Songs of the Dying Earth

by Gardner Dozois

  No sooner did dawn tip the sky than the door of his room once more crashed open.

  “Arise, villain!” roared the muscle-girt captain of a band of city militia, each man brandishing sword and club. “You are to accompany us to jail.”

  Evillo, yet somnolent, still felt his mouth sparkle with words. “You mistake your man!” he cried.

  “No, not we. You are a wretch who lured a filthy monster into this inn, wherewith to wreck the establishment. Worse even than this, as was earlier reported by the landlord, you have impersonated a member of the royal household.” Eloquently plead as he would, Evillo found himself disarmed of his sword and briskly conducted into the street. He was then marched away into the pillar-fallen and ruinous Old Town of Kaiin, where stood the fearsome, seven-storey dungeon errected aeons before by Gbile the Intolerant. Only when cast upon a vast and stenchful floor in semi-darkness, did he discover that Khiss had accompanied him, and still sat on his left shoulder.

  There passed then an unpleasant compendium of hours. The large room was already well stocked with criminals. Some groaned, and some uttered maledictions against various persons, amulets, and gods which had failed them. Some, more energetic, brawled and rolled across the space. Some crept about and attempted unneighbourly acts on the rest. One of these even essayed the theft of Khiss, thinking it to be a jewel. Evillo dissuaded the man, telling him that the gem was worthless, and besides carried a malwill, being the very cause of Evillo’s imprisonment.

  At noon, a panel was undone in the iron barrier, and a communal cauldron of lumpy, steaming gruel pushed through. On this, most flung themselves, slavering and hooting. Only those too weak, or in such despair as to be beyond nurture, desisted. Evillo numbered himself among the latter.

  However, with noon some little drips of maroon light had also penetrated the prison, through an assortment of cracks. By these miserable rays, Evillo noticed a tall and well-dressed older man with sable hair, who sat to one side. Neither eating or grieving, nor complaining, he had fixed Evillo with a piercing grey gaze.

  “Behold,” whispered Khiss, as if to itself, “it is the sorcerer Pendatas Baard.”

  Evillo racked his now burnished wits. He did not identify the name, although, for a fleeting moment it had seemed familiar. But the man’s gaze disconcerted him, and, presently, lacking the guidance of Khiss, Evillo rose and went towards him.

  The cold eyes lifted. “And do you know me?” inquired the mage.

  “You are Pendatas Baard, the sorcerer. Why therefore are you in a dungeon? Do your powers desert you?”

  This was perhaps too bold; the man grimaced, then smiled in superior fashion.

  “My powers are formidable. I was well taught by my father, the lamented Ultra-Mage Kateraspex. Know then, I am here due to an experiment on my part, extrapolated from Phandaal’s empurpled theorem of Locative Selfulsion.”

  Evillo recalled that Khiss, at their first meeting, had mentioned this particular magic.

  “What does the theorem entail?” he asked.

  “Surely,” said the mage, “so much is evident?”

  Evillo temporized. “You will pardon me, I hope, but it seemed to me that you stared at me a while. Maybe you have some task for me to perform? Even decidedly, such a necessary task as will cause my swift liberation from this jail?”

  “No, nothing like that,” replied the mage. “It seemed to me for a moment that I recognized something about you. Have you travelled much?”

  Evillo must admit he had not. But then he became animated, thinking of his much-travelled hero, Cugel, and added, “But I have journeyed in my mind. My mind has visited so many spots. The sombre north—the Ocean of Sighs—Almery of dim bare hills, the heaving river Xzan, sometimes called the Twish…the glass-turreted manse of the Laughing—”

  “Quite,” interposed Pendatas Baard concludingly.

  Just then, a loud clang shook the dungeon, followed by screeching. In their shoving anxiety to feed, the food vehicle had been toppled among the diners, and a man received burned legs and feet. As the unfortunate lay flapping on the floor, a curious compunction overcame Evillo. Leaving the mage, he hastened to the scalded man. Lying on the floor, Evillo commenced to crawl over his wounded legs. Cries of affronted mockery resulted, then fell still as Evillo completed his progress. The burned man bounced to his feet. “I am cured! The pain is laved from me! My skin is whole!” So much might be witnessed as a fact.

