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Swelaway Sea: Tameran's inland sea which lies a little over
200 leagues south of the city of Gendormargensis and is home to
the Safrak Islands. The Swelaway Sea is drained by the Pig River
which flows north-west to the Yolantarath.
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Since Thodric Jarl would brook no delay - war was afoot, and
he did not wish to miss out on his share of battle-blood glory -
the travelers joined their boat at the Palace Docks that very
evening. The sky was dubious, threatening bad weather, but Jarl
was hot to be gone regardless.
They descended to the docks, then there was a delay, for word
came that the Governor of the Safrak Bank wanted to say goodbye to
Guest Gulkan and Sken-Pitilkin. When the Governor materialized,
Guest was the first to notice him.
On Guest's first introduction to Banker Sod - an event which
had taken place on a day now more than a year in the past - the
Weaponmaster had been taken aback by Sod's racial configuration.
For Sod was an iceman, and had an iceman's pale skin. That skin
was thickly furred with white bodyhair, which contrasted vividly
with the golden hair of his head. His eyes and teeth were of a
yellow to match the hair of his scalp, but his fingernails were
black.
Over time, Guest had got used to Sod. He had also grown used
to the sight of Damsel, Sod's tender daughter, whom
he had seen at times in the mainrock Pinnacle and the city of
Molothair. From wondering at Damsel's strangeness, Guest had gone
on to wonder at what she might be like to have as a girlfriend.
Since Sod was now so much a part of the background of his
life, Guest scarcely registered his approach. But when Jarl saw
the man - why, Thodric Jarl looked as if he had suddenly been
dropped in boiling water.
"Gentle god!" said Jarl, voicing in his startlement the
mightiest of all his oaths. "It's Sod!"
"Jarl," said Sod, acknowledging recognition with displeasure.
"But you - but - man, it was - Chi'ash-lan it was - "
Sken-Pitilkin looked from Jarl to Sod, from Sod to Jarl.
There was something decidedly odd here. Obviously Jarl had seen
Sod in earlier years in Chi'ash-lan, and obviously Banker Sod was
not pleased at all to be so unexpectedly identified here on the
island of Alozay. Sken-Pitilkin, fearing that this unexpected and
inexplicable act of recognition somehow contained the seeds of a
most unfortunate breech of diplomatic protocol, tried to hush
Jarl.
But it was too late.
Sod had already decided that he was most displeased at being
recognized, and that in particular he was displeased at having
been recognized by Jarl.
"I want that man," said Sod, indicating Thodric Jarl.
Sundry Guardians moved to arrest Thodric Jarl.
In hindsight, it may be said of a certainty that Banker Sod
had over-reacted. In hindsight, it may be said of a certainty that
Sod would soon have realized as much, that diplomacy would have
had its way, that Jarl would have been released, and the whole
thing smoothed over and forgotten by the next day.
But Thodric Jarl was in his rune-warrior mode, so drew his
sword as if to hold the world at bay. He was outnumbered by twenty
to one - after all, he was a single man alone, and Sken-Pitilkin
certainly had no intention of fighting on his behalf - yet he
challenged the Guardians with the stoneblooded resolution which
befits a man born more for myth than life.
"Jarl!" said Sken-Pitilkin sharply. "No fighting!"
But it was too late, for the nearest Guardian had already
drawn his weapon in a matching gesture. Their razors clashed, and
scratched each other with a sound like the claws of a sliding cat
screaming across the tiles of a wet rooftop.
"That's enough!" roared Sken-Pitilkin.
The two swordsmen broke apart, both as yet unblooded. They
eyed each other, breathing hard.
"My good lord Banker," said Zozimus, addressing Banker Sod in
the urbanest of all imaginable tones, and doubtless intending to
build some swift diplomacy upon the foundations of goodwill so
diligently established by long months of slug chefery.
With the mercy of Sod's grateful belly thrown into the
equation, there was a near-certain hope of peaceful resolution.
But one of the younger Guardians had already drawn a knife, and
even as Zozimus spoke that Guardian threw that knife.
The knife went whizzing through the air, slicing - not at
Jarl! - but at Sken-Pitilkin!
With the roar of a Word, Sken-Pitilkin raised his country
crook. Caught in a vortex of levitational energies, the knife
snapped upwards, shattering into fragments in the buffeting
upsweep of the compulsion which commanded it.
"Ahyak Rovac!" screamed Rolf Thelemite, drawing his sword
with a shearing swipe which plucked the scarf from Zelafona's
hair.
And a moment later, the gloom of the Palace Docks was alive
with the dragon-slash of sword-silver combat. In the thrashwork
embroilments of battle, Sken-Pitilkin came face to face with a
Guardian. The hackwork hero chopped at the wizard with his tooth
of iron, but iron met country crook, and it was the iron which
shattered. The country crook twisted in Sken-Pitilkin's hands,
subtle as a licorice strap in the hands of an energetic child. It
thwacked the Guardian.
The man fell stumbling backwards, fell to the grip of
Pelagius Zozimus -
And -
Sken-Pitilkin winced, the sound of a bone-breaking crack
etched once and forever in his memory.
Zozimus held out a hand.
Zozimus spoke a Word.
The fresh-created corpse of the Guardian uprose, and stood on
tottering legs before its master, the necromancer Zozimus. Then
Zozimus drew his sword, and passed the weapon to the corpse. Which
grasped it.
Zozimus raised his hands.
He spoke a Word.
The corpse turned, and raised the sword for war. It raised
the sword against its former comrades.
Now Zozimus had spent most of his time on Alozay in the
kitchen. As lord of the larder, Zozimus had dedicated himself to
cooking up slugs and such, and had been grossly over-rewarded for
his enterprises in this direction - for Safrak's Bankers had
proved ready to part with good gold to satisfy their bellies,
though they never unclenched so much as silver to appease the
appetites of their minds.
However, though Zozimus customarily worked as a chef, and
hence was able to find a ready welcome in whatever city, palace,
pit, dungeon, ship, school or brewery in which he happened to
find himself, the truth of the matter was that Zozimus was a
necromancer.
A necromancer, yes!
Zozimus was a wizard of Xluzu, able to arcanely command the
dead. Upon the Palace Docks, Zozimus commanded the corpse of the
first of those who fell in battle, and sent that corpse against
its erstwhile companions. The sight of one of their own fighting
against them when dead was enough to rout the Guardians, who
mostly dived from the docks and began swimming to the low-lying
city of Molothair.
"So," said Jarl, panting harshly, "we have the docks in our
possession."
From the way he said it, Sken-Pitilkin momentarily thought
the Rovac warrior had no intention of stopping there, but meant to
scale the winch-ropes and take the mainrock at the storm.
"Possession?" said Zozimus. "I've not seen a deed to prove
it!"
As Zozimus so spoke, the shambling corpse which had been at
his command came striding down the docks. Zozimus spoke a Word.
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.
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