Songs of the Dying Earth

In Old Romarth

Manxolio Quinc was a Grandee of Old Romarth, who dwelt in the Antiquarian’s Quarter, and enjoyed a life of leisurely routine.

Due to the peculiar nature of the Antiquarian delving, a wall of dark red stone, one fathom thick and five ells high, had been raised around the whole quarter. At equal intervals along it had been erected towers mitered with immense lanterns of Lucifer-glass and cunning amplifying lenses brought at great expense from glassblowers in Kaiin, so that beams of particular penetration could transfix any effluvia, grues, dire-sloths, revenants, melancholics, or apparitions that might appear, or illume fugatives. The well-lit avenues allowed citizens to walk abroad at night without fear of pelgranes or press gangs. Murders, thefts, and morbid eventualities were rare.

These lights did not reach into the Cleft, a huge well piercing the Magistrate’ s square in the center of the Quarter, which gaped beneath the shadow of a skeletal derrick. The cries and moans that issued from the Cleft reminded passersby of the stringency of the law in the Antiquarian Quarter.

The other quarters of the city were not so orderly. Scofflaws and smugglers haunted the wharfs of the Mariner’s Quarter, and the ruffian gangs there were said to be organized by a voice that spoke out of the waters of the bay on moonless nights. A nest of Deodands occupied the empty mansions of the Old Quarter and had ferociously repulsed recent attempts to unseat them. Nomads from the Land of the Falling Wall moved into the deserted buildings and shops of the Carcass-Delver’s Quarter, housing their animals in the empty Odeon, penning their oasts in deserted arcades, pulling down mansions for firewood, and driving away Invigilators with glass-tipped arrows from their tiny, recurved bows. Each time they slew a patrol, the tribesmen could be seen in their painted contumely-masks dancing naked jigs on the rooftops.

The Invigilators manned the gates leading to the Antiquarian Quarter as if against besiegers. Only Manxolio Quinc made it his habit to travel into the ulterior parts of the city, where the laws held no control. He walked the route his fathers and grandfathers had walked during their tenures of office as Civic Remonstrators. The lictors whose duty it was to accompany the Remonstrator on patrol, carrying lancegays aflame with luminous venom, allowed their obligations to lapse, under the excuse that he needed no protection.

The fame of Manxolio Quinc rested on a mystic weapon thickly fraught with ancient reputation, called the Implacable Dark Iron Wand of Quordaal, which he was seen to carry with him, and from which a ominous susurration oft could be overheard.

Not even the Deodands in their fury dared molest him, as he strode each day at dawn to the highest point of the ruined citadel in the Old Quarter.

From here, the crumbling streets and ruins of the outer city lay outspread in the musty, wine-colored light like the intricate diorama a sorcerer’s table might hold.

The prospect included both the mountains to the north, their peaks stained cerise by the intervening air, and the sweep of the sluggish Szonglei River to the south, where feluccas with slanted sails and many-oared galliards brought silks and spices from Almery and Nefthling Reach and Lesser Far Zhjzo. These same galliards bore away the unearthed findings of Antiquarian Quarter: books and folios leathered in the skins of extinct animals, set with clasps of amethyst, citrine, or ametrine. Each outbound ship was a melancholy sight, for she carried away a treasure never to be replaced.

To the east, on the barren slope of Sunderbreak Fell, sometimes were glimpsed the strange lights that hovered unwinkingly over the onyx tower of the Sorcerer Iszmagn. To the west lengthened the dun shadows of the Ineluctable Forest, slowly overrunning roofless crofts and weedy plantations. The forest garmented the abandoned hill-land beyond, which was said to now be the haunt of the titan Magnatz, recently come from destroying the great metropolis of nacre-walled Undolumei, where the Three Ivory Princesses once dwelt in opiate bliss. From this direction, as if to lend gravity to the rumor, oft could be heard the echo of enormous convulsions, for whose origin no antiquarian of Old Romarth could offer an undisquieting theorem.

The sorcerer Iszmagn was known to have sent a split-tongued crow to the Chief Invigilator of the city, with this offer: to bend his unearthly art to the task of turning aside Magnatz. The price for this theurgy was exorbitant: six hundred fair gem-studded illuminated folios unearthed from beneath Romarth, and twelve of the fairest virgins in the city, blonde of hair and younger than sixteen winters, and two thousand talents of gold-weight, and the sacred white monkey from the pagoda of the beast-god Auugh. The Chief Invigilator pondered the decision, consulting with augers who watched the birds and astrologers who watched the stars.

From that high place, seeing all the world underfoot, all things in order, and with the great city and its red-tiled roofs and green glass towers silent below, chimneys threaded with blue smoke, Manxolio Quinc would be aware of a profound satisfaction. Certainly there were sorcerers, dark forests, titans, smugglers, nomads, and Deodands. But, what of them? What harm could they do, in the little time that remained to the world? History had entered its repose. No further great wars, experiments, or deeds were left to be done. It was an era for no effort more excessive than quaffing a hot rum toddy, before life on earth closed its eyes and sank into rest.

An Importunity

This routine was interrupted one morning as he descended the municipal stairs from the Citadel down toward the human-occupied Antiquarian Quarter. The third landing, called Leaper’s Landing, was hemmed in on two sides by statues of famous suicides in postures of defenestration. The dawn was wan that day, and the sun had a number of pustules on its surface: in the uncertain illumination, there seemed to be an extra figure among the statues.

Manxolio thought that the figure was contemplating a suicide in the gulf of air underfoot, as the hunched shoulders of this silhouette seemed poised as if to leap. It being no concern of his, he made as of to stroll past. Only then did Manxolio realize that the silhouette was facing him, and its posture suddenly seemed one of menace.

A man’s voice issued from the hood. “You are Manxolio Quinc? I seek you.”

“I bear that name.” Manxolio casually lifted the Implacable Dark Iron Wand and extended it to its full length. “Observe this instrument! It dates from the Nineteenth Eon, the time of the Knowledgeable Pharials. It is said to govern eight different actuators of energy, three aspects of visible refulgence, four more no longer visible, and an astute principle of anti-vitalistic projection.”

The man came closer. Manxolio tapped the heel of the rod on the flagstones of the landing, eliciting an almost-inaudible throb from the shaft. A dark nimbus shivered through the surface of the dull metal.

“With this,” continued Manxolio, “Quordaal the Rarely Compassionate slew the leviathan Amfadrang at a single impulse, annihilating the beast! See! The otherworldly vigor already begins to tremble through the weapon’s unquiet heart!”

The figure said, “No.”

Manxolio waited to hear more, but the cloaked man was now apparently caught in a reverie. “No? To what purport do you utter that monosyllabic negative?”

The figure sighed, and then spoke. “I mean, no, your estimation is understated. The wand is from an earlier time, the middle Eighteenth Eon: the design follows the precepts of Thorsingolian engineers. The energetic forces it commands are correctly numbered at twenty-one. Stroking the Implacable Dark Iron Wand to the ground merely activates its repair-cycle, which, if the cells had not been drained by effusion, would make no noise. Only an empty jar rattles so. The connection with the central potentium has been abrogated, leaving only secondary functions viable. Also, the Leviathan was not evaporated, as you said. The incorrupt serpent-corpse clogged the Szonglei River and blocked the harbor of Romarth for three centuries and a half, and thence was mined for bone and scale and cartilage, and other valuable byproducts, for several luxurious decades.”

Hiding a sensation of dread, Manxolio tapped the wand again, silencing it, wondering what would next eventuate. But the hooded stranger stood motionless.

Manxolio spoke in a voice of studied casualness: “This wand is the brother of the baton of the Curator of Man, and the Antiquarians of this city once, ages ago, communed with his archives. In my grandfather’s time, the weapon blew a vent through the north slope of Mount Scagg and out the other side. The tunnel exists to this day. My father, the last of the Remonstrators, could unsaddle a cataphract with a jolt. When I was younger, enough virtue remained in the marrow to deliver a vehement twinge that could unnerve even a full-grown forest-gleft. In any case, it is a stout truncheon, and I know how to break bones with it, and a hook unfolds from the end to allow me to use it like a peavey or picaroon, or, if my work require it, to impale a skull.” He opened this spike, which stood out from the shaft like a gnomon, giving the wand the aspect of a long-handled pickaxe.

The hooded man said, “Your work! What is its nature?”

“A strange question! You know the secrets of the greatest heirloom of the Quinc bloodline, and my name, and seek me, and do not know what I am in this town, splendid Old Romarth?”

“Your name was suggested to me by a pot-boy in the tavern, for I pestered him with questions while the landlord beat me.”

