by Dan Simmons
Derwe Coreme removed her sword, reversed it—her dragonscaled gauntlet protecting her hand from the blade’s razor sharpness—and smashed the heavy hilt down on the priceless crystal case. It shattered into a thousand shards and the warrior maven sheathed her sword, lifted the cat’s-eye crystal egg out, and presented it to Shrue, who pondered it a moment and then set it somewhere within the folds of his robe.
“We must begin our odyssey at once!” cried Dame War Maven Derwe Coreme. “Activate your jinker or jinker your carpet or wake up your rug or whatever the hell you must do. Treasures and booty await!”
“I think that we should…” began Shrue but was interupted by KirdriK flicking back into existence next to them.
“We have company,” rumbled the daihak. “And one of them is a Red.”
· · ·
The first pre-dawn light was lighting the crags and scragtrees around the summit and Library keep. Faucelme was there with his small army—eleven pelgranes, each larger than any Shrue had ever seen, each saddled as if to carry a man or demon—and then a tall, blond, handsome male human apprentice, also dressed in black, and the nine demons themselves. These last were the huge surprise to Shrue—not that the foul little magician would show up with demons in tow, that was a given, but that he could muster these terrible entities. Arrayed behind the apprentice and Faucelme (who was still dressed in black, the rings on his fingers glowing from more than reflected morning twilight) were nine Elementals—three Yellows (to be expected), three Greens (very impressive for any magus from the 21st Aeon), two Purples (rather astounding and not a small bit terrifying), and a Red.
The presence of the Red, Shrue knew, changed everything. How has this little homunculus ever managed to summon and bind a Red—or survive the process? wondered the diabolist. Aloud he said, “Welcome, Faucelme. I came for our dawn meeting, as you requested.”
The thief-magus grimaced a smile. “Oh, yes…rug merchant? If the best you can do is that simpering daihak, then perhaps you truly are only a carpet peddler.”
Shrue shrugged. He could feel Derwe Coreme’s poised readiness next to him, but the Myrmazon leader had little chance even with a Yellow, none with a Green or Purple, and less than none with Faucelme and his apprentice, much less with a Red. KirdriK’s attention was focused—through and across twelve dimensions of perception—totally on the Red. Shrue could feel the daihak strain against a century’s worth of invisible bindings like a wolf on a leash. KirdriK’s sublimated snarls were not on any frequency that human ears could hear, but both the two Purples and the single terrible Red were showing row upon row of what would be called fangs on lesser entities as they heard KirdriK’s challenge .
“I’ve already had my insects peer in at the rock that used to be Ulfänt Banderōz,” continued Faucelme. “Since I already have an adequate paperweight for the desk in my study, I have no use for the dead librarian. But I do want his…ho!…who is this rat that’s joined your ranks, diabolist?”
Meriwolt had been cowering behind Derwe Coreme but now poked his long snout and wide eyes around her armored hip. The diminutive Mauzman’s mouth hung open in awe or horror or terror or all three.
“Merely a possible new servant I am interviewing,” said Shrue. “You started to say that you wanted…to go down to the village with us to have breakfast? Or would you and your entourage rather enter the Library and pay your last respects to Ulfänt Banderōz while we return to Dirind Hopz?” Still smiling, Shrue jinkered the little carpet to life and floated it close.
The Red twitched his six onyx-taloned hands, and Shrue’s rug—a family heirloom from a time when the sun burned yellow—exploded in heatless crimson flames. The ash scattered in a rising breeze as the red sun struggled to rise across the river in the east.
“Thus to any attempts to jinker skyward,” hissed Faucelme. “Your wares wagon and other carpets are already ash, Shrue. I want the Finding Crystal and I want it now.”
Shrue’s left eyebrow arched almost imperceptibly. “Finding Crystal?”
Faucelme laughed and held his hand out as if ready to release the Red. “Shrue, you’re a fool. You’ve just figured out that Ulfänt Banderōz kept the volumes here unreadable by phase-shifting them in spacetime…but you still think there is a second library. There is only this one, the Ultimate Library, displaced in space and time. When I collapse that phase-shift, the magical lore of a million years will be mine. Now give me the Finding Crystal.”
