Schmoltz, the one-eyed innkeeper whose forearms were thicker than Shrue’s thighs, nodded at KirdriK and said, “An extra twelve terces if your monk sleeps on the floor or stands in the room while you sleep.”
“Followers of the Firschnian Eye seek only mortification and physical discomfort,” said Shrue. “The monk, who never sleeps, shall be satisfied to take shelter in your barn amidst the dung heaps and foul-smelling brids and mermelants.”
“That’ll be ten terces for use of the barn,” growled Schmoltz.
After securing KirdriK in the barn, Shrue went up to his room and set one of his own rugs on the floor—it filled the small space between the bed and the wall—and then laid his own clean sheets and blankets on the dubious cot, burning the old ones in a flameless blue vortex. Then the diabolist went down to the common room to eat his late dinner. Rug merchants of Azenomei Guild never removed their hats in public, so Shrue felt moderately comfortable with his disguise under the low-hanging velvet brim, silk straps, half-veil, and floppy ear coverings.
He’d finished only half of his stew and drained just one glass from his flagon of indifferent Blue Ruin when a short, balding man slipped into the empty chair opposite him and said, “I beg your pardon for the intrusion, but do I not find myself in the company of Shrue the diabolist?”
“You do not,” murmured Shrue, touching his merchant’s hat with his bony fingers. “Surely you recognize the sign of the Azenomei Guild?”
“Ahh, yes,” said the short, heavy, beady-eyed man. “But I apologize for any effrontery if I add that I also recognize the long, strong features of an arch-magus named Shrue. I had the pleasure of seeing the famous diabolist long ago in a thaumaturgical wares-fair in Almery.”
“You are mistaken,” said Shrue with an inaudible sigh. “I am Disko Fernschüm, rugseller and calendar-tapestry menologist from Septh Shrimunq in Province Wunk in south Ascolais.”
“My mistake then,” said Faucelme, “but please allow me to explain to the honorable merchant Disko Fernschüm the pressing business that I, Faucelme, would have had with the magician named Shrue. It will, I promise, be worth your while, sir.” And Faucelme signaled the serving person, Schmoltze’s ample-bosomed young wife, over to order a better flagon of wine.
Shrue knew of Faucelme, although the two had never conversed nor been introduced. Faucelme lived a life of some obscurity in the forest-wastes far north of Port Perdusz, living in a modest (for a magus) manse and pretending to be a most minor magician, all the while terrorizing his entire region, murdering and robbing wayfarers, and slowly building his magical powers through the acquisition of curios and talismans. The man himself looked harmless enough—short, bald, stooped, with a nose like a Gyre’s hooked beak and tiny, close-set eyes. A fringe of unkempt gray hair straggled down over Faucelme’s equally hairy ears. The old magician wore a black velvet suit, shiny and thin with age, and only the rich rings he sported on every finger gave any sense of his wealth and mendacity.
“You see,” said Faucelme, pouring Shrue a fresh goblet of Schmoltz’s best red, “just to the southeast of this weary—and smelly!—little caravan town, upon the summit of Mount Moriat, there lies the Ultimate Library of…”
“What has this to do with me?” interrupted Shrue. He’d gone back to drinking his lesser Blue Ruin. “Does the library need rugs?”
Faucelme showed ancient yellow teeth in a rodent’s smile. “You and I are not the first wizards here since Ulfänt Banderz’s death,” hissed the little guest-killer. “At least a score have left their carcasses on Mount Moriat’s summit, just outside the spell-shield wall the master of the Library left behind.”
Shrue radiated indifference and ate his stew.
“Ulfänt Banderz left a dozen layers of defense,” whispered Faucelme. “There is a Layer of Excruciating Breathlessness. Another Layer of Internal Conflagration. Then an inert layer, but one stocked with starving stone-ghouls and vampire necrophages. Then a Layer of Total Forgetfulness to the Defiler, followed by…”
“You mistake me for another,” said Shrue. “You mistake my silence at your boorishness for interest.”
