'Zozimus, what's wrong with him?'Sken-Pitilkin was irrevocably entangled with the Yarglat and their empire, unless he chose to quit those entanglements for unknown difficulties in some still more barbarous part of this benighted world, and, being thus entangled, he must necessarily -
'Come on,' said Zozimus, who had come ashore to retrieve his cousin.
'Pelagius?'
'It's me,' said Zozimus softly. 'Come on. Come get yourself on the ship.'
And Hostaja Torsen Sken-Pitilkin permitted his cousin to lead him aboard Jarl's ship. Already, the ropes were being loosed, or cut by men made brutal by expedient, and Sken-Pitilkin was scarcely aboard before they were slipping away into the darkening night.
Unfortunately, the night which was now darkening beyond the remotest point of intelligibility was also, weatherwise, a worsening night. A storm blew up that night, a storm of beserker fury, and the voyage which started thus badly grew no better as it proceeded. Thus began a wild voyage which eventually ended when the voyagers had to beach their much-leaking ship upon a nondescript green pancake liberally sprinkled with stone cottages and sheep fanks. This was the island of Ema-Urk, where Guest Gulkan and Rolf Thelemite promptly wrote themselves a place in local history by killing a sheep, which roused the ire of the locals to a homicidal pitch.
As the wizards Sken-Pitilkin and Zozimus tried to soothe the tempers of the locals, with some help from the dralkosh Zelafona – who contributed some of her bangles and baubles to the soothing -
Thodric Jarl cursed and kicked his ship.
'You bought this ship at Ink, I suppose?' said Guest.
'I did,' said Jarl.
His ship was a hulk of a fishing boat which he had indeed purchased at Ink, a village which made a lively profit by selling its worn-out vessels to unwary strangers. On close inspection,
Jarl was inclined to think it a very miracle that this particular hulk had dragged itself as far as Ema-Urk before succumbing to a long-overdue and entirely natural death.
'You were sold this boat by Umbilskimp, I suppose,' said Guest, who still remembered that salesman, and had not repented of his determination to hang the man.
'Umbilskimp?' said Jarl. 'Who's he?'Guest explained.
'Why,' said Jarl, when he had heard the explanation out.
'That's very interesting. But, no, it was a man by name of Mung who sold me this particular boat.'
Then the Weaponmaster Guest Gulkan and the Rovac warrior Thodric Jarl pacted with each other, swearing that if the village of Ink were to fall to their power then they would make it their business to see both Umbilskimp and Mung hung high, for both were murderers without a doubt.
Then Jarl proceeded with an inspection of his hulk.
By the time the wizards and the witch had bargained a peace for the shipwrecked travelers, Jarl had concluded – and nobody saw fit to disagree – that there was not one chance on this side of hell of their prodigiously rotten and storm-weakened ship getting them even half as far as the horizon.
'Which means,' said Jarl, 'that we're not going any further in this rotten hulk.'
Which left them with very few palatable choices, for it was almost certain that Governor Sod would be in pursuit of them, and it was almost equally certain that Sod would not be gentle in his handling of them if and when he finally caught up with them.
Chapter Nine
Ema-Urk: an island of the Swelaway Sea, green and low-lying, and the site of much growing of sheep.
Though Thodric Jarl did not trust the people of Ema-Urk to keep the bargain of the peace which Zelafona had bought for the travelers, nothing more ferocious than a straying sheep intruded upon the peace of the travelers as they slept away the worst of their fatigue.
After a night's sleep, the marooned adventurers began to wonder how (if!) they were going to escape from their predicament.
Their ship in its rottenness was unfit even to be made into firewood, far less to put to sea. There was no boat on all of Ema Urk which was worthy of the labor of stealing it, and Jarl did not see how their own could be repaired except by rebuilding it from scratch.
And as Ema-Urk was flat, grassy and treeless, to rebuild their boat from scratch would first require the growth of its very timbers from the seed.
'Hence,' said Jarl, 'it seems we will be stuck here until in the fullness of time the masters of Alozay hunt us down to this lair.'
'They would not dare to kill us, if that's what you're thinking,' said Sken-Pitilkin positively. 'Even though they're far from the Collosnon Empire, they can't risk arousing the wrath of Lord Onosh.'
'They will not kill us,' said Jarl grimly. 'At least not as far as history is concerned. When the history of this episode is written, it will simply be said that we set to sea and were thereafter unseen. Drowning will be the natural presumption. It will be said that we were seen to leave Alozay on an evening which threatened storm – that much is true. It will be said that the fishes have had our bones. They almost did.'
'We could always try talking our way out of it,' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'If a hunting party does come from Alozay, I'm sure – '
'You might convince them to give us a decent funeral,' said Jarl, 'but I doubt you could persuade them to do us any greater favor.'
'Nonsense,' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'We can negotiate anything.'
'You are a wizard,' said Jarl, 'and all the opportunities of the last four thousand years have not proved sufficient for wizards to negotiate a peace with the Rovac. I vote that we prepare ourselves for battle.'
Here note that this 'voting' was a commonplace way for the
Rovac to resolve their indecisions, for, lacking reductive wisdom, these low-brained warriors were often unable to resolve their problems by intellectual analysis. When stuck in such a predicament, they therefore endeavored to fight their way out of it by the process of piling up a great weight of numbers for one side or the other through the abovementioned process known as 'voting'. Thus did the Rovac often decide their disputes in the way in which battles are so often decided: through sheer weight of numbers.
In this connection, it is worth noting that a similar process of 'voting' was commonly used in an even more systematized form by the Orfus pirates of the Greater Teeth; from which it can be proved that your Rovac mercenary is nothing but a pirate in embryo. However, Sken-Pitilkin shared neither the Rovac love for 'voting' nor the Rovac joy in battle, and said as much.
'I think,' said Sken-Pitilkin, once he had voiced his objections to waging war on any pursuers from Alozay, 'that we had better do better than that.'
'Why?' said Guest, who was inclined to side with Thodric Jarl. 'What's wrong with fighting? If we can sort this thing out by killing someone, then let's do it.'
'Unfortunately,' said Sken-Pitilkin, who knew the Rovac manner well, 'Thodric Jarl isn't talking about sorting things out. He's talking about fighting to the death then dying.'
'Oh,' said Guest, his enthusiasm suddenly quenched. 'What do we do then?'
There was a silence as everyone pondered this question. Then the necromancer Zozimus spoke.
'Well,' said Zozimus, 'I think the time for desperate measures has more or less arrived. I've done my share, you can't deny me that, so now it's your turn.'
'My turn?' said Guest in bewilderment.
'He wasn't talking to you,' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'He was talking to me!'
And of course this was true. Zozimus, having commanded a corpse into battle at the docks of Alozay, thought he had well and properly done his share. Now it was time for Sken-Pitilkin to try something.
As the two wizards were cousins, and knew each other well, and kept a close eye on each other's affairs, Pelagius Zozimus had taken cognizance of the experiments which Sken-Pitilkin had been making, the experiments which had seen Alozay beset by explosions and by tornadoes. Now Zozimus clearly thought it time for Sken-Pitilkin to move from experiment to mature creation, despite the unavoidable perils which were implicit in such a
