House of Conceded Sacrifice: an institution in Obooloo which has the legal right to offer unassailable protection to all and sundry – for a price. It is nominally devoted to the worship of the Experimental Frog (also known as the Missing Frog, the Mouth of Blood, Our Great Lord Hosjabajaba, and as Jolatarba the Gourmet). Once refugees run out of money they are invariably dissected, their dissection being dedicated to the greater glory of the said Frog.
So it was that Guest Gulkan and his comrades escaped from the Temple of Blood and surrendered themselves to the House of Conceded Sacrifice, where they were received with the traditional courtesy extended to all who sought that refuge.
Night was almost done by the time the adventurers were safe in that refuge. Then came the dawn, bringing the familiar sun, the familiar sky. Yet despite the renewal of sun and sky, Guest Gulkan felt as if the world had been turned upside down.
The Weaponmaster had firmly expected that by now he would have been a wizard, and the honored ally of a liberated Great God, with the world at his feet, and enough strength at his command to allow him to crush the greatest of his enemies beneath the pad of the smallest toe of his left foot.
Instead, Guest had failed utterly. The Great God and its demons had been proved to be lairs. Guest's father had been sorely wounded, and was now imprisoned in the unchanging stasis of a time pod inside the Temple of Blood. The ring which commanded that time pod had been lost to a pool of sewage inside the Temple of Blood.
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 sundered 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.
"It looks as if it will have to be the hole," said Guest, with great reluctance. "Which of us is the bravest? Let the bravest prove himself, and lead the way!"
Upon which Pelagius Zozimus declared that Guest himself was the bravest. But Guest disputed this.
"No," said Guest, "it is my noble servant Thayer Levant who is the bravest. Lead on, Levant!"
On being poked with Guest's sword, Levant conceded that perhaps he was brave. And he crawled into the hole.
Then screamed.
"What is it?" said Guest, in great alarm, as Levant backed out of the hole.
"A centipede!" said Levant, in panic. "A huge centipede, bigger than you are!"Guest was greatly alarmed, at least until he realized that Levant was grinning.
"Enough of your jokes!" said Guest, who was in no mood for being trifled with. "Get into that hole before I kick you!"
Whereupon Levant led the way into the depths, with Guest Gulkan following him, and Sken-Pitilkin and Zozimus crawling along after them.
It would be tedious to recount in detail the long wanderings of the adventurers in the complex and seemingly never-ending underworld which they then entered. Tunnels led to tunnels in unceasing succession, until these four wanderers felt like insects lost in a monstrous maze constructed by a zealous child of over- intellectual disposition.
The tunnels were warm and cold by turns. Some were ice-cold in consequence of the actions of noisy machines busy with the production of huge blocks of ice. By drinking the melt water from such ice, the heroes kept themselves from dying of thirst; but they had nothing to eat, and so grew uncommonly hungry. At the peak of his hunger, Guest proposed that they eat the unfortunate Thayer Levant, and Sken-Pitilkin was not at all sure that he was joking.
"Are you serious?" said Sken-Pitilkin.
"Serious?" said Guest. "About what?"
"About eating Levant. You were talking about it only a moment ago."
"Was I?" said Guest. "I might have been talking about Levant, but I certainly wasn't thinking about him."
"Then of what were you thinking?" said Sken-Pitilkin.
"Of women," said Guest.
As if in direct response to this declaration, there came the sound of women singing. Their clear and beautiful voices sounded uncommonly close.
"Good grief!" said Sken-Pitilkin.
"A choir," said Zozimus. "Perhaps they would like to hire someone to cook for them."
"Not you, you lecherous old goat!" said Sken-Pitilkin.
"Lecherous?" said Zozimus, feigning amazement. "Me? Pitilkin,
I haven't had a woman for half five hundred years or more."
"Then now's no time to be changing your habits!" said Sken-Pitilkin.
"Yes," said Guest, setting out toward the voices.