Faucelme flushed and Shrue saw the hatred in the old magus’s eyes, but the killer’s expression slid back into a simulacrum of generous friendship. “Surely, Shrue the diabolist, it would be better—and wiser and safer—for the two of us to pool our resources…mine infinitely more modest than yours, of course, but surely stronger in combination than in separate attempts—as we both try to pass through the Twelve Defensive Layers after the dawn…”
“Why wait for morning if you are so eager?” asked Shrue.
Real fear flickered across Faucelme’s features. “Mount Moriat is renowned for its ghouls, goblins, ghosts, wolves, and albino Deodands, even outside of Ulfänt Banderz’s magical defenses. And you can hear the storm pounding upon the inn’s shingles even as we…”
“I do hear the storm,” said Shrue as he rose and signaled for Schmoltz’s daughter to clear away his things. He took the last of the Blue Ruin with him. “It makes me sleepy. I hope to join a caravan headed south in the morning, so I wish you a pleasant night’s sleep Ser…Faulcoom?”
He left Faucelme smiling and flexing his hands the way KirdriK was wont to do when he most wanted to strangle his master.
Shrue woke at exactly two bells in the morning, just as he had hypnotically instructed himself to do, but for a few seconds he was confused by the warmth of another body in bed with him. Then he remembered.
Derwe Coreme had been waiting in his tiny room when he’d come upstairs and watched him coyly from where she lay naked under the covers. She held the covers low enough that Shrue had seen that the cold river air coming in through the open window was affecting her. “I’m sorry,” he’d said, hiding his surprise. “I haven’t had time to do the gender-changing spell.”
“Then I’ll have to show you how a woman-version of Shrue might begin to pleasure me,” said Derwe Coreme. As it turned out, Shrue now remembered, the former princess to the House of Domber had not been as averse to men as she might have thought.
Now he slipped out from under the covers, careful not to wake the softly snoring warrior, got rid of his rug merchant clothes and cap in a silent flash of blue vortex, and dressed himself silently in his most elegant dark-gray tunic, pantaloons, and flowing robe made of the rarest spidersilk. Then he jinkered the carpet to life, brought it to a hover four feet above the floor, and climbed aboard with his shoulder valise.
“Did you just plan to leave me a note?” whispered Derwe Coreme.
Shrue the diabolist had not stuttered since his youth—a youth lost in the tides of time—but he came close to doing so at that moment. “On the contrary, I planned to be back before dawn and to commence where we left off,” he said softly.
“Pawsh,” said the war maven and slipped out of the covers, dressing quickly in her dragonscale armor.
“I had no idea that Myrmazons and their leader wore nothing under their scales,” said Shrue.
“If blade or beam cuts through those scales,” said Derwe Coreme as she buckled up her high boots, “it’s best not to have any underlayers with foreign matter that might infect the wound. A clean wound is the best wound.”
“My approach to life exactly,” whispered Shrue as his carpet floated at the level of the war maven’s bare left breast. “May I drop you somewhere on my way?”
Derwe Coreme slipped on two daggers, a belt dirk, a throwing star, a hollow iberk’s horn for signaling, and her full sword and scabbard, slid them aside, and climbed on the floating rug just behind him. “I’m coming with you.”
“But I assure you, there is no need for…” began Shrue.
“There was no need for the three hours until we fell asleep,” said Derwe Coreme, “but they worked out all right. I’d like to see this so-called Ultimate Library and Final Compendium of Thaumaturgical Lore from the Grand Motholam and Earlier. For that matter, I’d like to meet this Ulfänt Bander–oz I’ve heard so much abo
ut over the years.”
“Him…you might find disappointing,” said Shrue.
“So many men are,” said War Maven Derwe Coreme and put her arms around Shrue’s ribs as he tapped flight threads and maneuvered the jinkered carpet forward, out sixty feet above the river, and then up and east toward the dark mass of Mount Moriat.
The Ultimate Library had been carved into the very rock of Mount Moriat, but rose from the summit in a series of thick but gleaming towers, gables, bulges, cupolas, and turrets. The keep was blind—that is, the many windows were mere slits, none broader than Derwe Coreme’s slender (but powerful) hand. The layers of protection spells caused the entire structure to gleam milkily and Shrue thought that countless castles lost to memory must have looked like that in the full moonlight in aeons long past. Then Shrue’s incipient melancholy grew deeper at the realization that no one else alive he knew would think of anything on the Dying Earth in moonlight; the Earth’s moon had wandered away into deep space millions of years ago, beyond even the reach of most legend. Most of the night sky above them now was dark save for a few dim stars marking the merest hint of where a progression of proud constellations had once burned.
