Alozay: Safrak's ruling island. Its Grand Palace occupies the mainrock Pinnacle, the prodigious upthrust of rock which overshadows the city of Molothair. Molothair itself lies on a tongue of low-lying land. Alozay has two sets of docks on Alozay: the Palace Docks, serving the mainrock Pinnacle, and the Molothair Docks, serving the low-lying city itself.
Early in the spring of the year Alliance 4306 – a few days after Guest Gulkan's 16th birthday and a full year after Guest Gulkan's introduction to the demon Iva-Italis – the Rovac warrior Thodric Jarl came to Safrak to recall Guest Gulkan to Gendormargensis.
While the Collosnon Empire had been told that Guest was on Alozay as a hostage, Jarl knew otherwise, and knew that there would be no trouble in recovering the boy from Safrak. In Gendormargensis, it was thought by the uninitiated that the Safrak
Bank regularly demanded hostages from the Collosnon Empire.
However, while it is certainly true that selected individuals were on occasion sent to Alozay as "hostages", the Safrak Bank never demanded any such prisoners, and in fact was paid good gold for safeguarding them.
The Emperor Onosh was a Yarglat barbarian, true, but he had dwelt in Gendormargensis for so long that he was perilously close to being civilized. In Gendormargensis, Lord Onosh had been guided by selected advisors of Sharla ancestry – the Sharla being the sophisticated people who had owned the Collosnon Empire before the Yarglat took it from them in the Wars of Dominion. Aided by his Sharla advisors, and by the subtlety of his dralkosh Bao Gahai,
Lord Onosh had learnt some nimble tricks of politics, and had gone some distance toward mastering the art of blaming all of one's cruel, self-serving and unpopular actions upon some other agency.
In a truly sophisticated civilization, the art of the abdication of responsibility is brought to such a high pitch of perfection that no government ever admits to wanting to do anything which is in the least bit cruel, self-serving or unpopular. The political praxis of such states consists of one long exercise in the avoidance of responsibility. Typically, the government of a sophisticated state presents itself as kind, thoughtful and humane.
But -
But the kind, thoughtful and human administrations of sophisticated states are guides by a network of committees, subcommittees, research groups, panels, outside experts and other such similar functionaries who can be relied upon to produce a string of recommendations which are typically cruel, vicious, short-sighted and barbarous in effect.
And, since it is one of the conceits of high civilization that no government is competent to decide the rights and wrongs of any question through the application of its own wisdom, it follows that the kindest and most diligently popular of all enlightened governments can practice a cruel, self-serving and unpopular brand of politics by the simple expedient of bowing to the wisdom of its advisers – and can do this in good conscience.
Since the Collosnon Empire was a comparatively primitive organization, it had not yet constructed such a comprehensive apparatus of systematized intellectual dishonesty. Hence Lord Onosh had to bear personal responsibility for at least some of his own actions. Nevertheless, the emperor was slowly learning that it was best if his misdeeds be blamed on other people, and he was becoming pretty good at placing the responsibility for his most unpopular actions on either his enemies or his allies.
Safrak accommodated the Witchlord's needs by allowing him to send prisoners to Alozay as "hostages". This let him exile selected dissidents, sending them into distant custody while protesting his love for them, and blaming their fate on the hostage-demanding land of Safrak.
A nice trick, this. It had allowed the Witchlord to exile his son from Gendormargensis without appearing to be cruel, capricious or arbitrary – and allowed him to recall the boy at his pleasure by simply telling Gendormargensis that Safrak had chosen to relinquish its hostage.
So it was that in the spring of the year Alliance 4306 – ah, but the date has been given already! Repetition, repetition, there is no point to it, no need for it. The parchment holds the ink, and holds it for all time. So if the date be lost in the first reading, then it will be found in the second.
A second reading!?!
Is the historian truly counseling a second reading of his works?
Yes, he is!
And shamelessly!
