George Martin - Songs of the Dying Earth

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…”