“Why did the landlord beat you?”

“Inadvertently, I cheated him of his due: your coinage is unfamiliar. Your people use scales pried from the belly of a aquatic megafauna for your bezants.”

Manxolio was taken aback at this comment. Could it be so? Putting his hand into his poke, he drew out two large blue bezants and a smaller pink. These were hemi-circular flakes of steel-hard substance. Enamel? Armor? In the dim rose light, Manxolio squinted at the coins in new wonder. The scales of Amfadrang, perhaps? The notion was unnerving.

Manxolio dismissively put away his coins. “I am an Effectuator — the last of that profession on all of Old Earth. The nature of my work is, in return for suitable remuneration, to expedite legal awkwardnesses, gather information of value, discourage effrontery, observe nuances, and to apply, when needed, deterrents to malefactors.”

“A resolver of mysteries?”

“Ahh…! You seek an Effectuation? No doubt your paramour sweats and swoons in the arms of another! Your outrage is understandable. With a clew-hook and fine thread, I can hoist myself to the most difficult vantages by rooftop or wall, and peer in through casements or chimneypot, using a technique I call the Surreptitious Dangle-Glass.”

“Suspicion of infidelity is not my impetus.”

“You display a charming innocence! Best to be sure. With no more noise than a shadow glancing along the snow, I can trail even an alert woman to discover the meaning of her unexplained absences, or rare lapses of memory.”

“While your clandestine skills are doubtless unparalleled, my needs are otherwise. Can you find missing men? Lost goods?”

“Such is a specialty of mine, if I may speak without boasting. What have you lost? What is your name and family? What man do you want me to find?”

“I wish to engage your services,” declared the young man. “I have lost my essential being. I cannot answer you my name: it is gone. The missing man…is me.”

The man threw back his hood. He was bruised along his cheek, and the quirk of his mouth suggested pain in his tooth or jaw. He was a slight but well-knit youth with clear eyes, who carried himself with an unconscious dignity so natural that Manxolio did not at first realize that, beneath the heavy cloak, the youth wore slops apparently from a rag-pickers wagon.

A Question of Memory

The stranger was exasperating to the patience of even so equitable a temper as Manxolio’s. His conversation consisted of a never-ending series of inquiries, over matters both small and great, philosophical and childlike, to the point of bewilderment. The stranger was also prone to eccentric behavior, stooping to examine objects in the street, craning his neck to see details of the rooftops.

They soon came to the domicile of Manxolio Quinc. Within, the parlor was walled with green and gold, and the posts had been carved into an intricate pattern of birds and lianas.

A fire crackled warmly on the grate to one side, and Bittern, the only servant in the house, set out warm drinks in porcelain cups. Garments of Manxolio’s father found in an old chest, able to fit the frame of the young man, had been exchanged for the rags, which Manxolio had decreed insufficient for a patron of the art of effectuation.

Only with difficulty could Manxolio restrain the young man from crawling the carpet to inspect the wainscoting joists, or fingering the carven roof-posts, asking questions about the artist, his school of craft, and the tools used in the woodwork. Finally, he was settled in a wing-backed chair near the fire.

Manxolio spoke meditatively, “Before I speak, let me impart my wisdom, an old man to a young.”

“Speak on. I have a deep thirst for wisdom.”

“Just this: ponder the advantage of ceasing to inquire further into your lost self-being.”

The youth raised his eyebrows. “What advantage?”

“The red sun shivers and is soon to die, whereupon all life on Old Earth will grope in the gloom and freeze. In the face of such an impending actuality, you must weigh the chance that your lost essential self once enjoyed a happy life, and that the restoration of your essence would return you to that happiness: over against this, weigh the carefree solitude you currently enjoy, a man with neither known debts nor parental obligations. Consider! What if you recovered your selfhood, and learned that a long voyage was required to return you to your proper place? The sun could fail before the voyage was done. Reaching home, perhaps an unadvantageous marriage, or durance in military service, or the completion of an onerous religious vow awaits you, involving acts of unusual and disquieting self-abnegation, chastity, or temperance. No, the statistics do not favor the resumption of an interrupted life. The wise course is to accept your condition with the equilibrium of a philosopher.”

The youth shook his head briefly. “The hunger for knowledge aches in my soul like an intrusive void.”

Manxolio nodded. “You speak like one who is well-read (indeed, one whose knowledge is beyond credible belief) but nothing of the strangeness of wizardry hangs about you: too hale a look gleams in your eye for you to be one who has memorized the polydimensional runes of continuum-jarring magic, nor have your fingernails been yellowed and stained by trifling with alchemic reagents. Not a wizard, then. But who else studies? You are not an Antiquarian. And yet your color and accent are local. You are from this land.”

“Then who am I? What befell me?”

“A dereliction of the mnemonic centers of the cortex can sometimes be caused by a shock to the skull that disarranges the fibers and nodules of the brain. You have no head wound sufficient for this. A second alternative is psychic distress, or a convulsion of purely spiritual influences caused by phrensy. Again, you are too oriented, too knowing, to be a sufferer of this type of malady. The final alternative is magic.”

“Are there theurgist’s draughts to enchant the memory?”

“Perhaps, but you exhibit none of the signs. No. I deduce a power more primal than mere pharmacopoeia at work. The IOUN stones, geodes of solidified primal ylem, collapsed by gravity in the heart of dead stars, and extracted by means too exotic for description, represent an ulterior order of being: they are said to be able to soak up the vibrations of thaumaturgy like a tippler drinking wine, and to drain soul and vital quintessence. I know of but one agency able to drain the very memories from the intellect: the IOUN stones!”

“Who controls this astonishing efficacy?”

“To my knowledge, none. The wizards of the various lands fritter away their lore in exchanges of morbid glamour and poisonous dream-weft, belittling each other with tricks, or devising homunculi. Any wizard administering such matchless strength as the IOUN stones bestow would have made himself supreme over his peers forthwith.”

The youth nodded. “This implies I was bereft by a wizard only recently come into the possession of such stones, who has not yet had time — or lacks utterly the inclination — to impose his will on the world.”

Manxolio sipped his tea meditatively. “You seem capable of clear deductions, which is at odds with your mental defect. How do you know of such mysteries, as, to pick a merely random example, the exact specifics of the Dark Iron Wand?”

“An afflatus, a ghost, an echo, seems to tremble in my brain. Now it is gone.” A haunted look shivered through the young man’s countenance. “I seem to see the tapestry of knowledge as a vast and varied landscape, picked out with fulvous hues of gold, tawny, or silver-white, emerald and aquamarine, seething with the shapes of man and beast, dates and places, an intricate structure of mathematics, more colossal than a tower. Then the mind-cloud returns, and all is snatched away.”

Manxolio, who knew friends of his own age that suffered from senility or depredations of time, was disquieted. “In any case, there is a second and obvious clue as to your origin. The question arises: how long across the surface of the senile Earth could a man bereft of memory, penniless and weaponless, wander? Your face betrays no signs of long fasting; your flesh is not cracked with thirst, nor do you bear scars such as might be found upon someone who has escaped the alarming claws of forest Deodands, dire-wolves, flesh-eager anthropophages, or one-eyed Arimaspians. You have hardly even a growth of beard. What is your earliest memory?”

“I saw a star. I was standing near a great rock covered with ochre moss, and I wept.”

“From what direction did you approach this city?”

“I am not sure. The stars look wrong to me, as if they are shifted from their accustomed positions.”

“Curious. I can put no meaning to that comment.”

“I remember walking along a dry streambed.”

Manxolio spread his hands, breaking into a smile. “That is the river Scaum, drunk dry by the titan Magnatz, who is rumored to be lumbering through the lands west of here, toppling mountains and trampling towers. If you came afoot, it will be a simple matter, less than an afternoon’s ride, to follow your trail on mounted steeds, perhaps with an ahulph to track the scent, and discover where your essence was lost.”

The young man came to his feet. “Your thought process has struck upon an elegant solution! When can we begin?”

“Ah! I do not wish to trifle with a magician who controls the efficacy of IOUN Stones. Even to have spoken to you involves me in discomforting jeopardy. Who knows what clairvoyance this mage might command? His sandestins could be anywhere. A whorl of mystic excrescence could even now be being parsed from the hide of some chained demon-being, to be flung across intervening miles from some warlock’s laboratory, to shatter the panels of my doors, intrude into the chamber, and reduce me instantly to soot. No! The question of proper remuneration asserts itself.”

And, with a delicate motion, he drew the Implacable Dark Iron Wand from its holster, and laid it in the young stranger’s lap.

