a wasteland of the torn and tattered, a wasteland of mulched houses and slewed shacks, of canted temples and drowned corpses, of groaning cattle and struggling pigs half-drowned in pits of morass. Finding his strength, or what was left of it, Guest struck out for the nearest shore, and hauled himself up onto the bog of undry land, there to grapple with the oppressive physicality of cold slime and stinking slush.
He was unslaked, unfed, and overwashed, and his father was missing, was nowhere to be seen, so what should he be doing first?
As Guest was still wondering, a body came floating downstream, face upturned to the sun, and he realized it was his father, and realized the man was dead.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Nijidith River: a flux of filth which flows out from Stench Caves and down to Lake Kak, that singularly unpristine body of water on the shores of which stands the city of Obooloo, capital of the Izdimir Empire.
Guest Gulkan dragged his father from the river. It was him!
It was him! Guest smoothed his hand over the steep slope of his father's forehead, feeling beneath his fingers the corrugations of the deep ridges gouged in the bone of that forehead, ridges which ran from hairline to eyebrows. He was too devastated to weep.
As Guest sat there on the banks of the Nijidith river, kneeling beside his father's corpse, that corpse opened its eyes.
"Wah!" said Guest, taking very much by surprise.
"So you too are dead," said Lord Onosh.Guest thought about it a moment, then declared that, in his considered opinion, neither of them was dead, as unlikely as that might seem.
"I think you wrong," said Lord Onosh. "I thing the pair of us certainly dead, for where could this be if it is not in hell?"
Now the Witchlord was being perfectly reasonable when he delivered himself of this opinion, for in all truth the landscape in which the two Yarglat barbarians were marooned did look very much like one of the uncouth outlands of hell. Guest conceded as much.
"Yet," said Guest, "I believe us to be alive."
"Then all I can say," said his father, "is that it would be much more convenient if we were dead."
To this gloomy sentiment, Guest voiced no opposition. For survival was sheer depression in such a brutalized landscape, and all the Weaponm
aster really wanted to do was to collapse. He was ragged with lack of sleep, his throat was sore, his belly was griping, and he was so severely bruised that to move was to inflict upon himself a savagery of suffering.
Yet, being disciplined in the necessities of war, both Witchlord and Weaponmaster did get themselves moving, and shambled along the riverbank, heading downstream until they saw what looked to be a surviving hut atop an unwashed knoll.
"The hut," said Guest, pointing it out.
"Huhn," grunted his father.
And no debate more complicated than that, the two bent their footsteps toward the hut, where they found a peasant family engaged in taking a meal.
There were eight or nine peasants - it was hard to count them exactly, since three or four of the smallest were sitting under an outside table at the feet of their elders - and one of these was a young woman who was breastfeeding a piglet. This scene of indulgence reminded Guest of another young woman - perhaps the very same one - whom he had seen performing a similar action while he was on his way to the Stench Caves.
"Hello," said Guest, trying to smile, and doing his best to look more like a man and less like a zombie.
He was greeted with blank incomprehension.
"Speak you the Galish Trading Tongue?" said Guest, voicing the question in that language.
The same mute, uncomprehending stares were echoed back to him by way of reply.
"Toxteth?" said Guest. "Galsh Ebrek. Wen Endex. Understand?"
In educated company, the names of places often rouse a response where other vocabulary fails, but none of these peasants was geographer enough to have heard of any place so foreign as Wen Endex.
"Never mind," said Lord Onosh. "We don't have to talk to them. We can take what we want."
"Can we?" said Guest, casting hungry eyes on the chickens which were grucking around under upturned baskets of loose-woven cane. "We have no swords, and I for one am in no mood for war."
"Never mind," said Lord Onosh.
Then the Witchlord took off his boot, pulled the cornucopia from his foot, and wrung out the cornucopia as best he could. None of the peasants reacted to the sight of this device, so Guest presumed they did not realize its import.
Having thus readied the cornucopia, Lord Onosh reached out and took a handful of soy beans from a cast iron bowl which sat in the middle of the peasants' table. None of the peasants made any move to stop him, for he was bigger and brawnier than they were.
Indeed, from the paralysed steadfastness of their silence, Guest deduced that they thought both Witchlord and Weaponmaster to be ghouls or demons, and not creatures to be challenged or otherwise trifled with.
Having seized a handful of soy beans, Lord Onosh let them fall into the cornucopia, then upended the thing.
A dribble of soy beans spilt from the cornucopia's crumpled green cone. Then, with a rustling hiss, a cascade of beans slewed forth, piling up around the Witchlord's feet. Suddenly, Lord Onosh began to laugh. Despite his fatigue, his hunger, his unappeased thirst, he was enraptured by the sheer childish pleasure of working a miracle. Such was his engrossment in this task that he walked right round the hut, spilling out a track of soy beans.
"Enough!" said Guest.
At which his father brought the cornucopia to the vertical.
It made a terminal grockling sound as it swallowed anything that was left inside it, then was silent. Empty.
At all this, the peasants sat and stared, for these shenanigans were totally beyond their experience, and they had no repertoire of reaction which was adequate to the occasion. Then a full-grown pig came porking up the slope to the hut, and began to trough its way through the spilt soy beans, eating with a sanguine confidence which persuaded the peasants to follow suit.
