Farnol tottered through fire to reach the dining hall. The great glass knot still sat on the table. At its center, the leaden casket offering life—provided his uncle had spoken the truth; with Uncle Dhruzen, always open to question.
As if on cue, Dhruzen of Karzh walked into the room, closely attended by old Gwyllis. He checked at sight of his nephew, and a smirk of soft benevolence creased his face.
“My dear lad, such a joyous happening! Here you are, back home again, and looking so well!”
A grim smile twisted Farnol’s lips. He said nothing.
“You have come home, no doubt, fully prepared to honor the sorcerous traditions of House Karzh. Eh, Nephew?”
“Yes,” said Farnol.
“Really.” Unpleasant surprise flashed across Dhruzen’s countenance, dissolving swiftly into avuncular affection. “Well. I expected no less. Justify my confidence in you, Nephew. Display your sorcerous mastery.”
“I will,” returned Farnol, with some persistent hope that he spoke the truth. Marshalling the last of his strength, he breathed deep and called out the Swift Mutual Revulsion. The syllables flew like arrows, and an inner certainty that he had never before experienced dawned. Expectantly, he regarded the knot.
The glassy coils began to writhe. A hissing chorus of inexpressible detestation arose. The undulations waxed in vigor, the hissing swelled to a hysterical crescendo, and the knot tore itself apart, its five component glass reptiles flinging themselves from the table top and shooting off in all directions. Farnol scarcely noted the vitreous lizards. Their disengagement exposed a small leaden casket. He opened it and discovered a flask. Drawing the cork, he drained the contents at a gulp. Dizziness assailed him, a weakness in his limbs, and a profound internal chill. Shuddering, he dropped into the nearest chair. He could hardly stir, and his vision was clouded, but not extinguished. He could watch.
The five glass reptiles, desperate to flee one another, were hurling themselves about the dining hall in mounting frenzy. Overturning furniture, caroming off walls, clawing woodwork, spraying venom, and hissing wildly, they had transformed the room into an arena. With a spryness exceptional in one of his years, Gwyllis had sought refuge atop the table. Dhruzen of Karzh’s corpulence precluded similar prudence. As one of the lizards sped straight toward him, crimson eyes glittering and tail lashing, Dhruzen seized the nearest chair, raised it, and brought it down with force. Easily evading the blow, the lizard launched itself in a prodigious spring, struck Dhruzen’s chest like a missile from a catapult, knocked him to the floor, and drove little venomous fangs into his neck.
Dhruzen of Karzh commenced to jerk, twitch, and spasm. His back arched, his slippered heels drummed the floor, a froth bubbled upon his lips. His face turned an ominous shade of green, and presently he expired. All this Farnol watched with interest and mild compunction.
His own internal fires were abating. The heat and pain were dwindling, and a cool, fresh sense of renewal was stealing along his veins. He felt his strength returning, and he managed to rise from his chair. Catching Gwyllis’ eye, he gestured, and the old servant understood at once. Gwyllis gingerly climbed down from the table. Together, the two of them flung the dining hall casements wide.
Perceiving escape from intolerable propinquity, the glass reptiles sprinted for the open windows. One after another, they leaped from the second story, shattering themselves to fragments upon the marble terrace below.
“You have recovered, Master Farnol?” Gwyllis tweetled.
Farnol considered. “Yes,” he decided, “I believe I have. It would seem that Uncle Dhruzen spoke truly of that antidote. When you have fully recovered your own equanimity, Gwyllis, please effect Uncle Dhruzen’s removal.”
“Gladly. And then, sir? May I take the liberty of asking what you will do next?”
“Do?” The answer came with ease, as if it had been waiting a lifetime. “I shall continue working to build my sorcerous knowledge. I seem to have acquired the knack, and it is, after all, a tradition of Karzh.”
“Welcome home, Master Farnol.”
“Thank you, Gwyllis.”