"Let's each of us keep to our habits."
Zozimus and Sken-Pitilkin followed Guest Gulkan, but Thayer Levant lingered.
"Levant!" said Sken-Pitilkin. "Hurry up!"
"But," said Levant, diffidently.
"But what?" said Sken-Pitilkin.
"But," said Levant, "they might be… they might be mermaids."
"What?!" said Sken-Pitilkin in astonishment.
Then Levant confessed to his superstition. Thayer Levant was from Chi'ash-lan, and the people of those parts have many dire superstitions concerning mermaids. It is said amongst them that these half-human fishes configure themselves as beautiful women, then use the beauty of their voices to lure strangers to a hideous death.
"Levant," said Sken-Pitilkin firmly, "there are no such things as mermaids. They are imaginary creatures, like elves, and orcs, and gnomes, and fairies, and leprechauns, and talking animals. And even supposing that there were mermaids, what then?
Would you really expect to find them down here in these tunnels, deep deep deep beneath the earth?"
"By now," said Levant, evidencing an unusual intellectual belligerence, "we may well be deep deep deep beneath the sea, for there is no saying where these tunnels have taken us. So. So maybe they're mermaids, and maybe they'll eat us."
"Well," said Sken-Pitilkin, "Guest Gulkan lately suggested eating you, so if you've got to be eaten by someone it might as well be by mermaids. Come on!"
After considerable further hesitation, Thayer Levant at last consented to follow the others. With Guest Gulkan leaded, they braved their way into a huge chamber where there arose a kind of waterless fountain which was adorned with the warm and breathing bodies of a thousand women. Up, up rose this fountain, in tier upon tier, crowded with nubile beauty.
For once, Guest Gulkan was quite lost for words. He just stood there and gaped. As he stood there, a woman danced forth from the company of her peers, positively floating through the air as she tranced toward him. She beckoned to him, and he stepped forward, as if in a dream.
Abruptly -
The women vanished.
The women vanished with a clangor of metal and a burst of shuddering laughter. Immediately, the adventurers realized they were confronted by (and more than partially surrounded by) a huge heaped-up conglomeration of steel, a towering contraption of whispering tubes and slowly grinding tentacles, of rotating disks and spindling toroidal columns, of glowing screens and phosphorescent feelers, of spiked antennae and gleaming chelae.
This thing of coiled and coiling metal sat there in a huge and brooding inertia, sat there with all the mighty weight of an ink-black thundercloud pregnant with hailstones the size of a turtle, sat there in predatory poise. There was no telling what or where its eyes might be, yet the thing saw the travelers, clearly, and these four mortals were the focus of its vulturing regard.
Others had been thus focused upon beforehand, as was proved by the large number of corpses which lay scattered in immethodical disorder in and about the monster's great colony of threats. The bodies of close to fifty people were thus scattered, and, to judge by what was left of them, they had not died pleasantly.
"I told you!" said Levant fearfully, thinking himself doomed to become another such corpse.
"You told us of mermaids," said Sken-Pitilkin, with a pedantic emphasis which spoke of long years of pedagogical engagement. "But this is scarcely a mermaid! I think this thing to be an octopus, or a very kraken."
So spoke Sken-Pitilkin, and he spoke harshly, for he was more than half-inclined to blame Thayer Levant for their present predicament. For, if Levant had not spoken his utter nonsense about mermaids, Sken-Pitilkin might have given more serious consideration to the possible source of those womanly voices, and might have realized that the unlikeliness of finding a female choir so deep underground most surely spoke of deception and danger.
Do not therefore blame the adventurers' predicament upon any presumed defect of the wizard Sken-Pitilkin! recognize Sken-Pitilkin for what he was, an uncommonly sagacious and hypercapable wizard of Skatzabratzumon! And put the blame for the travelers' downfall firmly where it belongs – upon the back of the superstitious Thayer Levant!
