by Hugh Cook
"It looks as if it will have to be the hole," said Guest, with great reluctance. "Which of us is the bravest? Let the bravest prove himself, and lead the way!"
Upon which Pelagius Zozimus declared that Guest himself was the bravest. But Guest disputed this.
"No," said Guest, "it is my noble servant Thayer Levant who is the bravest. Lead on, Levant!"
On being poked with Guest's sword, Levant conceded that perhaps he was brave. And he crawled into the hole.
Then screamed.
"What is it?" said Guest, in great alarm, as Levant backed out of the hole.
"A centipede!" said Levant, in panic. "A huge centipede, bigger than you are!"Guest was greatly alarmed, at least until he realized that Levant was grinning.
"Enough of your jokes!" said Guest, who was in no mood for being trifled with. "Get into that hole before I kick you!"
Whereupon Levant led the way into the depths, with Guest Gulkan following him, and Sken-Pitilkin and Zozimus crawling along after them.
It would be tedious to recount in detail the long wanderings of the adventurers in the complex and seemingly never-ending underworld which they then entered. Tunnels led to tunnels in unceasing succession, until these four wanderers felt like insects lost in a monstrous maze constructed by a zealous child of over- intellectual disposition.
The tunnels were warm and cold by turns. Some were ice-cold in consequence of the actions of noisy machines busy with the production of huge blocks of ice. By drinking the melt water from such ice, the heroes kept themselves from dying of thirst; but they had nothing to eat, and so grew uncommonly hungry. At the peak of his hunger, Guest proposed that they eat the unfortunate Thayer Levant, and Sken-Pitilkin was not at all sure that he was joking.
"Are you serious?" said Sken-Pitilkin.
"Serious?" said Guest. "About what?"
"About eating Levant. You were talking about it only a moment ago."
"Was I?" said Guest. "I might have been talking about Levant, but I certainly wasn't thinking about him."
"Then of what were you thinking?" said Sken-Pitilkin.
"Of women," said Guest.
As if in direct response to this declaration, there came the sound of women singing. Their clear and beautiful voices sounded uncommonly close.
"Good grief!" said Sken-Pitilkin.
"A choir," said Zozimus. "Perhaps they would like to hire someone to cook for them."
"Not you, you lecherous old goat!" said Sken-Pitilkin.
"Lecherous?" said Zozimus, feigning amazement. "Me? Pitilkin,
I haven't had a woman for half five hundred years or more."
"Then now's no time to be changing your habits!" said Sken-Pitilkin.
"Yes," said Guest, setting out toward the voices.
"Let's each of us keep to our habits."
Zozimus and Sken-Pitilkin followed Guest Gulkan, but Thayer Levant lingered.
"Levant!" said Sken-Pitilkin. "Hurry up!"
"But," said Levant, diffidently.
"But what?" said Sken-Pitilkin.
"But," said Levant, "they might be ... they might be mermaids."
"What?!" said Sken-Pitilkin in astonishment.
Then Levant confessed to his superstition.Thayer Levant was from Chi'ash-lan, and the people of those parts have many dire superstitions concerning mermaids. It is said amongst them that these half-human fishes configure themselves as beautiful women, then use the beauty of their voices to lure strangers to a hideous death.
"Levant," said Sken-Pitilkin firmly, "there are no such things as mermaids. They are imaginary creatures, like elves, and orcs, and gnomes, and fairies, and leprechauns, and talking animals. And even supposing that there were mermaids, what then?
Would you really expect to find them down here in these tunnels, deep deep deep beneath the earth?"
"By now," said Levant, evidencing an unusual intellectual belligerence, "we may well be deep deep deep beneath the sea, for there is no saying where these tunnels have taken us. So. So maybe they're mermaids, and maybe they'll eat us."
"Well," said Sken-Pitilkin, "Guest Gulkan lately suggested eating you, so if you've got to be eaten by someone it might as well be by mermaids. Come on!"
After considerable further hesitation, Thayer Levant at last consented to follow the others. With Guest Gulkan leaded, they braved their way into a huge chamber where there arose a kind of waterless fountain which was adorned with the warm and breathing bodies of a thousand women. Up, up rose this fountain, in tier upon tier, crowded with nubile beauty.
