Songs of the Dying Earth

“Time?” repeated Ulfant Banderoz as if he’d already forgotten the question. “The time to repair my so-called apprentices’ little vandalism? Oh, about four days of constant work, I would imagine. Give or take, as you like to say, a half hour.”

Shrue and Derwe Coreme exchanged glances. Each realized that they’d lost their race with time and each was thinking of how they would like to spend the last eighteen hours of his or her life — give or take thirty minutes — and the answer in both their eyes was visible not only to each other but to Ulfant Bander — oz.

“Oh, good gracious no,” laughed the Librarian. “I shan’t let the world end while I’m saving it. We’ll establish a Temporal Stasis for the entire Dying Earth, I’ll exempt myself from it to do my repair work outside of time, and that, as they say, will be that.”

“You can do that?” asked Shrue. “You can set the whole world in Stasis?” His voice, he realized, had sounded oddly like Meriwolt’s squeak.

“Of course, of course,” said Ulfant Banderoz, hopping off the bed and heading for the stairs to his workshop. “Done it many a time. Haven’t you?”

At the top of the stairway, the Librarian stopped suddenly and seized Shrue’s arm. “Oh, I don’t want to play the arch-magus of arch-maji or anything, dear boy, but I do have a bit of important advice. Do you mind?”

“Not at all,” said Shrue. The mysteries of a million years and more of lost lore were at this magus’s beck and call.

“Never hire a mouse as your apprentice,” whispered Ulfant Banderoz. “Goddamned untrustworthy, those vermin. No exceptions.”

To Shrue’s and every other human being on the Dying Earth’s way of perceiving it, the timespace crack — which no one else (except the still flying and fleeing Faucelme) even knew about — was fixed in an eyeblink.

The earthquakes ceased. The tsunamis stopped coming. The days of full darkness dropped to a reasonable number. The elderly red sun still struggled to rise in the morning and showed its occasional pox of darkness, but that was the way things had always been — or at least as long as anyone living could remember it being. The Dying Earth was still dying, but it resumed its dying at its own pace. One assumed that the pogroms against magicians would go on for months or years longer — such outbursts have their own logic and timelines — but Derwe Coreme suggested that in a year or two, there would be a general rapprochement.

“Perhaps it would be better if there’s not a total rapprochement,” said Shrue.

When the Myrmazon leader looked sharply at him, Shrue explained. “Things have been out of balance on our dear Dying Earth for far too long,” he said softly. “Millions of years ago, the imbalance benefited political tyrants or merchants or the purveyors of the earliest form of real magic called science. For a long time now, wealth and power have been preserved for those willing to isolate themselves from real humanity for long enough to become a true sorcerer. For too long now, perhaps, those of us who are — let us say — least human in how we spend our time and with whom we associate, have owned too much of the world’s literature and fine food and art and wealth. Perhaps the Dying Earth has enough years and centuries left to it that we can move into another, healthier, phase before the end.”

“What are you suggesting?” asked the war maven with a smile. “Peasants of the world, unite?”

Shrue shook his head and smiled ruefully, embarrassed by his speech.

“But no matter what comes, you want to wait and see it all,” said Derwe Coreme. “Everything. Including the end.”

“Of course,” said Shrue the diabolist. “Don’t you?”

There came several weeks as the galleon and people were being repaired when life was easy and merry — even self-indulgent — and then, too suddenly (as all such departing times always seem to be) it was over and time for everyone to go. Ulfant Banderoz announced that he had to go visit himself — his dead stone other self — at the First Library and to repair that oversight of death.

“How can you do that?” asked Derwe Coreme. “When you need the stone nose and there was only one of those and Shrue here used it on you already?”

The old Librarian smiled distractedly. “I’ll think of something along the way,” he said. He gave Derwe Coreme a hug — an overlong and far too enthusiastic hug, to Shrue’s way of thinking — and then she handed the Librarian the half-full tube of epoxy and he winked out of existence.

“I’m not sure,” mused Shrue, stroking his long chin, “how instantaneous travel allows one to figure anything out along the way.”

“Is that how you’re going home?” asked Derwe Coreme. “Instantaneous travel?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” Shrue said brusquely.

Captain Shiolko and his passengers had voted and had decided — not quite unanimously, but overwhelmingly — that they would return home the long way, continuing to travel east around the Dying Earth.

“Think of it,” called down Captain Shiolko as the gangplank was being drawn up. “Steresa’s Dream may be the first sky galleon of the modern era to circumnavigate the globe — if globe it really is. My dear wife Steresa would have been so proud of the boys and me. We might be back at Mothmane Junction in a month — or two or three months — or perhaps four — six at the most.”

Or you might all be eaten by a dragon larger than the one I conjured, thought Shrue. Aloud, he shouted his wishes for a safe and happy voyage.

Then there were only the eight of them, nine of them counting KirdriK, and before Shrue could say farewell to the Myrmazons, the daihak cleared his throat — a sound only slightly softer than a major boulder avalanche — and said, “Master Magus, binder, foul human scum, I humbly ask that I might stay.”

“What?” said Shrue. For the first time in a very, very long time, he was truly and totally nonplussed. “What are you talking about? Stay where? You can’t stay anywhere. You’re bound.”

“Yes, Master,” rumbled KirdriK. The daihak’s hands were clenching and unclenching, but more as if he were running the brim of an invisible hat through them than as if he were rehearsing a strangulation. “But Master Ulfant Banderoz has asked me to stay and be his apprentice here at the Library, and if you would release me — or loan me to him, at least temporarily — I would like to do that…Master.”

Shrue stared for a long minute and then threw his head back and laughed. “KirdriK, KirdriK…you know, do you not, that this will mean that you will be double-bound. By me and then by Ulfant Banderoz, whose binding spells are probably stronger than mine.”

“Yes,” rumbled KirdriK. The rumble had the sullen but hopeful undertones of a child’s pleading.

“Oh, for the sake of All Gods,” sputtered Shrue. “Very well then. Stay here at this Library at the east ass-end of nowhere. Shelve books…a daihak shelving books and learning basic conjuring spells. What a waste.”

“Thank you, Master Magus.”

“I’ll reclaim you in a century or less,” snapped Shrue.

“Yes, Master Magus.”

Shrue gave one last whispered command to the daihak and then strolled over to where the Myrmazons had finished collapsing their tents and packing them onto the megillas. He squinted at the disagreeable, spitting, venomous, treacherous reptiles and their high, small, infinitely uncomfortable-looking saddles set ahead of the packs and weapons. To Derwe Coreme, who was tightening the last of what looked to be a thousand straps, he said, “You’re really serious about this epic seven-riding-home nonsense.”

She looked at him coldly.

“You do remember,” he said equally as coldly, “those seas and oceans we crossed coming here?”

“Yes,” she said, hitching a final strap so tightly that the huge megilla gasped out its breath in a foul-smelling whoosh. “And perhaps you remember, in all your centuries of bookish studies — or maybe just because you brag about having a cottage there — that there are land bridges around the Greater and Lesser Polar Seas. That’s why they’re called seas, Shrue, instead of oceans.”

“Hmmm,” said Shrue noncommittally, still frowning up at the restless, wriggling, spitting megillas.

Derwe Coreme stood before him. She was wearing her highest riding boots and held a riding shock-crop which she slapped against her calloused palm from time to time. Shrue the diabolist admitted to himself that he found something about that vaguely exciting.