Songs of the Dying Earth

by Gardner Dozois

  Tiredly, Evillo anticipated the prison, but instead the throng, cheering and rejoicing, bore him to the palace of Kandive the golden.

  “How pleasing that we have refound you, dear boy,” declaimed Kandive. “I am already bereft of sons and nephews; they have such a propensity for extended voyages whereon they vanish. It seems to me, when we have consulted the proper sages, that you will be my direct heir, in default of all the others. For you are the child of my half-sister who, sixteen years before and when visiting an obscure fane above the Derna, mislaid you, through sheer carelessness, near the village of Ratgrad.”

  Evillo stood nonplussed. Had his good luck returned? He grasped also that certain powers belonging to the arrogant Khiss had indeed been given to him. Released from Khiss’ personalized Equivalence, Evillo might surely now enjoy them. And not least as heir to white-walled Kaiin.

  While he was considering these prospects, he saw amid the crowd the Darkographer Kaiine. Evillo recalled how he had misunderstood the gallant’s warning—not to avoid stepping upon the snail, but simply to avoid the snail altogether.

  So easily might one topple into folly. One must have things straight.

  He therefore at once asked Kandive, “And is my name Evillo, as I have thought from the age of seven?”

  “Not at all,” replied the puzzled Kandive. “By the cyclopaedia, whatever put such an idea in your head?

  “What then, sir, is my name?”

  “Why, my boy, hear, and thereafter bear with pride your true cognomen, written in the archives of Ascolais. It is Blurkel.”

  Evillo staggered. Supposing this due to rapture, Kandive clapped him on the back.

  But it was the full weight of the strident three-fold curse of Pendatas Baard, coming home to roost. Vented upon him in the name of Blurkel, the young man felt it attach itself like a swarm of stones.

  That very night, as all feasted in the lavish courts of Kandive, the recurrent leucomorph uncharacteristically dropped from a chandelier upon Blurkel. Its attack had been much refined by practice.

  Afterword:

  For me, Jack Vance is one of the literary gods.

  In the earliest ’70’s, when I was in a very unhappy and depressed condition, my magical, wise mother, (who had already turned me on to mythology, history, and SF), bought me Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth. At once I escaped my leaden state and entered the teeming and ironically shining landscape of Vance’s extraordinary, decadently future world.

  I still possess this volume—the English Mayflower edition—treasured and often read, though by now its pages are pale brown and many are loose inside the cover. (The spine seems to have been nibbled by a pelgrane).

  The Dying Earth novels and stories are picaresque adventures in the truest sense, peripatetic, and express-paced. They carry echoes not only of the Thousand Nights and a Night, but of such other witty sombre epics as Gulliver’s Travels, not to mention the visions of Milton and Blake. Vance seems genuinely, within the fantasy-SF envelope, to access the Mediaeval mind: here the world may end at any moment and fabulous beasts and monsters co-exist with sinful, selfish, and (rarely) spiritual man. The narratives range from the screamingly hilarious to the seductively beautiful, to the shockingly—if fastidiously presented—violent. As for black humour, Vance might have invented it.

  Such masterworks have fired and—I hope—taught my imagination, ever since the first plunge. Influence is too small a word. What I owe to Vance’s genius, as avid fan and compulsive writer; is beyond calculation.

  Every book reasserts its peerless magic on every one of the uncountable times I re-re-read it. In fact, I don’t quite believe Jack Vance invented the Dying Earth. Part of me knows he’s been there. Often.

  But then. He takes us there too, doesn’t he?

