George Martin - Songs of the Dying Earth

“Let us hope that your bedchambers keep to a higher standard than your kitchen.”

“For three terces you can share the big bed with Mumpo and his family,” the landlord said, indicating the rustics near the hearth. “A private room will cost you twelve.”

“None but the best for Molloqos the Melancholy.”

“Our best room rents for twenty terces, and is presently occupied by Prince Rocallo.”

“Remove his things at once, and have the room readied for me,” Molloqos commanded. He might have said a good deal more, but just then the dark-eyed woman woman rose and came over to his table. He nodded toward the chair across from him. “Sit.”

She sat. “Why do you look so sad?”

“It is the lot of man. I look at you, and see the child that you were. Once you had a mother who held you to her breast. Once you had a father who dandled you upon his knee. You were their pretty little girl, and through your eyes they saw again the wonders of the world. Now they are dead and the world is dying, and their child sells her sadness to strangers.”

“We are strangers now, but we need not remain so,” the woman said. “My name is—”

“—no concern of mine. Are you a child still, to speak your true name to a sorcerer?”

“Sage counsel.” She put her hand upon his sleeve. “Do you have a room? Let us repair upstairs, and I will make you happy.”

“Unlikely. The earth is dying. So too the race of men. No erotic act can change that, no matter how perverse or energetic.”

“There is still hope,” the woman said. “For you, for me, for all of us. Only last year I lay with a man who said a child had been born to a woman of Saskervoy.”

“He lied, or was deceived. At Saskervoy the women weep as elsewhere, and devour their children in the womb. Man dwindles, and soon shall disappear. The earth will become the haunt of Deodands and pelgranes and worse things, until the last light flickers out. There was no child. Nor will there be.”

The woman shivered. “Still,” she said, “still. So long as men and women endure, we must try. Try with me.”

“As you wish.” He was Molloqos the Melancholy, and he had seen her for what she was. “When I retire, you may come to my bedchamber, and we shall try the truth of things.”

The placards were made of dark black wood, sliced paper thin and brightly painted. They made a faint clacking sound when Lirianne turned them over. The game was simple enough. They played for terces. Lirianne won more than she lost, though she did not fail to note that whenever the wagering was heavy, somehow Chimwazle showed the brightest placards, no matter how promising her own had seemed at first.

“Fortune favors you this evening,” Chimwazle announced, after a dozen hands, “but playing for such small stakes grows tiresome.” He placed a golden centum on the table. “Who will meet my wager?”

“I,” said Rocallo. “The earth is dying, and with it all of us. What do a few coins matter to a corpse?”

Lirianne looked sad. “I have no gold to wager.”

“No matter,” said Chimwazle. “I have taken a fancy to your hat. Put that in the wager, against our gold.”

“Oho. Is that the way of it?” She cocked her head and ran the tip of her tongue across her lip. “Why not?”

Shortly she was hatless, which was no more than she had expected. She handed the prize to Chimwazle with a flourish and shook out her hair, smiling as he stared at her. Lirianne took care never to look directly at the sorcerer seated by the window, but she had been aware of him since the moment he had entered. Gaunt and grim and fearsome, that one, and he stank of sorcery so strongly that it overwhelmed the lesser magics wafting off the odious fraud Chimwazle. Most of the great mages were dead or fled, slain by shadow swords or gone to some underworld or overworld, or perhaps to distant stars. Those few who remained upon the dying earth were gathering in Kaiin, she knew, hoping to find safety there behind the white-walled city’s ancient enchantments. This was surely one of them.

Her palm itched, and Tickle-Me-Sweet sang silent by her side. Lirianne had tempered its steel in the blood of the first wizard she had slain, when she was six-and-ten. No protective spell was proof against such a blade, though she herself had no defense but her wits. The hard part of killing wizards was knowing when to do it, since most of them could turn you into dust with a few well-chosen words.

A round of ales arrived, and then another. Lirianne sipped at her first tankard while her second sat untouched by her elbow, but her companions drank deep. When Rocallo called for a third round, Chimwazle excused himself to answer a call of nature, and loped across the common room in search of a privy. He gave the necromancer’s table a wide berth, Lirianne did not fail to note. That pale grim creature seemed deeply engrossed in conversation with the inn’s resident doxy, oblivious to the wattled pop-eyed rogue scuttling past, but the golden eye atop his wizard’s staff had fixed on Chimwazle and watched his every move.

“Chimwazle has been cozening us,” she told Rocallo when the toad-faced creature was gone. “I won the last showing, and you the two before that, yet his pile of terces is as large as ever. The coins move whenever we’re not looking. Creeping home across the table. And the placards change their faces.”

The prince gave a shrug. “What does it matter? The sun grows dark. Who shall count our terces when we’re dead?”

His ennui annoyed her. “What sort of prince sits by and lets some feeble wizard make a fool of him?”

“The sort who has experienced Lugwiler’s Dismal Itch, and has no desire to experience it again. Chimwazle amuses me.”

“It would amuse me to tickle Chimwazle.”

“He will laugh and laugh, I have no doubt.”

Then a shadow fell across them. Lirianne looked up, to find the grim-visaged necromancer looming over them. “It has been three hundred years since last I played a hand of pegotty,” he intoned in a sepulchral tone. “May I sit in?”

The Great Chimwazle’s stomach was a-heave. The meat pie might be to blame, all that gristle and suet. Or perhaps it was the Twk-men he had eaten in the woods. Delicious little things, but never easy to digest. They might be in his belly still, stabbing at him with their silly little spears. He should have stopped at a dozen, but once he had started, it was so easy to think, well, one more would be nice, and perhaps another after that one. He wondered if their spears were poisoned. Chimwazle had not considered that. It was a disagreeable thought.

Almost as disagreeable as this inn. He should have paid more heed to the Pooner. The Tarn House had little to recommend it, save perhaps the pretty freckly thing who had joined his little game of peggoty. Already he had won her hat. Her boots would soon follow, and then her stockings. Chimwazle was only waiting for some of the other travellers in the common room to retire to their beds before beginning his assault in earnest. Rocallo was too dull and diffident to interfere, he was certain. Once he’d won her clothes the girl would have nothing to wager but her indenture, and afterward he could harness her to his cart an arm’s length ahead of Polymumpho. Let the Pooner chase after her henceforth, that should serve to keep those hairy legs of his pumping briskly. Chimwazle might not even need to ply the whip.

The inn’s privy was cramped and smelly, and offered neither bench nor bar, but only a ragged hole in the floor. Squatting over it with his breeches round his ankles, Chimwazle grunted and groaned as. he voided his bowels. The act was never a pleasant one for him, attended as it was by the risk of waking the imp nested in the fleshier portions of his nether parts, whose second favorite amusement was loudly describing Chimwazle’s manhood in terms of withering scorn (its first favorite amusement was something Chimwazle did not wish to think about).