Shrue tried to shake away the debilitating melancholy and concentrate on the task ahead, but—as he was also too prone to do—he wondered, not for the first or ten-thousandth time, what his real motive was in entering the Ultimate Library and reading Ulfänt Banderz’s books. Knowledge said part of his mind. Power whispered a more honest part. Curiosity argued an equally honest part. Control of the Dying Earth said the deepest and least-dissimulating core of the diabolist’s weary and melancholy brain.
“Are you going to land this rag?” asked Derwe Coreme over his shoulder. “Or are we just going to circle a thousand feet above the Dirindian until the sun comes up?”
Shrue brought the carpet down to a three-foot hover and dejinkered it as they stepped off. KirdriK was waiting just outside the phase fields as ordered. Either he had shed his monk’s robes or the beasties on his way up had clawed and chewed them off in their dying seconds.
“Great Krem,” whispered the war maven Myrmazon leader, hand going reflexively to her sword. “You choose ugly servants, Shrue.”
“You should see Old Blind Bommp,” said KirdriK through his rasp and gargle and growl.
“Silence,” commanded Shrue. “I have to study Ulfänt Banderz’s layers of defensive fields.”
Within a moment, he knew that the vile Faucelme had been essentially correct: there were a dozen layers to the Library’s defenses, eight of them active spells, four of them—counting the ghost—physical. As he probed and countered, Shrue felt something like disappointment fill him. Ulfänt Banderz had been one of the arch-maguses of all magi still living on the Dying Earth, but these defenses—while deadly enough to the average magician or would-be barbarian vandal—were easy enough to foil and countermand. Shrue had to spend less than five minutes on the first eight, and as for the spellbound circling (and starving) wolves, stone-ghouls, and vampire necrophages, KirdriK put them out of their misery within seconds.
They stepped across the massive old drawbridge—the Library’s moat was more decorative than serviceable, although Shrue saw croc-men swimming in the black water—and were confronted by the equally massive door sporting a surprisingly heavy lock.
“Are you going to blast that off?” asked Derwe Coreme. “Or would you prefer me to use my blade?”
“Neither you nor your blade would survive, I fear,” Shrue said softly. “Civilized people use a key.” He pulled one from his robes, fit it, clicked it, and opened the heavy door. Answering the Myrmazon’s quick, sharply questioning gaze, Shrue added, “I was a guest here long ago and took the liberty of studying the lock then.”
The inside of the Ultimate Library was dark and silent, the air dead, as in a room or crypt that had been closed up for centuries rather than weeks. Wary of boobytraps, Shrue had KirdriK emit a soft but bright glow from his chest that illuminated everything for twenty paces in front of the three of them. Shrue also allowed the daihak to lead the way, although always while under the diabolist’s guidance. They moved from room to room, then from floor to floor, up stairways rimned with dust. Here and there on the floor lay what they first took to be stone statues—short, nonhuman shapes—until finally Shrue said, “These are Ulfänt Banderz’s servants or apprentices. It seems they also turned to stone when he died.”
On each level of the darkened library, there were racks and shelves and stacks of books, most of the volumes a third to half as tall as Shrue himself. When they had progressed far enough that Shrue was moderately certain that there would be no goblin attack or sudden, deadly efulsion of dark forces, he lifted a dusty volume off its shelf and set it down heavily on an ancient, high, and slanted wooden reading table.
“I’m interested to read whatever this is,” whispered Derwe Coreme. It was hard to speak at normal volume in the echoing spaces.
“Be my guest,” said Shrue and opened the large book. He read—or rather, looked—over the war maven’s dragonscaled shoulder. The yellowish light from KirdriK’s chest was more than ample.
Derwe Coreme’s head snapped back as if she had been slapped. Shrue himself tried to focus, but the sentences and words and very letters shimmered in and out of focus and visibility as if they were written in quicksilver.
