Songs of the Dying Earth

by Gardner Dozois

  Prince Rocallo winced. “Enough! Chimwazle, cease this unmanly caterwauling. Some of us are attempting to drink.”

  The rogue rolled unto his rump, which was wide and wobbly and amply padded. “The Twk-men—”

  “—remain without,” said Lirianne. The door remained wide open, but none of the Twk-men had followed Chimwazle inside. Chimwazle blinked his bulbous eyes and peered about from side to side to make certain that was true. Although no Twk-men were to be seen, the back of his neck was covered with festering boils where they had stung him with their lances, and more were sprouting on his cheeks and forehead.

  “I do hope you know a healing spell,” Rocallo said. “Those look quite nasty. The one on your cheek is leaking blood.”

  Chimwazle made a noise that was half a groan and half a croak and said, “Vile creatures! They had no cause to abuse me thus. All I did was thin their excess populace. There were plenty left!” Puffing, he climbed back onto his feet and retrieved his cap. “Where is that pestilential innkeep? I require unguent at once. These pin-pricks have begun to itch.”

  “Itching is only the first symptom,” said Lirianne, with a helpful smile. “The lances of the Twk-men are envenomed. By morning, your head will be as large as a pumpkin, your tongue will blacken and burst, your ears will fill with pus, and you may be seized by an irresistable desire to copulate with a hoon.”

  “A hoon?” croaked Chimwazle, appalled.

  “Perhaps a grue. It depends upon the poison.”

  Chimwazle’s face had turned a deeper shade of green. “This affront cannot be borne! Pus? Hoons? Is there no cure, no salve, no antidote?”

  Lirianne cocked her head to one side thoughtfully. “Why,” she said, “I have heard it said that the blood of a sorcerer is a sure remedy for any bane or toxin.”

  Chimwazle went creeping up the stairs with his companions padding quietly at his heels. Lirianne had her sword, and Prince Rocallo a dagger. Chimwazle had only his hands, but those hands were damp and soft and hideously strong. Whether they were strong enough to twist a wizard’s head off remained to be seen.

  The steps were steep and narrow and creaked beneath his weight. Chimwazle panted softly as he climbed, his tongue lolling from his mouth. He wondered if Molloqos would be asleep yet. He wondered if the sorcerer had thought to bar his door. He wondered why it was that he was going first. But there was no turning back. Lirianne was close behind him, blocking his retreat, and Rocallo came after her, smiling with those pointy yellow teeth. And the boils on his face and neck were itching abominably and growing by the moment. One just beneath his ear had swelled up large as an egg. A bit of blood was not too much to ask, a favor from one magician to another. Alas, Molloqos might not see it that way. He did not have Chimwazle’s generosity of soul.

  At the top of the steps, the three conspirators clustered close together outside the sorcerer’s door. “He’s in there,” said Lirianne, sniffing at the air with her pert little nose. “I can smell his wizard’s stink.”

  Rocallo reached out for the latch. “Gently,” Chimwazle cautioned, in a whisper. “Oh, soft goes it, slowly, slowly, it would be discourteous to wake him.” He scratched at a boil on his brow, but that only seemed to make the itching worse.

  “The door is barred,” Rocallo whispered back.

  “Alas,” Chimwazle said, relieved. “Our plan is foiled. Back to the common room, then. Let us reconsider over ale.” He scratched furiously beneath his chin, groaned.

  “Why not break the door down?” asked Lirianne. “A big strong man like you…” She squeezed his arm and smiled. “Unless you would rather give pleasure to a hoon?”

  Chimwazle shuddered, though even a hoon might be preferable to this itching. Glancing up, he saw the transom. It was open just a crack, but that might be enough. “Rocallo, friend, lift me up onto your shoulders.”

  The prince knelt. “As you wish.” He was stronger than he looked, and seemed to have no trouble hoisting Chimwazle up into the air, for all his bulk. Nor did the nervous trumpet notes emitted by Chimwazle’s nether parts dismay him unduly.

  Pressing his nose to the transom, Chimwazle slid his tongue through the gap and down the inside of the doorframe, then curled it thrice around the wooden plank that barred the way. Slowly, slowly, he lifted the bar from its slot…but the weight proved too great for his tongue, and the plank fell clattering to the floor. Chimwazle reeled backwards, Prince Rocallo lost his balance, and the two of them collapsed atop each other with much grunting and cursing while Lirianne skipped nimbly aside.

