Songs of the Dying Earth

“I will say this,” the magician continued, “whether Iucounu lives or has died, whether he has died but has since rebecome living, if he is perhaps secreted in study elsewhere about the manse, or even should he be away from home merely visiting some other, I remain, and currently shall do so always. Grasp, if you are able: I am a sembling which Iucounu made in his own likeness. And now I am caretaker of his castle. In me you will, should you wish to make a test of me, find all his formidable and eclectically amusing powers, for I have been invested with them in perpetuity. Therefore, abandon shyness and step within.”

“Your generosity overmatches, alas, my available time. I am due at the manse of my employer, who sent me out solely to locate his pet vowl, which had strayed from the garden,” Evillo dissembled.

“Ah, a pet.” said Iucounu’s sembling. “Iucounu too did or does have one such. See, there it bounds! Ettis, my pretty, to me! To me!” A shrill bark at once responded from above.

Evillo recalled Ettis also. Cugel’s gambits to avoid poison offered him by the magician, had resulted in the animal’s death. This self-same creature now soared down from the air, conceivably having sprung from a handy parapet. Although still round and long furred, with circular black eyes, Evillo was aware of two extra characteristics missing from the Ettis of the story. Firstly, the daylight shone through its body, Secondly, its teeth and claws had grown to abnormal length and acuity. Ettis, it seemed, had become an undead vampiric salk.

“Pardon me — I hear my master’s impatient shout and must be gone,” cried Evillo, and took to his heels.

His intention was to charge at once downhill, in the direction of the River Xzan. If needful, he would jump right into it, even should he discompose thereby another Fiscian lover.

Nevertheless, a spell of the magician, or of the guardian sembling, had already been activated. To his despair, Evillo found that he could run only around the manse, here and there leaping over obstacles, such as steps or small statues. In doing this, he passed by the windows through which he had previously stared. He noted inadvertantly that the rodent bones now danced a tarantella, but the whirl in the red paper room, like the sylph, was gone. Rushing by the void, however, a perturbing thought assailed him, even in the midst of his own concern. It seemed to him he had caught a faint echo of converse inside the nothingness: “Let tonight last forever!” said one. “My own sentiment;” averred another. “There is never more to experience than this single ‘now’.”

Had Cugel, in his triumph, uttered some guileless sophistry and thus himself activated a dormant but deadly domestic safeguard, involving petrified time?

But there was no margin to ponder. Evillo ran, swordless since the jail, and unable to break away from the magician’s walls. While behind him galloped Ettis, now on terra firma, now in the air, its joyous canine screams splintering the ears.

“Khiss:” gasped Evillo, as he entered his second circuit of the enormous building, “do you indeed youself know the spell of Selfulsion? It seemed to me you might. If so — can you not release said knack and send us hence?”

Khiss answered, “I will do my best, despite the jolting I presently receive. But you yourself must visualize some place of charm and safety. I cannot work alone.”

How heavy in that moment seemed the snail that Evillo carried.

“I know so little, and yet my skull is packed with the scenes of Cugel’s journeys — but anywhere other than here will serve.”

No sooner had Evillo panted out the words than he stumbled over a low wall inlaid with glossold. He fell into a bush of flowering casperine, from which some of the leftover blue beetlecules lifted to bite him. At the same instant, Ettis came flying from the air like a furry pancake, claws akimbo.

Evillo gave himself up for lost. Then he experienced once more the sensation of fog and vertigo that had attended his ejection from the prison with Pendatas Baard. Rather than Ettis, another country slammed into his spine. He lay staring up into a swimming hallucination of sea-green hills scarfed in a soft blue mist. This lasted less than a heartbeat. Thereafter, he was glaring through the foliage of a gigantic thamber oak to the blood-red sky of sunfall. Stars were already visible, their constellations set in unfamiliar patterns. The diamond mask of Lyraleth bemused him.

He came gradually to see he was in a forest glade, and all alone. If he had sloughed the intolerable Ettis, so he had also sloughed his mentor, Khiss.

Primed to lament, Evillo rose. And learned that he was not quite alone after all.

He had dropped on this occasion into the vernal labyrinth of the Lig Thig, or Great Erm, that stupendous and ominous forest of the far north. Here Cugel had undergone certain trials and tribulations.