A Question of Proper Remuneration

Manxolio Quinc said meditatively, “While I might, hypothetically, be delighted to exert my proficiency on your behalf merely for the intellectual pleasure that comes of the exercise of one’s faculties, in practice, the Law of Equipoise must intercede. Savants have studied the cosmos and determined that for each action there must be a corresponding counter-action; for each debt, payment; for each effort, recompense; for each injustice, revenge! When all the balancing forces have countered each other, all stresses released, neutrality will dominate, and the universe sink into peaceful, if exhausted, oblivion.”

“A dismal theory. Suppose it so: then what did those who concocted it receive in return for its invention? If they acted from selfless love of truth, their theory is invalidated.”

Manxolio scowled in confusion. “Tell me, first, can the force ever be restored to this wand?”

The youth gazed at him with narrow eyes. “You could make yourself a power greater than ever was the Grand Motholam. Is that the payment you wish?”

Manxolio shook his head. “My ambitions are far less exquisite. I crave that the Implacable Dark Iron Wand be restored to its legendary magnificence that I might protect myself.”

“From your enemies?”

“Mine are not so fearsome. From yours.”

The youth, without a further word, unfolded the wand, touched a section with a quick flick of his fingers. To Manxolio’s astonishment, the outer surface of the Implacable Dark Iron Wand opened with a ringing like the clatter of coins.

The innards thus exposed consisted of a tightly-wound spine of multicolored strands and curving threads of glass and metal and fire, to which were affixed black metallic disks, slivers of pale crystal, hissing orbs of eye-defeating nothingness, and points of light smaller and bluer than the tails of fireflies.

“How did you open it?” asked Manxolio in a strangled voice.

“Manually. The thought-sensitive nodes that would normally render the wand dehiscent upon unspoken command are inoperative. Depressing these two carbuncles works the molecular latch.”

“Those two…How abnormal!” Manxolio found himself leaning foreword. Recovering his dignity, and not wishing to seem at a loss, now he sank back in his chair cushions, saying nonchalantly, “Neither my father nor my grandfather imparted to me that such a latch existed. Obviously, there was no need.”

The young man gave him a penetrating look. “You have owned this instrument for how many years, and you never made a systematic inspection of it?”

Manxolio groped for an answer, but the youth had already returned to his task. “What are you doing now?”

“I am tuning the internal register to my life-patterns, so that I may have the diagnostic index inspired into my conceptual lobe. There is a sufficient residual charge of nervous flux remaining, I hope: otherwise, I will not be able to read the instrument.”

At once, the little blue dots of light shining from the inner works flickered and went dim.

The young man seemed distraught. “A piece of ill luck! Even a partial investment of the thought-energy extender has drained the primary operative!” He closed the hemicylindrical housing, and telescoped the Wand back to a short baton. No whisper came from the black metal

“It is inert! You’ve killed it!” cried Manxolio, leaping to his feet. “I have known that artifact since childhood! You are a murderer!”

“Do not indulge in anthropomorphism. I am still effecting a repair.” The young man rose unhurriedly to his feet, unfolded the wand once again, and tapped the heel sharply against the carpet. To the infinite relief of Manxolio, the familiar low moan, a throb of power, issued softly from the wand.

The youth now performed a strange act. Facing one direction, then another, he moved the wand back and forth in a slow arc. The susurration rose and fell in pitch.

“What do these antics mean?” said Manxolio, his eyes wide.

Again, the youth gave Manxolio an odd look. “You have never noticed that the sound given off by the repair cycle alters in pitch and consistence?”

Manxolio nodded brusquely. “Of a certainty! Am not I the Earth’s last Effectuator, a man of perspicacity, an acute observer of details? I have often waved the wand to make the pitch oscillate. It frightens suspects into odd confessions.”

The young stranger said, “But the cause of the change did not provoke your curiosity? You never mapped the waveforms against a graph? You never followed the variation in sound to its source?”

Manxolio gazed at him blankly. “I assume you mean to make some trenchant point, but, at the moment, your meaning escapes me.”

The youth favored him with an easy smile. “Grasp the Wand lightly. The sound will climb in pitch as we grow closer to the source of the signal, which implies an energy supply. There may be a potentium nearby, at which we can restore the instrument to power.”

A Question of Descent

In the middle of a wide square paved in alternating brown and black tile, the two men walked beneath the shadow of a black derrick. A ring of knee-high white stones surrounded a chasm. They stepped over and stood at the lip, looking down into the Cleft.

The lip itself was ragged, and broken tiles canted dangerously over the dark hole. The sun, like a bubble of rosy wine, had risen toward noon, and the rust-colored light slanted wanly into the pit. A vast space was revealed, with what seemed colonnades and corridors opening up upon a central well.

The tiles of the street were nothing more than the rooftiles of a building immense beyond description: soil and stone had accumulated atop this roof. The city later erected atop it was no more significant than the nests of rooks found in the eaves of barns.

The architecture underneath was old, with that exactitude of beauty and detail evidenced nowhere in the above-ground buildings; but rubbish and broken rock, slick with mushrooms and spores, lay everywhere. There was a noise of dripping water echoing from the gloomy depths.

A squadron of soldiers, led by two officers in square-topped plumed helmets, and wearing scaly jackets made of hard, brightly-colored flakes, approached at a quickstep from the wrought-iron wickets fronting the Magistracy building. In their hands were lances with tips of sharpened glass, and large round shields of transparent substance.

Manxolio said in a low voice: “We are discovered. These are the Uhlan Elite, the privy guard of the Invigilator’s Order. Such is the price of overzealous curiosity. I might be able to deter them from trifling with us, if they respect my rank. Do not aggravate them with questions!”

The young man lifted his eyes and saw them. “Note the vermeil, purple, rose, and lavender hue of the scales they wear. Their armor is worked from a leviathan’s hide. The bucklers are made from shed eye-cusps.” He seemed not overly concerned with their approach. “The Dark Iron Wand points downward, and south-southwest. That third level: see the dark residue of the radium lamps? Behind those cracked valves beneath that fallen architrave is an energetic source.”

Now the men-at-arms were at hand. The men saluted Manxolio with a flourish of their glassy spears and a click of their boots, and the two officers greeted him with polite words.

Manxolio said genteelly, “Permit me to introduce two of the Invigilators, upon whose valor the peace of Old Romarth with tranquil confidence depends: here is Ullfard of House Urilim, son of Oothbard; and this is Right-Lieutenant Mmamneron of House Mm, son of Mmaeal, a didact and antiquarian. Much of his family’s riches come from the Cleft, and so his fathers have made an avocation of its study.” Then, turning to them: “This is…ah…call him Anomus. He is assisting me in effectuating a case. The details of the matter are delicate, and a nicety of discretion is called for. I trust I need say no more?” He favored them with an engaging smile.

In a soft voice, Ullfard said, “Noble sirs, I cannot help but trouble you to notice that you have overstepped the bounds of demarcation, quite clearly inscribed in this circle of white stones circumvallating the aperture of the Cleft. This is a dereliction of the First Order against the civic mandates. I enjoin you, out of the graciousness of your high station, sirs, to remove yourselves with no delay.”

Even as he spoke, there came a voice from the pit, a hushed whisper, and then a murmur as of many voices. In the dim light, figures could be seen, thin, bone-white and wild-eyed, dressed in rags. These men were peering from the tumbled rocks that clustered near the corridor-ends. The Cleft itself was infundibular, so that the Cleft offered a diminishing view of each successive level. The ragged men among the columns and broken walls of the first level seemed fully human; lower down, where there was less light, could be glimpsed larger, thinner shapes, perhaps of Ska or Visitants or beast-human hybrids.

Anomus (or so he was called now) spoke up. “Sirs! I see children’s faces down there, thin and scarred with disease. If this is where you emplace your criminals, how came these to be there?”

Manxolio winced.

Ullfard politely answered, “In the ordinary course of nature, once female felons, murderesses, mulct-evaders, scolds, harridans, or strumpets, run afoul of the edicts, they are lowered into the Cleft. The convicted women wed, or are taken without wedlock, there in the dark, and produce whelps, who are the small faces you see.”

Anomus said, “But why is not the platform of your derrick lowered for the children to ascend? They have committed no offense.”

Ullfard smiled. “In principle, I suppose you are correct, but modern legal theory holds that no child is truly human unless raised into the sunlight, since our race is self-evidently a diurnal one. These creatures are nocturnal. While they might biologically be children, in the legal sense they occupy a less dignified category. Besides, who knows what crimes these dark beings commit against each other in the wet and stinking pits of under-earth? They are surely guilty of something! In any case, I fear, gentle sirs, that I must insist with unseemly persistence that you remove yourself from this area. None may approach the Cleft.”

