Songs of the Dying Earth

as far away from Ascolais and Almery and Kauchique and the Land of the Falling Wall as we could be, without coming closer to home by continuing on eastward, I mean, so we thought it might be fun to ride the megillas home.”

“Fun?” repeated Shrue, refilling everyone’s flute. “It might take years for you to get home…if any of you survived the adventure, which would be highly doubtful.”

Derwe Coreme smiled and sipped her sparkling goldwine. Meriwolt and his sister frowned and downed their third flute in an impatient gulp.

“Well,” Shrue said to the Myrmazon chief, “I hope your megillas can swim, my dear. But then again…if we survive this current crisis…as you said, your adventures would be sung of for a thousand years or longer.”

“Oh, I think…” began Derwe Coreme.

“I really think we need to go inside and visit the Master’s corpse,” interrupted Meriwolt. “May I at least look at the nose of our Master, Ulfant Bander — oz? Perhaps there is some way we could reattach it.”

“Of course,” Shrue said apologetically, setting his flute down on the stone balustrade and fumbling in his robes for the box. He handed it to Meriwolt.

The Mauz twins both clutched the box at once and a change came over their features. Meriwolt struck the box against stone, smashing the glass, and lifted the nose out. Both brother and sister held the nose high and a radiance poured from the stone chard and surrounded both of them. Then the two opened their mouths and a fog flowed forth, surrounding Shrue, Derwe Coreme, and KirdriK.

Shrue recognized the Moving Miasma of Temporal Stasis by its perfume-stink, but before he could react, his body and muscles were frozen in place. Even the daihak stood frozen over the open trunk.

Meriwolt and Mindriwolt cackled and writhed and rubbed against one another. “Oh, Shrue, you old fool!” squeaked Meriwolt. “How my darling and I feared that you’d figure things out before this moment! How much useless anxiety we had that you were smarter than you actually are…we sent the Red to Faucelme to distract you, but now I doubt if we needed to have bothered.”

The two separated and danced around the frozen trio. Mindriwolt squeaked at them, “My darling brother, my darling lover, was never just a clerk, you foolish magus. He was Ulfant Banderoz’s trusted apprentice in the First Ultimate Library…as was I here in the Second. Ulfant Banderoz trusted each of us…needed us, since only through our womb-joined minds and twinned perceptions could even he unscramble the time-twisted titles and contents of his many books…and so he taught us a few paltry tricks, but all the time we were learning, learning…”

“Learning!” roared Mauz Meriwolt. The radiance of power around him had turned from silver to red as he spoke. Pirouetting much as he had when he’d danced to his own calliope, the little figure mumbled a spell, called up a sphere of blue flame, and pitched it at the moored sky galleon. The ship’s reefed mainsail burst into flame. Meriwolt threw another blue-flame sphere and then Mindriwolt joined him.

Captain Shiolko threw down the gangplank and cast off the mooring lines, but it was too late — the Steresa’s Dream was burning in a dozen places. Meriwolt and his sister danced and capered and laughed as the burning sky galleon listed to one side and lost altitude, trailing smoke behind it, smashing through trees as Shiolko attempted to guide it into the waterfall.

Meriwolt turned, stalked up to Shrue, stood on the railing, and tweaked the time-frozen diabolist’s long nose even as he held up the stone nose of his former Master.

“This…” the pibald rodent cried, holding high the stone nose, “was our last worry. But that worry’s past, as are your lives, my helpful fools. Thank you for reuniting my darling and me. Thank you for insuring the end of the Dying Earth as you knew it.” Meriwolt danced to the oversized hour glass near the door. “Twenty-two hours and the Libraries converge…”

“…and this world ends…” squeaked Mindriwolt.

“…and the new age begins…” piped Meriwolt.

“…and the Red and other Elementals join us, their Masters in…” squeaked Meriwolt.

“…in a new age where…”

“…where…a new age where…”

“…where…why does my belly ache?” squeaked Mindriwolt.

“…a new age where…mine does as well,” squeaked Meriwolt. He rushed at the frozen Shrue. “What have you done, diabolist? What…where…what have…speak! But try a spell and…die. Speak!” He waved his white-gloved, three-fingered hand.

Shrue licked his lips. “Apprentices always overreach,” he said softly.

Meriwolt cried out in pain, fell to the ground, and doubled over with cramps. Mindriwolt fell atop him, also writhing and screaming, their short tails twitching. In fifteen seconds, the writhing and screaming ceased. The pibald bodies were totally entangled but absolutely still.

The Temporal Stasis fog began to disperse and Shrue banished the last of it with a murmur. KirdriK rumbled into consciousness. Derwe Coreme half-staggered and touched her pale brow as Shrue supported her.

“Something in the sparkling goldwine?” she said.

“Oh, yes,” said Shrue. “You may feel a little unsettled for a few hours, but there will be no serious side effects for us. The potion in the wine was quite specific as to its target…an ancient but very effective form of rat poison.”

Meriwolt had bragged that they only had twenty-two hours left until the end of the world: Shrue and Derwe Coreme used ninety minutes of that remaining time helping Shiolko and his sons and passengers douse the last of the flames and attend to the superficial burns of the firefighters. Most of the damage to Steresa’s Dream had been limited to its sails — for which it had replacements — but there would be days if not weeks of labor finding, cutting, replacing, sanding, and varnishing new planks for its deck and hull.

Then the diabolist and warrior and daihak used another two of their few remaining hours hunting through Ulfant Banderoz’s cluttered workshops and personal rooms looking for a tube or jar of epoxy. Shrue knew more than fifty binding and joining incantations, but none that would work as well with stone as simple epoxy.

It was KirdriK who found the tube, tucked away with some suspicious erotic paraphnernalia in the lowest drawer of a seventy-drawer cluttered desk.

Shrue joined the nose to the noseless stone corpse’s face with great care, wiping away the traces of excess epoxy when he was done. Derwe Coreme had been wanting to ask why this corpse of Ulfant Banderoz was also noseless — since Shrue had done nothing here with his chisel and hammer — but she decided that the mysteries of conjoined but separate time and space with their twelve dimensional knots and twelve-times-twelve coexistent potentials could wait until a less time-critical juncture. The reality was that this corpse of Ulfant Banderoz had also turned to stone and — at least since Shrue’s chiseling three weeks and more than half a world away — was indeed noseless. The reality of now was a concept that Derwe Coreme had never failed to grasp — or at least not since she was kidnapped from Cil and the House of Domber when she was a teenager.

The gray-slate corpse of Ulfant Banderoz turned to pink granite, the pink granite slowly fading to pink flesh.

The Master of the Ultimate Library and Final Compendium of Thaumaturgical Lore from the Grand Motholam and Earlier sat up, looked around, and felt on his nightstand for his spectacles. Setting them on his nose, he peered at the two humans and daihak peering at him and said, “You, Shrue. I thought it would be you…unless of course it was to be Ildefonse or Rhialto the self-proclaimed Marvellous.”

“Ildefonse is buried alive in a dungheap and Rhialto has fled the planet,” Shrue said dryly.

“Well, then…” smiled Ulfant Banderoz. “There you have it. How much time do we have until the Libraries converge and the world ends?”

“Well…eighteen hours, give or take a half hour,” said Shrue.

“Mmmm,” murmured Ulfant Banderoz with a scowl. “Cutting it a little close here, weren’t we? Trying to impress the lady, perhaps? Mmmm?”

Shrue did not dignify that question with an answer but something about Derwe Coreme’s grin seemed to please the resurrected old Library Master.

“How long will it take you to set the timespace separation of the two Libraries to rights?” asked Shrue. “And can I help in any way?”