covering, but it soon faded once more.
Farfal was introduced to the household of Balthasar the Canny as a new servant. He observed Balthasar’s five sons and his seven concubines (although he was not permitted to speak to them), was introduced to the House- Carl, who held the keys, and the maidmen who hurried and scurried thence and hither at the House-Carl’s command, and than whom there was nothing lower in that place, save for Farfal himself.
The maidmen resented Farfal, with his pale skin, for he was the only one apart from their master permitted in the Sanctum Sanctorum, Master Balthasar’s room of wonders, a place to which Master Balthasar had hitherto only repaired alone.
And so the days went by, and the weeks, and Farfal ceased to marvel at the bright orange-red sun, so huge and remarkable, or at the colours of the daytime sky (predominantly salmon and mauve), or at the ships that would arrive in the ship-market from distant worlds bearing their cargo of wonders.
Farfal was miserable, even when surrounded by marvels, even in a forgotten age, even in a world filled with miracles. He said as much to Balthasar the next time the merchant came in the door to the sanctum. “This is unfair.”
“Unfair?”
“That I clean and polish the wonders and precious things, while you and your other sons attend feasts and parties and banquets and meet people and otherwise and altogether enjoy living here at the dawn of time.”
Balthasar said, “The youngest son may not always enjoy the privileges of his elder brothers, and they are all older than you.”
“The red-haired one is but fifteen, the dark-skinned one is fourteen, the twins are no more than twelve, while I am a man of seventeen years…”
“They are older than you by more than a million years,” said his father. “I will hear no more of this nonsense.”
Farfal the Unfortunate bit his lower lip to keep from replying.
It was at that moment that there was a commotion in the courtyard, as if a great door had been broken open, and the cries of animals and house-birds arose. Farfal ran to the tiny window and looked out. “There are men,” he said. “I can see the light glinting on their weapons.”
His father seemed unsurprised. “Of course,” he said. “Now, I have a task for you Farfal. Due to some erroneous optimism on my part, we are almost out of the stones upon which my wealth is founded, and I have the indignity of discovering myself to be overcommitted at present. Thus it is necessary for you and I to return to our old home and gather what we can. It will be safer if there are two of us. And time is of the essence.”
“I will help you,” said Farfal, “if you will agree to treat me better in the future.”
From the courtyard there came a cry. “Balthasar? Wretch! Cheat! Liar! Where are my thirty stones?” The voice was deep and penetrating.
“I shall treat you much better in the future,” said his father. “I swear it.” He walked to the casement, pulled off the cloth. There was no light to be seen through it, nothing inside the wooden casing but a deep and formless blackness.
“Perhaps the world has entirely ended,” said Farfal, “and now there is nothing but nothing.”
“Only a handful of seconds have passed there since we came through it,” his father told him. “That is the nature of time. It flows faster when it is younger and the course is narrower: at the end of all things time has spread and slowed, like oil spilled on a still pond.”
Then he removed the sluggish spell-creature he had placed on the casement as a lock, and he pushed against the inner casing, which opened slowly. A chill wind came through it which made Farfal shiver. “You send us to our deaths, father,” he said.
“We all go to our deaths,” said his father. “And yet, here you are, a million years before your birth, still alive. Truly we are all composed of miracles. Now, son, here is a bag, which, as you will soon discover, has been imbued with Swann’s Imbuement of Remarkable Capacity, and will hold all that you place inside it, regardless of weight or mass or volume. When we get there, you must take as many stones as you can and place them in the bag. I myself will run up the hill to the nets and check them for treasures — or for things that would be regarded as treasures if I were to bring them back to the now and the here.”
“Do I go first?” asked Farfal, clutching the bag.
“Of course.”
“It’s so cold.”
In reply his father prodded him in the back with a hard finger. Farfal clambered, grumbling, through the casement, and his father followed.
“This is too bad,” said Farfal. They walked out of the cottage at the end of time and Farfal bent to pick up pebbles. He placed the first in the bag, where it glinted greenly. He picked up another. The sky was dark but it seemed as if something filled the sky, something without shape.
There was a flash of something not unlike lightning, and in it he could see his father hauling in nets from the trees at the top of the hill.
A crackling. The nets flamed and were gone. Balthasar ran down the hill gracelessly and breathlessly. He pointed at the sky. “It is Nothing!” he said. “Nothing has swallowed the hilltop. Nothing has taken over.”
There was a powerful wind then, and Farfal watched his father crackle, and then raise into the air, and then vanish. He backed away from the Nothing, a darkness within the darkness with tiny lightnings playing at its edges, and then he turned and ran, into the house, and through the door into the second room. But he did not go through into the second room. He stood there in the doorway, and then turned back to the Dying Earth. Farfal the Unfortunate watched as the Nothing took the outer walls and the distant hills and the skies, and then he watched, unblinking as Nothing swallowed the cold sun, watched until there was nothing left but a dark formlessness that pulled at him, as if restless to be done with it all.
Only then did Farfal walk into the inner room in the cottage, into his father’s inner sanctum a million years before.
A bang on the outer door.
“Balthasar?” It was the voice from the courtyard. “I gave you the day you begged for, wretch. Now give me my thirty stones. Give me my stones or I shall be as good as my word — your sons will be taken off-world, to labour in the Bdellium Mines of Telb, and the women shall be set to work as musicians in the pleasure palace of Luthius Limn, where they will have the honour of making sweet music while I, Luthius Limn, dance and sing and make passionate and athletic love to my catamites. I shall not waste breath in describing the fate I would have in store for your servants. Your spell of hiding is futile, for see, I have found this room with relative ease. Now, give me my thirty stones before I open the door and render down your obese frame for fat and throw your bones to the dogs and the deodands.”
Farfal trembled with fear. Time, he thought. I need Time. He made his voice as deep as he could, and he called out, “One moment, Luthius Limn. I am engaged in a complex magical operation to purge your stones of their negative energies. If I am disturbed in this, the consequences will be catastrophic.”
Farfal glanced around the room. The only window was too small to permit him to climb out, while the room’s only door had Luthius Limn on the other side of it. “Unfortunate indeed,” he sighed. Then he took the bag his father had given to him and swept into it all the trinkets, oddments and gewgaws he could reach, still taking care not to touch the green flute with his bare flesh. They vanished into the bag, which weighed no more and seemed no more full than it had ever done.
He stared at the casement in the centre of the room. The only way out, and it led to Nothing, to the end of everything.
“Enough!” came the voice from beyond the door. “My patience is at an end, Balthasar. My cooks shall fry your internal organs tonight.” There came a loud crunching against the door, as if of something hard and heavy being slammed against it.
Then there was a scream, and then silence.
Luthius Limn’s voice: “Is he dead?”
Another voice — Farfal thought it sounded like one of his half-brothers — said, “I suspect that the door is magically protected and warded.”
“Then,” boomed Luthius Limn, decisively, “we shall go through the wall.”
Farfal was unfortunate, but not stupid. He lifted down the black lacquer box from the nail upon which his
