Songs of the Dying Earth

by Gardner Dozois

  “Those two…How abnormal!” Manxolio found himself leaning foreword. Recovering his dignity, and not wishing to seem at a loss, now he sank back in his chair cushions, saying nonchalantly, “Neither my father nor my grandfather imparted to me that such a latch existed. Obviously, there was no need.”

  The young man gave him a penetrating look. “You have owned this instrument for how many years, and you never made a systematic inspection of it?”

  Manxolio groped for an answer, but the youth had already returned to his task. “What are you doing now?”

  “I am tuning the internal register to my life-patterns, so that I may have the diagnostic index inspired into my conceptual lobe. There is a sufficient residual charge of nervous flux remaining, I hope: otherwise, I will not be able to read the instrument.”

  At once, the little blue dots of light shining from the inner works flickered and went dim.

  The young man seemed distraught. “A piece of ill luck! Even a partial investment of the thought-energy extender has drained the primary operative!” He closed the hemicylindrical housing, and telescoped the Wand back to a short baton. No whisper came from the black metal

  “It is inert! You’ve killed it!” cried Manxolio, leaping to his feet. “I have known that artifact since childhood! You are a murderer!”

  “Do not indulge in anthropomorphism. I am still effecting a repair.” The young man rose unhurriedly to his feet, unfolded the wand once again, and tapped the heel sharply against the carpet. To the infinite relief of Manxolio, the familiar low moan, a throb of power, issued softly from the wand.

  The youth now performed a strange act. Facing one direction, then another, he moved the wand back and forth in a slow arc. The susurration rose and fell in pitch.

  “What do these antics mean?” said Manxolio, his eyes wide.

  Again, the youth gave Manxolio an odd look. “You have never noticed that the sound given off by the repair cycle alters in pitch and consistence?”

  Manxolio nodded brusquely. “Of a certainty! Am not I the Earth’s last Effectuator, a man of perspicacity, an acute observer of details? I have often waved the wand to make the pitch oscillate. It frightens suspects into odd confessions.”

  The young stranger said, “But the cause of the change did not provoke your curiosity? You never mapped the waveforms against a graph? You never followed the variation in sound to its source?”

  Manxolio gazed at him blankly. “I assume you mean to make some trenchant point, but, at the moment, your meaning escapes me.”

  The youth favored him with an easy smile. “Grasp the Wand lightly. The sound will climb in pitch as we grow closer to the source of the signal, which implies an energy supply. There may be a potentium nearby, at which we can restore the instrument to power.”

  A Question of Descent

  In the middle of a wide square paved in alternating brown and black tile, the two men walked beneath the shadow of a black derrick. A ring of knee-high white stones surrounded a chasm. They stepped over and stood at the lip, looking down into the Cleft.

  The lip itself was ragged, and broken tiles canted dangerously over the dark hole. The sun, like a bubble of rosy wine, had risen toward noon, and the rust-colored light slanted wanly into the pit. A vast space was revealed, with what seemed colonnades and corridors opening up upon a central well.

  The tiles of the street were nothing more than the rooftiles of a building immense beyond description: soil and stone had accumulated atop this roof. The city later erected atop it was no more significant than the nests of rooks found in the eaves of barns.

  The architecture underneath was old, with that exactitude of beauty and detail evidenced nowhere in the above-ground buildings; but rubbish and broken rock, slick with mushrooms and spores, lay everywhere. There was a noise of dripping water echoing from the gloomy depths.

  A squadron of soldiers, led by two officers in square-topped plumed helmets, and wearing scaly jackets made of hard, brightly-colored flakes, approached at a quickstep from the wrought-iron wickets fronting the Magistracy building. In their hands were lances with tips of sharpened glass, and large round shields of transparent substance.

  Manxolio said in a low voice: “We are discovered. These are the Uhlan Elite, the privy guard of the Invigilator’s Order. Such is the price of overzealous curiosity. I might be able to deter them from trifling with us, if they respect my rank. Do not aggravate them with questions!”

  The young man lifted his eyes and saw them. “Note the vermeil, purple, rose, and lavender hue of the scales they wear. Their armor is worked from a leviathan’s hide. The bucklers are made from shed eye-cusps.” He seemed not overly concerned with their approach. “The Dark Iron Wand points downward, and south-southwest. That third level: see the dark residue of the radium lamps? Behind those cracked valves beneath that fallen architrave is an energetic source.”

