Songs of the Dying Earth

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 Ulfant Banderoz 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 Ulfant Banderoz 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 Ulfant Banderoz’s careless tampering with timespace, 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. Ulfant Banderoz has kept this library stable but timespace 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, Ulfant Banderoz lost control of the two Libraries’ phase shift in the months before he died. The closer the Libraries come in time, the greater the spacetime 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 14^th 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 Ulfant Banderoz’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 Ulfant Banderoz 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