Songs of the Dying Earth

Dan Simmons THE GUIDING NOSE OF ULFÄNT BANDERŌZ

In the waning millennia of the 21^st Aeon, during one of the countless unnamed and chaotic latter eras of the Dying Earth, all the usual signs of imminent doom suddenly went from bad to worse.

The great red sun, always slow to rise, became more sluggish than ever. Like an old man loathe to get out of bed, the bloated sun on some mornings shook, quivered, staggered, and rippled forth earthquakes of protesting rumbles that radiated west from the eastern horizons across the ancient continents, shaking even the low mountain ranges worn down by time and gravity until they resembled old molars. Black spots poxed and repoxed the slowly rising sun’s dim face until entire days were all but lost to a dull, maroon twilight.

During the usually self-indulgent and festival-filled month of Spoorn, there were five days of near total darkness, and crops failed from Ascolais through Almery to the far fen borders of the Ide of Kauchique. River Scaum in Ascolais turned to ice on the morn of MidSummer’s Eve, freezing the holy aspirations off thousands who had immersed themselves for the Scaumish Rites of Multiple Erotic Connections. What few ancient upright stones and wall-slabs that were still standing at the Land of the Falling Wall rattled like bones in a cup and fell, killing countless lazy peasants who had foolishly built their hovels in its lee over the millennia just to save the cost of a fourth wall. In the holy city of Erze Damath, thousands of pelgranes — arriving in flocks the size of which had never been seen before in the memory of man and non-men — circled for three days and then swooped down, carrying off more than six hundred of the most pious pilgrims and befouling the Black Obelisk with their bone-filled droppings.

In the west, the setting sun appeared to pulse larger and closer until the forests of the Great Erm burned. Tidal waves washed away all cities and vestiges of life from the Cape of Sad Remembrance, and the ancient market town of Xeexees, only forty leagues south of the city of Azenomei, disappeared completely one night at three minutes after midnight during the height of its crowded Summer Fair; some say the town was swallowed whole in a great earthly convulsion, some say it shifted in an eyeblink to one of the unbreathable-air worlds of the dodge-star Achernar, but whichever was the case, the many residents of the metropolis of nearby Azenomei huddled in their homes in fear. And during all these individual tragedies, more than half the surrounding region once known in better days as the Grand Motholam suffered floods, droughts, pestilence, devaluation of the terce, and frequent darknesses.

The people, both human and otherwise, reacted as people always have during such hard times in the immemorial history of the Dying Earth and the Earth of the Yellow Sun before it; they sought out scapegoats to hound and pound and kill. In this case, the heaviest opprobrium fell upon magicians, sorcerers, wizards, warlocks, the few witches still suffered to live by the smug male majority, and other practitioners of the thaumaturgical trade. Mobs attacked the magicians’ manses and conclaves; the servants of sorcerers were torn limb from limb when they went into town to buy vegetables or wine; to utter a spell in public brought instant pursuit by peasants armed with torches, pitchforks, and charmless swords and pikes left over from old wars and earlier pogroms.

Such a downturn in popularity was nothing new for the weary world’s makers of magic, all of whom had managed to exist for many normal human lifetimes and longer, so at first they reacted much as they had in earlier times of persecution: they shielded their manses with spells and walls and moats, replaced their murdered servants with less-fragile demons and entities from the Overworld and Underworld, brought up jarred foods from their vast basement stores and catacombs (while having their servants plant vegetable gardens within their spell-walled grounds), and generally laid low, some laying so low as to become literally invisible.

But this time the prejudice did not quickly fade. The sun continued to flicker, vibrate, cause convulsions below, and generally offer almost as many dark days as light. The scores of human species on the Dying Earth made common cause with the thousands of no-longer-human sort — the ubiquitous pelgranes and Deodands and prowling erbs and lizard folk and ghosts and stone-ghouls and Saponids and necrophages and visps and burrowing dolorants who were merely the tip of this truly terrible nonhuman icespike — and that common cause was to kill magicians.

When the unpleasant realities of this particular wizard-pogrom began to sink in, the various magicians of Almery and Ascolais (and other lands west of the Falling Wall) who had once belonged to the now-defunct “Fellowship of the Blue Principles” or its successor-organization, the so-called “Renewed Green and Purple College of Grand Motholam,” reacted in ways consistent with their character: some fled the Dying Earth by unbinding the twelve dimensional knots and slipping sideways to Archeron or Janck or one of the other coexisting worlds discovered by the old Aumoklopelastianic Cabal; a few fled backward in time to more felicitous Aeons; more than a few took their motile manses or self-contained glebe-globes and made a run for it through the galaxy and beyond. (Teutch, a recognized Elder of the Hub, brought along his entire private infinity.)

A very few of the magicians who were more self-confident or curious or hoping to prosper through others’ misfortune or simply bold (or perhaps merely much more prone to melancholy) took the risk of remaining on the Dying Earth to see what transpired.

Shrue the diabolist was more sanguine than most. Perhaps this was due to his age — he was older than any of his fellow thaumaturgs could have surmised. Or perhaps it was due to his magical specialty — most professional binders of demons and devils from the Overworld, Underworld, foreign stars, and other Aeons died young and in great pain. Or perhaps it was due to a rumored broken relationship and broken heart many millennia in his past. (Some whispered that Shrue had once loved and bedded and wedded and lost Iallai, she who had been the entity Pandelume’s favorite dancer and the originator of the Dance of the Fourteen Silken Movements. Others whispered — even more softly — that Shrue had tumbled in thrall to one of his male apprentices back when the Mountains of Magntaz were still sharp, and had retired from magical life for centuries when the beautiful young man had stolen Shrue’s most powerful runes and run away with a leather-bound Saponid from the night-town of Saponce.)

Shrue had heard all of these rumors and smiled — albeit sadly — at them all.

When the Great Panic came this time, Shrue the diabolist closed up Way Weather, his lovely manse of many rooms and sculpted towers in the hills above the north edge of Were Woods, and, using a less stressful variation on the ancient Spell of Forlorn Encystment, sank his manse, his beautiful gardens, and twelve of his thirteen servants some forty-five miles beneath the surface of the Dying Earth. Shrue’s diabolic equipment, mementos, the bulk of his library, and the curios and ancillary demons he’d collected over the many centuries would be safe there underground, unless — of course — the great red sun actually swallowed the Dying Earth this time around. As for the truly amazing collection of flowers, trees, and exotiterra plants and animals from his garden (not to mention his twelve stored human and near-human servants), they were wrapped in miniature Omnipotent Eggs, each egg wrapped in turn in its own Field of Temporal Stasis, so Shrue was confident that if the Earth and he survived, so would his domestic staff, awakening months or years or centuries or millennia hence as if rising from a restorative sleep.

Shrue kept only Old Blind Bommps, his manservant and irreplaceable chef, to travel north with him to his remote summer cottage on the shores of the Lesser Polar Sea. Bommps knew his way around the polar cottage and its protected grounds there as well as he’d memorized the many rooms, turrets, tunnels, secret passages, stairways, guest houses, kitchens, gardens, and grounds of Way Weather itself.

As for the scores of minor devils, demons, sandestins, stone-ghouls, elementals, archvaults, daihaks, and (a few) rune-ghosts that Shrue kept at his beck and call, all of these save one sank below with Way Weather manse in the Modified Spell of Forlorn Encystment — yet each remained capable of being summoned in an instant by the briefest incantation.

The only otherish entity that Shrue the diabolist took with him to the cottage on the shores of the Lesser Polar Sea was KirdriK.

KirdriK was an odd hybrid of forces — part mutant sandestin from the 14^th Aeon, part full-formed daihak in the order of Undra-Hadra. Only the greatest arch-magicians in the history of the post-Yellow Sun Dying Earth dared to attempt to control a mature daihak-sandestin hybrid. Shrue the diabolist kept three such terrifying creatures in his employ at once. Two now rested forty-five miles beneath the surface of the earth, but KirdriK jinkered north along with Shrue and Old Blind Bommp, cushioned atop one of the larger rugs from Way Weather’s grand hall. The jinkered carpet traveled at night, never rising above five thousand feet, and was protected by Shrue’s Omnipotent Sphere as well as by the ancient carpet’s own Cloud of Concealment, generated by the warp and woof of its softly singing incantatorial threads.

It had taken Shrue thirty-five years to summon KirdriK, another sixty-nine years to fully bind him, ten years to teach the monster a language other than its native curses and snarls, and more than twice a hundred years to make the halfbreed daihak superficially civil enough to take his place among Shrue’s staff of loyal domestics. Shrue thought that it was time the creature began earning his keep.

Shrue’s first few weeks at his polar cottage were as quiet and uneventful as even the most retiring diabolist might have wished.

Early each morning, Shrue would rise, exercise his personal combat skills for an hour with a private avatar bound during the days of Ranfitz’s War, and then retire to his garden for a long session of meditation. None of Shrue’s former colleagues or competitors had known it, but the diabolist had long been adept in the Slow Discipline of Derh Shuhr, and Shrue exercised those demanding mental abilities every day.

The garden itself, while modest in comparison with that of Way Weather and also mostly sunken below the level of the surrounding lawns and low tundra growth, was still impressive. Shrue’s tastes ran contrary to most magi’s love of the wildly exotic — feathered parasol trees, silver and blue tantalum foil leaves, air-anenome trifoliata, transparent trunks and the like — and tended, as Shrue himself did, toward the more restrained and visually pleasing: tri-aspen imported from such old worlds as Yperio and Grauge, night-blooming rockwort and windchime sage, and self-topiarying Kingreen.

In late morning, when the huge red sun had finally freed itself from the southern horizon, Shrue would walk down the long dock, unfold the masts and sails of his sleek quintfoil catamaran, and sail the limpid seas of the Lesser Polar Sea, exploring coves and bays as he went. There were seamonsters even beneath the surface of the tideless, shallow polar seas, of course — codorfins and forty-foot water shadows the most common — but even such aquatic predators had long-since learned not to attempt to molest an archmage of Shrue the diabolist’s reputation.

Then, after an hour or two of calm sailing, he would return and enjoy the abstemious lunch of pears, fresh-baked pita, Bernish pasta, and cold gold wine that Bummp had prepared for him.

In the afternoon, Shrue would work in one of his workshops (usually the Green Cabal) for several hours, and then emerge for a late afternoon cordial in the library and to hear KirdriK’s daily patrol report and finally to open his mail.

This day, KirdriK shuffled into the library bowlegged and naked except for an orange breachclout that did nothing to hide either the monster’s gender or his odd build. The smallest the daihak could contract his physical shape still left him almost twice as tall as any average human. With his blue scales, yellow eyes, six fingers, gill slits along neck and abdomen, multiple rows of incisors, and purple feathers flowing down from his chest and erupting along the red crestbones of his skull — not to mention the five-foot long dorsal flanges that vented wide and razor-sharp whenever KirdriK became agitated or simply wanted to impress his foes — Shrue had to dress his servant in the loose, flowing blue robes and veil-mesh of a Firschnian monk whenever he took him out in public.

Today, as mentioned, the daihak wore only the obscene orange breachclout. After he’d shuffled before the diabolist and knuckled his forehead in a parody of a salute — or perhaps just to preen the white feather-floss that grew from his barnacle-sharp brow — KirdriK went through his inevitable rumbling, growling, and spitting sounds before being able to speak. (Shrue had long since spell-banished and pain-conditioned the cursing and roaring out of the daihak — at least in the magician’s presence — but KirdriK still tried.)

“What have you seen today?” asked Shrue.

(rumble, spit) “A grizzpol, a man’s hour’s walk east along the shore,” rumbled KirdriK in tones that approached the subsonic, but which Shrue had modified his ears to pick up.

“Hmmm,” murmured the diabolist. Grizzpols were rare. The huge tan bears, recreated by a polar-dwelling magician named Hrestrk-Grk in the 19^th Aeon, were reported, by legend at least, to have originated from the crossbreeding of fabled white bears that had lived here millions of years earlier when the poles were cold and huge, with vicious brown bears from the steppes further south. “What did you do with the grizzpol?” asked Shrue.

“Ate it for lunch.”

“Anything else?” asked the diabolist.

“I came across five Deodands lurking about five miles into the Final Forest,” rumbled KirdriK.

Shrue’s always-arched eyebrow raised a scintilla higher. Deodands were not native to the polar forests or gorse steppes. “Oh,” he said mildly. “Why do you think they were this far north?”

“Trying to claim the magus-bounty,” growled KirdriK and showed all three or four hundred of his serriated and serrated teeth.

Shrue smiled. “And what did you do with these five, KirdriK?”

Still showing his teeth, the daihak lifted a fist over Shrue’s tea table, opened his hand, and let sixty or so Deodane fangs rattle onto the parqueted wood.

Shrue sighed. “Collect those,” he ordered. “Have Bommp grind them into the usual powder and store them in the usual apothecam jars in the Blue Diadem workshop.”

KirdriK growled and shifted from one huge, taloned foot to the other, his hands twitching and jerking like a strangler’s. Shrue knew that the daihak tested his restraint bonds and spells every hour of every day.

“That’s all,” said the diabolist. “You are dismissed.”

KirdriK departed by the tallest of the five doorways that opened into the library, and Shrue opened the window that looked into his courtyard eyrie and called in the day’s batch of newly arrived sparlings.

There were nine of the small, gray, songless birds this day and they lined up on the arm of Shrue’s chair. As each approached the magus’s hand, Shrue made a pass, opened the bird’s tiny chest, and drew out its second heart, dropping each in turn into an empty teacup with a soft splat. Shrue then conjured a new and preprogrammed blank recording heart for each sparling and set it in place. When he was finished, the nine birds flew out the window, rose out of the courtyard, and went about their business to the south.

Shrue rang for Old Bommp and when the tiny man padded silently into the room, said, “There are only nine today. Please add some green tea to bring the flavor up.” Bommp nodded, unerringly found the teacup that sat in its usual place, and padded away with the same blind but barefoot stealth by which he’d entered. Five minutes later, he was back with Shrue’s steaming tea. When the servant was gone, the diabolist sipped and then closed his eyes to read and see his mail.

It seemed that Ildefonse the Preceptor had returned from wherever he had fled off the Dying Earth because he had forgotten some of his velvet formal suits. While decloaking his pretentious manse, the pompous magician had been set upon by a mob of more than two thousand local peasants and pelgranes and Deodands working in unison — very strange — and they had Ildefonse’s mouth taped, eyes covered, and fingers immobilized before the foolish old magician could waggle a finger or mutter a curse, much less cast a spell. They stripped the old fool of his clothes, amulets, talismen, and charms. As soon as they touched his body with their bare hands, Ildefonse’s defensive Egg shimmered into place, but the mob simply carried that into town and buried it in a mound of dung piled to the ceiling of the one-room stone gaol in the center of the Commons, placing twenty-four guards and five hungry Deodands around the gaol and dungheap.

Shrue chuckled and went on to the rest of the sparling-heart news.

Ulfänt Banderōz was dead.

Shrue sat bolt upright in his chair, sending the teacup flying and shattering.

Ulfänt Banderōz was dead.

Shrue the diabolist leaped to his feet, clasped his hands behind his back, and began rapidly pacing the confines of his great library, eyes still closed, as blind as old Bummp, but, like Bummp, so familiar with the perimeter and carpet and hardwood and shelves and tables and other furniture in his great library that he never jostled a curio or open volume. Shrue, whose nature it was never to cease concentrating, was concentrating more fiercely and single-mindedly than he had in some time.

Ulfänt Banderōz was dead.

Other magicians had suspected Ulfänt Banderōz of being the oldest among them — truly the oldest magus on the Dying Earth. But for millennia stacked upon millennia, as long as any living wizard could remember and longer, Ulfänt Banderōz’s only contribution to their field was his maintenance of the legendary Ultimate Library and Final Compendium of Thaumaturgical Lore from the Grand Motholam and Earlier. The tens of thousands of huge, ancient books and lesser collections of magical tapestries, deep-viewers, talking discs, and other ancient media constituted the single greatest gathering of magical lore left in the lesser world of the Dying Earth. Ulfänt Banderōz allowed other magi to visit only rarely and upon his own whim, but over the countless centuries, most living wizards had visited the Ultimate Library and walked in wonder through its many corridors of shelved books.

To no avail.

There was some sort of curse or spell on every item in the Ultimate Library so that only Ulfänt Banderōz — and perhaps a few of his apprentices working there — could cull any meaning from the books and other devices. Letters shifted and scurried and melted on each page, defying translation. Verbal artifacts slurred and skipped and lapsed into frequent silences. Ancient drawings and tapestries and pictures blurred and faded even as one began to study them.

And Ulfänt Banderōz — a broad, heavy, bejowled, beady-eyed, ill-smelling ancient — would laugh at the frustrated magicians and have his servants show them out.

