'Gaaaa!' cried Guest Gulkan.
But before anyone else could find breath sufficient to join this chorus, the airship slam-crashed into a crevasse, bounced, flipped, rolled over and over, and came to rest in ruins at the foot of the glacier.
There were a few groans from the ship's settling timbers, then all was silent but for a tiny chink, chink, chink. The sound was from the golden serpent which hung from Rolf Thelemite's left ear. It was swaying still from the violence imparted to it by its aerial adventure, and was knocking against a rusted bolthead.
The earring chinked itself to silence.
With the ceasing of that sound, every sound in the audible universe seemed to have ceased.
There was a long, long silence.
Then a groan.
Then, bit by bit, the travelers began to pick themselves up.
'We've been wrecked,' said the dwarf Glambrax.
'Air-wrecked,' said Rolf Thelemite.
'Wrecked with a crash,' said Guest Gulkan. 'We crashed.'
'Crashed,' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'That's a good word for it. Is anybody hurt?'
Nobody was, excepting Thodric Jarl, and his injuries appeared to be limited to a couple of broken ribs.
'Very well,' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'Let us be making our way to that building.'
And he pointed out the building he meant, which was the one dominant human-made feature of an otherwise bleak and desolate landscape. Sken-Pitilkin's airship had crashed in a valley which was deep and narrow. This bare and barren upland valley ran from east to west, and the heroes of the airship had been airwrecked (or, to use Sken-Pitilkin's parlance, 'crashed') upon the southern heights of that valley.
The building to which Sken-Pitilkin had pointed stood on the northern slopes of the valley. It was huge. From the distance, the travelers could see no windows in that building, nor could they clearly make out its color. Guest Gulkan declared it to be not a building but a block-built mud heap.
'Then since we have a mud beetle in our ranks,' said Thodric Jarl, 'let us be making for it.'Guest thought it best not to ask which of them was the mud beetle, and in the wisdom of his silence the party began to navigate toward that far-distant goal. This required the aircrashed aeronauts to descend into the depths of the valley before scaling the opposing slope.
So they began the descent.
At these heights, the air was thin, and to walk was a labor.
Even though they were going downhill, they found they must necessarily stop every four or five paces to rest for a trifle; and it seemed that each of them at each halt discovered more and more bruises, scrapes, cracks and cuts which had previously gone unnoticed in the excitement of their air-escapade.
'Grief of a dog!' said Rolf, picking his way downhill. 'I'd not see fit to bury a dead beetle in a place as miserable as this!'
In truth, the Rovac warrior Rolf Thelemite was an apt judge of landscape.
For the valley through which they labored was a singularly uninspiring realm of shattered rock and smashed stone. The wedgework of the weather had split huge rafts of scree from the disintegrating mountains. There was nothing whatsoever in that blasted landscape to hold the eye, unless one was attracted by the great lumps of stone which reared up on the skyline, where the sun blazed down from a sky as blue as an ice-maiden's eye.
As they descended, the dralkosh Zelafona began to stumble.
She did not complain, but the subdued silence of her dwarf-son Glambrax was sufficient to warn Sken-Pitilkin that the mother was in trouble.
'Here,' said Sken-Pitilkin, passing his country-crook to Zelafona. 'Lean on this.'
She took it without a word, enduring the gift as if it were an insult. But she stumbled less thereafter – though Sken-Pitilkin stumbled more, and began to repent of the folly which had led him to pass his mainstaff support to a witch. He regretted being overgenerous with Zelafona. For, after all, the witch and her dwarf- son were largely to blame for Sken-Pitilkin's present predicament.
Had it not been for the recklessness of their avaricious folly, the Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin would still have been safely ensconced on his home island of Drum, rather than mucking about in a wilderness of mountains.
In this lies a tale.
In the romantic folly of his former years, Hostaja Torsen Sken-Pitilkin had set himself against the Confederation of Wizards, seeking with the propaganda of his tongue and by the moral force of his generous example to oppose that Confederation's despotic oppression of witches. Like other immature idealists before him, Sken-Pitilkin had found both propaganda and moral example to be inefficient against vested financial interests; and those of the Confederation who had set themselves to break up the Sisterhood's mighty Credit Union soon set themselves the task of breaking up Sken-Pitilkin.
Thus Sken-Pitilkin had become an outlawed renegade with a price on his head; and for long years he had wandered, with none but the irregular verbs as his companions, until at last he invaded Drum (an easy invasion, this, the island being uninhabited at the time) and (armed with a large sack of flea powder and a dozen rat traps) secured possession of Drum's ruling castle.
For long generations thereafter, Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin lorded it over the island of Drum as the absolute master of all he surveyed. True, most of what he surveyed was bits and pieces of the wrath-wracked waters of the Penvash Channel, that strategically important strait which separates the continent of Argan from the Ravlish Lands; but of that at least he had unopposed suzerainty.
Then came disaster.
Disaster came to Sken-Pitilkin's castle in the form of the witch Zelafona and her dwarf-son Glambrax. These two (in conjunction with Pelagius Zozimus, who surely should have known better!) had been embroiled in a complicated conspiracy to steal from one of the libraries of the Confederation of Wizards a complete and detailed history of the Credit Union once run by the Sisterhood of Witches.
That at least is the story which Zelafona retailed to Sken-Pitilkin. Pelagius Zozimus cheerfully confirmed the story, though Zozimus was ever an adroit master of deception. Sken-Pitilkin darkly suspected that a lot was being left unsaid, for whatever wickedness the would-be thieves had perpetrated in the south, they had roused the Confederation to a wrathfullness never seen before or since, and it is hard to imagine that the attempted theft of a History could have inspired such anger.
The Confederation had pursued all three thieves – Zelafona,
Glambrax and Pelagius Zozimus – and had pursued them with such ferocity that pursuit was not close behind when the malefactors sought refuge on the island of Drum. The evil ones did not come to Drum by accident. No, they knew Sken-Pitilkin to be in residence upon that island.
When these refugees arrived, Sken-Pitilkin found he had no option but the help them. After all, Zozimus was his cousin.
Furthermore, Sken-Pitilkin owed a great debt of honor to a powerful witch known as Bao Gahai, who had thrice saved his life in earlier centuries. So Sken-Pitilkin found himself honor-bound to help Zelafona, for the witch Zelafona was Bao Gahai's sister.
Here let it be known that honor does not lie in the sole possession of the warriors. For, while your bloodstained barbarian will boast much of 'the honor of his sword', honor has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the hacking off of heads or the dissection of the liver. Sken-Pitilkin was honorable; and, in his honor, he assisted all three refugees to elude their pursuers. Which, of course, made Sken-Pitilkin himself a target for that very pursuit.
Consequently, the renegade wizard of Skatzabratzumon joined the refugees in their flight into the northern continent of Gendormargensis, where they sought shelter from the great and honorable Bao Gahai, the advisor (some said: the consort) of Lord Onosh, Lord Onosh being the father of Guest Gulkan and the ruler of the Collosnon Empire.
Thus Sken-Pitilkin was exiled from his home island of Drum; and was forced to earn his living as a mere tutor; and became unconscionably embroiled in the affairs of the Yarglat; and found himself on a stumblestone mountainside somewhere in the northern continent of Tameran, with the witch Zelafona availing herself of his country crook for her own support.
'Chala?' said Glambrax, speaking anxiously to Zelafona.
'I'm all right, sugarlump,' said she, though the manifest strain of the statement gave the lie to her own
