heights of the Temple of Blood had already roused a great number of soldiers into the streets, and roadblocks had been thrown up, dividing Obooloo into a number of small areas between which communication was impossible.
Finding themselves trapped in a small area of the city, and surely doomed to be discovered by search parties, Guest Gulkan and his companions turned again to Thayer Levant, and asked for direction.
'I think,' said Levant, 'that only one recourse remains to us, and that is to make our way to the House of Conceded Sacrifice, which lies nearby.'
'The House of Conceded Sacrifice?' said Guest. 'That sounds ominous.'
'It is,' said Levant. 'For it is a place where people go to die, and death is the only way to leave it.'
This scarcely sounded inviting, but the inhospitality of the city was such that, in the end, Guest Gulkan and his companions had no alternative but to accept Levant's advice, and to consign themselves to the House of Conceded Sacrifice.
Chapter Thirty-Three
House of Conceded Sacrifice: an institution in Obooloo which has the legal right to offer unassailable protection to all and sundry – for a price. It is nominally devoted to the worship of the Experimental Frog (also known as the Missing Frog, the Mouth of Blood, Our Great Lord Hosjabajaba, and as Jolatarba the Gourmet). Once refugees run out of money they are invariably dissected, their dissection being dedicated to the greater glory of the said Frog.
So it was that Guest Gulkan and his comrades escaped from the Temple of Blood and surrendered themselves to the House of Conceded Sacrifice, where they were received with the traditional courtesy extended to all who sought that refuge.
Night was almost done by the time the adventurers were safe in that refuge. Then came the dawn, bringing the familiar sun, the familiar sky. Yet despite the renewal of sun and sky, Guest Gulkan felt as if the world had been turned upside down.
The Weaponmaster had firmly expected that by now he would have been a wizard, and the honored ally of a liberated Great God, with the world at his feet, and enough strength at his command to allow him to crush the greatest of his enemies beneath the pad of the smallest toe of his left foot.
Instead, Guest had failed utterly. The Great God and its demons had been proved to be lairs. Guest's father had been sorely wounded, and was now imprisoned in the unchanging stasis of a time pod inside the Temple of Blood. The ring which commanded that time pod had been lost to a pool of sewage inside the Temple of Blood.
And as for Guest, why, he found himself a prisoner in the House of Conceded Sacrifice, which offered refugees sanctuary for only as long as they could afford to pay for their keep.
Once the adventurers had exhausted their supply of ready cash, they would be dissected, this dissection counting as a sacrifice in honor of the Experimental Frog, the deity to whom the House of Conceded Sacrifice was dedicated.
The priests of the House of Conceded Sacrifice provided the adventurers with a list of temple charges. After consulting with the other adventurers, Guest pronounced the prices reasonable, and announced that he and his companions would stay for twenty-nine days then prepare themselves for dissection by drinking themselves into insensibility. Guest made this announcement in Toxteth, which was the only language he had in common with any of the priests of the House of Conceded Sacrifice. He made the announcement directly to the High Priest of that House, since Guest and his companions had stirred up so much trouble in the city that no lesser dignitary dared to deal with them.
'I have heard,' said Guest, 'that there is a spirit of great potency distilled from the crushings of the sugar cane.'
'There is,' said the High Priest gravely. 'It is called rum.'
'Very well,' said Guest. 'On the thirtieth day, we'll drink down a barrel of this – this rum. A barrel between four. Will that suffice?'
'My lord,' said the High Priest, 'a barrel would suffice for the suicide of thirty. We do not wish you dead.'
'I am of the Yarglat,' said Guest staunchly. 'I will still be fit enough to scream, even should I drink the whole of this barrel to myself. I have but one request. After I have been dissected, I wish my body to be burnt of a pyre of my own making. My companions wish likewise.'
The High Priest had no objection to this, so Guest Gulkan and his companions spent twenty-nine days building such a pyre, configuring it in the form of a gigantic bird's nest, and at dawn on the thirtieth day they all four of them piled into this stickbird and took to the heavens.
Up, up, up and away they whirled! Guest whooped with exhilaration as he looked down upon Obooloo. Then he spat.
Unfortunately, Guest's spittle fell into Lake Kak, a body of water so thoroughly polluted that no act by any human agency could possibly damage it further. Still, this gesture of defiance buoyed up the Weaponmaster; and, thus buoyed, he settled himself down to endure the rigors of air-flight.
From Obooloo they flew to Manamalargo, a lagoon on the seawashed shores of Yestron, the seas of the washing being none other than the waters of the Great Ocean, that bulk of salinity otherwise known as Moana, or (to give its name as do the Yarglat) as the Sea of Salt.
Once all were rested – to the extent that rest is possible on the shores of Manamalargo, a region beset by stench-hole snakes and pestilential mosquitoes – the four took to the air once more, intending to search out the fabled island of Untunchilamon.
However, the navigational difficulties of airflight being greater than the groundsman might suppose, their quest for Untunchilamon proved fruitless.
It also proved exceedingly dangerous.
The stickbird was held aloft and velocitated through the air by energies generated by a conflict between its abnormal components and the normalizing forces of the universe. Yet the whole arrangement was so intrinsically unstable that Sken-Pitilkin was taxed to the limit by the demands of managing his unruly instrument. Given the slightest mismanagement, the stickbird would shake itself to pieces, or – quite possibly – explode with force sufficient to rupture the sky from horizon to horizon. Sken-Pitilkin, then, was subjected to such extreme degrees of physical and psychic stress that he was more than once tempted to deliberately crash his creation, and thus bring his agonies to an end.
In the course of his flyforth across bewilderments of sea and sky, Sken-Pitilkin five times rested and renewed his strength on nameless chunks of coral and rock lost somewhere in the vastness of Moana. Then, his strength almost being exhausted for a sixth time, Sken-Pitilkin at last found something to which he could put a name.
But it was not the island of Untunchilamon.
It was, rather, the continent of Argan.
A sizeable discovery, you might think, but not the kind of thing one can claim by right of salvage and stuff into a spare pocket; and Sken-Pitilkin was not entirely glad to have found it.
Down from the clouds came Sken-Pitilkin and his passengers, hurtling toward the shores of the above- mentioned and above-named continent of Argan.
'Brace!' yelled Sken-Pitilkin, as his stickbird went skimming across the waves.
All braced.
The stickbird clipped a wave, spun skywards, plunged, hit the sea with a shatter-splash, bounced, hit the sands, scuffed up the beach with a great flurry of fractured silicon and shell, then skidded. Then flipped. The passengers went sprawling to the sands, from which they picked themselves up – all except Sken-Pitilkin.
'Cousin,' said Zozimus. 'Are you hurt?'
'Mortally,' said Sken-Pitilkin weakly.
Then collapsed into the silence of utter exhaustion, which elicited no sympathy whatsoever from those whom he had so grievously misled across the ocean.
'Dogs and cats!' said Thayer Levant, giving voice to one of the mightiest oaths of Chi'ash-lan. 'Where are