Now a voice spoke from underfoot. “Ullfard, Ullfard, of Urilim! We ache with hunger! Lower the platform, let the viands and good brown beer be bestowed! We thirst! We sicken of eating mushrooms! It is I, Chomd, the chieftain of the Northwest Buried Corridor, who speaks!”

Ullfard clashed his spear against his transparent shield, producing a ringing clatter, surprisingly loud. “Silence, worms of the underworld! I speak with men of stature and distinction! Draw back from the open air! Now is not the hour when you are allowed to see the sunlight! Draw back, I say, or I will call the archers. They have plucked fresh needles of potent import from the gnarled limbs of cacti, which you will mourn to find embedded in your flesh! Draw back!”

The voice spoke again: “Noble and kindly Ullfard of Urilim! Important news! A swimmer in the mud discovered an inundated hatch in the second level, leading into the treasure houses of the third level, where, dry and untouched, corridor upon corridor of mummified remains, still seated in the postures they assumed in life, rear among the broken splendor of their libraries and relict-halls! Rare crystals taken from a mausoleum we have found, the brain-stone of a grue, the vestments of the matriarchs of the Nineteenth Aeon, as well as codices and tomes. All rarities, worth stoops of wine and fat hens! The books are illuminated in precise hand, crafted with capitals in red ink, and set with tiny nodules of malachite. Lower the platform, the beloved platform, forty-nine feet. Send us the hens, for we hunger, or we will burn the books, and no advantage will there be to your fairs and merchant houses!”

A second voice, this one dimmer, as if farther off, cried out then: “Heed him not, Ullfard! Gward the Huge, hetman of the Third Dungeon importunes! We have legal title to those books; they were found on our level. Lower the platform ninety-one feet, and we will pour out with abundant hand the folios and geodes from the ancient glory of Romarth! Send us lamps, lamps with oil, and more treasures will be yours! Send us weapons, dirks and derringers, petards and partisans, ranceurs and guisarmes with iron beaks, that we may drive back the impertinent trespassers of the second level! We are harder-working, and will heap up in vertiginous piles the ancestral heirlooms for you to sell!”

Ullfard clashed his spear against his shield. “Silence! Draw back! Or shall I order the sluices opened?”

Mmamneron of Mm said nervously to Anomus, “The talk of the Inhumed is often wild, and full of rare allusions, difficult to interpret! When they speak of selling the priceless archeological treasures of Old Romarth, of course, this is a short expression, a synecdoche, really, for reposing these rarities in the museums of the Antiquarians, where they are preserved for scholarly study.”

Anomus said to the Invigilators, “We mean to enter the Cleft, explore certain corridors and shafts of the buried city, and return. We will lose the signal if we delay. What is the procedure?”

Ullfard said unctuously, “There is no procedure. Without the Magistrate’s order, none can be lowered into the Cleft, and even that only after a disquisition and official hearing, and a consultation of the auguries. As for now, by approaching the Cleft, you trespass, and you must withdraw. Such is the unrelenting law.”

Anomus said, “What is the penalty for defying this law?”

Ullfard blew out his cheeks. “Why, in a severe case, or if the workforce needs replenishment, the punishment for trespass would be introduction into the Cleft.”

“So, the punishment for attempting to enter the Cleft, is that one is allowed to enter the Cleft?”

Manxolio Quinc spoke hesitatingly. “Anomus, it is no use. We cannot offend the ancient ceremonies. If the Magistrate were here…but even so, there is no provision for introducing innocent men into the Beneath-world. The concept is novel, perhaps even obscene…perhaps we can retire to yonder legal library. A narrow examination of the Edicts might elucidate an overlooked exception.”

Anomus, without a word, plucked the Dark Iron Wand from Manxolio’s surprised fingers and tossed it lightly into the air. It fell into the Cleft, ringing against the broken columns and canted floors as it toppled, glinting in the rosy light. Eventually the chiming clatter ceased. Faintly came also the sinister whispering moan of the Wand.

The pale faces peering between the columns underfoot, startled by the noise, ran away.

Anomus said, “Behold. I confess to both tortuous battery, impertinence, and theft of a priceless heirloom. Rather than trouble your magistrate, I hereby condemn myself. Will you lower me on the chain of the derrick? Otherwise the legacy of House Quinc is forever lost.”

The Invigilators said nothing, but stood blinking.

Up the Scaum

The afternoon sky was dark with cloud. Manxolio Quinc rode an oast, a disturbingly humanoid biped, which he controlled by thongs through its nose. Anomus was mounted on a more traditional blue-feathered horse.

The men rode along the dry streambed of the dead river Scaum. To either hand rose the barren earth walls of an old streambed. A line of crooked trees, ginkgo and gumwood, grew along what had once been the riverside. The landscape around was rolling slopes of waist-high grass, dry and gray, interrupted by lumps of granite and flint.

A remnant of the river, a mere stream a boy could have waded, slid noiselessly through a trough of mud and rocks, amid the bones of many fishes. Lily pads and lotus plants grew there, half masking the yellow water in green.

Manxolio toyed with the Implacable Dark Iron Wand as they rode. The metal of the shaft was blacker than heretofore, rich and shining with dark luster. A spark of greenish-white acetylene light appeared at the blunt tip of the wand whenever Manxolio, astonishment in his eyes, squinted at it. He would laugh; the spark would vanish, and then, a moment later, with innocent glee, he would squint again, and make the burning spark reappear.

Anomus said, “Do not exhaust the charge. As I warned, I was only able to stir to action two of the secondary functions: first, the Zone of Intrusive Nigrescence, which darkens the luminary spectrum in all its phases; and second, the Many-valued Magnific Exultation. This is a complex vibration of sympathetic pulses, which will enable partial amplification of any third-order force or lower, and follow its vector and configuration, and augment it. Of the primary functions, I performed a bypass by means of a shunt, but it is frail. The phlogiston chambers have sufficient vehemence to produce a single lance of fire in the pyroconductive mode. I could not restore variant control, as the aperture valve is lost; the cell will discharge all its power at once.”

Manxolio contented himself with silently commanding the picaroon hook to open or shut with a satisfying snap. He could feel the power of the wand in his brain, present, but unobtrusive, like a whisper from a dark closet into a sunlit room. “How did you survive the Cleft? What happened beneath the Earth?”

“I discovered the node buried beneath the rubble of a flooded museum-chamber, but it still glistened with sufficient power that I was able to recharge auxiliary manifestation. Three times I held my breath and dived beneath the still, dark, freezing waters of the mausoleum floor. The only tools I had to work with were those the Wand itself temporarily solidified out of hardened air. I could not repair the main cells. However, when in contact with the potentium node, the wand was able to detect a second, but very faint, whisper of power. It lies in this direction. That is what you are supposed to be seeking with the Wand, and why it is, in theory at least, in your hand now.”

“Of course! I was just, ah…In any event, how was it that the Inhumed did not rip your body to bits, and consume the flesh of your limbs and frame?”

“Once I restored power to the lighting elements, they were grateful, and were willing to stay out of sight while I negotiated with you to lower a sturdy chain. I promised I would secure their release.”

“And your threat to unleash a cataclysm of fire, I assume, was a similar falsehood? The wand, if it is still as weak as you say, could not cut through bedrock and flagstones to envelope the Magistracy building in a holocaust!”

Anomus gave him a quizzical look. “My comment, if anything, was an understatement. As I said, I could not replace the aperture valve on the main beam emitter.”

Manxolio sniffed. “You are merely fortunate that I recalled that one of the ancient prerogatives of the Civic Remonstrator was to commute sentences. Otherwise the Uhlans would not have worked the derrick to remove you from the Cleft.”

Anomus said blandly, “Yet I was not sentenced by any lawful process.”

“A mere technicality. Your act was an eccentric affront to conformity. But no matter, for, look there!” He pointed up to where the brush and grasses by the river bank had been disturbed. “Our investigation nears a definite result. Your trail here entered the streambed.”

The Dead Town of Sfere

Plainly visible were naked footprints in the clay of the slope. “There is your foot, preserved in a muddy petrosomatoglyph. Observe the disturbance in the eucalyptus leaves, elsewhere fallen evenly, and the snapped twigs. There was rain two days ago, and water would have smoothed the edges of these prints, or sponged them away in a wash of mud. This gives us an upper limit for the time. Do you recall pushing through the brush here?”

Anomus squinted and shook his head. “I recall tumbling. Perhaps it was this slope.”

“What else do you recall?”

