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 move.
        "What are you two hatching up?" said Thodric Jarl
suspiciously.
        "An airship," said Zozimus crisply. "A ship with which to
conquer the air. My good cousin Sken-Pitilkin had done all the
experimental work and is ready to proceed with a full-scale
model."
        "Cousin," said Sken-Pitilkin, who had the gravest of
reservations about making the leap which Zozimus proposed, "this
is no time for joking."
        "I'm serious," said Zozimus.
        Then Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin lapsed into the High Speech of
wizards, and in that tongue he berated Zozimus, telling him that
any attempt to fly a full-sized ship through the air would result
in their certain deaths.
        "Because," said Sken-Pitilkin, still speaking in the High
Speech of wizards, "I have been unable to control the sustained
destruction which is necessary for such flight. Any ship which I
make will explode, or burn, or shake itself to death, or rupture
in outright whirlwind. I cannot control the destruction!"
        "Ah," said Zozimus, "but I can guess why, already. You have
not provided your sustained destruction with a safety valve."
        "A safety valve?" said Sken-Pitilkin. "What are you talking
about?"
        "A safety valve," said Zozimus, "is a valve built into a
pressure cooker. Now pressure cookers - "
        "Oh, pressure cookers!" said Sken-Pitilkin. "Now I remember!"
        Sken-Pitilkin remembered very well, even though his cousin's
experiments with pressure cookers had taken place a good three
generations earlier. In the course of his experimenting, Zozimus
had blown up three kitchens, and had almost blown up himself. On
one notable occasion -
        But enough of this! Life is far too short for us to be giving
a full account of the derelictions of Pelagius Zozimus, that over-
rated and over-paid slug-chef who ever won greater resources for
his kitchens than all the irregular verbs in the world could
command in nine times ninety generations. Sufficient to say that
Zozimus's experiments with pressure cookers had been exhaustive,
not to say exhausting, and Sken-Pitilkin remembered as much, and
the truth of the memory was clearly written on Sken-Pitilkin's
face.
        "Yes," said Zozimus, reading his cousin's expression. "You
remember well. Well, then. I ventured. I experimented. And I
learnt! What I learnt through the design of pressure cookers is
that great forces must be given a means of escape. If the force
grows too great, then it must blow its way clear through a weak
point in the device, thus preserving the integrity of the device."
        Then Zozimus explained that, in his judgment, the flame
trench known as Drangsturm was a perfect example of the control of
great destructive forces. If the destruction temporarily got out
of hand, then great gouts of flame would be thrown high in the
air, thus bleeding off the surplus force with no harm to the
fabric of the device which generated that force.
        "I see," said Sken-Pitilkin. "So you think I should govern
the forces unleashed in my airship by - by what? By arranging for
bits of the ship to be selectively smashed to smithereens by an
excess of such force?"
        "No," said Zozimus. "I believe you should arrange for excess
force to be bled off in the form of rotational energy."
        Sken-Pitilkin thought about this, trying to work through the
logical implications of Zozimus's suggestion.
        "But," said Sken-Pitilkin, once he understood the import of
his cousin's proposal, "that would mean my ship would spin round
and round like a - a - like something that spins round and round,
what do you call those things, a - "
        "A windmill," said Zozimus.
        "Yes, a windmill, or one of those, those, you know, those
octopus things, those things that whirl round and round on a
stick, round and round - "
        "A species of firework," said Zozimus.
        "Yes, yes," said Sken-Pitilkin, "fireworks, that time in
Tang, you remember, round and round, round and round, sparks and
smoke in all directions, and then, then - bang!"
        "There would be no bang," said Zozimus positively. "There
would merely be a trifle amount of ... rotation."
        "Whirlygigging," said Sken-Pitilkin, direly suspecting that
"rotation" was at best but a weak euphemism for the consequences
of the arrangement which Zozimus was proposing. "Whirlygigging,
round and round like an octopus. The ship would burst. Or at the
least - I'm sure at the very least we'd all be hideously sick. I
won't have anything to do with the idea."
