Cornucopia: horn of plenty rumored to lie in the Stench Caves of Logthok Norgos. Many people have died questing for this legendary generator of wealth, most notoriously Uri the Valorous, far-famed master of insouciant courage. It is possible that the murkbeast which dwells near the entrance to the caves bears much of the responsibility for the 100% fatality rate amongst cornucopia-questers. The above-mentioned murkbeast currently has Guest Gulkan by the ankle, is dragging him toward its maw, and looks set to munch him down in moments.
As Guest Gulkan screamed, the murkbeast wrenched him toward its maw. With one convulsive spasm of strength, it got his booted foot inside its mouth.
Then stopped.
"Gods, gods, gods," sobbed Guest.
Lazily, the murkbeast tasted his boot.
So there was Guest Gulkan, down on his elbows in the muck, his sword in his hand but in no position to strike. His foot was in the murkbeast's mouth. And it was… it was making up its mind. Thanks to its prodigious strength, the murkbeast could torn its prisoner from limb to limb had it so wished. But the thing had bruited down a sating surfeit of the Mutilator's soldiers, and had no true appetite for further human flesh.
Even so, the thing was seriously considering gulleting Guest Gulkan as well. The murkbeast was like a small child which has stuffed itself with sweetmeats to the point of vomiting, but is still tempted by the gross and slimy glitter of a candied cherry, and deludes itself into thinking it can munch down that cherry while still escaping the painful and inevitable consequences of further gluttony.
"Help me!" said Guest, in a very whimper of uncontrolled and uncontrollable terror.
The cut-thrust heat of action was over. Time had slowed to a slow ooze, and in that ooze the Weaponmaster had all too much opportunity to consider the dreadfulness of his situation. Here we must remember that Guest Gulkan had already lost his limbs on one occasion, arms and legs having been torn away by the Great Mink in an arena in Chi'ash-lan. That being so, he knew the truth of pain, and knew that there is nothing worse.
"Be still," said Lord Onosh, urgently.
This was the most useless of all conceivable advice, for Guest was already being still. Very still. Furthermore, he had absolutely no intention of being anything else. But his studied quiescence did him no good at all. The tentacle wrapped round his ankle tightened. Then wrenched. Then pulled off his boot. Guest screamed.
"Has it hurt you?" said the Witchlord.
That sobered Guest sufficiently to allow him to give voice to an obscenity. Upon which the murkbeast swallowed his boot, decided it liked leather, and helped itself to the other.
"The boots have gone," said Guest flatly. "It will be flesh and blood next."
At which, Lord Onosh hesitated. Then kicked something.
Stooped. Grabbed something from the muck, and began to haul it towards the murkbeast.
"What are you doing?" said Guest.
"I'm – "
The murkbeast sucked roughly on Guest's feet.
"God's grief!" said Guest, sobbing in uncontrollable terror.
"Hold on, hold on," said his father. "I'm coming."
Indeed, the Witchlord was floundering through the mud with all the speed he could muster, dragging with him the corpse of one of the Mutilator's guards. As he closed the distance, Lord Onosh sheathed his sword and held the corpse in front of him as a shield.
The Witchlord's approach put the murkbeast in something of a minor quandary. If this dumb two-legged animal was going to walk right into its mouth, then there was no need for the murkbeast to waste time by capturing it. But what if it changed its mind? Best to make sure…
So thinking, the murkbeast extended a lazy tentacle and grabbed the corpse which Lord Onosh was holding in front of him as a shield. Lord Onosh heaved mightily on that corpse. Thinking it held a living animal with its tentacle, and thinking that animal was struggling to get away, the murkbeast heaved mightily on the corpse, wrenched it from the Witchlord's grasp and hauled it towards its mouth.
Lord Onosh then tried to attack, thinking to close with the monster and kill it while it was corpse-consuming. But the mud was too thick, too clutching, and he was still floundering even as the murkbeast opened its mouth wide enough to swallow both Guest Gulkan and the corpse simultaneously. Guest felt himself being sucked into the murkbeast's mouth.
"Your sword!" yelled his father. "You still have your sword!"
True.
Clutching his sword, Guest fought savagely, turning himself onto his back as he was sucked into the murkbeast's mouth.