Let it clearly be stated that a second reading is not just to be recommended but is, rather, close to being compulsory. For this is a True History, one which faithfully strives to render the tangled complexities of life itself. To unknot the tangles of this interweaving in a single reading will not be easy. After all, the events confused their very victims, so how should they be clearcut plain to the onlooker?
Read then this history a second time!
If this suggestion seems bizarre, then know that it is not entirely without precedent. Your true scholar will give a book a generation if the text be worthy. And if the book be sufficiently irregular in its verbs, why then, a true scholar will stand content to pore its pages for the better part of a millennium, and think the time well spent.
Yet this is a counsel of perfection, impossible for those whose brief mortality makes the pursuit of such perfection an unattainable ideal. So, in case the constraints of that mortal disease called life make a second reading impossible, let the date be restated, and hammered down, and branded on the mind.
It was spring, and early spring at that. It was the year Alliance 4306, and Guest Gulkan in his adolescent youth had attained the unholy age of 16, surely one of the most perilous of ages in the whole passage from babyhood to manhood. The boy Guest, the self-styled Weaponmaster, had then been in residence on Safrak's ruling island for upwards of a year; and in that year had engaged in an unholy amount of drinking, gambling and troublemaking, none of which will be detailed here – which is not to suggest that any of it had escaped the notice of his elders.
In the early spring of that year, the Rovac warrior Thodric Jarl – gray in beard and gray in eye, he whom Guest Gulkan had dueled for the favors of the woman Yerzerdayla – came to Safrak's ruling island to summon the Witchlord's son home to Gendormargensis.
Thodric Jarl did not come alone. He traveled with friendly swords to guard his back, for the countryside was in disorder. A tax revolt centered on Locontareth had quite got out of hand, and Lord Onosh was marching to war against the rebels. The Witchlord wished the Weaponmaster to march to battle at his side, hence had sent Jarl to fetch the young man.
By this time, the influenza epidemic which had decimated Safrak a year previously was but an almost-forgotten incident in history. The Collosnon Empire had heard nothing of that epidemic.
All those people had died without Lord Onosh, Jarl, or Bao Gahai, or any other in Gendormargensis learning of their deaths. Bones become dust but the blood goes on.
While Jarl had heard nothing of the epidemic – and was destined to learn nothing – he had heard much of the island of Alozay, center of all trade between the Collosnon Empire and Port Domax (Port Domax being a free city placed many leagues distant on the shores of the Great Ocean of Moana).
Lord Onosh had given Thodric Jarl no orders to scout for the means whereby Alozay might be defeated, and to Jarl's best knowledge the Witchlord had no designs on the Safrak Islands.
Nevertheless, as a boat brought Jarl and his comrades to the Palace Docks at the foot of the mainrock Pinnacle, Jarl studied all with a warrior's eye, and committed all to memory.
Jarl could see no certain way to storm the heights, since the rocks above overhung the docks of Alozay, and to gain the heights one had to be winched up to a drop-hole which gaped in the living rock far, far above.
Still, presumably the mainrock Pinnacle could be taken by siege, assuming one had boats enough, and patience sufficient.
At the dockside, Jarl was met by a yellow-skinned cur-dog which bit at his boots, then by a tall and sallow junior Banker, a young man with crooked teeth and breath so bad it scared away the dog. The junior Banker addressed Jarl in the Eparget of the Yarglat. Jarl's native tongue was Rovac, but war had made him the master of a good half-dozen languages, with Eparget the latest to be subdued to his possession. Thus he was able to explain himself.
The junior Banker heard Jarl's mission then told him that he and his comrades would have to wait.
"None of you can proceed," said the junior Banker, "until at least one of you has been properly identified and vouched for. You must get a security clearance before you can be allowed to proceed."
Thodric Jarl protested vehemently, and demanded to see the Governor of the Bank – but the Governor was unavailable.
"Someone already on Alozay must vouch for you before you can be allowed to proceed," said the junior Banker, with the repetitive instincts of either a born parrot or a born bureaucrat.
"But I don't know anyone on Alozay!" said Jarl.
