George Martin - Songs of the Dying Earth

“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.