Clasping his sword with both hands, he turned the blade upwards.
Even as the murkbeast bit down.
The murkbeast munched down with full force, munched without thought, driving Guest Gulkan's sword upward through the roof of its mouth. The pain of this unprecedented wound sent it into spasms. Caught still in its mouth, Guest was trapped by the wet, pumping lubrication of the murkbeast's spasming organ of absorbtion. He was being stifled, pulped, crushed. He could not breathe. A huge heat was drowning him, was -
"Ya!"
The shout was the Witchlord's, a shout of wrath, a shout so loud that Guest heard it even in his confinement. With that shout, the Witchlord drove his sword deep into the murkbeast's guard- glutted stalk.
This rupture of its belly was more than the murkbeast could stand. Insane with pain, it vomited up the contents of its gut. Guest was ejected in a hurtling spurt which saw him thrown to the mud, with a rain of corpse-mash splattering down on him.
Then the murkbeast collapsed in a shuddering heap, and Lord Onosh grabbed his son and dragged him to safety.
"Gods," said Guest, when his father released him. "I'm – "
"Hush down," said the Witchlord. "Hush down, and still. Lie still, and rest… "
Whereupon his son, needing no further introduction, flopped like a rag doll. A very muddy, wet, disheveled rag doll. A barefooted rag doll.
Even after all the trauma he had so recently suffered, the Weaponmaster had wit enough to lament the loss of his boots, for an underground warren like the Stench Caves was sure to be prodigiously productive of things which could tear the feet.
"Well," said Lord Onosh, at length, "at least we're through the worst of it."
"Are we?" said Guest.
"We got past the – the thing," said Lord Onosh.
"The murkbeast," said Guest.
"You had heard of it?" said Lord Onosh.
"I had not heard of it," said Guest, "but my many travels have made me adroit in putting names to unknown things. We will call it the murkbeast."
"The eater of many men," said Lord Onosh.
"Doubtless," said Guest. "But it can hardly have eaten everyone."
Many people had quested into the Stench Caves in search of the cornucopia. None had survived. Guest doubted that a mere murkbeast could have been sufficient for the destruction of so many heroes – for, after all, the murkbeast had not proved a match for two brawny Yarglat barbarians, and some of those who had quested into the Stench Caves had gone in great companies, strongly armed and surely proof against all but the worst of violence.
"You are very much the pessimist today," said Lord Onosh. "So I hope you won't be too offended if I give you some good news."
"What good news?" said Guest.
"I spy light," said his father. "White light. Over there."
With that, Lord Onosh pointed in a direction which might have been north, south, east or west – there was no telling precisely which, for both Witchlord and Weaponmaster had got hopelessly turned around in their underground adventuring.
"It is white light, yes," said Guest. "A good change from this liquid vomit of green which pours down upon us. Very well, then. I am ready for the journey."
"So let's be going," said his father – spuriously, but the Witchlord found himself reluctant to let his son claim the initiative.
With that, the pair set off toward the white light, which grew to a steady promise, a promise which was fulfilled when they gained the safety of a tunnel smooth-walled, level, flat and warm.
In that tunnel, there was music – quiet music, not like the roiling measures of the musicians of Sung, but subtle easings reminiscent of the drift of the sea, and backed by a leisured pulse which spoke of the womb at midnight.
The light which lit this tunnel was that of mother-of-pearl: a gleaming gloss with something of the restfulness of gray about it. Into this restfulness there ventured the two Yarglat barbarians. Both had lost their swords in the battle with the murkbeast, though they still had knives, throwing stars, eye- gouging handscrews, darning needles and packets of pepper. And Guest still had – it was safe in a buckle-down sheath – the bead- tipped blade which he had stolen from the Mutilator.
Thus armed, the pair proceeded down the corridor, looking like two mud-besplattered lunatics who had escaped from an asylum by way of a swamp. They had the wary look of men for whom the world has become a place of hallucinatory shock, of untrustworthy delusion, of tripwire and deadfall.
Yet…
The swooming music continued its sundering lunder-munder melodiby, drowsing all with restfulness; and the tunnel was pleasantly warm, with the nondescript gray tiles assuming a similar warmth beneath Guest Gulkan's naked feet; and the way was clear, and…
"Stop," said Lord Onosh. Guest stopped immediately.
