incontinently tampering with a subtle wizardly mechanism he found in its depths.
Be that as it may, the outcome was that Guest Gulkan was carried north of the Greaters to Sung, a barbarous province of the Ravlish Lands. In some quarters, it is alleged that he did not leave Sung before committing a number of murders. Indeed, Poulaan is said to have blamed the Weaponmaster for the death of his much- beloved brother Cromarty, who was put to death in the town of Keep in a singularly sanguinary manner.
Whatever the truth of the matter, it is certain that Guest, having been abstracted from the Greater Teeth by the villainous Poulaan, ended up in Sung, a dismal land of bogs and rockdumps in Ravlish East, where peasants with provincial mudpuddle minds dedicate themselves to the practice of obscure yet hideous abominations. The inhabitants of this depraved place eat offal (in addition to pork), rape sheep, commit vile abominations with toads, and abominate themselves also with liquid dung. Nor is this the limit of their delinquencies, for the people of Sung have disgraced themselves down through the generations by systematic inhospitality, the worst manifestation of which is that they frequently mistake wandering scholars for lepers and endeavor to stone them to death. They further display their debased iniquity by giving houseroom to the skavamareen, an instrument of aural obscenity which has long been outlawed in every civilized nation from Tang to Chi'ash-lan. It must also be said that a debasement equal to that of their morals has from time to time afflicted their coinage; and from this great injury has been suffered by innocent persons.
The capital of Sung is Keep, which has been mentioned above as the site of the alleged murder of Cromarty, and Keep is notable inasmuch as it is a town much undermined by gemrock tunnelling, to the point where its very existence has been for some time threatened. One has read that anciently great civilizations were destroyed by the very processes which produced their wealth; and, while Sung is neither great nor (properly speaking) an abode of civilization, one foresees that its destruction will ultimately befall it thanks to a similar dynamic.
However, despite the sundry derelictions of Keep, of Sung, and of the people of Sung, Guest Gulkan escaped from that barbarous province with skin and foreskin yet intact, and got himself down to the coast.
He then headed toward D'Waith.
D'Waith is the seaport at the easternmost end of the Ravlish Lands, and hence is the port which is handiest to Drum. One might therefore have presumed Guest Gulkan to be making for the island of Drum, intent on discovering whether the sagacious Sken-Pitilkin yet survived on that island; and intent, too, on recruiting Sken-Pitilkin's power, might, wisdom and all-round sagacity to his cause.
But – not a bit of it!
Though Guest Gulkan had reached the full years of his maturity, he had yet to acquire wisdom; and the proof of this is that he had no thought of seeking the help of his tutelary wizard, but planned instead to get transport from D'Waith to the Greaters, and there to present himself once again to Elkor Alish, and this time to make a full confession of the existence of the Circle of the Partnership Banks. Guest had been grievously shaken by his kidnapping. Having been swept to Sung by the villainous Togura Poulaan, he had been forced to acknowledge that the slow, elegant ballet of carefully choreographed politicking in which he had been engaged on the Greaters was fatuous. For Guest was not living in any great Age of Peace in which slow measures might yet win the day. Instead, he was living in an Age of Darkness, which favored the roughness of the fist and the sharpness of the swordblade.
So Guest, who had previously been working on intricate plans for the confidential recovery of the star-globe from the rivers of Penvash, planned to now abandon subtlety and secrecy altogether, and to confront Elkor Alish with the truth.
This is what he would say: 'Just south of here, a short voyage distant from the Greaters, a Door awaits us on the island of Stokos. It is the Door of the Stokos Bank, a Door which is linked to similar Banks in places as far afield as Chi'ash-lan and Dalar ken Halvar. Command of this Circle of Banks would answer your most crying need: possession of a source of wealth equal to the demands of financing your war against the Confederation of Wizards. If you will but give me an army, a small one, then I will wrest from the waters of Penvash the device which commands these Doors, and place both the device and myself at your service.'