  Now the men-at-arms were at hand. The men saluted Manxolio with a flourish of their glassy spears and a click of their boots, and the two officers greeted him with polite words.

  Manxolio said genteelly, “Permit me to introduce two of the Invigilators, upon whose valor the peace of Old Romarth with tranquil confidence depends: here is Ullfard of House Urilim, son of Oothbard; and this is Right-Lieutenant Mmamneron of House Mm, son of Mmaeal, a didact and antiquarian. Much of his family’s riches come from the Cleft, and so his fathers have made an avocation of its study.” Then, turning to them: “This is…ah…call him Anomus. He is assisting me in effectuating a case. The details of the matter are delicate, and a nicety of discretion is called for. I trust I need say no more?” He favored them with an engaging smile.

  In a soft voice, Ullfard said, “Noble sirs, I cannot help but trouble you to notice that you have overstepped the bounds of demarcation, quite clearly inscribed in this circle of white stones circumvallating the aperture of the Cleft. This is a dereliction of the First Order against the civic mandates. I enjoin you, out of the graciousness of your high station, sirs, to remove yourselves with no delay.”

  Even as he spoke, there came a voice from the pit, a hushed whisper, and then a murmur as of many voices. In the dim light, figures could be seen, thin, bone-white and wild-eyed, dressed in rags. These men were peering from the tumbled rocks that clustered near the corridor-ends. The Cleft itself was infundibular, so that the Cleft offered a diminishing view of each successive level. The ragged men among the columns and broken walls of the first level seemed fully human; lower down, where there was less light, could be glimpsed larger, thinner shapes, perhaps of Ska or Visitants or beast-human hybrids.

  Anomus (or so he was called now) spoke up. “Sirs! I see children’s faces down there, thin and scarred with disease. If this is where you emplace your criminals, how came these to be there?”

  Manxolio winced.

  Ullfard politely answered, “In the ordinary course of nature, once female felons, murderesses, mulct-evaders, scolds, harridans, or strumpets, run afoul of the edicts, they are lowered into the Cleft. The convicted women wed, or are taken without wedlock, there in the dark, and produce whelps, who are the small faces you see.”

  Anomus said, “But why is not the platform of your derrick lowered for the children to ascend? They have committed no offense.”

  Ullfard smiled. “In principle, I suppose you are correct, but modern legal theory holds that no child is truly human unless raised into the sunlight, since our race is self-evidently a diurnal one. These creatures are nocturnal. While they might biologically be children, in the legal sense they occupy a less dignified category. Besides, who knows what crimes these dark beings commit against each other in the wet and stinking pits of under-earth? They are surely guilty of something! In any case, I fear, gentle sirs, that I must insist with unseemly persistence that you remove yourself from this area. None may approach the Cleft.”

  Now a voice spoke from underfoot. “Ullfard, Ullfard, of Urilim! We ache with hunger! Lower the platform, let the viands and good brow
n beer be bestowed! We thirst! We sicken of eating mushrooms! It is I, Chomd, the chieftain of the Northwest Buried Corridor, who speaks!”

  Ullfard clashed his spear against his transparent shield, producing a ringing clatter, surprisingly loud. “Silence, worms of the underworld! I speak with men of stature and distinction! Draw back from the open air! Now is not the hour when you are allowed to see the sunlight! Draw back, I say, or I will call the archers. They have plucked fresh needles of potent import from the gnarled limbs of cacti, which you will mourn to find embedded in your flesh! Draw back!”

  The voice spoke again: “Noble and kindly Ullfard of Urilim! Important news! A swimmer in the mud discovered an inundated hatch in the second level, leading into the treasure houses of the third level, where, dry and untouched, corridor upon corridor of mummified remains, still seated in the postures they assumed in life, rear among the broken splendor of their libraries and relict-halls! Rare crystals taken from a mausoleum we have found, the brain-stone of a grue, the vestments of the matriarchs of the Nineteenth Aeon, as well as codices and tomes. All rarities, worth stoops of wine and fat hens! The books are illuminated in precise hand, crafted with capitals in red ink, and set with tiny nodules of malachite. Lower the platform, the beloved platform, forty-nine feet. Send us the hens, for we hunger, or we will burn the books, and no advantage will there be to your fairs and merchant houses!”