"Then," said the junior Banker, "you are going to be waiting at the docks for a long time."
So Jarl admitted to knowing Rolf Thelemite, who was produced in order that he might identify Jarl. Thodric Jarl glowered at Rolf Thelemite, who smiled. Though both these worthies were Rovac warriors, the pair were by no means friends. Long, long ago, on a day when Jarl had been very drunk, Rolf Thelemite had defeated him in a fist fight, and Jarl still held a grudge against the man on that account. Rolf Thelemite knew as much.
"Ha-hmmm," said Rolf Thelemite, as he inspected Jarl.
"Get it over with, man," snapped Jarl. "Tell them who I am."
"Who are you supposed to be?" said Rolf.
"Stop being ridiculous!" said Jarl. "You know full well who I am."
"Do I?" said Rolf.
"Of course you do!" said Jarl. "I'm Thodric Jarl, son of Oric Slaughterhouse, and blood of the clan of the bear."
"Ha-hmm," said Rolf. "I did know a man named Thodric Jarl.
You could tell him because – what was it? A cow, that was it. This Jarl, he had a little cow tattooed on his throat. A pretty cow it was, with a small golden bell hanging from its own throat."
Thodric Jarl's response was a roar of rage, but at last he calmed down, and allowed the junior Banker to uplift his beard to check for tattoos. To the Banker's patent amusement, there was indeed a little cow tattooed on Jarl's throat – a very pretty cow with a buttercup emblazoned on its flanks – and the design was completed by a pretty little bell colored to match the buttercup.
"Yes," said Rolf, visually reacquainting himself with that tattoo, "this is indeed the Rovac warrior Thodric Jarl."
"You," said Jarl, speaking to Rolf in the Rovac tongue, "I'll deal with you later!"
Then Jarl was consigned to a winch-basket, together with a sack of fish fillets, a woman with a teething baby, the Banker with breath so bad it could scare a dog, and with five heroically unscared dogs which had been for a constitutional walkabout on the docks.
When they were half-way up, the winch-rope jammed, and Jarl was left swinging for an eternity. Then the basket was at last hauled to its full height, and Jarl stepped out into the tunnel system of the mainrock Pinnacle. Having thus entered the Grand Palace of Alozay, Jarl waited until a number of his traveling companions had been winched up to join him, and then they went in force to seek out Guest Gulkan.
The mainrock Pinnacle: the spike of rock which rises from the Swelaway Sea on the island of Alozay, and which overlooks the city of Molothair. The mainrock is pierced and hollowed by the stairs and chambers of the Grand Palace of Alozay, in which is found the administrative machinery of Safrak and the precincts of the Safrak
Bank. In the same Grand Palace are the quarters occupied by Guest Gulkan and those who came with him from Gendormargensis.
It was then spring in the year Alliance 4306, as has been already stated, and Guest Gulkan had just recently celebrated his sixteenth birthday. At age 16, Guest was no wiser than he had been at birth, but the wizard Sken-Pitilkin was still relentlessly continuing those pedagogical labors which he had begun when Guest was aged but five.
Though Guest had acquired no one iota of wisdom in a full eleven years of instruction, he had won some knowledge of geography – he could tell the Pig from the Yolantarath, and Molothair from Gendormargensis – and was an enthusiastic student of ethnology. He had also made progress with some of the simpler languages, such as Toxteth – the language of beer-and-dice companions such as Hrothgar – and Galish.
Now Galish is of course but a poor toy for the intellect, being dismally deficient in the more complex irregularities, so Sken-Pitilkin took no joy in his pupil's growing proficiency in that tongue. Nor did he rejoice in Guest's accomplishments in Toxteth, since its mastery was linked with Guest's dangerous ambition to be a Guardian. Sken-Pitilkin endeavored to steer Guest in a safer direction – that of the largely academic challenges of Strogloth's Compendium of Delights. But Guest rejected the book, refusing, for example, to learn even one of the intricately irregular verbs of Slandolin, the elegant literary language of Ashmolea. So Sken Pitilkin tempted him by offering to teach the High Speech of wizards – a necessary adjunct, surely, to Guest's ambition to become a wizard! Guest then stabbed at the High Speech, but his stabs were wide of the mark, and so far he could not bring a word of it to his tongue. Sken-Pitilkin sometimes found it a great relief to abandon the intricacies of linguistic instruction for the comparative simplicities of geography.