Afterword:
Many years ago, when I was a youngster growing up in New Jersey, my parents often exchanged grocery bags full of used paperback books with friends and fellow-readers. Whenever a new bagful entered the house, I would sift through the contents in search of anything and everything interesting. One such scan turned up a few old issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I had never before encountered that magazine. I looked through an issue, and was quickly caught up in a story by a writer that I had likewise never before encountered. The story was “The Overworld,” and the writer was Jack Vance. I read, and my tender young imagination was promptly caught in a bear trap. What a world was Vance’s Dying Earth! I was enthralled with the exoticism, the color, the glamour, the magic, adventure, and danger. I loved the astonishing language, the matchless descriptive passages, the eccentric characters, baroque dialogue, the wit, style, inventiveness, and above all, the writer’s deliciously evil sense of humor. Of course, I quickly discovered that “The Overworld” was only the first adventure of that reprobate Cugel the Clever—there were several more. The other issues of Fantasy and Science Fiction in that brown paper bag contained some of them. For the others, I spent months scrounging through used bookstores. It was not for another several years that I stumbled upon a copy of The Eyes of the Overworld, and finally acquired the entire Cugel narrative, as it existed at that time.
Much time has passed. There have been many other fantasy and science fiction writers to enjoy, admire (and envy!) My judgment has matured. But the sense of amazement and delight that Vance’s stories awoke in me remains intact, as strong now as it was decades ago. And when I am asked (as writers invariably are) who influenced me, there are several names on the list, but the name that always pops out fast and first is Jack Vance.
—Paula Volsky
Jeff VanderMeer
The Final Quest of the Wizard Sarnod
World Fantasy Award-winning writer and editor Jeff VanderMeer is the author of such novels as Dradin in Love, Veniss Underground, and Shriek: An Afterword. His many stories have been collected in The Book of Frog, The Book of Lost Places, Secret Life, Secret Lives, and City of Saints and Madmen: The Book of Ambergris. As editor, he has produced Leviathan 2, with Rose Secrest, Leviathan 3, with Forrest Aguirre, which won the World Fantasy Award in 2003, The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases, with Mark Roberts, and Best American Fantasy, with wife Ann VanderMeer, the start of a new “Best of the Year” series. He won another World Fantasy Award for his novella “The Transformation of Martin Lake,” and has also published a book of non-fiction essays, reviews, and interviews, Why Should I Cut Your Throat?. His most recent books are a new collection, The Surgeon’s Tale, co-written with Cat Rambo; a chapbook novella, The Situation; a collaborative anthology with Ann VanderMeer, Fast Ships, Black Sails; and the anthology Mapping the Beast: The Best of Leviathan. With Ann VanderMeer, he has co-edited the anthologies Steampunk and The New Weird, and Best American Fantasy 2.
They live in Tallahassee, Florida.
In the ornate story that follows, the wizard Sarnod, who has dwelt for untold ages in a lonely stone tower on an island in Lake Bakeel, imperiously dispatches two of his most potent servants on a hair-raisingly dangerous mission to the fabulous realms of the Under Earth, with the odds of success stacked dramatically against them—although if they do succeed, their victory may have consequences that no one could ever have expected.
The Final Quest of the Wizard Sarnod
Jeff VanderMeer
The morning the Nose of Memory arrived to destroy his calm, the Wizard Sarnod rose as on any other day late in the life of the Dying Earth. He donned his sea-green robes woven from the scales of a monstrous fish and stared out the window that graced the top of his tower. Soon, he would descend for his daily breakfast of salamanders—one served cold for memory,
one served hot for his heart, and one served living for his brain—but first he sought the selfish comfort of surveying his lands.
The tower stood upon an island that lay at the center of Lake Bakeel, fed by a lingering finger of the Derna River. Beyond the lake lay the gnarled forests and baleful grasslands through which none, not even erb or Deodand, traveled without his knowledge or permission. Despite this mastery, Sarnod found that each new morning for more than a year had brought an unease, like a hook in his heart, accompanied by a strange thirst. He seemed always dry, his skin itchy and taut. The bowl of water he kept in his chambers did not help. The fresh, moist smell of the lake beyond came through the window like a thing physical, more threatening than the giant fish that roamed beneath its dark surface.