“It was night. As I said, the stars seemed out of place. I fell down the slope because I came upon it unawares.”

“Why did you not await the dawn-light?”

“I did not know how long the nights lasted on this world.”

Manxolio’s face grew long with surprise. “A singular comment, even eccentric. This leads to a strange supposition.”

With some difficulty, the two men drove or lead the biped and the blue-feathered horse up the muddy slope. They pressed past the brush and gumwood trees. Unlimbering a lantern made from the carbuncles of luminous fish, Manxolio narrowly inspected the ground. For an hour, they followed the meager traces: a broken leaf, a displaced pebble sitting pale-side up.

They debated for a time what to do, whether to return to Old Romarth and secure a hunting pack of ahulphs, or set out sugar to attract a Twk-man, when the upper winds, breaking apart the cloud cover, allowed cerise, rose, and orange beams of light to touch upon the landscape. The ruddy light caught a tumble of bright stones in the distance.

Below them was a wide valley, bisected by the riverbed. The lower parts of the valley were inundated, for the Scaum was blocked. A great topple of stone formed a crude dam, and, behind it, a lake had spread. From the waters rose broken columns, and mossy, topless towers, broken arches, and vacant windows. From their shape, it was clear that the stones forming the dam were nothing other than the houses and towers, fortresses and defensive walls, of what had once been a small city, pulled up by some unimaginable force and heaped into a dike.

Not far from where they stood and observed these melancholy ruins, rose a single standing stone, incised with moss-obscured designs. Here and there, poking through the clumped grass and bushes, rose statues of graceful maidens, now armless, their piquant features blurred with rain. Between these statues ran a roadway of white stone, now green and cracked with overgrowth. Sections of the city walls were still standing, triangular as broken teeth, and not all the houses and mansions of the suburbia were inundated, though all were unroofed, doorless, weed-choked.

Anomus pointed: “That is the stone I recall in my first memories.”

Manxolio approached, leaned precariously from the saddle on the shoulders of his oast, and scraped some of the moss free with a broad-bladed dagger. “This is the City of Sfere, founded in the third year of his reign by the Hero-King Sferendur, and is under the protection of the nine goddesses of Good Fortune, Long Life, and Tranquility. The words of a curse against trespassers who would disturb them is inscribed on the reverse: if I might venture an opinion…” (he gazed in bitter awe at the sheer volume of destruction involved in upending an entire city) “…the curse proved nonoperative.” He twisted in the saddle and looked toward Anomus. “If this is your home, you escaped a decisive disaster.”

Anomus was looking with great curiosity at the ruins. White stones shined in the sunlight. The square foundations of vanished buildings were arranged in rows like a graveyard. Sheep grazed among the broken columns. Down the slope, beneath the lake, could be glimpsed houses and towers, and the concentric stone benches of a great amphitheatre or coliseum, half-buried in mud and waterweed.

“Within myself, I observe merely a blank.” Anomus said, “If this was my home, even the grief I should feel has been taken from me.”

“Your trail ends here,” said Manxolio. “There is nothing more to discover.” Anomus seemed not to hear, and his face was set without expression.

Manxolio felt an unexpected compassion rising in him, like a bubble in the mud, and bursting forth. “Come! Return with me to Old Romarth, and I will, despite my age, make you my apprentice. You will learn the slights and craftsmanship of investigation, and become as watchful as a cat, loyal as a dog, dangerous as an erb! A man to be respected! We can start by learning the strangle-grips to use on a prisoner, which elicit pain, but leave no marks, or only such bruises as admit of ambiguous explanation.”

Anomus said, “I do not quit yet. Whatever stole my essential self did not commit the deed when this disaster befell. When did the river Scaum run dry?”

“Seven years past, no longer.”

Anomus said, “If your arts as an Effectuator can tell us nothing more, then mine as a scholar can do otherwise. Hold forth the Implacable Wand once more: the single question remains to us — to find the source of the invisible pulse the wand detected. Now that we are closer, a clearer sign may eventuate.”

Manxolio and Anomus dismounted, and trod the wintery grass. They came upon a wide square of colored tiles, cracked and faded, in the midst of the grass like an island, covered with an inch or two of stinking, standing water. In the midst was the rubble of a well mouth, clogged with a litter of branches and floating rubbish, and with weathered statues of river-goddesses still tilting dry pitchers above it.

The rains from two days ago apparently had overflowed the well, for now several trickles of water spilled over the cracked lip. Transparent insects with exaggerated legs danced across the stagnant surface, leaving tiny ripples. The image was one of desolation.

“The source is near,” Manxolio reported.

Anomus splashed across the stagnant water, sending irked insects to the air, and plunged his arm into the litter occupying the well mouth. Manxolio saw a glint of metal. In a moment, Anomus returned with an object, no larger than a tambourine.

“Here is a Transmultiangular Peripatetic Analept, flung into a well and abandoned as junk. By mere chance, it fell onto a mat of branches, and was carried to the surface again when the water rose. Who would dispose of such a remarkable artifact in so casual a fashion?”

The object in the hands of the young man was a twisted shape of brass and mirrored crystal, but an eye-defeating visual effect made Manxolio unable to register the shape in his mind. It seemed, from one viewpoint, to be a Penrose triangle, with some sort of strange depth held in the center; but when Anomus twisted it, it folded into a shape like a Moebius strip, a flat circle with a half-twist in it.

Anomus said thoughtfully, “It seems of new fabrication. None of the elements have suffered elution. There is no yellowing of the crystals, no Doppler effect due to expansion of microcosmic venules.”

Manxolio laughed without mirth. “It is yours.”

“In what sense? I would not throw such a thing down a well.”

Manxolio said heavily, “Nonetheless, it is yours. This is an instrument to induce a portcullis into some demon-world beyond the warp and woof of space, or a portage to the transplutonian worlds which whirl through the upper abyss.”

Anomus replied, “It is the end point of the Indigo Path of Instantaneous Motion, which allows for superluminal passage of energy and matter across any distances. The Path, to operate, must be maintained at both ends: there is no fixed anchor established at this end. But how do you know of it?”

“By deduction. And yet you seem, outwardly, to be human; indeed, you have the same color and accent as a man of Old Romarth: but this carried you here from elsewhere. You…” But he stopped, for the Dark Iron Wand was vibrating in his hand.

“What does this mean?” Manxolio asked.

But Manxolio was answered by the Wand itself, which reacted to his words, and imposed knowledge directly into his consciousness: the tension in timespace had reached a cusp, beyond which natural law is inoperative.

The sun passed behind a thin cloud, and, in the dim light, the full moon could be seen faintly in the east, surrounded by stars. The insects, which normally sang when the sun was dim, and the birds, which sang when it was shining, both were silent. The wind itself was still.

Manxolio said, “A supernatural event is occurring!”

The Dead Lord of Sfere

He spoke truly: bells and gongs could be heard tolling from beneath the waters. Beneath the lake, the lifeless buildings now seemed whole, their roofbeams gilded and painted, and lights shined through their stained glass windows, painting the underwater with delicate colors.

While the two men stood in awe, the oast and the blue-feathered horse bellowed and whinnied, and fled away.

Arms of white mist, spangled as if with fireflies, had collected over the lake, then thickened and formed into a transparent figure, robed in shimmering iridium, and bearing a coronet of thirteen moonstones.

It spoke, and even though its voice made no noise, both men understood the meaning without hearing any words. Behold me, the shade and echo and remnant of Sferendur, whose sacrifice founded this fair town.

Anomus knelt, and addressed the disembodied shadow. “Illustrious specter, who am I and whence did I come? By what means might I recall my lost being?”

Again, the strangely wordless meaning was imparted into their understanding.

You are Guyal of Sfere, son of Ghyll, last of my bloodline, last indeed of all my people, foully slain seven years agone. But I name you anew: Guyal of Sferendelume. You are the Curator of the Museum of Man, which by your arts you lifted, huge and weightlesss as a thundercloud, above the regions of the sky and into the ulterior void.

Anomus, or Guyal, listened with intent curiosity, but it was Manxolio who gaped in astonishment. “The Curator!” he whispered in awe.

Longing to soar the starry path of heaven, and with all the gathered knowledge of countless aeons, you followed the wake of the Pharials and the ambitious Clambs who departed Earth; as did the lordly Merioneth ages before them, whose children were remade into pitiless star-gods beyond Antares; and the Gray Sorcerers still earlier, who departed Earth in secret. In the Pleiades, of filial courtesy, you named a virginal and shining world of my name, calling her Sferendelume.