Pedagog and pupil were hard at work on geography when Thodric Jarl arrived at the docks which served the mainrock
Pinnacle; they were still hard at it when Rolf Thelemite exposed Jarl's cute-cow tattoo; and they had not yet exhausted the subject when the dwarf Glambrax intruded upon their lessons.
They were discussing the Untunchilamons.
There is of course only one Untunchilamon, but Guest Gulkan had got it into his head that there were 27, thus making it obvious that he had mixed them up with the islands of Rovac, which are a different pot of frogs and grasshoppers entirely. Sken-Pitilkin was busy enlightening him when Glambrax intruded, and kicked Sken-Pitilkin in the shins.
"My lord," said Glambrax, formally advising them of his presence.
"What did you say?" said Sken-Pitilkin, attempting to swat
Glambrax with his country crook, but missing.
"I said," said Glambrax, "that someone wants to see Guest Gulkan."
The dwarf had in fact said no such thing, and in any case Sken-Pitilkin believed it extremely unlikely that anyone had any requirement for the boy's presence. The scholar suspected, rather, that the dwarf had arrived by preconcerted plan to liberate the boy for larrikinism.
"Guest Gulkan is busy," said Sken-Pitilkin.
"But there are people to see him," said Glambrax.
"Then," said Sken-Pitilkin, at last succeeding in landing a retaliatory blow upon the quick-leaping dwarf, "they can see him later."
"They will see him now," said Glambrax, unchastened by his chastisement. "They insist."
"Then let them insist," said Sken-Pitilkin, raising his country crook as if for fresh assault.
"They insist they'll boil me alive unless I let them in to see him."
"Then boiled you will be, so you'd better get used to the idea," said Sken-Pitilkin. "You could use a bath in any case."
"They'll boil you too," said Glambrax. "These you can't keep waiting. Thodric Jarl's out there, Lord Alagrace with him."
"Really," said Sken-Pitilkin, in a manner which made quite clear his opinion of dwarves, Jarls and Alagraces.
"Truly and really," said Glambrax. "They want the boy Guest for a purpose too foul for my tongue, and in their fervor they'll boil you in oil if you hold them to no."
"I'll do all the oil-boiling round here," said Sken-Pitilkin warmly. "Get off with you!"
"I can't tell that to Jarl!" said Glambrax. "He'd spit me and split me. You know what he's like."
"Then, that being the case," said Sken-Pitilkin, "he can get on with the spitting of you immediately. But as for seeing young Guest, why, he can see young Guest when I'm through with him."
"Is that your final answer?" said Glambrax.
"My first and my final," said Sken-Pitilkin. "Go tell them, whoever them may be, that Guest is much too ugly to be seen. Tell them to come back later, after I've cut his ears off."
Then he turned to his pupil, who was engaged in the studious dissection of a flea.
"Untunchilamon," said Sken-Pitilkin.
"What?" said Guest Gulkan, looking up from his anatomising.
"We were talking of Untunchilamon," said Sken-Pitilkin. "Have you forgotten?"
"No, no, not at all," said Guest. "Untunchilamon. Well. It has fleas, probably. Most places have fleas, especially this one.
As well as fleas, Untunchilamon has 27 islands, and lots of people, who one and all consume the staunch, which is cream and water curdled, and makes you drunk."
"No!" said Sken-Pitilkin. "That is not Untunchilamon, that is
Rovac, as I just told you."
"You just told me nothing," said Guest. "You just told Glambrax something about baths, that was what you just told."
"Then never mind what I said," said Sken-Pitilkin. "And let go of that flea, boy, it's far too small to eat. Come, boy, settle. And let us return to our dragons."