Shrue reluctantly removed the crystal from his robe with both hands, but kept his long, gnarled fingers around it as it glowed in his palms. Beneath them, the granite of Mount Moriat shook as the sun struggled to rise, its bloated red face flickering and spotted.
“Faucelme, it is you who’ve not thought this through,” Shrue said softly. “Don’t you understand? It’s Ulfänt Banderōz’s careless tampering with time-space, this very Ultimate Library, that is unstable. This…” He took one hand off the mesmeric Finding Crystal and gestured toward the vibrating stone of the Library behind him. “…is what is causing the Dying Earth to die even before its short allotted final days have come to pass.”
Faucelme laughed again. “You must think I was born yesterday, diabolist. Ulfänt Banderōz has kept this library stable but time-space separated longer than you—or even I—have been alive. Hand me the crystal at once.”
“You must understand, Faucelme,” said Shrue. “It was not until I came here that I understood the true cause of the world’s current instability. For whatever reason, Ulfänt Banderōz lost control of the two Libraries’ phase shift in the months before he died. The closer the Libraries come in time, the greater the space-time damage to the red sun and the Dying Earth itself. If you bring the two Library realities together, as you and your Red propose to do, it will bring about the end of everything…”
“Nonsense!” laughed Faucelme.
“Please listen…” began Shrue but saw the madness flickering in the other magician’s eyes. It was not, he now understood, a question of whether Faucelme would release the Red. Faucelme was more the Red’s puppet than vice versa, and the Elemental cared not a terce whether the millions upon the Dying Earth survived another day. In desperation, Shrue said, “There is no guarantee that your Red—even with the Purples in support—can defeat a sandestin-daihak hybrid from the 14th Aeron.”
Faucelme’s eyes were flickering red. It was not an illusion or a reflection of the shaking sunrise. Something ancient and inhuman had taken possession of the small human shell and was literally burning to get out. “You are correct, Shrue the diabolist,” said Faucelme. “There is no guarantee that my Red shall prevail—only overwhelming odds. But you know as well as I what the outcome will be in thirty seconds if we both unleash our entities—you your daihak, I my Elementals. You might even survive—it’s conceivable. But the whore and the rodent will be dead before five of those thirty seconds have passed, as will be all eight thousand people in the valley below. Decide, Shrue. I demand the Finding Crystal…now.”
Shrue the diabolist tossed the crystal to Faucelme. Suddenly, Shrue seemed to shrink, to become little more than a tall but thin and frail old man in spidersilk robes, his spine curved under the burden of age and a terrible weariness.
“I’d kill you all now,” said Faucelme, “but it would be a waste of energy I need for the voyage.” Barking in a language older than the mountain upon which they stood, Faucelme commanded the two Purples to remain behind and to keep Shrue and his entourage from leaving the Library. Then Faucelme, his apprentice, the vibrating Red, and the three Yellows and three Greens mounted their mutated pelgranes and rose into the sky.
Even from a distance, Shrue could see Faucelme in the saddle, bending over his glowing Finding Crystal as the eleven giant pelgranes flapped their way southeast until they were lost in the soft red glare of the sunrise.
“Come,” Shrue said wearily. “The Purples may allow us to live a little longer and we might as well find something to eat in the Library.”
Derwe Coreme opened her mouth as if to speak angrily, looked sharply at the stooped old man who had been her energetic lover just hours earlier, and disgustedly followed Shrue into the Library. Mauz Meriwolt and then KirdriK—the daihak moving reluctantly and jerkily and not under his own volition—followed. The demon’s multidimensional gaze never left the two Purples.
· · ·
Once inside, Shrue’s demeanor changed completely. The magus loped through the library stacks and bounded up stairs as if he were a boy. Meriwolt’s black bare feet slapped on stone and Derwe Coreme had to run to keep up, her right hand holding her scabbard and iberk’s horn in place to keep them from clanking. “Did you think of something?” she called to Shrue as the diabolist burst into Ulfänt Banderōz’s death chamber again. Derwe Coreme was panting only slightly from the exertion but she noticed with some small vexation that Shrue was not breathing heavily at all.
