Drum: Sken-Pitilkin's home island in the Penvash Channel (otherwise known as the Penvash Strait) from which he has long been exiled. In spring of the year Alliance 4293, the peace of Drum was disturbed by the arrival of fugitives, these being Pelagius Zozimus, the dralkosh Zelafona and the dwarf Glambrax.
All three were running from the wrath of the Confederation of Wizards. Sken-Pitilkin gave them shelter, only to find that pursuit was hot on their heels. Fearing for his life, Sken-Pitilkin fled from Drum with the others, and after two years of wandering all four arrived in Gendormargensis, in spring of the year Alliance 4295, at which time Guest Gulkan was only five years of age. It is now Alliance 4315, but Sken-Pitilkin has not returned to Drum in the 22 years since he first fled from that island.
To make a swift transit to Drum, Shabble soared high above fog and clouds, then navigated by the stars. But Sken-Pitilkin kept his stickbird firmly in the mist, and flew throughout the night in those realms of obscurity.
In the gray of dawn, the exhausted wizard of Skatzabratzumon set his stickbird down in a swampy clearing somewhere in the woods. Which woods? Sken-Pitilkin and his passengers could not tell.
"We don't know where to find ourselves," said Sken-Pitilkin,
"so it's most unlikely that Shabble can hunt us. Therefore I pronounce us safe. Guest. Look to our security. For I must sleep."Sken-Pitilkin was as good as his word. He curled up in the bottom of his stickbird, shrouded himself with a solskin horse blanket, and in moments was as dead to the world as a hedgehog wrapped in clay.
Whereupon Guest marched across the soft and yielding turf, making for the nearest tree. The over-bright luxuriant green went squidge-slush-slurk beneath his boots. He grasped the lowest branch of the nearest tree then began to climb, forcing his way upward to the heights which rustled with the dry rasp of leaves growing brittle-brown as their autumn change beset them. Guest expected his survey to reveal a clutch of bloodthirsty saurian monsters, or mayhap a crocodile. But all he saw was swampland and the glimmer-glip of water clipped by the sun.
In such a setting, it was hard to take seriously the possibility of pursuit. But of course there would be pursuit.
Shabble would hunt for the star-globe, because if there was one thing Shabble loved it was a toy, and the Door of the Partnership Banks was surely the greatest toy of all. Guest, then, was doomed to be hunted by an immortal bubble.
And how exactly could one hide from such a bubble for three years, particularly when rumor's sweep tracks out a radius measured in leagues by the hundred? Shabble would be monitoring rumor. And so too might the various demons such as Italis of Alozay and Ko of Chi'ash-lan.
If the demons conspired with Shabble, and dedicated themselves to sifting the news which filtered through cities such as Obooloo and Chi'ash-lan, then Guest and his companions would have to shun all of civilization for fear of discovery. And, speaking of demons – how many of the things were there exactly?
There were two of the jade-green monsters in Obooloo alone: the demon Lob in the precincts of the Bondsmans Guild and the demon Ungular Scarth in the Temple of Blood.
Demons and Shabble.
A dire combination, if it ever came to pass.
Meantime, Shabble alone was formidable enough.
Human pursuit is constrained by time, weather, money and mortality, but Shabble acknowledged none of those. Only boredom would bring Shabble's hunting to an end – and would a three year hiatus be long enough to guarantee such boredom?
What if Shabble found the very hunt itself to be an eternally rewarding game?
So thinking, Guest tried to rouse himself to a state of concern. But all was autumn drowsiness.
Sunlight.
Shadow.
Peace.
Somewhere a bird called:
"Kil-klop! Kil-klop!"
Its song was bright-metallic, a slither of sharpness needling through the utter relaxation of the day.
After his ravaging journeys, the Weaponmaster had at last entered upon a phase of utter peace and oozing time. He felt strangely at a loss; and then, in his idleness, gradually became conscious of his overwhelming fatigue. So he descended from his tree and joined Sken-Pitilkin in sleep; and he slept like a baby until roused for a conference. Sken-Pitilkin kicked off that conference.