"Our dragons?"
"I meant," said Sken-Pitilkin, "let us get on with our business. And did we not cover that very precise idiom only a week ago?"
"What's a week?"
"You've asked me that question already, and I believe you've already had a perfectly good answer. Anyway. Our lesson.
Untunchilamon. Where was I? Oh, bloodrock, that's it.
Untunchilamon has bloodrock – "
"And women."
"And women, yes. Also torturers, and I wish I had one such on hand to restore a little discipline. And it has jellyfish, flying fish, parrots – "
"Parrots?"
"A type of bird."
"Like a vulture?"
"Approximately. Anyway, it has parrots. Parrots, then. And monkeys. A monkey being, before you ask, a creature in the form of a dwarf, only it has fur, and climbs trees, and has no speech but a chatter of anger."
"You're making that up!" said Guest.
"It is true," said Sken-Pitilkin solemnly. "Also on Untunchilamon we find the coconut, which is a nut the size of your skull, with a thin juice within, or a white meat, or a mix of both, depending on the ripeness of the nut."
"A nut the size of my skull," said Guest, rehearsing this datum in tones of patent disbelief.
"Thus did I truth it," said Sken-Pitilkin.
But young Guest thought this purported truth to be one more absurd impossibility, fit to rank alongside the whale and the crocodile – the crocodile being a legendary animal of singular ferocity which was alleged to have the ability to change itself at will from a floating tree trunk to a ravaging monster.
"Have you held this coconut in those very hands of yours?" said Guest, in tones of challenge. "Have you eaten of this coconut, as you have eaten of the flying fish?"
"I have eaten both," said Sken-Pitilkin. "I have eaten each alone and both in alliance together on the same plate, the site of my gormandizing being Injiltaprajura, that city which serves as the capital of Untunchilamon. Injiltaprajura lies on the shores of the Laitemata Harbor. There – "
"There irregular verbs breed in great quantities, doubtless," said Guest.
"So they do, so they do," said Sken-Pitilkin. "For all manner of languages are amok amidst the islanders."
"And, pray tell," said Guest Gulkan, "what quirk of character took you to a place so impossibly distant?"
"I was young," said Sken-Pitilkin. "Yes, boy! Don't look at me like that! I was young, once, for all that you disbelieve it.
Young, and bold, and stupid, and singularly proud of it, for I was born and bred in Galsh Ebrek, where the Yudonic Knights value a swordsman's stupidity even more than do the barbarous Yarglat of Tameran."
"So youth took you to Untunchilamon," said Guest. "It must be a place most crowded if youth alone suffices to fate a world of unfortunates to its shores."
"In my case," said Sken-Pitilkin, "it was more than youth which took me there. I went there on a quest."
"A quest!" said Guest.
"The quest for the x-x-zix," said Sken-Pitilkin.
"A dangerous quest, that," said Guest. "Why, you'd break your very jaw just trying to name the thing you were questing for. How did you say it again?"
"The x-x-zix. A particularly wild and dangerous species of irregular verb. It has two teeth, which are in the shape of saws; and it has fifty tails, the tips of these being poisonous. It is valued on account of the feathers it grows from its nose, which are more fanciful than those of the ostrich."
"The ostrich?"
"A type of chicken. But with feathers of a value exceeded only by those of the x-x-zix, the irregular verb we were discussing, which is notable not just for its feathers but also because it subsists exclusively upon liquid tar and excretes amber and ambergris on alternate days of the week."
"The week!" said Guest. "It is a measure of days, like the month!"
"Did I not tell you precisely that just a little earlier this very morning?"
"You did not," said Guest. "I worked it out myself, though I can't for the life of me work out why you'd chase to Untunchilamon for a verb, be it a regular verb or otherwise."
"The lust for knowledge, boy," said Sken-Pitilkin. "A safer lust than the lust for loins. Not that Untunchilamon was all that safe. Why, I almost got turned inside out by a certain crab which took exception to my taste for research."
"You tried to eat it?" said Guest.
