Songs of the Dying Earth

by Gardner Dozois

  “Enough!” Sarnod said, rallying his resolve. “It matters not how it was sent or why, just what we should send back to the UNDERHIND.”

  “What can we send back?” T’sais Prime asked in a dull voice.

  “You,” he said, pointing at her. “And you,” he continued, pointing in the vicinity of where he thought Whisper Bird might be lurking. “Each of you I shall send to the place that best suits your nature. You will find and bring back the woman Vendra and the man who is my brother, Gandreel, long-banished to the UNDERHIND.” Then added, in warning: “Them and them alone—any other brought back shall perish in the journey! A prison the UNDERHIND is and a prison it shall remain.”

  Whisper Bird said only, “You will have to make us small.”

  “I have always liked the size I am,” T’sais Prime said, “and the work I have been doing.” Sarnod knew she labored solely on tapestries, which she created only because he had placed a spell of Fascination with Detail upon her.

  Whisper Bird said something resigned in a language so ancient that Sarnod could not understand it, but it sounded like a creaking gate on a desolate plain.

  Sarnod ignored them both equally and, using the half-senile machines that lived in the skin of the tower, made them see the images of Vendra and Gandreel, gone long before he had made T’sais and ensorcelled Whisper Bird. Then he gave them the power to project those images into the minds of any they might meet in their journeys. Then he made T’sais small. Whisper Bird had already reduced himself, and, in that form, was almost visible: a sunspot floating in the corner of the eye.

  As they stood tiny on the golden dais looking up at him, Sarnod gave Whisper Bird and T’sais each three spells to use.

  “Be wary of my brother Gandreel,” he told them, “for he too was once a sorcerer, if of a minor sort, and he will have found ways to harness those around him to his will. As for Vendra, beware her guile.

  “Know too that the minutes may pass differently for you in the UNDERHIND. What is a half-hour for me here may be a year for you, and thus you may return after much adventure to find it has been but a single day for me.” Miniaturization was an uncertain thaumaturgy and it made mischievous play with time.

  Sarnod levitated each in turn, and spun each without protest into one of the two open eyes—and thus into the UNDERHIND.

  After they were gone, The Mouth grimaced and said, “Much may be lost in the seeking.”

  The hook in Sarnod’s heart drove deeper.

  The Nose of Memory, now akin to a canvas sack filled with soggy bones, expelled one last sigh.

  Whisper Bird neither felt nor cared to feel the foetid closeness of the level of the UNDERHIND known to some as the Place of Mushrooms and Silence—this continuous cave with its monstrous bone-white lobsters waiting in dank water for the unwary; its thick canopy of green-and-purple-and-gray fungus that listened and watched; its bats and rats and blind carnivorous pigs; its huge and rapacious worms like wingless dragons, all of it boiled in a pervasive stench of decay, all lit by a pale emerald luminescence that seemed more akin to the bottom of the sea.

  Invisible he might be otherwise, but not soundless, not smell-less, and thus his nerves were on edge. Even his invisibility itself was an illusion, an effect of the spell that had robbed him of his human form and condemned him to live not just on the Dying Earth but in far Embelyon simultaneously—so that he walked forever in two places at once, neither here nor there, his body like an image seen in twinned rows of mirrors facing each other down a long corridor. Even now, as he searched for the man and woman Sarnod had so ruthlessly banished from his life, a part of Whisper Bird explored the plains and forests of Embelyon.

  Surrounded by so many watchful ears attached to dangerous bodies, Whisper Bird slowed his thoughts and stretched out his fear so thin that he could barely feel it. Thus fortifie, he continued on until, finally, he became uncomfortably aware of a rising hum, a distant sound that trembled through the ground carried by the uncanny whispers of the creatures around him. The sound marched closer and closer, resolved into the words “bloat toad,” repeated again and again like a warning or chant.

  Around him now floated great white fungal boweries that laid down lines like jellyfish trawling for the unwary and wounded. A cloud of whipping mushroom tendrils. A pyramid of screaming flesh. Moving within their poison sting unharmed were horrible visps and also corpse-white gaun: long-limbed, strong, be-fanged, stalking through the perpetual night.