Whereas the Earth has rolled in her orbit so long that the threads of timespace have frayed, allowing dark visitants from the nooks of nether-space to intrude, and the weight of time has overlaid the substance of the world with a patina collected from untold millenniums of fear and human pain — in stark contrast, azure Sferendelume is fresh and unstained, the giant sun Alcyone is dazzling bluish-white and vehement, her littler companion suns bathe the globe with radiance of vermilion, blue, and fulvous gold: and no ear there has heard rumor of the demon realm of La-Er, or the imperturbable hungers of Blikdak of the under-gloom.

The knowledge of the Museum of Man you unhoarded, and built tools and servant-beings to wield them, and the lost star lords from the Cluster of Hyades to the Clouds of Magellan you called to you: the Sacerdotes of forgotten Aerlith, and the Pnumekin, who toiled in the service of the buried kingdoms of a war-torn orb in Argo Navis, you freed and restored their humanity.

When all was prepared for the lost peoples of Earth, and golden mansions readied to receive them, you descended to this globe.

The apparition raised its head, and the nothingness of its eyes blazed with emotion: To your first home of Sfere out of compassion for your father, nine brothers and twelve uncles, you came, to call them to the hither shore of the seas of night. His death you must avenge: that gaes lay I upon you.

To find his slayer, and your lost remembrance, await the monster that approaches, for my appearance has enraged him. Now he comes. And throwing his mantle over his head, the vision evaporated, leaving the lake water roiling and disturbed.

A moment later, and the ringing gongs fell silent; the walls of the drowned city were dark, blind and broken as before.

The Titan

Manxolio said, “There is a tale of Guyal of Sfere, a boy born bereft of wits. In punishment for his endless curiosity, he was sent forth to seek the mythical Museum of Man beyond the lands of the Saponids. What he found there, none know.”

The youth, now called Guyal of Sferendelume, Curator of the Museum of Man, addressed Manxolio Quinc: “Evidently Guyal of Sfere — if I am he — found the Curator and assumed his post.”

“Nothing else could explain the bizarre expanse of your knowledge. Your ancestral specter spoke words of ominous import. It is the titan Magnatz — a name of terror — who destroyed your ancestral home here, and who approaches now.”

“By what do you deduce this?”

“First, many of the craters here look suspiciously like footprints of vast dimensions; second, rumors spread in my city to the effect that the Sorcerer Iszmagn seeks to extort vast wealth from Romarth, feeding on our fear of Magnatz as a vulture feeds on rancid meat; third, I see between the crest of yonder two hills the motion as of a third hill, but this one covered with hair, not trees, and two lakes suspiciously like eyes. Magnatz is upon us!”

“Since we cannot outrun the event, our choices are limited to seclusion, negotiation, and deterrence.”

The noise of the footfalls was like repeated thunder. Like a rising harvest moon, the head of Magnatz hove into view between the hilltops, huge and pale.

Manxolio draw himself to his full height. “What need have we to talk or run? Does this monstrosity not also threaten Romarth? Then he is my foe as well! Have you not restored this dread weapon, the very Implacable Dark Iron Wand itself? One bolt remains, you said! Hah-La! I have no need of two!”

Unlimbering the Wand to its full length, Manxolio flourished it the direction of the monster, whose shoulders and torso were now visible over the hilltops. A secondary aiming-beam lashed out with a finger of red fire, scorching Magnatz slightly along one cheek. Instead of a beam of furious destruction, a whining note issued from the rod, which plaintively dropped in pitch and trailed off.

“Ah,” exclaimed Guyal, “That was unexpected.”

Magnatz roared in fury, and pulled up the crest of a hill to hurl at them. While the titan was still hefting the broken peak aloft, Manxolio called on the Wand and established a zone of lightlessness like a smothering cloud. Both men sprinted with agility: they heard a noise like the end of the world as numberless tons of rock and dirt, trees and topsoil, fell short and missed them. Only gravel like stinging hail smote them.

Manxolio adjusted the Zone of Primary Nigrescence to position it overhead. To them, it was a roof; to the titan, a lake to wade in.

He displayed the Wand to Guyal. “Examine this. What is the error?”

Guyal communed with the instrument. “No error. It is a safety feature. The aiming register senses that the titan has a charmed life, rendering him immune to fire, fear, iron, pain, or directed energy. Magnatz can neither starve, choke, nor drown, because he is surrounded by a system of runic pulses that ward his vitality in nine directions. The rod will not discharge, as the bolt would have merely returned on its flow path, and slain you.”

“Perhaps we could lure him into a pit of eighty fathoms.”

“The plan is commendable in theory, but otherwise not actionable.”

Manxolio said, “Your Analept! I can see that it seethes with eldritch ultra-dimensional energies. Can it blast Magnatz with a spurt of extraordinary fire, or, failing that, open a port to a far world wherein we might end our days, perhaps as unhappy exiles solacing ourselves with exotic native girls and strange unearthly wines, but end our days, lo, long years rather than short minutes hence?”

Guyal twisted the shining object from a square to a cruciform to a triangle, and between the brass bars of the armature there seemed to hang distant stars in a void. “I fear not. The effluvium of nullity is not anchored on this end, and there is no potentium closer than Romarth wherewith to affix it. If I put tension on the strand through overspace, the mass would merely be drawn to the nearest gravitating body. Portage to Sferendelume this cannot presently supply.”

“Useless geegaw! Then what can it do?”

“By itself, it has sufficient lifting force to hale a man, nothing more massive, into the upward spaces.”

But there was no more time for speaking. Large as the funnels of two strangely parallel tornados, the legs of the titan were visible beneath the cloudy zone of darkness, wading toward them, a stormcloud of dust and brush and broken stones at his heels.

Then came a sound like the wind being torn in two, and a mighty truncheon, some huge fasci made of bundled pine trunks, came through the nigrescent zone and smote the ground. But the blow went astray: a hundred feet to the east of the two men, there was a cataclysm; the earth puked up a fountain where the bludgeon struck, and now there was a little, barren valley, half a dozen paces across, filled with steam.

Manxolio looked at the Dark Iron Wand. “Well, perhaps negotiation should have been our first attempt. Was there not a second efficacy you restored to this instrument?”

Guyal did not answer him, for the two men heard the noise of the descending bludgeon and took to their heels. The cloak of darkness under which they cowered permitted the two adventurers, for frantic minutes while they hopped and dodged in wild, eccentric leaps, to evade the thunderous blows of the truncheon of Magnatz.

Guyal hissed over the noise of tumbling stones, “Address him! Mask my motions!” and he ran swiftly toward the huge, creaking feet of the giant.

Manxolio, white-faced with terror, for a moment could not bring himself to speak. Then he saw his fastidiously lacquered and brushed hat, which had fallen from his head in his gyrations, laying in tatters in a smoking crater-mouth. That image resolved his courage.

He called out, “Magnatz! Heed me! Destroy me not, for I have news that concerns you!”

The truncheon went above the dark cloud, as if readying for another blow, but instead came words, huge and deep, as if a volcano spoke: “What news of little men could concern me? My life is charmed, and nothing can destroy it. Each year I grow in size. I push up mountains with my stride, fill wide valleys with my spew. I am as vast and as terrible as the sea.”

Manxolio drew a shivering breath, clenching his teeth to prevent them from chattering. “All too true, great Magnatz! And yet I have dire news. The Sorcerer Iszmagn cheats you!”

“My brother? Cheats me how?”

“Iszmagn foretells your coming to quaking towns, and extorts from them rich treasures, women of allure, gold and bezants plentiful beyond count. Does he share these assets with you? He bathes in a tub of porphyry filled with steaming milk, while round-hipped virgins feed him delectable grapes and coo amorous ditties to trifle away the nights! What does he do for you? Where is the gold of Magnatz?”

A laugh answered him, like the gust of a hurricane. “Nay, it is I who cheat him! For all his dreadful lore, he flitters away his time chasing dream-bubbles, which he captures in living lenses. At my order, he exacts from men, terrified by the rumor of my coming, all the taxation any emperor might require. The gold and women I take to myself, to use or consume in sport. To him, I leave nothing by baubles and trash! Why, just yesterday, following certain dream-signs, we came upon a star-wanderer and robbed him — but Iszmagn took nothing but worthless stones to float round his head. Worthless! For they could protect no one from the strength of my hands. The wanderer we spared, merely so the curiosity of Iszmagn could be sated, to see how long his amnesia would obtain. Our hope was that the press-gangs of Romarth would throw him in the Cleft for vagrancy.”

At that moment, Guyal seemed to fall beneath the feet of Magnatz; or, at least, Manxolio lost sight of him. Then Guyal called out: “The second restored efficacy is the magnific adumbration! Use it now on the Analept!”

