George Martin: Songs of the Dying Earth

His father smirked and stroked his impressive white beard like a man petting an animal. “Wealth indeed,” he said. “There is much call in these times for pebbles and small rocks from the End of the Earth: there are spells, cantrips and magical instruments for which they are almost irreplaceable. And I deal in such things.”

Farfal the Unfortunate nodded. “And if I do not wish to be a servant,” he said, “but simply request to be returned to where we came from, through that casement, why, what then?”

Balthasar the Tardy said only, “I have little patience for such questions. The sun has gone out. In hours, perhaps minutes, the world will have ended. Perhaps the universe also has ended. Think no more on these matters. Instead, I shall procure a locking-spell-creature for the casement, down at the ship-market. And while I go to do that, you can order and polish all the objects you can see in this cabinet, taking care not to put your fingers directly upon the green flute (for it will give you music, but replace contentment in your soul with an insatiable longing) nor get the onyx bogadil wet.” He patted his son’s hand affectionately, a glorious, resplendent creature in his many-coloured silks. “I have spared you from death, my boy,” he said. “I have brought you back in time to a new life. What should it matter that in this life you are not son but servant? Life is life, and it is infinitely better than the alternative, or so we presume, for nobody returns to dispute it. Such is my motto.”

So saying he fumbled beneath the casement, and produced a grey rag, which he handed to Farfal. “Here. To work! Do a good job and I shall show you by how much the sumptuous feasts of antiquity are an improvement over smoked seabird and pickled ossaker-root. Do not, under any circumstances or provocation, move the casement. Its position is precisely calibrated. Move it, and it could open to anywhere.”

He covered the casement with a piece of woven cloth, which made it less remarkable that a large wooden casement was standing, unsupported, in the centre of a room.

Balthasar the Tardy left that room through a door that Farfal had not previously observed. Bolts were slammed closed. Farfal picked up his rag, and began, wanly, to dust and to polish.

After several hours he observed a light coming through the casement, so brightly as to penetrate the cloth covering, but it soon faded once more.

Farfal was introduced to the household of Balthasar the Canny as a new servant. He observed Balthasar’s five sons and his seven concubines (although he was not permitted to speak to them), was introduced to the House-Carl, who held the keys, and the maidmen who hurried and scurried thence and hither at the House-Carl’s command, and than whom there was nothing lower in that place, save for Farfal himself.

The maidmen resented Farfal, with his pale skin, for he was the only one apart from their master permitted in the Sanctum Sanctorum, Master Balthasar’s room of wonders, a place to which Master Balthasar had hitherto only repaired alone.

And so the days went by, and the weeks, and Farfal ceased to marvel at the bright orange-red sun, so huge and remarkable, or at the colours of the daytime sky (predominantly salmon and mauve), or at the ships that would arrive in the ship-market from distant worlds bearing their cargo of wonders.

Farfal was miserable, even when surrounded by marvels, even in a forgotten age, even in a world filled with miracles. He said as much to Balthasar the next time the merchant came in the door to the sanctum. “This is unfair.”

“Unfair?”

“That I clean and polish the wonders and precious things, while you and your other sons attend feasts and parties and banquets and meet people and otherwise and altogether enjoy living here at the dawn of time.”

Balthasar said, “The youngest son may not always enjoy the privileges of his elder brothers, and they are all older than you.”

“The red-haired one is but fifteen, the dark-skinned one is fourteen, the twins are no more than twelve, while I am a man of seventeen years…”

“They are older than you by more than a million years,” said his father. “I will hear no more of this nonsense.”

Farfal the Unfortunate bit his lower lip to keep from replying.

It was at that moment that there was a commotion in the courtyard, as if a great door had been broken open, and the cries of animals and house-birds arose. Farfal ran to the tiny window and looked out. “There are men,” he said. “I can see the light glinting on their weapons.”

His father seemed unsurprised. “Of course,” he said. “Now, I have a task for you Farfal. Due to some erroneous optimism on my part, we are almost out of the stones upon which my wealth is founded, and I have the indignity of discovering myself to be overcommitted at present. Thus it is necessary for you and I to return to our old home and gather what we can. It will be safer if there are two of us. And time is of the essence.”

“I will help you,” said Farfal, “if you will agree to treat me better in the future.”

From the courtyard there came a cry. “Balthasar? Wretch! Cheat! Liar! Where are my thirty stones?” The voice was deep and penetrating.

“I shall treat you much better in the future,” said his father. “I swear it.” He walked to the casement, pulled off the cloth. There was no light to be seen through it, nothing inside the wooden casing but a deep and formless blackness.

“Perhaps the world has entirely ended,” said Farfal, “and now there is nothing but nothing.”

“Only a handful of seconds have passed there since we came through it,” his father told him. “That is the nature of time. It flows faster when it is younger and the course is narrower: at the end of all things time has spread and slowed, like oil spilled on a still pond.”

Then he removed the sluggish spell-creature he had placed on the casement as a lock, and he pushed against the inner casing, which opened slowly. A chill wind came through it which made Farfal shiver. “You send us to our deaths, father,” he said.

“We all go to our deaths,” said his father. “And yet, here you are, a million years before your birth, still alive. Truly we are all composed of miracles. Now, son, here is a bag, which, as you will soon discover, has been imbued with Swann’s Imbuement of Remarkable Capacity, and will hold all that you place inside it, regardless of weight or mass or volume. When we get there, you must take as many stones as you can and place them in the bag. I myself will run up the hill to the nets and check them for treasures — or for things that would be regarded as treasures if I were to bring them back to the now and the here.”

“Do I go first?” asked Farfal, clutching the bag.

“Of course.”

“It’s so cold.”

In reply his father prodded him in the back with a hard finger. Farfal clambered, grumbling, through the casement, and his father followed.

“This is too bad,” said Farfal. They walked out of the cottage at the end of time and Farfal bent to pick up pebbles. He placed the first in the bag, where it glinted greenly. He picked up another. The sky was dark but it seemed as if something filled the sky, something without shape.

There was a flash of something not unlike lightning, and in it he could see his father hauling in nets from the trees at the top of the hill.

A crackling. The nets flamed and were gone. Balthasar ran down the hill gracelessly and breathlessly. He pointed at the sky. “It is Nothing!” he said. “Nothing has swallowed the hilltop. Nothing has taken over.”

There was a powerful wind then, and Farfal watched his father crackle, and then raise into the air, and then vanish. He backed away from the Nothing, a darkness within the darkness with tiny lightnings playing at its edges, and then he turned and ran, into the house, and through the door into the second room. But he did not go through into the second room. He stood there in the doorway, and then turned back to the Dying Earth. Farfal the Unfortunate watched as the Nothing took the outer walls and the distant hills and the skies, and then he watched, unblinking as Nothing swallowed the cold sun, watched until there was nothing left but a dark formlessness that pulled at him, as if restless to be done with it all.