The Walrus and the Warwolf

twisting down its back (markings reminiscent of the forging-patterns of Gouda Muck's mastersword) it whipped free from the Great One's hands and fell to the floor.

There was an uproar as heroes competed for the precious little monster. But the man who had been sharpening the knife stayed calm. Humming gently to himself, he leaned over Drake's body and cut once, neatly, making an incision under the floating rib on Drake's right-hand side.

Drake hissed, with fear, with anger, with pain. The old woman had regained the snake. She was fondling it. Stroking it. Crooning to it. Bringing it closer. She was – no!'No! No! No!' screamed Drake.

But she put the head of the snake to his open wound. He screamed again as it began gnawing into his vitals. It was like being stabbed repeatedly with a red-hot poker.

Then, strangely, the pain lessened. It became dull. Disappeared altogether. Yes. While teeth still tunnelled, he no longer cared. He was starting to float, hmmm, yes, drifting away on a river of deliciously warm milk.

The Great One leaned over him. He smiled up at her face, noting, for the first time, the red veins spiderwebbed in the milk white of her eyes. She kissed him, giving him her blessing for the Journey. He felt himself falling. Her face contracted to a point, then disappeared altogether. The last sounds hissed into silence.'Who am I?' he wondered.Idly.Then wondered no more, for he was unconscious. # # #

Drake did not wake to clarity, but to fever. Hot, flushed and thirsting, he endured cramps, spasms and hallucinations. He was fed strange foods and stranger fluids, which sustained life but did not cure him.

'Arabin,' he said. 'Get Arabin. Jon Arabin, understand?'

' O-fo-lo-mo-lee,' said one of the young women who fed him.And smiled, and left him.But did not return with Jon Arabin.

Time and again Drake repeated his demand. He had to get a message through to his captain. If he stayed in this crazy place, he would die.

'I'm sick, yes,' said Drake, to one of his handmaidens, 'but I'll do as well on the Warwolf as I would here. Honest. It's the sea air, I need it to keep me alive.'The response was another smile.Nothing more.

He could see, through his sickroom's embrasure, a slice of blue sky, occasionally decorated by patches of high cloud. Fair weather cloud, yes. In the little time he'd spent on the Warwolf, he'd already got into the habit of taking a right healthy interest in the weather.

'Those idle sons of sodfish will be playing around the anchor cable again, I suppose,' said Drake.

Yes. Or practising sword under the hard gaze of the ship's weapons muqaddam. Or patching sails. Or splicing ropes. Or-

But no matter. Whatever they were doing, Drake wanted to be with them. Aye. In the company of his comrades true. Quin Baltu, Shewel Lokenshield, Goth Sox, Lee Dix, Hewlet Mapleskin, aye, and Jon Disaster – he remembered them as brothers.

Finally, the day came when Drake was well enough to quit his bed and venture to the embrasure. Squinting into the brilliance of a world lit by real honest sunlight, he looked down on Ling Bay – and saw that the Warwolf was gone.

No! Surely not! Surely Arabin's ship of green sails lay close to the cliff, hidden by the limitations of the embrasure!

On rubbery legs, Drake staggered from the room, questing for a better view.

'Jon, Jon,' he said, as he stumbled down white-lit corridors. 'Jon, you can't have left me. No, say it's not true!'

How often did ships come to Ling? The Warwolf, or so it was alleged, visited once every two years. Apart from that – nothing.

'You'd better be there, Jon Arabin,' threatened Drake. 'You'd better be there, you and your ship. Or I'll damn you to fifty hells for seventy times eternity!'

Finally he found a square door cut in the side of the cliff, high above the sea. He stepped outside, into the warmth of the sun. Below lay all of Ling Bay: innocent of any ship. Clear shone the sparkling waters, as beautiful as the women of a poet's dreams. And empty.Drake wept.

9

Saba Yavendar. one of the Nine Immortals; won poetic fame with Winesong and Warsong, written in the Stabilized Scholastic Standard (later adopted as the High Speech of wizards) of the Technic Renaissance.

Survived Genetic Mutiny and Interregnum. Joined Institute of Applied Theology (later destroyed by Founders in Wars of Suppression). After Famine Years, was adviser to Lords of the Eightfold Way (forerunner of Confederation of Wizards).

Gained great power in Empire of Wizards after Long War against Swarms, but lost all in Years of Chaos. Disappeared after offending Talaman the Torturer (aka T. the Castrator, T. the Eye Gouger and T. the Baby Strangler).

Later works (including notorious Victory of the Prince of the Favoured Blood) popular crowd-pleasers scorned by scholarship, which must concur with Larftink that Yavendar 'lived too long and wrote far, far too much'. Indeed, Gatquip's long-disputed claim that the Complete Works can be reduced to a canon of a dozen lines demands positive reassessment.

Drake's wound healed to a crinkled red scar. His fever abated. Abandoning his bed (yes, by now he recognized a heap of stones and sand as a bed) he explored. Questing. Seeking. Searching for a way out of this warren, a way back to civilization. He found rooms packed with dusty old bones. A mortu

ary, where the unkempt dead, anointed with wild honey, lay waiting for the Funeral Winds. A strange globular room with silver walls where his weight left him, and he hung weightless in the air like a fish in water.

He took stairs which descended as well as those which went up, thinking there might be tunnels which travelled deep underground before breaking out to freedom. He found dank, gloomy, ill-lit places flooded with slimy water.

Once, he found a door which opened on a huge, utterly silent hall perhaps three leagues in length, where a dozen bulbous grey shapes, each hundreds of paces long, lay half-submerged in pitch-black water.

'Grief of suns!' said Drake. 'Will I never get out of here?'

He lost his way a dozen times, and once wandered for a whole day in waterless tunnels before chancing his steps back to the inhabited areas. Nothing daunted, he set out again – but this time he carried a chunk of charcoal with which to mark his way on the walls.

At last, he squeezed out through a narrow vent to stand in harsh clifftop sunshine. He had won a view of some of the meanest terrain in creation, a desolation of stone pillars, razor-sharp shadows, thornbush, cactus, sparce acacia, gulleys, buttes, sinkholes, escarpments and ravines.There was no sign of water.'Desolation,' muttered Drake.

He had never before seen a landscape so lonely. Utterly unmarked by human hand. He longed to be on Stokos again, ah yes, back on his home island where the terrain had been civilized by mines, quarries, slag heaps, ash pits, and other comforting signs of human activity.I'd die of loneliness if I tried to walk across this.

He saw something glinting a few paces away. What? His hot black shadow crabbed across the rocks as he ventured to the glitter. It proved to be a chunk of sharp-cut white crystals. Very hard.

'That quartz stuff Disaster talked about,' said Drake.

And wished he had Disaster with him. Or Ika Thole, yes, or even dim-witted Harly Burpskin.

'Anyone,' said Drake, 'as long as we've language in common.'

He was talking to himself a lot, these days. Was that a sign of madness?'I'll talk when I want!' yelled Drake, suddenly angry.

And he hurled the chunk of quartz into the wilderness. Then it occurred to him that maybe the stuff was worth having. Disaster had called it 'cheap', but perhaps Drake could bluff an unwary buyer into thinking it valuable.'Where did my quartz go?' he said.