  The other prisoners promptly crowded about Evillo. “You are a mighty sorcerer. Save us, great master! We are all innocent as new-born elds. Only free us, and we will be your slaves. Refuse—and mage or not, you shall die!”

  Evillo stood aghast, and neither the teaching of Khiss. nor any memories of Cugel’s wit, provided him at this point with eloquence.

  “Khiss! Instruct me—what now?”

  Khiss murmured.

  “The great master whispers a spell,” surmised the prisoners. “Let us hope it summons our release—for our sakes and his!”

  “It is as you desire,” Evillo confirmed hastily. “But stand further off, or the force of the freeing mantra may smash us all to pieces.” The prisoners withdrew. Khiss then muttered again. Directed by the mutter, Evillo spun about in time to see the real magician, Pendatas Baard, wavering in and out of visibility.

  Faithful to Khiss’ next injunction, Evillo raced to the mage, and flung himself upon him, grasping him vigorously with both arms and legs.

  Pendatas Baard uttered a strangled roar of rage and pain, but the vacillating waver, now unstoppable, had swiftly involved Evillo also. In another second, the full trio, mage, young man, and snail, vanished from the dungeon.

  4: The Sembling

  There was a form of bad weather in Almery that day. The three travellers fell amid the tempest, as simultaneously on the hard eastern banks of the Xzan or Twish.

  Evillo found that, rather than brush water drops from his face, he brushed off small flexible animalcules of a bluish type which, hitting him here and elsewhere, bit him.

  For a short time, Pendatas Baard and Evillo were united in a frenzied dance, beating away this vicious insectile rain. Presently, the mage thought to erect by sorcery a canopy of steel that, no doubt inadvertantly, sheltered Evillo also. Here they huddled, while without the sky fell and the river popped and sizzled.

  “You will accept my heartiest curse for this, you felon, a curse too vile even to detail but lasting your life long,” stormed Pendatas Baard. “Render your name, that I may fix the bane more thoroughly.”

  “If I should modestly decline such honour?”

  “I shall blast you to syrop here and now.”

  “Blurkel,” offered Evillo.

  “My thanks. Consider yourself, Blurkel, accursed to the sorry limit of your days. I will not trouble to curse your brooch. Such an exertion is beneath me. Did you not know that your idiotic attempt to wrap me in an embrace of farewell, however understandable, must dislodge the architecture of the Selfulsion? Behold where you have landed me!”

  “Where?” asked Evillo, for he had not yet identified the geography.

  “The Selfulsion, which I, like my father Kateraspex, have almost perfected from Phandaal’s theorem, having permitted me to enter the ancient jail and verify certain opinions I hold on the vile nature of humanity, was due to return me to my domicile in the Old Town. Your solipsistic intercession has instead dashed both of us across the landscape and into the environ of Almery, in which country I must assume that you, if not I, take an obsessive interest.”

  “Almery:”

  “Just so. The fanged beetle-pour has lessened: regard, above the slopes, the manse of that pest, Iucounu the Laughing Magician. He has already sensed me and sent a storm of biting mites. He was the mortal foe of my father. And now, quite preposterously, is mine.”

  From the tales of Cugel, Evillo had already learned of the malice of Iucounu, but also of other events which might be expected to have curtailed it. “But is Iucounu not dead? I had heard—�
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  “Bah: Such criminals never die, they are ineradicable.”

  “Can you not then at once avail yourself of the Selfulsion, and vacate the spot?”

  “That is the one flaw in my calculus. In the prison, I learned that I was unable immediately to reactivate the spell. Two hours must elapse before I found myself in a position to depart. At which juncture, you befoulled the locomotion. Normally, the practitioner—myself—may, via the Selfulsion, physically manifest in an instant at any place on the earth of which he knows, and which he may at least partially envisage. But your image of this place, the purlieus of Iucounu, proved stronger than my own merely formulaic memory of my house. A second time I curse you, Blurkel, and a third!”

  Dejected, Evillo left the shelter of the steel canopy. The rain of beetles had ceased, although clouds yet blew across the dark blue sky, revealing the sun only in ruby winks.