As the peasants started in on the soy beans - tentatively at first, as if fearing that what was undenied to a pig might yet be denied to them - Witchlord and Weaponmaster seated themselves at the table and helped themselves to long and greedy draughts of potable water. As if realizing that their guests might be human beings, and humans beings sorely beset by adversity, the oldest of the female peasants - a venerable materfamilias with a face seamed like a gray mudswamp in a time of drought - began to fuss around them. Before she was through, a pair of straw sandals had been procured for Guest's sore feet, and the food on the table had been supplemented by a bowl of boiled potatoes and a plate of raw mushrooms.
Comforted by this attention, both Witchlord and Weaponmaster began to start to feel human again. They ate prodigiously, downing handfuls of soy beans. Working away at the munchiness of those beans, Guest found they brought back memories of Dalar ken Halvar, where he had often eaten the same provender.
The peasants relaxed, chattering away to each other in their own language. Listening to these gray-skinned Janjuladoola people talking in the Janjuladoola tongue, the two Yarglat barbarians were painfully reminded of the fact that they were marooned on a foreign continent where they spoke not a word of the dominant language, and where they were unlikely to run into more than an occasional smattering of people who spoke their own native Eparget.
Consequently, there was absolutely no point in whoring off into the hinterland in the hope of somehow finding a way off the continent by land or sea. They did not know the language; they had no money; and they would draw undue attention to themselves if they went around routinely performing miracles with the cornucopia.
There remained to them but one sensible course of action: to follow the Nijidith to Obooloo, which city could reasonably be expected to have been disordered by flood, and in that city to venture to Achaptipop, the great rock which sustained the Sanctuary of the Bondsmans Guild. If they could only win admission to that Bank, then the Circle of the Partnership Banks would take them to Dalar ken Halvar, where Guest's wife Penelope was surely waiting for his return, and then on to Alozay, where Lord Onosh had his kingdom.
"If," said Guest, as they discussed this, "your kingdom has not been somehow subverted or overthrown in your absence."
"I doubt very much that it has been," said Lord Onosh. "For Sod was as hostage on Alozay, and Bao Gahai was in charge of his custody."Guest thought this a less than adequate guarantee of the security of his father's kingdom, but did not dispute with him.
Nor did he dispute with his father when Lord Onosh retained the cornucopia - seeming to think it his own property. While Guest was greatly displeased at his father's presumption, he thought that now was not the time for a confrontation over the matter, so held his tongue on the journey to Obooloo.
Witchlord and Weaponmaster traveled cautiously, taking time to rest, sleep and scavenge in accordance with their requirements, and so it was dawn on a summer's day when they finally entered the city of Obooloo.
That city was beset by a dreadful desolation. The whole city was one reeking morass of urine, and nobody moved in the streets.
One might have thought the population dead, but for constant and unnerving wailing which arose from ten thousand buildings. It was the wailing of sinners beseeching the gods for mercy.
For the people of Obooloo knew nothing of Guest's discovery of the cornucopia and his use of it. All they knew was that the gods had pissed on their city, filling the Nijidith with a torrent of filth which had caused Lake Kak to rise and storm the city with sundering pollution. Now, in dread, the people of Obooloo tried to stave off a repeat performance, or to advert the imminent end of the world which so many of them feared.
So Witchlord and Weaponmaster proceeded without opposition into the heart of the city, guided by the great rock Achaptipop, which landmarked the way when they were confused by the backstreet bafflings of this alien urbanization. But their progress toward Achaptipop took them inevitably closer to the Temple of Blood, and when Guest realized he was in the presence of that building - which was unmistakable, since there was no other great building immediately south of Achaptipop - he drew his father's attention to the fact.
"You're not thinking of going in there, ar
e you?" said Lord Onosh.
To Lord Onosh, the Temple of Blood was the place where he had been sorely wounded, then captured. To Lord Onosh, the Temple of Blood was the scene of one of the worst traumas of his life. But to Guest, the fighting in the Temple had been but a trifling incident. After all, what was a swordpoint brawl to a hero who has faced the Great Mink in a gladiatorial arena, who has dared the wrath of two therapists, and who has escaped alive from the very mouth of a murkbeast?
"If you're in such a great big hurry to get home," said Guest, "then go ahead. If that's what you want, I'll dare the temple on my own."
Whereupon his father produced the cornucopia, spat in it, and declared himself armed for the expedition. Carrying the cornucopia upright, the Witchlord then headed toward the Temple of Blood, declaring that any opposition would see the entire city digested by the outflux of his saliva.Guest Gulkan thought his father's spittle to be but a poor weapon with which to defy the strength of a Temple, let alone the undiluted might of an entire city, but it was the best weapon they had. Their swords had been lost in the Stench Caves of Logthok
Norgos, and since that loss they had met nobody from whom they could beg, borrow or steal any replacements. In particular, soldiers were so short on the ground that it was possible that perhaps the army had committed suicide en masse as an act of contrition for presumed offences against the gods.
With Lord Onosh bearing the cornucopia, Witchlord and Weaponmaster won their way to the Temple of Blood, and, entering by the unguarded southern gate, found the interior of that sacred place to be eerily silent.
They found their way to the central courtyard which held the Burning Pit, which was today very much an unburning pit - for it was full of squelched ashes. Amidst those ashes, Guest saw a ribcage, a cracked skull and a thighbone. Turning his face from these grim tokens of piety, he looked up - and realized that the southern face of the great rock Achaptipop was covered with crawling figures. Like so many spiders, dozens of penitents were scaling the face of the cliff, as they always do when the city of Obooloo has suffered some great misfortune.