“Ah,” cried the woman warrior. “That gives me a blinding headache just trying to bring a word into focus.”
“Men have gone blind staring at these books,” whispered Shrue.
“Magicians, you mean,” said Derwe Coreme.
“Yes.”
“Can your monster read it?” she asked.
“No,” croaked KirdriK. “I am literate in more than nine hundred phonetic and glyphic alphabets and more than eleven thousand written languages, living and dead, but these symbols scatter like cockroaches when a light is turned on.”
Shrue smiled dryly and applauded in the direction of Derwe Coreme and his daihak. “Congratulations,” he said to the woman. “You’ve just elicited the first simile I’ve heard from KirdriK in more than a hundred…”
There came a sound from the darkness behind them.
Derwe Coreme whirled and her long blade glittered in KirdriK’s chest-light. The daihak balled his huge six-fingered fists and showed a wall of teeth. Shrue raised three long fingers, more in restraint of his companions than in defense.
A short—no more than four feet tall—form stepped from the shadows and a genderless voice squeaked, “Do not harm me! I am a friend.”
“Who are you?” demanded Shrue.
“What are you?” asked the Myrmazon leader.
“I am called Mauz Meriwolt,” squeaked the little form. “I was—have always been, since birth—Ulfänt Bander–oz’s servant boy.”
“Boy?” repeated Derwe Coreme and lowered her sword.
Shrue had his Expansible Egg incantation ready to surround them at the utterance of a final syllable, not to mention his Excellent Prismatic Spray spell ready to slice this newcomer to ribbons in an instant, but even the diabolist—who judged few things or people upon their appearance—sensed no threat from the tiny form. Mauz Meriwolt was pibald in hue, with arms and legs thinner and more rubbery than Shrue’s old wrists, tiny three-fingered hands, an oversized head with oversized ears placed too far back, a long proboscis with only a few whiskers protruding, and enormous black eyes.
“What are you?” repeated Derwe Coreme.
The little person seemed befuddled by the question, so Shrue answered for him. “Ulfänt Banderz had the affectation of recreating lost life forms from the dim past to fill his staff,” he said softly. “I believe that our short friend Mauz Meriwolt came from some long-forgotten line of rodents.”
“You can call me Meriwolt,” squeaked the shy little form. “The ‘Mauz’ was some sort of honorific…I think.”
“Well, then, Meriwolt,” said Shrue, his voice carrying an edge, “perhaps you can explain
why you survived here when all of Ulfänt Banderz’s other servants appear to have been turned into stone like their master.” The magus gestured toward a stone figure on the floor—what might have been a humanoid attempt at the ancient life form called a feline.
“That’s Gernisavien, the Master’s neo-cat and tutor to all of us lesser servants,” said Meriwolt. “She…changed…at the instant of the Master’s death, as did all the others.”
“Then we ask again,” said Shrue. “Why not you?”
The little figure shrugged and Shrue noticed for the first time that Meriwolt had a skinny but short whip of a tail. “Perhaps I was not important enough to turn to stone,” he said, his voice squeaking with misery. “Or perhaps I was spared because—despite my unimportance—the Master seemed to feel some affection for me. Master Ulfänt Banderz was not widely known for his sentimental side, but it may be the reason I was spared when all the others died when he did. I can think of no other.”
“Perhaps,” said Shrue. “In the meantime, Meriwolt, take us to your Master.”
Derwe Coreme, Shrue, and KirdriK followed the little creature up stairways, through hidden doorways, and through more huge rooms filled from floor to ceiling with racks and shelves of books.
“Did you ever shelve these books for your master?” Shrue asked the little figure as they climbed to yet another level and entered a turrent staircase.
“Oh, yes, sire. Yes.”
“So you could read the titles?”
“Oh, no, sire,” said Meriwolt. “No one in the Library could read the titles or any part of the books. I simply knew where the book should go on the shelves or in the stacks.”
“How?” asked Derwe Coreme.
“I don’t know, sire,” squeaked Meriwolt. He gestured to a low door. “Here is the Master’s bedchamber. And within is…well…the Master.”
Songs of the Dying Earth Page 64