"There's a… a rat or something," said Lord Onosh.
"Where?" said Guest, looking down the corridor, which curved subtly as it disappeared into the distance.
"There's a door," said Lord Onosh. "Do you see it?"
Even as the Witchlord spoke, an animal ventured from a door some thirty paces away.
"It is a rat," said Guest.
"A tame rat, perhaps," said Lord Onosh.
"We'll see," said Guest.
And with that, the two advanced upon the small creature, which made no move to run away. It was certainly built along the general lines of a rat, but as they approached it sat up on its hindpaws, and seemed quite comfortable in that posture. Guest studied the beast with caution, knowing that a wild animal that is over-friendly may well have rabies.
He remembered an episode from way back in his past, when, in the early years of his youth, he had ventured down from the Ibsen-Iktus Mountains in the company of the witch Zelafona, her dwarfson Glambrax and others. Glambrax had been bitten by a dog believed to be rabid, which had occasioned a great lecture from Sken-Pitilkin on the subject of rabies.
"This thing may be diseased," said Guest. "As the fox from the forest which licks your hand may be dooming you to death by rabies, so too may this thing."
"Perhaps," said Lord Onosh. "But it looks a pleasant enough creature."
This was so odd, coming from the Witchlord, that Guest Gulkan half-wondered whether the soothing background music had addled his father's head. But… well, it had to be admitted that the thing in front of them was certainly layered with cuteness, so much so that Guest was hardly sure whether it was any kind of rat at all.
"It's soft," said Guest, who was by now almost within grabbing distance of the thing. "And a little bit plump."
"A rat well-fed," said his father.
"I'm not a rat," said the beast, sounding very offended.
The quokka spoke in Eparget, the very Yarglat tongue in which Witchlord and Weaponmaster had been conversing. To hear the creature speak shocked both barbarians to silence.
Lord Onosh sucked in breath through his teeth.
And Guest -Guest found himself sweating. He reminded himself that there are no such things as talking animals. Guest remembered Sken-Pitilkin telling him as much. There are no talking animals, just as there are no orcs, elves or leprechauns. They are things of fantasy, things which have no place in our world of mud and blood and toil and disease, of sickness and failure, of human frailty and invincible death.
Yet!
"You," said the Witchlord, heavily, "you are a rat."
"I am not!" protested the beast.
"What are you, then?" said Guest, feeling himself dragged into this conversation rather against his better judgment.
"I'm a quokka."
"A quokka?" said Guest. "What in the name of Behenial is a quokka?"
"What, for that matter, is Behenial?" said his father.
"Behenial," said Guest, "is one of the gods my good friend Rolf Thelemite used to swear by. Now, by the name of Behenial – what are you, quokka-thing?"
"I'm a philosopher," said the quokka.
"I asked not of your profession but of your species," said Guest. "Of your species, your kind. What manner of thing is a quokka?"
"It is a marsupial," said the quokka.
"And," said Guest Gulkan, unable to keep himself from asking the next and most obvious question, "what then is a marsupial?"
"A kind of rat, obviously," said his father. "Shall you kill it or shall I?"
"I will," said Guest.
"No!" squealed the quokka.
And fled.
Now it might be thought that Witchlord and Weaponmaster had better things to do than hunt after a small furry animal – even an animal which spoke. But both were in a mood for a meal, and both remembered the most excellent taste of the roast rat which had been served to them before their entry into the nethermost depths of the Stench Caves. Accordingly, they set themselves to pursue the quokka-rat, which fled down a sidetunnel which led into a -
Witchlord and Weaponmaster halted at the end of the sidetunnel, and gaped at the vast chamber into which it led.
It was a huge chamber, lit by trumpeting radiance, and dominated by a gigantic multi-tiered banqueting table, the most enormous banqueting table which ever was. It was gorgeous with the orange of oranges, the red gloss of apples, a cascade of cucumbers awash in a river of rain-flushed lettuce leaves. Wine winked in a constellation of crystal vases. Milk and honey ran in rivers. And there were cakes, cakes loaded with cherries, bulging with almonds, adorned with marzipan. And there were cones of sugar, absolute cones of it, fantastically expensive, the height of luxury.
