go landing there.'
In fact, on Sken-Pitilkin's first visit to Untunchilamon it was the very red-dusted ruins which Guest had espied which had brought the sage to something very perilously close to disaster.
Those ruins had lured him – not through exercise of magic but simply by existing. For Sken-Pitilkin had been young then, in comparative terms if not in terms absolute; and such had been the foolishness of his (comparative) youth that he had dared himself to those ruins on a whim, and had been lucky to escape from their dangers with his life.
'Maybe we can go to the ruins on the trip home,' said Guest, watching them recede in the distance.
'Maybe, maybe,' said Sken-Pitilkin, sending his stickbird speeding southward, and hunting the horizon to the south for some sign of Injiltaprajura.
Before such sign was espied, Thayer Levant cried in his native garble:
'Ware! Ware! A claw! A claw!'
'A claw?' said Sken-Pitilkin, addressing Levant in his native Galish. 'Enough of your nonsense. Look! That rim of rock! See the glitter-flash? That's the topmost building of Injiltaprajura, for sure. The pink palace. Pokra Ridge.'
'Sken-Pitilkin,' said Zozimus quietly, or as quietly as the buffeting winds of airflight would allow. 'There are two claws in pursuit. I suggest you turn and give them the benefit of your attention.'
'Claws?' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'Nonsense!'
But then Guest Gulkan took the sage by the shoulders and physically forced him to a confrontation with the pair of levitating claws fast approaching from the rear.
'Claws!' said Sken-Pitilkin in astonishment.
The claws were of a luminously explosive orange. Each was thrice the length of your average rowboat, and each had as many wings as a stickbird – which is to say, none.
'Hold tight!' cried Sken-Pitilkin.
'Why?' said Zozimus. 'Pitilkin, you're not thinking of – '
But the brave Sken-Pitilkin was not thinking at all. Rather, he was acting.
As a brawny slave, seeking to free himself from a mine ruined by rockfall, lifts a huge weight at the risk of crushing vertebrae or splitting his spine clean down the middle, so Sken-Pitilkin jerk-thrust the stickbird upward, sending it soaring into the sky.
Up up up up they burst -
Winning a view of Untunchilamon, spread out for league upon league of redness beneath them. In that vastness, Sken-Pitilkin spied a great pit – a pit of such vastness that Sken-Pitilkin was reminded of Argan's notorious dry pit.
'The claws!' cried Zozimus in alarm.
The claws were pursuing.
So Sken-Pitilkin slammed the stickbird down in a spiral which took it plunging into the pit. At the bottom, Sken-Pitilkin braked their fall with levitating energies, looked up and saw -
'Out!' yelled Sken-Pitilkin.
One and all abandoned ship, and moments later the claws fell upon that ship and sundered it, while the adventurers sheltered in a niche in the side of the pit.
When the claws had torn the stickbird to pieces, they did their best to likewise tear the adventurers. But the questing heroes were safe in their niche, which was large enough to accommodate a few humans, but too small to admit the enormity of the claws. So, being frustrated in their destructive whims, the claws began to ascend toward the heights – and were torn to pieces by Something invisible which disintegrated them in flame and sundering thunder.
'Grief of gods!' said Guest.
'Can you think of nothing original to say in the face of such a distinctly original encounter?' said Sken-Pitilkin, dusting himself down.
'Original!' said Guest. 'I think there to be nothing original about someone or something trying to tear me to pieces! Rather, I think it to be the story of my life, and probably the story of my death as well! Now, how do we get out of here?'
'We climb,' said Zozimus, optimistically.
'Climb?' said Sken-Pitilkin, kicking through the wreckage of his stickbird in search of his country crook.
'Why not?' said Zozimus. 'Or maybe you could levitate us.'
'I will be doing no levitating today,' said Sken-Pitilkin, recovering his country crook.
'Why not?' said Guest.
'Because,' said Sken-Pitilkin, 'even if I were to levitate us to the heights, supposing that feat to be within my power, we would be lost in a waterless desert, and doomed to die in consequence of the strength of the sun.'
So spoke Sken-Pitilkin, who, in his youth, had almost died from thirst in that very same desert. But Guest was not convinced.
'You will levitate us!' said the Weaponmaster, threatening Sken-Pitilkin with his sword.
'I will levitate your weapon, and promptly, unless you lower it,' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'Remember! You have not an army at your back! Not this time! This is no repeat of Ibsen-Iktus!'
Thus admonished, Guest lowered his sword, declaring that he would climb the walls anyway, and risk death from thirst in the sun, whatever Sken-Pitilkin said about it.
But the walls of the pit were quite unclimbable, leaving the adventurers with two distinctly unpalatable options. One was to sit where they were and shortly die of thirst. The other was to exit from the pit by a shoulder-width hole which looked as if it would make an ideal lair for a large spider of bloody disposition and anthropophagous habits.
'It looks as if it will have to be the hole,' said Guest, with great reluctance. 'Which of us is the bravest? Let the bravest prove himself, and lead the way!'
Upon which Pelagius Zozimus declared that Guest himself was the bravest. But Guest disputed this.
'No,' said Guest, 'it is my noble servant Thayer Levant who is the bravest. Lead on, Levant!'
On being poked with Guest's sword, Levant conceded that perhaps he was brave. And he crawled into the hole.
Then screamed.
'What is it?' said Guest, in great alarm, as Levant backed out of the hole.
'A centipede!' said Levant, in panic. 'A huge centipede, bigger than you are!'Guest was greatly alarmed, at least until he realized that Levant was grinning.
'Enough of your jokes!' said Guest, who was in no mood for being trifled with. 'Get into that hole before I kick you!'
Whereupon Levant led the way into the depths, with Guest Gulkan following him, and Sken-Pitilkin and Zozimus crawling along after them.
It would be tedious to recount in detail the long wanderings of the adventurers in the complex and seemingly never-ending underworld which they then entered. Tunnels led to tunnels in unceasing succession, until these four wanderers felt like insects lost in a monstrous maze constructed by a zealous child of over- intellectual disposition.
The tunnels were warm and cold by turns. Some were ice-cold in consequence of the actions of noisy machines busy with the production of huge blocks of ice. By drinking the melt water from such ice, the heroes kept themselves from dying of thirst; but they had nothing to eat, and so grew uncommonly hungry. At the peak of his hunger, Guest proposed that they eat the unfortunate Thayer Levant, and Sken-Pitilkin was not at all sure that he was joking.
'Are you serious?' said Sken-Pitilkin.
'Serious?' said Guest. 'About what?'
'About eating Levant. You were talking about it only a moment ago.'
'Was I?' said Guest. 'I might have been talking about Levant, but I certainly wasn't thinking about him.'
'Then of what were you thinking?' said Sken-Pitilkin.
'Of women,' said Guest.
As if in direct response to this declaration, there came the sound of women singing. Their clear and beautiful