  Invoking his first spell, Phandaal’s Litany of Silent Coercion, he brought a gaun close and projected the images of Gandreel and Vendra into it.

  Have you seen either one?

  The gaun’s thoughts—like spiders with tiny moist bodies and long, barbed legs—made him shudder: I will rend you limb-from-limb. I will call my brothers and sisters, and we will feast on your flesh.

  Whisper Bird repeated his question and felt the gaun’s brain constrict from the force of the spell.

  Beyond this cavern, beyond the corridor that follows, beyond the Bloat Toad, in the village there, you will find what you seek.

  What is the Bloat Toad? Whisper Bird asked.

  It is both your riddle and your answer, the gaun replied.

  What does this mean?

  But the gaun just laughed, and Whisper Bird, not wishing to suffer the retaliation of its fast-approaching brethren, Suggested that the creature batter its head against the corridor wall until it was dead, and then moved on through the darkness.

  All around him now came the vibration of a discordant music fashioned from muttered thoughts, rising full-throated and deep from the dark: bloattoad bloattoad bloattoad.

  If Whisper Bird must go slow and silent, so T’sais Prime must go fast and quick, and if never a bird had she been, it would have been to her benefit to be one. She arrived in the UNDERHIND known as The Place of Maddening Glass after “nightfall,” when only the faint green glow from far above signaled the ceiling of this place, the light bleeding off from the level above, where Whisper Bird labored in his quest as she in hers. She was surrounded by a hundred thousand jagged gleaming surfaces—cracked sheets of mirror, giant purple-tinged cusps—reflecting such a welter of images that she could not tell what was real and what was not.

  Ghoul bears and Deodands were fast-approaching, hot to her scent. Not built for the adventure of close combat, T’sais used her first spell, of Flying Travel, to summon Twk-Men. They descended from the sky on their dragonflies, here as large as small dragons.

  Four bore her upward upon a raft of twigs lashed together and set between them, the space between the flickering dance of the dragonflies’ wings so slight that T’sais thought they must surely overlap, and, out of rhythm, plummet to the jagged surface. But they did not.

  At first, the Twk-Men seemed so solicitous and friendly that she wondered aloud why they had been banished to this place.

  “I dared to ask for a thimbleful more of sugar for giving Sarnod information on his enemies,” said one.

  “I dared to fly over the lake while he watched,” said the second. “It was summer and I was feeling lazy and desired to skim the surface, dip my dragonfly’s wings into the water.”

  “I cannot remember why I am here,” said the third. “But it seems not that much different than being on the surface. We die here and we die there, and though we cannot see the true sun, we know it dies, too.”

  The fourth Twk-Man, the leader of them all, would have none of her questions, though, and asked, “Whither do you go, and why, and do you have a pinch of salt for us?”

  “I am seeking these two exiles,” T’sais Prime replied, and projected the images of Vendra and Gandreel into all four minds of the Twk-Men, which set them to talking amongst themselves in the lightning-fast speech typical of their kind.

  “We know one of them. The woman,” the lead Twk-Man said. “How much salt will you give us to be led to her?”

  T’sais’ heart leapt, for she did not wish to spend longer in this place than necessar
y.

  “A pinch of salt here is either a boulder, or, if it came with me, too small even for you to barter for,” T’sais Prime said. “You will have to content yourself with the compulsion of the spell.”

  “Fair enough,” the Twk-Man said, although he did not sound happy, and the buzz of his dragonfly’s wings became louder.

  “Where can I find her, Twk-Man?”

  The Twk-Man laughed. “She lies upon a raft carried through the air by four unfortunate Twk-Men.”

  “Surely this is some form of joke,” T’sais Prime said.

  “Perhaps the joke is played on you,” the Twk-Man said grimly. “Perhaps your quest is different than you think.”

  “Tend to your flying, and take me somewhere safe, lest I unleash another spell,” T’sais said, although she needed to hoard all that Sarnod had given her.

  Smiling savagely, the Twk-Man turned in his saddle and held up a mirror to T’sais’ face. “In this place Sarnod has banished us to, we all see each others’ faces everywhere. But perhaps in your world, you cannot see yourself?”

