Songs of the Dying Earth

“They are difficult to dismiss.”

“They trouble me. I am just a reflection of a reflection, and not truly my self.”

“And yet,” the Captain said with sudden softness, his voice like a silken glove, “they have only made me more curious to encounter the image in the flesh.”

“The kindness of that does not make me the least less troubled,” she said. “But knowledge might. Do you know my lineage?’

“As it happens, I do,” the Captain said, “from the books that surround us.” He thus proceeded to tell her the story of T’sais and T’sain and all that had happened to them, of Turjan too, and his quest. He was a good storyteller, she thought as she listened, to be horrified and enthralled all at once, to want to know and yet not to know.

When he had finished and they sat once again across from each other and not within the ancient and mysterious world of Embelyon conjured up by the Captain, T’sais said in rising protest, “but I am nothing like what you describe.”

“Are you sure?” That one light-blue eye seemed determined to lay bare her very core with its intensity.

“Certain enough.”

Whereupon the Captain drew a blade from his boot and tossed it past her left ear. To her surprise, she caught it by the hilt as if born to it.

“That was luck,” she said.

Whereupon he hurled an apple at her, which she impaled upon the blade, felt the weight of it held there, red and wounded.

“Yes,” the Captain said. “Luck. If that word has some meaning other than the one I know.”

She frowned. “This I do not want. It is not me,” she said, and realizing it was true dropped the blade, apple bouncing across the floor.

The Captain reached across the table and took her hand in his. He had a callused hand, a rough hand, and she liked the feel of it.

“Sometimes,” he said, “it is enough to know what one has hidden within them. It need not be used to be of use.”

T’sais Prime stared at him as if he had said the one true thing in all the world.

The Captain rose, releasing her.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “you will join our crew and I will assist you in your quest. As you will assist in ours. For, alas, I know where the one you seek can be found.”

As Battle raged, ebbed and flowed, the pressure in Whisper Bird’s mind an intolerable weight, something inside of him began to burn where nothing had burned before, and he flung his voice into the void and cried out in anguish, and wrenched away the man’s influence.

“I am a door for no one!”

The sound of Whisper Bird’s voice was so loud that it made the slow folk around them seek shelter amid the discolored bones.

Before him, the old man slumped forward, sighed, and admitted to defeat. “I have studied much, I have studied long, for what else is there to do here, and yet it is not enough, I think.”

Whisper Bird saw that the conflict had burned off the man’s beard. The cloudy film had left his eyes, and he was staring right at and into Whisper Bird. Only now did Whisper Bird recognize the depth of the disguise.

“How could I not know earlier?”

Gandreel smiled. “Even you sometimes see only that which is visible.”

“Apparently. Or I am not myself.”

“What is it like now, in the tower?” Gandreel asked. “I remember it as a happy place, at times. When Sarnod was gone visiting the far reaches of his domain, Vendra and I would feast with the people of nearby villages. The tower conjured up for us never-ending food and wine. The music was most joyful.”

“It is as it ever was.”

“How is my brother?”

“Your brother has suffered a change of heart. He wishes for you to return with me.”

“Ha, how you jest!” Gandreel said. “I have lost Vendra because of him and been reduced to bending my sad environs to my will. My brother is vengeful and banishment is the least of his trespasses upon the Dying Earth. I have cast about for many ways to leave this place, but why should I return with you?”

Whisper Bird sighed. “I am but an unwilling servant with no special affection for Sarnod, who would avaunt to Embelyon and be whole and reunited with his family.”

“Will your family recognize you now?” Gandreel whispered, although all attempt at stealth seemed foolish after Whisper Bird’s great cry.

“I will make them recognize me,” Whisper Bird said, and shuddered, for he realized that they might never recognize him, not in the way he wished, or that they might already be dead.

Gandreel looked away, as if Whisper Bird had said something impossibly sad. “I will come with you,” Gandreel said. “And we will meet our fates together. I can see the portal leading back to Sarnod, but am only able to send things through it, not myself. This will not change”

“Was it you then who sent the Nose of Memory?” Whisper Bird asked.

Gandreel nodded. “Yes, in my stead, that it might change Sarnod’s mind. And, perhaps, from what you say, with success.”

“Be that as it may, we must now leave swiftly,” Whisper Bird said, who heard disturbing sounds fast approaching. “I have awakened much from slumber.”

“Yes, this is undeniably true, and more reason still to leave.”

Lurching toward them, from the far-above ceiling, came all the deadly creatures of that place, to which Whisper Bird’s cry had been as loud as the sound of a cliff falling into the sea.

Whisper Bird said the Spell of Unassailable Speed and led Gandreel out of that place.

For three months, two of them as lovers, T’sais Prime and the Captain, who one night whispered his true name to her, traveled across the land of Maddening Glass. For three months, they sought yet never found, with no hint of the woman Vendra but of her essential self always too many; she had only to look down to be aware of ghosts. For three months, she did not guess that the Captain might be delaying their arrival at her destination. There was much to distract her.

Alone together in bed after a frenzied conjoining, her head upon the Captain’s hairy belly, T’sais Prime would ask him, “Why should you have me when there are so many other me’s?”

And he would whisper more quietly than Whisper Bird, “Because you are the only T’sais Prime. This little fuzz upon the back of your neck that I like to kiss is yours alone. That look upon your face of amused puzzlement is yours alone. And this. And this,” and after awhile, again aroused and again satisfied, she would fall into deep sleep contented with the truth of his answers.

Finally, though, they had traveled so far and for so long that, even with the distraction of many daily perils, T’sais Prime could not ignore that whenever they began to approach the far eastern cliffs that lined the edge of their world, the Captain would murmur to his first mate, and by the next day those cliffs would be more distant, not less so.

Thus, eventually she asked that terrible yet tiny question, why?, and from the look in the Captain’s eye, she knew that now the Captain would take her there rather than risk lying to her again.

A week later — alone together in a small ship strapped to an infant mermelant — they came to a place where the broken glass below met a cliff that jutted out toward them. Carved upon the crumbling stone, obscured in part by vines, was a face mirroring T’sais Prime’s own.

“What is the meaning of this?” T’sais asked, turning to the Captain.

“She you seek lives here, within the stone house atop the cliff. Know what is real and what is not,” the Captain said.

“Why do you say that?” she asked as she embraced him.

“Some lives are illusion. Some places are more real thanothers,” the Captain replied. Thus saying, he took off