we?'
'We are now,' said Pelagius Zozimus, scrutinizing the beach of their landing, 'on the Chameleon's Tongue.'
'Tongue?' said Guest Gulkan. 'This is a tongue?'
'Indeed it is,' said Zozimus. 'We are on the Tongue of a certainty. To be precise, we are at the Elbow.'
'The Elbow?' said Guest. 'Only a moment ago you called it a tongue. What will you have it next? A kneecap?'
'No,' said Zozimus, 'for the Kneecap is elsewhere.'
Then Zozimus detailed out the location of the Kneecap, and having thus indulged himself in an entirely gratuitous display of geographical superiority, he suggested that they climb the conical knoll which he identified as the Elbow so they might confirm that they were on the beach known as the Tongue.
Thereupon all but the collapsed Sken-Pitilkin climbed the knoll, and Zozimus confirmed that they were truly on the Tongue, the white-heat beaches of which stretched away for league upon league to north and to west. Out to sea lay the Teardrop Islands, and inland rose the heights of the Lizard Crest Rises.
'It is true of a certainty,' said Zozimus. 'That fool Sken-Pitilkin has flown us clean across the ocean.'
Later, when finally roused from the sleep of his exhaustion, Sken-Pitilkin confessed as much.
'We have,' said that wizard of Skatzabratzumon, 'but one option.'
'And that is?' said his companions.
'To fly back across Moana,' answered Sken-Pitilkin, with swift-reviving enthusiasm for further adventures in flight. 'Fly back again in quest for Untunchilamon.'
His companions however averred that they had several alternative options, some of which were starting to look increasingly palatable. The roasting of Sken-Pitilkin, for instance; or the boiling of him, bones and ungutted flesh together; or the braining of him with heavy rocks; or the feeding of his intellect to a pit of dragons; or the delivery of his walking corpse to the slaveyards of Lesser Narglash.
'Furthermore,' said Zozimus, 'that does not exhaust our choices. For we have yet another option. We could walk from here to Drangsturm, then book passage on a ship and get to Untunchilamon the fast way.'
'The fast way!' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'A ship would take months!'
'Months!' said Zozimus. 'It would take months, would it?
Well, with you stitching your way back and forth across the ocean in the derelictions of your confidence, we look to waste out a lifetime in futility.'
As the two wizards argued it out, Guest took himself off into the hinterland, returning much later with a dead lizard. In the evening, that lizard made a meal, once it had been supplemented by fish caught by Sken-Pitilkin and clams dug from the seasands by a reluctant Thayer Levant working under the remorseless supervision of Pelagius Zozimus.
That night, Guest Gulkan dreamt his way through the plunging darkness of blue seas and green, through the kraken depths of the northern wastes and the shallows of the Green Sea.
The Weaponmaster woke from his dreams to find it was late at night, and cold, and dark. A desolate wind blew in from the sea. Guest got up on his four limbs and crouched on the beach, watching the sea suspiciously. Watching. Listening. Waiting. For what? He knew not, but felt fearfully vulnerable.
'There is nothing,' he muttered.
Then took a piss. The head of his penis was furry with smegma, and the smell got on Guest's fingers, and he sniffed at the smell, and was comforted by it on this strange and darkened beach. Nothing is more intimately consoling than one's own scent, just as few things can be so repulsive as the smell of a stranger.
But the transitory comfort of Guest's private indulgence was not enough to guard him against the dark, for Guest began to be convinced that he knew what had wakened him. That he knew what was out there. It was the Great Mink. He was sure of it. He could see it! He could see its hulking shadow! Guest was convinced that he was deluding himself. He was in a land too warm for the Great Mink, a land far removed from ice and snow. Nevertheless, while logic told him that there could not possibly be any such monster lurking in the night, he was simultaneously gripped by the unshakable belief that just such an animal was out there – and that he could see it.
So Guest sat for a frozen eternity, until at last the slow lightbirth of dawn revealed the hulking shadow to be no more than a tree trunk.
And in the relief of the morning, Guest told his companions of his plan for finding Untunchilamon, a plan he had got from brooding on his dream of the night.
'We ride the line of the green,' said Guest Gulkan.
'The green?' said Zozimus.
'The green of the Green Sea,' said Guest.
Then he explained.
In the course of his flight across Moana, Guest had observed that the shallow waters round islands and reefs appear from the air to be uncommonly green, and are clearly demarked from the blue-black of the deeper waters. It was known that the southern waters of Moana, those waters known as the Green Sea, were uncommonly shallow; and it was consequently obvious that they should be a literal green.
'Furthermore,' said Guest, 'it is known that the island of
Untunchilamon lies on the line of demarcation which separates the depths from the shallows. Therefore, if we do but follow the line of green, then we must necessarily find Untunchilamon.'
This sounded so suspiciously like commonsense that Sken-Pitilkin was sure there had to be a thousand things wrong with it.
And, apart from all other reservations – since when had Guest Gulkan been a geographer?!
But at last Sken-Pitilkin and the others were persuaded to Guest Gulkan's enterprise. So to the air they took, and found their way to the line of the Green Ocean, and followed that line as best they could, until one day Guest Gulkan espied great upthrusts of red rock in the distance.
'Red rocks ahead!' said Guest, announcing the oncoming cliffs.
'The bloodstone of Untunchilamon,' said Sken-Pitilkin.
And turned his stickbird north.
'Cousin,' said Zozimus, 'we seek the city of Injiltaprajura, which lies at Untunchilamon's southernmost point.'
'So we do, so we do,' said Sken-Pitilkin, 'but I hope to make a discreet entry to the island, so let us land a little to the north of the city.'
In accordance with this strategy, Sken-Pitilkin brought his stickbird over the coast of the island of Untunchilamon some distance to the north of Injiltaprajura, its one and only city.
His stickbird passed over the briskwater surf of the fringing reef at altitude, then over those cliffs of bloodstone. An updraft hit them, flinging the stickbird high to the heavens.
'Wa!' cried Guest, alarmed.
'Pitilkin!' cried Zozimus.
'No danger, no danger,' said Sken-Pitilkin, skewing the stickbird across the lurching sky. 'Sit back! Relax! Enjoy the view!'
A good view it was, too, for the deserts of Zolabrik were laid out beneath them.
'If this be Untunchilamon,' said Guest, 'then where be its dragons?'
Even from great altitude, the smallest details of the ground are easily espied from the air. But there were no dragons to be seen in Untunchilamon's desert. There was no sign of life in the desert at all.
'Relax,' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'Dragons you'll see in plenty when we get to Injiltaprajura.'
Injiltaprajura was and is the port which lies at the southern extremity of Untunchilamon; and it was and is the sole concentration of human life on that island. The rest of that rockbeast is an extensiveness of sun-parched desolation interspersed with pits, craters and sundry ruins.
'What's down there?' said Guest, scanning the wastelands below.
'Nothing that need trouble us,' said Sken-Pitilkin.
'A city!' cried Guest, making out an extensive configuration of square-walled rock in the desert. 'It's a city!'
'It is but ruins,' said Sken-Pitilkin, 'as you can see from here. Ruins abandoned for millennia. We've no call to