For once, Guest Gulkan was quite lost for words. He just stood there and gaped. As he stood there, a woman danced forth from the company of her peers, positively floating through the air as she tranced toward him. She beckoned to him, and he stepped forward, as if in a dream.
Abruptly -
The women vanished.
The women vanished with a clangor of metal and a burst of shuddering laughter. Immediately, the adventurers realized they were confronted by (and more than partially surrounded by) a huge heaped-up conglomeration of steel, a towering contraption of whispering tubes and slowly grinding tentacles, of rotating disks and spindling toroidal columns, of glowing screens and phosphorescent feelers, of spiked antennae and gleaming chelae.
This thing of coiled and coiling metal sat there in a huge and brooding inertia, sat there with all the mighty weight of an ink-black thundercloud pregnant with hailstones the size of a turtle, sat there in predatory poise. There was no telling what or where its eyes might be, yet the thing saw the travelers, clearly, and these four mortals were the focus of its vulturing regard.
Others had been thus focused upon beforehand, as was proved by the large number of corpses which lay scattered in immethodical disorder in and about the monster's great colony of threats. The bodies of close to fifty people were thus scattered, and, to judge by what was left of them, they had not died pleasantly.
"I told you!" said Levant fearfully, thinking himself doomed to become another such corpse.
"You told us of mermaids," said Sken-Pitilkin, with a pedantic emphasis which spoke of long years of pedagogical engagement. "But this is scarcely a mermaid! I think this thing to be an octopus, or a very kraken."
So spoke Sken-Pitilkin, and he spoke harshly, for he was more than half-inclined to blame Thayer Levant for their present predicament. For, if Levant had not spoken his utter nonsense about mermaids, Sken-Pitilkin might have given more serious consideration to the possible source of those womanly voices, and might have realized that the unlikeliness of finding a female choir so deep underground most surely spoke of deception and danger.
Do not therefore blame the adventurers' predicament upon any presumed defect of the wizard Sken-Pitilkin! recognize Sken-Pitilkin for what he was, an uncommonly sagacious and hypercapable wizard of Skatzabratzumon! And put the blame for the travelers' downfall firmly where it belongs - upon the back of the superstitious Thayer Levant!
"I do not think this is a kraken," said Guest, at last recovering his voice. "I think it is a - "
"Whatever it is," said Zozimus, "suppose we quietly back out of here."
Then Zozimus matched action to suggestion. But a lithe tentacle, green in color and slick in its glistening, promptly whipped around his ankles and held him fast. It held him with a strength which bruised his flesh and almost broke his bones.
"It has me!" said Zozimus.
"Then - nobody move," said Sken-Pitilkin. "Guest! Don't move!"
"I'm not moving," said Guest, who was still staring at the looming monstrosity which confronted them.
The thing was huge. Guest got giddy just looking at it.
Obviously it would be quite impossible to hack it to pieces with his sword. Confronted by such invincible strength, Guest Gulkan was possessed by a sense of angry frustration. He was a Yarglat barbarian! Therefore, hacking things to pieces was a part of his birthright! An essential part of his cultural heritage!
Throughout his childho
od, the Weaponmaster had lived with the certainty that if he was brawny enough and quick enough on his feet, then he could hack into bloody pieces anyone and everyone who was intemperate enough to oppose his will. But there would be no such hacking here in Untunchilamon's underworld. Consequently, Guest wished most heartily that he was back in Tameran, back on the flatlands of the Collosnon Empire, sending out his scouts and manoeuvering his cavalry; and, in this time of peril, Guest felt not so much fear as, rather, a sickening sense of homesickness.
Beset by such homesickness, the Yarglat barbarian at last acknowledged that the had been in error when he had wilfully embroiled himself in the affairs of wizards, demons and gods. But it was too late to turn back!
Then, realizing he was trapped, irrevocably entangled in matters far beyond his competence, Guest Gulkan grew angry, so angry that he challenged the looming monster in front of him, challenged it as if it were a paltry slave, and he a victorious conqueror with his boot on its neck.
