George Martin - Songs of the Dying Earth

“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.