  And it was true, she saw with shock—how could she not have realized it before?—Sarnod’s former lover shared every element and description of her own face. Was she sent, then, by trickery into her own oblivion, or was there truly a quest for a Vendra, for a Gandreel?

  “I do not like your tricks, Twk-Man,” T’sais said. “I do not like them at all.”

  “It is a dark night,” the Twk-Man said, “to fall so far, should your spell fade before we leave you.”

  The ill-fated gaun proved truthful in his directions. No bigger than a man’s fist, the Bloat Toad sat in the middle of a vast and empty cavern that was covered with dull red splotches and smelled vaguely of spoiled meat. In Whisper Bird’s imagination, the Bloat Toad had been as large as a brontotaubus and twice as deadly. In fact, except for its glowing gold eyes and the prism of blue-and-green that strobed over its be-pimpled skin, the Bloat Toad looked ordinary.

  Whisper Bird stood in front of the creature in that cathedral of dust motes and dry air: invisible shadow confronting placable foe.

  It stared back at him.

  Was it oddly larger now?

  Or was Whisper Bird smaller?

  Whisper Bird took a step to the side of the Bloat Toad, and as his foot came down—

  KRAAAOOCK

  —was lifted up by the leathery skin of an amphibian suddenly rendered enormous—and smashed against the side of the cavern. All the breath went out of Whisper Bird’s delicate chest. Even though he existed in two places at once, it still hurt like a hundred knives. The Bloat Toad’s tough but doughy flesh, which stank of long-forgotten swamps, held him in place for several horrible moments.

  Then the pressure went away. Whisper Bird fell limply to the ground.

  When he had recovered, Whisper Bird saw that the Bloat Toad sat once more in the center of the room. The toad was again small, strobing green-blue, blue-green.

  Now Whisper Bird understood the nature of the splotches on the walls. Had he existed in just this one world, he would already be dead.

  After many minutes of reflection and recovery, twice more Whisper Bird tried to pass the Bloat Toad—once creeping stealthy, once running fast without guile. Twice more, impervious to accompanying spells and with croak victorious, the Bloat Toad filled the cavern, re-crushing Whisper Bird. Until it felt to him as though he were a bag of sand, and the sand was all sliding out of a hole.

  Bent at a wretched angle, hobbling, and badly shaken, he eventually stood once more before the Bloat Toad.

  Now, in the extremity of his pain, Whisper Bird turned as much of his attention as he could to his second self in Embelyon, experiencing its forests, its rippling fields that changed color to reflect the sky. There, his family, wife and infant son, had lived in a cottage in a glade deep in the forest where they grew food in a garden and counted themselves lucky to be beneath the notice of the mighty princes and wizards who struggled for dominion over all. They did not care that the Earth was dying, but only that they were living. Who knew now how old his son was, whether there were streaks of gray in his wife’s hair? Nor whether either would recognize him as human.

  At some future moment, Whisper Bird might be whole and be once more with them, but for that he must move past this moment now.

  As before, Whisper Bird stared at the Bloat Toad and the Bloat Toad stared at Whisper Bird.

  “Do you talk, I wonder, Bloat Toad? Are you mindless or mind-full? Is there nothing that will move you?” Whisper Bird said, already flinching in anticipation of his words activating the toad’s power.

  But Bloat Toad cared no more for words than for the particulars of Whisper Bird’s servitude. The creature stared up at Whisper Bird and made a smug croaking sound. Kraaoock…

  A more direct soul would have tried to smash the Bloat Toad to death with a hammer and danced on his pulped remains. But Whisper Bird had no such weapon; all he had as a tool was his ghostly assassin-like absence.

  And this gave him an idea, for Whisper Bird could split himself again if he so chose, an act of will only possible because he held the knowledge of his Essential Sundering within him like a half-healed wound.

  Thus decided, Whisper Bird stood in front of the Bloat Toad—and leapt to both sides at once, like two identical wings with no body between them. It felt like deciding to die.