"No. I merely tried to engage it in discussion, but it told me – "
"The crab talked?"
"It did," said Sken-Pitilkin.
"Oh, I see," said Guest Gulkan, abrupting into something perilously close to bad temper. "A story about talking animals, is it? And what do you think I am? A child?" Guest's change of mood was as abrupt as that of a man who, while idling down a pathway in a meditative mood, is precipitated into a pit-trap. While abrupt, this mood-change was in no wise feigned.
At sixteen, Guest Gulkan was far too old for fairy tales.
And, even as a small boy, he had always despised stories about talking animals. Since coming to Alozay, he had several times encountered crabs in the flesh of the fact. True, they were the freshwater crabs of the Swelaway Sea rather than the greater crabs of the Sea of Salt. Still, having met with crabs, and having been torn by their pincers while trying to dissect them – your average crab being more of a warrior than your average flea – Guest thought he knew to a nicety both the talents and the limitations of the breed. And he in the days of his self-proclaimed maturity most certainly had no time at all for any ridiculous nonsense about a talking crab.
"Well?" said Guest, as Sken-Pitilkin gave him no answer.
"Well what?" said his tutor, who was still trying to work out just what had offended the boy.
"You insulted me," said Guest. "And I asked for an explanation. Are you going to give it?"
"Where lies the insult?" said Sken-Pitilkin.
"A talking crab!" said Guest. "Is that not insult enough?"
"It is but knowledge," said Sken-Pitilkin, genuinely puzzled.
"It is but knowledge, for I have but been retailing a few facts from my own experience. Where lies the insult in that?"
"A nonsense of talking crabs and parrot-vultures," said Guest, working himself up into a proper rage even as he talked.
"Is that not insult? Stuff for children! Fish that fly and crabs that talk."
"They are facts, and I have witnessed them," said Sken-Pitilkin mildly. "But if you have made up your mind to be angry, then don't let mere fact prevent you from indulging unreason."
"You fiddle the world so often with word-games that you forget the world is not a game," said Guest, rising to his feet.
"The world is what it is, and men are what they are, and I am a man, and I will not be insulted like a child."
"Why not?" said Sken-Pitilkin, feeling it was high time for some home truths to be spoken. "For you have the singularly changeable moods of a bad-tempered and over-indulged child."
"Men have been killed for less than that," said Guest Gulkan, doing his best to snarl and grate, to bitter the words from his lips like so much poison.
"So they have, so they have," said Sken-Pitilkin, relapsing into placidity. "But character is destiny, and if mine is to die at the hands of a Yarglat lout over the matter of an imagined insult, why then, so be it." Sken-Pitilkin showed no fear of the quick-boil of the young man's temper, but instead comported himself as calmly as if engaged in a tea-tasting ceremony. This enraged Guest Gulkan all the more, so much so that he almost ventured to strike his tutor.
But he restrained himself, remembering what had happened on the occasion of their last physical confrontation. Sken-Pitilkin had avoided the blow and had rapped Guest painfully with his country crook, which had left the boy seriously sore for the next three days thereafter.
So in the heat of his anger Guest Gulkan did not venture to strike, but instead stormed toward the door.
"And where do you think you're going?" said Sken-Pitilkin.
"Character is destiny," said Guest Gulkan. "And I'm going to find mine."
As the boy was so speaking, the door was thrown open, and in came destiny in the form of Thodric Jarl and his associates. Guest Gulkan was taken aback by this metal-crashing parcel of armed men, all swords and gauntlets, boots and helmets, shields and chain mail. He fell back before them, and seized Sken-Pitilkin's country crook in lieu of a sword, for he thought the intruders bent on murder.
"Out!" said Sken-Pitilkin irefully, as the intrusionists came trampling into his educational laboratory with their muddy boots on. "You can't come in here! We're in the middle of a lesson."
"The lesson is over," said Thodric Jarl, the leader of the intrusionists. "The lesson is over, for life has begun."