"Grief of a dog!" said Lord Onosh in astonishment.
Then made as if to enter.
But to Guest, this place had an ugly familiarity. It was familiarity by analogy. The Stench Caves were an underworld, a veritable Downstairs, and in this underground was something possessed of an uncommon linguistic fluency, and associated with this was an intoxicating allurement which was analogous to -
"No!" said Guest, grabbing his father He grabbed so roughly that the Witchlord at first feared his son to be intent on murder, and tried to break free.
"Let go!" said Lord Onosh.
"No, no," said Guest desperately. "You can't go in, it's murder."
"If it will make you happy," said Lord Onosh, with an ill grace, "then I'll stand here all day and slaver. But come tomorrow, I'll go in and eat!"
"Tomorrow?" said the quokka. "Why wait for tomorrow? What's the matter? Come in! Come in! There are good things to eat!"
"Then, little thing, " said Guest, watching the animal closely, "pray be so kind enough as to fetch me a small portion of one of those good things."
The quokka hesitated. Its nose twitched nervously. Guest detected this petit betrayal and knew the thing to be a liar.
"We know what this is," said Guest.
"It's a feast," said the quokka.
"No it isn't," said Guest.
"It is, it is!" said the quokka, with insistent fervor.
"No," said Guest, stamping the word with definitive negativeness. "It's not a banquet. It's a therapist."
"A therapist?" said the quokka innocently. "What on earth is a therapist?"
"Come here," said Guest. "Come to my clutches, and I'll show you exactly what a therapist is!"
At that, the quokka ventured forward. In the most affecting manner imaginable, it ventured to place its very paw upon Guest Gulkan's mud-clad shin.
"Will you starve yourself for suspicion?" said the quokka.
"As I trust you, won't you trust me?"
The animal was so trusting, and so surpassingly cute, that it was enough to make the heart melt. Any civilized person would have trusted it immediately. But Guest was a barbarian, a Yarglat barbarian, and one who had lately been terrorized by a murkbeast, and so was in no mood to be merciful. He snatched at the quokka, seized it and shook it – his hand at its throat! – then squeezed it so hard that it squealed. Red blood stained its teeth.
At which, a voice of moiling thunder spoke, a voice underwritten with subsonic threat:
"Let it go!"Guest did not such thing, but turned to view the banqueting chamber. The banquet had entirely disappeared. In its place stood a towering conglomeration of slowly-evolving windmills, of spindling bones and twirling tapes of metal, of skeletal steel and huge beams around which spheres and cones went twining.
"Wah!" said Lord Onosh, taken aback. "What is it?"
"I am a Great God," said the dull-roar voice. "You have displeased me! Fall down on your knees and repent!"
Now when one is confronted by a Great God, and a Great God which is manifestly some ten thousand times larger than an elephant, then one's natural reaction is to do what it says. So Lord Onosh quite naturally went down on its knees.
But Guest Gulkan – who had had far more to do with gods and demons of all descriptions than had his father – gripped his father by his muddy black hair and wrenched him to his feet. Then Guest spat on the floor. Lord Onosh expected that the Great God would retaliate by obliterating them on the spot, but it did no such thing. Guest Gulkan then addressed the apparition in front of him.
"You are no god," said Guest. "You are but a wretched therapist, a torturing machine, and once I get out of here then all the world will know of you."
Then, as the therapist roared with anger, and thrashed at the Weaponmaster with every spike, prong, hook and tentacle at its disposal – finding him, however, some several paces beyond its grasp – Guest retreated, taking the quokka with him.
Once Guest and his father were safe in the main tunnel, Lord Onosh asked the obvious question.
"That thing," said Lord Onosh. "How did you know what it was?"
"Because," said Guest, "I met a great family of such things on the island of Untunchilamon. They breed there in their thousands, as do huge crabs some ten times the height of a man, and the flying bubbles which men call shabbles."
Then, having delivered himself of that geographical information, Guest Gulkan set about interrogating the quokka.
"Thing," said Guest, "I suspect that the therapist bred you."
To this, the quokka made no answer.
