'It is escaping,' said Guest.
'Yes,' said his father. 'But where?'
'All waters from the Stench Caves drain from the Nijidith River,' said Guest. 'Or so I was told.'
'I was briefed likewise,' said his father. 'So, if there is but one outlet from this hell-hole, then the waters will surely lead us out of it.'
'A man would have to be very brave to venture this flood,' said Guest speculatively, looking at the sinuous lines of strength which marked the currents generated by the swift-draining urine.
'A man would have to be braver yet to stay here and starve,' said his father. 'I am thirsty, and I have not drunk. I am hungry, and I have not eaten. I am tired, and I have not slept, nor do I expect to sleep in a pit which stinks as much as this one.'
'You are right,' said Guest, conceding his own hunger, thirst and fatigue. 'We'd best be going, and now.'
There were three things which Guest wished to preserve in the journey ahead. One was the ring of ever-ice, which should be safe enough on his finger. The second was the knife he had stolen from
Aldarch the Third, which… well, it was in a buckle-down sheath, and if that was not good enough then there was no way Guest could improve its security.
But what of the cornucopia?
How was he going to keep that safe?
'I'll keep that in my boot,' said Lord Onosh, seeing Guest looking speculatively at the cornucopia. Guest was most reluctant to surrender the thing, but could not think of a safer way to manage its transit. So he handed it over to his father, who took off his right boot. On his right foot,
Lord Onosh was wearing two pairs of woollen socks. In their own lands, the Yarglat are accustomed to prepare the foot for the boot by winding a long bandage around it, but such foot-bindings were not the fashion in the Izdimir Empire, and it was that Empire which had equipped the Witchlord for this particular mission.
Lord Onosh took off his own socks, then forced his foot into the cornucopia. Guest thought this a most unwise procedure, but his father came to no harm from it.
With the cornucopia acting as a singularly odd and ill- fitting sock, Lord Onosh crammed his foot back into his boot – not without difficulty! – and laced up that boot with the very same bootlace which had recently been used to hang a quokka.
Then father and son plunged into the swirling waters – they both of them tried most strenuously to think of the flux which faced them as being a flux of water – and began a journey into nightmare. Down they went, sucked away by the swirling currents of drainage, plummeted down a huge sewerpipe where darkness ground darkness in a throttling cacophony of buffeting backspray and jolting collision. Skleetering rats screamed and clawed in the frothing upswirl which rammed them against the roofs of caverns then slammed them down drop-pipes, floated them through caverns loud with the guttural glorp of sideline discharges, then sent them screaming over impromptu waterfalls.
Sometimes Guest saw – or thought he saw – his father's greensheened face. But sometimes he saw nothing, for sometimes the hot flux plunged him into a roaring darkness where breathing was an intermittent luxury, where rocks rubbled him, where rapids tried to kick him to bits with a billion boots, and where Things with leathery wings went screeching overhead – for all the world as if Guest Gulkan's ears had liberated themselves and, each taking flight from its perch, multiplied themselves in flight until their strength was legion.
After awhile, Guest Gulkan no longer knew whether he was alive or dead, awake or awrath in nightmare. He was swept from one passage of temporary strangulation to the next, was boiled, vomited, plunged, purged, gobleted, zorded, rambleskinned and rumped, was battered by the slurping outpour of a million billion bowls of soup, was shocked by the sundering waves of five oceans and a dozen seas, was -
Was shocked at last to the daylight, was vomited out from the dark, was plunged down the boiling thrash of the Nijidith River, and then was swashed away downstream in the company of shattered bits of tables, chairs, doors, gates, gods and shrines, dead kittens and half-chewed cockroaches, dishrags and begging bowls, the underwear of drowned priests and the straw sandals of doomed peasants.
Floating on his back, Guest was slewed around by the sun, cartwheeled by the hallucinatory daylight, overawed by skies of a blue so wide it was beyond his imagination.
Was this life?
It seemed it was.
But -
What a world! And what a life!
The banks of the river were a wasteland of the torn and tattered, a wasteland of mulched houses and slewed shacks, of canted temples and drowned corpses, of groaning cattle and struggling pigs half-drowned in pits of morass. Finding his strength, or what was left of it, Guest struck out for the nearest shore, and hauled himself up onto the bog of undry land, there to grapple with the oppressive physicality of cold slime and stinking slush.
He was unslaked, unfed, and overwashed, and his father was missing, was nowhere to be seen, so what should he be doing first?
As Guest was still wondering, a body came floating downstream, face upturned to the sun, and he realized it was his father, and realized the man was dead.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Nijidith River: a flux of filth which flows out from Stench Caves and down to Lake Kak, that singularly unpristine body of water on the shores of which stands the city of Obooloo, capital of the Izdimir Empire.
Guest Gulkan dragged his father from the river. It was him!
It was him! Guest smoothed his hand over the steep slope of his father's forehead, feeling beneath his fingers the corrugations of the deep ridges gouged in the bone of that forehead, ridges which ran from hairline to eyebrows. He was too devastated to weep.
As Guest sat there on the banks of the Nijidith river, kneeling beside his father's corpse, that corpse opened its eyes.
'Wah!' said Guest, taking very much by surprise.
'So you too are dead,' said Lord Onosh. Guest thought about it a moment, then declared that, in his considered opinion, neither of them was dead, as unlikely as that might seem.
'I think you wrong,' said Lord Onosh. 'I thing the pair of us certainly dead, for where could this be if it is not in hell?'
Now the Witchlord was being perfectly reasonable when he delivered himself of this opinion, for in all truth the landscape in which the two Yarglat barbarians were marooned did look very much like one of the uncouth outlands of hell. Guest conceded as much.
'Yet,' said Guest, 'I believe us to be alive.'
'Then all I can say,' said his father, 'is that it would be much more convenient if we were dead.'
To this gloomy sentiment, Guest voiced no opposition. For survival was sheer depression in such a brutalized landscape, and all the Weaponmaster really wanted to do was to collapse. He was ragged with lack of sleep, his throat was sore, his belly was griping, and he was so severely bruised that to move was to inflict upon himself a savagery of suffering.
Yet, being disciplined in the necessities of war, both Witchlord and Weaponmaster did get themselves moving, and shambled along the riverbank, heading downstream until they saw what looked to be a surviving hut atop an unwashed knoll.
'The hut,' said Guest, pointing it out.
'Huhn,' grunted his father.
And no debate more complicated than that, the two bent their footsteps toward the hut, where they found a peasant family engaged in taking a meal.
There were eight or nine peasants – it was hard to count them exactly, since three or four of the smallest were sitting under an outside table at the feet of their elders – and one of these was a young woman who was breastfeeding a piglet. This scene of indulgence reminded Guest of another young woman – perhaps the very
