Songs of the Dying Earth

Being introduced to Jack and his family by Tim Underwood at the end of 1980 meant the world to me, and led to the start of a very special friendship, one which has never ceased to be a source of great pleasure. One moment I’m a soldier sitting on a doorstep at the 3TB army base in 1968 reading Star King and The Killing Machine, then thirty years later I’m drifting off to sleep to the words of Night Lamp, Ports of Call, and Lurulu coming through the walls as Jack ‘reads’ through his current work in progress using his talking computer program. One moment I’m a steadfast fan, a fledgling storyteller refining my craft in faraway Sydney, trying to land my first sale, then I’ve become “The Smuggler” and one of Jack’s closest friends, making annual visits to the wonderful house in the Oakland hills, switching on the navigation lights in the bar whenever he announces that the sun is well and truly over the yard-arm, making sure there’s not a trace of zucchini to spoil a meal, taking enormous pains when playing washboard to Jack’s banjo, ukelele, and kazoo always to finish at the same time. As Jack has said on many occasions, usually when several glasses of tipple have come and gone: “Vance deposes, Dowling disposes!” Neither of us is sure what it means, but it makes for a fine toast.

As well as sharing many unforgettable adventures with Jack and Norma over the years, among them our momentous road trip to Three Rivers in January 1984 where we visited a genuine (we insist!) haunted house, we’ve spent hours discussing projects, process and storytelling in general. In a special sense, “The Copsy Door” is the result of years of rich and sustained exposure to Jack’s work, and of countless hours chatting before the fire, working at the kiln, listening to the Black Eagle Jazz Band, and choosing who, among friends and notables, would make the wholly imaginary voyage from Oakland down to Sydney on the fine Vance ketch, Hinano.

On a more specific note, I once unwittingly “borrowed” the name Amberlin from Jack’s Rhialto the Marvelous as a name for a café in my Tom Rynosseros stories. Jack in turn took my coining “shatterwrack” for the extinct volcano Shattorak in Ecce and Old Earth (unwittingly, he insists!). It seemed fitting that my contribution to this book had to concern a particular wizard named Amberlin.

How did the story come about? Why, it was very much a case of painting myself into a corner. I simply had Amberlin step into his workroom one fine morning to deal with something called a Copsy Door, then saw where it went from there. I like to think that, in more ways than one, Jack himself helped with the writing.

— Terry Dowling

Liz Williams Caulk the Witch-chaser

British Writer Liz Williams has had work appear in Interzone, Asimov’s, Visionary Tongue, Terra Incognita, The New Jules Verne Adventures, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, and elsewhere, and her stories have been collected in Banquet of the Lords of Night and Other Stories. Her books include the critically acclaimed novels The Ghost Sister, Empire of Bones, The Poison Master, Nine Layers of Sky, Snake Agent, The Demon and the City. and Darkland. Her most recent novels are The Shadow Pavillion and Winterstrike. She lives in Brighton, England.

Here she takes us along with a witch-chaser as he leaves Azenomei and heads down the river Scaum to the open sea, away from Almery and toward the bleak shores of Alster — and also toward, for better or worse, a change of professions…

Caulk the Witch-chaser

Liz Williams

Caulk the witch-chaser came out of Almery on a rising tide, sailing first the brief distance down the Xzan, then the Scaum, towards the coast. Occasionally, he took the strand of hair out of the pouch and studied it: it lay silver in his palm, like the light of the long-lost moon, but he knew that if he looked at it under the sun, it would be the dull scarlet of old blood. Caulk smiled thinly at this thought, opening his coat and adjusting first his thirty nine daggers, then the scalps. The smell of the Scaum rose up, salty and brackish, redolent of unsuccessful poison.

By midnight, he had reached the mouth of the estuary. He anchored the boat for a few minutes, sent down a fluke-loaded line, then brought it back up writhing with glass eels. He cooked them in a mess in a pan, ate absently, and headed for open sea.