"I had thought to run to Drum," said Sken-Pitilkin, "but on mature reflection that seems too obvious. After all, I am known to all of Safrak as the wizard of Drum."
"You are?" said Guest, by no means certain that Sken-Pitilkin was as famous as he thought.
"At the very least," said Sken-Pitilkin, "the demon Italis knows me as such, and it may well be that the demon will tell Shabble where to look for me. So we must not go to Drum. At least, we must not go there directly. As we know, the bubble's weakness is its capacity for boredom. It lacks persistence. If it does not find us in a season, then, having searched Drum and found it empty, it is unlikely to return."
"We hope," said Sod.
"We hope, yes," said Sken-Pitilkin. "In any case, we know that we must at a minimum secure our disappearance for our season.
Therefore we must choose some place which is less than obvious."
"Ema-Urk," said Guest, naming the island on which his brother Morsh Bataar had wife, children and sheep farm.
"You jest, I hope," said Sken-Pitilkin, "for Ema-Urk is far too close to Alozay."
Then the wizard of Skatzabratzumon pulled out a map of Tameran, a weathered map of parchment which had dirt seamed in its folds.
"As you can guess from the condition of this document," said Sken-Pitilkin, "it is no map of mine. I abstracted from a room of maps in Trilip Obo, the Archive Stratum of the mainrock Pinnacle."
Then Sken-Pitilkin pulled out a handful of coins.
"What's this?" said Guest. "Divination?"
"In a manner of speaking," said Sken-Pitilkin. "We must each write down the name of one of the destinations shown on this map, then choose a destination by the tossing of coins."
"Why?" said Guest.
"Because," said Sken-Pitilkin, "Shabble is smart enough to out-guess us if we work by logic. Therefore we must call chance to our assistance."
Then Sken-Pitilkin demanded that they each choose a destination. Guest Gulkan vacillated between Stranagor – the place of his birth – and Gendormargensis. He settled on Gendormargensis. His brother Eljuk opted for Qonsajara, high in the mountains of Ibsen-Iktus. Thayer Levant decided upon Favanosin, while Ontario Nol chose the uplands of the Balardade Massif. Sken-Pitilkin himself then chose Stranagor.
"And you?" said Sken-Pitilkin to Sod.
"I," said Banker Sod, "choose Alozay itself."
"Alozay!" said Sken-Pitilkin. "Why, but that's impossible!"
"Why?" said Sod. "Shabble will surely have left Alozay to seek us elsewhere. If we return, then we can revenge ourselves upon Shabble's creatures. Furthermore, we can glut our pockets with gold, which would see us better prepared for a journey than we are at present."
Sod's plan was extremely dangerous, but Sken-Pitilkin, though he thought Sod over-audacious, nevertheless accepted that plan as one possible option.
Then Sken-Pitilkin tossed the coins that the coins might decide which plan they would opt for.
The coins directed them to Guest Gulkan's choice:
Gendormargensis.
This occasioned uneasiness amongst all of them, even Guest Gulkan himself, for Gendormargensis was ruled by the Red Emperor Khmar, who had won his name by slaughtering so many of his enemies that the rivers ran red with their blood.
"I have another plan," said Nol. "It lacks the virtue of being randomly chosen. But, even so, I do not think that Shabble will divine this plan."
Then the wizard of Itch pointed at Sken-Pitilkin's map. He pointed at the south-west of Tameran. He pointed at a tongue of land which sprinted out into the sea, terminating in a bulb of rock. He pointed at the bulb itself "There," said Ontario Nol, softly. "The bubble will not seek us there."
"There!?" said Sken-Pitilkin, in patent alarm.
While thoughts of venturing to Gendormargensis had made Sken-Pitilkin uneasy, this new suggestion made him positively alarmed.
"What place is that?" said Guest Gulkan. Sken-Pitilkin looked around, then said, albeit with some reluctance:
"We will not speak its name. Not here. But Nol is right. It is a good destination."
So Sken-Pitilkin flew his stickbird to Lex Chalis, a place of caverns where the rock is fluid and warm beneath the touch. It is a place of ghosts, a place of hallucinatory dreams and waking delusions. Do you wish to hear more? Then you must seek elsewhere for the telling. For Lex Chalis awakens things which the mind has deliberately put to sleep. It stirs the old things to life, cracks the inner coffers of the psyche, incarnates the dead.