“I didn’t just think of it,” said Shrue. “I knew it all along. That beautiful Finding Crystal was mere bait. It will lead Faucelme and his Elementals nowhere—or at least nowhere they want to be. My hope is that it will take them to the open jaws of a Lanternmouth Leviathan in the South Polar Sea.”
“I don’t understand,” squeaked Meriwolt, looking at the shards of shattered glass cover where the Finding Crystal had been so prominently displayed. “Why would the Master leave…” The little Mauzman looked at Shrue and stopped.
“Precisely,” said Shrue. He reached into his shoulder bag and pulled out a stone chisel, a hammer, and an elaborate little wooden box with a glass front. Leaning over the remains of Ulfänt Banderōz like a doctor come too late, Shrue chipped off the dead magician’s not-insignificant nose with three hard taps on the chisel. The glass panel on the small box slid open at a gesture, Shrue set the nose in place, the panel closed, and there was an audible hiss and sigh as the box pumped all air out of the small space. Shrue held the box out absolutely flat, glass face up, while the other two huddled close and KirdriK remained in the doorway, staring down through wood, iron, and stone at the two Purples outside.
The nose in the box quivered like a compass needle and turned slowly until the nostrils faced south-southeast.
“Wonderful!” cried Derwe Coreme. “Now all you have to do is jinker one of these carpets into flight and we’ll find the other Ultimate Library before the sun sets!”
Shrue smiled ruefully. “Alas, Faucelme was telling the truth when he said that he had destroyed all of my jinkerable rugs.”
“You’re a magician,” said the Myrmazon leader. “Won’t any carpet turn into a flying carpet at your command?”
“No, my dear,” said Shrue. “There was something called science behind the magic in those wonderful jinkered bits of cloth and wire. Faucelme’s vandalism this morning has been profound. Those rugs alone were worth more than all the fabled treasure in the catacombs beneath Erze Damath. Also, Faucelme was telling the truth—his Red’s spell will bring down any jinkered flying device in all of the Dying Earth—that is how powerful a Red Elemental can be.”
KirdriK growled and Shrue realized the daihak had said, “The Tunnel Apothegm?”
“No, the guiding nose will not work beneath all that stone,” Shrue said softly.
“We can take the megillas, we bring extras along,” said Derwe Coreme, “but if the other Ultimate Library is on the other side of the world, it might take…”
“Forever,” chuckled Shrue. “Especially since, the last time I checked, your megillas were not enthusiastic swimmers. There may be several seas and oceans in the way.”
“We’re foiled then?” asked Meriwolt. The little servant sounded relieved.
Shrue glanced at the little figure and his stare was cold and appraising. “I guess you are a member of this expedition now, Mauz Meriwolt. That is, if you want to be.”
“If my twin sister really is in the Other Library, I would like to meet her,” came the squeak.
“Very well then,” said Shrue, setting the case with Ulfänt Banderōz’s nose carefully in his shoulder bag, nestled amidst an extra set of underlinens. “There are ways to fly other than magic. The caravan transit hub of Mothmane Junction is only fifty leagues south and east from here along the River Dirindian, and, unless I am mistaken, the old sky galleon towers and the ships themselves are still intact.”
“Intact,” said Derwe Coreme, “but lacking their vital lifting fluid since the trade routes to the far north closed. No sky galleon has flown from Mothmane Junction in the last two years.”
Shrue smiled again. “We can take your megillas,” he said softly. “If we’re willing to ride them half to death—which means saddle sores for this old magus’s bum—we can be in Mothmane Junction by midday tomorrow. But we shall have to stop at my wares wagon below to fetch my traveling trunk.”
“Faucelme said that he’d burned your wares wagon and all its contents,” reminded Derwe Coreme.
“So he did,” said Shrue. “But my trunk is hard to steal and harder to burn. We shall find it intact in the ashes. The sky galleon owners of Mothmane Junction will welcome some of the things that KirdriK packed in it…which reminds me. KirdriK?”
The daihak, the purple feathers rising from the red crestbones of his skull to touch the doorframe twelve feet above the ground, his huge six-fingered hands twitching and opening and closing, growled a response.
“Would you be so kind,” said Shrue, “as to kill the two Purples waiting below?”
