fatigue. So he descended from his tree and joined Sken-Pitilkin in sleep; and he slept like a baby until roused for a conference. Sken-Pitilkin kicked off that conference.
'I had thought to run to Drum,' said Sken-Pitilkin, 'but on mature reflection that seems too obvious. After all, I am known to all of Safrak as the wizard of Drum.'
'You are?' said Guest, by no means certain that Sken-Pitilkin was as famous as he thought.
'At the very least,' said Sken-Pitilkin, 'the demon Italis knows me as such, and it may well be that the demon will tell Shabble where to look for me. So we must not go to Drum. At least, we must not go there directly. As we know, the bubble's weakness is its capacity for boredom. It lacks persistence. If it does not find us in a season, then, having searched Drum and found it empty, it is unlikely to return.'
'We hope,' said Sod.
'We hope, yes,' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'In any case, we know that we must at a minimum secure our disappearance for our season.
Therefore we must choose some place which is less than obvious.'
'Ema-Urk,' said Guest, naming the island on which his brother Morsh Bataar had wife, children and sheep farm.
'You jest, I hope,' said Sken-Pitilkin, 'for Ema-Urk is far too close to Alozay.'
Then the wizard of Skatzabratzumon pulled out a map of Tameran, a weathered map of parchment which had dirt seamed in its folds.
'As you can guess from the condition of this document,' said Sken-Pitilkin, 'it is no map of mine. I abstracted from a room of maps in Trilip Obo, the Archive Stratum of the mainrock Pinnacle.'
Then Sken-Pitilkin pulled out a handful of coins.
'What's this?' said Guest. 'Divination?'
'In a manner of speaking,' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'We must each write down the name of one of the destinations shown on this map, then choose a destination by the tossing of coins.'
'Why?' said Guest.
'Because,' said Sken-Pitilkin, 'Shabble is smart enough to out-guess us if we work by logic. Therefore we must call chance to our assistance.'
Then Sken-Pitilkin demanded that they each choose a destination. Guest Gulkan vacillated between Stranagor – the place of his birth – and Gendormargensis. He settled on Gendormargensis. His brother Eljuk opted for Qonsajara, high in the mountains of Ibsen-Iktus. Thayer Levant decided upon Favanosin, while Ontario Nol chose the uplands of the Balardade Massif. Sken-Pitilkin himself then chose Stranagor.
'And you?' said Sken-Pitilkin to Sod.
'I,' said Banker Sod, 'choose Alozay itself.'
'Alozay!' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'Why, but that's impossible!'
'Why?' said Sod. 'Shabble will surely have left Alozay to seek us elsewhere. If we return, then we can revenge ourselves upon Shabble's creatures. Furthermore, we can glut our pockets with gold, which would see us better prepared for a journey than we are at present.'
Sod's plan was extremely dangerous, but Sken-Pitilkin, though he thought Sod over-audacious, nevertheless accepted that plan as one possible option.
Then Sken-Pitilkin tossed the coins that the coins might decide which plan they would opt for.
The coins directed them to Guest Gulkan's choice:
Gendormargensis.
This occasioned uneasiness amongst all of them, even Guest Gulkan himself, for Gendormargensis was ruled by the Red Emperor Khmar, who had won his name by slaughtering so many of his enemies that the rivers ran red with their blood.
'I have another plan,' said Nol. 'It lacks the virtue of being randomly chosen. But, even so, I do not think that Shabble will divine this plan.'
Then the wizard of Itch pointed at Sken-Pitilkin's map. He pointed at the south-west of Tameran. He pointed at a tongue of land which sprinted out into the sea, terminating in a bulb of rock. He pointed at the bulb itself 'There,' said Ontario Nol, softly. 'The bubble will not seek us there.'
'There!?' said Sken-Pitilkin, in patent alarm.
While thoughts of venturing to Gendormargensis had made Sken-Pitilkin uneasy, this new suggestion made him positively alarmed.
'What place is that?' said Guest Gulkan. Sken-Pitilkin looked around, then said, albeit with some reluctance:
'We will not speak its name. Not here. But Nol is right. It is a good destination.'
So Sken-Pitilkin flew his stickbird to Lex Chalis, a place of caverns where the rock is fluid and warm beneath the touch. It is a place of ghosts, a place of hallucinatory dreams and waking delusions. Do you wish to hear more? Then you must seek elsewhere for the telling. For Lex Chalis awakens things which the mind has deliberately put to sleep. It stirs the old things to life, cracks the inner coffers of the psyche, incarnates the dead.
Worse, in the caverns of Lex Chalis, the thoughts of one person's mind create half-perceived shadows in the minds of that person's companions. Assume, then, that you are in Lex Chalis in the company of Guest Gulkan, he who was once mauled by the Great Mink in an arena in Chi'ash-lan. Assume that Guest is asleep, and dreaming, and that you are dreaming too. Can you imagine what your condition will be when you finally wake, heart pounding, eyes bulging, skin drenched with sweat?
In the great days of the Empire of Wizards, when all of Argan was ruled by the eight orders of the Confederation, then many wizards ventured north to Tameran, and dared their way to the caverns of Lex Chalis. But it is not recorded that any of them had any profit from such venture. For the place is beyond the understanding of wizardry; and, as far as history can tell, there has never been anything made of flesh or blood or stone or steel which has been able to grapple with its mysteries.
During the season in which the travelers sojourned in Lex Chalis, Ontario Nol was once moved to theorize on the nature of the caverns of Lex Chalis. He claimed those caverns to be the work of a theoretical breed of Experimenters.
'It is said by those who claim to know,' said Ontario Nol,
'that Probability is a single sheet of fabric pockmarked here and there by those patches of embroidery which mortal creatures know as the Realms of Time.
'It is further said that Probability is the great Enablement which permits the existence of the gods. Enabled by Probability, a god such as the Horn may master a small patch of this great fabric to its own purposes, just as a woman may master a small patch of a great bedsheet for her own embroidery.'
Listening to this theorizing, Guest Gulkan thought it disgraceful that a Yarglat male as mighty as Ontario Nol should use reference to a woman's work to describe things so weighty.
Nevertheless, he followed the metaphor.
'If the gods, then, are those who embroider worlds on the raw fabric of Probability,' said Ontario Nol, 'then the Experimenters are those who move from patch to patch to rearrange each piece of embroidery to something closer to their own liking.'
At which, Guest Gulkan began to lose track of Nol's explanation, finding the metaphor to be growing obscure. So Nol switched metaphors.
'Supposing we talk of the soil as a great Enablement which permits life,' said Nol. 'Suppose we then think of a god as an entity which can create a seed – an entity which can create life.
This is a mighty act, and it takes a god to do it. But what then do we call the farmer who takes the seed and breeds it down through the generations to a plant reshaped to his own requirements. Is the farmer a god? No. He is but a technician, albeit great in his field. And those who claim to know of such things construe their theoretical Experimenters as just such a breed of technicians.'Guest Gulkan had difficulty following this metaphor, too, since it was an agricultural metaphor, and the Yarglat have precious little understanding of farming. So Ontario Nol was put to the labor of explaining that farmers can selectively breed plants to reshape them to their own requirements – a datum which was new to Guest, and one which he was inclined to regard with great scepticism.
Yet that was the best metaphor which Ontario Nol could provide, so, whether Guest could understand it or not, he had to put up with it.
'We have, then,' said Ontario Nol, 'three levels of Power.