Shrue had gone to the Ultimate Library three times over the millennia, twice prewarned of the arbitrariness of the letters and words, and thus prepared with fixating counterspells, magical solutions, enchanted viewing lenses, and other plans, but each time the letters shifted, the sentences began and then faded away, the long, arcane written incantations and spells and numerical cabalistic formulae fled from both his eye and memory.

Ulfänt Banderōz had laughed his croaking, choking, cackle of a laugh, and Shrue had departed, defeated once again.

Some wizards had followed the easiest route and shown up secretly armed with demons and attack spells, their plan simplicity itself — kill Ulfänt Banderōz and either force his odd apprentices (all recombinated from animals and creatures from earlier Aeons) into revealing the secret of fixing the books in time, or, failing that, simply taking over the Ultimate Library until they, the wizards, could solve the puzzle in their own time.

No one ever succeeded. Ulfänt Banderōz could not be intimidated, nor could he be out-magicked in his own Library. The bones of the thousands who had been foolish enough to try such tactics had been ground into white pebbles that paved the attractive white walkway to the front door of the Ultimate Library.

But now Ulfänt Banderōz was dead. The sparling’s heart revealed that the ancient magus’s body had, upon the point of death, turned to stone and was currently laid out in his bedroom high in the tallest tower of the huge stone Library keep. The heart-news also told Shrue that it was rumored that only one of the scores of apprentices had survived but that he was a prisoner inside the Ultimate Library since — immediately upon Ulfänt Banderōz’s death and turning to stone — at least a dozen terrible spell-barriers had sealed off the Library from the world around it.

Shrue the diabolist did not have to open his eyes or consult a globe or atlas to know where the Ultimate Library and Final Compendium of Thaumaturgical Lore from the Grand Motholam and Earlier lay. Ulfänt Banderōz’s library was a mere five thousand leagues southeast of Shrike’s cottage and then two leagues up Mount Moriat, high above the Dirindian River, just above the crossroads caravan city of Dirind Hopz, some two hundred leagues southwest of the southernmost limit of the Falling Wall. It was wild country, its dangers and wildness ameliorated only by the fact that Dirind Hopz lay on one of the Nine Major Caravan Routes to the holy city of Erze Damath.

Shrue opened his eyes and rubbed his long fingers and smooth palms together. He had a plan.

First he called down a Gyre from its nest of bones in his eyrie, immobilized the terrible raptor with a magical pass, and prepared a second message heart for it. The message was for Dame Derwe Coreme, formerly of the House of Domber but now War Maven of the Cillian Myrmazons. Derwe Coreme, Shrue knew, was, with her Maven Myrmazons, currently protecting and traveling with just such a caravan of pilgrims headed for Erze Damath and a mere hundred leagues north of his destination of Dirind Hopz.

The Gyre wriggled and protested as much as the inhibitatory spell allowed it to. The megaraptor’s red eyes tried to burn its hatred into Shrue the diabolist. Shrue ignored it; he’d been hate-stared by better men and beasts. “Go supersonic,” he commanded as he released the Gyre and watched it flap out of the courtyard and south on its preprogrammed course.

Then Shrue touched the pulsing green gem that called in KirdriK. The bowlegged daihak shuffled and strained out of old habit, but it also listened as Shrue gave his commands.

“Go to the pasture and fetch in one of the stronger and smarter horxbrids. Lenurd will do. Then get the larger wares wagon out of the stable, harness Lenurd, and load a week’s food and wine in the back as well as eight or ten of our least valuable rugs from the vault. When you finish with that, come up to fetch my traveling chest. Oh, and carefully pour a full lentra of ossip phlogista from the vat into a container and pack it as well.”

“A lead container?” growled KirdriK.

“Unless you want to be last seen floating north over the Lesser Polar Sea,” Shrue said dryly. “And wear your robe. We’re going five thousand leagues south to a place called Dirind Hopz, beyond the Falling Wall.”

Shrue usually saw no reason in revealing his plans or reasons — or anything else — to his servants, but he knew that long before he’d first summoned the demon, KirdriK had spent an unpleasant twelve hundred years imprisoned in a cell a mile underground, and still had unpleasant associations with being buried alive; Shrue wanted the creature to prepare himself for the coming voyage.

KirdriK expelled his obligatory snarling and spitting noises and said, “You plan to drive the wares wagon five thousand leagues south, Magus-Master?”

Shrue knew that the daihak had attempted a drollery. With no roads within fifteen hundred leagues of the shores of the Lesser Polar Sea, the wagon would not make it through the sedge barrier almost within sight of the cottage. “No,” said Shrue, “I’ll be using the Constantly Expanding and Contracting Tunnel Apothegm. We shall ride in the wagon while it rides within the traveling burrow-space.”

Now KirdriK actively writhed in his effort to break the unbreakable binding spells, his massive brow, flexible snout, and many rows of teeth gnashing and rippling and flexing. Then he subsided. “Master…” began the daihak, “I humbly submit that it would be faster to jinker the large unicorn carpet, roll the wagon onto it, and fly the…”

“Silence!” said Shrue the diabolist. “This is a bad time for wizards to be arriving anywhere by jinkered anything. Prepare the horxbrid and wagon, fetch my trunk, dress yourself in the dark blue Firschnian monk robes, and meet me on the lawn in forty-five minutes. We depart this very afternoon.”

The last few leagues rumbling along with the pilgrims’ caravan were much more pleasant — even for Shrue — than the hours spent hurtling underground through rock and magma. KirdriK had been commanded to silence once above ground, but for these last miles and leagues he expressed his dissatisfaction by hissing and belching at every opportunity.

In happier days, such a caravan passing through hostile lands — the primary assailants here were wind-stick wraiths, rock goblins, and human bandits — would have been protected by a minor wizard utilizing his various protective spells in exchange for pay. But since the rise of murderous prejudice against the magi, the pilgrims to holy shrines, merchants, and other caravaners had to make do with mercenary soldiers. The leader of this band of eighteen Myrmazon mercenaries was War Maven Dame Derwe Coreme.

Derwe Coreme and Shrue the diabolist had known each other for a bilbo tree’s age, but the magician’s true identity was safe with the woman warrior. It’s true that she laughed out loud when she first abandoned her megilla to ride in Shrue’s canvas-covered wagon; the diabolist sat at the reins shrouded in a common merchant’s shapeless tan robes, his lined and almost frighteningly saturnine face largely hidden by the shadows thrown by his soft-crowned, wide-and floppy-brimmed green-velvet Azenomei-Guild rugseller’s hat. The two chatted comfortably as Shrue’s wood-wheeled wagon rolled along in the rear of a caravan of more than forty similar wagons while KirdriK hawked, spat, and hissed in the rear amongst the carpets and Derwe Coreme’s fanged and clawed two-legged megilla bounded alongside in a state of extreme reptilian agitation at the scent of the daihak.

Dame War Maven Derwe Coreme’s past was shadowy and largely lost to legend, but Shrue knew that once this beautiful but scarred elder warrior had been a soft, innocent and sullen girl, as well as a largely useless princess fifth in line to the throne of Cil’s now-defunct House of Domber. Then one day a thief and a vagabond sent on a useless odyssey imposed as punishment by Iucounu the Laughing Magician had kidnapped young Derwe Coreme, despoiled her for his pleasure, and eventually traded her to a small band of the vile sump-swamp river Busiacoes in exchange for travel advice of very dubious value. The Busiacoes had used her roughly for more than a year. Eventually, her character and heart hardening like tempered steel, Derwe Coreme killed the six Busiacoes who’d kept her as a pleasure slave, wandered the swamp Wegs and Mountains of Magnatz for several years with a barbarian warrior named Conawrd (learning more about blade-and-spear warfare than any former princess in the history of the Dying Earth and, many say, more than the dull-witted Conawrd himself), and then struck out on her own to earn a living as a mercenary while wreaking her revenge on all those who had ever slighted her. The thief and vagabond who had first abducted her — although Derwe Coreme by this time considered that abduction a boon — was eventually tracked down in Almery. Although Derwe Coreme had originally planned for the splay-footed lout to suffer indignities that no male of any species would wish to contemplate, much less experience, she eventually contrived for him to escape with all of his members and appendages intact. (He had not been very good, but he had — after all — been her first. And far more than her parents or early palace tutors, his particular brand of selfish indifference had helped make Derwe Coreme what she was today.)

In recent decades, Dame War Maven Derwe Coreme had personally trained and hired out her Three Hundred Myrmazons — women warriors each with a story and attitude as ferocious as their leader’s — for lucrative mercenary work. For this caravan duty, eighteen Myrmazons had come along (although four or five would have sufficed for the few hundred wind-stick wraiths, rock goblins, and human bandits waiting to waylay this caravan) and each young woman warrior was megilla-mounted and dressed in skintight dragonscale armor that left her left breast bare. Even the Myrmazons’ adversaries — in their last seconds of life — found this ritual form of dress distracting.

As they chatted, Derwe Coreme laughed and said, “You are as droll and witty and private as ever, Shrue. I’ve often wondered what might have been our relationship if you’d been younger and I’d been more kindly disposed toward the male of our species.”

“I’ve often wondered what our relationship might have been had you been older and I had been a female of our species,” said Shrue the diabolist.

“You have the magic,” laughed War Maven Derwe Coreme. “Make it so!” And with that she whistled shrilly, her megilla ran up alongside the wagon and lowered its scaly neck, and she leaped across to the saddle and spurred the beast away.

The Caravan town of Dirind Hopz was overflowing with displaced pilgrims, merchants, and wayfarers. Bandit activity and general mayhem were so rampant in all directions south that even the most pious worshipers bound for Erze Damath found themselves halted in Dirind Hopz until private armies could clear the roads. There was a huge temporary encampment on the plains just to the northeast of the town and most of the pilgrims in Shrue’s caravan camped there, living in their wagons, and Derwe Coreme and her Myrmazons set up their own city of tall red tents. Shrue, however, in his guise as rugseller — and because he wanted to get as close as he could to the mountain along the river that had the Ultimate Library and Final Compendium at its summit — brought KirdriK and sought out an inn.

All the finer establishments were on the bluffs high above the Dirindian River, where they received cool breezes, offered expansive views, and kept their distance from the many sewers that opened into the Dirindian; but all the finer establishments were full. Shrue finally found a tiny room and tinier cot up under the eaves in the ancient, leaning, ramshackle Inn of the Six Blue Lanterns but had to pay an outrageous twenty terces for it.

Schmoltz, the one-eyed innkeeper whose forearms were thicker than Shrue’s thighs, nodded at KirdriK and said, “An extra twelve terces if your monk sleeps on the floor or stands in the room while you sleep.”

“Followers of the Firschnian Eye seek only mortification and physical discomfort,” said Shrue. “The monk, who never sleeps, shall be satisfied to take shelter in your barn amidst the dung heaps and foul-smelling brids and mermelants.”

“That’ll be ten terces for use of the barn,” growled Schmoltz.

After securing KirdriK in the barn, Shrue went up to his room and set one of his own rugs on the floor — it filled the small space between the bed and the wall — and then laid his own clean sheets and blankets on the dubious cot, burning the old ones in a flameless blue vortex. Then the diabolist went down to the common room to eat his late dinner. Rug merchants of Azenomei Guild never removed their hats in public, so Shrue felt moderately comfortable with his disguise under the low-hanging velvet brim, silk straps, half-veil, and floppy ear coverings.

He’d finished only half of his stew and drained just one glass from his flagon of indifferent Blue Ruin when a short, balding man slipped into the empty chair opposite him and said, “I beg your pardon for the intrusion, but do I not find myself in the company of Shrue the diabolist?”

“You do not,” murmured Shrue, touching his merchant’s hat with his bony fingers. “Surely you recognize the sign of the Azenomei Guild?”

“Ahh, yes,” said the short, heavy, beady-eyed man. “But I apologize for any effrontery if I add that I also recognize the long, strong features of an arch-magus named Shrue. I had the pleasure of seeing the famous diabolist long ago in a thaumaturgical wares-fair in Almery.”

“You are mistaken,” said Shrue with an inaudible sigh. “I am Disko Fernschüm, rugseller and calendar-tapestry menologist from Septh Shrimunq in Province Wunk in south Ascolais.”

“My mistake then,” said Faucelme, “but please allow me to explain to the honorable merchant Disko Fernschüm the pressing business that I, Faucelme, would have had with the magician named Shrue. It will, I promise, be worth your while, sir.” And Faucelme signaled the serving person, Schmoltze’s ample-bosomed young wife, over to order a better flagon of wine.

Shrue knew of Faucelme, although the two had never conversed nor been introduced. Faucelme lived a life of some obscurity in the forest-wastes far north of Port Perdusz, living in a modest (for a magus) manse and pretending to be a most minor magician, all the while terrorizing his entire region, murdering and robbing wayfarers, and slowly building his magical powers through the acquisition of curios and talismans. The man himself looked harmless enough — short, bald, stooped, with a nose like a Gyre’s hooked beak and tiny, close-set eyes. A fringe of unkempt gray hair straggled down over Faucelme’s equally hairy ears. The old magician wore a black velvet suit, shiny and thin with age, and only the rich rings he sported on every finger gave any sense of his wealth and mendacity.

“You see,” said Faucelme, pouring Shrue a fresh goblet of Schmoltz’s best red, “just to the southeast of this weary — and smelly! — little caravan town, upon the summit of Mount Moriat, there lies the Ultimate Library of…”

“What has this to do with me?” interrupted Shrue. He’d gone back to drinking his lesser Blue Ruin. “Does the library need rugs?”

Faucelme showed ancient yellow teeth in a rodent’s smile. “You and I are not the first wizards here since Ulfänt Banderōz’s death,” hissed the little guest-killer. “At least a score have left their carcasses on Mount Moriat’s summit, just outside the spell-shield wall the master of the Library left behind.”

Shrue radiated indifference and ate his stew.

“Ulfänt Banderōz left a dozen layers of defense,” whispered Faucelme. “There is a Layer of Excruciating Breathlessness. Another Layer of Internal Conflagration. Then an inert layer, but one stocked with starving stone-ghouls and vampire necrophages. Then a Layer of Total Forgetfulness to the Defiler, followed by…”

“You mistake me for another,” said Shrue. “You mistake my silence at your boorishness for interest.”

Faucelme flushed and Shrue saw the hatred in the old magus’s eyes, but the killer’s expression slid back into a simulacrum of generous friendship. “Surely, Shrue the diabolist, it would be better — and wiser and safer — for the two of us to pool our resources…mine infinitely more modest than yours, of course, but surely stronger in combination than in separate attempts — as we both try to pass through the Twelve Defensive Layers after the dawn…”

“Why wait for morning if you are so eager?” asked Shrue.

Real fear flickered across Faucelme’s features. “Mount Moriat is renowned for its ghouls, goblins, ghosts, wolves, and albino Deodands, even outside of Ulfänt Banderōz’s magical defenses. And you can hear the storm pounding upon the inn’s shingles even as we…”

“I do hear the storm,” said Shrue as he rose and signaled for Schmoltz’s daughter to clear away his things. He took the last of the Blue Ruin with him. “It makes me sleepy. I hope to join a caravan headed south in the morning, so I wish you a pleasant night’s sleep Ser…Faulcoom?”

He left Faucelme smiling and flexing his hands the way KirdriK was wont to do when he most wanted to strangle his master.

Shrue woke at exactly two bells in the morning, just as he had hypnotically instructed himself to do, but for a few seconds he was confused by the warmth of another body in bed with him. Then he remembered.

Derwe Coreme had been waiting in his tiny room when he’d come upstairs and watched him coyly from where she lay naked under the covers. She held the covers low enough that Shrue had seen that the cold river air coming in through the open window was affecting her. “I’m sorry,” he’d said, hiding his surprise. “I haven’t had time to do the gender-changing spell.”

“Then I’ll have to show you how a woman-version of Shrue might begin to pleasure me,” said Derwe Coreme. As it turned out, Shrue now remembered, the former princess to the House of Domber had not been as averse to men as she might have thought.

Now he slipped out from under the covers, careful not to wake the softly snoring warrior, got rid of his rug merchant clothes and cap in a silent flash of blue vortex, and dressed himself silently in his most elegant dark-gray tunic, pantaloons, and flowing robe made of the rarest spidersilk. Then he jinkered the carpet to life, brought it to a hover four feet above the floor, and climbed aboard with his shoulder valise.

“Did you just plan to leave me a note?” whispered Derwe Coreme.

Shrue the diabolist had not stuttered since his youth — a youth lost in the tides of time — but he came close to doing so at that moment. “On the contrary, I planned to be back before dawn and to commence where we left off,” he said softly.

“Pawsh,” said the war maven and slipped out of the covers, dressing quickly in her dragonscale armor.

“I had no idea that Myrmazons and their leader wore nothing under their scales,” said Shrue.

