Songs of the Dying Earth

“What happened to you?” he asked. “You were gone the entire night.”

“It was strange,” she said. “They searched for me carrying tubes of blue concentrate. I might have killed one, but not both, so I hid in the room at the end of the corridor we first explored.”

“The study…the laboratory?”

“Yes. I met someone there. I…It was an old man, I think. He gave me these clothes and spoke to me of many things. Yet I cannot picture him, nor do I recall a word he said.”

“Pandelume,” said Thiago.

“If it was he, I cannot remember.”

A curious white flickering, a discharge of some type, passed across the face of the sun. They stared hopefully, but it remained a molten horror, like an emblem on an evil flag. Some of the cracks in the black crust were sealing over and the coating of orange plasma looked to have thinned; but it was otherwise unchanged.

“We have to go!” Derwe Coreme sprang to her feet.

“It is a fine notion, but how?”

She went to the wall, pressed an indentation next to the one Cugel had pressed. A wide section of the floor retracted with an accompanying grinding noise. Light streamed upward from a hole. Another staircase spiraled downward. Thiago asked how she had known about the stair. She shook her head and set about retrieving her knives. To remove the blade from Diletta’s neck, she was forced to wrench and tug, her foot pinning the corpse’s shoulder in place, until it came free with a sucking noise. She wiped it clean on her trousers and started down the stairs. Thiago could find no reason to stir himself. One death was like another.

A whisper, one that seemed shaped by the tower itself, as if it were a vast throat enclosing them, said, “Go. Goooo…” The walls of the room wavered like smoke and Thiago had an apprehension that Pandelume was all around them, that the voice was his, and that his substance was the stuff of the walls, the floors, that this was not merely his place…it was him. Deciding that the prospect of a bottomless stair was less fearful than what he might face were he to remain, Thiago came wearily to his feet and began his descent.

It was a long way to the bottom of the stair, longer than would accord with the tower’s height, and they stopped to rest on several occasions. During one such rest period, Derwe Coreme said, “How could those women stay with him?”

“You were with him once.”

“Yes, but I would have left at the earliest opportunity. Our association was based solely on necessity.”

“The women may have been no different from you at the outset. Cugel has a knack for bending people to his will, even when they do not care for him.”

“Do you think he is alive?”

Thiago shrugged. “Who can say?”

At the bottom of the tower was a partly open door. They passed through it and into the field of boulders. The sun was at meridian, shining down a reddish light that, though a shade dimmer than usual, was well within its normal range of brightness. They gazed at it, silent and uncomprehending, shielding their eyes against the glare.

“I am afraid,” said Derwe Coreme as they walked toward the edge of the Great Erm. “Did the sun rekindle as we descended? Have we crossed over to another plane of existence? Did Pandelume intercede for us? Life offered few certainties, but now there are even fewer.”

The high sun burnished the massy dark green crowns of the trees, causing them to seem drenched with blood. Derwe Coreme passed beneath the first of them and along an avenue that ran between two mandouars. Thiago glanced back and saw the tower dissolve into a swirling mist; from the mist another image materialized, that of a gigantic figure who looked to be no more than emptiness dressed in a hooded robe, the features invisible, the body apparent yet unreal. For an instant, something sparkled against the caliginous blackness within the cowl, a blue oval no bigger than a firefly. The same blue, Thiago noted, as the egg in which Cugel had escaped, pulsing with the same vital energy, twinkling like a distant star. It winked dark to bright to dark and then vanished, swallowed by the void.

Intially, Thiago was distressed to think that Cugel might be alive, but when he considered the possibilities, that Cugel might travel on forever in that void, or that he might be bound for some hell of Pandelume’s device, or for one of the worlds they had glimpsed at the ends of the corridors, for the table in the workshop, say, where he would be imprisoned beneath a glass bell and subject to exotic predation…though a clear judgment on the matter was impossible, these notions dispelled his gloom.

Pandelume’s figure dispersed, fading and fading until only the feeble red sun and some puffs of cloud were left in the sky. Thiago broke into a jog in order to catch up with Derwe Coreme. Following her trim figure into the shadows, he recognized that though nothing had changed, everything had changed. The sun or something like it lived on, and the world below was still ruled by magicians and magic, and they themselves were ruled by the magic of doubt and uncertainty; yet knowing this no longer felt oppressive, rather it envigorated him. He was free for the moment of gloom, lighter at heart by one hatred, and the next time Derwe Coreme asked one of her imponderable questions, some matter concerning fate or destiny or the like, he thought he might be inclined, if he deemed the occasion auspicious, to provide her with a definitive answer.

Afterword:

I first encountered Jack Vance’s work in junior high, when I read a paperback edition of The Dying Earth sheathed in one or another textbook (I hated mathematics, so most often I read it during math class). I was immediately hooked. I searched the newsstands for Mr. Vance’s books — I recall being exhilarated when I stumbled across The Languages of Pao, and later, in college, when I discovered the first three novels of his Demon Princes series, which I also read hidden in textbooks. I think I began to associate the reading of Vance with a certain criminality and, in this particular instance, with an aversion to a certain history professor who spoke with a Southern drawl and pronounced “feudalism” as fee-yood-a- lism.

Of the many books I have read by Jack Vance, and I think I’ve read them all, I suppose it was The Dying Earth that was the biggest influence on my writing simply because it was the first to introduce me to the Vance-ian syntax and formality of language. I was already on a path that would lead to a complicated syntax and formal style, thanks to my father’s pushing me that way, but Vance was my discovery and I accepted the lessons more willingly and more naturally from him than from an authority figure. Aside from the odd movie, Vance was my first exposure to science fiction — my father had forbidden all such reading material — and as such he was a revelation. That one could write stories about a dying sun and the peculiar folk who lived beneath it came as a shock, one from which I never recovered. Most of my stories are set in contemporary times, but were it not for Vance I think I might have been one of those writers who examine the psychological nuances of their failed marriages. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but this way it’s been so much more fun…

Thanks, JV.

— Lucius Shepard

Tad Williams THE LAMENTABLY COMICAL TRAGEDY (OR THE LAUGHABLY TRAGIC COMEDY) OF LIXAL LAQAVEE

A well-worn adage of the present day tells us that “it doesn’t matter if you win or lose, but how you play the game.” But millions of years in the future, on the Dying Earth, as the comical tragedy (or tragic comedy) that follows makes clear, it does matter whether you win or lose. In fact, it couldn’t matter more…

Tad Williams became an international bestseller with his very first novel, Tailchaser’s