"Who are you?" said Guest, with a lifetime of practiced self-assertion pouring itself into the challenge.
"I am the therapist Schoptomov," said the monster, answering Guest Gulkan in his native Eparget. "Who are you? Who are you, and what are you doing here?" Guest Gulkan cleared his throat, as if in preparation for explanation. Sken-Pitilkin covertly stepped on his foot. The Weaponmaster took the hint, and was silent.
"We're, ah, tourists," said Sken-Pitilkin.
"Tourists?" said the therapist doubtfully.
"Yes," said Sken-Pitilkin. "We've come to see the, ah, the dragons, Untunchilamon is very famous for its dragons, is that not the case?"
"Where are you from?" said the therapist, disregarding the question of dragons.
"From Chi'ash-lan," said Sken-Pitilkin, hoping at least to puzzle the monstrosity.
"Ah," said the therapist. "Chi'ash-lan. I have heard of that place. They feed, I am told, on the eyes of the dog."
"You are uncommonly well-informed," said Sken-Pitilkin, astoundingly astonished to find the therapist so well-versed in the ways of such a far and distant land.
By contrast, Guest Gulkan in his ignorance thought the therapist to be in error; for Guest in his confusion thought that it was only in the Safrak Islands that the eyes of a dog are a favored delicacy. But, while Safrak does use the dog the fullest, the same gastronomical quirk is found also in Chi'ash-lan.
"You find me informed, do you?" said the therapist smugly.
"Well, I make it my business to be informed. And I don't believe for a moment that you're here as tourists. Why did you come here?
The truth!"
"The truth," said Sken-Pitilkin, prevaricating, and wishing that Zozimus would say something to help him out.
"Yes, yes, the truth," said Schoptomov. "Truth, the highest virtue!"
"We had business with one Wazir Sin," said Sken-Pitilkin, since nobody else had courage or wit sufficient to help bluff the monster.
"Ah, Sin, Sin," said the therapist. "A delightful man by all accounts. A man very much after my own tastes. He was doing so very well, too. It is most unfortunate."
"You mean he's dead?" said Guest Gulkan.
"Several years dead," said the therapist.
"Then who rules Untunchilamon?" said Guest.
"I do," said the therapist.
"You braggarting liar!" said Guest, still in his mode of wrath. "You are not a ruler! You are just a species of vermin, a species of rat!"
This speech caused Sken-Pitilkin great pain, for had not the venerable wizard Skatzabratzumon labored for years in an effort to teach Guest Gulkan the arts of diplomacy? All useless, useless, wasted effort - for once a Yarglat barbarian, always a Yarglat barbarian!
"The therapist," said Sken-Pitilkin, seeking to remedy the damage which had surely been done, "is of such sophistication that the rule of Untunchilamon is surely not beyond its capabilities."
"You are right," said the therapist, not bothering to disguise its amused delight, for it had been a long time since anyone had flattered it. "I also have the capacity to kill you."
"Who are you?" said Guest. "And what?"
"I have told you my name already," said the therapist Schoptomov. "If you have forgotten it, then it is fear which is doing the forgetting. As for my function, why, I have told you that, too. I am a therapist."
"A therapist?" said Guest.
"I administer therapy," said Schoptomov. "Algetic therapy."
"What mean you by that?" said Guest Gulkan, puzzled.
"It's a torturer," said Zozimus. "That's what it means."
"You sound as if you despise the Art," said Schoptomov.
"Well, my friend, you will despise it less hereafter."
At this threat, Guest Gulkan suddenly bethought himself of the heaviness of the amulet which hung as a pendant from the necklace he wore always at his throat. Paraban Senk, the disembodied entity which had ruled Cap Foz Para Lash in the city of Dalar ken Halvar, had not wanted him to depart with that amulet. Later, the demon Icaria Scaria Iva-Italis had immediately recognized that amulet for what it was.
But what was it?Guest felt the amulet start to beat in time with his very heart, and, inspired by that beating, knew - he had the gift of Knowing, did he not? - that this amulet was a device which would be proof against the power of the monster which now confronted them.
So Guest seized his amulet, and drew it forth from its concealment, lifting the necklace clear of his head and brandishing its pendant on high as he cried:
"Behold, the mazadath!"
