a Yarglat barbarian.
Though Guest was no scholar, he had been trained in ethnology by Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin, and so had diligently set himself the task of discovering whether the rollercoaster and the bungi jump had been instituted as initiation rites – fearsome tests of manhood to be undertaken as part of the rites of passage marking the transition from childhood – or whether these outrageous forms of horrorshock were looked upon as a form of fun.
After long research, Guest concluded that the peoples of the high civilizations known to Paraban Senk routinely plunged down artificial mountains in rickety carts, or hurled themselves from the heights with elasticated ropes tied to their ankles, purely for their own pleasure. He was most frightfully glad that he had not been born into any world where pleasure itself had the taste of torture, and looked upon Sken-Pitilkin's airship as a device better fit for such a world than for his own.
Ever since the precipitous flight which had seen Guest and his companions flung from the Swelaway Sea to an air-wrecking in the Ibsen-Iktus mountains, Guest had entirely ceased to envy the birds; and it was only with the greatest reluctance imaginable that he allowed himself to be cajoled into Sken-Pitilkin's airship to partake of its second flight.
In the end, thinking himself doomed to reduced to a mess of fractured chicken bones, Guest Gulkan climbed into the gigantic nest of sticks which Sken-Pitilkin declared to be an airship.
To his amazement, it flew.
And Guest, dazzled and bewildered by the wonders of controlled flight (which was entirely different from the absolutely uncontrolled flights which he had previously endured), was returned to the ground in one piece, amazed to find his skull and skeleton intact.
'Now,' said Sken-Pitilkin, 'since you have recovered your strength, and since I have a functional airship, we can start to plan our campaign.'
'Our campaign?' said Guest.
'Our quest,' said Sken-Pitilkin.
'Quest?'
'For the x-x-zix,' said Sken-Pitilkin.
'It would seem,' said Guest, 'that I have a lot to learn.'
'So you have,' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'So you have. Very well!
Let us start the explanations!'
Then, in tedious detail, Sken-Pitilkin took Guest Gulkan through the tortuous details of the Witchlord's slow and painful negotiations with the Partnership Banks. Since Lord Onosh had suffered so badly from the Banks' deceits, he had not easily been able to bring himself to trust Sod.
But Banker Sod had been given great incentive to make agreement with Lord Onosh, for the Partnership Banks as a whole were unhappy with Sod. It was agreed amongst the Banks that Sod should never have incarcerated Ulix of the Drum in his timeprison; and the Banks were alarmed at the ambition Sod had shown by arranging this incarceration, for it appeared that Sod had imprisoned the rightful ruler of Dalar ken Halvar because he had entertained notions of seizing that city and ruling it himself.
Furthermore, the Partnership Banks were distressed that Sod had used ineffective treacheries in his dealings with the Witchlord Onosh. Effective treacheries against non-Bankers were acceptable, but the price of failure was…
Sod had a lively sense of what the price of failure might be, and so exerted himself strenuously to negotiate an agreement with the Witchlord Onosh. Finally, under dire pressure from the Partnership Banks, Sod surrendered Eljuk Zala Gulkan to his father, and then surrendered himself to the Witchlord as a hostage.
Once his son Eljuk had been restored to him, and once he had Sod as a hostage, Lord Onosh at last consented to negotiate with the Partnership Banks in earnest, as a result of which the Doors of the Circle of the Banks were open again.
'Furthermore,' said Sken-Pitilkin, 'Ontario Nol has recently returned to Alozay through those Doors, there to resume his training of Eljuk Zala.'
'I am pleased for my brother,' said Guest Gulkan, mightily wearied by the laborious detail in which Sken-Pitilkin had told the tale of the negotiations for the reopening of the Circle.
'There is more pleasure yet to come,' said Sken-Pitilkin.
'The high point of my story is that we are to be privileged to travel the Circle, just as Plandruk Qinplaqus was in former times when he traveled that Circle as Ulix of the Drum.'
'We?' said Guest. 'Who are you talking of?'
'Myself,' said Sken-Pitilkin, 'and yourself, and Thayer Levant, and Pelagius Zozimus.'
'And Qinplaqus himself?' said Guest.
'He no longer wishes to risk the Circle,' said Sken-Pitilkin.
'For after having been once betrayed and imprisoned, he cannot bring himself to trust the Banks. He blames the Partnership Banks as a whole for Sod's delinquencies, and will assist us against them.'
'What are we planning?' said Guest. 'War?'
'We are seeking leverage,' said Sken-Pitilkin. 'And once we have it, we will see how much of the Circle we can win. We already rule the Door at Alozay, and Plandruk Qinplaqus is our ally here in Dalar ken Halvar. If we could but win Chi'ash-lan, then we would be well placed to coerce the Partnership Banks as a whole to obedience to our will.'
This was a new Sken-Pitilkin, a Sken-Pitilkin whom Guest Gulkan had not previously seen. The Sken-Pitilkin who had been the companion of Guest's childhood had been a broken-down exponent of the irregular verbs, a ragged refugee scraping his living in exile, an irascible master of the classroom.
But Sken-Pitilkin's true history was far greater and grander than anything Guest had guessed at. Sken-Pitilkin had known power; and fame; and glory; and mightiness; and mastery; and the appetite for such things had been rekindled during the long manoeuverings of the past four years.
While Guest had been concerning himself with the exercise of his limbs, the eating of his meals and the rigors of his marital bed, Sken-Pitilkin had been exercising himself mightily in politics, embroiling himself in the affairs of the Witchlord Onosh and the Partnership Banks, acting as translator, as advisor, as diplomat, as interrogator, and as a professional practitioner of international law.
So it was that, for four long years, as Guest had turned inward in the manner of the invalid, his world shrinking till it took account of little outside his own skin, Sken-Pitilkin's world had been enlarging to a point where its complexity could not be compressed into anything less than a volume of ten thousand pages or more.
(Oh, Time! Strength! Cash! Patience!)
So Guest was uncommonly sluggish in responding to Sken-Pitilkin's enraptured enthusiasm for the embroilments of a quest and its consequences. Sken-Pitilkin perceived this sluggishness, but, presuming it would be transitory, he said:
'We were talking of the x-x-zix. The subject of our quest.
Have you by chance heard of this device?'
Then Guest Gulkan thought, and by a miracle of memory he recalled an early mention of the thing. (In truth, Sken-Pitilkin must have spoken of the x-x-zix a thousand times in Guest Gulkan's youth, but the Yarglat barbarian was such a poor scholar that it was a very miracle that he remembered so much as a single of these mentions).
'The Untunchilamons!' said Guest. 'That was it! The Untunchilamons! When you were young, you quested for the x-x-zix.
You quested on all twenty-six of the Untunchilamon, and you – '
'There is but one Untunchilamon,' said Sken-Pitilkin.
'No,' said Guest. 'There are twenty-six. I remember that distinctly. If you told me that once you told it to me a hundred times.'
'No, no,' said Sken-Pitilkin, who had long been out of the habit of tutoring young Guest, and so had started to forget how difficult it was. 'It was you who told me the number twenty-six, which you got from confusing Untunchilamon with the islands of
Rovac. There is but one Untunchilamon, and I can state it as a certainty since I have been there.'
'In your youth.'
'Yes, in my youth.'