Worse, in the caverns of Lex Chalis, the thoughts of one person's mind create half-perceived shadows in the minds of that person's companions. Assume, then, that you are in Lex Chalis in the company of Guest Gulkan, he who was once mauled by the Great Mink in an arena in Chi'ash-lan. Assume that Guest is asleep, and dreaming, and that you are dreaming too. Can you imagine what your condition will be when you finally wake, heart pounding, eyes bulging, skin drenched with sweat?
In the great days of the Empire of Wizards, when all of Argan was ruled by the eight orders of the Confederation, then many wizards ventured north to Tameran, and dared their way to the caverns of Lex Chalis. But it is not recorded that any of them had any profit from such venture. For the place is beyond the understanding of wizardry; and, as far as history can tell, there has never been anything made of flesh or blood or stone or steel which has been able to grapple with its mysteries.
During the season in which the travelers sojourned in Lex Chalis, Ontario Nol was once moved to theorize on the nature of the caverns of Lex Chalis. He claimed those caverns to be the work of a theoretical breed of Experimenters.
"It is said by those who claim to know," said Ontario Nol,
"that Probability is a single sheet of fabric pockmarked here and there by those patches of embroidery which mortal creatures know as the Realms of Time.
"It is further said that Probability is the great Enablement which permits the existence of the gods. Enabled by Probability, a god such as the Horn may master a small patch of this great fabric to its own purposes, just as a woman may master a small patch of a great bedsheet for her own embroidery."
Listening to this theorizing, Guest Gulkan thought it disgraceful that a Yarglat male as mighty as Ontario Nol should use reference to a woman's work to describe things so weighty.
Nevertheless, he followed the metaphor.
"If the gods, then, are those who embroider worlds on the raw fabric of Probability," said Ontario Nol, "then the Experimenters are those who move from patch to patch to rearrange each piece of embroidery to something closer to their own liking."
At which, Guest Gulkan began to lose track of Nol's explanation, finding the metaphor to be growing obscure. So Nol switched metaphors.
"Supposing we talk of the soil as a great Enablement which permits life," said Nol. "Suppose we then think of a god as an entity which can create a seed – an entity which can create life.
This is a mighty act, and it takes a god to do it. But what then do we call the farmer who takes the seed and breeds it down through the generations to a plant reshaped to his own requirements. Is the farmer a god? No. He is but a technician, albeit great in his field. And those who claim to know of such things construe their theoretical Experimenters as just such a breed of technicians."Guest Gulkan had difficulty following this metaphor, too, since it was an agricultural metaphor, and the Yarglat have precious little understanding of farming. So Ontario Nol was put to the labor of explaining that farmers can selectively breed plants to reshape them to their own requirements – a datum which was new to Guest, and one which he was inclined to regard with great scepticism.
Yet that was the best metaphor which Ontario Nol could provide, so, whether Guest could understand it or not, he had to put up with it.
"We have, then," said Ontario Nol, "three levels of Power.
There is the original Enablement, which some call Probability.
Then there are the gods, the creators-of-life, those who shape spheres of existence from raw Probability. Then there are the technicians, those who do but remold that which the gods have created."
"What of demons?" said Guest. "And ghosts?"
"They are the creatures of the sub-categories," said Nol, using one of those airy generalizations which a teacher employs when he is in no mood to plunge into complexities. "Let us not bother with sub-categories. Let us stick to our main division, which is the Enablement, the gods and the technicians. The Experimenters, then, are a theoretical race of technicians much given to wholesale remolding."
"And," said Guest, "you claim these caverns of Lex Chalis to be a part of their work?"
"I claim nothing," said Ontario Nol. "I merely retail the theories of others. Those others claim the very configuration of our world to be the result of a wholesale remolding undertaken by the Experimenters. It is said by these theorists that Lex Chalis is a communicator of sorts – an artefact which the Experimenters once used to communicate from world to world."
So said Ontario Nol.