  Then the door swung open.

  Molloqos the Melancholy did not need to speak a word.

  Silent he bid them enter and silent they obeyed, Chimwazle scrambling over the threshold on hands on feet as his fellows stepped nimbly around him. When all of them had come inside he closed the door behind them and barred it once again.

  The rogue Chimwazle was almost unrecognizable beneath his floppy hat, his toadish face a mass of festering boils and buboes where some Twk-men had kissed him with their lances. “Salve,” he croaked, as he climbed unsteadily to his feet. “We came for salve, sorry to disturb you. Dread sir, if you perhance should have some unguent for itching…”

  “I am Molloqos the Melancholy. I do not deal in unguents. Come here and grasp my staff.”

  For a moment, Chimwazle looked as he might bolt the room instead, but in the end he bowed his head and shuffled closer, and wrapped a soft splayed hand around the ebon shaft of the tall sorcerer’s staff. Inside the crystal orb the True-Seeing Eye had fixed on Lirianne and Rocallo. When Molloqos thumped the staff upon the floor, the great golden eye blinked once. “Now look again upon your companions, and tell me what you see.”

  Chimwazle’s mouth gaped open, and his bulging eyes looked as though they might pop out of his skull. “The girl is cloaked in shadows,” he gasped, “and under her freckly face I see a skull.”

  “And your prince…”

  “…is a demon.”

  The thing called Prince Rocallo laughed, and let all his enchantments dissolve. His flesh was red and raw, glowing like the surface of the sun, and like the sun half-covered by a creeping black leprosy. Smoke rose stinking from his nostrils, the floorboards began to smoulder beneath his taloned feet, and black claws sprang from his hands as long as knives.

  Then Molloqos spoke a word and stamped his staff hard against the floor, and from the shadows in a corner of the room a woman’s corpse came bursting to leap upon the demon’s back. As the two of them lurched and staggered about the room, tearing at each other, Lirianne danced aside and Chimwazle fell backwards onto his ample rump. The stench of burning flesh filled the air. The demon ripped one of the corpse’s arms off and flung it smoking at the head of Molloqos, but the dead feel no pain, and her other arm was wrapped about its throat. Black blood ran down her cheeks like tears as she pulled him backward onto the bed.

  Molloqos stamped his staff again. The floor beneath the bed yawned open, the mattress tilted, and demon and corpse together tumbled down into a gaping black abyss. A moment later, there came a loud splash from below, followed by a furious cacophony, demonic shrieking mingled with a terrible whistling and hissing, as if a thousand kettles had all come to a boil at once. When the bed righted itself the sound diminished, but it was a long while before it ended. “W-what was that?” asked Chimwazle.

  “Hissing eels. The inn is famous for them.”

  “I distinctly recall the innkeep saying that the eels were off the menu,” said Chimwazle.

  “The eels are off our menu, but we not off theirs.”

  Lirianne made a pouty face and said, “The hospitality of the Tarn House leaves much to be desired.”

  Chimwazle was edging toward the door. “I mean to speak firmly to the landlord. Some adjustment of our bill would seem to be in order.” He scratched angrily at his boils.

  “I would advise against returning to the common room,” said the necromancer. “No one in the Tarn House is all that he a
ppears. The hirsute family by the hearth are ghouls clad in suits of human skin, here for the meat pies. The greybeard in the faded raiment of a knight of Old Thorsingol is a malign spirit, cursed to an eternity of purple scrumby for the niggardly gratuities he left in life. The demon and the leucomorph are no longer a concern, but our servile host is vilest of all. Your wisest course is flight. I suggest you use the window.”

  The Great Chimwazle needed no further encouragement. He hurried to the window, threw the shudders open, and gave a cry of dismay. “The tarn! I had forgotten. The tarn has encircled the inn, there’s no way out.”

  Lirianne peered over his shoulder, and saw that it was true. “The waters are higher than before,” she said thoughtfully. That was a bother. She had learned to swim before she learned to walk, but the oily waters of the tarn did not look wholesome, and while she did not doubt that Tickle-Me-Sweet would be a match for any hissing eel, it was hard to swim and swordfight at the same time. She turned back to the necromancer. “I suppose we’re doomed, then. Unless you save us with a spell.”

