The Witchlord Onosh in his mercy and his wisdom had provided the travelers with gold in plenty – certainly enough, in combination with their other discardable possessions, to buy them a boat for the passage to Safrak. Unfortunately, Rolf Thelemite persuaded the Weaponmaster Guest to join him in the pursuit of a bargain and save their cash for pleasure rather than transit.
Fortunately, the sagacious Sken-Pitilkin vetoed the purchase of any bargain, and they spent their gold on an expensive but seaworthy boat.
The boat, which was named the Lathmish, was sold to them by a man named Umbilskimp, an old man who suffered bitterly from chilblains and emphysema. It came with a money-back warranty which guaranteed it to be good for five years or fifty return trips across the Swelaway Sea. Both Zozimus and Sken-Pitilkin checked the wording of the warranty, and checked it closely – and, on being satisfied, they herded Guest and Rolf aboard the boat, and set to sea.
But when the travelers were well launched upon the cold gray chop of the Swelaway Sea, the boat began to leak; and before they were so much as half-way to Alozay they found their craft was leaking like a fish hacked open by a landing hook.
Fortunately, the travelers managed to get their leaking wreck of a boat as far as the island of Ema-Urk before it actually sank. Once the thing had been grounded, an inspection of the hull proved it to be one spongy mass of sodden rot, which the boat salesman must have known.
'He is a murderer!' said Guest, denouncing the venial Umbilskimp. 'And if I get him in my power then I will hang him!'
'An excellent sentiment,' said Sken-Pitilkin, who usually deplored violence, but who on this occasion found himself in total agreement with Guest's vow of vengeance. 'Let us report the man as soon as we get to Alozay, and perhaps they will have the grace to give us satisfaction.'
And when a passing boat had at length given them passage to Alozay, they did just that – reporting the delinquent Umbilskimp to Banker Sod himself.
But Vernon Brigadoon Sod, the man of iceman race who headed the Safrak Bank and dominated the island of Alozay, declared the affairs of Ink to be no concern of his.
'In Safrak,' said Sod, 'we see our law as being concerned with the rule of the Safrak Islands. No more, no less.'
'Then who rules Ink?' said Guest.
'Nobody,' said Sod. 'Ink is a free village, just as Port Domax is a free city. If you must have vengeance upon this fellow Um – Umbik -
'
'Umbilskimp,' supplied Guest, who had vowed never to forget the man until the man was dead.
'If you must have your vengeance,' said Sod, 'then you must secure it for yourself, and you will not be securing it while you are resident upon Alozay.'
So Guest arrived upon Alozay, Safrak's ruling island and the site of the capital city of Molothair, and his arrival was marred by the fact that he was cheated of his legitimate revenge upon the salesman who had almost encompassed his murder.
He vowed again that he would not forget the fellow.
Meantime, back in Gendormargensis, the Witchlord Onosh sat closeted with Thodric Jarl and Eljuk Zala, trying to work out how to deal with the problems in Locontareth.
The city of Locontareth had long been a c entre of unrest, and there were rumors which suggested that one Sham Cham of that city was exercising his talents in stirring up a tax revolt. Acting on Thodric Jarl's suggestion, Lord Onosh had tried to dispose of the matter with the minimum of fuss, by sending killers to ensure that Sham Cham passed away quietly in his sleep.
Lord Onosh had just lately received news that the killers had been killed in their turn, and that a very lively and decidedly unkilled Sham Cham now slept with half a dozen man-eating guard dogs in his room.
'It looks,' said Lord Onosh gloomily, 'as if this will be Stranagor all over again.'
'Stranagor?' said Eljuk Zala. 'What's that got to do with it?'
'My, ah, my – how did I phrase it? – my Provision for the Permanent Abolition of Riverside Vermin,' said the Witchlord Onosh. 'That was it. The vermin being the Geflung. It was a revolt, a tax revolt. You don't remember?'
Eljuk Zala confessed that he had no recollection of ever reading or hearing about any such revolt.
This disturbed the Witchlord greatly, for nobody could be ignorant of the late and lamentable tax revolt in Stranagor unless they were ignorant of the affairs of the empire as a whole, and such ignorance was dangerous in the empire's anointed heir.
Nevertheless, the Witchlord Onosh did his best to conceal his disappointment as he explained.
'In the country around Stranagor,' said Lord Onosh, 'live the Geflung, who – '
As the Witchlord began to explain things to Eljuk Zala,
Thodric Jarl turned his own attention to a map of the Collosnon Empire and began planning a war against Locontareth, something he was sure the empire would find itself engaged in before too terribly long – if not in the coming year, then in the year after.
Chapter Four
Safrak Bank: organization which rules the Safrak Islands of the Swelaway Sea. Its ostensible business is to fatten on trade passing between Port Domax and the heartland of Tameran.
Guest Gulkan's birthday was in spring, and it was in spring of Alliance 4305 that he turned 15. His birthday was ill-omened, for it found him afflicted by influenza.
While leprosy, cholera and bubonic plague have names to rival nightmare, for swift and sudden devastation nothing can match the more lethal strains of influenza. This epidemic had claimed a tenth of Safrak's population in barely thirty days, and looked fit to claim Guest as well. He was fevered and awash with sweat, so weak in his ague's anguish that he lacked the strength to crack a flee.
In the end, the boy only survived because a guardian named Hrothgar took him home to his wife Una, who had just lost her baby to the epidemic, and so was able to wetnurse the patient. Guest was far too sick to derive any erotic satisfaction from this privilege, but Una's help saw him through his crisis, and shortly he was tottering around in the spring sunshine, feeling more like a ghost of himself than an actual boy of flesh and blood.
'You're no ghost,' said Una, pulling on one of his big ears.
'There's no ghost here! There's an elephant!' Guest, who had begun to grow infatuated with the gray-eyed Una, promptly lost all sympathy with the woman. If there was one thing the young Weaponmaster absolutely hated, it was a woman who pulled on his ears. And, sooner or later, every woman of his acquaintance seemed to end up doing exactly that. Those ears, it seemed, had a fatal attraction for the entire female sex.
With his infatuation thus abruptly terminated, Guest was glad to flee from Hrothgar's house – a ramshackle wooden building in the ramshackle city of Molothair – and return to his own quarters in the mainrock Pinnacle.
On his return to the mainrock, he was promptly nobbled for guard duty. He was weak in the aftermath of his sickness, but weakness was no disqualification for work at such a time. Guest Gulkan was technically resident upon Alozay as a hostage, but this was a mere legalism. The Safrak Bank trusted him – as much as it trusted any boy of 15 – and so readily employed his brutality. It set him to guard the time prison, a large hall with a series of transparent pods set around its walls.
Mark the layout of the Hall of Time!
The mainrock Pinnacle stands at the northern end of the long and narrow island of Alozay. It is a mighty upthrust of granite, a misshapen tube of rock which bulbs outward at its middlemost point.
To win admission to the mainrock, one must come to its docks, which lie in the cold and guttural shadows of the mainrock's wave-slapped northern shore. One is then hauled upwards to Gud Obo, the Winch Stratum, the lowest of the seven inhabited levels of the mainrock. Gud Obo houses the winch-works, the servant quarters, and the storerooms.