"I do not think this is a kraken," said Guest, at last recovering his voice. "I think it is a – "
"Whatever it is," said Zozimus, "suppose we quietly back out of here."
Then Zozimus matched action to suggestion. But a lithe tentacle, green in color and slick in its glistening, promptly whipped around his ankles and held him fast. It held him with a strength which bruised his flesh and almost broke his bones.
"It has me!" said Zozimus.
"Then – nobody move," said Sken-Pitilkin. "Guest! Don't move!"
"I'm not moving," said Guest, who was still staring at the looming monstrosity which confronted them.
The thing was huge. Guest got giddy just looking at it.
Obviously it would be quite impossible to hack it to pieces with his sword. Confronted by such invincible strength, Guest Gulkan was possessed by a sense of angry frustration. He was a Yarglat barbarian! Therefore, hacking things to pieces was a part of his birthright! An essential part of his cultural heritage!
Throughout his childhood, the Weaponmaster had lived with the certainty that if he was brawny enough and quick enough on his feet, then he could hack into bloody pieces anyone and everyone who was intemperate enough to oppose his will. But there would be no such hacking here in Untunchilamon's underworld. Consequently, Guest wished most heartily that he was back in Tameran, back on the flatlands of the Collosnon Empire, sending out his scouts and manoeuvering his cavalry; and, in this time of peril, Guest felt not so much fear as, rather, a sickening sense of homesickness.
Beset by such homesickness, the Yarglat barbarian at last acknowledged that the had been in error when he had wilfully embroiled himself in the affairs of wizards, demons and gods. But it was too late to turn back!
Then, realizing he was trapped, irrevocably entangled in matters far beyond his competence, Guest Gulkan grew angry, so angry that he challenged the looming monster in front of him, challenged it as if it were a paltry slave, and he a victorious conqueror with his boot on its neck.
"Who are you?" said Guest, with a lifetime of practiced self-assertion pouring itself into the challenge.
"I am the therapist Schoptomov," said the monster, answering Guest Gulkan in his native Eparget. "Who are you? Who are you, and what are you doing here?" Guest Gulkan cleared his throat, as if in preparation for explanation. Sken-Pitilkin covertly stepped on his foot. The Weaponmaster took the hint, and was silent.
"We're, ah, tourists," said Sken-Pitilkin.
"Tourists?" said the therapist doubtfully.
"Yes," said Sken-Pitilkin. "We've come to see the, ah, the dragons, Untunchilamon is very famous for its dragons, is that not the case?"
"Where are you from?" said the therapist, disregarding the question of dragons.
"From Chi'ash-lan," said Sken-Pitilkin, hoping at least to puzzle the monstrosity.
"Ah," said the therapist. "Chi'ash-lan. I have heard of that place. They feed, I am told, on the eyes of the dog."
"You are uncommonly well-informed," said Sken-Pitilkin, astoundingly astonished to find the therapist so well-versed in the ways of such a far and distant land.
By contrast, Guest Gulkan in his ignorance thought the therapist to be in error; for Guest in his confusion thought that it was only in the Safrak Islands that the eyes of a dog are a favored delicacy. But, while Safrak does use the dog the fullest, the same gastronomical quirk is found also in Chi'ash-lan.
"You find me informed, do you?" said the therapist smugly.
"Well, I make it my business to be informed. And I don't believe for a moment that you're here as tourists. Why did you come here?
The truth!"
"The truth," said Sken-Pitilkin, prevaricating, and wishing that Zozimus would say something to help him out.
"Yes, yes, the truth," said Schoptomov. "Truth, the highest virtue!"
"We had business with one Wazir Sin," said Sken-Pitilkin, since nobody else had courage or wit sufficient to help bluff the monster.
"Ah, Sin, Sin," said the therapist. "A delightful man by all accounts. A man very much after my own tastes. He was doing so very well, too. It is most unfortunate."