“If blade or beam cuts through those scales,” said Derwe Coreme as she buckled up her high boots, “it’s best not to have any underlayers with foreign matter that might infect the wound. A clean wound is the best wound.”

“My approach to life exactly,” whispered Shrue as his carpet floated at the level of the war maven’s bare left breast. “May I drop you somewhere on my way?”

Derwe Coreme slipped on two daggers, a belt dirk, a throwing star, a hollow iberk’s horn for signaling, and her full sword and scabbard, slid them aside, and climbed on the floating rug just behind him. “I’m coming with you.”

“But I assure you, there is no need for…” began Shrue.

“There was no need for the three hours until we fell asleep,” said Derwe Coreme, “but they worked out all right. I’d like to see this so-called Ultimate Library and Final Compendium of Thaumaturgical Lore from the Grand Motholam and Earlier. For that matter, I’d like to meet this Ulfänt Bander — oz I’ve heard so much about over the years.”

“Him…you might find disappointing,” said Shrue.

“So many men are,” said War Maven Derwe Coreme and put her arms around Shrue’s ribs as he tapped flight threads and maneuvered the jinkered carpet forward, out sixty feet above the river, and then up and east toward the dark mass of Mount Moriat.

The Ultimate Library had been carved into the very rock of Mount Moriat, but rose from the summit in a series of thick but gleaming towers, gables, bulges, cupolas, and turrets. The keep was blind — that is, the many windows were mere slits, none broader than Derwe Coreme’s slender (but powerful) hand. The layers of protection spells caused the entire structure to gleam milkily and Shrue thought that countless castles lost to memory must have looked like that in the full moonlight in aeons long past. Then Shrue’s incipient melancholy grew deeper at the realization that no one else alive he knew would think of anything on the Dying Earth in moonlight; the Earth’s moon had wandered away into deep space millions of years ago, beyond even the reach of most legend. Most of the night sky above them now was dark save for a few dim stars marking the merest hint of where a progression of proud constellations had once burned.

Shrue tried to shake away the debilitating melancholy and concentrate on the task ahead, but — as he was also too prone to do — he wondered, not for the first or ten-thousandth time, what his real motive was in entering the Ultimate Library and reading Ulfänt Banderōz’s books. Knowledge said part of his mind. Power whispered a more honest part. Curiosity argued an equally honest part. Control of the Dying Earth said the deepest and least-dissimulating core of the diabolist’s weary and melancholy brain.

“Are you going to land this rag?” asked Derwe Coreme over his shoulder. “Or are we just going to circle a thousand feet above the Dirindian until the sun comes up?”

Shrue brought the carpet down to a three-foot hover and dejinkered it as they stepped off. KirdriK was waiting just outside the phase fields as ordered. Either he had shed his monk’s robes or the beasties on his way up had clawed and chewed them off in their dying seconds.

“Great Krem,” whispered the war maven Myrmazon leader, hand going reflexively to her sword. “You choose ugly servants, Shrue.”

“You should see Old Blind Bommp,” said KirdriK through his rasp and gargle and growl.

“Silence,” commanded Shrue. “I have to study Ulfänt Banderōz’s layers of defensive fields.”

Within a moment, he knew that the vile Faucelme had been essentially correct: there were a dozen layers to the Library’s defenses, eight of them active spells, four of them — counting the ghost — physical. As he probed and countered, Shrue felt something like disappointment fill him. Ulfänt Banderōz had been one of the arch-maguses of all magi still living on the Dying Earth, but these defenses — while deadly enough to the average magician or would-be barbarian vandal — were easy enough to foil and countermand. Shrue had to spend less than five minutes on the first eight, and as for the spellbound circling (and starving) wolves, stone-ghouls, and vampire necrophages, KirdriK put them out of their misery within seconds.

They stepped across the massive old drawbridge — the Library’s moat was more decorative than serviceable, although Shrue saw croc-men swimming in the black water — and were confronted by the equally massive door sporting a surprisingly heavy lock.

“Are you going to blast that off?” asked Derwe Coreme. “Or would you prefer me to use my blade?”

“Neither you nor your blade would survive, I fear,” Shrue said softly. “Civilized people use a key.” He pulled one from his robes, fit it, clicked it, and opened the heavy door. Answering the Myrmazon’s quick, sharply questioning gaze, Shrue added, “I was a guest here long ago and took the liberty of studying the lock then.”

The inside of the Ultimate Library was dark and silent, the air dead, as in a room or crypt that had been closed up for centuries rather than weeks. Wary of boobytraps, Shrue had KirdriK emit a soft but bright glow from his chest that illuminated everything for twenty paces in front of the three of them. Shrue also allowed the daihak to lead the way, although always while under the diabolist’s guidance. They moved from room to room, then from floor to floor, up stairways rimned with dust. Here and there on the floor lay what they first took to be stone statues — short, nonhuman shapes — until finally Shrue said, “These are Ulfänt Banderōz’s servants or apprentices. It seems they also turned to stone when he died.”

On each level of the darkened library, there were racks and shelves and stacks of books, most of the volumes a third to half as tall as Shrue himself. When they had progressed far enough that Shrue was moderately certain that there would be no goblin attack or sudden, deadly efulsion of dark forces, he lifted a dusty volume off its shelf and set it down heavily on an ancient, high, and slanted wooden reading table.

“I’m interested to read whatever this is,” whispered Derwe Coreme. It was hard to speak at normal volume in the echoing spaces.

“Be my guest,” said Shrue and opened the large book. He read — or rather, looked — over the war maven’s dragonscaled shoulder. The yellowish light from KirdriK’s chest was more than ample.

Derwe Coreme’s head snapped back as if she had been slapped. Shrue himself tried to focus, but the sentences and words and very letters shimmered in and out of focus and visibility as if they were written in quicksilver.

“Ah,” cried the woman warrior. “That gives me a blinding headache just trying to bring a word into focus.”

“Men have gone blind staring at these books,” whispered Shrue.

“Magicians, you mean,” said Derwe Coreme.

“Yes.”

“Can your monster read it?” she asked.

“No,” croaked KirdriK. “I am literate in more than nine hundred phonetic and glyphic alphabets and more than eleven thousand written languages, living and dead, but these symbols scatter like cockroaches when a light is turned on.”

Shrue smiled dryly and applauded in the direction of Derwe Coreme and his daihak. “Congratulations,” he said to the woman. “You’ve just elicited the first simile I’ve heard from KirdriK in more than a hundred…”

There came a sound from the darkness behind them.

Derwe Coreme whirled and her long blade glittered in KirdriK’s chest-light. The daihak balled his huge six-fingered fists and showed a wall of teeth. Shrue raised three long fingers, more in restraint of his companions than in defense.

A short — no more than four feet tall — form stepped from the shadows and a genderless voice squeaked, “Do not harm me! I am a friend.”

“Who are you?” demanded Shrue.

“What are you?” asked the Myrmazon leader.

“I am called Mauz Meriwolt,” squeaked the little form. “I was — have always been, since birth — Ulfänt Bander — oz’s servant boy.”

“Boy?” repeated Derwe Coreme and lowered her sword.

Shrue had his Expansible Egg incantation ready to surround them at the utterance of a final syllable, not to mention his Excellent Prismatic Spray spell ready to slice this newcomer to ribbons in an instant, but even the diabolist — who judged few things or people upon their appearance — sensed no threat from the tiny form. Mauz Meriwolt was pibald in hue, with arms and legs thinner and more rubbery than Shrue’s old wrists, tiny three-fingered hands, an oversized head with oversized ears placed too far back, a long proboscis with only a few whiskers protruding, and enormous black eyes.

“What are you?” repeated Derwe Coreme.

The little person seemed befuddled by the question, so Shrue answered for him. “Ulfänt Banderōz had the affectation of recreating lost life forms from the dim past to fill his staff,” he said softly. “I believe that our short friend Mauz Meriwolt came from some long-forgotten line of rodents.”

“You can call me Meriwolt,” squeaked the shy little form. “The ‘Mauz’ was some sort of honorific…I think.”

“Well, then, Meriwolt,” said Shrue, his voice carrying an edge, “perhaps you can explain why you survived here when all of Ulfänt Banderōz’s other servants appear to have been turned into stone like their master.” The magus gestured toward a stone figure on the floor — what might have been a humanoid attempt at the ancient life form called a feline.

“That’s Gernisavien, the Master’s neo-cat and tutor to all of us lesser servants,” said Meriwolt. “She…changed…at the instant of the Master’s death, as did all the others.”

“Then we ask again,” said Shrue. “Why not you?”

The little figure shrugged and Shrue noticed for the first time that Meriwolt had a skinny but short whip of a tail. “Perhaps I was not important enough to turn to stone,” he said, his voice squeaking with misery. “Or perhaps I was spared because — despite my unimportance — the Master seemed to feel some affection for me. Master Ulfänt Banderōz was not widely known for his sentimental side, but it may be the reason I was spared when all the others died when he did. I can think of no other.”

“Perhaps,” said Shrue. “In the meantime, Meriwolt, take us to your Master.”

Derwe Coreme, Shrue, and KirdriK followed the little creature up stairways, through hidden doorways, and through more huge rooms filled from floor to ceiling with racks and shelves of books.

“Did you ever shelve these books for your master?” Shrue asked the little figure as they climbed to yet another level and entered a turrent staircase.

“Oh, yes, sire. Yes.”

“So you could read the titles?”

“Oh, no, sire,” said Meriwolt. “No one in the Library could read the titles or any part of the books. I simply knew where the book should go on the shelves or in the stacks.”

“How?” asked Derwe Coreme.

“I don’t know, sire,” squeaked Meriwolt. He gestured to a low door. “Here is the Master’s bedchamber. And within is…well…the Master.”

“Have you been inside since your master died?” asked Shrue.

“No, sire. I was…afraid.”

“Then how do you know your master is dead within?” asked Shrue. The diabolist knew that Ulfänt Banderōz was dead and turned to stone on the bed within because he had looked through the eyes of his spy sparling perched on the narrow slit of window above, but he was open to catching this Mauz Meriwolt in a lie if there was a lie.

“I peeked through the keyhole,” squeaked the little assistant.

Shrue nodded. To KirdriK he said, “Stand guard on the drawbridge outside.” To Derwe Coreme and the trembling Meriwolt he said, “Please go stand behind those thick columns. Thank you.”

Shrue touched the latch — the door to Ulfänt Banderōz’s chamber was unlocked — and then he opened the door and stepped within.

In an instant, Phandaal’s Excellent Prismatic Spray sent a thousand shards of frozen colors, each as terrible as a bolt of barbed crystal, hurtling into the space that Shrue the diabolist occupied. Shrue’s modified Expansible Egg froze them in midair, and a gesture by the diabolist banished them.

An efulsion of green fog — instantly fatal to human or magician’s lungs — erupted from the ceiling and floorboards and from the stone corpse of Ulfänt Banderōz himself. Shrue raised both palms, transformed the efulsion into a harmless, colorless fog, and then waved it away. He waited.

Nothing more erupted, exploded, slouched forth, or efulged.

“You may come in now,” Shrue said to the war maven and Mauzman.

The three stood next to the bed that held the stone corpse of the Master of the Ultimate Library and Final Compendium of Thaumaturgical Lore from the Grand Motholam and Earlier. The petrified remains of Ulfänt Banderōz looked ancient but dignified as he lay there fully dressed with his eyes closed, feet together, hands calmly clasped over his lower belly.

“He seems to have known that death was coming,” whispered Derwe Coreme.

“The Master had been suffering bouts of ill health for several years before…before…this,” squeaked Meriwolt in his softest voice.

“Was your master frequently absent from the Library?” Shrue asked the assistant.

“For a week of every month for as long as I can remember, and I have been the Master’s faithful assistant for many centuries,” piped the Mauzman.

“As I thought,” mused Shrue. “There is a second Library.”

“What?” cried the Myrmazon chief.

Shrue opened his hands. “Actually it is the same Library, my dear, but phase-displaced in space — by many hundreds or thousands of miles and leagues, no doubt — and in time by at least a few fractions of a second. This is why the books cannot be read here.”

“But they can be read in the other Library?” asked Derwe Coreme.

“No,” smiled Shrue, “but in the other Library there must be the means to bring the two libraries back in phase.” He turned to Meriwolt. “Did you have a twin by any chance?”

The pibald little figure was so startled that his three-fingered hands flew up and his odd ears went back. “Yes — a sister who died at birth — or rather, when we were devatted. The Master has told me many times that it was a shame that she did not live — he had named her Mindriwolt. How did you know, sire?”

“She did not die at birth,” said Shrue. “All these centuries, your twin has been an assistant at Ulfänt Banderōz’s phase-shifted second Library.

This is how you sometimes ‘just know’ where to shelve the books your Master ordered you to shelve.”

“She did not…was not…turned to stone when the Master died?” asked Meriwolt in a trembling squeak.

Shrue absently shook his head. “I suspect not. We will know when we go there.”

“Where is this place?” asked Derwe Coreme, an aggressive explorer’s — or perhaps plunderer’s — smile on her face. “And what treasures may it hold?”

Shrue opened his hands and arms again, gesturing toward the Library beneath and around them. “The treasures of the secrets of ten thousand-thousand ages of power and science and magic,” he said softly. “The great Phandaal’s long-lost mysteries. Panguire’s Prime Commandments. The secrets of Clamhart and Tinkler and Xarfaggio and a hundred other magi of ancient days — men who make today’s magicians, myself included, look like children playing witlessly with colored blocks.”

“How do we find it?” asked the war maven.

Shrue crossed the modest room to a recessed closet shielded by a simple rood screen, checked for boobytraps, and rolled back the screen. Atop a single primitive dresser was a glass case, and, within the case, gleaming softly, was a perfectly smooth crystal the size and shape of a merg’s egg. Inside the gently pulsing crystal, what looked like the vertical slash of a crimson cat’s eye glowed.

“What is it?” breathed Meriwolt.

“A Finding Crystal,” said Shrue. “Enchanted to lead the bearer to something important…such as the second Library.” He tapped his thin lower lip while he studied the crystal case that contained the treasure. “Now to find a way to open this without…”

Derwe Coreme removed her sword, reversed it — her dragonscaled gauntlet protecting her hand from the blade’s razor sharpness — and smashed the heavy hilt down on the priceless crystal case. It shattered into a thousand shards and the warrior maven sheathed her sword, lifted the cat’s-eye crystal egg out, and presented it to Shrue, who pondered it a moment and then set it somewhere within the folds of his robe.

“We must begin our odyssey at once!” cried Dame War Maven Derwe Coreme. “Activate your jinker or jinker your carpet or wake up your rug or whatever the hell you must do. Treasures and booty await!”

“I think that we should…” began Shrue but was interupted by KirdriK flicking back into existence next to them.

“We have company,” rumbled the daihak. “And one of them is a Red.”

The first pre-dawn light was lighting the crags and scragtrees around the summit and Library keep. Faucelme was there with his small army — eleven pelgranes, each larger than any Shrue had ever seen, each saddled as if to carry a man or demon — and then a tall, blond, handsome male human apprentice, also dressed in black, and the nine demons themselves. These last were the huge surprise to Shrue — not that the foul little magician would show up with demons in tow, that was a given, but that he could muster these terrible entities. Arrayed behind the apprentice and Faucelme (who was still dressed in black, the rings on his fingers glowing from more than reflected morning twilight) were nine Elementals — three Yellows (to be expected), three Greens (very impressive for any magus from the 21^st Aeon), two Purples (rather astounding and not a small bit terrifying), and a Red.

The presence of the Red, Shrue knew, changed everything. How has this little homunculus ever managed to summon and bind a Red — or survive the process? wondered the diabolist. Aloud he said, “Welcome, Faucelme. I came for our dawn meeting, as you requested.”

The thief-magus grimaced a smile. “Oh, yes…rug merchant? If the best you can do is that simpering daihak, then perhaps you truly are only a carpet peddler.”

Shrue shrugged. He could feel Derwe Coreme’s poised readiness next to him, but the Myrmazon leader had little chance even with a Yellow, none with a Green or Purple, and less than none with Faucelme and his apprentice, much less with a Red. KirdriK’s attention was focused — through and across twelve dimensions of perception — totally on the Red. Shrue could feel the daihak strain against a century’s worth of invisible bindings like a wolf on a leash. KirdriK’s sublimated snarls were not on any frequency that human ears could hear, but both the two Purples and the single terrible Red were showing row upon row of what would be called fangs on lesser entities as they heard KirdriK’s challenge.

“I’ve already had my insects peer in at the rock that used to be Ulfänt Banderōz,” continued Faucelme. “Since I already have an adequate paperweight for the desk in my study, I have no use for the dead librarian. But I do want his…ho!.. who is this rat that’s joined your ranks, diabolist?”

