so a day's deprivation will have to suffice.'
'What about drinking?' said Guest. 'Can we drink?'
'What do you have in mind?' said Sken-Pitilkin. Guest told him, and was advised that it would be unwise in the extreme for him to proceed with his stated intention of consuming three beers, two gins and a brandy before boarding Sken-Pitilkin's airship.
'Besides,' said Sken-Pitilkin, 'I doubt whether there is either gin or brandy to be had on Ema-Urk.'Guest Gulkan and Rolf Thelemite both assured him that both were to be had, and in quantity. They had assured themselves of this already.
'Then,' said Sken-Pitilkin, 'I adjure you to abstain from such.'
'Adjure?' said Guest. 'What on earth does that mean?'
'It means,' said Sken-Pitilkin, 'that I'm ready to kick you unless you show good sense and abstinence.'
Then those who were doomed to join Sken-Pitilkin in the experimental flying ship launched themselves upon a one-day fast.
All but for the Weaponmaster.
Despite the timely warning issued by the sagacious Sken-Pitilkin, and despite the threat of reprisals courtesy of Sken-Pitilkin's boot, the young Weaponmaster chose to indulge in a pre- flight dinner which included rhubarb sausages anointed with cod liver oil. This dish was especially invented for the occasion by an over-enthusiastic Pelagius Zozimus, whose deviations from gastronomic routine tended to be not only frequent but disastrous.
Rhubarb sausages with cod liver oil!
As heaven is my witness, this is what Zozimus cooked!
And Guest, in the folly of his youth -Guest ate it!
In his wisdom, the wizard Sken-Pitilkin refused to allow his intestinal peace to be vandalized by such a dish, and leavened his fast only with a small crust of dry bread and a pannikin of boiled water. But Guest ate the rhubarb sausages with a truly barbaric enthusiasm, swallowed a second helping of cod liver oil, and went on to consume two steaks cut from the more blubbery parts of a whale (steaks which had been cut from the beast some three years earlier, and which had been imported to Ema-Urk at the bottom of a barrel of vinegar), then followed these steaks with a dish of exceedingly greasy pork, an entire apple pie heaped with whipped cream, and, as a special after-dinner treat, the ears of five dogs (the ears of dogs being a special delicacy much favored by the gourmets of the islands of Safrak). He then proceeded to his drinking – only the beers he drank were seven in number, not three; the gins he consumed were set before him in quadruplicate; and his brandy was double.
Here Guest Gulkan was true to his Yarglat heritage. The Yarglat are capable of subsisting on the most parsimonious of diets when necessity demands; and when at war will content themselves at need with a single cup of fresh hot blood tapped from a vein in a living horse. But their indulgences are in keeping with their deprivations; and what they eat, and the quantities in which they eat it, is scarcely believable even to those who have seen such feats repeated thrice or thirty times; and their drinking matches their eating.
Never have the Yarglat been able to hold any great banquet without one person at least dying simply from overdrinking. The uninitiated may think this an exaggeration – but death from abuse of liquor has ever been a leading cause of death amongst the heroes of the northern horsetribes. Furthermore, history can name of a certainty at least four rulers of the Collosnon Empire who died of over-drinking, and a further three who expired through sheer gluttony: Dobdask, who expired while trying to eat an entire horse to win a bet with one of his generals; Henza, who collapsed while eating one of his generals; and Yeldanov Ax, who died as a consequence of disembowelling a whale and eating a considerable portion of the gut, an eccentricity which tends to support those rumors which claim him to have been somewhat deranged.
So Guest Gulkan indulged himself as the Yarglat will, and in what was left of the night he tried to digest that which he had ingested. Guest's attempts at digestion were not entirely successful, and in the gray light of the morrow's dawn he looked rather queasy. The chip-chop motion of the Swelaway Sea was making him uneasy: he had to avert his eyes lest it make him positively sick.
Nevertheless, he joined his fellow air-adventurers; and, once all had made their wills and had handed these into the care and keeping of Lord Alagrace, they bravely climbed aboard the airship.
All but Rolf Thelemite.
'Climb aboard, three-nipples,' said Thodric Jarl, all graybearded harshness in the gray dawn.
Three-nipples? What kind of nickname was that?
As the other travelers were still wondering, Jarl disembarked, caught Rolf by the single gold-snake earring which hung from his left ear, and dragged him aboard the boat.
'Sit!' said Jarl, compressing a lifetime's scorn into the single word.
Rolf Thelemite sat. His lower lip was trembling. It communicated its anxiety to the lip above it. Rolf's eyes blinked, so fast and so fiercely that at last he had to close them altogether. Jarl said something to him in the Rovac tongue, and he bit his lower lip. Hard. Drawing blood.
'All ready?' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'Very well! Brace yourselves! And hold on tight!' Sken-Pitilkin said a Word, and -
The ship rotated violently, and slammed itself into the sky.
It whipped itself toward the heavens like a cartwheel driven by demons, and undigested food in matching cartwheels came spurting from Guest Gulkan's lips.
Up, up, up, up, up went the airship.
Slammed through the sky, they skipped marches in moments.
Mere eagles or dragons would have been left creaking in their wake like so many inconsequential toothpicks awash in the boil of a racing sloop. As the waddle of a ducking is to the speed of a galloping stallion, so was the stasis of all lesser forms of transport when compared to the compressed delirium of that airship in flight.
The heavens themselves screamed. The heavens screamed as the very sky was torn asunder by the assault of that ship. As lightning launches itself in javelins of fire, as thunder cracks its discus, in such a manner did that ship hurtle itself through the blue empyrean.
And, all the time, the remains of the banquet shot from Guest Gulkan's gaping mouth in spuming cartwheels, so it looked for all the world as if the boy had been transformed into one of those octopus things which goes whirlygigging round on a stick, one of those hectic fireworks which are so much the fashion in Tang.
Thus flew Sken-Pitilkin's airship.
As for the master of that ship -
Why, Sken-Pitilkin found himself unable to control the vessel, for it was spinning so quickly that he was pinned against the planks by centrifugal force. He managed to wrench his head sideways, and wished he had not. For on turning his head, Sken-Pitilkin found he could see through a gap in the planks. Through that gap he saw the sea, then hills, hills buckling away in nightmarish cascades of onslaughting rotational energy. Then the shocked and air-shattered wizard almost lost an eyeball to a passing mountain peak. Almost, but not quite – for the airship cleared the mountaintop by half a handspan.
A moment later, there was a loud bang – BANG! – and the ship lost power.
Cartwheeling still, it plummeted through the air, slowing, sliding, losing momentum and -
And falling!
'Grief of gods!' cried Zozimus, clutching at a rope.
He might as well have clutched at the sky itself, or a handful of cloud, for there was nothing which could save them now.
The ship was most definitely falling. Count one! It was falling still! Count two! Most definitely falling! Count three! Sken-Pitilkin waited for his life to start to flash before his eyes, but for some unaccountable reason the only thing he could think of was a baked hedgehog. Sken-Pitilkin was still trying to decipher the import of this visionary hedgehog when his airship impacted with the most enormous crash. Ice and snow flew shattering upward, for the ship had fallen with full force upon the uppermost reaches of an upland glacier.
'We're down!' cried Glambrax.
Upon which the ship began to slide, suggesting that there yet lay ahead of them a great deal in the way of down, downwards and doom. This was swiftly confirmed as the ship gathered speed, sliding down that glacier with precipitous velocity.
'Aaaagh!' said Zozimus.
'Waaaah!' said Sken-Pitilkin.
