Songs of the Dying Earth

magickless glows and throbs and safety devices and arcane gauges and bone-felt spell-less vibrations that often, when he could not sleep, he came down to the engine and steering compartment to watch it all work.

The sky galleons had been built for passenger comfort and even those paying the fewest terces found themselves in comfortable surroundings. For Shrue and the other high-paying passengers, it was sheer luxury. The diabolist’s and Derwe Coreme’s stateroom at the third level near the stern had a wall of crystal windows that looked out and down. Their double-sized hammock rocked softly and securely in even the worst night storms. After Shrue had checked their course and done his Discipline rites in the morning, he would wake his warrior roommate and the two would shower together in their own private bath. Then they would step out onto their private balcony to breathe the cool morning air and would go forward along the central corridor to the passenger dining area near the bow where there were crystal windows looking ahead and underfoot. The sense of vertigo in these glass- bottomed lower rooms faded with familiarity.

On the fifth day, the Steresa’s Dream passed east out of known territory. Even Captain Shiolko admitted that he was excited to learn what lay ahead of them. Over wine with Shrue and Derwe Coreme late that night, the captain explained that although his sky galleon was built as a world-traveler, Shiolko’s wife Steresa, while she lived, so worried about dangers to her husband and children that, in his love and deference to her, the captain had stowed away his impatience to see the farthest lands and satisfied himself with transiting passengers to known (and relatively safe) destinations such as Pholgus Valley, Boumergarth, the former cities on the Cape of Sad Remembrance, and towns and ports in between. Now, said the captain, he and his sons and the brave passengers and the fine ship that Steresa had loved and feared so much were outward bound on the sort of voyage for which Steresa’s Dream had been designed and built centuries before Shiolko or his late wife had been born.

After the first week, Shrue had become impatient, eager to rush to the Second Ultimate Library, sure that KirdriK had been bested and eviscerated somewhere in the Overworld and that even now the Purples were returning to Faucelme’s evil band, and he’d urged Captain Shiolko to take the galleon high up into what was left of the Dying Earth’s jet stream — up where the wind howled and threatened to tear the white sails to ribbons, where ice accumulated on the spars and masts and ropes, and where the passengers had to retreat, wrapped in furs and blankets, to sealed compartments to let the ship pressurize their rooms with icy air.

But he’d seen the folly in this even before Derwe Coreme said softly to him, “Can Faucelme’s false Finding Crystal lead him to the other Library?”

“No,” said Shrue. “But sooner or later he — or more likely, the Red — will understand that they’ve been tricked. And then they’ll come seeking us.”

“Would you rather they find us frozen and blue from lack of breath?” said the warrior maven.

Shrue had shaken his head then, apologized to the captain and passengers for his haste, and allowed Shiolko to bring the Steresa’s Dream down — in a slow, dreamlike descent — to her lower, warmer altitudes and more leisurely breeze-driven pace.

During the second week of their voyage, there were some memorable moments for Shrue the diabolist:

For a full day, Steresa’s Dream wove slowly between massive stratocumulus clouds that rose nine leagues and more before anvilling out high in the stratosphere. When the sky galleon had to go through one of these cloud giants, the ship’s lanterns came on automatically, one of Shiolko’s sons activated a mournful fog horn on the bow, and moisture dripped from the spars and rigging.

For two days, they flew above a massive forest fire that had already devoured millions of hectares of ancient woodland. Steresa’s Dream bucked and rolled to the violent thermal updrafts. The smoke became so heavy that Shiolko took the ship as high as she could go without incurring icing, and still Shrue and the passengers had to wear scarves over their noses and mouths when they went on deck. That night, the fifty-four passengers — including Derwe Coreme’s Myrmazons and Mauz Meriwolt, who no longer bothered wearing the monk’s robes — dined in awed silence, staring down through the dining room’s crystal hull-floor as the inferno raged and roared less than a mile below them.