  Nevertheless he saw—up the hill, nor so far off—the manse that Canja Veck had so aptly described. Its steep gables and lace-work of sky-walks and balconies glittered in the racing interrupted light, while the green glass domes flashed now peridot, now carnelian, reminding him of the flickering tongues of snakes.

  “What shall I do?” he inquired of Khiss.

  “What men must do. You are here. You must go on.”

  It seemed to Evillo then that Khiss had grown far heavier, and even perhaps rather larger. As if the snail symbolized the weight of the mage’s projected curses—which presumably had missed Evillo himself.

  As he climbed the hill, Evillo glanced back once, and noted Pendatas Baard digging for himself, by means of magic, a deep hidey-hole in the ground.

  The manse lay along a road paved by brown tiles. These showed some symptoms of wear. Evillo had also spotted a deserted village overwhelmed by trees. Several disconcerting ruins of seemingly great age also lay around. In short, nothing but the magician’s home was at all in repair.

  Evillo had deduced from the tales the Fabler recounted that Iucounu, even he, had finally met his match—less in the person of Cugel than through the energies of the alarming god-being Sadlark, and the terrible Spatterlight. Yet surely the touchy mage Pendatas should have known the truth.

  An air of desuetude and disconsolation nevertheless hung over the building. Reaching it, and cautious as Cugel himself had once been, the young man peered in at a number of windows. Through one, he viewed a chamber hung with crimson papers, where something whirled vaguely along the floor. Through another was a large hall laid with an intricately woven rug of forest green, fusk, fruslian mauve, and orange. On this stood a slender tantalum pedestal atop which, slowly and gracefully, there danced the skeleton of a rodent. In a third window, he spied a beautiful sylph with silver hairs but she faded even as he looked. Within the fourth window, nothing at all was visible—which is to say, nothing, since the entire room was a disturbing void from which Evillo quickly averted his eyes.

  He had, in fact, no wish to risk entry. Star-struck curiosity alone impelled him to circle the fatal house. Nor did his teacher Khiss remonstrate, despite once or twice making a tsking noise.

  Evillo then found a side-door in the stone-work, hanging ajar.

  Beyond lay a courtyard where grew a single spindly mulgoon tree of purple leaves. At that moment, the clouds left the sun. Magenta light flooded the area, and from under the tree came gliding a person whom Evillo might have met only yesterday, he knew him so infallibly. Small and pearshaped, his upper body was bundled in a black tunic with a collar of tall quills. His bird-thin legs were clad in many-coloured pantaloons. His bald head and face had the form and yellow shade of a perch-pumpkin; his eyes were miniatures of dead wood. His mouth curved in an eternal grin. Who else could it be but the Laughing One?

  “What have we here?” asked Iucounu, mirthful and merciless. “Yet one more visitor? Ah, to be so popular is indeed a boon! Pray enter and witness my treasures. Never stint your imaginative ambitions with regard to stealing anything you may see. Do pray indulge your most venal fantasies! You will not be the first to do so, nor, I suspect, the last. Until the sun goes out, no doubt, callers will arrive on similar missions.”

  Khiss offered nothing. Evillo’s brain sent a message to his tongue.

  “I am glad to see you well, sir,” he said, offering a low bow.

  “Had you heard I was not?”

  Evillo checked, sensing his blunder.

  Iucolunu added, leering with apparent glee, “Some story of my perishment in a fountain, I judge, consumed by the Spatterlight, which Cugel the Unclever tricked me into pressing home upon my forehead?”

  “Clearly greatly exaggerated…” stammered Evillo.

  “Not necessarily. Or perhaps. Which would you say? Do you believe I am dead? More to the point, do I believe I am?”

  Evillo now prudently kept quiet.

  “I will say this,” the magician continued, “whether Iucounu lives or has died, whether he has died but has since rebecome living, if he is perhaps secreted in study elsewhere about the manse, or even should he be away from home merely visiting some other, I remain, and currently shall do so always. Grasp, if you are able: I am a sembling which Iucounu made in his own likeness. And now I am caretaker of his castle. In me you will, should you wish to make a test of me, find all his formidable and eclectically amusing powers, for I have been invested with them in perpetuity. Therefore, abandon shyness and step within.”