"In nature," said Guest, "there are no such things as talking animals. It follows that you speak through some resource of the therapist. Either you are an extension of the very therapist itself, or else it has somehow tutored your animal brain to enhance it to the point where speech is one of its capabilities."
Lord Onosh could not quite follow this argument. This is hardly surprising. For Lord Onosh was but poorly educated, whereas his son had long been tutored by Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin, most excellent and sagacious of all the wizards of Skatzabratzumon.
Furthermore, Guest Gulkan had resided for four years in the halls of Cap Foz Para Lash, where he had been introduced to many notions which were alien to his father – such as the idea that a machine of sufficient subtlety could insinuate its processes into the brain of an animal then animate that animal as a puppet.
"If you are but an extension of the therapist," said Guest, in a conversational tone of voice, "then doubtless your death will mean nothing, for you are but a fingernail."
"Quokka," said the quokka, getting that word out in defiance of Guest's choking pressure.
"I was speaking by way of analogy," said Guest. "You know the analogies? My good tutor Sken-Pitilkin was very big on the analogies, though I must say I never saw their use till today."
Ah!
Take note!
It is said that, as we go through life, we slowly accumulate wisdom. In Guest Gulkan's life there had so far been precious little sign of this process – till now! On this day of days, he had saved his own life by arguing by analogy, and had saved the life of his father too. Had Guest not been adroit with his analogies, then both Witchlord and Weaponmaster would surely have already been dangling upside down while a chortling therapist gouged out their eyes.
Let us then open the Book of Morals, and record in that Book the supremacy of the philosophies, for it was the application of philosophy had saved Guest Gulkan's life, saving him from a doom against which the strength of his sword would have availed him not (even presuming him to have had a sword, and of course he had none, having lost his steel to the murkbeast).
Doubtless, had Guest been philosopher sufficient, he could have resolved all his other difficulties with equal ease, sliding past the murkbeast without getting so much as the smallest splattering of mud upon his hide, discovering the cornucopia and then securing his exit from the Stench Caves.
But, since Guest's wisdom had yet to reach its full flowering, he had solve his remaining problems by using a non- philosophical mode of operation. This he did by further squeezing the quokka.
"Quokka," repeated the quokka.
"A quokka, are you?" said Guest. "Then I tell you this. You will very shortly be a dead quokka unless you bind yourself to my service. I once hung three men. In the village of Ink, that's where it was. I hung them high in a consequence of the damage they did to me and mine. They brought our lives into peril by selling us rotten boats. Just as I hung those men, so I will hang you, for I think you a menace as great, if not greater."
"Quokka," said the quokka.
"Are you pretending to be imbecile?" said Guest. "Well, if you are, then you will die as an imbecile. Father! A bootlace! I will hang this thing, and now!"
Then Lord Onosh consented to free one of his bootlaces, something not easily done, for the thing had tightened after getting wet, and the Witchlord broke two fingernails getting it free. But with the bootlace free, Guest Gulkan made a hangman's knot – he had learnt that art from Thodric Jarl – and placed the noose around the quokka's neck.
At which the animal broke down entirely, and began to cry.
Have you seen a rat cry? No? Then imagine it. It is the most lugubrious of sights. But it left Guest Gulkan entirely unmoved.
"Since you weep," said Guest, "then I presume you to be a creature in your own right, presumably one tutored beyond its natural temperament by injection of nanotechnological manipulators."
By this phrase "nanotechnological manipulators", Guest Gulkan meant "very small insect-like working-things made of steel". To say this, he did not use the Eparget of the Yarglat, for the Yarglat have little use for nanotechnology. Instead, Guest inserted into his conversation a fragment of alien nomenclature which he had absorbed in the halls of Cap Foz Para Lash in the city of Dalar ken Halvar.
On hearing the words "nanotechnological manipulators" phrased in that alien nomenclature, the quokka flinched as if burnt.
"Aha!" said Guest. "It confesses its nature, does it?"
"I confess nothing," said the quokka sullenly.
"Then I will hang you," said Guest.
"If you hang me," said the quokka, "then you'll die. You can't get out of here alone."
"Well then," said Guest, "if I must die, I'll at least having the satisfaction of having one last meal before I do die."
