Songs of the Dying Earth

Shrue joined the nose to the noseless stone corpse’s face with great care, wiping away the traces of excess epoxy when he was done. Derwe Coreme had been wanting to ask why this corpse of Ulfänt Banderz was also noseless — since Shrue had done nothing here with his chisel and hammer — but she decided that the mysteries of conjoined but separate time and space with their twelve dimensional knots and twelve-times-twelve coexistent potentials could wait until a less time-critical juncture. The reality was that this corpse of Ulfänt Banderz had also turned to stone and — at least since Shrue’s chiseling three weeks and more than half a world away — was indeed noseless. The reality of now was a concept that Derwe Coreme had never failed to grasp — or at least not since she was kidnapped from Cil and the House of Domber when she was a teenager.

The gray-slate corpse of Ulfänt Banderz turned to pink granite, the pink granite slowly fading to pink flesh.

The Master of the Ultimate Library and Final Compendium of Thaumaturgical Lore from the Grand Motholam and Earlier sat up, looked around, and felt on his nightstand for his spectacles. Setting them on his nose, he peered at the two humans and daihak peering at him and said, “You, Shrue. I thought it would be you…unless of course it was to be Ildefonse or Rhialto the self-proclaimed Marvellous.”

“Ildefonse is buried alive in a dungheap and Rhialto has fled the planet,” Shrue said dryly.

“Well, then…” smiled Ulfänt Banderz. “There you have it. How much time do we have until the Libraries converge and the world ends?”

“Well…eighteen hours, give or take a half hour,” said Shrue.

“Mmmm,” murmured Ulfänt Banderz with a scowl. “Cutting it a little close here, weren’t we? Trying to impress the lady, perhaps? Mmmm?”

Shrue did not dignify that question with an answer but something about Derwe Coreme’s grin seemed to please the resurrected old Library Master.

“How long will it take you to set the timespace separation of the two Libraries to rights?” asked Shrue. “And can I help in any way?”

“Time?” repeated Ulfänt Banderz as if he’d already forgotten the question. “The time to repair my so-called apprentices’ little vandalism? Oh, about four days of constant work, I would imagine. Give or take, as you like to say, a half hour.”

Shrue and Derwe Coreme exchanged glances. Each realized that they’d lost their race with time and each was thinking of how they would like to spend the last eighteen hours of his or her life — give or take thirty minutes — and the answer in both their eyes was visible not only to each other but to Ulfänt Bander — oz.

“Oh, good gracious no,” laughed the Librarian. “I shan’t let the world end while I’m saving it. We’ll establish a Temporal Stasis for the entire Dying Earth, I’ll exempt myself from it to do my repair work outside of time, and that, as they say, will be that.”

“You can do that?” asked Shrue. “You can set the whole world in Stasis?” His voice, he realized, had sounded oddly like Meriwolt’s squeak.

“Of course, of course,” said Ulfänt Banderz, hopping off the bed and heading for the stairs to his workshop. “Done it many a time. Haven’t you?”

At the top of the stairway, the Librarian stopped suddenly and seized Shrue’s arm. “Oh, I don’t want to play the arch-magus of arch-maji or anything, dear boy, but I do have a bit of important advice. Do you mind?”

“Not at all,” said Shrue. The mysteries of a million years and more of lost lore were at this magus’s beck and call.

“Never hire a mouse as your apprentice,” whispered Ulfänt Banderz. “Goddamned untrustworthy, those vermin. No exceptions.”

To Shrue’s and every other human being on the Dying Earth’s way of perceiving it, the timespace crack — which no one else (except the still flying and fleeing Faucelme) even knew about — was fixed in an eyeblink.

The earthquakes ceased. The tsunamis stopped coming. The days of full darkness dropped to a reasonable number. The elderly red sun still struggled to rise in the morning and showed its occasional pox of darkness, but that was the way things had always been — or at least as long as anyone living could remember it being. The Dying Earth was still dying, but it resumed its dying at its own pace. One assumed that the pogroms against magicians would go on for months or years longer — such outbursts have their own logic and timelines — but Derwe Coreme suggested that in a year or two, there would be a general rapprochement.

“Perhaps it would be better if there’s not a total rapprochement,” said Shrue.