Thus epic heroes are wont to speak, but Thodric Jarl was no epic hero. He was a run-of-the-mill hackman, a mediocre mercenary who had long ago been exiled from Rovac for stealing sheep. (Or so at least Rolf Thelemite was wont to allege, and Sken-Pitilkin had heard the allegations, and had often declared himself inclined to believe them.) Jarl was young, and over-vigorous, and decidedly curt in his manner. Sken-Pitilkin was not at all pleased to see him, and made his displeasure plain.
"You say the lesson is over?" said Sken-Pitilkin. "The lesson is hardly started yet! But I'll give you a lesson you won't forget, not when I'm through with you."
"Hush down, you irascible old man," said Lord Alagrace, one of Thodric Jarl's companions in boorishness.
This annoyed Sken-Pitilkin intensely, for while Thodric Jarl could never transcend his stiffnecked nature, Sken-Pitilkin knew Lord Alagrace of old, and knew that Alagrace could be quite the diplomat when he thought it worth his while.
After all, sal Pentalon Sorvolosa dan Alagrace nal Swedek quen Larsh was no brute of a Yarglat barbarian. He was the scion of one of the High Houses of Sharla, and the Sharla, as has been noted above, were ever a sophisticated people. Ethnology teaches one the natural limits of peoples such as Yarglat and Rovac. One expects such barbarians to brute their way through the world like slum-born streetfighters. But ethnology could make no excuse whatsoever for Lord Pentalon Alagrace. He knew better, and Sken-Pitilkin thought he should demonstrate as much.
"Get out of here!" said Sken-Pitilkin. "Get out of here, the lot of you!"
"Who is this unruly old man?" said one of the sworders who had bruted his armpits into the room in company with Jarl and Alagrace. "Shall we kill him?"
"No," said Thodric Jarl, "we'll not kill him, for he's not worth the bloodspill. He is but a useless old beggar whom the Witchlord chased from Gendormargensis for drowning a child's pet dog, and other crimes equally as cowardly."
Thus Thodric Jarl in his youth, gross in libel and uncouth in epithet. But even a dog can count its own legs, as the saying has it, and sometimes Jarl had a truth or two to his tongue. Certainly he hit the mark when he called Sken-Pitilkin irascible, for how could that scholar be otherwise when beset by the likes of Jarl?
But Jarl was wrong to speak of Sken-Pitilkin as being an old man, for Sken-Pitilkin was not old – rather, he was positively ancient.
Nor was he (strictly speaking) a man, for he was a wizard, and in the process of attaining power wizards make themselves creatures of a different order from the ordinary run of humanity. Sken-Pitilkin began to explain these points to Jarl, but Jarl was in no mood to hear them, and ventured to let fall a curse upon Sken-Pitilkin's venerable head.
Things might then have become unpleasant but for the intervention of Lord Alagrace, who called for silence then explained the business which the intruders were about. Guest Gulkan's time as a hostage on the Safrak Islands had come to an end, and Lord Alagrace and his companions were here to fetch the boy home to Gendormargensis.
"And me?" said Sken-Pitilkin, asking his fate. Sken-Pitilkin had no particular wish to return to Gendormargensis, cold city of mud and lice. But he judged it unsafe to return to Drum – his habitual home island in the Penvash Strait – and he thought he would receive precious little charity from Safrak's Bankers if he chose to remain on the island of Alozay once his sole student had departed.
"Lord Onosh bids you to return to Gendormargensis along with his son," answered Lord Alagrace.
Details were then gone into, and as the details were gone into, Guest Gulkan became increasingly upset.
"I'm not going," he said.
"You're what?" said Lord Alagrace in amazement.
"I'm not going!" said Guest.
In the year since his encounter with Icaria Scaria Iva-Italis, Demon by Appointment to the Great God Jocasta, Guest Gulkan had thought repeatedly about the possibility of winning power as a wizard. Though Sken-Pitilkin had prevented Guest from having further contact with Iva-Italis, Guest had already realized that such prevention could be circumvented in time. In time, once he had a sufficiency of Toxteth at his command, Guest could join the Guardians, Alozay's Toxteth-speaking mercenaries, winning by this manoeuver the certainty of further contact with Iva-Italis.
