Songs of the Dying Earth

“Now, fish, devour my enemies,” Sarnod said, “and you, Whisper Bird, employ your invisible weapons, and between you both, bring this struggle to a close.”

“As you wish, Sarnod,” Whisper Bird said, “but it may take some time for me to cross the floor from fish to reach the foe.”

Fish-Sarnod, meanwhile, propelled by ever-fading thoughts of life as the mighty wizard, confused and frightened and enraged, bellowed, “I am Sarnod!”

These words startled one and all in the Seeing Hall, even Sarnod. The stabbing lines faltered over his head. Gandreel stared at the fish from one knee. Vendra’s glassy, pain-filled gaze affixed him.

“The fish believes it’s you, my brother,” Gandreel said. “Thus perhaps you are truly an imposter of a kind.”

“Perhaps these thoughts can be enhanced,” Vendra said, concentrating strangely upon the fish. “For surely Sarnod’s spell is too far along for him to simply end it to confront new danger.”

Whereupon the fish, staring at these apparitions with their strange sounds, insisted one final time “I am Sarnod!” although it no longer knew the meaning of the words, and, thus saying, concluded all conflict and discussion with a mighty leap forward toward the dimly perceived source of its affliction. In two gulps, it swallowed surprised, protesting Sarnod, the half-formed stabbing lines above him lashing out in blind confusion, then lunged for the huge window, smashed through, and plunged into the cool, deep, sad-dark lake beyond, the waters like a second skin, while from behind it sensed the shock in its wake, all of Sarnod’s spells broken with his last smothered scream — Whisper Bird with a long sigh already returning to Embelyon, and, somewhere far-distant, T’sais sensing some fundamental change — and The Mouth’s further exultations and wisdoms muffled as the fish dove deeper and deeper still, into the thick silt of the lake bed, and as Sarnod’s final quest ended, sought only the oblivion of no-thought, no-dominion, and a feast of salamanders, in that place where the light from the dying sun could not penetrate except as a pale, fast-fading memory.

Afterword:

I first encountered Jack Vance through his “The Dragon Masters” novella. I found it during a school fieldtrip to the library when I was twelve, and it so dazzled me that I sought out Vance’s Dying Earth tales. As a kid, I loved the adventure aspects and the outlandish imagination.

As an adult, my affection for Vance only deepened, because there was so much in the stories that I hadn’t seen earlier. Cugel, for example, is the kind of person who does whatever is necessary to survive in what is a very harsh world. This makes him more of an anti-hero than a hero, because his actions can be morally suspect. Sometimes he is even driven to unnecessary cruelty. What saves him from being repugnant often has to do with the rogues around him: there’s always someone worse than him that we’re rooting against.

I also appreciated the genius quality of imagination even more as an adult. There’s something about reading as a teenager that levels out these qualities — you see through the text to what it’s trying to be rather than what it is, and you’re much more forgiving of stylistic flaws. So, back in the day, I didn’t think of Vance as being necessarily any more brilliant than anything else I was reading. But, coming back to Vance, I can really appreciate the high quality of the writing and of his rather black sense of humor.

In terms of my own writing, the idea of Vance creating or refining “scientifantasy,” or far-future SF that read like fantasy, really resonated. I don’t have much of a scientific background, but I liked the idea of the reader having to interpret the text in that way — to see past a “spell” and think that it might be some advanced form of nanotechnology or some other science incomprehensible to us today. As a result, Vance, along with Cordwainer Smith, had a huge influence on my Veniss Underground novel and related short stories. Without Vance, or Smith, I would never have even tried to write science fiction.

Vance’s overall influence seems to me to have been vast. Some writers have long, productive careers and their sheer longevity makes them iconic. With Vance, there’s a different sense — the idea that he was very much an innovator to whom the rest of the world eventually caught up. I doubt that some of the approaches in my work, or in any number of other writers’ work, could or would exist without Vance. That there’s such a wide Vance influence across many different kinds of writers strikes me as important, too. That’s because a reader can interpret the Dying Earth in different ways: you can read them as straight-on fantasy stories; you can read through them to the far- future aspects; you can read through them in a postmodern way, because there’s so much subtext. This, for me, is what has made them classics, and made them last for writers and readers alike.

— Jeff VanderMeer

Kage Baker THE GREEN BIRD

One of the most prolific new writers to appear in the late ‘90s, Kage Baker made her first sale in 1997, to Asimov’s Science Fiction, and has since become one of that magazine’s most frequent and popular contributors with her sly and compelling stories of the adventures and misadventures of the time- traveling agents of the Company; of late, she’s started two other linked sequences of stories there as well, one of them set in as lush and eccentric a High Fantasy milieu as any we’ve ever seen. Her stories have also appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Sci Fiction, Amazing, and elsewhere. Her first Company novel, In the Garden of Iden, was also published in 1997 and immediately became one of the most acclaimed and widely reviewed first novels of the year. More Company novels quickly followed, including Sky Coyote, Mendoza in Hollywood, The Graveyard Game, The Life of the World to Come, The Machine’s Child, and Sons of Heaven, and her first fantasy novel, The Anvil of the World. Her many stories have been collected in Black Projects, White Knights, Mother Aegypt and Other Stories, The Children of the Company, and Dark Mondays. Her most recent books are three new novels, Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key, about some of the real pirates of the Caribbean, the new fantasy novel The House of the Stag, and a full-length version of The Empress of Mars. In addition to her writing, Baker has been an artist, actor, and director at the Living History Center, and has taught Elizabethan English as a second language. She lives in Pismo Beach, California.

Here, she follows the infamous Cugel the Clever on a visit to the white-walled city of Kaiin, where he’s soon embroiled in an intricate plot to steal a fabulous pet…a plot that proves to have unfortunate consequences for all concerned.

It amused Justice Rhabdion of Kaiin to dispose of malefactors by dropping them down a certain chasm located at the edge of his palace gardens.

Deep and steep-sided the chasm was, bottomed with soft sand, so that more often than not the objects of Justice Rhabdion’s displeasure survived the fall. This was all to the good, as far as Rhabdion was concerned, since it provided him with further subject for mirth. On claret-colored summer afternoons, he used to have his Chair of Office moved out on the balcony that overlooked his garden pleasaunce, and which, incidentally, gave him an excellent view into the chasm as well. There he would smile to watch the antics of the enchasmates, as they fruitlessly sought to escape or quarreled with one another.

To further tease those unfortunates who had been so consigned, Justice Rhabdion had had vines of Saskervoy planted all along the chasm’s rim, prodigious black creepers, with scarlet leaves in shape and function like razors, save for their motility and the small voracious mouths set just above each stem. Each enchasmed newcomer attempted to depart by means of seizing and scrambling up the vines, generally at the cost of a finger or nose and never farther than the first third of the way before having to let go and fall.

Rhabdion’s gardeners stinted the vines’ feeding, to keep them keen; and this in time diminished their effect, for the enchasmates quickly learned better than to grasp at the vines. Therefore in their impatience to feed, the