George Martin - Songs of the Dying Earth

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 thAeon, 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.