As they neared a coastline, the sky galleon flew low over the last stages of a war, where a besieging army was attacking an iron-walled fortress city. Several of the ancient, rusted walls had already been breeched, and reptile-mounted cavalry and armored infantry were pouring in like ants while the defenders blocked streets and plazas in a last, desperate stand. Derwe Coreme’s experienced eye announced that there were more than a hundred thousand besiegers set against fewer than ten thousand defenders of the doomed city. “I wish they could have hired my three hundred and me,” Derwe Coreme said softly as the galleon passed above the carnage and burning port and floated southeast out to sea.

“Why?” said Shrue. “You would certainly be doomed. No three hundred warriors in the history of the Earth could save that city.”

The war maven smiled. “Ah, but the glory, Shrue! The glory. My Myrmazons would have extended the fight for weeks, perhaps months, and our war prowess and glory would be sung until the red sun goes dark.”

Shrue nodded, even though he did not understand at all, and touched her arm and said, “But that could be mere weeks or days from now, my friend. At any rate, I am glad you and your three hundred are not down there.”

The Steresa’s Dream sailed due east across a green, shallow sea and then they were above what both Captain Shiolko and Shrue believed was the legendary Equatorial Archipelago. The passengers lunched on their terraces and looked down as Shiolko brought the galleon low to less than a thousand feet above the tropical-foliaged isles and green lagoons. The islands themselves seemed uninhabited, but the inter- island waterways, bays, and countless lagoons were filled with hundreds upon hundreds of elaborate houseboats, some almost as large as the sky galleon, and all a mass of baroque wood designs, bright brass festoons, crenellated towers and arching cabins, and each carrying more flags, banners, and colorful silks than the last.

They left the archipelago behind and crossed further south and east into deeper waters — the sea went from green to light blue to a blue so dark as to rival the Dying Earth’s sky — and the only moving things now spied below were the great, shadowy shapes of whales and the sea monsters who ate the whales. In the dining room that night, the ocean below was alive with a surface phosphorescence underlaid by the more brilliant and slow-moving biological arc lamps of the Lampmouth Leviathans. Realizing that one of those beasts could swallow the Steresa’s Dream whole, Shrue was as relieved as the other passengers when Captain Shiolko took the galleon higher to find more favorable winds.

The next morning, one of Captain Shiolko’s sons showed Derwe Corme and Shrue how to hook their small webbing hammocks to clasps set high in the crosstrees of the mainmast above the Geyre’s nest. It was a gusty day and the sails and tops of the masts were often tilted thirty to forty degrees from vertical as the great ship first tacked and then ran before the wind. The magus’s and war maven’s tiny hammocks swung sixty feet above the deck and then, in an instant of roll, were thousands of feet above a solid floor of stormclouds miles and leagues below. It was sun-dark day and the primary light came from the lightning that rolled and rippled through the bellies of the clouds beneath them.

“That’s odd,” said Derwe Corme as she rolled out of her hammock and into Shrue’s. The cheap clasps and thin webbing strings on Shrue’s hammock groaned and stretched but held as Derwe sat up and straddled him. “I never knew I was afraid of heights until today.”

On Sixthday Night of the second week, Shiolko and his sons opened the beautiful Grand Ballroom — its crystal floor took up almost a third of the hull bottom — and the passengers and sons staged a Mid-Voyage Festival, even though no one had the slightest idea if the voyage was at its midpoint or not. By midnight, Shrue cared no more than the others about such niggling fine points.

Even after two weeks, Shrue was surprised at his fellow passengers’ festive skills. Shiolko’s sons, it turned out, each played an instrument — and played it well. The side-windows were open in the Grand Ballroom and out into the interocean night went the complex bell-chimes of tiancoes, the string music of violins, serpis, and sphere- fiddles, the clear notes from flutes, claxophone, harp, and trumpet, and the bass of tamdrums and woebeons. Captain Shiolko, it turned out, was as much a master of the three-tiered piano as he was of his ship, and thus the dancing began.

Reverend Cepres and his two wives — Wilva and Cophrane — had not been seen out of their cabin since the voyage commenced, but they appeared in brilliant blue silks this night and showed the interested celebrants how to