Meriwolt had been cowering behind Derwe Coreme but now poked his long snout and wide eyes around her armored hip. The diminutive Mauzman’s mouth hung open in awe or horror or terror or all three.

“Merely a possible new servant I am interviewing,” said Shrue. “You started to say that you wanted…to go down to the village with us to have breakfast? Or would you and your entourage rather enter the Library and pay your last respects to Ulfänt Banderōz while we return to Dirind Hopz?” Still smiling, Shrue jinkered the little carpet to life and floated it close.

The Red twitched his six onyx-taloned hands, and Shrue’s rug — a family heirloom from a time when the sun burned yellow — exploded in heatless crimson flames. The ash scattered in a rising breeze as the red sun struggled to rise across the river in the east.

“Thus to any attempts to jinker skyward,” hissed Faucelme. “Your wares wagon and other carpets are already ash, Shrue. I want the Finding Crystal and I want it now. “

Shrue’s left eyebrow arched almost imperceptibly. “Finding Crystal?”

Faucelme laughed and held his hand out as if ready to release the Red. “Shrue, you’re a fool. You’ve just figured out that Ulfänt Banderōz kept the volumes here unreadable by phase-shifting them in spacetime…but you still think there is a second library. There is only this one, the Ultimate Library, displaced in space and time. When I collapse that phase-shift, the magical lore of a million years will be mine. Now give me the Finding Crystal.”

Shrue reluctantly removed the crystal from his robe with both hands, but kept his long, gnarled fingers around it as it glowed in his palms. Beneath them, the granite of Mount Moriat shook as the sun struggled to rise, its bloated red face flickering and spotted.

“Faucelme, it is you who’ve not thought this through,” Shrue said softly. “Don’t you understand? It’s Ulfänt Banderōz’s careless tampering with timespace, this very Ultimate Library, that is unstable. This…” He took one hand off the mesmeric Finding Crystal and gestured toward the vibrating stone of the Library behind him. “…is what is causing the Dying Earth to die even before its short allotted final days have come to pass.”

Faucelme laughed again. “You must think I was born yesterday, diabolist. Ulfänt Banderōz has kept this library stable but timespace separated longer than you — or even I — have been alive. Hand me the crystal at once.”

“You must understand, Faucelme,” said Shrue. “It was not until I came here that I understood the true cause of the world’s current instability. For whatever reason, Ulfänt Banderōz lost control of the two Libraries’ phase shift in the months before he died. The closer the Libraries come in time, the greater the spacetime damage to the red sun and the Dying Earth itself. If you bring the two Library realities together, as you and your Red propose to do, it will bring about the end of everything…”

“Nonsense!” laughed Faucelme.

“Please listen…” began Shrue but saw the madness flickering in the other magician’s eyes. It was not, he now understood, a question of whether Faucelme would release the Red. Faucelme was more the Red’s puppet than vice versa, and the Elemental cared not a terce whether the millions upon the Dying Earth survived another day. In desperation, Shrue said, “There is no guarantee that your Red — even with the Purples in support — can defeat a sandestin-daihak hybrid from the 14^th Aeron.”

Faucelme’s eyes were flickering red. It was not an illusion or a reflection of the shaking sunrise. Something ancient and inhuman had taken possession of the small human shell and was literally burning to get out. “You are correct, Shrue the diabolist,” said Faucelme. “There is no guarantee that my Red shall prevail — only overwhelming odds. But you know as well as I what the outcome will be in thirty seconds if we both unleash our entities — you your daihak, I my Elementals. You might even survive — it’s conceivable. But the whore and the rodent will be dead before five of those thirty seconds have passed, as will be all eight thousand people in the valley below. Decide, Shrue. I demand the Finding Crystal…now.”

Shrue the diabolist tossed the crystal to Faucelme. Suddenly, Shrue seemed to shrink, to become little more than a tall but thin and frail old man in spidersilk robes, his spine curved under the burden of age and a terrible weariness.

“I’d kill you all now,” said Faucelme, “but it would be a waste of energy I need for the voyage.” Barking in a language older than the mountain upon which they stood, Faucelme commanded the two Purples to remain behind and to keep Shrue and his entourage from leaving the Library. Then Faucelme, his apprentice, the vibrating Red, and the three Yellows and three Greens mounted their mutated pelgranes and rose into the sky.

Even from a distance, Shrue could see Faucelme in the saddle, bending over his glowing Finding Crystal as the eleven giant pelgranes flapped their way southeast until they were lost in the soft red glare of the sunrise.

“Come,” Shrue said wearily. “The Purples may allow us to live a little longer and we might as well find something to eat in the Library.”

Derwe Coreme opened her mouth as if to speak angrily, looked sharply at the stooped old man who had been her energetic lover just hours earlier, and disgustedly followed Shrue into the Library. Mauz Meriwolt and then KirdriK — the daihak moving reluctantly and jerkily and not under his own volition — followed. The demon’s multidimensional gaze never left the two Purples.

Once inside, Shrue’s demeanor changed completely. The magus loped through the library stacks and bounded up stairs as if he were a boy. Meriwolt’s black bare feet slapped on stone and Derwe Coreme had to run to keep up, her right hand holding her scabbard and iberk’s horn in place to keep them from clanking. “Did you think of something?” she called to Shrue as the diabolist burst into Ulfänt Banderōz’s death chamber again. Derwe Coreme was panting only slightly from the exertion but she noticed with some small vexation that Shrue was not breathing heavily at all.

“I didn’t just think of it,” said Shrue. “I knew it all along. That beautiful Finding Crystal was mere bait. It will lead Faucelme and his Elementals nowhere — or at least nowhere they want to be. My hope is that it will take them to the open jaws of a Lanternmouth Leviathan in the South Polar Sea.”

“I don’t understand,” squeaked Meriwolt, looking at the shards of shattered glass cover where the Finding Crystal had been so prominently displayed. “Why would the Master leave…” The little Mauzman looked at Shrue and stopped.

“Precisely,” said Shrue. He reached into his shoulder bag and pulled out a stone chisel, a hammer, and an elaborate little wooden box with a glass front. Leaning over the remains of Ulfänt Banderōz like a doctor come too late, Shrue chipped off the dead magician’s not-insignificant nose with three hard taps on the chisel. The glass panel on the small box slid open at a gesture, Shrue set the nose in place, the panel closed, and there was an audible hiss and sigh as the box pumped all air out of the small space. Shrue held the box out absolutely flat, glass face up, while the other two huddled close and KirdriK remained in the doorway, staring down through wood, iron, and stone at the two Purples outside.

The nose in the box quivered like a compass needle and turned slowly until the nostrils faced south-southeast.

“Wonderful!” cried Derwe Coreme. “Now all you have to do is jinker one of these carpets into flight and we’ll find the other Ultimate Library before the sun sets!”

Shrue smiled ruefully. “Alas, Faucelme was telling the truth when he said that he had destroyed all of my jinkerable rugs.”

“You’re a magician,” said the Myrmazon leader. “Won’t any carpet turn into a flying carpet at your command?”

“No, my dear,” said Shrue. “There was something called science behind the magic in those wonderful jinkered bits of cloth and wire. Faucelme’s vandalism this morning has been profound. Those rugs alone were worth more than all the fabled treasure in the catacombs beneath Erze Damath. Also, Faucelme was telling the truth — his Red’s spell will bring down any jinkered flying device in all of the Dying Earth — that is how powerful a Red Elemental can be.”

KirdriK growled and Shrue realized the daihak had said, “The Tunnel Apothegm?”

“No, the guiding nose will not work beneath all that stone,” Shrue said softly.

“We can take the megillas, we bring extras along,” said Derwe Coreme, “but if the other Ultimate Library is on the other side of the world, it might take…”

“Forever,” chuckled Shrue. “Especially since, the last time I checked, your megillas were not enthusiastic swimmers. There may be several seas and oceans in the way.”

“We’re foiled then?” asked Meriwolt. The little servant sounded relieved.

Shrue glanced at the little figure and his stare was cold and appraising. “I guess you are a member of this expedition now, Mauz Meriwolt. That is, if you want to be.”

“If my twin sister really is in the Other Library, I would like to meet her,” came the squeak.

“Very well then,” said Shrue, setting the case with Ulfänt Banderōz’s nose carefully in his shoulder bag, nestled amidst an extra set of under-linens. “There are ways to fly other than magic. The caravan transit hub of Mothmane Junction is only fifty leagues south and east from here along the River Dirindian, and, unless I am mistaken, the old sky galleon towers and the ships themselves are still intact.”

“Intact,” said Derwe Coreme, “but lacking their vital lifting fluid since the trade routes to the far north closed. No sky galleon has flown from Mothmane Junction in the last two years.”

Shrue smiled again. “We can take your megillas,” he said softly. “If we’re willing to ride them half to death — which means saddle sores for this old magus’s bum — we can be in Mothmane Junction by midday tomorrow. But we shall have to stop at my wares wagon below to fetch my traveling trunk.”

“Faucelme said that he’d burned your ware wagon and all its contents,” reminded Derwe Coreme.

“So he did,” said Shrue. “But my trunk is hard to steal and harder to burn. We shall find it intact in the ashes. The sky galleon owners of Mothmane Junction will welcome some of the things that KirdriK packed in it…which reminds me. KirdriK?”

The daihak, the purple feathers rising from the red crestbones of his skull to touch the doorframe twelve feet above the ground, his huge six-fingered hands twitching and opening and closing, growled a response.

“Would you be so kind,” said Shrue, “as to kill the two Purples waiting below?”

KirdriK showed a fanged smile so broad that it literally went from one pointy ear to the other. Another few inches and the top of his head would have fallen off.

“But take them to the tenth level of the Overworld to do the deed,” added Shrue. Turning to Meriwolt and Derwe Coreme he explained, “It reduces the number of collateral casualties considerably. At least in this world.” Turning to KirdriK again, he said, “Rejoin us as soon as you are finished in the Overworld.”

KirdriK winked out of sight and a few seconds later there came an astonishing thunderclap, rattling the Library, as the daihak dragged the two Purples out of one reality and into another. The stone corpse of Ulfänt Banderōz jiggled on its high bed and books and nostrums tumbled from shelves and dressertops.

“To the damned megillas,” said Shrue. Derwe Coreme was loosening the iberk’s horn from her belt as they left the room.

Mauz Meriwolt lagged behind a moment. Standing over the noseless stone corpse, the little figure clasped his hands in front of him and bowed his head. His huge black eyes filled with tears. “Goodbye, Master,” he said.

Then Meriwolt hurried down to join the other two. Dame War Maven Derwe Coreme’s shattering hornblast was already echoing from the mountainside while the blare of answering iberk horns rose from the valley below.

There were three tall steel-and-iron towers rising over the caravan city of Mothmane Junction like metal markers on a sundial. The tower tops ranged from three hundred to six hundred feet above the town and river. Each tower was made of open girders, skeletal and functional yet still ornamental in some forgotten age’s style, and the top of each tower was an acre or two of flatness broken only by the necessary cranes, dock-cradles, ramps, shacks, passenger waiting areas, and cargo conveyors necessary to service the almost constant flow of sky galleons that had once filled the skies here. Now as Shrue and his companions, including the seventeen Myrmazons who’d accompanied their leader, rode down the wide main avenue of Mothmane Junction — residents and stranded pilgrims and others scurrying to get out of the way of the exhausted and angry megillas — the diabolist could see that only three galleons remained. For centuries, the sky galleon trade had withered as the quantities of ossip sap and its phlogista extract became more and more scarce. Most of the ancient sky galleons that had called Mothmane their primary port had long since been grounded elsewhere or stolen by pirates and put to more practical uses on the Dying Earth’s seas or rivers.

But three remained — grounded atop their respective departure towers but relatively intact. Before they reached the shadows of those towers, Shrue took out his telescope and studied their choices.

The first tower rising into the dark blue midday sky, that of the Most Excellent Marthusian Comfort Cruise Line, was little more than girders of rust holding up crossbeams of wooden decay. The outside stairway had collapsed and the broad-bucketed elevator had long since plummeted to the bottom of its shaft. Shrue could see rough rope ladders spiderwebbing the structure and men moving on the sagging platform three hundred feet above the river, but they appeared to be dismantling the once-proud galleon that nestled in its dockstays. The ship’s masts were minus their sails and most of the deck structures — and some of the hull — had already been stripped of the priceless ironwood.

The second tower, its ancient signs and banners still proclaiming Lumarthian Luxury Travel! Cruises and Transits to Anywhere on the Dying Earth! Sky Galleons of Ultimate Comfort and Total Safety and Most Decadent Luxury! Pilgrims Welcome!! Worshipers of Yaunt, Jastenave, Phampoun, Aldemar, and Suul — Praised Be Their Names! — 10 % Discount!, was hardly more intact than the first tower and ship. There was no one visible atop the tower — even the cargo-handlers’ shacks had fallen down. The sky galleon docked there was larger than the first, but looked as if it had been in a battle — the length of its hull had been scorched and breached and riddled with ten-foot-long iron harpoons that gave the old galleon a porcupined look.

Shrue sighed and studied the third and tallest tower. The stairway — all sixty zigzagging flights of it — looked shaky but complete. The lift platform was still at the bottom of its shaft but Shrue could see that all of the levitation equipment had been removed and the remaining metal cables — looking too old and far too thin to support much weight — were connected to a manual crank at the bottom. The banner here was more modest—Shiolko and Sons. Sky Galleon Transit to Pholgus Valley, Boumergarth, and the Cape of Sad Remembrance (Ossip Supplies Permitting).

Well, thought Shrue, no one would be paying to fly to the Cape of Sad Remembrance after the recent tsunamis. He focused his glass on the flat top of the tower.

There were tents and people there — scores of both — which was both reassuring and dismaying. Whoever these potential passengers were, it looked as if they had been waiting a long time. Laundry hung from ropes tied between old tents. The sky galleon, however, looked more promising. Nestled in its tall cradle-stays, this ship — smaller than the other two — looked not only intact but ready to fly. The square-rigged sails were tidily shrouded along spars on the foremast and mainmast while lateen-rigged canvas was tied up along the two after-masts. A bold red pennant flew from the foremast some sixty or seventy feet above the galleon’s deck and Shrue could make out brightly painted gunports, although they were closed so he could not tell if there were any actual guns or hurlers behind them. At the bottom of the cradle, sunlight glinted on the great ovals and squares of crystallex set in as windows along the bottom of the hull. Young men — Shiolko’s sons was Shrue’s wild guess — were busy running up ramps and clambering expertly through the masts, lines, and stays.

“Come,” said Shrue, spurring his panting and sulky megilla. “We have our galleon of choice.”

“I’m not climbing sixty flights of rusting, rotting stairs,” said Derwe Coreme.

“Of course not,” said Shrue. “There is a lift.”

“The lift platform itself must weigh a ton,” said Derwe Coreme. “It has only a cable and a crank.”

“And you have seventeen marvelously muscled Myrmazons,” said Shrue.

The owner and captain of the sky galleon, Shambe Shiolko, was a short, heavily muscled, white-bearded beetle-nut of a man and he drove a hard bargain.

“As I’ve explained, Master Shrue,” said Shiolko, “there are some forty-six passengers ahead of you—” Shiolko gestured toward the muddle of sagging tents and shacks on the windswept platform where they all stood six hundred feet above the river. “And most of them have been waiting the two years and more that I’ve lacked the extract of ossip and atmospheric emulsifier which allow our beautiful galleon to fly…”

Shrue sighed. “Captain Shiolko, as I have tried to explain to you, I have the ossip phlogista for you…” Shrue nodded to Derwe Coreme, who lifted the heavy sealed vat out of his trunk and carried it over, setting it on the boards of the platform with a heavy thunk. And from his robes, Shrue produced a smaller lead box which still glowed a mild green. “And I also have the crygon crystals for the atmospheric emulsifier you require. Both are yours without cost as long as you book us passage on this voyage.”

Captain Shiolko scratched at his short beard. “There are the expenses of the trip to consider,” he mumbled. “The salaries for my eight sons — they serve as crew, y’know. Food and water and grog and wine and other provisions for the sixty passengers.”

“Sixty passengers?” said Shrue. “There need only be provisions for myself and this servant…” He gestured toward Mauz Meriwolt who was largely disguised within a diminutive Firschnian monk’s robe. “With the possible addition of another member of my party who might join us later.”

“And me,” said War Maven Derwe Coreme. “And six of my Myrmazons. The rest can return to our camp.”

Shrue raised an eyebrow. “Certainly, my dear, you have other more…profitable…undertakings to pursue? This voyage will be of an undetermined length, and, indeed, might take us all the way to the opposite sides of the Dying Earth, and that by a circuitious route…”

“Nine of you then,” grumbled Captain Shiolko. “Plus the forty-six who have waited so long. That will be provisions for fifty-five passengers, and nine crew of course, counting myself, so sixty-four mouths to feed. The Steresa’s Dream has always set a fine table, sir. Mere provisions, not including our salaries, will come to…mmmm…five thousand, three hundred terces for the vittles and a mere two thousand four hundred terces above that for our labors and skills….”