  —Tanith Lee

  Dan Simmons

  The Guiding Nose of Ulfänt Banderz

  A writer of considerable power, range, and ambition, an eclectic talent not willing to be restricted to any one genre, Dan Simmons sold his first story to The Twilight Zone Magazine in 1982. By the end of that decade, he had become one of the most popular and bestselling authors in both the horror and the science fiction genres, winning, for instance, both the Hugo Award for his epic science fiction novel Hyperion and the Bram Stoker Award for his huge horror novel Carrion Comfort in the same year, 1990. He’s gone on to win two more Bram Stoker Awards and two World Fantasy Awards (for Song of Kali and “This Year’s Class Picture”). He has continued to split his output since between science fiction (The Fall of Hyperion, The Hollow Man, Endymion, The Rise of Endymion, Ilium, Olympos) and horror (Song of Kali, Summer of Night, Children of the Night…although a few of his novels are downright unclassifiable (Phases of Gravity, for instance, which is a straight literary novel, although it was published as part of a science fiction line), and some (like Children of the Night) could be legitimately considered to be either science fiction or horror, depending on how you squint at them. Similarly, his first collection, Prayers to Broken Stones, contains a mix of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and “mainstream” stories, as do his more recent collections, Lovedeath and Worlds Enough and Time: Five Tales of Speculative Fiction. Many of his recent books confirm his reputation for unpredictability, including The Crook Factory, a spy thriller set in World War II and starring Ernest Hemingway, Darwin’s Blade, a “statistical thriller” halfway between mystery and dark comedy, Hardcase, Hard Freeze, and Hard As Nails, hardboiled detective novels, and, A Winter Haunting, a ghost story. His most recent books are the bestselling novel, halfway between historical and horror, The Terror, the chapbook novella, Muse of Fire, and a major new novel about Charles Dickens, Drood. Born in Peoria, Illinois, Simmons now lives with his family in Colorado.

  In the complex and richly imagined story that follows, he takes us on a race across unknown territory to the very ends of the Dying Earth, with terrible enemies in close pursuit and the fate of all who live at stake, and everything depending on the guidance of…a nose?

  The Guiding Nose of Ulfänt Banderz

  Dan Simmons

  In the waning millennia of the 21st Aeon, during one of the countless unnamed and chaotic latter eras of the Dying Earth, all the usual signs of imminent doom suddenly went from bad to worse.

  The great red sun, always slow to rise, became more sluggish than ever. Like an old man loathe to get out of bed, the bloated sun on some mornings shook, quivered, staggered, and rippled forth earthquakes of protesting rumbles that radiated west from the eastern horizons across the ancient continents, shaking even the low mountain ranges worn down by time and gravity until they resembled old molars. Black spots poxed and repoxed the slowly rising sun’s dim face until entire days were all but lost to a dull, maroon twilight.

  During the usually self-indulgent and festival-filled month of Spoorn, there were five days of near total darkness, and crops failed from Ascolais through Almery to the far fen borders of the Ide of Kauchique. River Scaum in Ascolais turned to ice on the morn of MidSummer’s Eve, freezing the holy aspirations off thousands who had immersed themselves for the Scaumish Rites of Multiple Erotic Connections. What few ancient upright stones and wall-slabs that were still standing at the Land of the Falling Wall rattled like bones in a cup and fell, killing countless lazy peasants who had foolishly built their hovels in its lee over the millennia just to save the cost of a fourth wall. In the holy city of Erze Damath, thousands of pelgranes—arriving in flocks the size of which had never been seen before in the memory of man and non-men—circled for three days and then swooped down, carrying off more than six hundred of the most pious pilgrims and befouling the Black Obelisk with their bone-filled droppings.

  In the west, the setting sun appeared to pulse larger and closer until the forests of the Great Erm burned. Tidal waves washed away all cities and vestiges of life from the Cape of Sad Remembrance, and the ancient market town of Xeexees, only forty leagues south of the city of Azenomei, disappeared completely one night at three minut
es after midnight during the height of its crowded Summer Fair; some say the town was swallowed whole in a great earthly convulsion, some say it shifted in an eyeblink to one of the unbreathable-air worlds of the dodge-star Achernar, but whichever was the case, the many residents of the metropolis of nearby Azenomei huddled in their homes in fear. And during all these individual tragedies, more than half the surrounding region once known in better days as the Grand Motholam suffered floods, droughts, pestilence, devaluation of the terce, and frequent darknesses.

  The people, both human and otherwise, reacted as people always have during such hard times in the immemorial history of the Dying Earth and the Earth of the Yellow Sun before it; they sought out scapegoats to hound and pound and kill. In this case, the heaviest opprobrium fell upon magicians, sorcerers, wizards, warlocks, the few witches still suffered to live by the smug male majority, and other practitioners of the thaumaturgical trade. Mobs attacked the magicians’ manses and conclaves; the servants of sorcerers were torn limb from limb when they went into town to buy vegetables or wine; to utter a spell in public brought instant pursuit by peasants armed with torches, pitchforks, and charmless swords and pikes left over from old wars and earlier pogroms.

