Songs of the Dying Earth

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 Ulfant Banderoz’s nose carefully in his shoulder bag, nestled amidst an extra set of under-linens. “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 ware 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 Ulfant Banderoz 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).

Well, thought Shrue, no one would be paying to fly to the Cape of Sad Remembrance after the recent tsunamis. He focused his glass on the flat top of the tower.

There were tents and people there — scores of both — which was both reassuring and dismaying. Whoever these potential passengers were, it looked as if they had been waiting a long time. Laundry hung from ropes tied between old tents. The sky galleon, however, looked more promising. Nestled in its tall cradle-stays, this ship — smaller than the other two — looked not only intact but ready to fly. The square-rigged sails were tidily shrouded along spars on the foremast and mainmast while lateen-rigged canvas was tied up along the two after-masts. A bold red pennant flew from the foremast some sixty or seventy feet above the galleon’s deck and Shrue could make out brightly painted gunports, although they were closed so he could not tell if there were any actual guns or hurlers behind them. At the bottom of the cradle, sunlight glinted on the great ovals and squares of crystallex set in as windows along the bottom of the hull. Young men — Shiolko’s sons was Shrue’s wild guess — were busy running up ramps and clambering expertly through the masts, lines, and stays.

“Come,” said Shrue, spurring his panting and sulky megilla. “We have our galleon of choice.”

“I’m not climbing sixty flights of rusting, rotting stairs,” said Derwe Coreme.

“Of course not,” said Shrue. “There is a lift.”

“The lift platform itself must weigh a ton,” said Derwe Coreme. “It has only a cable and a crank.”

“And you have seventeen marvelously muscled Myrmazons,” said Shrue.

The owner and captain of the sky galleon, Shambe Shiolko, was a short, heavily muscled, white-bearded beetle-nut of a man and he drove a hard bargain.

“As I’ve explained, Master Shrue,” said Shiolko, “there are some forty-six passengers ahead of you—” Shiolko gestured toward the muddle of sagging tents and shacks on the windswept platform where they all stood six hundred feet above the river. “And most of them have been waiting the two years and more that I’ve lacked the extract of ossip and atmospheric emulsifier which allow our beautiful galleon to fly…”

Shrue sighed. “Captain Shiolko, as I have tried to explain to you, I have the ossip phlogista for you…” Shrue nodded to Derwe Coreme, who lifted the heavy sealed vat out of his trunk and carried it over, setting it on the boards of the platform with a heavy thunk. And from his robes, Shrue produced a smaller lead box which still glowed a mild green. “And I also have the crygon crystals for the atmospheric emulsifier you require. Both are yours without cost as long as you book us passage on