Manxolio squinted. The iron pulsed in his grip. The dark zone dispersed. For one terrifying heartbeat of time, the titan reared above them, visible, a vast bulk. At that same moment, from beneath the giant’s toe, issued a strange, piercing, three-toned note. There was a wash of motion, a curtain of upward-rushing dust and wind. Manxolio blinked, caught a last sight of Magnatz the titan dwindling to a mote in the dark blue spaces of the upper sky.

Perhaps a minute later, the pale disk of the full moon formed a new crater, large as Tycho, and rays of moondust scattered far across the airless surface, forming an asterism. The crater was white-hot with the impact of some vast body, but the glow soon diminished through yellow to pink to a sullen red.

The Call to the Violent Cloud

Guyal Rose from the footprint-shaped crater of broken rock where he lay, and made his way wearily to the side of Manxolio.

Manxolio spoke: “How did you survive the pressure of the giant’s foot?”

Guyal said, “The Analept was able to produce a repulsive force, under which I hid, like a turtle in a shell. It was not until you employed the many-valued magnific adumbration that the Analeptic lifting energies were augmented to hurl the monster aloft. Unfortunately, I lost my grip on the Analept, and the strand of star-stuff that connected it to Sferendelume in the Pleiades yanked it to an unknown location. Magnatz will not perish, being charmed against suffocation, and neither will he die of old age, so he will remain in the discomfort of decompression, bleeding from his eyes, nose, ears, and mouth, until entropy halts the universe. How did you know Iszmagn and Magnatz were in league?”

“The honed intuition of an Effectuator. The similarity of names. I told myself that a charmed life implies someone to cast the charm; and the magic which swelled his bulk implied a magician. I asked myself why Iszmagn benefits from the depredations of Magnatz; where there is benefit, might there not be alliance?”

“A correct guess. I am relieved to satisfy, and within moments, the gaes placed by my ancestor, but I am no closer to achieving the resumption of my inner self.”

Manxolio stared incredulously. “Did you not hear? The titan himself described the theft, and identified its perpetrator.”

“I was preoccupied by being trod upon, and so some nuances of the conversation regrettably escaped me,” admitted Guyal.

“The Sorcerer Iszmagn overcame you and took your IOUN stones and your recollections, leaving you alive to study the effects of his experiment in mind-theft. Your dream of revenge is nuncupatory, since so powerful an adversary cannot be overcome.”

“Was it not you who, earlier this day, spoke of the Law of Equipoise, which demands retaliation for each affront?”

“And you denied its self-evident verity.”

Guyal looked up at the sky and uttered a deep sigh.

Manxolio said, “You are resigned, then, to omit this quest? Return with me to Romarth; we will live lives of ease.”

“No, I sigh because we go to our fates with no time to prepare: for the sorcerer manifests the Call of the Violent Cloud to ensnare us.”

There was an noise in the air as of many voices roaring. At once, a column of boiling black smoke hurled down from the sky. Manxolio again commanded the baton to issue the Zone of Primary Nigrescence, which instantly blotted out all sight, but did nothing to impede the Violent Cloud. The two were snatched up, whirled abominably, yanked and jerked in four directions, and then hurled contemptuously to the ground in a spasm of motion.

It was still dark as pitch. Guyal was surprised not to find himself in the crater of a volcano or the midst of a sea of ice, which would have been the most efficient way to extinguish their lives. Instead, he groaned on pavement, aware of his bruises. As he rose to his feet, he heard a peculiar hissing sound, as if white-hot wires were plunged into sizzling wine. The odor of burning, the smell of hot rock and molten metal came from every side.

“Do not yet lift the Zone, Manxolio!” warned Guyal, hoping Manxolio was alert. “Someone employs the Excellent Prismatic Spray against us — while the visual phase of reality remains inoperative, the photonic eruption cannot scald us.”

In a moment, the commotion fell silent. Manxolio lifted the Nigrescent Zone, and visible light returned to the area.

The Dreaming Sorcerer

They stood in the courtyard of a tower of onyx and dark basalt, fantastically carved in rococo designs, and upheld by wide flying buttresses. The courtyard held smoldering urns filled with burning floral displays, a dozen cracked statues of glyptodonts from the First Aeon, and a silver-basined fountain, now a mass of boiling steam. The flagstones in each direction were pitted with tiny dark asterisks, evidence of a recent rain of incandescent darts.

A hundred smoldering little streamers led from the courtyard to a high balcony, where the sorcerer Iszmagn stood, hand still raised and fingertips still glowing, a look of dark satisfaction beginning to elongate into an expression of surprise.

He wore a knee-length jacket of green cusps, and in the center of each there flashed and floated colors never seen in waking life. The cusps also blinked and stared in alarm, and showed other evidence that they were animate objects, stirred at least to a mockery of life. In the middle of his forehead was the eye of an Archveult of Sirius grafted to his brow, a tendril root no doubt sunk deeply into his brain-pan.

In a galaxy around his head swarmed and danced the colored polygons of IOUN stones: spheres, ellipsoids, spindles, each the size of a small plum, and vibrant with inner auroras.

With the merest of hesitations, the sorcerer raised his fingers and the syllables of the Instantaneous Electric Effort gushed forth from his mouth. Tridents and biforks of lighting fell from the balcony, but Manxolio manifested a thick disk of the Nigrescent Zone in midair between them, and the fulgurations were absorbed without effect.

While the dark zone hung overhead, obscuring their motions, Guyal pointed to the iron-bound oaken doors leading into the tower. Manxolio placed the heel of the Wand on the stones, and jammed the head beneath an ornamental boss. He unfolded the Wand, and augmented the motive force with the Magnific Adumbration. The locks shattered and the door sagged open.

The Onyx Tower

Manxolio and Guyal crept into the entrance hall. The wonders of the sorcerer’s walls and ceilings were hidden by Manxolio’s cloud of darkness, but the floor was visible: blocks of hollow glass, each one of which held a different brightly-colored fish. To one side, the first few steps of an insubstantial, spidery, curving stairway were visible.

There was a snap of energy, and the zone vanished.

Guyal said, “Unexpected! Iszmagn has discovered how to abjure the primary nigrescence.”

Manxolio said in a low voice: “I suspect the IOUN stones. Let us retreat, and calculate a more complete stratagem in a leisurely fashion, perhaps over a beaker of Old Golden in the taproom of the Scatterlamp Hotel.”

Guyal said, “Retreat is unlikely, as the tower is now surrounded with blue extract.” Nearby was an arched window carved with grimacing gnomes. The ground below was infected with aquamarine pulsations of singularly uninviting aspect.

Up the stairs, they passed through an alchemical lab, seething with alembics and bubbling retorts, and then a chamber composed of looking glasses, each face of which showed a different landscape, none of which were of Earth.

They came upon Iszmagn in the astrological copula, laying at ease upon a pink couch, a plate of candied figs at his elbow, a hookah in his hand. Huge crystalline windows loomed behind the couch of Iszmagn, showing the sky, the red sun, and the faint full moon with its new crater. The IOUN stones swarmed the glass-domed chamber like bees.

“Leave me in peace, you clumsy creatures of the waking world!” called Iszmagn. “I have no ambitions, save to live out the remainder of human life on earth in comfort, collecting my dream-lenses. They are my companions, they whisper love-songs to me as I sleep!”

Guyal spoke in a voice of doom: “Iszmagn the Sorcerer, for the death of the peoples of Sfere and Vull and gay Undolumei and countless others, and in recompense for the murder of my father and brothers, I call on you to surrender, that your life might be spared. Here stands the Remonstrator of Old Romarth: he will take you into custody, and you will receive the justice of their Magistrates.”

“What? And toil in the Cleft for my daily ort of bread, and firken of unclean water?” called out Iszmagn in a strange, strangled, high-pitched voice. He gave a shrieking giggle of laughter. His two eyes seemed dull and listless; only the third eye, taken from a nonhuman being from Sirius, glittered with intention.

Said Guyal. “Will you capitulate? Human life is rare: in all eternity, each man has but one. Better to toil than to perish.”

“So, I killed your father and all your kin! What of it? I have arranged that you have no memory, so it causes you no real grief: your complaint against me is highly theoretical, if not absurd.”

Manxolio, made courageous, perhaps, by desperation, spoke up: “Behold, I hold in hand the Implacable Dark Iron Wand of Quordaal.”

The lenses in Iszmagn’s coat flickered with emotion: the dream images surged and darkened. The sorcerer rose to his feet, saying, “I have attempted reason, but you are stubborn! Enough!” and then he uttered Lispurge’s Vexatious Thrust.