  Such a downturn in popularity was nothing new for the weary world’s makers of magic, all of whom had managed to exist for many normal human lifetimes and longer, so at first they reacted much as they had in earlier times of persecution: they shielded their manses with spells and walls and moats, replaced their murdered servants with less-fragile demons and entities from the Overworld and Underworld, brought up jarred foods from their vast basement stores and catacombs (while having their servants plant vegetable gardens within their spell-walled grounds), and generally laid low, some laying so low as to become literally invisible.

  But this time the prejudice did not quickly fade. The sun continued to flicker, vibrate, cause convulsions below, and generally offer almost as many dark days as light. The scores of human species on the Dying Earth made common cause with the thousands of no-longer-human sort—the ubiquitous pelgranes and Deodands and prowling erbs and lizard folk and ghosts and stone-ghouls and Saponids and necrophages and visps and burrowing dolorants who were merely the tip of this truly terrible nonhuman icespike—and that common cause was to kill magicians.

  When the unpleasant realities of this particular wizard-pogrom began to sink in, the various magicians of Almery and Ascolais (and other lands west of the Falling Wall) who had once belonged to the now-defunct “Fellowship of the Blue Principles” or its successor-organization, the so-called “Renewed Green and Purple College of Grand Motholam,” reacted in ways consistent with their character: some fled the Dying Earth by unbinding the twelve dimensional knots and slipping sideways to Archeron or Janck or one of the other co-existing worlds discovered by the old Aumoklopelastianic Cabal; a few fled backward in time to more felicitous Aeons; more than a few took their motile manses or self-contained glebe-globes and made a run for it through the galaxy and beyond. (Teutch, a recognized Elder of the Hub, brought along his entire private infinity.)

  A very few of the magicians who were more self-confident or curious or hoping to prosper through others’ misfortune or simply bold (or perhaps merely much more prone to melancholy) took the risk of remaining on the Dying Earth to see what transpired.

  Shrue the diabolist was more sanguine than most. Perhaps this was due to his age—he was older than any of his fellow thaumaturgs could have surmised. Or perhaps it was due to his magical specialty—most professional binders of demons and devils from the Overworld, Underworld, foreign stars, and other Aeons died young and in great pain. Or perhaps it was due to a rumored broken relationship and broken heart many millennia in his past. (Some whispered that Shrue had once loved and bedded and wedded and lost Iallai, she who had been the entity Pandelume’s favorite dancer and the originator of the Dance of the Fourteen Silken Movements. Others whispered—even more softly—that Shrue had tumbled in thrall to one of his male apprentices back when the Mountains of Magntaz were still sharp, and had retired from magical life for centuries when the beautiful young man had stolen Shrue’s most powerful runes and run away with a leather-bound Saponid from the night-town of Saponce.)

  Shrue had heard all of these rumors and smiled—albeit sadly—at them all.

  When the Great Panic came this time, Shrue the diabolist closed up Way Weather, his lovely manse of many rooms and sculpted towers in the hills above the north edge of Were Woods, and, using a less stressful variation on the ancient Spell of Forlorn Encystment, sank his manse, his beautiful gardens, and twelve of his thirteen servants some forty-five miles beneath the surface of the Dying Earth. Shrue’s diabolic equipment, mementos, the bulk of his library, and the curios and ancillary demons he’d collected over the many centuries would be safe there underground, unless—of course—the great red sun actually swallowed the Dying Earth this time around. As for the truly amazing collection of flowers, trees, and exotiterra plants and animals from his garden (not to mention his twelve stored human and near-human servants), they were wrapped in miniature Omnipotent Eggs, each egg wrapped in turn in its own Field of Temporal Stasis, so Shrue was confident that if the Earth and he survived, so would his domestic staff, awakening months or years or centuries or millennia hence as if rising from a restorative sleep.

  Shrue kept only Old Blind Bommps, his man-servant and irreplaceable chef, to travel north with him to his remote summer cottage on the shores of the Lesser Polar Sea. Bommps knew his way around the polar cottage and its protected grounds there as well as he’d memorized the many rooms, turrets, tunnels, secret passages, stairways, guest houses, kitchens, gardens, and grounds of Way Weather itself.

