Songs of the Dying Earth

Mauz Meriwolt lagged behind a moment. Standing over the noseless stone corpse, the little figure clasped his hands in front of him and bowed his head. His huge black eyes filled with tears. “Goodbye, Master,” he said.

Then Meriwolt hurried down to join the other two. Dame War Maven Derwe Coreme’s shattering hornblast was already echoing from the mountainside while the blare of answering iberk horns rose from the valley below.

There were three tall steel-and-iron towers rising over the caravan city of Mothmane Junction like metal markers on a sundial. The tower tops ranged from three hundred to six hundred feet above the town and river. Each tower was made of open girders, skeletal and functional yet still ornamental in some forgotten age’s style, and the top of each tower was an acre or two of flatness broken only by the necessary cranes, dock-cradles, ramps, shacks, passenger waiting areas, and cargo conveyors necessary to service the almost constant flow of sky galleons that had once filled the skies here. Now as Shrue and his companions, including the seventeen Myrmazons who’d accompanied their leader, rode down the wide main avenue of Mothmane Junction — residents and stranded pilgrims and others scurrying to get out of the way of the exhausted and angry megillas — the diabolist could see that only three galleons remained. For centuries, the sky galleon trade had withered as the quantities of ossip sap and its phlogista extract became more and more scarce. Most of the ancient sky galleons that had called Mothmane their primary port had long since been grounded elsewhere or stolen by pirates and put to more practical uses on the Dying Earth’s seas or rivers.

But three remained — grounded atop their respective departure towers but relatively intact. Before they reached the shadows of those towers, Shrue took out his telescope and studied their choices.

The first tower rising into the dark blue midday sky, that of the Most Excellent Marthusian Comfort Cruise Line, was little more than girders of rust holding up crossbeams of wooden decay. The outside stairway had collapsed and the broad-bucketed elevator had long since plummeted to the bottom of its shaft. Shrue could see rough rope ladders spiderwebbing the structure and men moving on the sagging platform three hundred feet above the river, but they appeared to be dismantling the once-proud galleon that nestled in its dockstays. The ship’s masts were minus their sails and most of the deck structures — and some of the hull — had already been stripped of the priceless ironwood.

The second tower, its ancient signs and banners still proclaiming Lumarthian Luxury Travel! Cruises and Transits to Anywhere on the Dying Earth! Sky Galleons of Ultimate Comfort and Total Safety and Most Decadent Luxury! Pilgrims Welcome!! Worshipers of Yaunt, Jastenave, Phampoun, Aldemar, and Suul — Praised Be Their Names! — 10 % Discount!, was hardly more intact than the first tower and ship. There was no one visible atop the tower — even the cargo-handlers’ shacks had fallen down. The sky galleon docked there was larger than the first, but looked as if it had been in a battle — the length of its hull had been scorched and breached and riddled with ten-foot-long iron harpoons that gave the old galleon a porcupined look.

Shrue sighed and studied the third and tallest tower. The stairway — all sixty zigzagging flights of it — looked shaky but complete. The lift platform was still at the bottom of its shaft but Shrue could see that all of the levitation equipment had been removed and the remaining metal cables — looking too old and far too thin to support much weight — were connected to a manual crank at the bottom. The banner here was more modest—Shiolko and Sons. Sky Galleon Transit to Pholgus Valley, Boumergarth, and the Cape of Sad Remembrance (Ossip Supplies Permitting).

Well, thought Shrue, no one would be paying to fly to the Cape of Sad Remembrance after the recent tsunamis. He focused his glass on the flat top of the tower.