With that, the Weaponmaster rose to his full height, and raised the bootlace. The quokka was dragged upwards onto the tips of its toes. It squealed as the noose tightened. Guest eased off the pressure – just a trifle.
"All right, all right!" said the quokka. "I'll show you, I'll show you! I'll show you the way out! But. But. You have to promise me. You have to promise not to kill me."
"You have my word," said Guest. "I give you my oath upon it.
I swear by my honor. I will not kill you, nor do you any other harm. But – but! This oath is conditional. To be honored with your life, you must find us the cornucopia."
"The cornucopia?" said the quokka scornfully. "There's no such thing."
"Then," said Guest, again tightening the bootlace, "you will very shortly find yourself equally non-existent."
At that, the quokka was at last persuaded, and, with uncommonly little fuss and difficulty, it guided them first to the cornucopia – which was hidden in a the heart of a three- dimensional maze which would have perplexed the intellect of any five dozen mathematicians put together – then led them to a gnarled flight of derelict stone stairs which led upward.
"Your liberty is at the top of these stairs," said the quokka. "But as for me – this is as far as I go."
"Very well," said Guest. "Father mine, it is time for you to hang this quokka."
"Hang me!" said the quokka, in great distress. "But you swore to preserve me!"
"I swore to do you no harm," said Guest, demonstrating his rapidly advancing philosophical prowess by a strict application of logic. "That is not the same as preserving you. I will be true to my oath. I will do you no harm. It is my father who will do you harm."
"I doubt it," said the Witchlord.
"What?" said Guest, startled.
"You may amuse yourself by hanging this rat, if you wish," said Lord Onosh, "but I think it beneath my dignity."
"Dignity!" said Guest. "We're not talking dignity! We're talking of law! This thing has led men to its deaths, I'm sure of it. Are we to let it free to lead more men to destruction?"
Here Guest had a point. It was undeniably true that the quokka had tried to lead both Witchlord and Weaponmaster to their deaths; and, in all probability, if released it would encompass the death of anyone else who found their way into the Stench Caves. So it was necessary to hang it. Hanging is an ugly business, and in an ordered society there would be no need for it, since in an ordered society, there would be no need for it, since an ordered society would have an Inspector of Boats to regulate the sale of boats and an Inspector of Caves to regulate the governance of Stench Caves.
But as Guest Gulkan lived in a singularly disordered age, a great age of darkness in which competent Inspectors and other regulatory bureaucrats were singularly thin on the ground, he must necessarily be put to the trouble of undertaking the singularly brutal business of hanging in order to serve the ends of justice and preserve the lives of the unwary.
So the quokka was duly hung; and, having been hung, it was eaten. Raw. For Witchlord and Weaponmaster did not have a tinderbox between them; and, besides, they were in no mood to waste time on unnecessary cookery.
Having eaten the quokka – not all of it, for they were not hungry enough to trouble themselves with the guts, and they discarded the fur and the bones – Witchlord and Weaponmaster ventured up the stairs.
At the top of the stairs, the two Yarglat barbarians found themselves at the bottom of a huge pit. Honest sunlight beamed down on them from the top of the pit – it was by Guest's reckoning late afternoon – but the walls of the pit were quite unclimbable.
Witchlord and Weaponmaster climbed to the small mound of rubble in the middle of the pit, a mound made of rocks and of bones, of stones and of dirt, of the droppings of bats and the feathers of vultures. Guest saw something which he thought he recognized. He picked it up. It was a skull.
"So much for that!" said Guest, tossing the skull away.
The quokka had betrayed them!
Realizing this, Guest greatly regretted having persuaded his father to hang the brute. He had discovered one of the great drawbacks of hanging, which is this: supposing you hang a person, and that person then proves to have been a greater criminal than you thought, why, it is impossible to recall them so you can escalate their punishment. This is why, under many of those regimes which do practice hanging, convicted criminals are kept under lock and key for as much as ten or twenty years, to allow the authorities time to prove out any greater crimes of which they may be guilty.
"We have at least the cornucopia," said the Witchlord, trying to be encouraging.
"So we do," said Guest. "So we do."
But he thought of the possession of this magical device as a totally inadequate compensation for being marooned at the bottom of an unclimbable pit somewhere in the Stench Caves of Logthok
Norgos.
