Hugh Cook - The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

"Gods!" said Guest, kicking his way clear of the trash-dump rubbish heap. "What a let down!"

And so it was.

"Have you a coin about you?" said Guest.

"No," said his father.

But Guest had already guessed that the cornucopia would not prove an adequate counterfeiter of coinage.

"Time for us to be going," said the Witchlord.

"Where?" said his son.

"If we presume that this treacherous quokka has done its best to defeat our escape," said Lord Onosh, "then our best bet is to go back the way we came."

"If we can remember it," said Guest. "Well then! Lead on! I'm ready!"

But Lord Onosh chose to take a piss before leading on, making Guest realize that it was time for him to do the same himself.

Obedient to nature's necessities, Guest pissed… and was childish enough to try to fill the cornucopia with his outflow.

"What are you doing?" said Lord Onosh, when he turned to see Guest at play with a pissing cornucopia.

"I am – "Guest was about to come up with some justification for his behavior, but did not, for the trickle of urine which was exiting from the cornucopia in his hands suddenly abrupted into a vomiting outflow which made the cornucopia plunge and buck, so that it took all his strength to hold the thing.

The outflow knocked the Witchlord off his feet, and he went rolling away for a dozen paces before he recovered himself and stood. Lord Onosh tried to find words for his rage:

"You – you – you – "

The Witchlord was so profoundly angry he was quite speechless. And Guest -

"Gods!" said Guest, half-shocked, half-intrigued by the strength with which the flux of fluid was bolting from the cornucopia. "It's increasing!"

Indeed, the force of the outsurge from the cornucopia was increasing to such an extent that dirt, stones and entire rocks were blown away where the yellow flux impacted.

"Guest!" said Lord Onosh. "Will you stop that!"

"I will not!" yelled Guest.

"Then if you don't – "

"Yes!" said Guest. "Tell me what happens if I don't!"

"If you don't," said Lord Onosh, raising his voice to make himself heard over the pounding shock-splatter of the cornucopia's high-pressure vomiting, "then I'll – I'll – "

Then the Witchlord fell silent.

He was starting to think.

The Witchlord stared with wild surmise at the ever- intensifying torrent which was blasting from the cornucopia. A veritable stream of urine was pounding away, trying to escape from the nearest tunnel, and already it was plain that the tunnel would be hard put to drain the flux if it increased any further.

There then followed a long and very tedious siege of automated pissing, as father and son took turns at holding the cornucopia, keeping it pointing downwards so it would continue to output its surges.

Sitting atop the small mound in the center of the great pit, father and son worked the evening through, and maintained this great labor of hosing all through the following night. But when dawn came, they at last admitted defeat, and raised the cornucopia to the vertical, thus cutting off the flow of urine.

"It is no good," said Guest, sadly folding up the cornucopia.

"There are too many holes in this pit."

So there were, so there were.

Though the whole pit was one reeking yellowish pool of piss, in which the central mound was a small and forlorn island, there was no hope of the flood filling the pit as a whole and thus floating Witchlord and Weaponmaster to freedom. Even as they watched, the piss-level began to drop by perceptible degrees.

"It is escaping," said Guest.

"Yes," said his father. "But where?"

"All waters from the Stench Caves drain from the Nijidith River," said Guest. "Or so I was told."

"I was briefed likewise," said his father. "So, if there is but one outlet from this hell-hole, then the waters will surely lead us out of it."

"A man would have to be very brave to venture this flood," said Guest speculatively, looking at the sinuous lines of strength which marked the currents generated by the swift-draining urine.

"A man would have to be braver yet to stay here and starve," said his father. "I am thirsty, and I have not drunk. I am hungry, and I have not eaten. I am tired, and I have not slept, nor do I expect to sleep in a pit which stinks as much as this one."

"You are right," said Guest, conceding his own hunger, thirst and fatigue. "We'd best be going, and now."

There were three things which Guest wished to preserve in the journey ahead. One was the ring of ever-ice, which should be safe enough on his finger. The second was the knife he had stolen from

Aldarch the Third, which… well, it was in a buckle-down sheath, and if that was not good enough then there was no way Guest could improve its security.

But what of the cornucopia?

How was he going to keep that safe?

"I'll keep that in my boot," said Lord Onosh, seeing Guest looking speculatively at the cornucopia. Guest was most reluctant to surrender the thing, but could not think of a safer way to manage its transit. So he handed it over to his father, who took off his right boot. On his right foot,

Lord Onosh was wearing two pairs of woollen socks. In their own lands, the Yarglat are accustomed to prepare the foot for the boot by winding a long bandage around it, but such foot-bindings were not the fashion in the Izdimir Empire, and it was that Empire which had equipped the Witchlord for this particular mission.

Lord Onosh took off his own socks, then forced his foot into the cornucopia. Guest thought this a most unwise procedure, but his father came to no harm from it.

With the cornucopia acting as a singularly odd and ill- fitting sock, Lord Onosh crammed his foot back into his boot – not without difficulty! – and laced up that boot with the very same bootlace which had recently been used to hang a quokka.

Then father and son plunged into the swirling waters – they both of them tried most strenuously to think of the flux which faced them as being a flux of water – and began a journey into nightmare. Down they went, sucked away by the swirling currents of drainage, plummeted down a huge sewerpipe where darkness ground darkness in a throttling cacophony of buffeting backspray and jolting collision. Skleetering rats screamed and clawed in the frothing upswirl which rammed them against the roofs of caverns then slammed them down drop-pipes, floated them through caverns loud with the guttural glorp of sideline discharges, then sent them screaming over impromptu waterfalls.

Sometimes Guest saw – or thought he saw – his father's greensheened face. But sometimes he saw nothing, for sometimes the hot flux plunged him into a roaring darkness where breathing was an intermittent luxury, where rocks rubbled him, where rapids tried to kick him to bits with a billion boots, and where Things with leathery wings went screeching overhead – for all the world as if Guest Gulkan's ears had liberated themselves and, each taking flight from its perch, multiplied themselves in flight until their strength was legion.

After awhile, Guest Gulkan no longer knew whether he was alive or dead, awake or awrath in nightmare. He was swept from one passage of temporary strangulation to the next, was boiled, vomited, plunged, purged, gobleted, zorded, rambleskinned and rumped, was battered by the slurping outpour of a million billion bowls of soup, was shocked by the sundering waves of five oceans and a dozen seas, was -

Was shocked at last to the daylight, was vomited out from the dark, was plunged down the boiling thrash of the Nijidith River, and then was swashed away downstream in the company of shattered bits of tables, chairs, doors, gates, gods and shrines, dead kittens and half-chewed cockroaches, dishrags and begging bowls, the underwear of drowned priests and the straw sandals of doomed peasants.