Sarnod lived alone in the tower but for the companionship of his two servants, both of whom he had ensorcelled to his need, using in part his own blood to bind or build them. The first was named Whisper Bird Oblique Beak, and the creature was always somewhere in the room with him, a subtle guardian of his person. The life of Whisper Bird had a poetry to it beyond Sarnod’s ken, the poetry of silence. Whisper Bird lived invisible and remote, Sarnod’s conversation with him ever terse yet ethereal.
At that moment, Whisper Bird spoke in Sarnod’s ear, startling him. Whisper Bird said, “On the golden dais beneath The Mouth a creature has appeared from Below.”
“A creature from the UNDERHIND? Impossible,” Sarnod said.
“And yet…probable,” Whisper Bird replied.
Just as there was an Over Earth, so too there were various Under Earths, one of which, nameless or unspeakable, Sarnod had found and harnessed to his will. He called it simply UNDERHIND, in the Speech of De-emphasis, because it was tiny, and there all the enemies he had punished lived miniaturized amid honeycombs of tunnels and caverns in the full knowledge, as Sarnod liked to think, of the enormity of their defeat.
“I will investigate,” Sarnod said, and as if in response Whisper Bird passed through him to the door in a wave of cold and heat that made him shudder—what manner of ghost, what manner of being, had he harnessed?
Together, man visible and creature invisible, they went to see what had thus intruded on their daily ritual.
Every Morning, Sarnod’s other servant, T’sais Prime, prepared his breakfast of salamanders. But this morning, Sarnod’s salamanders—green-glowing, plucked from the rich mud of the lake—lay forgotten on the kitchen counter, eyeless (for Sarnod did not like to see his food staring at him). The sounds of breathing came from the Seeing Hall beyond, where stood The Mouth and the golden dais.
The Mouth had been part of the tower long before Sarnod had taken up residence there. The two unblinking eyes above its inscrutable lips Sarnod himself had created—each a portal to a section of the UNDERHIND. Just as he did not like his food staring at him, he did not like a mouth without eyes. Under Sarnod’s thaumaturgies, The Mouth now functioned also as a secret portal back from the UNDERHIND.
The Mouth had spoken only three times.
The first time it had said, “Beware the falsehood of memory.”
The second time it had said, “What man can truly know but you?”
The third time it had said, “The fish rots from the head.”
Little else had ever come out of it but stenches and perfumes. Until now.
In the ancient Seeing Hall, The Mouth and golden dais lay at the far end. To the left hung the huge circle of a shimmering window, through which the lake and sky reflected against the white marble in a myriad shades of blue.
Near the dais, T’sais Prime watched over the intruder. Her pale, dark-haired presence both loosened the hook in his heart and sent it mercilessly deep. Arms folded, she stared down at the dais with a blank look. T’sais Prime was the reflection of a woman created in the vats from tales and potions brought from far-distant Embelyon. Nothing of that reflection had ever been his, for she did not want him, and he chose not to coerce her, nor even inform her as to her true nature. She seemed to have none of the passion and fire of the original—some aspect of the formula he’d failed to master and which continued to elude him.
As guarded in her way as Whisper Bird was in his, T’sais only raised one eyebrow upon Sarnod’s approach. That her expression was always half wistful, half sullen, pained him. She was the last from the now-cold vats; frustrated by his failures, Sarnod had turned his energies elsewhere.
“What is this thing that has come to us?” Sarnod asked.
“It has no head and yet it lives,” T’sais said. “It lives, but why?”
“It entered with a blast of cold yet hot air,” Whisper Bird said from somewhere to Sarnod’s left.
Sarnod drew nearer. What T’sais had caught was trapped under a large bell jar upon the gold dais.
Sarnod took out a magnifying glass from his robes. He had found it in the tower, and like everything in the tower it had its own mind. As he trained the glass on the creature, the oval grew cloudy, then clear, the handle suddenly hot. The thing indeed had no head. It had no eyes. It had no mouth. Although Sarnod looked square upon it, the thing seemed to lose focus, move to the corner of his vision. He thought it was curled up, then longer, like a stretching cat.
A strange thought came to him, from memories far distant, almost not his own: of a dusty book, turned to a certain page.