In response ....
In response, the therapist laughed. Which angered Guest intensely, for he was profoundly tired of things laughing at him.
"Why, a mazadath!" said the therapist. "A pretty trinket, but one useless for the concerns of the moment."
In demonstration of this, the therapist swatted Guest with a lazy tentacle, knocking the mazadath from his grasp and sending it skittling across the floor. At which Zozimus said to Sken-Pitilkin:
"Can you?"Sken-Pitilkin knew what this question meant. It meant: can you lift this therapist? Ordinarily, Sken-Pitilkin would have answered: no. For the therapist was huge. Its weight was surely greater than that of the demons of Safrak, Chi'ash-lan and Obooloo put together. By trying to lift it, Sken-Pitilkin might kill himself.
But Sken-Pitilkin said, without hesitation:
"I will need a moment's distraction, cousin."
"Then you shall have it," said Zozimus.
Then Pelagius Zozimus animated those corpses which lay about the therapist. In creaking swarms they attacked, flesh falling away as they stormed around the therapist, trying to attack the brute's tentacles and chelae.
What good could this do?
None whatsoever!
For the therapist was too much of a brute to be harmed by the belaboring of a few dozen rotting corpses.
Nevertheless, the therapist was momentarily taken by surprise at this attack. In alarm, it flailed at the corpses with its tentacles. The tentacle which had gripped Pelagius Zozimus came free, whipping itself into the battle against the corpses.
"Now!" said Zozimus.
Then Hostaja Torsen Sken-Pitilkin exerted all his power, and wrenched the therapist - tore it loose from its foundations, heaved it into the air then dumped it down.
Hard.
The therapist screamed. Pipes ruptured. Flailing steam gouted into the air. Bursts of lightning crackled. Guest Gulkan seized Sken-Pitilkin - who had quite fainted away on account of the monstrous nature of his exertions - then led the retreat at the sprint.
Pelagius Zozimus grabbed the country crook which had fallen from Sken-Pitilkin's grasp, and sprinted alongside Guest Gulkan. Thayer Levant lagged a footstep in the rear - and was soon lagging even further, for he paused momentarily to scoop up Guest's fallen mazadath.
The therapist lashed at Levant with a tentacle.
Almost caught him!
But Levant gained the safety of the corridor to which his fellows had fled,
leaving the therapist behind him. The wounded monstrosity bellowed in a fury close to madness. In the heat of its rage, it forgot which languages the adventurers had used, and swore at them in some uncouth tongue from its monstrous past.
"Gods!" said Guest, coming to a panting halt, and letting Sken-Pitilkin slip unconscious to the floor. "He's heavy. And he's hot!"
Pelagius Zozimus touched Sken-Pitilkin's skin. It was hot, hot as if in a fever. The venerable wizard of Skatzabratzumon seemed to be positively burning up. Zozimus shuddered.
"What is it?" said Guest.
"We are lucky he is only hot," said Zozimus. "That is what it is!"Guest did not rightly understand the import of this remark, but, sensing it might be something he was better off not understand, he asked no more about it. Instead, he reclaimed his mazadath from Thayer Levant, slung the chained amulet around his neck, and declared himself ready to go on a reconnaissance mission to find some ice.
By the time Guest had returned with some ice - quite a long time, as it happened - Sken-Pitilkin was conscious again. The wizard of Skatzabratzumon proved strong enough to suck on some ice, though it was a long while before he was strong enough to speak, and longer yet before he was capable of walking.
But at last the adventurers got underway again, and a long and weary journey they had before they at last found their way to the daylight.
When at last the travelers did escape to the outer air, they found the fair city of Injiltaprajura to be in a state of uncommon disorder. For the eminent Wazir Sin had indeed been overthrown, and overthrown something close to seven years earlier, a fact which had escaped the notice of everyone from Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin to Plandruk Qinplaqus; for it must be understood that, while Untunchilamon is regularly visited by travelers bent on trade, the extreme isolation of that island means that news is only slowly disseminated from there to parts as far removed as the northern continent of Tameran and the southern continent of Parengarenga. Sken-Pitilkin explained as much to his companions.
