Songs of the Dying Earth

Even in death the necromancer presented such a frightful countenance that Chimwazle was almost afraid to touch him, but the eels were still hissing hungrily down below, and he knew his chances of escape would be much improved if they were sated. So he steeled himself, knelt, and undid the clasp that fastened the dread wizard’s cloak. When he rolled his body over to pull the garment off, the sorcerer’s features ran like black wax, melting away to puddle on the floor. Chimwazle found himself kneeling over a wizened toothless corpse with dim white eyes and parchment skin, his bald pate covered by a spiderweb of dark blue veins. He weighed no more than a bag of leaves, but he had a little smile on his lips when Chimwazle tossed him down to the hissing eels.

By then the itching seemed to be subsiding. Chimwazle gave himself a few last scratches and fastened the necromancer’s cloak about his shoulders. All at once, he felt taller, harder, sterner. Why should he fear the things down in the common room? Let them go in fear of him!

He swept down the steps without a backward glance. The ghost and ghouls took one look at him and moved aside. Even creatures such as they knew better than to trouble a wizard of such fearsome mien. Only the innkeep dared accost him. “Dread sir,” he murmurred, “how will you settle your account?”

“With this.” He drew his sword and gave the thing a tickle. “I will not be recommending the Tarn House to other travellers.”

Black waters still encircled the inn, but they were no more than waist deep, and he found it easy enough to wade to solid ground. The Twk-men had vanished in the night and the hissing eels had grown quiescent, but the Deodands still stood where he had seen them last, waiting by the iron palanquin. One greeted him. “The earth is dying and soon the sun shall fail,” it said. “When the last light fades, all spells shall fail, and we shall feast upon the firm white flesh of Mollogos.”

“The earth is dying, but you are dead,” replied Chimwazle, marvelling at the deep and gloomy timbre of his voice. “When the sun goes out, all spells shall fail, and you shall decay back into the primeval ooze.” He climbed into the palanquin and bid the Deodands to lift him up. “To Kaiin.” Perhaps somewhere in the white-walled city, he would find a lissome maid to dance naked for him in the freckly girl’s high boots. Or failingthat, a hoon.

Off into purple gloom rode Molloqos the Melancholy, borne upon an iron palanquin by four dead Deodands.

Afterword:

I expect I was about ten or eleven years old the first time I encountered the work of Jack Vance, when I grabbed one of those Ace Doubles with the colorful red-and-blue spines off the spinner rack in the candy store at First Street and Kelly Parkway in Bayonne, New Jersey. Most of the Doubles featured “two complete novels” (today we would call them novellas) by two different writers, published back-to-back, but this one had the same byline on both sides, pairing Slaves of the Klau with an abridged version of Big Planet.

Slaves of the Klau was pretty good, my eleven year old self decided after reading it. Big Planet blew me away, even in its abridged state. Thereafter I looked for Vance’s name whenever I set one of those spinner racks to spinning. And so it was that a few years later, I stumbled on the Lancer paperback of The Dying Earth.

Half a century has passed since then, and that slim little collection remains one of my all-time favorites. Scarcely a year goes by that I do not take it down and dip into it again. The world that Vance created ranks with Tolkien’s Middle Earth and Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age as one of fantasy’s most unforgettable and influential settings. The poetry of Vance’s language also moved me (not to mention expanding my vocabulary!). His dialogue in particular was so arch and dry and witty that I could not read enough of it, then or now. But it was the characters that I loved best. T’sain and T’sais, Guyal of Sfere, Turjan of Miir…and of course Liane the Wayfarer, whose encounter with Chun the Unavoidable remains perhaps my single favorite fantasy short story.

Vance made us wait sixteen years between the first Dying Earth book and the second, but by the time Eyes of the Overworld was published, I was accustomed to snatching up every book that had his name on it as soon as it hit the bookshops. To my surprise, this new one was nothing at all like the original. This time, Jack showed us an entirely different side of the world he had created, while introducing us to Cugel the Clever, a rogue so venal and unscrupulous that he makes Harry Flashman look like Dudley Doright. How could you not love a guy like that? Other readers shared my enthusiasm, plainly, to judge from the number of times that Cugel has come back. You can’t keep a bad man down.