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 Fernschum, 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 Fernschum 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 Ulfant Banderoz’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.
“Ulfant Banderoz 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 Ulfant Banderoz’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 Ulfant Bander — oz I’ve heard so much about 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 Ulfant Banderoz’s books.