  A second voice, this one dimmer, as if farther off, cried out then: “Heed him not, Ullfard! Gward the Huge, hetman of the Third Dungeon importunes! We have legal title to those books; they were found on our level. Lower the platform ninety-one feet, and we will pour out with abundant hand the folios and geodes from the ancient glory of Romarth! Send us lamps, lamps with oil, and more treasures will be yours! Send us weapons, dirks and derringers, petards and partisans, ranceurs and guisarmes with iron beaks, that we may drive back the impertinent trespassers of the second level! We are harder-working, and will heap up in vertiginous piles the ancestral heirlooms for you to sell!”

  Ullfard clashed his spear against his shield. “Silence! Draw back! Or shall I order the sluices opened?”

  Mmamneron of Mm said nervously to Anomus, “The talk of the Inhumed is often wild, and full of rare allusions, difficult to interpret! When they speak of selling the priceless archeological treasures of Old Romarth, of course, this is a short expression, a synecdoche, really, for reposing these rarities in the museums of the Antiquarians, where they are preserved for scholarly study.”

  Anomus said to the Invigilators, “We mean to enter the Cleft, explore certain corridors and shafts of the buried city, and return. We will lose the signal if we delay. What is the procedure?”

  Ullfard said unctuously, “There is no procedure. Without the Magistrate’s order, none can be lowered into the Cleft, and even that only after a disquisition and official hearing, and a consultation of the auguries. As for now, by approaching the Cleft, you trespass, and you must withdraw. Such is the unrelenting law.”

  Anomus said, “What is the penalty for defying this law?”

  Ullfard blew out his cheeks. “Why, in a severe case, or if the workforce needs replenishment, the punishment for trespass would be introduction into the Cleft.”

  “So, the punishment for attempting to enter the Cleft, is that one is allowed to enter the Cleft?”

  Manxolio Quinc spoke hesitatingly. “Anomus, it is no use. We cannot offend the ancient ceremonies. If the Magistrate were here…but even so, there is no provision for introducing innocent men into the Beneath-world. The concept is novel, perhaps even obscene…perhaps we can retire to yonder legal library. A narrow examination of the Edicts might elucidate an overlooked exception.”

  Anomus, without a word, plucked the Dark Iron Wand from Manxolio’s surprised fingers and tossed it lightly into the air. It fell into the Cleft, ringing against the broken columns and canted floors as it toppled, glinting in the rosy light. Eventually the chiming clatter ceased. Faintly came also the sinister whispering moan of the Wand.

  The pale faces peering between the columns underfoot, startled by the noise, ran away.

  Anomus said, “Behold. I confess to both tortuous battery, impertinence, and theft of a priceless heirloom. Rather than trouble your magistrate, I hereby condemn myself. Will you lower me on the chain of the derrick? Otherwise the legacy of House Quinc is forever lost.”

  The Invigilators said nothing, but stood blinking.

  Up the Scaum

  The afternoon sky was dark with cloud. Manxolio Quinc rode an oast, a disturbingly humanoid biped, which he controlled by thongs through its nose. Anomus was mounted on a more traditional blue-feathered horse.

  The men rode along the dry streambed of the dead river Scaum. To either hand rose the barren earth walls of an old streambed. A line of crooked trees, ginkgo and gumwood, grew along what had once been the riverside. The landscape around was rolling slopes of waist-high grass, dry and gray, interrupted by lumps of granite and flint.

  A remnant of the river, a mere stream a boy could have waded, slid noiselessly through a trough of mud and rocks, amid the bones of many fishes. Lily pads and lotus plants grew there, half masking the yellow water in green.

  Manxolio toyed with the Implacable Dark Iron Wand as they rode. The metal of the shaft was blacker than heretofore, rich and shining with dark luster. A spark of greenish-white acetylene light appeared at the blunt tip of the wand whenever Manxolio, astonishment in his eyes, squinted at it. He would laugh; the spark would vanish, and then, a moment later, with innocent glee, he would squint again, and make the burning spark reappear.

