George Martin - Songs of the Dying Earth

“Your generosity overmatches, alas, my available time. I am due at the manse of my employer, who sent me out solely to locate his pet vowl, which had strayed from the garden,” Evillo dissembled.

“Ah, a pet.” said Iucounu’s sembling. “Iucounu too did or does have one such. See, there it bounds! Ettis, my pretty, to me! To me!” A shrill bark at once responded from above.

Evillo recalled Ettis also. Cugel’s gambits to avoid poison offered him by the magician, had resulted in the animal’s death. This self-same creature now soared down from the air, conceivably having sprung from a handy parapet. Although still round and long furred, with circular black eyes, Evillo was aware of two extra characteristics missing from the Ettis of the story. Firstly, the daylight shone through its body, Secondly, its teeth and claws had grown to abnormal length and acuity. Ettis, it seemed, had become an undead vampiric salk.

“Pardon me — I hear my master’s impatient shout and must be gone,” cried Evillo, and took to his heels.

His intention was to charge at once downhill, in the direction of the River Xzan. If needful, he would jump right into it, even should he discompose thereby another Fiscian lover.

Nevertheless, a spell of the magician, or of the guardian sembling, had already been activated. To his despair, Evillo found that he could run only around the manse, here and there leaping over obstacles, such as steps or small statues. In doing this, he passed by the windows through which he had previously stared. He noted inadvertantly that the rodent bones now danced a tarantella, but the whirl in the red paper room, like the sylph, was gone. Rushing by the void, however, a perturbing thought assailed him, even in the midst of his own concern. It seemed to him he had caught a faint echo of converse inside the nothingness: “Let tonight last forever!” said one. “My own sentiment;” averred another. “There is never more to experience than this single ‘now’.”

Had Cugel, in his triumph, uttered some guileless sophistry and thus himself activated a dormant but deadly domestic safeguard, involving petrified time?

But there was no margin to ponder. Evillo ran, swordless since the jail, and unable to break away from the magician’s walls. While behind him galloped Ettis, now on terra firma, now in the air, its joyous canine screams splintering the ears.

“Khiss:” gasped Evillo, as he entered his second circuit of the enormous building, “do you indeed youself know the spell of Selfulsion? It seemed to me you might. If so — can you not release said knack and send us hence?”

Khiss answered, “I will do my best, despite the jolting I presently receive. But you yourself must visualize some place of charm and safety. I cannot work alone.”

How heavy in that moment seemed the snail that Evillo carried.

“I know so little, and yet my skull is packed with the scenes of Cugel’s journeys — but anywhere other than here will serve.”

No sooner had Evillo panted out the words than he stumbled over a low wall inlaid with glossold. He fell into a bush of flowering casperine, from which some of the leftover blue beetlecules lifted to bite him. At the same instant, Ettis came flying from the air like a furry pancake, claws akimbo.

Evillo gave himself up for lost. Then he experienced once more the sensation of fog and vertigo that had attended his ejection from the prison with Pendatas Baard. Rather than Ettis, another country slammed into his spine. He lay staring up into a swimming hallucination of sea-green hills scarfed in a soft blue mist. This lasted less than a heartbeat. Thereafter, he was glaring through the foliage of a gigantic thamber oak to the blood-red sky of sunfall. Stars were already visible, their constellations set in unfamiliar patterns. The diamond mask of Lyraleth bemused him.

He came gradually to see he was in a forest glade, and all alone. If he had sloughed the intolerable Ettis, so he had also sloughed his mentor, Khiss.

Primed to lament, Evillo rose. And learned that he was not quite alone after all.

He had dropped on this occasion into the vernal labyrinth of the Lig Thig, or Great Erm, that stupendous and ominous forest of the far north. Here Cugel had undergone certain trials and tribulations.

About the glade, the trees clustered close, towering deodars and capacious amberquers, limned with cochineal highlights. Northern mandouars loured like priests attired in smoke. Contrastingly, a pleasing scent of vanilla drifted on an evening Fader, or west wind. The aroma wafted from a long clay pipe that three sabre-toothed, man-eating Deodands passed to and fro between them. They were the impossibly unhuman black of burned skeel. They smoked, and smiled to welcome Evillo to dinner, he being the food.

As the daylight ebbed, the tallest Deodand approached Evillo. The Deodand spoke.

“What a pleasure that you have entered the glade. My friends and I have not eaten a morsel for several days. The last of our — shall I say — patrons did however leave us this pipe and pouch of pods and herbs. A selfless thought. We have much enjoyed it.”

Evillo glanced at the Deodand. “A tonic to hear you speak of friendship. I fear that my own friend, a very fat fellow named Huge, has lagged behind. Already I miss him painfully, he is such fine company, and though hardly the height of that tree, is at least three times its girth.”

The Deodand paused, appearing interested.

“Is he so? Why then is he so disappointingly late?”

“Initially, I believe, in order to persuade two other grand fellows of our acquaintance, by name Gargantuan and Likewise, to come with us on our jaunt.”

“Well, then,” said the Deodand, with a winning grin, “while we await such excellent extra confreres, we may partake of a starter dish before the feast. Come! We insist that you participate; indeed, it is essential. That seen to, we will greet your friends when they arrive with equal gladness.”

“This causes embarrassment,” grieved Evillo. “Without a certain act, Huge, Gargantuan, and Likewise will not appear. Let me elucidate. You will have noted my supernatural method of arrival? I can translocate from any one place to any other at the blink of an eye. Huge, inevitably, can do the same. However he has recently become prey to a silly habit of wishing me always, when once I reach any destination, to observe a fussy ritual. Without this, which infallibly he detects from afar, he refuses to follow me. Nor obviously, therefore, will our hefty friends.”

By now, the two other Deodands had approached. They sat elegantly on nearby tree-stumps, the pipe stowed. One sang a little ditty.

“What then does the ritual entail?” another asked at length.

“It is so tiresome,” replied Evillo, “I feel I should omit it. Let us simply proceed to the food. After all, three such enormous gentlemen as my friends will surely deplete your stores.”

“Not precisely,” the first Deodand reassured him. “No, no, we long to meet with them. I urge you to enact the ritual. We will patiently stand by.”

“Alas, I must ask you to assist. But no — it is beneath you! Let us make do with the starter dish, of whatever sort it is.”

“Not at all. Be assured. We are more than willing to help you.”

The other two Deodands concurred with enthusiasm. “Very well then, I must bind your eyes with these strips torn from my shirt, as so — yes, indeed, they must come from my own garments or Huge will know, and withhold his company. There. I trust they are not too tight. Now each of us must lie face down on the ground and count, one after the other, to the number one hundred. You, sir, the first. Then you, sir, and lastly, sir, you. I must do the counting last of all, for so my foolish friend Huge will have it.”