"You mean he's dead?" said Guest Gulkan.
"Several years dead," said the therapist.
"Then who rules Untunchilamon?" said Guest.
"I do," said the therapist.
"You braggarting liar!" said Guest, still in his mode of wrath. "You are not a ruler! You are just a species of vermin, a species of rat!"
This speech caused Sken-Pitilkin great pain, for had not the venerable wizard Skatzabratzumon labored for years in an effort to teach Guest Gulkan the arts of diplomacy? All useless, useless, wasted effort – for once a Yarglat barbarian, always a Yarglat barbarian!
"The therapist," said Sken-Pitilkin, seeking to remedy the damage which had surely been done, "is of such sophistication that the rule of Untunchilamon is surely not beyond its capabilities."
"You are right," said the therapist, not bothering to disguise its amused delight, for it had been a long time since anyone had flattered it. "I also have the capacity to kill you."
"Who are you?" said Guest. "And what?"
"I have told you my name already," said the therapist Schoptomov. "If you have forgotten it, then it is fear which is doing the forgetting. As for my function, why, I have told you that, too. I am a therapist."
"A therapist?" said Guest.
"I administer therapy," said Schoptomov. "Algetic therapy."
"What mean you by that?" said Guest Gulkan, puzzled.
"It's a torturer," said Zozimus. "That's what it means."
"You sound as if you despise the Art," said Schoptomov.
"Well, my friend, you will despise it less hereafter."
At this threat, Guest Gulkan suddenly bethought himself of the heaviness of the amulet which hung as a pendant from the necklace he wore always at his throat. Paraban Senk, the disembodied entity which had ruled Cap Foz Para Lash in the city of Dalar ken Halvar, had not wanted him to depart with that amulet. Later, the demon Icaria Scaria Iva-Italis had immediately recognized that amulet for what it was.
But what was it? Guest felt the amulet start to beat in time with his very heart, and, inspired by that beating, knew – he had the gift of Knowing, did he not? – that this amulet was a device which would be proof against the power of the monster which now confronted them.
So Guest seized his amulet, and drew it forth from its concealment, lifting the necklace clear of his head and brandishing its pendant on high as he cried:
"Behold, the mazadath!"
In response…
In response, the therapist laughed. Which angered Guest intensely, for he was profoundly tired of things laughing at him.
"Why, a mazadath!" said the therapist. "A pretty trinket, but one useless for the concerns of the moment."
In demonstration of this, the therapist swatted Guest with a lazy tentacle, knocking the mazadath from his grasp and sending it skittling across the floor. At which Zozimus said to Sken-Pitilkin:
"Can you?"Sken-Pitilkin knew what this question meant. It meant: can you lift this therapist? Ordinarily, Sken-Pitilkin would have answered: no. For the therapist was huge. Its weight was surely greater than that of the demons of Safrak, Chi'ash-lan and Obooloo put together. By trying to lift it, Sken-Pitilkin might kill himself.
But Sken-Pitilkin said, without hesitation:
"I will need a moment's distraction, cousin."
"Then you shall have it," said Zozimus.
Then Pelagius Zozimus animated those corpses which lay about the therapist. In creaking swarms they attacked, flesh falling away as they stormed around the therapist, trying to attack the brute's tentacles and chelae.
What good could this do?
None whatsoever!
For the therapist was too much of a brute to be harmed by the belaboring of a few dozen rotting corpses.
Nevertheless, the therapist was momentarily taken by surprise at this attack. In alarm, it flailed at the corpses with its tentacles. The tentacle which had gripped Pelagius Zozimus came free, whipping itself into the battle against the corpses.
"Now!" said Zozimus.
Then Hostaja Torsen Sken-Pitilkin exerted all his power, and wrenched the therapist – tore it loose from its foundations, heaved it into the air then dumped it down.
Hard.