“Outrageous!” laughed Shrue. “Your sky galleon will sit here forever unless I provide the ossip extract and emulsifier. I should be charging you seven thousand five hundred terces, Captain Shiolko.”

“That is always your privilege to do so, Master Shrue,” grunted the old sky sailor. “But then the cost of your passage would rise to more than fourteen thousand terces. I thought it easier the first way.”

“But certainly,” said Shrue, gesturing to the crowd, “these good people do not want to take such a long and…I confess…dangerous voyage, since I would insist that our destination, which is not yet even fixed, will be the first one to which we sail. You can return for them. This amount of ossip phlogista alone should levitate your beautiful galleon…”

“The Steresa’s Dream,” said Captain Shiolko.

“Yes, lovely name,” said Shrue.

“Named after my late wife and the mother of the eight crewmen,” murmured the old captain.

“Which makes it even more lovely,” said Shrue. “But, as I was saying, even if we were to meet your exorbitant demand for recompense, these good people should not wish to endanger their lives in such a dangerous voyage when they desire simple transit to less problematic destinations.”

“With all due respect, Master magus,” said Shiolko, “look at them what’s waited here so patient for two years and more and understand why they will insist they be aboard whenever Steresa’s Dream departs its cradle. The three there in blue finery — that is Reverend Ceprecs and his two wives and they booked passage on our fine galleon for their honeymoon cruise, and that was twenty-six months ago, sir. The Reverend’s religion forbids him to consummate the happy trio’s marriage vows until they are officially on their honeymoon, you see, so they have waited these two years and more in that leaking old burlap tent you see over near the comfort shack…”

Shrue made an indecipherable noise in his throat.

“And the seven persons there in working brown,” continued Shiolko. “They be the Brothers Vromarak who wish nothing more than to bring the ashes of their dead father home to their ancestral sod hut on the Steppes of Shwang in the distant east Pompodouros so they can return to Mothmane and resume work at the stone quarry…”

“But the east Pompodouros almost certainly will not be on our way,” said Shrue.

“Aye, Master,” said Shiolko, “but as you say, if you won’t be wanting transport back to here, we can drop the Brothers on their way — and only for an additional eight hundred terces from each of them for my inconvenience. And that tall, tall fellow there, that is Arch-Docent Huǽ from Cosmopolis University…he’s been waiting nineteen months now in that cardboard shack you see there…and he cannot complete his thesis on the effect of antique effectuations on working-glass gloam-mine gnomes unless he visits the city of fallen pylons across the Melantine Gulf. I will charge him only a modest surcharge of fifteen hundred terces for that detour. And then, near the back of that group of orphans, there is Sister Yoenalla, formerly of Bglanet, who must…”

“Enough!” cried Shrue, throwing up his hands. “You shall have your seven thousand five hundred terces and your ossip and your emulsifier and you may load the paying menagerie as well. How long until we can sail?”

“It will take my sons only the afternoon and night to load the necessary viands and water flasks for the first weeks of our voyage, Master Magus,” grunted Shiolko, showing only the slightest flush of pride at his success. “We can sail at dawn, should the treacherous sun choose to favor us with one more sunrise.”

“At dawn then,” said Shrue. He turned to reason with Derwe Coreme but the woman was already choosing the six Myrmazons to accompany her and giving the others instructions about their return to the Myrmazon camp.

And thus began what Shrue would later realize were — incredibly, almost incomprehensibly — the happiest three weeks of his life.

Captain Shiolko was true to his word and Steresa’s Dream lifted away from its docking cradle just as the red sun began its own tortured ascent into the deep blue sky. The galleon hovered for a moment like a massive wood-and-crystal balloon some thousand feet above what looked to be the entire population of Mothmane Junction turned out to watch its departure, and then Shiolko’s eight “sons” (Shrue had already noticed that three of them were young women) shook out the canvas sails, the captain engaged the atmospheric emulsifier at the stern — which thickened the air beneath the sky galleon’s hull and rudder sufficiently to allow it to make way and to tack against the wind — and, following Shrue’s directions after the diabolist had consulted his little box holding Ulfänt Banderōz’s nose, set the ship’s course south-southeast.

All forty-six of Shiolko’s original customers as well as Derwe Coreme and her Myrmazons, Meriwolt (still in his robes), and Shrue himself then pressed to the railings of the mid-deck or their private stateroom terraces and waved to the shouting crowds below. At first, Shrue thought that the thousands of Mothmane Junction residents, peasants, shopkeepers, and rival sky galleon workers were roaring their approval and best wishes up to the voyagers, but then he saw the low morning sunlight glinting off arrows, crossbow bolts, rocks, and a variety of other things flung up at Steresa’s Dream and he realized that the first departure of a sky galleon in more than two years was not an occasion held in unalloyed affection and approval. But in a few moments, the galleon had gained several thousand feet in altitude and, after first following the River Dirindian south for a few leagues, banked off southwest above the wooded Kumelzian Hills and left Mothmane Junction and its muted roars far behind.

For the next several days and then weeks, Shrue’s and the ship’s routine blended into one.

At sunrise each morning, the diabolist would rise from his place in the double hammock he shared in the comfortable suite with Derwe Coreme and — even before meditating according to the Slow Discipline of Derh Shuhr — Shrue would scramble up the manropes to the Gyre’s nest near the top of the mainmast and there use Ulfänt Banderōz’s guiding nose to take a new course reading. That course would be checked via the nose box several times during the day — Captain Shiolko was a master at making the slightest adjustments — and for the final time, by the light of the binnacle (when one of Shiolko’s male or female sons was at the wheel), just at midnight.

Steresa’s Dream itself was one of those rarest of avas in the later Aeons of the Dying Earth — a machine with complicated machinery inside it — and on the first day of the voyage, Captain Shiolko proudly showed off his beautiful ship to Shrue, Derwe Coreme, robed Meriwolt, and many of the other interested passengers and pilgrims. Shrue immediately then understood that the tiny crew of eight “sons” could manage such a complicated craft not due to the usual reason — magic — but because the huge sky galleon was largely automated. Controls on the quarterdeck at the rear of the ship (which was Shiolko’s private preserve unless the captain specifically invited a passenger to come up) or other controls down in the aft engine and steering compartment helped reef and furl the sails, shift and shorten the countless ropes and lines, move ballast as needed, and even calculate wind and drag and mass so as best to move the ossip phlogista through the maze of pipes that honeycombed the hull, masts, spars, and sails themselves. The emulsifier machine so fascinated Shrue with its magickless glows and throbs and safety devices and arcane gauges and bone-felt spell-less vibrations that often, when he could not sleep, he came down to the engine and steering compartment to watch it all work.

The sky galleons had been built for passenger comfort and even those paying the fewest terces found themselves in comfortable surroundings. For Shrue and the other high-paying passengers, it was sheer luxury. The diabolist’s and Derwe Coreme’s stateroom at the third level near the stern had a wall of crystal windows that looked out and down. Their double-sized hammock rocked softly and securely in even the worst night storms. After Shrue had checked their course and done his Discipline rites in the morning, he would wake his warrior roommate and the two would shower together in their own private bath. Then they would step out onto their private balcony to breathe the cool morning air and would go forward along the central corridor to the passenger dining area near the bow where there were crystal windows looking ahead and underfoot. The sense of vertigo in these glass-bottomed lower rooms faded with familiarity.

On the fifth day, the Steresa’s Dream passed east out of known territory. Even Captain Shiolko admitted that he was excited to learn what lay ahead of them. Over wine with Shrue and Derwe Coreme late that night, the captain explained that although his sky galleon was built as a world-traveler, Shiolko’s wife Steresa, while she lived, so worried about dangers to her husband and children that, in his love and deference to her, the captain had stowed away his impatience to see the farthest lands and satisfied himself with transiting passengers to known (and relatively safe) destinations such as Pholgus Valley, Boumergarth, the former cities on the Cape of Sad Remembrance, and towns and ports in between. Now, said the captain, he and his sons and the brave passengers and the fine ship that Steresa had loved and feared so much were outward bound on the sort of voyage for which Steresa’s Dream had been designed and built centuries before Shiolko or his late wife had been born.

After the first week, Shrue had become impatient, eager to rush to the Second Ultimate Library, sure that KirdriK had been bested and eviscerated somewhere in the Overworld and that even now the Purples were returning to Faucelme’s evil band, and he’d urged Captain Shiolko to take the galleon high up into what was left of the Dying Earth’s jet stream — up where the wind howled and threatened to tear the white sails to ribbons, where ice accumulated on the spars and masts and ropes, and where the passengers had to retreat, wrapped in furs and blankets, to sealed compartments to let the ship pressurize their rooms with icy air.

But he’d seen the folly in this even before Derwe Coreme said softly to him, “Can Faucelme’s false Finding Crystal lead him to the other Library?”

“No,” said Shrue. “But sooner or later he — or more likely, the Red — will understand that they’ve been tricked. And then they’ll come seeking us.”

“Would you rather they find us frozen and blue from lack of breath?” said the warrior maven.

Shrue had shaken his head then, apologized to the captain and passengers for his haste, and allowed Shiolko to bring the Steresa’s Dream down — in a slow, dreamlike descent — to her lower, warmer altitudes and more leisurely breeze-driven pace.

During the second week of their voyage, there were some memorable moments for Shrue the diabolist:

For a full day, Steresa’s Dream wove slowly between massive stratocumulus clouds that rose nine leagues and more before anvilling out high in the stratosphere. When the sky galleon had to go through one of these cloud giants, the ship’s lanterns came on automatically, one of Shiolko’s sons activated a mournful fog horn on the bow, and moisture dripped from the spars and rigging.

For two days, they flew above a massive forest fire that had already devoured millions of hectares of ancient woodland. Steresa’s Dream bucked and rolled to the violent thermal updrafts. The smoke became so heavy that Shiolko took the ship as high as she could go without incurring icing, and still Shrue and the passengers had to wear scarves over their noses and mouths when they went on deck. That night, the fifty-four passengers — including Derwe Coreme’s Myrmazons and Mauz Meriwolt, who no longer bothered wearing the monk’s robes — dined in awed silence, staring down through the dining room’s crystal hull-floor as the inferno raged and roared less than a mile below them.

As they neared a coastline, the sky galleon flew low over the last stages of a war, where a besieging army was attacking an iron-walled fortress city. Several of the ancient, rusted walls had already been breeched, and reptile-mounted cavalry and armored infantry were pouring in like ants while the defenders blocked streets and plazas in a last, desperate stand. Derwe Coreme’s experienced eye announced that there were more than a hundred thousand besiegers set against fewer than ten thousand defenders of the doomed city. “I wish they could have hired my three hundred and me,” Derwe Coreme said softly as the galleon passed above the carnage and burning port and floated southeast out to sea.

“Why?” said Shrue. “You would certainly be doomed. No three hundred warriors in the history of the Earth could save that city.”

The war maven smiled. “Ah, but the glory, Shrue! The glory. My Myrmazons would have extended the fight for weeks, perhaps months, and our war prowess and glory would be sung until the red sun goes dark.”

Shrue nodded, even though he did not understand at all, and touched her arm and said, “But that could be mere weeks or days from now, my friend. At any rate, I am glad you and your three hundred are not down there.”

The Steresa’s Dream sailed due east across a green, shallow sea and then they were above what both Captain Shiolko and Shrue believed was the legendary Equatorial Archipelago. The passengers lunched on their terraces and looked down as Shiolko brought the galleon low to less than a thousand feet above the tropical-foliaged isles and green lagoons. The islands themselves seemed uninhabited, but the inter-island waterways, bays, and countless lagoons were filled with hundreds upon hundreds of elaborate houseboats, some almost as large as the sky galleon, and all a mass of baroque wood designs, bright brass festoons, crenellated towers and arching cabins, and each carrying more flags, banners, and colorful silks than the last.

They left the archipelago behind and crossed further south and east into deeper waters — the sea went from green to light blue to a blue so dark as to rival the Dying Earth’s sky — and the only moving things now spied below were the great, shadowy shapes of whales and the sea monsters who ate the whales. In the dining room that night, the ocean below was alive with a surface phosphorescence underlaid by the more brilliant and slow-moving biological arc lamps of the Lampmouth Leviathans. Realizing that one of those beasts could swallow the Steresa’s Dream whole, Shrue was as relieved as the other passengers when Captain Shiolko took the galleon higher to find more favorable winds.

The next morning, one of Captain Shiolko’s sons showed Derwe Corme and Shrue how to hook their small webbing hammocks to clasps set high in the crosstrees of the mainmast above the Geyre’s nest. It was a gusty day and the sails and tops of the masts were often tilted thirty to forty degrees from vertical as the great ship first tacked and then ran before the wind. The magus’s and war maven’s tiny hammocks swung sixty feet above the deck and then, in an instant of roll, were thousands of feet above a solid floor of stormclouds miles and leagues below. It was sun-dark day and the primary light came from the lightning that rolled and rippled through the bellies of the clouds beneath them.

“That’s odd,” said Derwe Corme as she rolled out of her hammock and into Shrue’s. The cheap clasps and thin webbing strings on Shrue’s hammock groaned and stretched but held as Derwe sat up and straddled him. “I never knew I was afraid of heights until today.”

On Sixthday Night of the second week, Shiolko and his sons opened the beautiful Grand Ballroom — its crystal floor took up almost a third of the hull bottom — and the passengers and sons staged a Mid-Voyage Festival, even though no one had the slightest idea if the voyage was at its midpoint or not. By midnight, Shrue cared no more than the others about such niggling fine points.

Even after two weeks, Shrue was surprised at his fellow passengers’ festive skills. Shiolko’s sons, it turned out, each played an instrument — and played it well. The side-windows were open in the Grand Ballroom and out into the interocean night went the complex bell-chimes of tiancoes, the string music of violins, serpis, and sphere-fiddles, the clear notes from flutes, claxophone, harp, and trumpet, and the bass of tamdrums and woebeons. Captain Shiolko, it turned out, was as much a master of the three-tiered piano as he was of his ship, and thus the dancing began.

Reverend Cepres and his two wives — Wilva and Cophrane — had not been seen out of their cabin since the voyage commenced, but they appeared in brilliant blue silks this night and showed the interested celebrants how to dance the wild and uninhibited Devian Tarantula. The Brothers Vromarak put aside their mourning for the night and led everyone in a hopping, leaping tango-conga line that concluded with two-thirds of the dancers collapsing in a wriggling, laughing heap. Then Arch-Docent Huǽ—the same tall, silent, solemn form with whom Shrue had played chess every evening on the foredeck — who had left his dark docent robes behind in his booklined stateroom, appeared barechested in gold slippers and silver pantaloons to dance a wild solo Quostry to the pounding piano and tamdrums. The dance was so gravity-defying and amazing to watch that the sixty-some passengers and crew applauded to the beat until Huǽ concluded by literally leaping to the ceiling, tapdancing there for an impossible three minutes, and then lowering himself like a spider to the crystal dancefloor below and bowing.

Little Maus Meriwolt wheeled out an instrument that he’d cobbled together. The thing appeared to be a mixture of organ, calliope, and fog horn, and Meriwolt — dressed now in his fanciest yellow shirt, white gloves, and red shorts — tapdanced in oversized wooden clogs as he sang in his falsetto and pulled ropes to activate the various horns, pipes, and steam sirens. The effect was so comical that the round of applause Meriwolt received rivaled Arch-Docent Huǽ’s reception.

But perhaps the most amazing part of the long night to Shrue was the transformation of Dame War Maven Derwe Coreme and her six Myrmazons.

Shrue had never seen Derwe Coreme or her fighters out of their formfitting dragonscale armor, but this night they appeared in thin, floating, incredibly erotic gowns of shimmeringly translucent silk of soft red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Everyone in the ballroom gasped when the Myrmazons floated in like a rainbow. And — like the bands of color in a rainbow — the intensity and hues shifted and changed from one to another as the women moved and as one moved in relation to them. Derwe Coreme, who had entered in a red dress, had her thin gauze’s color shift to violet as Shrue approached to ask her to dance. Each of the young women’s gowns shifted color as they moved and as their bodies moved beneath the fabric, but the full rainbow was always present with all seven of its colors.

“Astounding,” whispered Shrue much, much later as he held Derwe Coreme close as they danced. The orchestra, apparently exhausted from its own exertions during the wild dances, was playing a slow waltz half as old as time. The ball was almost over. There was a pre-dawn grayness to the light outside the crystal windows. Shrue could feel Derwe Coreme’s breasts against him as they slowly moved together across the crystal hull-floor. “Your gown — all your gowns — are astounding,” he said again.