  “Which spell would you have me use?” asked Molloqos, in a mordant tone. “Shall I summon an Agency of Far Dispatch to whisk us three away to the end of the earth? Call down fire from the sky with the Excellent Prismatic Spray to burn this vile hostelry to the ground? Pronounce the words of Phandaal’s Shivering Chill to freeze the waters of the tarn as hard as stone, so that we may scamper safely over them?”

  Chimwazle looked up hopefully. “Yes, please.”

  “Which?”

  “Any. The Great Chimwazle was not meant to end up in a meat pie.” He scratched a boil underneath his chin.

  “Surely you know those spells yourself,” said Molloqos.

  “I did,” said Chimwazle, “but some knave stole my grimoire.”

  Molloqos chuckled. It was the saddest sound that Lirianne had ever heard. “It makes no matter. All things die, even magic. Enchantments fade, sorceries unravel, grimoires turn to dust, and even the most puissant spells no longer work as they once did.”

  Lirianne cocked her head. “Truly?”

  “Truly.”

  “Oho.” She drew her sword and gave his heart a tickle.

  The Necromancer died without a sound, his legs folding slowly under him as if he were kneeling down to pray. When the girl slipped her sword out of his chest, a wisp of scarlet smoke rose from the wound. It smelled of summer nights and maiden’s breath, sweet as a first kiss.

  Chimwazle was aghast. “Why did you do that?”

  “He was a necromancer.”

  “He was our only hope.”

  “You have no hope.” She wiped her blade against her sleeve. “When I was fifteen a young adventurer was wounded outside my father’s inn. My father was too gentle to let him die there in the dust, so we carried him upstairs and I nursed him back to health. Soon after he departed I found I was with child. For seven months my belly swelled, and I dreamed of a babe with his blue eyes. In my eighth month the swelling ceased. Thereafter I grew slimmer with every passing day. The midwife explained it all to me. What use to bring new life into a dying world? My womb was wiser than my heart, she said. And when I asked her why the world was dying, she leaned close and whispered ‘wizard’s work.’”

  “Not my work.” Chimwazle scratched at his cheeks with both hands, half mad with the itching. “What if she was wrong?”

  “Then you’ll have died for nought.” Lirianne could smell his fear. The scent of sorcery was on him, but faintly, faintly, drowning beneath the green stink of his terror. Truly, this one was a feeble sort of magician. “Do you hear the eels?” she asked him. “They’re still hungry. Would you like a tickle?”

  “No.” He backed away from her, his bloody fingers splayed.

  “Quicker than being eaten alive by eels.” Tickle-Me-Sweet waved in the air, glimmering in the candlelight.

  “Stay back,” Chimwazle warned her, “or I will call down the Excellent Prismatic Spray upon you.”

  “You might. If you knew it. Which you don’t. Or if it worked. Which it won’t, if our late friend can be believed.”

  Chimwazle backed away another step, and stumbled over the necromancer’s corpse. As he reached out to break his fall, his fingers brushed against the sorcerer’s staff. Grasping it, he popped back to his feet. “Stay away. There’s still power in his staff, I warn you. I can feel it.”

  “That may be, but it is no power you can use.” Lirianne was certain of that. He was hardly half a wizard, this one. Most likely he had stolen those placards, and paid to have the roaches glamored for him. Poor sad wicked thing. She resolved to make a quick end to his misery. “Stand still. Tickle-Me-Sweet will cure your itch. I promise you, this will not hurt.”

  “This will.” Chimwazle grasped the wizard’s staff with both hands, and smashed the crystal orb down on her head.

  Chimwazle stripped both corpses clean before tossing them down the chute behind the bed, in hopes of quieting the hissing eels. The girl was even prettier naked than she had been clothed, and stirred feebly he was dragging her across the room. “Such a waste,” Chimwazle muttered as he heaved her down into the abyss. Her hat was much too small for him and had a broken feather, but her sword was forged of fine strong springy steel, her purse was fat with terces, and the leather of her boots was soft and supple. Too small for his feet, but perhaps one day he’d find another pretty freckly girl to wear them for him.