The therapist screamed. Pipes ruptured. Flailing steam gouted into the air. Bursts of lightning crackled. Guest Gulkan seized Sken-Pitilkin – who had quite fainted away on account of the monstrous nature of his exertions – then led the retreat at the sprint.
Pelagius Zozimus grabbed the country crook which had fallen from Sken-Pitilkin's grasp, and sprinted alongside Guest Gulkan. Thayer Levant lagged a footstep in the rear – and was soon lagging even further, for he paused momentarily to scoop up Guest's fallen mazadath.
The therapist lashed at Levant with a tentacle.
Almost caught him!
But Levant gained the safety of the corridor to which his fellows had fled, leaving the therapist behind him. The wounded monstrosity bellowed in a fury close to madness. In the heat of its rage, it forgot which languages the adventurers had used, and swore at them in some uncouth tongue from its monstrous past.
"Gods!" said Guest, coming to a panting halt, and letting Sken-Pitilkin slip unconscious to the floor. "He's heavy. And he's hot!"
Pelagius Zozimus touched Sken-Pitilkin's skin. It was hot, hot as if in a fever. The venerable wizard of Skatzabratzumon seemed to be positively burning up. Zozimus shuddered.
"What is it?" said Guest.
"We are lucky he is only hot," said Zozimus. "That is what it is!"Guest did not rightly understand the import of this remark, but, sensing it might be something he was better off not understand, he asked no more about it. Instead, he reclaimed his mazadath from Thayer Levant, slung the chained amulet around his neck, and declared himself ready to go on a reconnaissance mission to find some ice.
By the time Guest had returned with some ice – quite a long time, as it happened – Sken-Pitilkin was conscious again. The wizard of Skatzabratzumon proved strong enough to suck on some ice, though it was a long while before he was strong enough to speak, and longer yet before he was capable of walking.
But at last the adventurers got underway again, and a long and weary journey they had before they at last found their way to the daylight.
When at last the travelers did escape to the outer air, they found the fair city of Injiltaprajura to be in a state of uncommon disorder. For the eminent Wazir Sin had indeed been overthrown, and overthrown something close to seven years earlier, a fact which had escaped the notice of everyone from Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin to Plandruk Qinplaqus; for it must be understood that, while Untunchilamon is regularly visited by travelers bent on trade, the extreme isolation of that island means that news is only slowly disseminated from there to parts as far removed as the northern continent of Tameran and the southern continent of Parengarenga. Sken-Pitilkin explained as much to his companions.
"But," said Guest Gulkan, "you told me that you traveled the Circle of the Doors at length while you were acting as diplomat for my father Lord Onosh!"
"So I did, so I did," said Sken-Pitilkin.
"Then," said Guest, "your travels must have taken you repeatedly to Obooloo, where it seems the story of Untunchilamon's wazirless state is well known! Therefore I find myself unable to understand why you did not learn what Obooloo knows all too well!"Sken-Pitilkin took this criticism hard, but at last admitted – and let this concession be seen as proof of his scholarly maturity! – that he had not inquired too closely into the affairs of Untunchilamon because he had been there once himself.
Admittedly, that personal visit had been a long time in the past; but the fact of having made such a visit had tricked Sken-Pitilkin into thinking himself an expert on Untunchilamon, and hence free from the duties of research.
Let this be a lesson to all travelers! The country you visited in your youth is no longer the same nation of which you have such fond recollections! For its government has changed, yes, and its laws, its customs, its currency, and maybe its very language and religion into the bargain!
So, if a moral is to be drawn from this book (and it is said, is it not, that all books should have morals, even if they be books of history like this one?) then let the moral be this: personal knowledge does not secure one's freedom from the burdens of research!
The Untunchilamon which Sken-Pitilkin had visited in his youth had been a well-ordered state ruled by a wazir loyal to the rulers of Obooloo. But the Untunchilamon in which he now found himself was a mutinous state in rebellion against the Izdimir Empire, that hegemonic power which was ruled from Obooloo by Aldarch the Third, Mutilator of Yestron.