“What? This old thing?” said Derwe Coreme, tossing aside a floating ribbon of the nearly transparent and seemingly gravity-free fabric — it was now green. “Just something the girls and I picked up after sacking the city of Moy.” She was obviously amused — and perhaps pleased — by Shrue’s amazement. “Why, diabolist? Does this sort of garb on a warrior not fit into your magician’s philosophy?”

Shrue recited softly—

“That is astounding,” whispered Derwe Coreme. “Who wrote it? Where did you find it?”

“No one knows who wrote it,” said Shrue, pulling her closer and whispering against her cheek. “I was thinking a moment ago that this waltz is half as old as time…well, that verse, the name of its author lost to us, is as old as time. And older than all our memories — save my mother’s, who used to put me to sleep with ancient poetry.”

Derwe Coreme pulled back suddenly to study Shrue’s face. “You? Shrue the diabolist? With a mother? It is hard to imagine.”

Shrue sighed.

Suddenly Arch-Docent Huǽ cut in — not to dance with Derwe Coreme, but to talk excitedly to Shrue. “Did I hear you just say something about gnome mines? I am doing my thesis on gnomes in gloam-mines, you know!”

Shrue nodded, took Derwe Coreme’s hand, and said, “Fascinating. But I fear the lady and I must turn in now. I shall talk to you about gnome mines another time — perhaps over chess tomorrow.”

Arch-Docent Huǽ, appearing somewhat less professorial than usual with his bare chest, red cumberbund, silver pantaloons, and gold slippers, looked crestfallen.

As they went up the grand stairway out of the ballroom, Derwe Coreme whispered, “My leaving will ruin the rainbow.”

Shrue laughed. “Five of your other six colors left with gentlemen hours ago.”

“Well,” said the war maven, “I cannot say that I am leaving with a gentleman.”

Shrue glanced at her sharply. Although his expression had not changed, he was amazed to find that his feelings were deeply hurt.

As if sensing this, Derwe Coreme squeezed his hand. “I am leaving with the gentleman,” she said softly. “Of this voyage. Of all the males I’ve known in my not-insignificant lifetime. Perhaps in all of the Dying Earth. A gentleman and a magician — not a common combination, that.”

Shrue did not argue. He said nothing as they went up to their stateroom.

Two days later the Steresa’s Dream crossed the western coastline of another continent just after dawn. Ulfänt Banderōz’s nose shifted at least ten degrees northeast in its little box and the sky galleon altered its course to follow.

“Captain,” Shrue said as he stood on the otherwise empty quarterdeck near Shiolko at the great wheel, “I noticed the gunports along the hull…”

Shiolko rumbled his sailor’s laugh. “Paint only, Master magus. Paint only. For appearance sake come sky pirates or angry husbands after a port call.”

“Then you have no weapons?”

“Three crossbows and my grandfather’s cutlass in the weapons’ locker,” said Shiolko. “Oh, and the harpoon gun down in the for’ard hold.”

“Harpoon gun?”

“A great awkward thing that runs off compressed air,” said the captain. “Fires an eight-foot long barbed bolt of a harpoon trailing a mile or three of thin steel cable. Originally meant to hunt whales or baby Lanternmouths or some such. My sons and I have never had reason nor opportunity to use it.”

“You might want to bring it up on deck and see if it works,” said Shrue. “Practice with it a bit.”

Late that afternoon, the galleon crossed an expanse of ochre and vermillion desert glinting with crystals. The Steresa’s Dream was flying low enough that everyone could see the huge, blue creatures — rather like soft-shelled chambered nautiluses, Shrue thought from where he watched from the railing — which had evolved a single great wheel by which they rolled singularly and in groups across the red desert floor, leaving tracks ten leagues long.

“We could practice on one of them!” called one of Shiolko’s sons to Shrue. He and two others had assembled and hooked up the air-harpoon gun nearby on the deck but had yet to fire one of the barbed harpoons.

“I wouldn’t,” said Shrue.

“Why not?” asked the goodnatured young man.

Shrue pointed. “Those tracks the blue-wheelers are leaving in the sand? They’re ancient glyphs. The creatures are wishing us fair winds and a pleasant voyage.”

As they passed beyond the desert, Derwe Coreme joined him at the rail. “Shrue, tell me the truth. You never had any plans to flee the Dying Earth when its last days came, did you?”

“No,” said Shrue. He showed a quick, uncharacteristic grin. “It’s all just too damned interesting to miss, isn’t it?”

Early the next morning they had entered a higher, sharper range of mountains than any of them had ever seen before — the peaks were high enough that real snow remained on the summits — when suddenly the low clouds ahead parted and the Steresa’s Dream was floating above tall, thin metal-and-glass towers that were lit from within by something brighter than lanterns.

A dozen ancient air cars flew into the air like hornets from those towers and swept toward the galleon.

Captain Shiolko sounded the alarm — he’d had to retrieve several of the klaxons and sirens from Meriwolt’s cobbled-together musical instrument — and the passengers went to their stations belowdeck as rehearsed. The captain’s sons took their places in the rigging or at firefighting stations and Shrue saw all three ancient crossbows in use. Shiolko himself, at the wheel, had buckled on the cutlass that one of his female sons had brought him. Derwe Coreme and her six Myrmazons deployed themselves with their shorter crossbows and edged weapons — two of the women on the port side rail, two on the starboard, one in the bow, one in the stern at the quarterdeck behind the captain, and Drew Coreme herself roaming. Shrue remained where he’d been at the port railing.

Three of the air cars swept in closer. Shiolko was having one of his sons run up the white and blue universal flag of parley when the three air cars fired narrow, intense beams of light at the Steresa’s Dream. Two sails and narrow circles of decking burst into flame, but Shiolko’s sons put out the fires with buckets of water in half a minute.

Four more air cars joined the first three, and they swept in closer on the port side, choosing to unleash their heat beams from only a hundred yards out.

“Fire,” said Derwe Corme. All seven of the Myrmazons triggered their blunt but powerful crossbows. They reloaded so quickly from their belt-quivers that Shrue could not see the actual motions. Together, the seven got off eleven volleys in less than a minute.

Bolts pierced the yellowed, brittle canopies of the ancient air cars and six of the seven, their pilots dead, plummeted down through the clouds to crash on the snowy peaks below. The seventh air car wobbled away, no longer under its pilot’s control.

The remaining five began to circle the Steresa’s Dream from half a league out, attempting to ignite the galleon’s wide, white sails with their attenuated beams.

Shrue glanced at the compressed-air harpoon gun, but Shiolko’s sons were too busy cooling the white-circled hot spots on the sails to man the clumsy weapon. Closing his eyes, Shrue raised both arms, turned his fingers into quickly moving summoning claws, and chanted a spell taught him a century earlier by a misogynist fellow-magus named Tchamast.

Out of the clouds to the northeast emerged a half-mile-long crimson dragon, its wings longer than the galleon, its eyes blazing yellow, its long teeth glinting in the sunlight, its maw wide enough to swallow all five air cars at once. Everyone on the Steresa’s Dream ceased their cries and motion until the only audible sounds were the flapping of the sails in their stays and the much louder flap-flap-flap of the giant dragon’s leathery wings.

The air cars turned clumsily and fled back toward the distant tower-city.

The dragon ceased its pursuit of the metal and plastic vehicles and turned its interest toward the Steresa’s Dream, its long, sinuous body undulating like a sea serpent’s as it flew between the clouds. Its yellow eyes looked hungry.

“The harpoon gun!” cried Captain Shiolko to his sons. “Man the harpoon gun.”

Shrue shook his head and held up one hand to stop the young men. Checking to make sure that the last of the air cars was out of sight, Shrue raised both arms again — the gray spidersilk of his robe sleeves sliding back — and made motions as if directing an invisible orchestra, and the dragon disappeared with a thunderclap implosion. The passengers applauded.

Later that evening, Shrue came up on deck to another round of applause. The passengers were watching a smaller, greener, but angrier version of his dragon trying to keep up with the sky galleon but falling behind as the wind came strong straight from the southwest, propelling Steresa’s Dream over and away from the last of the mountain peaks and their attendant clouds. Belching fire in the direction of the galleon, the smaller dragon turned back toward the clouds and high peaks.

“I think your first dragon was more convincing,” said Captain Shiolko as the passengers on deck again applauded the magician.

“So do I,” said Derwe Coreme. “This one seemed a tad…less solid. Almost transparent in spots.”

Shrue shrugged modestly. He saw no reason to tell them that the second dragon had been real.

They spotted their followers just after dawn. Shrue and Derwe Coreme were awakened by a son and — after receiving permission from Captain Shiolko — hurried up onto the quarterdeck to the aft railing. The captain, several of his sons, Arch-Docent Huǽ, Meriwolt, and several of the other passengers were sharing Shiolko’s telescope to study the dots flitting above the western horizon. The morning air was free of clouds and absolutely clear. Shrue’s own tiny telescope folded as flat as a monocle but it was the most powerful instrument aboard the Steresa’s Dream. The diabolist unfolded it and looked toward the horizon for a long moment, then handed the better telescope to the captain. “It’s the eleven pelgranes,” he said softly. “Faucelme has found us.”

“There’s one saddle empty,” said Derwe Coreme when it was her turn to look through the telescope.

“The apprentice seems to have gone missing,” said Shrue. “But you’ll notice that the two Purples are back and in their respective saddles.”

Derwe Coreme’s pale face lifted toward Shrue. “Then your daihak — KirdriK — has failed. If that is true…”

“If that is true,” said Shrue, “then we are all doomed. But it is possible that the two Purples we see here are projections of Faucelme’s. Of the Red’s, rather, since I believe that Faucelme himself has little or no autonomy any longer. They obviously think that our belief that KirdriK has been defeated would hurt our morale.”

“It certainly hurts mine,” squeaked Meriwolt.

Shrue put his long finger to his lips. “No one else need know about KirdriK’s battle with the Purples. Then, projection or no, the morale of our small band will not suffer.”

“Until Faucelme and his Red and Purples kill us,” said Derwe Coreme very softly. But she was smiling and there was a gleam in her eye.

“Yes,” said Shrue.

Captain Shiolko walked over to their group. He and the other crew and passengers knew only what Shrue had felt it necessary to tell them earlier — that there was a possibility of pursuit by another magician and his minions.

“They’re closing,” said Shiolko. “And unless Steresa’s Dream is blessed by stronger winds from the southwest, they’ll continue to close. Will they attack?”

“I think not,” said Shrue. “I have something they want, but what they want most is to reach the place to which Ulfänt Banderōz’s nose is guiding us. But as they get closer, I believe I can add a disincentive to any impulsive behavior on their part.” Shrue turned to the seven-foot-tall Arch-Docent Huǽ and the diminutive Mauz Meriwolt. “Would you two gentlemen be kind enough to accompany me below?”

Ten minutes later, Shrue reappeared on deck leading an eleven-foot-tall figure by the hand. The form was completely shrouded within the blue robes and black veil of a Firschnian monk. Shrue led the towering, if slightly unsteady, figure aft and set the monk’s hands on the railing.

“What if I have to move?” came Arch-Docent Huǽ’s muffled voice from approximately the chest of the tall monk. “You shouldn’t have to unless they attack,” said Shrue. “And if it comes to that, our little guise will have already been found out. Oh…but if either of you need to use the head, Meriwolt can guide you while one of us holds your hand, Arch-Docent.”

“Wonderful,” came a frustrated squeak from behind the veil.

Descending to their cabin, Derwe Coreme whispered, “What are the chances that the real KirdriK will be victorious and return in time to help us?”

Shrue shrugged and showed his long hands. “As I’ve said before, my dear, a battle such as this in the Overworld may go on for anything from ten minutes to ten centuries of our time. But KirdriK knows the importance of returning as soon as he is victorious—if he prevailed and survived.”

“Is there any chance that the daihak simply fled?” she whispered.

“No,” said Shrue. “None. KirdriK is still well and truly bound. If he survives — and either he or the two Purples must die — he shall return immediately.”

All that day the pelgranes and their saddled passengers grew closer, until the black flapping forms held station a little less than two leagues behind the sky galleon. Shrue urged Captain Shiolko to have his sons practice with the air-powered harpoon gun, which they did diligently through the long, hot day, firing and reeling in the long barbed bolt time after time. A little after noon, the guiding nose of Ulfänt Banderōz swiveled due east and the galleon and following pelgranes changed course accordingly.

“I’ve never seen pelgranes that large,” Shiolko said to Shrue late that afternoon as both men studied their pursuers through telescopes. “They’re almost twice the size of the normal monsters.”

It was true. Pelgranes fed on humans — they liked nothing better for their diet — but it would be all a regular pelgrane could do to carry off one adult man or woman in its talons. These creatures looked as if they could carry a man in each taloned claw while feeding on a third in its mouth-beak.

“Some magical breeding of the species thanks to Faucelme and the Red,” murmured Shrue. From the middledeck came a flat explosion of compressed air as three of the sons fired off the harpoon gun yet again. Then the screech-and-whine as they began laboriously cranking back the bolt on its quarter-mile of steel cable.

The eleven flying forms were backlit by the huge setting sun as one of the pelgranes broke formation and began closing the gap to the galleon.

“The saddleless one,” said Derwe Coreme, who was watching through Shrue’s telescope. She and her Myrmazons had all of their weapons strapped to their dragonscaled backs and belts. “Damn!”

“What?” said Captain Shiolko and Shrue together.

“It’s carrying a white and blue flag.”

So it was. Shiolko’s sons did their best to train the ungainly harpoon gun on the approaching pelgrane — and Derwe Coreme’s Myrmazons found it much easier to bring their short but powerful crossbows to bear — but the pelgrane was indeed carrying a white and blue flag of truce in one of its fleshy, pink little wing hands. They allowed it to flap closer and land on the portside railing.

Most of the passengers made a huge semicircle on deck, then half a semicircle as they tried to get upwind of the stinking pelgrane, as some of the Myrmazons and Shiolko’s sons kept an eye on the other ten pelgranes behind them, making sure this visit was not just a distraction.

Shrue and the captain stepped closer, moving into the sphere of carrion stench that hung around the creature. The diabolist noticed that the pelgrane was wearing smoked goggles — they hated flying in daylight.

“What do you want?” demanded Captain Shiolko. And then, as an afterthought, added, “If you crap on my railing or deck, you die.”

The pelgrane smiled a foul pelgranish smile. “Your magician knows what we want.”

“I’m fresh out of Finding Crystals,” said Shrue. “What happened to Faucelme’s apprentice?”

“He became too…ambitious,” wheezed the pelgrane. “As all apprentices do, sooner or later. Faucelme was forced to…punish…him. But do not change the subject, diabolist. Hand over the nose.”

Something about the phrasing of that demand made both Shrue and Derwe Coreme laugh. The others in the mass of passengers and crew looked at them as if they’d gone mad.

“Tell the Red and his puppet Faucelme that their projection of the Purples is a sad failure,” said Shrue. He nodded toward the silent, tall monk’s figure at their stern rail. At least Meriwolt had managed to turn Arch-Docent Huǽ around so that the black veil under the hood was aimed in the general direction of the pelgrane. “We know how the battle in the Overworld really went.”

The pelgrane looked bored. “Are you going to give me the nose or make Faucelme take it from you?”

Shrue sighed. “Let me show you something, my friend,” he said softly. “Young Shiolko — Arven — could you give me that extra bit of block and tackle? Yes, set it on the deck in front of me. Thank you. Are you watching, pelgrane?”

The oversized pelgrane’s yellow eyes were shifting — hungrily — every way but toward the heavy block and bit of rope on the deck. It licked its foul chops while looking at the passengers, but said, “Oh, is there a birthday party underway here? Did you all hire a village magic-maker? Is the old man going to show us that there’s nothing up his sleeves and then make the big, bad block and tackle disappear? That will deeply impress one of the seventeen Elemental Reds in all of the universe!”

Shrue smiled and snapped his fingers.

The heavy block disappeared.

The pelgrane screamed in pain and horror. Its talons and both of its tiny fleshy hands clutched at its own belly.

“You looked hungry,” said Shrue. “I know that Faucelme and Faucelme’s owner are watching and listening through you. Let them know that they could never seize the nose of Ulfänt Banderōz before I send it elsewhere — and to an elsewhere infinitely less retrievable than your foul belly, pelgrane.”

Still shrieking, the pelgrane flapped into the air, writhing and rolling, and then screamed, “I’ll have my dinner from you yet, mortals.” It feinted in Shrue’s direction, but banked suddenly, seized Reverend Cepres’s younger wife Wilva in its talons, and flapped away toward the south, still screeching and shrieking in pain even as Wilva screamed.

“Quick!” cried Shrue, gesturing the frozen Shiolko sons toward the compressed-air harpoon gun.

