Songs of the Dying Earth

The smoke brought with it such severe memories that Sarnod forgot his readied spell, and wept, though his countenance remained stern. For he saw Vendra, created to be his lover, and his brother Gandreel, who had betrayed Sarnod with her. The memory lay like a crush of sour fruit in his mouth: intense, clear, and yet fast- fading.

Sarnod had cherished them both, had welcomed Gandreel to his tower after long absence in the service of Rathkar the Lizard King, only to find the two, several weeks later, by the shores of the lake, amid a grove of trees, locked in a carnal embrace. His wrath had turned the surface of the lake to flame. His sadness had changed it to ice, and then the numbness in his heart had restored all to what it had been before.

After, against their pleading, their weeping, Sarnod had banished them to the levels of the UNDERHIND. As with all of his enemies, he used his spells of Being Small, Pretending Small, Staying There, and Forgetting the Past for a Time. Into the UNDERHIND they had gone, and there they had now remained for many years.

Eruptions of hatred had scarred his heart ever since, had disturbed his sleep, made him lash out at every living thing that moved across plains and forest, many a traveler finding himself taken up by a vast, invisible hand and set down several leagues hence, usually in a much worsened condition.

But now, with the vapor of the past so vividly renewing the sharpness of his former love, his former joy, two pains massaged the hook in his heart. The pain physical presaged death. The pain mental presaged the birth of regret, for he had performed many terrible and vengeful deeds throughout his life, even if some seemed to have been committed by another self.

It had been, he realized, a long and lonely time without Vendra and Gandreel, the vats cold and useless, the world outside become stranger and more dangerous. With his desire for the one and his love for the other rose again a parched feeling — a burning need for the cleansing water of the lake. For a moment, he wanted to dive through the great window of the Seeing Hall and into the lake, there to be free.

“You are Sarnod the mighty wizard. That is not in your nature,” he said, aloud.

“This we have now heard,” Whisper Bird replied, with a hint of warning. “After many minutes of peculiar silence.”

“Who could have sent this?” Sarnod asked. A sense of helplessness came over him with the voicing of the question.

“Master, shall we be spared the extent of your not-knowing?” Whisper Bird said, almost apologetically.

T’sais Prime sighed, said, “I am working on a tapestry that requires my attention. May I leave now?”

“Enough!” Sarnod said, rallying his resolve. “It matters not how it was sent or why, just what we should send back to the UNDERHIND.”

“What can we send back?” T’sais Prime asked in a dull voice.

“You,” he said, pointing at her. “And you,” he continued, pointing in the vicinity of where he thought Whisper Bird might be lurking. “Each of you I shall send to the place that best suits your nature. You will find and bring back the woman Vendra and the man who is my brother, Gandreel, long-banished to the UNDERHIND.” Then added, in warning: “Them and them alone—any other brought back shall perish in the journey! A prison the UNDERHIND is and a prison it shall remain.”

Whisper Bird said only, “You will have to make us small.”

“I have always liked the size I am,” T’sais Prime said, “and the work I have been doing.” Sarnod knew she labored solely on tapestries, which she created only because he had placed a spell of Fascination with Detail upon her.

Whisper Bird said something resigned in a language so ancient that Sarnod could not understand it, but it sounded like a creaking gate on a desolate plain.

Sarnod ignored them both equally and, using the half-senile machines that lived in the skin of the tower, made them see the images of Vendra and Gandreel, gone long before he had made T’sais and ensorcelled Whisper Bird. Then he gave them the power to project those images into the minds of any they might meet in their journeys. Then he made T’sais small. Whisper Bird had already reduced himself, and, in that form, was almost visible: a sunspot floating in the corner of the eye.

As they stood tiny on the golden dais looking up at him, Sarnod gave Whisper Bird and T’sais each three spells to use.

“Be wary of my brother Gandreel,” he told them, “for he too was once a sorcerer, if of a minor sort, and he will have found ways to harness those around him to his will. As for Vendra, beware her guile.

“Know too that the minutes may pass differently for you in the UNDERHIND. What is a half-hour for me here may be a year for you, and thus you may return after much adventure to find it has been but a single day for me.” Miniaturization was an uncertain thaumaturgy and it made mischievous play with time.

Sarnod levitated each in turn, and spun each without protest into one of the two open eyes — and thus into the UNDERHIND.

After they were gone, The Mouth grimaced and said, “Much may be lost in the seeking.”

The hook in Sarnod’s heart drove deeper.

The Nose of Memory, now akin to a canvas sack filled with soggy bones, expelled one last sigh.

Whisper Bird neither felt nor cared to feel the foetid closeness of the level of the UNDERHIND known to some as the Place of Mushrooms and Silence — this continuous cave with its monstrous bone-white lobsters waiting in dank water for the unwary; its thick canopy of green-and-purple-and-gray fungus that listened and watched; its bats and rats and blind carnivorous pigs; its huge and rapacious worms like wingless dragons, all of it boiled in a pervasive stench of decay, all lit by a pale emerald luminescence that seemed more akin to the bottom of the sea.

Invisible he might be otherwise, but not soundless, not smell-less, and thus his nerves were on edge. Even his invisibility itself was an illusion, an effect of the spell that had robbed him of his human form and condemned him to live not just on the Dying Earth but in far Embelyon simultaneously — so that he walked forever in two places at once, neither here nor there, his body like an image seen in twinned rows of mirrors facing each other down a long corridor. Even now, as he searched for the man and woman Sarnod had so ruthlessly banished from his life, a part of Whisper Bird explored the plains and forests of Embelyon.

Surrounded by so many watchful ears attached to dangerous bodies, Whisper Bird slowed his thoughts and stretched out his fear so thin that he could barely feel it. Thus fortifie, he continued on until, finally, he became uncomfortably aware of a rising hum, a distant sound that trembled through the ground carried by the uncanny whispers of the creatures around him. The sound marched closer and closer, resolved into the words “bloat toad,” repeated again and again like a warning or chant.

Around him now floated great white fungal boweries that laid down lines like jellyfish trawling for the unwary and wounded. A cloud of whipping mushroom tendrils. A pyramid of screaming flesh. Moving within their poison sting unharmed were horrible visps and also corpse-white gaun: long-limbed, strong, be- fanged, stalking through the perpetual night.

Invoking his first spell, Phandaal’s Litany of Silent Coercion, he brought a gaun close and projected the images of Gandreel and Vendra into it.

Have you seen either one?

The gaun’s thoughts — like spiders with tiny moist bodies and long, barbed legs — made him shudder: I will rend you limb-from-limb. I will call my brothers and sisters, and we will feast on your flesh.

Whisper Bird repeated his question and felt the gaun’s brain constrict from the force of the spell.

Beyond this cavern, beyond the corridor that follows, beyond the Bloat Toad, in the village there, you will find what you seek.

What is the Bloat Toad? Whisper Bird asked.

It is both your riddle and your answer, the gaun replied.

What does this mean?

But the gaun just laughed, and Whisper Bird, not wishing to suffer the retaliation of its fast-approaching brethren, Suggested that the creature batter its head against the corridor wall until it was dead, and then moved on through the darkness.

All around him now came the vibration of a discordant music fashioned from muttered thoughts, rising full- throated and deep from the dark: bloattoad bloattoad bloattoad.