But -
"You're going, all right," said Thodric Jarl, and grabbed Guest by the scruff of the neck as if to drag him from the room then and there.
An ungainly struggle followed, during which the daring Sken-Pitilkin, by dint of swift action and heroic enterprise, managed to save those precious books and manuscripts which were in danger of being trampled to death in the skirmish.
The victory went to the Rovac, for Jarl was accomplished in battle, and he overpowered Guest Gulkan's brutality, then sat on the boy while Lord Alagrace lectured him.
"You are coming home," said Lord Alagrace.
"But I am a hostage," said Guest.
"Your father has no more need of any hostages in the Safrak
Islands," said Lord Alagrace, putting into words a truth of which Guest was already fully aware. "Nor had he ever any such need. You were put here to keep you safe from your own violence. But now the empire has need of that violence. So back you come! Back to Gendormargensis and the battles which threaten the empire. You're coming home."
"Me!" said Guest. "I'd rather die!"
"If that's your choice," said Thodric Jarl, "I'll cut your throat on the spot. Well? What do you choose? Your father or your death?"
When put on the spot like that, Guest Gulkan chose his father, and by evening all those who had come to Alozay with Guest Gulkan were readying themselves for the return – those personages being the wizards Pelagius Zozimus and Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin, the witch Zelafona and her dwarf-son Glambrax, and the Rovac warrior Rolf Thelemite, redoubtable in the drinking of beer and the boasting of battles.
In honor of the occasion, Pelagius Zozimus had dragged out his marvelous fish-scale armor, gear of war surely more befitting an elven lord than a miserable slug-chef. Naturally,
Zozimus completed his style by matching the armor with a sword as beautiful. The dralkosh Zelafona, though warmly trussed in leathers and wool, adorned the shredded gray of her coiffure with a scarf of bird-plume silk. Her dwarf-son Glambrax swaggered through the Grand Palace in miniaturized chain mail and battle- leathers to match, perking his appearance with an elaborate hat made from complicated folds of cloud-pattern paper.
As for the rest, they were scarcely to be distinguished one from the other – a rabble of sworders in boots and thew-leathers, ostentatiously boot-thumping along with a great weight of woven iron upon their shoulders. In that company, Sken-Pitilkin distinguished himself by the dignified common sense of his fisherman's skirts.
So that company gathered its numbers and marched in triumph to Gud Obo, the Winch Stratum of the mainrock Pinnacle. In triumph? Yes! For they were led by Thodric Jarl, and that dour and merciless warrior of Rovac was quite incapable of accomplishing even the simplest of tasks without making a mighty occasion out of it. In those days of his youth, Jarl was a man mesmerized by the spell of his own warriorhood. He could scarcely dice a carrot or slice an egg without first incanting runes of battle for the benefit of his butter knife.
In those days of his youth, Thodric Jarl was a man made for life in a world of myth; and to hear him talk of the years of peace which he had endured in Gendormargensis, why, you might think he had spent those years in a state of conscious torture.
But now! Now war was ready, therefore -
But we have all heard the boasting of warriors before, and there is no point in detailing the obsessions of Rovac as presented by Thodric Jarl. Suffice it to say that, in the briefness of their reacquaintance, Jarl had already managed to irritate Sken-Pitilkin beyond measure by his posturing, and Sken-Pitilkin had been moved to suggest that the wind-flapping gap between Jarl's labile lips should best be repaired with a stout needle and a decent length of cat gut.
As Rolf Thelemite and Guest Gulkan went swaying down in a winch basket for what might well be the last time – though Guest was grimly determined to return some day to Alozay, and have an accounting with the demon Iva-Italis! – they discussed the extreme hostility which had already marked the forced fellowship of Thodric Jarl and Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin. And they staked hot gold on when the Rovac warrior would have the killing of the wizard.
Not if, but most definitely when.