  As for the scores of minor devils, demons, sandestins, stone-ghouls, elementals, archvaults, daihaks, and (a few) rune-ghosts that Shrue kept at his beck and call, all of these save one sank below with Way Weather manse in the Modified Spell of Forlorn Encystment—yet each remained capable of being summoned in an instant by the briefest incantation.

  The only otherish entity that Shrue the diabolist took with him to the cottage on the shores of the Lesser Polar Sea was KirdriK.

  KirdriK was an odd hybrid of forces—part mutant sandestin from the 14th Aeon, part full-formed daihak in the order of Undra-Hadra. Only the greatest arch-magicians in the history of the post-Yellow Sun Dying Earth dared to attempt to control a mature daihak-sandestin hybrid. Shrue the diabolist kept three such terrifying creatures in his employ at once. Two now rested forty-five miles beneath the surface of the earth, but KirdriK jinkered north along with Shrue and Old Blind Bommp, cushioned atop one of the larger rugs from Way Weather’s grand hall. The jinkered carpet traveled at night, never rising above five thousand feet, and was protected by Shrue’s Omnipotent Sphere as well as by the ancient carpet’s own Cloud of Concealment, generated by the warp and woof of its softly singing incantatorial threads.

  It had taken Shrue thirty-five years to summon KirdriK, another sixty-nine years to fully bind him, ten years to teach the monster a language other than its native curses and snarls, and more than twice a hundred years to make the halfbreed daihak superficially civil enough to take his place among Shrue’s staff of loyal domestics. Shrue thought that it was time the creature began earning his keep.

  Shrue’s first few weeks at his polar cottage were as quiet and uneventful as even the most retiring diabolist might have wished.

  Early each morning, Shrue would rise, exercise his personal combat skills for an hour with a private avatar bound during the days of Ranfitz’s War, and then retire to his garden for a long session of meditation. None of Shrue’s former colleagues or competitors had known it, but the diabolist had long been adept in the Slow Discipline of Derh Shuhr, and Shrue exercised those demanding mental abilities every day.

  The garden itself, while modest in comparison with that of Way Weather and also mostly sunken below the level of the surrounding lawns and low tundra growth, was still impressive.
Shrue’s tastes ran contrary to most magi’s love of the wildly exotic—feathered parasol trees, silver and blue tantalum foil leaves, air-anenome trifoliata, transparent trunks and the like—and tended, as Shrue himself did, toward the more restrained and visually pleasing: tri-aspen imported from such old worlds as Yperio and Grauge, night-blooming rockwort and windchime sage, and self-topiarying Kingreen.

  In late morning, when the huge red sun had finally freed itself from the southern horizon, Shrue would walk down the long dock, unfold the masts and sails of his sleek quintfoil catamaran, and sail the limpid seas of the Lesser Polar Sea, exploring coves and bays as he went. There were seamonsters even beneath the surface of the tideless, shallow polar seas, of course—codorfins and forty-foot water shadows the most common—but even such aquatic predators had long-since learned not to attempt to molest an arch-mage of Shrue the diabolist’s reputation.

  Then, after an hour or two of calm sailing, he would return and enjoy the abstemious lunch of pears, fresh-baked pita, Bernish pasta, and cold gold wine that Bummp had prepared for him.

  In the afternoon, Shrue would work in one of his workshops (usually the Green Cabal) for several hours, and then emerge for a late afternoon cordial in the library and to hear KirdriK’s daily patrol report and finally to open his mail.

  This day, KirdriK shuffled into the library bowlegged and naked except for an orange breachclout that did nothing to hide either the monster’s gender or his odd build. The smallest the daihak could contract his physical shape still left him almost twice as tall as any average human. With his blue scales, yellow eyes, six fingers, gill slits along neck and abdomen, multiple rows of incisors, and purple feathers flowing down from his chest and erupting along the red crestbones of his skull—not to mention the five-foot long dorsal flanges that vented wide and razor-sharp whenever KirdriK became agitated or simply wanted to impress his foes—Shrue had to dress his servant in the loose, flowing blue robes and veil-mesh of a Firschnian monk whenever he took him out in public.