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 air-
crashed 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 over-
generous 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.
        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.
        In such procession, the air-crashed aeronauts went laboring
up the path, making for the building which dominated the heights,
and for an uncertain reception at the hands of unknown strangers.