KirdriK showed a fanged smile so broad that it literally went from one pointy ear to the other. Another few inches and the top of his head would have fallen off.
“But take them to the tenth level of the Overworld to do the deed,” added Shrue. Turning to Meriwolt and Derwe Coreme he explained, “It reduces the number of collateral casualties considerably. At least in this world.” Turning to KirdriK again, he said, “Rejoin us as soon as you are finished in the Overworld.”
KirdriK winked out of sight and a few seconds later there came an astonishing thunderclap, rattling the Library, as the daihak dragged the two Purples out of one reality and into another. The stone corpse of Ulfänt Banderōz jiggled on its high bed and books and nostrums tumbled from shelves and dressertops.
“To the damned megillas,” said Shrue. Derwe Coreme was loosening the iberk’s horn from her belt as they left the room.
Mauz Meriwolt lagged behind a moment. Standing over the noseless stone corpse, the little figure clasped his hands in front of him and bowed his head. His huge black eyes filled with tears. “Goodbye, Master,” he said.
Then Meriwolt hurried down to join the other two. Dame War Maven Derwe Coreme’s shattering hornblast was already echoing from the mountainside while the blare of answering iberk horns rose from the valley below.
· · ·
There were three tall steel-and-iron towers rising over the caravan city of Mothmane Junction like metal markers on a sundial. The tower tops ranged from three hundred to six hundred feet above the town and river. Each tower was made of open girders, skeletal and functional yet still ornamental in some forgotten age’s style, and the top of each tower was an acre or two of flatness broken only by the necessary cranes, dock-cradles, ramps, shacks, passenger waiting areas, and cargo conveyors necessary to service the almost constant flow of sky galleons that had once filled the skies here. Now as Shrue and his companions, including the seventeen Myrmazons who’d accompanied their leader, rode down the wide main avenue of Mothmane Junction—residents and stranded pilgrims and others scurrying to get out of the way of the exhausted and angry megillas—the diabolist could see that only three galleons remained. For centuries, the sky galleon trade had withered as the quantities of ossip sap and its phlogista extract became more and more scarce. Most of the ancient sky galleons that had called Mothmane their primary port had long since been grounded elsewhere or stolen by pirates and put to more practical uses on the Dying Earth’s seas or rivers.
But three remained—grounded atop their respective
departure towers but relatively intact. Before they reached the shadows of those towers, Shrue took out his telescope and studied their choices.
The first tower rising into the dark blue midday sky, that of the Most Excellent Marthusian Comfort Cruise Line, was little more than girders of rust holding up crossbeams of wooden decay. The outside stairway had collapsed and the broad-bucketed elevator had long since plummeted to the bottom of its shaft. Shrue could see rough rope ladders spiderwebbing the structure and men moving on the sagging platform three hundred feet above the river, but they appeared to be dismantling the once-proud galleon that nestled in its dockstays. The ship’s masts were minus their sails and most of the deck structures—and some of the hull—had already been stripped of the priceless ironwood.
The second tower, its ancient signs and banners still proclaiming Lumarthian Luxury Travel! Cruises and Transits to Anywhere on the Dying Earth! Sky Galleons of Ultimate Comfort and Total Safety and Most Decadent Luxury! Pilgrims Welcome!! Worshipers of Yaunt, Jastenave, Phampoun, Aldemar, and Suul—Praised Be Their Names!—10% Discount!, was hardly more intact than the first tower and ship. There was no one visible atop the tower—even the cargo-handlers’ shacks had fallen down. The sky galleon docked there was larger than the first, but looked as if it had been in a battle—the length of its hull had been scorched and breached and riddled with ten-foot-long iron harpoons that gave the old galleon a porcupined look.
Shrue sighed and studied the third and tallest tower. The stairway—all sixty zigzagging flights of it—looked shaky but complete. The lift platform was still at the bottom of its shaft but Shrue could see that all of the levitation equipment had been removed and the remaining metal cables—looking too old and far too thin to support much weight—were connected to a manual crank at the bottom. The banner here was more modest—Shiolko and Sons. Sky Galleon Transit to Pholgus Valley, Boumergarth, and the Cape of Sad Remembrance (Ossip Supplies Permitting).