  “Your generosity overmatches, alas, my available time. I am due at the manse of my employer, who sent me out solely to locate his pet vowl, which had strayed from the garden,” Evillo dissembled.

  “Ah, a pet.” said Iucounu’s sembling. “Iucounu too did or does have one such. See, there it bounds! Ettis, my pretty, to me! To me!” A shrill bark at once responded from above.

  Evillo recalled Ettis also. Cugel’s gambits to avoid poison offered him by the magician, had resulted in the animal’s death. This self-same creature now soared down from the air, conceivably having sprung from a handy parapet. Although still round and long furred, with circular black eyes, Evillo was aware of two extra characteristics missing from the Ettis of the story. Firstly, the daylight shone through its body, Secondly, its teeth and claws had grown to abnormal length and acuity. Ettis, it seemed, had become an undead vampiric salk.

  “Pardon me—I hear my master’s impatient shout and must be gone,” cried Evillo, and took to his heels.

  His intention was to charge at once downhill, in the direction of the River Xzan. If needful, he would jump right into it, even should he discompose thereby another Fiscian lover.

  Nevertheless, a spell of the magician, or of the guardian sembling, had already been activated. To his despair, Evillo found that he could run only around the manse, here and there leaping over obstacles, such as steps or small statues. In doing this, he passed by the windows through which he had previously stared. He noted inadvertantly that the rodent bones now danced a tarantella, but the whirl in the red paper room, like the sylph, was gone. Rushing by the void, however, a perturbing thought assailed him, even in the midst of his own concern. It seemed to him he had caught a faint echo of converse inside the nothingness: “Let tonight last forever!” said one. “My own sentiment;” averred another. “There is never more to experience than this single ‘now’.”

  Had Cugel, in his triumph, uttered some guileless sophistry and thus himself activated a dormant but deadly domestic safeguard, involving petrified time?

  But there was no margin to ponder. Evillo ran, swordless since the jail, and unable to break away from the magician’s walls. While behind him galloped Ettis, now on terra firma, now in the air, its joyous canine screams splintering the ears.

  “Khiss:” gasped Evillo, as he entered his second circuit of the enormous building, “do you indeed youself know the spell of Selfulsion? It seemed to me you might. If so—can you not release said knack and send us hence?”

  Khiss answered, “I will do my best, despite the jolting I presently receive. Bu
t you yourself must visualize some place of charm and safety. I cannot work alone.”

  How heavy in that moment seemed the snail that Evillo carried.

  “I know so little, and yet my skull is packed with the scenes of Cugel’s journeys—but anywhere other than here will serve.”

  No sooner had Evillo panted out the words than he stumbled over a low wall inlaid with glossold. He fell into a bush of flowering casperine, from which some of the left-over blue beetlecules lifted to bite him. At the same instant, Ettis came flying from the air like a furry pancake, claws akimbo.

  Evillo gave himself up for lost. Then he experienced once more the sensation of fog and vertigo that had attended his ejection from the prison with Pendatas Baard. Rather than Ettis, another country slammed into his spine. He lay staring up into a swimming hallucination of sea-green hills scarfed in a soft blue mist. This lasted less than a heartbeat. Thereafter, he was glaring through the foliage of a gigantic thamber oak to the blood-red sky of sunfall. Stars were already visible, their constellations set in unfamiliar patterns. The diamond mask of Lyraleth bemused him.

  He came gradually to see he was in a forest glade, and all alone. If he had sloughed the intolerable Ettis, so he had also sloughed his mentor, Khiss.

  Primed to lament, Evillo rose. And learned that he was not quite alone after all.

  He had dropped on this occasion into the vernal labyrinth of the Lig Thig, or Great Erm, that stupendous and ominous forest of the far north. Here Cugel had undergone certain trials and tribulations.

  About the glade, the trees clustered close, towering deodars and capacious amberquers, limned with cochineal high-lights. Northern mandouars loured like priests attired in smoke. Contrastingly, a pleasing scent of vanilla drifted on an evening Fader, or west wind. The aroma wafted from a long clay pipe that three sabre-toothed, man-eating Deodands passed to and fro between them. They were the impossibly unhuman black of burned skeel. They smoked, and smiled to welcome Evillo to dinner, he being the food.