Songs of the Dying Earth

Guided by the efulsion, the harpoon flew impossibly true, smashing through the pelgrane’s thick thorax. Yellow ichor flew everywhere. The pelgrane’s scream reached into the ultrasonic.

“Quickly!” cried Shrue, helping the sons crank in the metal cable.

“I’ll drop her!” screamed the raging pelgrane. “Let me go, or by Highest Gods you worship, I’ll bite her head off now and drop her!”

“Drop her and you die now,” shouted Shrue, still cranking the pelgrane in. The six Myrmazons had their crossbows aimed unshakingly at its head. “Return her safely and you have a chance to live,” he said. “I promise you your freedom.”

The pelgrane screamed in frustration and pain. They cranked it aboard like some huge, stoop-shouldered, carrion-stinking, feathered fish, and the pelgrane flopped and writhed and bellowed and vomited yellow and green ichor everywhere. But Wilva flew free and Reverend Cepres gathered her up, weeping but alive, in his arms.

“You promised me my freedom!!” screamed the pelgrane.

“So I did,” said Shrue and nodded to Derwe Coreme, who instantly used her longest and sharpest sword to strike the giant pelgrane just above the thorax, severing that hairy body part — larger than Meriwolt, who had to leap and scramble to avoid its thrusting stinger — and sending the thorax flopping on the deck, still pierced by the long barbed harpoon. Shrue gestured again, a backhand dismissal, and the rest of the shrieking pelgrane was thrown overboard as if by a huge, invisible hand. It plummeted a thousand screaming, cursing, ichor-venting feet or more before it remembered it still had wings.

It was a long night and neither Shrue nor Derwe Coreme slept a moment of it. The clouds had closed in and by midnight Steresa’s Dream was enveloped in cloud-fog so thick that the sons had reduced all canvas so that the sky galleon was barely making way. Huddled in the slight glow of the binnacle near Captain Shiolko at the wheel, Shrue and the Myrmazon chief could see the bright lanterns on the mainmast only as the dimmest and most distant of spherical glows. The only sound aboard the ship, besides the quarter-hour calling of the time by one of Shiolko’s sons, was the drip-drip-drip of droplets from the masts and rigging. But from beyond the ship, growing closer by the hour, was the leathery flap of wings from ten pelgranes closing their circle.

“Do you think they will come aboard tonight?” whispered Derwe Coreme. Shrue was interested that he could hear no fear or concern whatsoever in her voice, only mild curiosity. Her six Myrmazons were wrapped in blankets on the damp deck, sleeping like children. And, Shrue knew, unlike children, they could and would come fully awake in a fraction of a second when the alarum was called. What must it be like, he wondered, to have trained and disciplined yourself to the point where fear could be banished?

He said, “It depends on whether the Red controlling Faucelme thinks he has a real chance of stealing the nose.” Shrue patted his robes where the small box was pocketed next to his heart.

“Does he…it?” whispered Derwe Coreme. “Have a real chance, I mean. By magic?”

Shrue smiled at her in the soft glow of the binnacle. “No magic that I cannot counter, my dear. At least in so obvious an attempt.”

“So you’re an equal to the Red and Faucelme in a fight?” The woman’s soft whisper may have had the slightest edge to it.

“I doubt it,” said Shrue. “I can keep them from snatching the nose, but odds are very much against me in a stand-up fight.”

“Even,” whispered Derwe Coreme as she patted the short crossbow slung across her shoulder, “if Faucelme were to die suddenly?”

“Even then,” whispered Shrue. “But even without the Red, the ancient magus known as Faucelme would not be so simple to kill. But that isn’t what’s worrying me tonight.”

“What is worrying you tonight, Shrue?” said Derwe Coreme and slipped her calloused fingers inside his robe to touch his bare chest.

Shrue smiled but pulled away and removed the tiny box from his robes. Holding it near the binnacle light, he whispered, “This.”

The guiding nose of Ulfänt Banderz was levitating in its box, rattling at the glass cover. Shrue turned the box on end and the nose slid to the top as if magnetized, the nostrils pointing up and only a little to their left in the night and fog.

“Above us?” hissed Derwe Coreme. “That’s impossible.”

Shrue shook his head. “You see that dial on the post near Captain Shiolko between the wheel and capstan? The small device in the ossip engine room below sends out pulses from the atmospheric emulsifier in the hull by the keel and those return to a receiver, telling the captain the true altitude of the ship even in darkness and fog. You notice that it now reads just above the numeral five — five thousand feet above sea level.”

“So?”

“We are in a valley,” whispered Shrue. “We’ve been following its contours for hours. The Ultimate Library is on one of the peaks above us and to the east — probably at about nine thousand feet of altitude.”