same one – whom he had seen performing a similar action while he was on his way to the Stench Caves.
'Hello,' said Guest, trying to smile, and doing his best to look more like a man and less like a zombie.
He was greeted with blank incomprehension.
'Speak you the Galish Trading Tongue?' said Guest, voicing the question in that language.
The same mute, uncomprehending stares were echoed back to him by way of reply.
'Toxteth?' said Guest. 'Galsh Ebrek. Wen Endex. Understand?'
In educated company, the names of places often rouse a response where other vocabulary fails, but none of these peasants was geographer enough to have heard of any place so foreign as Wen Endex.
'Never mind,' said Lord Onosh. 'We don't have to talk to them. We can take what we want.'
'Can we?' said Guest, casting hungry eyes on the chickens which were grucking around under upturned baskets of loose-woven cane. 'We have no swords, and I for one am in no mood for war.'
'Never mind,' said Lord Onosh.
Then the Witchlord took off his boot, pulled the cornucopia from his foot, and wrung out the cornucopia as best he could. None of the peasants reacted to the sight of this device, so Guest presumed they did not realize its import.
Having thus readied the cornucopia, Lord Onosh reached out and took a handful of soy beans from a cast iron bowl which sat in the middle of the peasants' table. None of the peasants made any move to stop him, for he was bigger and brawnier than they were.
Indeed, from the paralysed steadfastness of their silence, Guest deduced that they thought both Witchlord and Weaponmaster to be ghouls or demons, and not creatures to be challenged or otherwise trifled with.
Having seized a handful of soy beans, Lord Onosh let them fall into the cornucopia, then upended the thing.
A dribble of soy beans spilt from the cornucopia's crumpled green cone. Then, with a rustling hiss, a cascade of beans slewed forth, piling up around the Witchlord's feet. Suddenly, Lord Onosh began to laugh. Despite his fatigue, his hunger, his unappeased thirst, he was enraptured by the sheer childish pleasure of working a miracle. Such was his engrossment in this task that he walked right round the hut, spilling out a track of soy beans.
'Enough!' said Guest.
At which his father brought the cornucopia to the vertical.
It made a terminal grockling sound as it swallowed anything that was left inside it, then was silent. Empty.
At all this, the peasants sat and stared, for these shenanigans were totally beyond their experience, and they had no repertoire of reaction which was adequate to the occasion. Then a full-grown pig came porking up the slope to the hut, and began to trough its way through the spilt soy beans, eating with a sanguine confidence which persuaded the peasants to follow suit.
As the peasants started in on the soy beans – tentatively at first, as if fearing that what was undenied to a pig might yet be denied to them – Witchlord and Weaponmaster seated themselves at the table and helped themselves to long and greedy draughts of potable water. As if realizing that their guests might be human beings, and humans beings sorely beset by adversity, the oldest of the female peasants – a venerable materfamilias with a face seamed like a gray mudswamp in a time of drought – began to fuss around them. Before she was through, a pair of straw sandals had been procured for Guest's sore feet, and the food on the table had been supplemented by a bowl of boiled potatoes and a plate of raw mushrooms.
Comforted by this attention, both Witchlord and Weaponmaster began to start to feel human again. They ate prodigiously, downing handfuls of soy beans. Working away at the munchiness of those beans, Guest found they brought back memories of Dalar ken Halvar, where he had often eaten the same provender.
The peasants relaxed, chattering away to each other in their own language. Listening to these gray-skinned Janjuladoola people talking in the Janjuladoola tongue, the two Yarglat barbarians were painfully reminded of the fact that they were marooned on a foreign continent where they spoke not a word of the dominant language, and where they were unlikely to run into more than an occasional smattering of people who spoke their own native Eparget.
Consequently, there was absolutely no point in whoring off into the hinterland in the hope of somehow finding a way off the continent by land or sea. They did not know the language; they had no money; and they would draw undue attention to themselves if they went around routinely performing miracles with the cornucopia.
