Since Sod was now so much a part of the background of his life, Guest scarcely registered his approach. But when Jarl saw the man – why, Thodric Jarl looked as if he had suddenly been dropped in boiling water.
'Gentle god!' said Jarl, voicing in his startlement the mightiest of all his oaths. 'It's Sod!'
'Jarl,' said Sod, acknowledging recognition with displeasure.
'But you – but – man, it was – Chi'ash-lan it was – 'Sken-Pitilkin looked from Jarl to Sod, from Sod to Jarl.
There was something decidedly odd here. Obviously Jarl had seen Sod in earlier years in Chi'ash-lan, and obviously Banker Sod was not pleased at all to be so unexpectedly identified here on the island of Alozay. Sken- Pitilkin, fearing that this unexpected and inexplicable act of recognition somehow contained the seeds of a most unfortunate breech of diplomatic protocol, tried to hush Jarl.
But it was too late.
Sod had already decided that he was most displeased at being recognized, and that in particular he was displeased at having been recognized by Jarl.
'I want that man,' said Sod, indicating Thodric Jarl.
Sundry Guardians moved to arrest Thodric Jarl.
In hindsight, it may be said of a certainty that Banker Sod had over-reacted. In hindsight, it may be said of a certainty that Sod would soon have realized as much, that diplomacy would have had its way, that Jarl would have been released, and the whole thing smoothed over and forgotten by the next day.
But Thodric Jarl was in his rune-warrior mode, so drew his sword as if to hold the world at bay. He was outnumbered by twenty to one – after all, he was a single man alone, and Sken-Pitilkin certainly had no intention of fighting on his behalf – yet he challenged the Guardians with the stoneblooded resolution which befits a man born more for myth than life.
'Jarl!' said Sken-Pitilkin sharply. 'No fighting!'
But it was too late, for the nearest Guardian had already drawn his weapon in a matching gesture. Their razors clashed, and scratched each other with a sound like the claws of a sliding cat screaming across the tiles of a wet rooftop.
'That's enough!' roared Sken-Pitilkin.
The two swordsmen broke apart, both as yet unblooded. They eyed each other, breathing hard.
'My good lord Banker,' said Zozimus, addressing Banker Sod in the urbanest of all imaginable tones, and doubtless intending to build some swift diplomacy upon the foundations of goodwill so diligently established by long months of slug chefery.
With the mercy of Sod's grateful belly thrown into the equation, there was a near-certain hope of peaceful resolution.
But one of the younger Guardians had already drawn a knife, and even as Zozimus spoke that Guardian threw that knife.
The knife went whizzing through the air, slicing – not at Jarl! – but at Sken-Pitilkin!
With the roar of a Word, Sken-Pitilkin raised his country crook. Caught in a vortex of levitational energies, the knife snapped upwards, shattering into fragments in the buffeting upsweep of the compulsion which commanded it.
'Ahyak Rovac!' screamed Rolf Thelemite, drawing his sword with a shearing swipe which plucked the scarf from Zelafona's hair.
And a moment later, the gloom of the Palace Docks was alive with the dragon-slash of sword-silver combat. In the thrashwork embroilments of battle, Sken-Pitilkin came face to face with a Guardian. The hackwork hero chopped at the wizard with his tooth of iron, but iron met country crook, and it was the iron which shattered. The country crook twisted in Sken-Pitilkin's hands, subtle as a licorice strap in the hands of an energetic child. It thwacked the Guardian.
The man fell stumbling backwards, fell to the grip of Pelagius Zozimus -
And -Sken-Pitilkin winced, the sound of a bone-breaking crack etched once and forever in his memory.
Zozimus held out a hand.
Zozimus spoke a Word.
The fresh-created corpse of the Guardian uprose, and stood on tottering legs before its master, the necromancer Zozimus. Then Zozimus drew his sword, and passed the weapon to the corpse. Which grasped it.
Zozimus raised his hands.
He spoke a Word.
The corpse turned, and raised the sword for war. It raised the sword against its former comrades.
Now Zozimus had spent most of his time on Alozay in the kitchen. As lord of the larder, Zozimus had dedicated himself to cooking up slugs and such, and had been grossly over-rewarded for his enterprises in this direction – for Safrak's Bankers had proved ready to part with good gold to satisfy their bellies, though they never unclenched so much as silver to appease the appetites of their minds.
However, though Zozimus customarily worked as a chef, and hence was able to find a ready welcome in whatever city, palace, pit, dungeon, ship, school or brewery in which he happened to find himself, the truth of the matter was that Zozimus was a necromancer.
A necromancer, yes!
Zozimus was a wizard of Xluzu, able to arcanely command the dead. Upon the Palace Docks, Zozimus commanded the corpse of the first of those who fell in battle, and sent that corpse against its erstwhile companions. The sight of one of their own fighting against them when dead was enough to rout the Guardians, who mostly dived from the docks and began swimming to the low-lying city of Molothair.
'So,' said Jarl, panting harshly, 'we have the docks in our possession.'
From the way he said it, Sken-Pitilkin momentarily thought the Rovac warrior had no intention of stopping there, but meant to scale the winch-ropes and take the mainrock at the storm.
'Possession?' said Zozimus. 'I've not seen a deed to prove it!'
As Zozimus so spoke, the shambling corpse which had been at his command came striding down the docks. Zozimus spoke a Word.
The corpse passed him its sword – an implement now drenched with blood. Then it went ramshackle-walking onward down the docks, its head flopping limp and useless to the left. At a misstep, it went went wheeling into the darkened waters, throwing up a floundering spray as it fell. Pelagius Zozimus ignored it, for he was busy scraping his sword with his boot. With the sword scraped – a poor expedient, but this was a battlefield, not a barracks in preparation for paradeground display! – Zozimus sheathed it, then led the way aboard Jarl's ship.
It was then that time of day when things have grown so dark that one can scarcely see. However, the shadowing of the evening has proceeded by such imperceptible degrees that mind and eye have been fooled into accepting the shadows for the day. So one lives in a world which is coaldust mixed with deepest cloud, a world of darkness relieved merely by the bonechina brightslash of a rag of flapping sail or a torn piece of paper random in the wind.
In such shadow stood Sken-Pitilkin, the last to quit the docks. The choppy waves jostled the bulwarks of the docks, chill- slapped in syncoptic half-patterns, arrhythmic spray-bursts. The loudest sound was the creaking rubmark protest of Jarl's ship, straining at its ropes, chafing its fenders against the lowermost of Alozay's wave- mucked fortifications. In the gathering wind of the evening's night, the mounded death on the dockside was unstill, for hair was feathered, a belt flapped loose, and one gust unexpectedly scooped the weight of a helmet and rattled into the inkblack darkthickness by a sagging winch-basket.
In that windy darkness, Sken-Pitilkin endured a moment of unaccustomed desolation. Beset by wind and shadow, unsettled by death and by the prospect of a wild night on the bat-wing seas, the wizard of Drum wished himself back on Drum, back with his cats and his sea dragons, his library and his toasting rack.
But Drum -
'Come on, Sken-Pitilkin!'
But Drum was far, was far, far -
'Sken-Pitilkin!'
Drum was far distant from the Swelaway Sea, and return was denied by the wrath of the Confederation. So Sken-Pitilkin, irrevocably entangled in the fate of the Collosnon Empire -
