rocks and of bones, of stones and of dirt, of the droppings of bats and the feathers of vultures. Guest saw something which he thought he recognized. He picked it up. It was a skull.
'So much for that!' said Guest, tossing the skull away.
The quokka had betrayed them!
Realizing this, Guest greatly regretted having persuaded his father to hang the brute. He had discovered one of the great drawbacks of hanging, which is this: supposing you hang a person, and that person then proves to have been a greater criminal than you thought, why, it is impossible to recall them so you can escalate their punishment. This is why, under many of those regimes which do practice hanging, convicted criminals are kept under lock and key for as much as ten or twenty years, to allow the authorities time to prove out any greater crimes of which they may be guilty.
'We have at least the cornucopia,' said the Witchlord, trying to be encouraging.
'So we do,' said Guest. 'So we do.'
But he thought of the possession of this magical device as a totally inadequate compensation for being marooned at the bottom of an unclimbable pit somewhere in the Stench Caves of Logthok
Norgos.
So thinking, Guest let the cornucopia fall, then kicked it as it fell. It flopped into the air then sprawled flat on the ground.
The cornucopia was a piece of wrinkled green leather the length of Guest's forearm. It was shaped like a hollow cone, and nothing could be seen within it except a voluminous blackness. It was flexible, and could be comfortably folded up and stuck in one's pocket, and it worked as advertised – that is to say, it duplicated anything which might be put into it. Guest had already tested it by spitting into it and getting it to duplicate his dribble in a constant stream.
'Since we've got time on our hands,' said the Witchlord, 'you might make use of that thing to make me a ring.'
'A ring?' said Guest.
'Yes,' said his father. 'A ring of ever-ice. Or are we to fight over the one you're wearing on your finger?'
'That's a thought,' said Guest.
So he took the ring from his father, sucked on it to remove all crusted mud, spat out the mud, picked up the cornucopia, held it upright, then popped the ring of ever-ice into the voluminous darkness.
Then Guest turned the cornucopia upside down.
Out fell the ring of ever-ice.
Followed by a twin of itself.
Then a triplet.
Then, in a cascading rush, some seven or eight thousand rings came pouring from the cornucopia, piling up around their ankles in a clickering chittering turbulence.
'Whoa!' cried the Witchlord in alarm. Guest jerked the cornucopia to the upright, thus cutting off the flow of rings.
'Wah!' he said.
Then stooped to inspect the hoard at his feet.
'Why,' said Guest in disgust, picking up a handful of rings,
'they're rusted!'
And it was true.
The rings were rotten rounds of rust, each with a glob of rust where the original had displayed a chip of ever- ice. But where was the original?
'Where is my ring?' said Guest.
'It was probably the first to fall out,' said his father. 'It fell at your feet, so – don't move!'
Then Guest stooped to the scrapmetal nightmare at his feet, and rummaged through it with an avaricious diligence. Not all of the rings proved rusty, and some were tolerable counterfeits of the original. But Guest eventually located the one true ring of ever-ice, which could be told from all the others because only the true ring shone with its own inner light.
'Gods!' said Guest, kicking his way clear of the trash-dump rubbish heap. 'What a let down!'
And so it was.
'Have you a coin about you?' said Guest.
'No,' said his father.
But Guest had already guessed that the cornucopia would not prove an adequate counterfeiter of coinage.
'Time for us to be going,' said the Witchlord.
'Where?' said his son.
'If we presume that this treacherous quokka has done its best to defeat our escape,' said Lord Onosh, 'then our best bet is to go back the way we came.'
'If we can remember it,' said Guest. 'Well then! Lead on! I'm ready!'
But Lord Onosh chose to take a piss before leading on, making Guest realize that it was time for him to do the same himself.
Obedient to nature's necessities, Guest pissed… and was childish enough to try to fill the cornucopia with his outflow.
'What are you doing?' said Lord Onosh, when he turned to see Guest at play with a pissing cornucopia.
'I am – 'Guest was about to come up with some justification for his behavior, but did not, for the trickle of urine which was exiting from the cornucopia in his hands suddenly abrupted into a vomiting outflow which made the cornucopia plunge and buck, so that it took all his strength to hold the thing.
The outflow knocked the Witchlord off his feet, and he went rolling away for a dozen paces before he recovered himself and stood. Lord Onosh tried to find words for his rage:
'You – you – you – '
The Witchlord was so profoundly angry he was quite speechless. And Guest -
'Gods!' said Guest, half-shocked, half-intrigued by the strength with which the flux of fluid was bolting from the cornucopia. 'It's increasing!'
Indeed, the force of the outsurge from the cornucopia was increasing to such an extent that dirt, stones and entire rocks were blown away where the yellow flux impacted.
'Guest!' said Lord Onosh. 'Will you stop that!'
'I will not!' yelled Guest.
'Then if you don't – '
'Yes!' said Guest. 'Tell me what happens if I don't!'
'If you don't,' said Lord Onosh, raising his voice to make himself heard over the pounding shock-splatter of the cornucopia's high-pressure vomiting, 'then I'll – I'll – '
Then the Witchlord fell silent.
He was starting to think.
The Witchlord stared with wild surmise at the ever- intensifying torrent which was blasting from the cornucopia. A veritable stream of urine was pounding away, trying to escape from the nearest tunnel, and already it was plain that the tunnel would be hard put to drain the flux if it increased any further.
There then followed a long and very tedious siege of automated pissing, as father and son took turns at holding the cornucopia, keeping it pointing downwards so it would continue to output its surges.
Sitting atop the small mound in the center of the great pit, father and son worked the evening through, and maintained this great labor of hosing all through the following night. But when dawn came, they at last admitted defeat, and raised the cornucopia to the vertical, thus cutting off the flow of urine.
'It is no good,' said Guest, sadly folding up the cornucopia.
'There are too many holes in this pit.'
So there were, so there were.
Though the whole pit was one reeking yellowish pool of piss, in which the central mound was a small and forlorn island, there was no hope of the flood filling the pit as a whole and thus floating Witchlord and Weaponmaster to freedom. Even as they watched, the piss-level began to drop by perceptible degrees.
