Hugh Cook - The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

From Obooloo they flew to Manamalargo, a lagoon on the seawashed shores of Yestron, the seas of the washing being none other than the waters of the Great Ocean, that bulk of salinity otherwise known as Moana, or (to give its name as do the Yarglat) as the Sea of Salt.

Once all were rested – to the extent that rest is possible on the shores of Manamalargo, a region beset by stench-hole snakes and pestilential mosquitoes – the four took to the air once more, intending to search out the fabled island of Untunchilamon.

However, the navigational difficulties of airflight being greater than the groundsman might suppose, their quest for Untunchilamon proved fruitless.

It also proved exceedingly dangerous.

The stickbird was held aloft and velocitated through the air by energies generated by a conflict between its abnormal components and the normalizing forces of the universe. Yet the whole arrangement was so intrinsically unstable that Sken-Pitilkin was taxed to the limit by the demands of managing his unruly instrument. Given the slightest mismanagement, the stickbird would shake itself to pieces, or – quite possibly – explode with force sufficient to rupture the sky from horizon to horizon. Sken-Pitilkin, then, was subjected to such extreme degrees of physical and psychic stress that he was more than once tempted to deliberately crash his creation, and thus bring his agonies to an end.

In the course of his flyforth across bewilderments of sea and sky, Sken-Pitilkin five times rested and renewed his strength on nameless chunks of coral and rock lost somewhere in the vastness of Moana. Then, his strength almost being exhausted for a sixth time, Sken-Pitilkin at last found something to which he could put a name.

But it was not the island of Untunchilamon.

It was, rather, the continent of Argan.

A sizeable discovery, you might think, but not the kind of thing one can claim by right of salvage and stuff into a spare pocket; and Sken-Pitilkin was not entirely glad to have found it.

Down from the clouds came Sken-Pitilkin and his passengers, hurtling toward the shores of the above-mentioned and above-named continent of Argan.

"Brace!" yelled Sken-Pitilkin, as his stickbird went skimming across the waves.

All braced.

The stickbird clipped a wave, spun skywards, plunged, hit the sea with a shatter-splash, bounced, hit the sands, scuffed up the beach with a great flurry of fractured silicon and shell, then skidded. Then flipped. The passengers went sprawling to the sands, from which they picked themselves up – all except Sken-Pitilkin.

"Cousin," said Zozimus. "Are you hurt?"

"Mortally," said Sken-Pitilkin weakly.

Then collapsed into the silence of utter exhaustion, which elicited no sympathy whatsoever from those whom he had so grievously misled across the ocean.

"Dogs and cats!" said Thayer Levant, giving voice to one of the mightiest oaths of Chi'ash-lan. "Where are we?"

"We are now," said Pelagius Zozimus, scrutinizing the beach of their landing, "on the Chameleon's Tongue."

"Tongue?" said Guest Gulkan. "This is a tongue?"

"Indeed it is," said Zozimus. "We are on the Tongue of a certainty. To be precise, we are at the Elbow."

"The Elbow?" said Guest. "Only a moment ago you called it a tongue. What will you have it next? A kneecap?"

"No," said Zozimus, "for the Kneecap is elsewhere."

Then Zozimus detailed out the location of the Kneecap, and having thus indulged himself in an entirely gratuitous display of geographical superiority, he suggested that they climb the conical knoll which he identified as the Elbow so they might confirm that they were on the beach known as the Tongue.

Thereupon all but the collapsed Sken-Pitilkin climbed the knoll, and Zozimus confirmed that they were truly on the Tongue, the white-heat beaches of which stretched away for league upon league to north and to west. Out to sea lay the Teardrop Islands, and inland rose the heights of the Lizard Crest Rises.

"It is true of a certainty," said Zozimus. "That fool Sken-Pitilkin has flown us clean across the ocean."

Later, when finally roused from the sleep of his exhaustion, Sken-Pitilkin confessed as much.

"We have," said that wizard of Skatzabratzumon, "but one option."

"And that is?" said his companions.

"To fly back across Moana," answered Sken-Pitilkin, with swift-reviving enthusiasm for further adventures in flight. "Fly back again in quest for Untunchilamon."

His companions however averred that they had several alternative options, some of which were starting to look increasingly palatable. The roasting of Sken-Pitilkin, for instance; or the boiling of him, bones and ungutted flesh together; or the braining of him with heavy rocks; or the feeding of his intellect to a pit of dragons; or the delivery of his walking corpse to the slaveyards of Lesser Narglash.

"Furthermore," said Zozimus, "that does not exhaust our choices. For we have yet another option. We could walk from here to Drangsturm, then book passage on a ship and get to Untunchilamon the fast way."

"The fast way!" said Sken-Pitilkin. "A ship would take months!"

"Months!" said Zozimus. "It would take months, would it?

Well, with you stitching your way back and forth across the ocean in the derelictions of your confidence, we look to waste out a lifetime in futility."

As the two wizards argued it out, Guest took himself off into the hinterland, returning much later with a dead lizard. In the evening, that lizard made a meal, once it had been supplemented by fish caught by Sken-Pitilkin and clams dug from the seasands by a reluctant Thayer Levant working under the remorseless supervision of Pelagius Zozimus.

That night, Guest Gulkan dreamt his way through the plunging darkness of blue seas and green, through the kraken depths of the northern wastes and the shallows of the Green Sea.

The Weaponmaster woke from his dreams to find it was late at night, and cold, and dark. A desolate wind blew in from the sea. Guest got up on his four limbs and crouched on the beach, watching the sea suspiciously. Watching. Listening. Waiting. For what? He knew not, but felt fearfully vulnerable.

"There is nothing," he muttered.

Then took a piss. The head of his penis was furry with smegma, and the smell got on Guest's fingers, and he sniffed at the smell, and was comforted by it on this strange and darkened beach. Nothing is more intimately consoling than one's own scent, just as few things can be so repulsive as the smell of a stranger.

But the transitory comfort of Guest's private indulgence was not enough to guard him against the dark, for Guest began to be convinced that he knew what had wakened him. That he knew what was out there. It was the Great Mink. He was sure of it. He could see it! He could see its hulking shadow! Guest was convinced that he was deluding himself. He was in a land too warm for the Great Mink, a land far removed from ice and snow. Nevertheless, while logic told him that there could not possibly be any such monster lurking in the night, he was simultaneously gripped by the unshakable belief that just such an animal was out there – and that he could see it.

So Guest sat for a frozen eternity, until at last the slow lightbirth of dawn revealed the hulking shadow to be no more than a tree trunk.

And in the relief of the morning, Guest told his companions of his plan for finding Untunchilamon, a plan he had got from brooding on his dream of the night.

"We ride the line of the green," said Guest Gulkan.

"The green?" said Zozimus.

"The green of the Green Sea," said Guest.

Then he explained.

In the course of his flight across Moana, Guest had observed that the shallow waters round islands and reefs appear from the air to be uncommonly green, and are clearly demarked from the blue-black of the deeper waters. It was known that the southern waters of Moana, those waters known as the Green Sea, were uncommonly shallow; and it was consequently obvious that they should be a literal green.