Sarnod said the thought aloud: “It is called the Nose of Memory. It brings a message of a kind.”
“Shall we destroy it?” Whisper Bird breathed from near Sarnod and then far away.
But Sarnod held up a hand in abeyance. “Let us see what it may offer, first. I will protect us from any harm it might bring.” The unease in Sarnod’s heart beat as steady as ever, but he realized he shared T’sais’ malaise. This intrusion made him curious.
“Are you ready, Whisper Bird?” The animating principle behind Whisper Bird, Sarnod believed, had been both owl and heron—one watchful, one motionless, both deadly when called upon.
As T’sais stood back, Whisper Bird said, “Yesssss” from over Sarnod’s left shoulder. For once, he did not flinch.
Sarnod put away the magnifying glass and surrounded the bell jar with a Spell of True Sizing.
Up, up, up came the Nose of Memory in all of its headless glory, rising and rising until it lay lolling over the sides of the dais, squat and grey and placid, about the size of a worry dog and wearing the bell jar as an awkward, teetering hat. It smelled in an unsatisfactory way of milk and herbs and brine.
Now the Nose of Memory at least resembled its name: a huge nose with five nostrils, completing, in a way, the face on the wall. It lay there for a moment, long enough for Sarnod to step forward. Then it snorted in such a thunderous fashion that even Sarnod flinched.
“Do nothing, Whisper Bird,” Sarnod said, readying a spell of No Effect for what might come after.
Through one nostril and then the next and the next, until all five had ruptured, the Nose of Memory sent messages in a brittle blue smoke, writ in curling letters that, once smelled by Sarnod, blossomed into images in his mind. As the tendrils of smoke grew in length, came together, and began to form clouds, the Nose of Memory grew smaller and smaller until it resided somewhere between its unexpected largeness and its former smallness, and then became just a limp, lifeless deformity.
The smoke brought with it such severe memories that Sarnod forgot his readied spell, and wept, though his countenance remained stern. For he saw Vendra, created to be his lover, and his brother Gandreel, who had betrayed Sarnod with her. The memory lay like a crush of sour fruit in his mouth: intense, clear, and yet fast-fading.
Sarnod had cherished them both, had welcomed Gandreel to his tower after long absence in the service of Rathkar the Lizard King, only to find the two, several weeks later, by the shores of the lake, amid a grove of trees, locked in a carnal embrace. His wrath had turned the surface of the lake to flame. His sadness had changed it to ice, and then the numbness in his heart had restored all to what it had been
before.
After, against their pleading, their weeping, Sarnod had banished them to the levels of the UNDERHIND. As with all of his enemies, he used his spells of Being Small, Pretending Small, Staying There, and Forgetting the Past for a Time. Into the UNDERHIND they had gone, and there they had now remained for many years.
Eruptions of hatred had scarred his heart ever since, had disturbed his sleep, made him lash out at every living thing that moved across plains and forest, many a traveler finding himself taken up by a vast, invisible hand and set down several leagues hence, usually in a much worsened condition.
But now, with the vapor of the past so vividly renewing the sharpness of his former love, his former joy, two pains massaged the hook in his heart. The pain physical presaged death. The pain mental presaged the birth of regret, for he had performed many terrible and vengeful deeds throughout his life, even if some seemed to have been committed by another self.
It had been, he realized, a long and lonely time without Vendra and Gandreel, the vats cold and useless, the world outside become stranger and more dangerous. With his desire for the one and his love for the other rose again a parched feeling—a burning need for the cleansing water of the lake. For a moment, he wanted to dive through the great window of the Seeing Hall and into the lake, there to be free.
“You are Sarnod the mighty wizard. That is not in your nature,” he said, aloud.
“This we have now heard,” Whisper Bird replied, with a hint of warning. “After many minutes of peculiar silence.”
“Who could have sent this?” Sarnod asked. A sense of helplessness came over him with the voicing of the question.
“Master, shall we be spared the extent of your not-knowing?” Whisper Bird said, almost apologetically.
T’sais Prime sighed, said, “I am working on a tapestry that requires my attention. May I leave now?”
Songs of the Dying Earth Page 22