        Yet in time - and a remarkably short time it was - Sken-
Pitilkin was persuaded. The precise time of his persuasion was
noon, for by noon the master chef Zozimus had prepared a delicious
meal, working with slugs and watercress, with sheep bones and
freshwater crabs, with puffballs and mushrooms, with chopped worms
and tadpoles, all brisked and enlivened with touches of this and
that from his secret emergency herb hoard and spice stock. And
with this meal complete, Zozimus gave Sken-Pitilkin an ultimatum:
        "Design an airship or starve."
        Thus a decision was reached in favor of flight, and after
lunch the brave Sken-Pitilkin went to work, converting the ruinous
hulk of a watership into an airship. He exercised his power in the
manner of wizards, converting certain timbers of this ship into
artefacts possessed of magical power - artefacts which the
universe itself would seek to destroy if it got but half a chance.
        Sken-Pitilkin wrought these devices in such a way that their
magical nature could be shielded or unshielded at his command.
When each device was unshielded, the universe would seek to
destroy it, and the destructive forces thus unleashed would be
used for controlled flight, with any uncontrollable excess being
bled off into the "rotational energy" which Zozimus had suggested.
        At last the thing was finished - but the great Lord Alagrace
flatly refused to get into it. The parcel of soldiers who had
bodyguarded the great Thodric Jarl all the way to Alozay likewise
refused to dare Sken-Pitilkin's device.
        Thus, in the end, on its maiden flight the airship was crewed
by the wizard of Skatzabratzumon known as Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin,
by the wizard of Xluzu known as Pelagius Zozimus, by the witch
Zelafona and her dwarf-son Glambrax, by the mighty Rovac warrior
Rolf Thelemite, by the cow-tattooed Thodric Jarl, and by Guest
Gulkan, youngest and most undisciplined of the sons of the lord
of the Collosnon Empire.
        Name them and know them!
        For they were heroes, one and all!
        Pioneers of flight!
        Linked in a daring enterprise unparalleled in the history of
experimental wizardry!
        And possibly linked - Sken-Pitilkin could not help from
thinking as much - in being destined to share a common grave.
        A full day and a bit before they were to depart, Sken-
Pitilkin gathered the would be air-adventurers together and
indulged himself in a speech.
        "Man has never ventured to the heavens in a ship such as this
before," said Sken-Pitilkin. Then, glancing at Zelafona: "Nor
woman neither. We can but guess what shocks the buffets of the
heavens will impose on human physiology."
        "A guess is as good as a goose on a blind night," said Guest,
venturing one of the proverbs of Rovac which Rolf Thelemite had
taught him.
        "Pardon?" said Sken-Pitilkin.
        "Nothing," said Guest.
        "You said something," said Sken-Pitilkin. "I distinctly heard
you, and though what you said was less than distinct I'm perfectly
sure you didn't say nothing."
        "I said," said Guest, "that maybe if it's so dangerous we
shouldn't risk it."
        "I wouldn't say it's as dangerous as all that," said Sken-
Pitilkin, who thought it unwise to share the full strength of his
forebodings with the young Yarglat barbarian. "But I suspect it's
better undertaken on an empty stomach."
        "You mean," said Guest, "we shouldn't eat?"
        "Precisely," said Sken-Pitilkin briskly. "That's the main
point I want to get across today. We can't know anything of the
physiology of flight unless we look by analogy to the physiology
of seafaring. As travel by sea is apt to induce a sickness of
stomach, so may the air by analogy produce a like-belly illness.
Hence starvation is the order of the day. Or of three days,
ideally - however, we've not time for such a fast, 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 gray-
bearded 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.
        "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 air-
crashed 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 over-
generous 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 pronouncement.
        Chala? Sugarlump!?
        Pet names, doubtless, and proof of a tenderness of
relationship which Sken-Pitilkin had never thought to exist
between the dwarf and his mother.