Finding themselves in this disordered city, our heroes did the obvious. They pursued their business relentlessly! Using every power and device at their disposal, they strove mightily to win possession of the x-x-zix, the device known to Injiltaprajura as the wishstone.
But, since Sken-Pitilkin had been pitifully weakened by his encounter with the therapist Schoptomov; and since Guest Gulkan's strength proved quite unequal to the difficulties of the task; and since Pelagius Zozimus allowed himself to be shamefully distracted by the various career opportunities available to a master chef; and since Thayer Levant proved absolutely no help whatsoever; and since Injiltaprajura proved to be an uncommonly restless, dangerous, brutal, licentious and anarchic place, the bottom line is quite simple -
They failed.
Our heroes were now in a parlous position. They had quite failed to win control of the wishstone, the x-x-zix, the precious triakisoctahedron which would give them political leverage in the struggle for control of the Circle of the Partnership Banks.
Furthermore, they were marooned on Untunchilamon, which might at any day be invaded by the bloodthirsty armies of a victorious Mutilator. Sken-Pitilkin did the obvious.
He built another airship.
But, since Sken-Pitilkin's efforts to secure possession of the x-x-zix had made him many enemies on Untunchilamon, and since those enemies included certain sorcerers who were resident upon that island, Sken-Pitilkin's airship was promptly destroyed.
"This is not profiting us," said Pelagius Zozimus. "I vote that we build a boat."
"I vote that we steal one," said Guest Gulkan.
"I vote," said Thayer Levant, in disregard of the fact that he was not strictly entitled to a vote, "that we flee to Zolabrik and join Jal Japone."
Jal Japone was an outlaw drug dealer who dwelt in the desert wastelands north of Injiltaprajura. His reputation naturally made him attractive to one with Thayer Levant's criminal propensities, but Levant's suggestion was vetoed out of hand.
"I'll tell you what we do," said Sken-Pitilkin.
Then told. Sken-Pitilkin would build a decoy airship in public view and a real airship in secret. It would take time, but time they had – he hoped.
The days that then followed in Untunchilamon were tense and desperate. As Sken-Pitilkin labored to build his decoy airship and his true escape ship, the various factions on that fraught and troubled island manoeuvered for advantage. Ships arrived with the
Trade Winds, bringing confusing news, rumor, raiders, imposters, swindlers, cheats, refugees and free market entrepreneurs hellbent on making as many dragons as they could out of confusion and alarum.
And all these alarums ultimately culminated in a riot, in the course of which Guest Gulkan at last managed to secure the x-x-zix from Injiltaprajura's treasury, and to make his escape with the thing on a ship, in the company of Thayer Levant.
Now, one might think this a perfectly reasonable procedure.
For, after all, Levant and Guest Gulkan had come to Injiltaprajura to steal the x-x-zix, had they not? They had. But they had come, of course, in the company of the wizards Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin and Pelagius Zozimus.
And the really unfortunate thing is that, when riot arose,
Levant and Guest Gulkan seized a transitory opportunity to win the x-x-zix, and departed from Untunchilamon on a ship, leaving Sken-Pitilkin and Zozimus to make their way off the island as best they could.
This the two wizards eventually managed to do, for Sken-Pitilkin did in the end successfully build another airship. But the really unfortunate thing is that, by the time the wizards escaped from the island, Pelagius Zozimus had been turned into a hamster by a delinquent sorcerer of Injiltaprajura.
A hamster!?
The mighty slug-chef Zozimus, reduced to a hamster's estate?!
Sad but true!!
The details I would tell, but unfortunately it is a long story, which requires a book of its own, and cannot be fitted into this one. For this book concerns itself above all else with the history of the mighty Guest Gulkan, who got away from Untunchilamon by ship only to run into hideous danger before his ship had got all that terribly far.