There remained to them but one sensible course of action: to follow the Nijidith to Obooloo, which city could reasonably be expected to have been disordered by flood, and in that city to venture to Achaptipop, the great rock which sustained the Sanctuary of the Bondsmans Guild. If they could only win admission to that Bank, then the Circle of the Partnership Banks would take them to Dalar ken Halvar, where Guest's wife Penelope was surely waiting for his return, and then on to Alozay, where Lord Onosh had his kingdom.
'If,' said Guest, as they discussed this, 'your kingdom has not been somehow subverted or overthrown in your absence.'
'I doubt very much that it has been,' said Lord Onosh. 'For Sod was as hostage on Alozay, and Bao Gahai was in charge of his custody.'Guest thought this a less than adequate guarantee of the security of his father's kingdom, but did not dispute with him.
Nor did he dispute with his father when Lord Onosh retained the cornucopia – seeming to think it his own property. While Guest was greatly displeased at his father's presumption, he thought that now was not the time for a confrontation over the matter, so held his tongue on the journey to Obooloo.
Witchlord and Weaponmaster traveled cautiously, taking time to rest, sleep and scavenge in accordance with their requirements, and so it was dawn on a summer's day when they finally entered the city of Obooloo.
That city was beset by a dreadful desolation. The whole city was one reeking morass of urine, and nobody moved in the streets.
One might have thought the population dead, but for constant and unnerving wailing which arose from ten thousand buildings. It was the wailing of sinners beseeching the gods for mercy.
For the people of Obooloo knew nothing of Guest's discovery of the cornucopia and his use of it. All they knew was that the gods had pissed on their city, filling the Nijidith with a torrent of filth which had caused Lake Kak to rise and storm the city with sundering pollution. Now, in dread, the people of Obooloo tried to stave off a repeat performance, or to advert the imminent end of the world which so many of them feared.
So Witchlord and Weaponmaster proceeded without opposition into the heart of the city, guided by the great rock Achaptipop, which landmarked the way when they were confused by the backstreet bafflings of this alien urbanization. But their progress toward Achaptipop took them inevitably closer to the Temple of Blood, and when Guest realized he was in the presence of that building – which was unmistakable, since there was no other great building immediately south of Achaptipop – he drew his father's attention to the fact.
'You're not thinking of going in there, are you?' said Lord Onosh.
To Lord Onosh, the Temple of Blood was the place where he had been sorely wounded, then captured. To Lord Onosh, the Temple of Blood was the scene of one of the worst traumas of his life. But to Guest, the fighting in the Temple had been but a trifling incident. After all, what was a swordpoint brawl to a hero who has faced the Great Mink in a gladiatorial arena, who has dared the wrath of two therapists, and who has escaped alive from the very mouth of a murkbeast?
'If you're in such a great big hurry to get home,' said Guest, 'then go ahead. If that's what you want, I'll dare the temple on my own.'
Whereupon his father produced the cornucopia, spat in it, and declared himself armed for the expedition. Carrying the cornucopia upright, the Witchlord then headed toward the Temple of Blood, declaring that any opposition would see the entire city digested by the outflux of his saliva. Guest Gulkan thought his father's spittle to be but a poor weapon with which to defy the strength of a Temple, let alone the undiluted might of an entire city, but it was the best weapon they had. Their swords had been lost in the Stench Caves of Logthok
Norgos, and since that loss they had met nobody from whom they could beg, borrow or steal any replacements. In particular, soldiers were so short on the ground that it was possible that perhaps the army had committed suicide en masse as an act of contrition for presumed offences against the gods.
With Lord Onosh bearing the cornucopia, Witchlord and Weaponmaster won their way to the Temple of Blood, and, entering by the unguarded southern gate, found the interior of that sacred place to be eerily silent.
They found their way to the central courtyard which held the Burning Pit, which was today very much an
