Songs of the Dying Earth

At sunrise each morning, the diabolist would rise from his place in the double hammock he shared in the comfortable suite with Derwe Coreme and — even before meditating according to the Slow Discipline of Derh Shuhr — Shrue would scramble up the manropes to the Gyre’s nest near the top of the mainmast and there use Ulfänt Banderz’s guiding nose to take a new course reading. That course would be checked via the nose box several times during the day — Captain Shiolko was a master at making the slightest adjustments — and for the final time, by the light of the binnacle (when one of Shiolko’s male or female sons was at the wheel), just at midnight.

Steresa’s Dream itself was one of those rarest of avas in the later Aeons of the Dying Earth — a machine with complicated machinery inside it — and on the first day of the voyage, Captain Shiolko proudly showed off his beautiful ship to Shrue, Derwe Coreme, robed Meriwolt, and many of the other interested passengers and pilgrims. Shrue immediately then understood that the tiny crew of eight “sons” could manage such a complicated craft not due to the usual reason — magic — but because the huge sky galleon was largely automated. Controls on the quarterdeck at the rear of the ship (which was Shiolko’s private preserve unless the captain specifically invited a passenger to come up) or other controls down in the aft engine and steering compartment helped reef and furl the sails, shift and shorten the countless ropes and lines, move ballast as needed, and even calculate wind and drag and mass so as best to move the ossip phlogista through the maze of pipes that honeycombed the hull, masts, spars, and sails themselves. The emulsifier machine so fascinated Shrue with its magickless glows and throbs and safety devices and arcane gauges and bone-felt spell-less vibrations that often, when he could not sleep, he came down to the engine and steering compartment to watch it all work.

The sky galleons had been built for passenger comfort and even those paying the fewest terces found themselves in comfortable surroundings. For Shrue and the other high-paying passengers, it was sheer luxury. The diabolist’s and Derwe Coreme’s stateroom at the third level near the stern had a wall of crystal windows that looked out and down. Their double-sized hammock rocked softly and securely in even the worst night storms. After Shrue had checked their course and done his Discipline rites in the morning, he would wake his warrior roommate and the two would shower together in their own private bath. Then they would step out onto their private balcony to breathe the cool morning air and would go forward along the central corridor to the passenger dining area near the bow where there were crystal windows looking ahead and underfoot. The sense of vertigo in these glass-bottomed lower rooms faded with familiarity.

On the fifth day, the Steresa’s Dream passed east out of known territory. Even Captain Shiolko admitted that he was excited to learn what lay ahead of them. Over wine with Shrue and Derwe Coreme late that night, the captain explained that although his sky galleon was built as a world-traveler, Shiolko’s wife Steresa, while she lived, so worried about dangers to her husband and children that, in his love and deference to her, the captain had stowed away his impatience to see the farthest lands and satisfied himself with transiting passengers to known (and relatively safe) destinations such as Pholgus Valley, Boumergarth, the former cities on the Cape of Sad Remembrance, and towns and ports in between. Now, said the captain, he and his sons and the brave passengers and the fine ship that Steresa had loved and feared so much were outward bound on the sort of voyage for which Steresa’s Dream had been designed and built centuries before Shiolko or his late wife had been born.

After the first week, Shrue had become impatient, eager to rush to the Second Ultimate Library, sure that KirdriK had been bested and eviscerated somewhere in the Overworld and that even now the Purples were returning to Faucelme’s evil band, and he’d urged Captain Shiolko to take the galleon high up into what was left of the Dying Earth’s jet stream — up where the wind howled and threatened to tear the white sails to ribbons, where ice accumulated on the spars and masts and ropes, and where the passengers had to retreat, wrapped in furs and blankets, to sealed compartments to let the ship pressurize their rooms with icy air.

But he’d seen the folly in this even before Derwe Coreme said softly to him, “Can Faucelme’s false Finding Crystal lead him to the other Library?”

“No,” said Shrue. “But sooner or later he — or more likely, the Red — will understand that they’ve been tricked. And then they’ll come seeking us.”

“Would you rather they find us frozen and blue from lack of breath?” said the warrior maven.