Songs of the Dying Earth

Alfaro Morag. The bad magicians are escaping.

“How can that be?” Though he had noted the absence of the whirlaways, including his own.

The one called Barbanikos propped the way open when the demons returned. The demons themselves had no confidence in your promise to relax their indentures.

Golden-tongued Rhialto and Ildefonse would have leveraged any demonic doubt to adjust notoriously evanescent sandestin loyalties.

There was a reason they were indentured rather than hired.

Alfaro shrugged. He remained irked that his whirlaway had been appropriated — by Mune the Mage, surely — yet here was a problem solved without his having to offend Amuldar. A prodigy. He was free to be the Good Magician and free to make Tihomir whole.

A dozen more girls arrived to help Alfaro move his possessions into his wondrous new quarters, shaped by Amuldar’s engines based on his deepest fantasies.

Not even Ildefonse’s Boumergarth could match their opulence.

He had fallen into paradise.

Paradise was a blade with vicious edges.

Across subsequent centuries, individual magicians, or, occasionally, a cabal, attempted to avail themselves of the riches of Amuldar. Every stratagem failed.

Only Vermoulian the Dreamwalker penetrated Amuldar’s shell — by stalking the nightlands. The Dreamwalker traced the nightmare into which the Good Magician descended.

Alfaro Morag, as all the Good Magicians before him had, discovered that only a few millennia of this paradise left him unable to continue to endure the cost. As had they, he began to yearn for the escape of the beautiful.

The better grounded and rounded Tihomir Morag would gain fame as his brother’s successor.

Afterword:

I entered the Navy out of high school in 1962, severely afflicted by Ambition Deficit Disorder. Nevertheless, when the Navy offered to send me to college for an additional four years of my life I said “Yo-ho-ho!” and went off to the University of Missouri. As a gangly, uncoordinated freshman I lurched about in the wake of a senior keeper whose name I have forgotten but whose greatest good turn remains with me still.

On learning that I favored science fiction, too, he dragged me into the independent bookstore next door to the tavern where we spent our evenings practicing to become sailors on liberty. There he compelled me to fork over the outrageous sum of, I believe, 75 cents (plus tax!) for the Lancer Limited Edition paperback of Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth. I was aghast. Paperbacks were 50 cents or, at most, 60 cents at the time. But I got my money’s worth, yes I did. That book is gone, along with a couple of subsequent editions, because I have read and read and read, I cannot say how many times.

I was hooked from the first page. This was intellectual meth. I cannot shake the addiction, nor have I ever lost the tyro’s longing to create something “just like—” What every author feels about favorites who blazed new roads throught the ravines and thickets of literature’s Cumberland Gaps. One of the great thrills of my writing career was being invited to participate in this project. So, for the first time in two and a half decades, I wrote a piece of short fiction, to honor one of the greats who lured me into this field.

Events here chronicled occur at the extreme end of the 21st Aeon, in anotherwise dull epoch some centuries after happenings recorded in Rhialto the Marvellous.

— Glen Cook

Elizabeth Hand The Return of the Fire Witch

Elizabeth Hand is the author of ten novels, including Generation Loss, Waking the Moon, Mortal Love, and Winterlong, and three collections of short fiction, the most recent of which is Saffron & Brimstone: Strange Stories. She is a longtime contributor of book reviews and essays to the Washington Post, Village Voice, Salon, and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, among many others. In 2008 her psychological thriller Generation Loss received the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award, and her fiction has also received two Nebula Awards, three World Fantasy Awards, two International Horror Guild Awards, the James M. Tiptree Jr. Award and the Mythopeoic Society Award. She recently completed Wonderwall, a Young Adult novel about the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. She lives on the coast of Maine with her family, and is currently at work on Available Dark, a sequel to Generation Loss.

The Return of the Fire Witch

Elizabeth Hand