So thinking, Guest let the cornucopia fall, then kicked it as it fell. It flopped into the air then sprawled flat on the ground.
The cornucopia was a piece of wrinkled green leather the length of Guest's forearm. It was shaped like a hollow cone, and nothing could be seen within it except a voluminous blackness. It was flexible, and could be comfortably folded up and stuck in one's pocket, and it worked as advertised – that is to say, it duplicated anything which might be put into it. Guest had already tested it by spitting into it and getting it to duplicate his dribble in a constant stream.
"Since we've got time on our hands," said the Witchlord, "you might make use of that thing to make me a ring."
"A ring?" said Guest.
"Yes," said his father. "A ring of ever-ice. Or are we to fight over the one you're wearing on your finger?"
"That's a thought," said Guest.
So he took the ring from his father, sucked on it to remove all crusted mud, spat out the mud, picked up the cornucopia, held it upright, then popped the ring of ever-ice into the voluminous darkness.
Then Guest turned the cornucopia upside down.
Out fell the ring of ever-ice.
Followed by a twin of itself.
Then a triplet.
Then, in a cascading rush, some seven or eight thousand rings came pouring from the cornucopia, piling up around their ankles in a clickering chittering turbulence.
"Whoa!" cried the Witchlord in alarm. Guest jerked the cornucopia to the upright, thus cutting off the flow of rings.
"Wah!" he said.
Then stooped to inspect the hoard at his feet.
"Why," said Guest in disgust, picking up a handful of rings,
"they're rusted!"
And it was true.
The rings were rotten rounds of rust, each with a glob of rust where the original had displayed a chip of ever-ice. But where was the original?
"Where is my ring?" said Guest.
"It was probably the first to fall out," said his father. "It fell at your feet, so – don't move!"
Then Guest stooped to the scrapmetal nightmare at his feet, and rummaged through it with an avaricious diligence. Not all of the rings proved rusty, and some were tolerable counterfeits of the original. But Guest eventually located the one true ring of ever-ice, which could be told from all the others because only the true ring shone with its own inner light.
"Gods!" said Guest, kicking his way clear of the trash-dump rubbish heap. "What a let down!"
And so it was.
"Have you a coin about you?" said Guest.
"No," said his father.
But Guest had already guessed that the cornucopia would not prove an adequate counterfeiter of coinage.
"Time for us to be going," said the Witchlord.
"Where?" said his son.
"If we presume that this treacherous quokka has done its best to defeat our escape," said Lord Onosh, "then our best bet is to go back the way we came."
"If we can remember it," said Guest. "Well then! Lead on! I'm ready!"
But Lord Onosh chose to take a piss before leading on, making Guest realize that it was time for him to do the same himself.
Obedient to nature's necessities, Guest pissed… and was childish enough to try to fill the cornucopia with his outflow.
"What are you doing?" said Lord Onosh, when he turned to see Guest at play with a pissing cornucopia.
"I am – "Guest was about to come up with some justification for his behavior, but did not, for the trickle of urine which was exiting from the cornucopia in his hands suddenly abrupted into a vomiting outflow which made the cornucopia plunge and buck, so that it took all his strength to hold the thing.
The outflow knocked the Witchlord off his feet, and he went rolling away for a dozen paces before he recovered himself and stood. Lord Onosh tried to find words for his rage:
"You – you – you – "
The Witchlord was so profoundly angry he was quite speechless. And Guest -
"Gods!" said Guest, half-shocked, half-intrigued by the strength with which the flux of fluid was bolting from the cornucopia. "It's increasing!"
Indeed, the force of the outsurge from the cornucopia was increasing to such an extent that dirt, stones and entire rocks were blown away where the yellow flux impacted.
"Guest!" said Lord Onosh. "Will you stop that!"
"I will not!" yelled Guest.
"Then if you don't – "
"Yes!" said Guest. "Tell me what happens if I don't!"
"If you don't," said Lord Onosh, raising his voice to make himself heard over the pounding shock-splatter of the cornucopia's high-pressure vomiting, "then I'll – I'll – "
Then the Witchlord fell silent.
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 greensheened 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.