The Myrmazons needed no impetus. The pelgrane was no more than thirty yards away when six crossbow bolts slammed into the monster’s shoulders, back, and upper hairy thorax — the women warriors were trying to avoid hitting the woman hanging from its talons. The Myrmazons reloaded in an instant and Derwe Coreme raised her hand, ready to signal a second volley.

“No!” cried Shrue. “If it dies, it will release Wilva.” He gestured toward the Shiolko boys to fire, even as his lips chanted a spell and his fingers played the air as if it were the captain’s three-tiered piano.

Guided by the efulsion, the harpoon flew impossibly true, smashing through the pelgrane’s thick thorax. Yellow ichor flew everywhere. The pelgrane’s scream reached into the ultrasonic.

“Quickly!” cried Shrue, helping the sons crank in the metal cable.

“I’ll drop her!” screamed the raging pelgrane. “Let me go, or by Highest Gods you worship, I’ll bite her head off now and drop her!”

“Drop her and you die now,” shouted Shrue, still cranking the pelgrane in. The six Myrmazons had their crossbows aimed unshakingly at its head. “Return her safely and you have a chance to live,” he said. “I promise you your freedom.”

The pelgrane screamed in frustration and pain. They cranked it aboard like some huge, stoop-shouldered, carrion-stinking, feathered fish, and the pelgrane flopped and writhed and bellowed and vomited yellow and green ichor everywhere. But Wilva flew free and Reverend Cepres gathered her up, weeping but alive, in his arms.

“You promised me my freedom!!” screamed the pelgrane.

“So I did,” said Shrue and nodded to Derwe Coreme, who instantly used her longest and sharpest sword to strike the giant pelgrane just above the thorax, severing that hairy body part — larger than Meriwolt, who had to leap and scramble to avoid its thrusting stinger — and sending the thorax flopping on the deck, still pierced by the long barbed harpoon. Shrue gestured again, a backhand dismissal, and the rest of the shrieking pelgrane was thrown overboard as if by a huge, invisible hand. It plummeted a thousand screaming, cursing, ichor-venting feet or more before it remembered it still had wings.

It was a long night and neither Shrue nor Derwe Coreme slept a moment of it. The clouds had closed in and by midnight Steresa’s Dream was enveloped in cloud-fog so thick that the sons had reduced all canvas so that the sky galleon was barely making way. Huddled in the slight glow of the binnacle near Captain Shiolko at the wheel, Shrue and the Myrmazon chief could see the bright lanterns on the mainmast only as the dimmest and most distant of spherical glows. The only sound aboard the ship, besides the quarter-hour calling of the time by one of Shiolko’s sons, was the drip-drip-drip of droplets from the masts and rigging. But from beyond the ship, growing closer by the hour, was the leathery flap of wings from ten pelgranes closing their circle.

“Do you think they will come aboard tonight?” whispered Derwe Coreme. Shrue was interested that he could hear no fear or concern whatsoever in her voice, only mild curiosity. Her six Myrmazons were wrapped in blankets on the damp deck, sleeping like children. And, Shrue knew, unlike children, they could and would come fully awake in a fraction of a second when the alarum was called. What must it be like, he wondered, to have trained and disciplined yourself to the point where fear could be banished?

He said, “It depends on whether the Red controlling Faucelme thinks he has a real chance of stealing the nose.” Shrue patted his robes where the small box was pocketed next to his heart.

“Does he…it?” whispered Derwe Coreme. “Have a real chance, I mean. By magic?”

Shrue smiled at her in the soft glow of the binnacle. “No magic that I cannot counter, my dear. At least in so obvious an attempt.”

“So you’re an equal to the Red and Faucelme in a fight?” The woman’s soft whisper may have had the slightest edge to it.

“I doubt it,” said Shrue. “I can keep them from snatching the nose, but odds are very much against me in a stand-up fight.”

“Even,” whispered Derwe Coreme as she patted the short crossbow slung across her shoulder, “if Faucelme were to die suddenly?”

“Even then,” whispered Shrue. “But even without the Red, the ancient magus known as Faucelme would not be so simple to kill. But that isn’t what’s worrying me tonight.”

“What is worrying you tonight, Shrue?” said Derwe Coreme and slipped her calloused fingers inside his robe to touch his bare chest.

Shrue smiled but pulled away and removed the tiny box from his robes. Holding it near the binnacle light, he whispered, “This.”

The guiding nose of Ulfänt Banderōz was levitating in its box, rattling at the glass cover. Shrue turned the box on end and the nose slid to the top as if magnetized, the nostrils pointing up and only a little to their left in the night and fog.

“Above us?” hissed Derwe Coreme. “That’s impossible.”

Shrue shook his head. “You see that dial on the post near Captain Shiolko between the wheel and capstan? The small device in the ossip engine room below sends out pulses from the atmospheric emulsifier in the hull by the keel and those return to a receiver, telling the captain the true altitude of the ship even in darkness and fog. You notice that it now reads just above the numeral five — five thousand feet above sea level.”

“So?”

“We are in a valley,” whispered Shrue. “We’ve been following its contours for hours. The Ultimate Library is on one of the peaks above us and to the east — probably at about nine thousand feet of altitude.”

“Why haven’t we struck the cliffs around us and died?” asked Derwe Coreme. Once again, Shrue noticed, the only overlay was of mild curiosity.

“We are going dead slow, floating with the breezes,” whispered Shrue. “Also, I devised a little instrument — there, you may notice our good captain playing close attention to those four dials I jury-rigged from Meriwolt’s calliope.”

The warrior chief looked at the wires running from the device toward something in a box set near the binnacle, chuckled and shook her head. “Boys and their toys. But what’s to keep Faucelme and his pelgranes from striking the surrounding rocks in the dark?”

“Ahh,” breathed Shrue. “They know where they and where we are to a much finer degree than we do, I’m afraid. Pelgranes are nightflyers. They navigate by sound waves bouncing back from objects. That’s what my ‘little instrument’ is connected to — our unfortunate pelgrane visitor’s vibrating thorax. The creatures also ‘hear’ through their thoraxes…it’s why I let our friend come so close and behave true to pelgrane form earlier.”

“You needed his thorax.”

“Yes.” He squeezed her hand. Her skin was very cold and damp but her hand was not shaking in the least. “You can sleep if you want, my dear,” he whispered. “I have nothing to base it on but a hunch, but I don’t think the Red and Faucelme and the three Yellows and three Greens and their pelgranes will make their move tonight, in the dark.”

“Sleep?” whispered Derwe Coreme, former princess of the House of Domber. “And miss all this? You must be joking.” Spreading a blanket, she slid under Shrue’s outer robe and pulled him down next to her.

Captain Shiolko glanced over in their direction once, grunted softly, and then returned his attention to the emulsifier and thorax dials.

The nose began spinning at first light, when the clouds first showed a milky pre-dawn glow and then parted as the red sun struggled to rise. Captain Shiolko brought the galleon to full stop and then allowed it to rise more than three thousand feet.

The Second Ultimate Library was on a rocky promontory overhanging a vertical drop four thousand feet or more to the wooded valley below it. There was no moat at this version of the library, but wooded wilderness stretched away between high peaks for uncounted miles to its west.

“You can set down in that glade near the front door,” Shrue said to the captain. “Then let us out and go on to deliver the rest of your passengers.”

Shiolko grinned. “I know better than that, Master Magician. That Faucelme devil and the red thing what pulls his strings won’t let us go, no matter what. We’ll drop you off if you want, then we’ll moor nearby to that huge old tree near the waterfall where we can refill our casks, but we’ll watch and help if we can. Our fate is your fate. We know that.”

“I am sorry it has come to that,” Shrue said sincerely.

Captain Shiolko shrugged. “Somehow I think I’m speaking for everyone on the ship and perhaps for everyone on the Dying Earth. How it come to this, I don’t know…and don’t especially care. But we could have done worse than have you as our standard-bearer, I think, Master Magician Shrue. I don’t see no stinking kid’s birthday party anywhere near.”

The ten pelgranes landed in the glade even as Steresa’s Dream hovered and let down its gangplank. Derwe Coreme went down first, followed by her six Myrmazons leading sluggish and sleepy megillas just wakened from their sorcery-induced, three-week-long naps, straw from the livestock pens on the middle deck still clinging to their scales.

Faucelme laughed as Shrue descended the gangplank, leading the tall robed and veiled figure by his hand. “Your daihak looks a little wobbly there, diabolist!” called Faucelme as the robed form felt gingerly with his foot before stepping to the soil.

“Well,” said Shrue. “He’s been through a tough fight. At least he’s more solid than your pathetic Purples.”

Faucelme’s laughter stopped but his broad grin remained. “You’ll soon see how solid my Purples are, dead man.”

All of the Elementals had dismounted by now — the three Yellows, three Greens, two Purples, and the towering Red. The ten pelgranes began bellowing and surging — they’d obviously not been fed fresh meat or blood all through the long chase.

“Silence!” bellowed the Faucelme puppet and froze the pelgranes into an icy block of steaming Temporary Stasis with a single wave of his upraised palm.

Shrue blinked at the ease with which Faucelme — or, in truth, the Red — had effectuated such a difficult spell.

Faucelme stepped closer. Indeed, his clumsy, bowlegged steps did resemble those of a poorly handled puppet — although, thought Shrue, three weeks in a pelgrane saddle would create the same effect.

“Faucelme,” said Shrue. “Where is your apprentice?”

“Apprentices,” growled the little magus. “Bah! You know apprentices, Shrue. They always overreach…always. It’s why you’ve never had one of your own.”

“True,” said Shrue.

“Give me the nose,” demanded Faucelme, “and I may let your pet soldier-whore live. I might even allow the sky galleon to depart in one piece. But for you, Shrue, there is no hope.”

“So my mother often told me,” said Shrue. He reached into his robes and withdrew the nose box. “Do you give me your word, Faucelme…and your word, Elemental Red of the True Overworld’s Eleventh Realm?”

“You have our word,” said Faucelme and the Red in perfect unison.

“Well,” said Shrue, holding the box with the nose’s nostrils toward them, “then it saddens me a little to know that both your words combined aren’t worth a steaming pile of pelgrane shit. KirdriK!”

The tall figure in the blue monk’s robes pulled back its hood and veil with its huge, six-fingered hands revealing its red crest and purple feathers, then ripped the robes to shreds and stepped free. KirdriK’s dorsal flanges flared ten feet wide and glowed orange from internal heat. There were new, raw scars running across the daihak’s white-fuzzed brow and chest and upper thigh, but the creature seemed taller, stronger, more muscled, meaner, and more confident.

“He followed me home during the night,” said Shrue. “I decided to keep him.”

“My Purples,” said the Red even as the two projections winked out.

“Your Purples were good to the last drop of ichor,” rumbled KirdriK. “Their energy is in me now, along with their bones and viscera. Perhaps you can tell, Elemental.”

Faucelme only stared as the Red moved forward quickly in three huge strides. “No sandestin-daihak halfbreed ever decanted can stand up to an Elemental Red of the True Overworld’s Eleventh Realm!” roared the huge shape.

Before the daihak could speak, Shrue said softly, “KirdriK is daihak-bred from the order of Undra-Hadra. Do you really want to gamble your actual existence on the hope you can best him? Is the Ultimate Library so important to you?”

“Pah!!” roared the Red. “The Ultimate Library means nothing to me. All the spells in all the books in all the lost Aeons of the Dying Earth cannot equal the inbred knowledge of a Red fresh out of its egg!”

“Shut up, salamander,” rumbled KirdriK. “And fight. And die….”

Both the daihak and Elemental blurred around their extended edges as they prepared to flash to any of a dozen dimensions.

“Pah!” cried the Red again. “You and your library and your Dying Earth have less than twenty-four hours of existence anyway, diabolist. Enjoy it if you can!” The Elemental made a dismissive gesture and imploded out of existence on the plane of the Dying Earth. The Yellows and Greens followed in less than a second. The pelgranes remained frozen in their block of solidified Temporal Stasis.

Alone, twitching and staggering from the withdrawal of the Red from his nerves and brain and guts and muscles and sinews, Faucelme took a confused step backward.

Shrue allowed himself to grow until he was twenty feet tall. The morning wind rippled his spidersilk robe like a gray banner. “Now,” rumbled the giant, “do you still have business with me, Faucelme, waylayer of vagabonds, murderer of night-guests and cows and old women?”

The short magus shook his bald head and looked around like a man who had mislaid his teeth.

“Go away then,” said Shrue. He waved his arm and Faucelme flew into the air, and in less than five seconds had become a speck disappearing over the western horizon. Shrue resumed his normal size.

Meriwolt had descended the gangplank. His already rubbery-looking legs seemed especially wobbly after the three weeks of sky-galleon flight. Shrue pocketed the nose box, removed a heavy key from his pocket, and turned to KirdriK, Derwe Coreme, and Meriwolt. “Shall we look inside this library now? KirdriK! Bring my traveling chest. “

Everything looked precisely as it had in the first Library: the same benches, shelves, and thin windows, the same indecipherable books in the same places.

There was a scurry and scuttling in the shadows and the female twin of Mauz Meriwolt — Mauz Mindriwolt — came hurrying forward with a shriek to embrace her brother. The two hugged and kissed and passionately embraced with a duration and intensity not totally proper for a brother and sister, at least — if judging by the glance flashing between them — in the opinion of Derwe Coreme and Shrue the diabolist. KirdriK, still carrying his master’s huge trunk, showed no opinion.

After a moment, Shrue cleared his throat repeatedly until the two untangled themselves.

“Oh!” cried Mindriwolt in a squeaky voice only an octave or so higher than that of her brother’s, “I am so glad to see all of you! It has been so terrible — first the Master, Ulfänt Banderōz, turning to stone, and then the earthquakes and the fires and the red sun with its poxed face each morning — oh, I’ve been terrified!”

“I am sure you have, my dear, and as the Red Elemental outside reminded us, there’s nothing we can do to stop the reconvergence in time and space of your Library and the first Library within a day or less. The Dying Earth may truly meet its end before tomorrow’s sunset. But we are still alive and should celebrate small victories while we can.”

“We should indeed,” squeaked Meriwolt. “But first we should go up and pay our respects to this stone body of Ulfänt Banderōz, Master Shrue.

May I borrow the nose box for a moment? Our Master — Mindriwolt’s and mine — should not lie there without a nose.”

“You are correct, my little friend,” Shrue said somberly. “And if I’d not needed to find this place, I never would have used the chisel in the way I did.” He removed the nose box but hesitated and then pocketed it again. “But at this moment, Meriwolt, my old bones ache from the voyage and my nerves quiver from the terror of the near-showdown with the Elementals. Is there any place in this stone keep where we can step outside into sunlight for a moment of relaxation and refreshment before paying our respects?”

“The terrace at the end of the hallway outside our Master’s bedroom?” said Mindriwolt in her tiny, sweet, uncertain voice.

“That will do nicely,” said Shrue. “Come along, KirdriK. Do not jostle the refreshments.”

The Dying Earth was alive with earthquake tremors. Boulders crashed down avalanche chutes and trees vibrated in the thick forest. The sun was laboring harder than ever to climb toward the zenith and even the flickering sunlight felt uncertain. Still, the morning air was bracing as the Mauz twins, the warrior maid, the daihak, and the diabolist stepped out onto the open terrace. In the clearing and orchard below, the six Myrmazons had set up tents for an overnight stay and were exercising the megillas. Shiolko had moored the galleon to the huge tree near the waterfall and his sons were rolling giant water casks up and down the gangplank as the passengers stretched their legs in the meadow.

“It’s a good day to be alive,” said Shrue.

“Every day is a good day to be alive,” said Derwe Coreme.

“Let’s drink to that,” said the diabolist. Despite Meriwolt’s and Mindriwolt’s impatience, he took his time removing a deep bucket of ice from the large trunk KirdriK had set down. From the ice, he slowly removed a magnum of sparkling goldwine. Then he removed four crystal flutes from their careful padding.

“We should look in on the Master’s body…” began Meriwolt.

“All in good time,” said Shrue. He handed the brother and sister and then Derwe Coreme their flutes, filled theirs with bubbling wine, and then filled his own. “This is the best of my cellars,” he said proudly. “Three hundred years old and just reached its prime. There’s no finer sparkling goldwine in or on all the Dying Earth.”

He raised his flute in a toast and the others raised theirs. “To knowing that every day is a good day to be alive,” he said and drank. The others drank. KirdriK watched without interest. Shrue refilled all of their glasses.

“My dear,” he said to Derwe Coreme, “I’ll be staying here at the Second Library, no matter what happens. Do you have plans?”

“If the world doesn’t end in a day, do you mean?” she asked, sipping her wine.

“Yes,” said Shrue.

