Hugh Cook - The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

"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 aircrashed 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 overgenerous 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.