Songs of the Dying Earth

“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—”

“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