To the east, on the barren slope of Sunderbreak Fell, sometimes were glimpsed the strange lights that hovered unwinkingly over the onyx tower of the Sorcerer Iszmagn. To the west lengthened the dun shadows of the Ineluctable Forest, slowly overrunning roofless crofts and weedy plantations. The forest garmented the abandoned hill-land beyond, which was said to now be the haunt of the titan Magnatz, recently come from destroying the great metropolis of nacre-walled Undolumei, where the Three Ivory Princesses once dwelt in opiate bliss. From this direction, as if to lend gravity to the rumor, oft could be heard the echo of enormous convulsions, for whose origin no antiquarian of Old Romarth could offer an undisquieting theorem.
The sorcerer Iszmagn was known to have sent a split-tongued crow to the Chief Invigilator of the city, with this offer: to bend his unearthly art to the task of turning aside Magnatz. The price for this theurgy was exorbitant: six hundred fair gem-studded illuminated folios unearthed from beneath Romarth, and twelve of the fairest virgins in the city, blonde of hair and younger than sixteen winters, and two thousand talents of gold-weight, and the sacred white monkey from the pagoda of the beast-god Auugh. The Chief Invigilator pondered the decision, consulting with augers who watched the birds and astrologers who watched the stars.
From that high place, seeing all the world underfoot, all things in order, and with the great city and its red-tiled roofs and green glass towers silent below, chimneys threaded with blue smoke, Manxolio Quinc would be aware of a profound satisfaction. Certainly there were sorcerers, dark forests, titans, smugglers, nomads, and Deodands. But, what of them? What harm could they do, in the little time that remained to the world? History had entered its repose. No further great wars, experiments, or deeds were left to be done. It was an era for no effort more excessive than quaffing a hot rum toddy, before life on earth closed its eyes and sank into rest.
An Importunity
This routine was interrupted one morning as he descended the municipal stairs from the Citadel down toward the human-occupied Antiquarian Quarter. The third landing, called Leaper’s Landing, was hemmed in on two sides by statues of famous suicides in postures of defenestration. The dawn was wan that day, and the sun had a number of pustules on its surface: in the uncertain illumination, there seemed to be an extra figure among the statues.
Manxolio thought that the figure was contemplating a suicide in the gulf of air underfoot, as the hunched shoulders of this silhouette seemed poised as if to leap. It being no concern of his, he made as of to stroll past. Only then did Manxolio realize that the silhouette was facing him, and its posture suddenly seemed one of menace.
A man’s voice issued from the hood. “You are Manxolio Quinc? I seek you.”
“I bear that name.” Manxolio casually lifted the Implacable Dark Iron Wand and extended it to its full length. “Observe this instrument! It dates from the Nineteenth Eon, the time of the Knowledgeable Pharials. It is said to govern eight different actuators of energy, three aspects of visible refulgence, four more no longer visible, and an astute principle of anti-vitalistic projection.”
The man came closer. Manxolio tapped the heel of the rod on the flagstones of the landing, eliciting an almost-inaudible throb from the shaft. A dark nimbus shivered through the surface of the dull metal.
“With this,” continued Manxolio, “Quordaal the Rarely Compassionate slew the leviathan Amfadrang at a single impulse, annihilating the beast! See! The otherworldly vigor already begins to tremble through the weapon’s unquiet heart!”
The figure said, “No.”
Manxolio waited to hear more, but the cloaked man was now apparently caught in a reverie. “No? To what purport do you utter that monosyllabic negative?”
The figure sighed, and then spoke. “I mean, no, your estimation is understated. The wand is from an earlier time, the middle Eighteenth Eon: the design follows the precepts of Thorsingolian engineers. The energetic forces it commands are correctly numbered at twenty-one. Stroking the Implacable Dark Iron Wand to the ground merely activates its repair-cycle, which, if the cells had not been drained by effusion, would make no noise. Only an empty jar rattles so. The connection with the central potentium has been abrogated, leaving only secondary functions viable. Also, the Leviathan was not evaporated, as you said. The incorrupt serpent-corpse clogged the Szonglei River and blocked the harbor of Romarth for three centuries and a half, and thence was mined for bone and scale and cartilage, and other valuable by-products, for several luxurious decades.”