  Even in death the necromancer presented such a frightful countenance that Chimwazle was almost afraid to touch him, but the eels were still hissing hungrily down below, and he knew his chances of escape would be much improved if they were sated. So he steeled himself, knelt, and undid the clasp that fastened the dread wizard’s cloak. When he rolled his body over to pull the garment off, the sorcerer’s features ran like black wax, melting away to puddle on the floor. Chimwazle found himself kneeling over a wizened toothless corpse with dim white eyes and parchment skin, his bald pate covered by a spiderweb of dark blue veins. He weighed no more than a bag of leaves, but he had a little smile on his lips when Chimwazle tossed him down to the hissing eels.

  By then the itching seemed to be subsiding. Chimwazle gave himself a few last scratches and fastened the necromancer’s cloak about his shoulders. All at once, he felt taller, harder, sterner. Why should he fear the things down in the common room? Let them go in fear of him!

  He swept down the steps without a backward glance. The ghost and ghouls took one look at him and moved aside. Even creatures such as they knew better than to trouble a wizard of such fearsome mien. Only the innkeep dared accost him. “Dread sir,” he murmurred, “how will you settle your account?”

  “With this.” He drew his sword and gave the thing a tickle. “I will not be recommending the Tarn House to other travellers.”

  Black waters still encircled the inn, but they were no more than waist deep, and he found it easy enough to wade to solid ground. The Twk-men had vanished in the night and the hissing eels had grown quiescent, but the Deodands still stood where he had seen them last, waiting by the iron palanquin. One greeted him. “The earth is dying and soon the sun shall fail,” it said. “When the last light fades, all spells shall fail, and we shall feast upon the firm white flesh of Mollogos.”

  “The earth is dying, but you are dead,” replied Chimwazle, marvelling at the deep and gloomy timbre of his voice. “When the sun goes out, all spells shall fail, and you shall decay back into the primeval ooze.” He climbed into the palanquin and bid the Deodands to lift him up. “To Kaiin.” Perhaps somewhere in the white-walled city, he would find a lissome maid to dance naked for him in the freckly girl’s high boots. Or failingthat, a hoon.

  Off into purple gloom rode Molloqos the Melancholy, borne upon an iron palanquin by four dead Deodands.

  Afterword:

  I expect I was about ten or eleven years old the first time I encountered the work of Jack Vance, when I grabbed one of those Ace Doubles with the colorful red-and-blue spines off t
he spinner rack in the candy store at First Street and Kelly Parkway in Bayonne, New Jersey. Most of the Doubles featured “two complete novels” (today we would call them novellas) by two different writers, published back-to-back, but this one had the same byline on both sides, pairing Slaves of the Klau with an abridged version of Big Planet.

  Slaves of the Klau was pretty good, my eleven year old self decided after reading it. Big Planet blew me away, even in its abridged state. Thereafter I looked for Vance’s name whenever I set one of those spinner racks to spinning. And so it was that a few years later, I stumbled on the Lancer paperback of The Dying Earth.

  Half a century has passed since then, and that slim little collection remains one of my all-time favorites. Scarcely a year goes by that I do not take it down and dip into it again. The world that Vance created ranks with Tolkien’s Middle Earth and Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age as one of fantasy’s most unforgettable and influential settings. The poetry of Vance’s language also moved me (not to mention expanding my vocabulary!). His dialogue in particular was so arch and dry and witty that I could not read enough of it, then or now. But it was the characters that I loved best. T’sain and T’sais, Guyal of Sfere, Turjan of Miir…and of course Liane the Wayfarer, whose encounter with Chun the Unavoidable remains perhaps my single favorite fantasy short story.

  Vance made us wait sixteen years between the first Dying Earth book and the second, but by the time Eyes of the Overworld was published, I was accustomed to snatching up every book that had his name on it as soon as it hit the bookshops. To my surprise, this new one was nothing at all like the original. This time, Jack showed us an entirely different side of the world he had created, while introducing us to Cugel the Clever, a rogue so venal and unscrupulous that he makes Harry Flashman look like Dudley Doright. How could you not love a guy like that? Other readers shared my enthusiasm, plainly, to judge from the number of times that Cugel has come back. You can’t keep a bad man down.