This was what Guest planned to say, for he had been compelled to an acknowledgement of his own limits, of the uncertainties of his previous elaborate scheming, and of the need to cut his ambitions down to size, so his capacities would be equal to those ambitions. Thus, whereas the Weaponmaster had previously set his heart on mastering the Circle of the Partnership Banks in his own right, now he was prepared to compromise, to make an alliance with Elkor Alish, and to accept a subordinate role in any conquest of that Circle.
But he was too late!
For, on reaching D'Waith, Guest found that a ship from Androlmarphos was in port, and the news which had been brought by the ship had already infected the whole town.
Drangsturm had fallen.
Words cannot encompass the enormity of this disaster.
Drangsturm, of course, was the trench of flame which the wizards of the Confederation had built to guard the north of Argan from the monsters of the south.
In earlier discussion with Elkor Alish, Guest Gulkan had asked the Rovac warrior how he planned to master the defense of the continent once he had overthrown the Confederation of Wizards.
To this, the black-bearded Rovac warrior had given a two-part answer. First, he planned initially to compel a certain number of wizards to serve him as his slaves, and to maintain the flames of Drangsturm against invasion by the monsters of the Swarms. Second, he intended to later quest to the heartland of the terror-lands of the Deep South, and there to overthrow the Skull, the entity which commanded the Swarms.
Such was the hubris of Elkor Alish, he who is said to have been ultimately overpowered and slaughtered by certain of the monsters of the Swarms – for, if rumor is to be believed, Alish was killed by one of the Neversh while attempting to stem the invasion of the monsters which forced their way to the north after the destruction of Drangsturm.
When Guest Gulkan first heard the news of Drangsturm's fall,
Elkor Alish yet lived. But Guest did not think for a moment that Alish, or any other warrior, could hold the Swarms in battle.
During his earlier adventuring round the Circle that began in the Old City of Penvash, Guest had gone through a Door which opened onto the wrong side of Drangsturm, the southern side, that side which had always been the province of the monsters of the Swarms.
There he had encountered huge centipedes, from which he and his companions of the moment had fled.
And Guest knew, in his heart of hearts, that there was little to be done in the face of the Swarms except to run.
So, when Guest heard that Drangsturm had fallen, and that the Confederation of Wizards had destroyed itself in a civil war which had set one wizard against another, he realized that all of Argan was doomed. Words could not encompass the enormity of this disaster. The cities of Narba, Voice, Veda, Selzirk, Androlmarphos and Runcorn lay open to the onslaught of the worst of mindless marauding monsters – mindless monsters which were commanded by the malign intelligence of the Skull of the Deep South.
So Guest knew then – and rightly knew – that all would perish. The hotlands of the Far South would be overwhelmed. The ricelands and the wheatlands, all would go. The forests of the Chenameg Kingdom, the horselands of the Lezconcarnau Plains, the walls of Selzirk the Fair and the boulevards of Voice – all would fall to the forces of living death.
For three days, Guest Gulkan lingered in D'Waith, until he had exhaustively researched the news of Drangsturm's fall.
Meantime, discrete enquiry established that Sken-Pitilkin yet lived, and lived on Drum.
With news gathered, and with nothing of use yet left to do in D'Waith, Guest Gulkan persuaded a fisherman to dare the ugly waters of the Penvash Strait, that body of water which lies between the Ravlish Lands and the continent of Argan. It is toothed with rocks, haunted by sea serpents, and frequently beset by storms of great severity – all of which threaten to drown the mariner, or to wreck him upon shores where he will surely fall victim to the savagery of the harp seal (or so it is said, though, despite their bloodthirsty reputation, even harp seals have their occasional defenders).
This was the body of water which Guest Gulkan dared, and the dare brought him home to Drum, where the fisherman was rewarded by Sken-Pitilkin (and was rewarded, too, by being made guest of honor at a three-day poetry reading given by Sken-Pitilkin's sea dragons – though whether he was entirely appreciative of this