        On that journey down the mountainside, Sken-Pitilkin began to
suspect that the greater part of Glambrax's habitual brawling,
joking, hard-drinking delinquency was insulation - a layer of
hard-working diversion designed to cut the dwarf off from the
rawness of the painful realities of his own life. For, after all,
Glambrax was as much an exile as Sken-Pitilkin. A hard necessity
had driven the dwarf to Tameran, and doubtless in his private
moments he suffered from the driving, as did Sken-Pitilkin.
        So.
        In the unconscious wisdom of his habits, the dwarf Glambrax
had configured his life in such a way that he seldom had to endure
so much as a single solitary moment of personal reflection from
sun-dawn to dusk.
        But on these stony, steep-descending slopes, there was no
opportunity for brawling distractions. There was instead the
coldness of unfeeling reality, the uncompromising solidity of
stone, the randomness of scree, and the sharp-beak threats of
hunger, thirst and entropy.
        Like so many broken cockroaches, the air-wrecked aeronauts
stumbled stone by stone down the rockside, mite-made creatures of
bony flesh pinpricking their way across the rumplings of geology,
their significance dwarfed and denied by the razor-blade heights
of hostility which etched the skies above them.
        Up on those stone-slice heights - high, high above the rock
slopes and scree drifts where the travelers labored - lay white
snow-slice eternities of cold. A high wind was scouring a mist of
snow from one knife-edge peak, but this was so far above and beyond the travelers that they could not hear so much as a whisper of the crisping and keening of the ferocity of that bright-sun wind. Rather, they labored in stillness, a stillness loud with their harsh-panting breathing, the creaking of their knee joints, the
squiff-pulse labors of their hearts.
        At the bottom of the slope, when all downlabor was done and
their uplabor was about to be commenced, there was a stream which
ran toward the east. From which Sken-Pitilkin, learned in
geography, deduced that in all probability this valley would
ultimately provide them with an escape to the Swelaway Sea, should
they choose to follow that stream to the east.
        There was no need to ford the stream, since it was bridged. A
path came up the valley from out of the east, crossed the stream
by way of the bridge, then climbed toward the block-built building
up above.
        "What now?" asked Guest Gulkan, he who in the folly of his
youth still possessed strength sufficient for senseless questions.
        Guest Gulkan's traveling companions, who were one and all
exhausted by the rigors of the mountain heights, wasted no breath
on useless reply.
        Pelagius Zozimus took the lead.
        Pelagius Zozimus, still wearing his elf-bright fish-scale
armor, crossed the bridge, then began to mountain-climb upwards,
one trudge at a time. After him went Thodric Jarl, mouth agape in
a constant, unconscious, almost inaudible lisp of pain - for Jarl
was suffering grievously from his broken ribs. Then went Zelafona,
leaning on Sken-Pitilkin's country crook. Glambrax dogged his
mother's heels, and Sken-Pitilkin followed, half-hoping that
Zelafona would drop dead. For if she died then Sken-Pitilkin would
be able to recover his country crook, and his journey would be
that much easier. Naturally, the wizard had far too much pride to
ask for the voluntary return of that instrument.
        After Sken-Pitilkin came Guest Gulkan. The boy had long since
drawn his sword, and had been abusing that instrument shamelessly,
using it as a walking stick.
        The Rovac warrior Rolf Thelemite had been bravely trying to
resist Guest's example. For Rolf was - he was, wasn't he? - a
mighty killer of men. A conqueror of dragons. A slaughterer of
kings and emperors. A killer of orcs, ghouls, ghosts and
necromancers. As such, he could scarcely abuse the pride of his
steel by using it as a walking stick. Could he?
        As the way bent upward, the going got harder. Rolf at first
walked with a hand on each knee, as if striving the stabilize his
knee joints by force of digital pressure. Then at last he drew his
sword, and followed Guest's disgraceful example - hoping that
Thodric Jarl would not turn and discover him.
        In such procession, the air-crashed aeronauts went laboring
up the path, making for the building which dominated the heights,
and for an uncertain reception at the hands of unknown strangers.