But it must be clearly stated that there are well over a thousand different theories which purport to explain Lex Chalis, and that all of these theories are in conflict. The only thing which all theories are agreed upon is that Lex Chalis is a singularly unpleasant place in which to take up residence.
In that singularly unpleasant place, Sken-Pitilkin and his companions passed the winter season, grubbing a living from the seashore and studying the irregular verbs. Yes! Let it be stated as a fact! Before that season had run its course, Guest Gulkan had grown so desperately bored by the tedium of his refugee existence that he had permitted Sken-Pitilkin to tutor him in one or two of the milder of the foreign irregular verbs.
So passed a season of hardship, in which the refugees often Shabble searching the continents for their shadows, interrogating the buttercups of X-zox Kalada and the humming birds in the southern jungles, bathing in the red dust of Dalar ken Halvar or rolling in the snows of Chi'ash-lan Then, in the spring, Sken-Pitilkin at last declared that he was ready to fly them to Drum.
"Will that be any improvement?" said Guest, who knew of Sken-Pitilkin's island only that it was rocky and infested by sea dragons.
"A great improvement," said Sken-Pitilkin. "For we will be able to sleep in peace, without alien intrusions vexing our nights."
"You mean, then," said Guest, "that your island has no ghosts."
"That is not all I meant, but it is part of it," said Sken-Pitilkin. "Yes, take it from me, there are no ghosts on Drum."
That was a lie, for Drum was haunted by a number of ghosts, and Sken-Pitilkin knew at least seven of them by name. But, since their visitations were infrequent, Sken-Pitilkin thought he could get away with this lie.
Then Sod declared that, ghosts or no ghosts, he was in no mood to fly to Drum, and thought it would be far better for them to make for Chi'ash-lan.
"Impossible," said Sken-Pitilkin flatly. "For once you have been in Chi'ash-lan for a day or less, the demon Ko will know of it. And once Ko knows of it, then so too will every other such demon, and Shabble may well be in alliance with these demons by now even if Shabble was not in alliance with them before."
At last, Sod was persuaded – coerced is perhaps a better word for it – into Sken-Pitilkin stickbird. Then Sken-Pitilkin sent this airship whirling skywards, and headed south. Guest Gulkan, who had grim memories of a traumatic journey across the wastewaters of Moana, predicted of a certainty that Sken-Pitilkin would lose them somewhere over the sea. But in this the Weaponmaster was entirely mistaken, for Sken-Pitilkin knew Drum and its surrounding geography to a nicety. Thanks to his intimate knowledge of the area's geography, the wizard had already worked out a failsafe method of finding his way to Drum by air.
The sagacious wizard of Skatzabratzumon flew south, navigating by the sun alone. Since Lex Chalis is barely a hundred leagues north of Argan, Sken-Pitilkin soon picked up the coast of that continent. Then it was a simple matter to continue down the coastline, keeping a lookout to the west.
As Drum lies barely thirty leagues west of Argan, and as it is a considerable island (for an ant must walk for twenty leagues to cross from its northern coast to its southern), the island is easily seen from the air on a clear day.
Had Sken-Pitilkin gone too far south, he would have realized his error as soon as he reached Larbster Bay, an unmistakable landmark which should serve to safeguard the aerial navigator against error. That at least was the theory – but there was no need to put theory to the test.
For, as Sken-Pitilkin flew south, he sighted Drum to the west, and headed in that direction.
On reaching the island, Sken-Pitilkin did not immediately land at his castle, but ventured on a circumnavigation of the shore. From the heights, Sken-Pitilkin and his companions checked the rocky shores for boats, ships, rafts, canoes and wreckage, but saw none such. All they saw was a number of sea dragons, variously sea bathing and sun bathing.
"It is safe," said Sken-Pitilkin with satisfaction, "at least as far as I can see."
Then the wizard sent his stickbird scudding downwards toward his castle. But, while the airship was still high in the air, it began to shake, as if seized in the grip of an enormously powerful invisible monster.
As the air adventurers clutched at the sticks of the airship in outright panic, it tore apart entirely – leaving them hanging in the air with nothing between them and the rocks below but the clear blue sky.