Hugh Cook - The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

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.