  Bloat Toad, rising with incredible speed, gave out a confused croak—each eye following a different Whisper Bird—and winked out of existence.

  Over the plains of broken glass, the Twk-Men took T’sais Prime. Soon, she understood the true nature of the glass, and why none lived amongst it for very long. Each shard had captured and now reflected the light of some more ancient time, which played out in an insanity of fractured prisms. As they traveled, she saw laid out below her, and identified for her by the Twk-Men, the Gardens of Mazirian, a raging Thrang the Ghoul Bear, impossibly large, and Sadlark in battle against the demon Underherd. She saw Kutt the Mad King leading his menagerie of magically created monsters, Kolghut’s Tower of Frozen Blood, and, most terribly, a forever-replicating scene over many leagues, of Golickan Kodek the Conqueror’s infamous pillaging of the people of Bautiku and subsequent creation of a squirming pyramid of human flesh five hundred feet tall. And, yes, eventually, though she chose to ignore them, many reflections of her own self, some tiny, some huge and monstrous, bestriding the landscape below, brought out from the crazed glass. After awhile, T’sais’ initial horror gave way to such fascination that she could not bear to look down, as if her interest was unwholesome.

  “What happens to those who walk the surface?” she asked the Twk-Men as they struggled with their burden. They were headed for what looked like a series of dull, irregular clouds on the horizon.

  “They go mad,” one replied.

  “They become what they see,” another said.

  “They forget to eat or drink.”

  “They perish, believing all the time that they dine in the banquet hall of Kandive the Golden or are whispering in the ear of Turjan the Sorcerer.”

  “How did Sarnod create the glass?”

  The lead Twk-Man laughed in an unpleasant way. “That is beyond Sarnod’s ken. The glass is all that remains of the all-seeing Orb of Parassis, shattered in the War of the Underhinds. Sarnod’s luck is that it inhabits his prison, making the lives of vanquished enemies worse by far than without.”

  “And yet,” T’sais replied, “the glass illumines the UNDERHIND.”

  Day and night had no meaning in a world with no sun, dying or otherwise. Everything around them existed in a state of perpetual dawn or dusk, depending on the brilliance of the broken glass. The bright flashes of gold and green beneath them as ancient wars were fought, courtly dances re-enacted, and ghost-galleys sailed long dry oceans, now created a kind of weak sunrise.

  Soon, T’sais saw that ahead of them the clouds had become strange oblong balloons that moved, their tan hides pulsing, tiny limbs stickin
g out from the sides, heads mere dots. “Floating mermelants,” the Twk-Men called them, and, strapped to these creatures by means of ropes and cables and pulleys, were the frames of ships, canisters, balconies, and baskets. Even more peculiar, a vast tangled garden of flowers, vines, and vegetables hung from the moist moss-lined hull of each airship.

  “Who are they, the people who live here?” T’sais asked.

  “Raiders and builders and gardeners,” the head Twk-Man replied. “Murderers and bandits and farmers and sky sailors.”

  “How can they be all of these things?”

  The Twk-Man smiled grimly. “To be sent here, you must be a rogue of some kind, but to live here you must become something else.”

  “What if I do not desire to be taken there?” A sudden sense of helplessness overwhelmed her, despite her spells. To be beholden to the Twk-Men irked her, but to be dependent on strangers not bound to her will would be worse.

  “You have no choice. We will not take you by air raft across this entire world; we will risk your already weakening spell if you do not free us. Besides, these people roam everywhere.”

  So saying, they increased their speed and soon left her on the deck of one of the ships, the living balloon above snorting and expelling strong yet sweet-smelling gasses.

  The ship’s captain waited for her, his crew of ruffians hanging back, although whether from respect or caution, T’sais did not know.

  The Captain had two eye patches over his left eye, as if whatever lay hidden there had need of further restraint. The remaining light blue eye made him look younger than his years. A thick black beard covered much of his face. He had the wide, muscular build she favored in a man, and he smelled not unpleasantly of pipe tobacco.

  Just as T’sais found it difficult to forget that the living creature above her was all that kept the ship from plummeting to the broken glass below, so too it was difficult to forget that in her world the Captain was smaller than a thimble.