Derwe Coreme shrugged slightly and smiled. “The girls and I have discussed it. Our guess is that we’re about as far away from Ascolais and Almery and Kauchique and the Land of the Falling Wall as we could be, without coming closer to home by continuing on eastward, I mean, so we thought it might be fun to ride the megillas home.”

“Fun?” repeated Shrue, refilling everyone’s flute. “It might take years for you to get home…if any of you survived the adventure, which would be highly doubtful.”

Derwe Coreme smiled and sipped her sparkling goldwine. Meriwolt and his sister frowned and downed their third flute in an impatient gulp.

“Well,” Shrue said to the Myrmazon chief, “I hope your megillas can swim, my dear. But then again…if we survive this current crisis…as you said, your adventures would be sung of for a thousand years or longer.”

“Oh, I think…” began Derwe Coreme.

“I really think we need to go inside and visit the Master’s corpse,” interrupted Meriwolt. “May I at least look at the nose of our Master, Ulfänt Bander — oz? Perhaps there is some way we could reattach it.”

“Of course,” Shrue said apologetically, setting his flute down on the stone balustrade and fumbling in his robes for the box. He handed it to Meriwolt.

The Mauz twins both clutched the box at once and a change came over their features. Meriwolt struck the box against stone, smashing the glass, and lifted the nose out. Both brother and sister held the nose high and a radiance poured from the stone chard and surrounded both of them. Then the two opened their mouths and a fog flowed forth, surrounding Shrue, Derwe Coreme, and KirdriK.

Shrue recognized the Moving Miasma of Temporal Stasis by its perfume-stink, but before he could react, his body and muscles were frozen in place. Even the daihak stood frozen over the open trunk.

Meriwolt and Mindriwolt cackled and writhed and rubbed against one another. “Oh, Shrue, you old fool!” squeaked Meriwolt. “How my darling and I feared that you’d figure things out before this moment! How much useless anxiety we had that you were smarter than you actually are…we sent the Red to Faucelme to distract you, but now I doubt if we needed to have bothered.”

The two separated and danced around the frozen trio. Mindriwolt squeaked at them, “My darling brother, my darling lover, was never just a clerk, you foolish magus. He was Ulfänt Banderōz’s trusted apprentice in the First Ultimate Library…as was I here in the Second. Ulfänt Banderōz trusted each of us…needed us, since only through our womb-joined minds and twinned perceptions could even he unscramble the time-twisted titles and contents of his many books…and so he taught us a few paltry tricks, but all the time we were learning, learning…”

“Learning!” roared Mauz Meriwolt. The radiance of power around him had turned from silver to red as he spoke. Pirouetting much as he had when he’d danced to his own calliope, the little figure mumbled a spell, called up a sphere of blue flame, and pitched it at the moored sky galleon. The ship’s reefed mainsail burst into flame. Meriwolt threw another blue-flame sphere and then Mindriwolt joined him.

Captain Shiolko threw down the gangplank and cast off the mooring lines, but it was too late — the Steresa’s Dream was burning in a dozen places. Meriwolt and his sister danced and capered and laughed as the burning sky galleon listed to one side and lost altitude, trailing smoke behind it, smashing through trees as Shiolko attempted to guide it into the waterfall.

Meriwolt turned, stalked up to Shrue, stood on the railing, and tweaked the time-frozen diabolist’s long nose even as he held up the stone nose of his former Master.

“This…” the pibald rodent cried, holding high the stone nose, “was our last worry. But that worry’s past, as are your lives, my helpful fools. Thank you for reuniting my darling and me. Thank you for insuring the end of the Dying Earth as you knew it.” Meriwolt danced to the oversized hour glass near the door. “Twenty-two hours and the Libraries converge…”

“…and this world ends…” squeaked Mindriwolt.

“…and the new age begins…” piped Meriwolt.

“…and the Red and other Elementals join us, their Masters in…” squeaked Meriwolt.

“…in a new age where…”

“…where…a new age where…”

“…where…why does my belly ache?” squeaked Mindriwolt.

“…a new age where…mine does as well,” squeaked Meriwolt. He rushed at the frozen Shrue. “What have you done, diabolist? What…where…what have…speak! But try a spell and…die. Speak!” He waved his white-gloved, three-fingered hand.

Shrue licked his lips. “Apprentices always overreach,” he said softly.

Meriwolt cried out in pain, fell to the ground, and doubled over with cramps. Mindriwolt fell atop him, also writhing and screaming, their short tails twitching. In fifteen seconds, the writhing and screaming ceased. The pibald bodies were totally entangled but absolutely still.

The Temporal Stasis fog began to disperse and Shrue banished the last of it with a murmur. KirdriK rumbled into consciousness. Derwe Coreme half-staggered and touched her pale brow as Shrue supported her.

“Something in the sparkling goldwine?” she said.

“Oh, yes,” said Shrue. “You may feel a little unsettled for a few hours, but there will be no serious side effects for us. The potion in the wine was quite specific as to its target…an ancient but very effective form of rat poison.”

Meriwolt had bragged that they only had twenty-two hours left until the end of the world: Shrue and Derwe Coreme used ninety minutes of that remaining time helping Shiolko and his sons and passengers douse the last of the flames and attend to the superficial burns of the firefighters. Most of the damage to Steresa’s Dream had been limited to its sails — for which it had replacements — but there would be days if not weeks of labor finding, cutting, replacing, sanding, and varnishing new planks for its deck and hull.

Then the diabolist and warrior and daihak used another two of their few remaining hours hunting through Ulfänt Banderōz’s cluttered workshops and personal rooms looking for a tube or jar of epoxy. Shrue knew more than fifty binding and joining incantations, but none that would work as well with stone as simple epoxy.

It was KirdriK who found the tube, tucked away with some suspicious erotic paraphnernalia in the lowest drawer of a seventy-drawer cluttered desk.

Shrue joined the nose to the noseless stone corpse’s face with great care, wiping away the traces of excess epoxy when he was done. Derwe Coreme had been wanting to ask why this corpse of Ulfänt Banderōz was also noseless — since Shrue had done nothing here with his chisel and hammer — but she decided that the mysteries of conjoined but separate time and space with their twelve dimensional knots and twelve-times-twelve coexistent potentials could wait until a less time-critical juncture. The reality was that this corpse of Ulfänt Banderōz had also turned to stone and — at least since Shrue’s chiseling three weeks and more than half a world away — was indeed noseless. The reality of now was a concept that Derwe Coreme had never failed to grasp — or at least not since she was kidnapped from Cil and the House of Domber when she was a teenager.

The gray-slate corpse of Ulfänt Banderōz turned to pink granite, the pink granite slowly fading to pink flesh.

The Master of the Ultimate Library and Final Compendium of Thaumaturgical Lore from the Grand Motholam and Earlier sat up, looked around, and felt on his nightstand for his spectacles. Setting them on his nose, he peered at the two humans and daihak peering at him and said, “You, Shrue. I thought it would be you…unless of course it was to be Ildefonse or Rhialto the self-proclaimed Marvellous.”

“Ildefonse is buried alive in a dungheap and Rhialto has fled the planet,” Shrue said dryly.

“Well, then…” smiled Ulfänt Banderōz. “There you have it. How much time do we have until the Libraries converge and the world ends?”

“Well…eighteen hours, give or take a half hour,” said Shrue.

“Mmmm,” murmured Ulfänt Banderōz with a scowl. “Cutting it a little close here, weren’t we? Trying to impress the lady, perhaps? Mmmm?”

Shrue did not dignify that question with an answer but something about Derwe Coreme’s grin seemed to please the resurrected old Library Master.

“How long will it take you to set the timespace separation of the two Libraries to rights?” asked Shrue. “And can I help in any way?”

“Time?” repeated Ulfänt Banderōz as if he’d already forgotten the question. “The time to repair my so-called apprentices’ little vandalism? Oh, about four days of constant work, I would imagine. Give or take, as you like to say, a half hour.”

Shrue and Derwe Coreme exchanged glances. Each realized that they’d lost their race with time and each was thinking of how they would like to spend the last eighteen hours of his or her life — give or take thirty minutes — and the answer in both their eyes was visible not only to each other but to Ulfänt Bander — oz.

“Oh, good gracious no,” laughed the Librarian. “I shan’t let the world end while I’m saving it. We’ll establish a Temporal Stasis for the entire Dying Earth, I’ll exempt myself from it to do my repair work outside of time, and that, as they say, will be that.”

“You can do that?” asked Shrue. “You can set the whole world in Stasis?” His voice, he realized, had sounded oddly like Meriwolt’s squeak.

“Of course, of course,” said Ulfänt Banderōz, hopping off the bed and heading for the stairs to his workshop. “Done it many a time. Haven’t you?”

At the top of the stairway, the Librarian stopped suddenly and seized Shrue’s arm. “Oh, I don’t want to play the arch-magus of arch-maji or anything, dear boy, but I do have a bit of important advice. Do you mind?”

“Not at all,” said Shrue. The mysteries of a million years and more of lost lore were at this magus’s beck and call.

“Never hire a mouse as your apprentice,” whispered Ulfänt Banderōz. “Goddamned untrustworthy, those vermin. No exceptions.”

To Shrue’s and every other human being on the Dying Earth’s way of perceiving it, the timespace crack — which no one else (except the still flying and fleeing Faucelme) even knew about — was fixed in an eyeblink.

The earthquakes ceased. The tsunamis stopped coming. The days of full darkness dropped to a reasonable number. The elderly red sun still struggled to rise in the morning and showed its occasional pox of darkness, but that was the way things had always been — or at least as long as anyone living could remember it being. The Dying Earth was still dying, but it resumed its dying at its own pace. One assumed that the pogroms against magicians would go on for months or years longer — such outbursts have their own logic and timelines — but Derwe Coreme suggested that in a year or two, there would be a general rapprochement.

“Perhaps it would be better if there’s not a total rapprochement,” said Shrue.

When the Myrmazon leader looked sharply at him, Shrue explained. “Things have been out of balance on our dear Dying Earth for far too long,” he said softly. “Millions of years ago, the imbalance benefited political tyrants or merchants or the purveyors of the earliest form of real magic called science. For a long time now, wealth and power have been preserved for those willing to isolate themselves from real humanity for long enough to become a true sorcerer. For too long now, perhaps, those of us who are — let us say — least human in how we spend our time and with whom we associate, have owned too much of the world’s literature and fine food and art and wealth. Perhaps the Dying Earth has enough years and centuries left to it that we can move into another, healthier, phase before the end.”

“What are you suggesting?” asked the war maven with a smile. “Peasants of the world, unite?”

Shrue shook his head and smiled ruefully, embarrassed by his speech.

“But no matter what comes, you want to wait and see it all,” said Derwe Coreme. “Everything. Including the end.”

“Of course,” said Shrue the diabolist. “Don’t you?”

There came several weeks as the galleon and people were being repaired when life was easy and merry — even self-indulgent — and then, too suddenly (as all such departing times always seem to be) it was over and time for everyone to go. Ulfänt Banderōz announced that he had to go visit himself — his dead stone other self — at the First Library and to repair that oversight of death.

“How can you do that?” asked Derwe Coreme. “When you need the stone nose and there was only one of those and Shrue here used it on you already?”

The old Librarian smiled distractedly. “I’ll think of something along the way,” he said. He gave Derwe Coreme a hug — an overlong and far too enthusiastic hug, to Shrue’s way of thinking — and then she handed the Librarian the half-full tube of epoxy and he winked out of existence.

“I’m not sure,” mused Shrue, stroking his long chin, “how instantaneous travel allows one to figure anything out along the way.”

“Is that how you’re going home?” asked Derwe Coreme. “Instantaneous travel?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” Shrue said brusquely.

Captain Shiolko and his passengers had voted and had decided — not quite unanimously, but overwhelmingly — that they would return home the long way, continuing to travel east around the Dying Earth.

“Think of it,” called down Captain Shiolko as the gangplank was being drawn up. “Steresa’s Dream may be the first sky galleon of the modern era to circumnavigate the globe — if globe it really is. My dear wife Steresa would have been so proud of the boys and me. We might be back at Mothmane Junction in a month — or two or three months — or perhaps four — six at the most.”

Or you might all be eaten by a dragon larger than the one I conjured, thought Shrue. Aloud, he shouted his wishes for a safe and happy voyage.

Then there were only the eight of them, nine of them counting KirdriK, and before Shrue could say farewell to the Myrmazons, the daihak cleared his throat — a sound only slightly softer than a major boulder avalanche — and said, “Master Magus, binder, foul human scum, I humbly ask that I might stay.”

“What?” said Shrue. For the first time in a very, very long time, he was truly and totally nonplussed. “What are you talking about? Stay where? You can’t stay anywhere. You’re bound.”

“Yes, Master,” rumbled KirdriK. The daihak’s hands were clenching and unclenching, but more as if he were running the brim of an invisible hat through them than as if he were rehearsing a strangulation. “But Master Ulfänt Banderōz has asked me to stay and be his apprentice here at the Library, and if you would release me — or loan me to him, at least temporarily — I would like to do that…Master.”

Shrue stared for a long minute and then threw his head back and laughed. “KirdriK, KirdriK…you know, do you not, that this will mean that you will be double-bound. By me and then by Ulfänt Banderōz, whose binding spells are probably stronger than mine.”

“Yes,” rumbled KirdriK. The rumble had the sullen but hopeful undertones of a child’s pleading.

“Oh, for the sake of All Gods,” sputtered Shrue. “Very well then. Stay here at this Library at the east ass-end of nowhere. Shelve books…a daihak shelving books and learning basic conjuring spells. What a waste.”

“Thank you, Master Magus.”

“I’ll reclaim you in a century or less,” snapped Shrue.

“Yes, Master Magus.”

Shrue gave one last whispered command to the daihak and then strolled over to where the Myrmazons had finished collapsing their tents and packing them onto the megillas. He squinted at the disagreeable, spitting, venomous, treacherous reptiles and their high, small, infinitely uncomfortable-looking saddles set ahead of the packs and weapons. To Derwe Coreme, who was tightening the last of what looked to be a thousand straps, he said, “You’re really serious about this epic seven-riding-home nonsense.”

She looked at him coldly.

“You do remember,” he said equally as coldly, “those seas and oceans we crossed coming here?”

“Yes,” she said, hitching a final strap so tightly that the huge megilla gasped out its breath in a foul-smelling whoosh. “And perhaps you remember, in all your centuries of bookish studies — or maybe just because you brag about having a cottage there — that there are land bridges around the Greater and Lesser Polar Seas. That’s why they’re called seas, Shrue, instead of oceans.”

“Hmmm,” said Shrue noncommittally, still frowning up at the restless, wriggling, spitting megillas.

Derwe Coreme stood before him. She was wearing her highest riding boots and held a riding shock-crop which she slapped against her calloused palm from time to time. Shrue the diabolist admitted to himself that he found something about that vaguely exciting.

“Make up your mind if you want to come with us,” she said harshly. “We don’t have an extra megilla or extra saddle, but you’re skinny and light enough that you could ride behind me. If you hang on to me tight enough, you won’t fall off too many times.”

“That will be the day,” said Shrue the diabolist.

Derwe Coreme started to say something else, stopped herself, grabbed a loose scale, and swung herself easily up over the packs and scabbarded crossbows and swords to the tiny saddle. She kicked her boots into the stirrups with the absent ease of infinite experience, waved her hand to the Myrmazons, and the seven megillas leapt away toward the west.

Shrue watched them go until they were less than a dust cloud on the furthest ridge to the west. “The chances of any of you surviving this voyage,” he said to the distant dust cloud, “are nil minus one. The Dying Earth simply has too many sharp teeth.”

KirdriK came out of the Library carrying the things Shrue had requested. He laid the carpet out on the pine needles first — a good size, Shrue thought as he sat crosslegged in its center, five feet wide by nine feet long. Enough room to stretch out and take a nap on. Or to do other things on.

Then KirdriK set out the wicker hamper with Shrue’s warm lunch, a bucket holding three bottles of good wine set to chill, a sweater-cape should the day turn chilly, a book, and a larger chest. “It would have been a mixed metaphor of the worst sort,” said Shrue to no one in particular.

“Yes, Master Magus,” said KirdriK.

Shrue shook his head ruefully. “KirdriK,” he said softly. “I am a fool’s fool.”

“Yes, Master Magus,” said the daihak.

Without another word, Shrue extended his fingers, jinkered the old carpet’s flight threads into life, lifted it eight feet off the ground in a hover, turned to look sideways directly into the daihak’s disinterested — or at least noncommittal — yellow eyes, shook his head a final time, and commanded the carpet west, rising quickly over the trees, pursuing the disappearing dust cloud.

KirdriK watched the speck dwindle for a moment and then shambled bowleggedly into the Library to find something to do — or at least something interesting to read — until his new Master, Ulfänt Banderōz, returned, either alone or with his other self.