Songs of the Dying Earth

“No, nothing like that,” replied the mage. “It seemed to me for a moment that I recognized something about you. Have you travelled much?”

Evillo must admit he had not. But then he became animated, thinking of his much-travelled hero, Cugel, and added, “But I have journeyed in my mind. My mind has visited so many spots. The sombre north — the Ocean of Sighs — Almery of dim bare hills, the heaving river Xzan, sometimes called the Twish…the glass-turreted manse of the Laughing—”

“Quite,” interposed Pendatas Baard concludingly.

Just then, a loud clang shook the dungeon, followed by screeching. In their shoving anxiety to feed, the food vehicle had been toppled among the diners, and a man received burned legs and feet. As the unfortunate lay flapping on the floor, a curious compunction overcame Evillo. Leaving the mage, he hastened to the scalded man. Lying on the floor, Evillo commenced to crawl over his wounded legs. Cries of affronted mockery resulted, then fell still as Evillo completed his progress. The burned man bounced to his feet. “I am cured! The pain is laved from me! My skin is whole!” So much might be witnessed as a fact.

The other prisoners promptly crowded about Evillo. “You are a mighty sorcerer. Save us, great master! We are all innocent as newborn elds. Only free us, and we will be your slaves. Refuse — and mage or not, you shall die!”

Evillo stood aghast, and neither the teaching of Khiss. nor any memories of Cugel’s wit, provided him at this point with eloquence.

“Khiss! Instruct me — what now?”

Khiss murmured.

“The great master whispers a spell,” surmised the prisoners. “Let us hope it summons our release — for our sakes and his!”

“It is as you desire,” Evillo confirmed hastily. “But stand further off, or the force of the freeing mantra may smash us all to pieces.” The prisoners withdrew. Khiss then muttered again. Directed by the mutter, Evillo spun about in time to see the real magician, Pendatas Baard, wavering in and out of visibility.

Faithful to Khiss’ next injunction, Evillo raced to the mage, and flung himself upon him, grasping him vigorously with both arms and legs.

Pendatas Baard uttered a strangled roar of rage and pain, but the vacillating waver, now unstoppable, had swiftly involved Evillo also. In another second, the full trio, mage, young man, and snail, vanished from the dungeon.

4: The Sembling

There was a form of bad weather in Almery that day. The three travellers fell amid the tempest, as simultaneously on the hard eastern banks of the Xzan or Twish.

Evillo found that, rather than brush water drops from his face, he brushed off small flexible animalcules of a bluish type which, hitting him here and elsewhere, bit him.

For a short time, Pendatas Baard and Evillo were united in a frenzied dance, beating away this vicious insectile rain. Presently, the mage thought to erect by sorcery a canopy of steel that, no doubt inadvertantly, sheltered Evillo also. Here they huddled, while without the sky fell and the river popped and sizzled.

“You will accept my heartiest curse for this, you felon, a curse too vile even to detail but lasting your life long,” stormed Pendatas Baard. “Render your name, that I may fix the bane more thoroughly.”

“If I should modestly decline such honour?”

“I shall blast you to syrop here and now.”

“Blurkel,” offered Evillo.

“My thanks. Consider yourself, Blurkel, accursed to the sorry limit of your days. I will not trouble to curse your brooch. Such an exertion is beneath me. Did you not know that your idiotic attempt to wrap me in an embrace of farewell, however understandable, must dislodge the architecture of the Selfulsion? Behold where you have landed me!”

“Where?” asked Evillo, for he had not yet identified the geography.

“The Selfulsion, which I, like my father Kateraspex, have almost perfected from Phandaal’s theorem, having permitted me to enter the ancient jail and verify certain opinions I hold on the vile nature of humanity, was due to return me to my domicile in the Old Town. Your solipsistic intercession has instead dashed both of us across the landscape and into the environ of Almery, in which country I must assume that you, if not I, take an obsessive interest.”

“Almery:”

“Just so. The fanged beetle-pour has lessened: regard, above the slopes, the manse of that pest, Iucounu the Laughing Magician. He has already sensed me and sent a storm of biting mites. He was the mortal foe of my father. And now, quite preposterously, is mine.”

From the tales of Cugel, Evillo had already learned of the malice of Iucounu, but also of other events which might be expected to have curtailed it. “But is Iucounu not dead? I had heard—”

“Bah: Such criminals never die, they are ineradicable.”

“Can you not then at once avail yourself of the Selfulsion, and vacate the spot?”