Hugh Cook - The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

The corpse passed him its sword – an implement now drenched with blood. Then it went ramshackle-walking onward down the docks, its head flopping limp and useless to the left. At a misstep, it went went wheeling into the darkened waters, throwing up a floundering spray as it fell. Pelagius Zozimus ignored it, for he was busy scraping his sword with his boot. With the sword scraped – a poor expedient, but this was a battlefield, not a barracks in preparation for paradeground display! – Zozimus sheathed it, then led the way aboard Jarl's ship.

It was then that time of day when things have grown so dark that one can scarcely see. However, the shadowing of the evening has proceeded by such imperceptible degrees that mind and eye have been fooled into accepting the shadows for the day. So one lives in a world which is coaldust mixed with deepest cloud, a world of darkness relieved merely by the bonechina brightslash of a rag of flapping sail or a torn piece of paper random in the wind.

In such shadow stood Sken-Pitilkin, the last to quit the docks. The choppy waves jostled the bulwarks of the docks, chill- slapped in syncoptic half-patterns, arrhythmic spray-bursts. The loudest sound was the creaking rubmark protest of Jarl's ship, straining at its ropes, chafing its fenders against the lowermost of Alozay's wave-mucked fortifications. In the gathering wind of the evening's night, the mounded death on the dockside was unstill, for hair was feathered, a belt flapped loose, and one gust unexpectedly scooped the weight of a helmet and rattled into the inkblack darkthickness by a sagging winch-basket.

In that windy darkness, Sken-Pitilkin endured a moment of unaccustomed desolation. Beset by wind and shadow, unsettled by death and by the prospect of a wild night on the bat-wing seas, the wizard of Drum wished himself back on Drum, back with his cats and his sea dragons, his library and his toasting rack.

But Drum -

"Come on, Sken-Pitilkin!"

But Drum was far, was far, far -

"Sken-Pitilkin!"

Drum was far distant from the Swelaway Sea, and return was denied by the wrath of the Confederation. So Sken-Pitilkin, irrevocably entangled in the fate of the Collosnon Empire -

"Zozimus, what's wrong with him?"Sken-Pitilkin was irrevocably entangled with the Yarglat and their empire, unless he chose to quit those entanglements for unknown difficulties in some still more barbarous part of this benighted world, and, being thus entangled, he must necessarily -

"Come on," said Zozimus, who had come ashore to retrieve his cousin.

"Pelagius?"

"It's me," said Zozimus softly. "Come on. Come get yourself on the ship."

And Hostaja Torsen Sken-Pitilkin permitted his cousin to lead him aboard Jarl's ship. Already, the ropes were being loosed, or cut by men made brutal by expedient, and Sken-Pitilkin was scarcely aboard before they were slipping away into the darkening night.

Unfortunately, the night which was now darkening beyond the remotest point of intelligibility was also, weatherwise, a worsening night. A storm blew up that night, a storm of beserker fury, and the voyage which started thus badly grew no better as it proceeded. Thus began a wild voyage which eventually ended when the voyagers had to beach their much-leaking ship upon a nondescript green pancake liberally sprinkled with stone cottages and sheep fanks. This was the island of Ema-Urk, where Guest Gulkan and Rolf Thelemite promptly wrote themselves a place in local history by killing a sheep, which roused the ire of the locals to a homicidal pitch.

As the wizards Sken-Pitilkin and Zozimus tried to soothe the tempers of the locals, with some help from the dralkosh Zelafona – who contributed some of her bangles and baubles to the soothing -

Thodric Jarl cursed and kicked his ship.

"You bought this ship at Ink, I suppose?" said Guest.

"I did," said Jarl.

His ship was a hulk of a fishing boat which he had indeed purchased at Ink, a village which made a lively profit by selling its worn-out vessels to unwary strangers. On close inspection,

Jarl was inclined to think it a very miracle that this particular hulk had dragged itself as far as Ema-Urk before succumbing to a long-overdue and entirely natural death.

"You were sold this boat by Umbilskimp, I suppose," said Guest, who still remembered that salesman, and had not repented of his determination to hang the man.

"Umbilskimp?" said Jarl. "Who's he?"Guest explained.

"Why," said Jarl, when he had heard the explanation out.

"That's very interesting. But, no, it was a man by name of Mung who sold me this particular boat."

Then the Weaponmaster Guest Gulkan and the Rovac warrior Thodric Jarl pacted with each other, swearing that if the village of Ink were to fall to their power then they would make it their business to see both Umbilskimp and Mung hung high, for both were murderers without a doubt.

Then Jarl proceeded with an inspection of his hulk.

By the time the wizards and the witch had bargained a peace for the shipwrecked travelers, Jarl had concluded – and nobody saw fit to disagree – that there was not one chance on this side of hell of their prodigiously rotten and storm-weakened ship getting them even half as far as the horizon.

"Which means," said Jarl, "that we're not going any further in this rotten hulk."

Which left them with very few palatable choices, for it was almost certain that Governor Sod would be in pursuit of them, and it was almost equally certain that Sod would not be gentle in his handling of them if and when he finally caught up with them.

Ema-Urk: an island of the Swelaway Sea, green and low-lying, and the site of much growing of sheep.

Though Thodric Jarl did not trust the people of Ema-Urk to keep the bargain of the peace which Zelafona had bought for the travelers, nothing more ferocious than a straying sheep intruded upon the peace of the travelers as they slept away the worst of their fatigue.

After a night's sleep, the marooned adventurers began to wonder how (if!) they were going to escape from their predicament.

Their ship in its rottenness was unfit even to be made into firewood, far less to put to sea. There was no boat on all of Ema Urk which was worthy of the labor of stealing it, and Jarl did not see how their own could be repaired except by rebuilding it from scratch.

And as Ema-Urk was flat, grassy and treeless, to rebuild their boat from scratch would first require the growth of its very timbers from the seed.

"Hence," said Jarl, "it seems we will be stuck here until in the fullness of time the masters of Alozay hunt us down to this lair."

"They would not dare to kill us, if that's what you're thinking," said Sken-Pitilkin positively. "Even though they're far from the Collosnon Empire, they can't risk arousing the wrath of Lord Onosh."

"They will not kill us," said Jarl grimly. "At least not as far as history is concerned. When the history of this episode is written, it will simply be said that we set to sea and were thereafter unseen. Drowning will be the natural presumption. It will be said that we were seen to leave Alozay on an evening which threatened storm – that much is true. It will be said that the fishes have had our bones. They almost did."

"We could always try talking our way out of it," said Sken-Pitilkin. "If a hunting party does come from Alozay, I'm sure – "

"You might convince them to give us a decent funeral," said Jarl, "but I doubt you could persuade them to do us any greater favor."

"Nonsense," said Sken-Pitilkin. "We can negotiate anything."

"You are a wizard," said Jarl, "and all the opportunities of the last four thousand years have not proved sufficient for wizards to negotiate a peace with the Rovac. I vote that we prepare ourselves for battle."