  Anomus said, “Do not exhaust the charge. As I warned, I was only able to stir to action two of the secondary functions: first, the Zone of Intrusive Nigrescence, which darkens the luminary spectrum in all its phases; and second, the Many-valued Magnific Exultation. This is a complex vibration of sympathetic pulses, which will enable partial amplification of any third-order force or lower, and follow its vector and configuration, and augment it. Of the primary functions, I performed a bypass by means of a shunt, but it is frail. The phlogiston chambers have sufficient vehemence to produce a single lance of fire in the pyroconductive mode. I could not restore variant control, as the aperture valve is lost; the cell will discharge all its power at once.”

  Manxolio contented himself with silently commanding the picaroon hook to open or shut with a satisfying snap. He could feel the power of the wand in his brain, present, but unobtrusive, like a whisper from a dark closet into a sunlit room. “How did you survive the Cleft? What happened beneath the Earth?”

  “I discovered the node buried beneath the rubble of a flooded museum-chamber, but it still glistened with sufficient power that I was able to recharge auxiliary manifestation. Three times I held my breath and dived beneath the still, dark, freezing waters of the mausoleum floor. The only tools I had to work with were those the Wand itself temporarily solidified out of hardened air. I could not repair the main cells. However, when in contact with the potentium node, the wand was able to detect a second, but very faint, whisper of power. It lies in this direction. That is what you are supposed to be seeking with the Wand, and why it is, in theory at least, in your hand now.”

  “Of course! I was just, ah…In any event, how was it that the Inhumed did not rip your body to bits, and consume the flesh of your limbs and frame?”

  “Once I restored power to the lighting elements, they were grateful, and were willing to stay out of sight while I negotiated with you to lower a sturdy chain. I promised I would secure their release.”

  “And your threat to unleash a cataclysm of fire, I assume, was a similar falsehood? The wand, if it is still as weak as you say, could not cut through bedrock and flagstones to envelope the Magistracy building in a holocaust!”

  Anomus gave him a quizzical look. “My comment, if anything, was an understatement. As I said, I could not replace the aperture valve on the main beam emitter.”

  Manxolio sniffed.
“You are merely fortunate that I recalled that one of the ancient prerogatives of the Civic Remonstrator was to commute sentences. Otherwise the Uhlans would not have worked the derrick to remove you from the Cleft.”

  Anomus said blandly, “Yet I was not sentenced by any lawful process.”

  “A mere technicality. Your act was an eccentric affront to conformity. But no matter, for, look there!” He pointed up to where the brush and grasses by the river bank had been disturbed. “Our investigation nears a definite result. Your trail here entered the stream-bed.”

  The Dead Town of Sfere

  Plainly visible were naked footprints in the clay of the slope. “There is your foot, preserved in a muddy petrosomatoglyph. Observe the disturbance in the eucalyptus leaves, elsewhere fallen evenly, and the snapped twigs. There was rain two days ago, and water would have smoothed the edges of these prints, or sponged them away in a wash of mud. This gives us an upper limit for the time. Do you recall pushing through the brush here?”

  Anomus squinted and shook his head. “I recall tumbling. Perhaps it was this slope.”

  “What else do you recall?”

  “It was night. As I said, the stars seemed out of place. I fell down the slope because I came upon it unawares.”

  “Why did you not await the dawn-light?”

  “I did not know how long the nights lasted on this world.”

  Manxolio’s face grew long with surprise. “A singular comment, even eccentric. This leads to a strange supposition.”

  With some difficulty, the two men drove or lead the biped and the blue-feathered horse up the muddy slope. They pressed past the brush and gumwood trees. Unlimbering a lantern made from the carbuncles of luminous fish, Manxolio narrowly inspected the ground. For an hour, they followed the meager traces: a broken leaf, a displaced pebble sitting pale-side up.

  They debated for a time what to do, whether to return to Old Romarth and secure a hunting pack of ahulphs, or set out sugar to attract a Twk-man, when the upper winds, breaking apart the cloud cover, allowed cerise, rose, and orange beams of light to touch upon the landscape. The ruddy light caught a tumble of bright stones in the distance.