'So you will sport with me first.'
'We play no sport with merchandise.'
'Merchandise?'
'Khmar will pay highly for you. Surely.'
At that, young Guest struggled like a very hurricane trying to fight its way out of a leather sack. Fates worse than death! He screamed and he fought. But his best efforts availed not against his attackers, and, panting with effort, he was flung into a dour rockwall prison. Guest Gulkan was flung so hard that he would have bruised himself grievously against rock had the prison not been generously padded with flesh. A small and guttering lamp lit the scene with enough light to allow that flesh to be identified. Young Guest untangled himself in a hurry from Bao Gahai.
'Wa!' said Guest.
To be seized and imprisoned was bad enough. But to be locked up with the dralkosh Bao Gahai – that was intolerable!
There was a long and uncomfortable silence.
Then:
'Are you hurt?' said Bao Gahai, her bearded voice husky in the gloom.
'Who knows?' said Guest. 'Who cares?'
'I care,' said Bao Gahai softly.
'You!' said Guest. 'Why?'
Bao Gahai hesitated. Then thought:
– What does it matter?
'I care,' said Bao Gahai, 'because – '
But Bao Gahai never explicated her 'because', for the door burst open. Guest promptly made a break for freedom, but armed men jabbed at him with spears of a size fit for the harpooning of the very Great Mink itself. Once the belligerent Weaponmaster had been forced back against the far wall, other prisoners were hustled into the cell. The dralkosh Zelafona, and her dwarf-son Glambrax.
The slow-witted Morsh Bataar. The scholarly Sken-Pitilkin. The master chef Pelagius Zozimus. A fine scooping, this!
With the door slammed shut and locked against escape, Guest looked around the cell, scanning all by lantern light. As best he could, he feigned the staunch self-control of a hero, concealing his extreme embarrassment at his own nakedness. The Yarglat do not uncover themselves in public, and while Guest had done as much at his father's command on the washing-pool island, he would never voluntarily have done as much in the cells of the mainrock
Pinnacle, for, leaving aside all questions of taboos and embarrassments, the place was abominably cold. The cell was frigid and freezing, for all that there was so much flesh stuffed into it.
'So,' said Guest, when he had summed the faces. 'Our own have not betrayed us.'
'Bravely said,' said Morsh Bataar.
Then Morsh took off his over-length weather jacket, a fleecelined item of apparel which he had bought second-hand from one of his father's league riders many, many days ago in far-off Gendormargensis, and handed that jacket to Guest. Who took it in wordless gratitude. The wool was warm, and snugged down to his thighs.
Then, since nobody else seemed disposed to do it, Guest began testing the weaknesses of their place of dungeon, first trying the window. The window, which led to the outer world, was guarded with iron bars. The bars admitted great draughts of air for the cooling of overheated tempers, but would not admit a human.
'Still,' said Guest, giving the iron a slap. 'It is but brute matter. We can gnaw it through in less than a year with teeth and fingernails alone.'
Lightly he spoke, but had already deduced that even a rupture of the iron bars would secure them only the liberty to crawl out onto the sheer cliffside high above the waters. Unless they searched for sudden death, this liberty was not likely to be advantageous.
The young Weaponmaster then turned his attention to the stones of the cell, and soon determined that they could be hollowed out by tunneling, though it would probably take four or five decades for a tunnel of any significance to be made through rock so hard.
'The door,' said Guest, deciding. 'It has to be the door.
Zozimus! Sken-Pitilkin! Have done with this door!'
So spoke the Weaponmaster, for he was determined to get out of that cell that very night.
'If the door were a corpse then I could do with it,' said Zozimus. 'But as a mere necromancer, I can do nothing with brute wooden timbers.'
'And I,' said Sken-Pitilkin, 'can scarcely make the thing fly, for it is fixed in position.'
'Then you could jiggle it,' said Guest. 'You could jiggle it till it burst.'
'I cannot,' said Sken-Pitilkin, 'for I have been drinking strong liquor, and the exercise of wizardry is unwise in combination with drink. Besides, if I burst the thing, then shattered wood might fly inwards as likely as outwards.'
Actually, Sken-Pitilkin had been very conservative in his banqueting, and thought the exercise of wizardry safe in itself.
But could he truly use his powers of levitation to shake the door till it burst? He did not know, for he had no way of computing the door's strength.
It occurred to the sagacious wizard of Skatzabratzumon that he might conceivably be able to use his powers to manipulate the very locking mechanism of the door itself. But he said nothing of that to Guest, for to escape from the prison cell would be to find themselves at war with the armed strength of Alozay – and Sken-Pitilkin thought such war likely to end in their deaths.
Through long generations of experience, the wizards of Argan's Confederation have learnt that the powers of a lawyer are ultimately greater than those of a warrior. So, rather than brute it out with every sword in Alozay, Sken-Pitilkin planned to rest, and later to use his lawyerly skills to find a way out of his present predicament by negotiation.
But Guest had not the lawyer's temperament.
'Shoulders!' said Guest.
And Morsh Bataar joined him in rigorously bruising that portion of the human anatomy against unbruisable timbers.
'Yunch!' said Guest, giving vent to one of the choice Yarglat obscenities. 'The thing will not give.'
'What did you expect?' said Zozimus. 'This is no bridal suite, you know.'
'Nor I a virgin eager for penetration,' said Guest. 'Have you about you perhaps a tinder box, master chef?'
'I have,' said Zozimus, who was seldom without such an article.
'Then evidence your skills with it,' said Guest. 'The hell with brute force and battery! We'll burn our way out!'
Obviously Guest was severely drunk, or brain-damaged by the bruising he had suffered at the hands of his enemies, else would have realized that fire could easily be started with the cell's slow-burning lamp. But nobody chose to remind him of this, thinking that wisdom lay in silence.
'Zozimus!' said Guest imperiously. 'Your tinder box, man!
Get to it! Get to it, and burn!'
Now Zozimus was not wise, not in comparison with a true master of the intellect like Hostaja Torsen Sken- Pitilkin, yet the slug-chef possessed sense enough not to argue with an ox of a boy when the worst temper in that boy was bent upon works of wreckage.
So, even though Zozimus knew full well that what Guest proposed was impossible, he yet consented to kindle fire. However, as Guest soon proved to his own dissatisfaction by experiment, nothing is so reluctant to burn as a big burly door chunked out of planks thicker than a wrestler's thigh.
It is a commonplace error to think that wood burns easily. It does not. Wooden houses burn of a regularity, but the prior combustion of curtains clothes carpets wickerwork and children's toys is necessary to set walls and roof alight. Wooden forests not uncommonly perish in flame, but grass and undergrowth must be well alight before the shafting timbers of the trees themselves catch fire. Ships of wood likewise succumb to conflagration, but it is in ropes, rubbish, sails and paint lockers that the chief danger lies. The ardors of your very household fire