Hiding a sensation of dread, Manxolio tapped the wand again, silencing it, wondering what would next eventuate. But the hooded stranger stood motionless.
Manxolio spoke in a voice of studied casualness: “This wand is the brother of the baton of the Curator of Man, and the Antiquarians of this city once, ages ago, communed with his archives. In my grandfather’s time, the weapon blew a vent through the north slope of Mount Scagg and out the other side. The tunnel exists to this day. My father, the last of the Remonstrators, could unsaddle a cataphract with a jolt. When I was younger, enough virtue remained in the marrow to deliver a vehement twinge that could unnerve even a full-grown forest-gleft. In any case, it is a stout truncheon, and I know how to break bones with it, and a hook unfolds from the end to allow me to use it like a peavey or picaroon, or, if my work require it, to impale a skull.” He opened this spike, which stood out from the shaft like a gnomon, giving the wand the aspect of a long-handled pickaxe.
The hooded man said, “Your work! What is its nature?”
“A strange question! You know the secrets of the greatest heirloom of the Quinc bloodline, and my name, and seek me, and do not know what I am in this town, splendid Old Romarth?”
“Your name was suggested to me by a pot-boy in the tavern, for I pestered him with questions while the landlord beat me.”
“Why did the landlord beat you?”
“Inadvertently, I cheated him of his due: your coinage is unfamiliar. Your people use scales pried from the belly of a aquatic megafauna for your bezants.”
Manxolio was taken aback at this comment. Could it be so? Putting his hand into his poke, he drew out two large blue bezants and a smaller pink. These were hemi-circular flakes of steel-hard substance. Enamel? Armor? In the dim rose light, Manxolio squinted at the coins in new wonder. The scales of Amfadrang, perhaps? The notion was unnerving.
Manxolio dismissively put away his coins. “I am an Effectuator—the last of that profession on all of Old Earth. The nature of my work is, in return for suitable remuneration, to expedite legal awkwardnesses, gather information of value, discourage effrontery, observe nuances, and to apply, when needed, deterrents to malefactors.”
“A resolver of mysteries?”
“Ahh…! You seek an Effectuation? No doubt your paramour sweats and swoons in the arms of another! Your outrage is understandable. With a clew-hook and fine thread, I can hoist myself to the most difficult vantages by rooftop or wall, and peer in through casements or chimneypot, using a technique I call the Surreptitious Dangle-Glass.”
“Suspicion of infidelity is not my impetus.”
“You display a charming innocence! Best to be sure. With no more noise than a shadow glancing along the snow, I can trail even an alert woman to discover the meaning of her unexplained absences, or rare lapses of memory.”
“While your clandestine skills are doubtless unparalleled, my needs are otherwise. Can you find missing men? Lost goods?”
“Such is a specialty of mine, if I may speak without boasting. What have you lost? What is your name and family? What man do you want me to find?”
“I wish to engage your services,” declared the young man. “I have lost my essential being. I cannot answer you my name: it is gone. The missing man…is me.”
The man threw back his hood. He was bruised along his cheek, and the quirk of his mouth suggested pain in his tooth or jaw. He was a slight but well-knit youth with clear eyes, who carried himself with an unconscious dignity so natural th
at Manxolio did not at first realize that, beneath the heavy cloak, the youth wore slops apparently from a rag-pickers wagon.
A Question of Memory
The stranger was exasperating to the patience of even so equitable a temper as Manxolio’s. His conversation consisted of a never-ending series of inquiries, over matters both small and great, philosophical and childlike, to the point of bewilderment. The stranger was also prone to eccentric behavior, stooping to examine objects in the street, craning his neck to see details of the rooftops.
They soon came to the domicile of Manxolio Quinc. Within, the parlor was walled with green and gold, and the posts had been carved into an intricate pattern of birds and lianas.