A gust of the distilled motion darted out toward Manxolio. Guyal leaped in the way: the line of force passed through his chest; Guyal was flung like a rag doll up against a rack of plates of gold, silver, and green iridium; all clattered to the gemmed floorstones.

Manxolio flourished the Wand: a lance of thousand-lightninged brilliance roared out. Manxolio could not diminish the rush of white fire.

When at last silence fell, Manxolio blinked purplish dots from his eyes. The Wand was dull and exhausted.

Iszmagn was unhurt, his chamber undamaged, and the tumbling shapes circling his head were brighter. He emitted a cackle, and the lenses in his coat looked merry. “My IOUN stones drink magical vibrations! I am proof from all attack! Your zone of darkness, I have already deduced how to negate. Your Implacable Iron Wand has no further powers against me!”

Guyal rose to his feet. There was a hole in his coat, but the flesh beneath was untouched. “You do not know my powers,” he intoned.

At that moment, there came a momentary lull in the radiation of the sun — it flared like lightning, and then the world was plunged into a jet-black gloom, with the iron-red face of the moon flickering into darkness a half-second later.

The mage clutched his three eyes and screamed in terror. “The Sun! The death of all life is come!”

From the window came a noise: beneath the black sky, a lamentation passed across all the lands and seas, as every living man, and other creatures, talking beasts and semihumans, all who knew the meaning of this gloom, let out a cry. The noise was very faint indeed, for the tower was far from any dwelling of man, but it came from all quarters.

And yet, as good fortune would have it, this was merely a solar spasm of unusual opaqueness: the sun trembled with new effort. Ember-red light seeped forth from scabs on the sun’s surface, and flares clawed their way into visibility like volcanic eruptions. In a few moment, more than half the sun was re-ignited from its buried fires, the world was as well-lit as before, or very nearly.

When vision returned to the cupola of the tower, the spike of the Implacable Iron Rod could now be seen, having penetrated the skull of the Sorcerer Iszmagn. A river-delta of blood and brain matter, as well as other fluids the sorcerer had introduced into his nervous system, dripped along his neck and down his coat. The lenses were dark, their vitality exhausted: all the carefully collected dreams of the sorcerer were dead.

The Restoration of Guyal of Sfere

Manxolio, who held the haft in both hands, and stared in awe at the corpse, only slowly straightened and regained his composure. When he clicked shut the spike, the body slid heavily from the end, and splashed to the floor, already beginning to dissolve. It was clear that the IOUN stones did not protect physical flesh from merely physical assault.

He turned to Guyal, who seemed whole and unblooded. Manxolio said, “Difficult as this is for an Effectuator to admit, I confess I cannot fathom how you survived a cantrip that normally pierces quenched steel.”

Guyal smiled and held up his fist. Light shined between the cracks of his fingers. Opening his hand, he let loose a small IOUN stone, which darted like a fish, and took up orbit around the young man’s head. “These stones are mine, or so we deduced. I snatched one from the air as I jumped to take the blow.”

One by one, the other stones departed from their position near the corpse, and, following the first, took up positions in concentric circles around Guyal. The IOUN stones changed hue and grew duller, as first the oblongs, and then the spindles and spheres, gave up their essence. Guyal of Sferendelume stood taller, and majesty seemed to shine from his face.

His voice was now stronger, as if vibrant with unearthly wisdom. “I now recall my destiny and fate. Iszmagn was more foolish than I guessed, for the potentium of the Museum of Man upon Sferendelume in Pleiades, a trifling 440 lightyears from Earth, reaches me here still, and, like your Wand, it is directed by thought-pressure alone. Had I known, merely my wish could have set free powers of the first magnitude. Observe!”

Guyal made no gesture and spoke no spell, but Manxolio felt the floor cant like the deck of a ship. There was a sensation of rushing motion. When it ceased, outside the many windows of the cupola, Manxolio saw that the onyx tower now rested in the midst of the ruins of Sfere.

An invisible force was lifting the stones of the dam, one by one, and threads of silver water were beginning to return to the dry streambed of the lower Scaum.

“With the IOUN stones once more in my command, I can seek in the limitless void, discover and recall the Analept to Earth, and anchor it. It is done! Let there be the first anchor point here, in Sfere.

“The river Scaum shall live again, and bear the traffic of boats and rafts of pilgrims. The Indigo Path of Instantaneous Motion will loft all those who seek to depart the Dying Earth away, beyond the sky, to fair Sferendelume!”

Manxolio felt the Implacable Wand begin to vibrate in his hand, and it grew heavy as lead.

“As promised, the wand is restored.” The ringing voice of Guyal of Sferendelume continued, “Manxolio, I charge you to return to Old Romarth and tell them of this hope I bring. The end of Earth need not be the end of Man.

“As men from all the lands and continents of Earth gather, your decaying city shall be rich once more with the trade of passersby, both of pilgrims fleeing this dying world, and scholars descending from the stars to gather up the mementos and mysteries of Earth, and buried cities hale aloft from the bottom of the sea. Surely, the lore of the Antiquarians of Romarth will be a signal study, and the treasures of your past no longer need be sold as curios, but shall be properly collected, indexed, and examined by experts.

“I must now depart, before the IOUN stones grow exhausted, and go to my new world, not with my father, as I’d hoped, but alone.

“Tell all men that life on Earth is precarious, and commend to them to seek out the bright fields of the ulterior world: but warn them that, if this world holds no souls curious, like me, to seek the stars, I shall not return, and the path be closed forever. With my people slain, what is there for me? I have other duties and other loves beyond the Pleiades, and I hear the silver song of Sheirl calling me to the stars. Ah! Sheirl! I return to you!”

The Remonstrator of Old Romarth

Manxolio listened to this with growing disquiet, but said nothing. Guyal flung open the dome of the tower’s cupola, ascended into the sky, and vanished in a flare of indigo light.

When Guyal the Curator vanished, there came at that moment the strange three-tone chime of the Analept, even though that instrument was nowhere to be seen.

Now alone, Manxolio spent the afternoon investigating the various periapts and amulets horded in the store of Iszmagn. He discovered a curious property of the lenses of the sorcerer’s emerald coat: seemingly dead, nonetheless a simple pulse of meaning from the Implacable Wand could elicit an image from them, nightmarish, something from the dark under-mind of humankind, along with a disquieting aura.

Manxolio selected the most hideous of these lenses, and buried them, one after another, in a rough circle all about the valley of Sfere. He took care to place more of them near the river, or in any direction that promised an easy approach. He invoked them with his Wand, and at once a legion of specters, half-seen, terrifying, crowded the edges of vision.

He spent an hour cutting warning signs, in as many languages and scripts as he knew, into various rocks and standing walls, or along the bare side of a hill he cleaved in two with the Dark Iron Wand. Blood-curling threats and fanciful implications were abundant. All were warned to stay away, and sinister references were made to the Indigo Path of Death.

Another application of the power of the Implacable Wand, returned him in a whirl of motion to Old Romarth, indeed, to the very stoop of the Admonastic gate.

He strolled with stately stride up the narrow streets of the Antiquarian’s Quarter toward his abode, reflecting with infinite satisfaction on the consequence of events.

“The ancient power is restored to the Implacable Dark Iron Wand of my ancestors. I hold, a single man, the power of a brigade nay, a legion. I have slain a warlock, and a titan, without wound or scar. And, best of all, I now return to the comfortable and expected routine of retiring leisure! The clamor of ten thousand pilgrims, with all their crimes and diseases and strange food flooding into my fair city, has been averted. The learning and wisdom from beyond the stars, which is immense to the point of terror, will not be known on Earth, and the reputation of the Antiquarians will linger undisturbed, and unchallenged.

“And why should any one wish to flee the earth? A few are born here to high position: rulership is our duty and burden. The rest are born to ache and sweat with endless labor. It would be disloyal, nay, treason, for a man to depart the Earth merely because she is dying! Why, what kind of cad would abandon an ailing mother? The case is parallel, the moral maxim is the same!”

As he strolled near the Cleft in the central square of the quarter, he paused, for a strange light was shining up from underground. He heard the noise of the buried world on which the foundations of his house were planted: instead of the weeping and begging of the inhumed, the whines of their children for bread, he heard a solemn song. He could not distinguish words, but the tones were rich with joy.

Next he heard, not in the air, but inside the inner works of his ear, of an unearthly three-toned chime, and he realized that Guyal had established more than one anchor for the Analept.

The first of a countless number of soaring men, women, and children rose weightlessly from the cleft, poised in swan-dive against the infinity of the sky, were wrapped in the shining indigo light, and were gone.