Songs of the Dying Earth

Shrue radiated indifference and ate his stew.

“Ulfänt Banderz left a dozen layers of defense,” whispered Faucelme. “There is a Layer of Excruciating Breathlessness. Another Layer of Internal Conflagration. Then an inert layer, but one stocked with starving stone-ghouls and vampire necrophages. Then a Layer of Total Forgetfulness to the Defiler, followed by…”

“You mistake me for another,” said Shrue. “You mistake my silence at your boorishness for interest.”

Faucelme flushed and Shrue saw the hatred in the old magus’s eyes, but the killer’s expression slid back into a simulacrum of generous friendship. “Surely, Shrue the diabolist, it would be better — and wiser and safer — for the two of us to pool our resources…mine infinitely more modest than yours, of course, but surely stronger in combination than in separate attempts — as we both try to pass through the Twelve Defensive Layers after the dawn…”

“Why wait for morning if you are so eager?” asked Shrue.

Real fear flickered across Faucelme’s features. “Mount Moriat is renowned for its ghouls, goblins, ghosts, wolves, and albino Deodands, even outside of Ulfänt Banderz’s magical defenses. And you can hear the storm pounding upon the inn’s shingles even as we…”

“I do hear the storm,” said Shrue as he rose and signaled for Schmoltz’s daughter to clear away his things. He took the last of the Blue Ruin with him. “It makes me sleepy. I hope to join a caravan headed south in the morning, so I wish you a pleasant night’s sleep Ser…Faulcoom?”

He left Faucelme smiling and flexing his hands the way KirdriK was wont to do when he most wanted to strangle his master.

Shrue woke at exactly two bells in the morning, just as he had hypnotically instructed himself to do, but for a few seconds he was confused by the warmth of another body in bed with him. Then he remembered.

Derwe Coreme had been waiting in his tiny room when he’d come upstairs and watched him coyly from where she lay naked under the covers. She held the covers low enough that Shrue had seen that the cold river air coming in through the open window was affecting her. “I’m sorry,” he’d said, hiding his surprise. “I haven’t had time to do the gender-changing spell.”

“Then I’ll have to show you how a woman-version of Shrue might begin to pleasure me,” said Derwe Coreme. As it turned out, Shrue now remembered, the former princess to the House of Domber had not been as averse to men as she might have thought.

Now he slipped out from under the covers, careful not to wake the softly snoring warrior, got rid of his rug merchant clothes and cap in a silent flash of blue vortex, and dressed himself silently in his most elegant dark-gray tunic, pantaloons, and flowing robe made of the rarest spidersilk. Then he jinkered the carpet to life, brought it to a hover four feet above the floor, and climbed aboard with his shoulder valise.

“Did you just plan to leave me a note?” whispered Derwe Coreme.

Shrue the diabolist had not stuttered since his youth — a youth lost in the tides of time — but he came close to doing so at that moment. “On the contrary, I planned to be back before dawn and to commence where we left off,” he said softly.

“Pawsh,” said the war maven and slipped out of the covers, dressing quickly in her dragonscale armor.

“I had no idea that Myrmazons and their leader wore nothing under their scales,” said Shrue.

“If blade or beam cuts through those scales,” said Derwe Coreme as she buckled up her high boots, “it’s best not to have any underlayers with foreign matter that might infect the wound. A clean wound is the best wound.”

“My approach to life exactly,” whispered Shrue as his carpet floated at the level of the war maven’s bare left breast. “May I drop you somewhere on my way?”

Derwe Coreme slipped on two daggers, a belt dirk, a throwing star, a hollow iberk’s horn for signaling, and her full sword and scabbard, slid them aside, and climbed on the floating rug just behind him. “I’m coming with you.”

“But I assure you, there is no need for…” began Shrue.

“There was no need for the three hours until we fell asleep,” said Derwe Coreme, “but they worked out all right. I’d like to see this so-called Ultimate Library and Final Compendium of Thaumaturgical Lore from the Grand Motholam and Earlier. For that matter, I’d like to meet this Ulfänt Bander — oz I’ve heard so much about over the years.”

“Him…you might find disappointing,” said Shrue.

“So many men are,” said War Maven Derwe Coreme and put her arms around Shrue’s ribs as he tapped flight threads and maneuvered the jinkered carpet forward, out sixty feet above the river, and then up and east toward the dark mass of Mount Moriat.