Songs of the Dying Earth

Shrue had shaken his head then, apologized to the captain and passengers for his haste, and allowed Shiolko to bring the Steresa’s Dream down — in a slow, dreamlike descent — to her lower, warmer altitudes and more leisurely breeze-driven pace.

During the second week of their voyage, there were some memorable moments for Shrue the diabolist:

For a full day, Steresa’s Dream wove slowly between massive stratocumulus clouds that rose nine leagues and more before anvilling out high in the stratosphere. When the sky galleon had to go through one of these cloud giants, the ship’s lanterns came on automatically, one of Shiolko’s sons activated a mournful fog horn on the bow, and moisture dripped from the spars and rigging.

For two days, they flew above a massive forest fire that had already devoured millions of hectares of ancient woodland. Steresa’s Dream bucked and rolled to the violent thermal updrafts. The smoke became so heavy that Shiolko took the ship as high as she could go without incurring icing, and still Shrue and the passengers had to wear scarves over their noses and mouths when they went on deck. That night, the fifty-four passengers — including Derwe Coreme’s Myrmazons and Mauz Meriwolt, who no longer bothered wearing the monk’s robes — dined in awed silence, staring down through the dining room’s crystal hull-floor as the inferno raged and roared less than a mile below them.

As they neared a coastline, the sky galleon flew low over the last stages of a war, where a besieging army was attacking an iron-walled fortress city. Several of the ancient, rusted walls had already been breeched, and reptile-mounted cavalry and armored infantry were pouring in like ants while the defenders blocked streets and plazas in a last, desperate stand. Derwe Coreme’s experienced eye announced that there were more than a hundred thousand besiegers set against fewer than ten thousand defenders of the doomed city. “I wish they could have hired my three hundred and me,” Derwe Coreme said softly as the galleon passed above the carnage and burning port and floated southeast out to sea.

“Why?” said Shrue. “You would certainly be doomed. No three hundred warriors in the history of the Earth could save that city.”

The war maven smiled. “Ah, but the glory, Shrue! The glory. My Myrmazons would have extended the fight for weeks, perhaps months, and our war prowess and glory would be sung until the red sun goes dark.”

Shrue nodded, even though he did not understand at all, and touched her arm and said, “But that could be mere weeks or days from now, my friend. At any rate, I am glad you and your three hundred are not down there.”

The Steresa’s Dream sailed due east across a green, shallow sea and then they were above what both Captain Shiolko and Shrue believed was the legendary Equatorial Archipelago. The passengers lunched on their terraces and looked down as Shiolko brought the galleon low to less than a thousand feet above the tropical-foliaged isles and green lagoons. The islands themselves seemed uninhabited, but the inter-island waterways, bays, and countless lagoons were filled with hundreds upon hundreds of elaborate houseboats, some almost as large as the sky galleon, and all a mass of baroque wood designs, bright brass festoons, crenellated towers and arching cabins, and each carrying more flags, banners, and colorful silks than the last.

They left the archipelago behind and crossed further south and east into deeper waters — the sea went from green to light blue to a blue so dark as to rival the Dying Earth’s sky — and the only moving things now spied below were the great, shadowy shapes of whales and the sea monsters who ate the whales. In the dining room that night, the ocean below was alive with a surface phosphorescence underlaid by the more brilliant and slow-moving biological arc lamps of the Lampmouth Leviathans. Realizing that one of those beasts could swallow the Steresa’s Dream whole, Shrue was as relieved as the other passengers when Captain Shiolko took the galleon higher to find more favorable winds.

The next morning, one of Captain Shiolko’s sons showed Derwe Corme and Shrue how to hook their small webbing hammocks to clasps set high in the crosstrees of the mainmast above the Geyre’s nest. It was a gusty day and the sails and tops of the masts were often tilted thirty to forty degrees from vertical as the great ship first tacked and then ran before the wind. The magus’s and war maven’s tiny hammocks swung sixty feet above the deck and then, in an instant of roll, were thousands of feet above a solid floor of stormclouds miles and leagues below. It was sun-dark day and the primary light came from the lightning that rolled and rippled through the bellies of the clouds beneath them.