A fire crackled warmly on the grate to one side, and Bittern, the only servant in the house, set out warm drinks in porcelain cups. Garments of Manxolio’s father found in an old chest, able to fit the frame of the young man, had been exchanged for the rags, which Manxolio had decreed insufficient for a patron of the art of effectuation.
Only with difficulty could Manxolio restrain the young man from crawling the carpet to inspect the wainscoting joists, or fingering the carven roof-posts, asking questions about the artist, his school of craft, and the tools used in the woodwork. Finally, he was settled in a wing-backed chair near the fire.
Manxolio spoke meditatively, “Before I speak, let me impart my wisdom, an old man to a young.”
“Speak on. I have a deep thirst for wisdom.”
“Just this: ponder the advantage of ceasing to inquire further into your lost self-being.”
The youth raised his eyebrows. “What advantage?”
“The red sun shivers and is soon to die, whereupon all life on Old Earth will grope in the gloom and freeze. In the face of such an impending actuality, you must weigh the chance that your lost essential self once enjoyed a happy life, and that the restoration of your essence would return you to that happiness: over against this, weigh the carefree solitude you currently enjoy, a man with neither known debts nor parental obligations. Consider! What if you recovered your selfhood, and learned that a long voyage was required to return you to your proper place? The sun could fail before the voyage was done. Reaching home, perhaps an unadvantageous marriage, or durance in military service, or the completion of an onerous religious vow awaits you, involving acts of unusual and disquieting self-abnegation, chastity, or temperance. No, the statistics do not favor the resumption of an interrupted life. The wise course is to accept your condition with the equilibrium of a philosopher.”
The youth shook his head briefly. “The hunger for knowledge aches in my soul like an intrusive void.”
Manxolio nodded. “You speak like one who is well-read (indeed, one whose knowledge is beyond credible belief) but nothing of the strangeness of wizardry hangs about you: too hale a look gleams in your eye for you to be one who has memorized the polydimensional runes of continuum-jarring magic, nor have your fingernails been yellowed and stained by trifling with alchemic reagents. Not a wizard, then. But who else studies? You are not an Antiquarian. And yet your color and accent are local. You are from this land.”
“Then who am I? What befell me?”
“A dereliction of the mnemonic centers of the cortex can sometimes be caused by a shock to the skull that disarranges the fibers and nodules of the brain. You have no head wound sufficient for this. A second alternative is psychic distress, or a convulsion of purely spiritual influences caused by phrensy. Again, you are too oriented, too knowing, to be a sufferer of this type of malady. The final alternative is magic.”
“Are there theurgist’s draughts to enchant the memory?”
“Perhaps, but you exhibit none of the signs. No. I deduce a power more primal than mere pharmacopoeia at work. The IOUN stones, geodes of solidified primal ylem, collapsed by gravity in the heart of dead stars, and extracted by means too exotic for description, represent an ulterior order of being: they are said to be able to soak up the vibrations of thaumaturgy like a tippler drinking wine, and to drain soul and vital quintessence. I know of but one agency able to drain the very memories from the intellect: the IOUN stones!”
“Who controls this astonishing efficacy?”
“To my knowledge, none. The wizards of the various lands fritter away their lore in exchanges of morbid glamour and poisonous dream-weft, belittling each other with tricks, or devising homunculi. Any wizard administering such matchless strength as the IOUN stones bestow would have made himself supreme over his peers forthwith.”
The youth nodded. “This implies I was bereft by a wizard only recently come into the possession of such stones, who has not yet had time—or lacks utterly the inclination—to impose his will on the world.”
Manxolio sipped his tea meditatively. “You seem capable of clear deductions, which is at odds with your mental defect. How do you know of such mysteries, as, to pick a merely random example, the exact specifics of the Dark Iron Wand?”
“An afflatus, a ghost, an echo, seems to tremble in my brain. Now it is gone.” A haunted look shivered through the young man’s countenance. “I seem to see the tapestry of knowledge as a vast and varied landscape, picked out with fulvous hues of gold, tawny, or silver-white, emerald and aquamarine, seething with the shapes of man and beast, dates and places, an intricate structure of mathematics, more colossal than a tower. Then the mind-cloud returns, and all is snatched away.”
Manxolio, who knew friends of his own age that suffered from senility or depredations of time, was disquieted. “In any case, there is a second and obvious clue as to your origin. The question arises: how long across the surface of the senile Earth could a man bereft of memory, penniless and weaponless, wander? Your face betrays no signs of long fasting; your flesh is not cracked with thirst, nor do you bear scars such as might be found upon someone who has escaped the alarming claws of forest Deodands, dire-wolves, flesh-eager anthropophages, or one-eyed Arimaspians. You have hardly even a growth of beard. What is your earliest memory?”
“I saw a star. I was standing near a great rock covered with ochre moss, and I wept.”
“From what direction did you approach this city?”
“I am not sure. The stars look wrong to me, as if they are shifted from their accustomed positions.”
“Curious. I can put no meaning to that comment.”
“I remember walking along a dry stream-bed.”
Manxolio spread his hands, breaking into a smile. “That is the river Scaum, drunk dry by the titan Magnatz, who is rumored to be lumbering through the lands west of here, toppling mountains and trampling towers. If you came afoot, it will be a simple matter, less than an afternoon’s ride, to follow your trail on mounted steeds, perhaps with an ahulph to track the scent, and discover where your essence was lost.”
The young man came to his feet. “Your thought process has struck upon an elegant solution! When can we begin?”
“Ah! I do not wish to trifle with a magician who controls the efficacy of IOUN Stones. Even to have spoken to you involves me in discomforting jeopardy. Who knows what clairvoyance this mage might command? His sandestins could be anywhere. A whorl of mystic excrescence could even now be being parsed from the hide of some chained demon-being, to be flung across intervening miles from some warlock’s laboratory, to shatter the panels of my doors, intrude into the chamber, and reduce me instantly to soot. No! The question of proper remuneration asserts itself.”
And, with a delicate motion, he drew the Implacable Dark Iron Wand from its holster, and laid it in the young stranger’s lap.
A Question of Proper Remuneration
Manxolio Quinc said meditatively, “While I might, hypothetically, be delighted to exert my proficiency on your behalf merely for the intellectual pleasure that comes of the exercise of one’s faculties, in practice, the Law of Equipoise must intercede. Savants have studied the cosmos and determined that for each action there must be a corresponding counter-action; for each debt, payment; for each effort, recompense; fo
r each injustice, revenge! When all the balancing forces have countered each other, all stresses released, neutrality will dominate, and the universe sink into peaceful, if exhausted, oblivion.”
“A dismal theory. Suppose it so: then what did those who concocted it receive in return for its invention? If they acted from selfless love of truth, their theory is invalidated.”
Manxolio scowled in confusion. “Tell me, first, can the force ever be restored to this wand?”
The youth gazed at him with narrow eyes. “You could make yourself a power greater than ever was the Grand Motholam. Is that the payment you wish?”
Manxolio shook his head. “My ambitions are far less exquisite. I crave that the Implacable Dark Iron Wand be restored to its legendary magnificence that I might protect myself.”
“From your enemies?”
“Mine are not so fearsome. From yours.”
The youth, without a further word, unfolded the wand, touched a section with a quick flick of his fingers. To Manxolio’s astonishment, the outer surface of the Implacable Dark Iron Wand opened with a ringing like the clatter of coins.
The innards thus exposed consisted of a tightly-wound spine of multicolored strands and curving threads of glass and metal and fire, to which were affixed black metallic disks, slivers of pale crystal, hissing orbs of eye-defeating nothingness, and points of light smaller and bluer than the tails of fireflies.
“How did you open it?” asked Manxolio in a strangled voice.
“Manually. The thought-sensitive nodes that would normally render the wand dehiscent upon unspoken command are inoperative. Depressing these two carbuncles works the molecular latch.”
Songs of the Dying Earth Page 44