The Guiding Nose of Ulfant Banderoz

by Dan Simmons

  “Wonderful,” came a frustrated squeak from behind the veil.

  Descending to their cabin, Derwe Coreme whispered, “What are the chances that the real KirdriK will be victorious and return in time to help us?”

  Shrue shrugged and showed his long hands. “As I’ve said before, my dear, a battle such as this in the Overworld may go on for anything from ten minutes to ten centuries of our time. But KirdriK knows the importance of returning as soon as he is victorious—if he prevailed and survived.”

  “Is there any chance that the daihak simply fled?” she whispered.

  “No,” said Shrue. “None. KirdriK is still well and truly bound. If he survives—and either he or the two Purples must die—he shall return immediately.”

  · · ·

  All that day the pelgranes and their saddled passengers grew closer, until the black flapping forms held station a little less than two leagues behind the sky galleon. Shrue urged Captain Shiolko to have his sons practice with the air-powered harpoon gun, which they did diligently through the long, hot day, firing and reeling in the long barbed bolt time after time. A little after noon, the guiding nose of Ulfänt Banderōz swiveled due east and the galleon and following pelgranes changed course accordingly.

  “I’ve never seen pelgranes that large,” Shiolko said to Shrue late that afternoon as both men studied their pursuers through telescopes. “They’re almost twice the size of the normal monsters.”

  It was true. Pelgranes fed on humans—they liked nothing better for their diet—but it would be all a regular pelgrane could do to carry off one adult man or woman in its talons. These creatures looked as if they could carry a man in each taloned claw while feeding on a third in its mouth-beak.

  “Some magical breeding of the species thanks to Faucelme and the Red,” murmured Shrue. From the middledeck came a flat explosion of compressed air as three of the sons fired off the harpoon gun yet again. Then the screech-and-whine as they began laboriously cranking back the bolt on its quarter-mile of steel cable.

  · · ·

  The eleven flying forms were backlit by the huge setting sun as one of the pelgranes broke formation and began closing the gap to the galleon.

  “The saddleless one,” said Derwe Coreme, who was watching through Shrue’s telescope. She and her Myrmazons had all of their weapons strapped to their dragonscaled backs and belts. “Damn!”

  “What?” said Captain Shiolko and Shrue together.

  “It’s carrying a white and blue flag.”

  So it was. Shiolko’s sons did their best to train the ungainly harpoon gun on the approaching pelgrane—and Derwe Coreme’s Myrmazons found it much easier to bring their short but powerful crossbows to bear—but the pelgrane was indeed carrying a white and blue flag of truce in one of its fleshy, pink little wing hands. They allowed it to flap closer and land on the portside railing.

  Most of the passengers made a huge semicircle on deck, then half a semi-circle as they tried to get upwind of the stinking pelgrane, as some of the Myrmazons and Shiolko’s sons kept an eye on the other ten pelgranes behind them, making sure this visit was not just a distraction.

  Shrue and the captain stepped closer, moving into the sphere of carrion stench that hung around the creature. The diabolist noticed that the pelgrane was wearing smoked goggles—they hated flying in daylight.

  “What do you want?” demanded Captain Shiolko. And then, as an afterthought, added, “If you crap on my railing or deck, you die.”

  The pelgrane smiled a foul pelgranish smile. “Your magician knows what we want.”

  “I’m fresh out of Finding Crystals,” said Shrue. “What happened to Faucelme’s apprentice?”

  “He became too…ambitious,” wheezed the pelgrane. “As all apprentices do, sooner or later. Faucelme was forced to…punish…him. But do not change the subject, diabolist. Hand over the nose.”

  Something about the phrasing of that demand made both Shrue and Derwe Coreme laugh. The others in the mass of passengers and crew looked at them as if they’d gone mad.

  “Tell the Red and his puppet Faucelme that their projection of the Purples is a sad failure,” said Shrue. He nodded toward the silent, tall monk’s figure at their stern rail. At least Meriwolt had managed to turn Arch-Docent Huáe around so that the black veil under the hood was aimed in the general direction of the pelgrane. “We know how the battle in the Overworld really went.”

  The pelgrane looked bored. “Are you going to give me the nose or make Faucelme take it from you?”

  Shrue sighed. “Let me show you something, my friend,” he said softly. “Young Shiolko—Arven—could you give me that extra bit of block and tackle? Yes, set it on the deck in front of me. Thank you. Are you watching, pelgrane?”

  The oversized pelgrane’s yellow eyes were shifting—hungrily—every way but toward the heavy block and bit of rope on the deck. It licked its foul chops while looking at the passengers, but said, “Oh, is there a birthday party underway here? Did you all hire a village magic-maker? Is the old man going to show us that there’s nothing up his sleeves and then make the big, bad block and tackle disappear? That will deeply impress one of the seventeen Elemental Reds in all of the universe!”

  Shrue smiled and snapped his fingers.

  The heavy block disappeared.

  The pelgrane screamed in pain and horror. Its talons and both of its tiny fleshy hands clutched at its own belly.

  “You looked hungry,” said Shrue. “I know that Faucelme and Faucelme’s owner are watching and listening through you. Let them know that they could never seize the nose of Ulfänt Banderōz before I send it elsewhere—and to an elsewhere infinitely less retrievable than your foul belly, pelgrane.”

  Still shrieking, the pelgrane flapped into the air, writhing and rolling, and then screamed, “I’ll have my dinner from you yet, mortals.” It feinted in Shrue’s direction, but banked suddenly, seized Reverend Cepres’s younger wife Wilva in its talons, and flapped away toward the south, still screeching and shrieking in pain even as Wilva screamed.

  “Quick!” cried Shrue, gesturing the frozen Shiolko sons toward the compressed-air harpoon gun.

  The Myrmazons needed no impetus. The pelgrane was no more than thirty yards away when six crossbow bolts slammed into the monster’s shoulders, back, and upper hairy thorax—the women warriors were trying to avoid hitting the woman hanging from its talons. The Myrmazons reloaded in an instant and Derwe Coreme raised her hand, ready to signal a second volley.

  “No!” cried Shrue. “If it dies, it will release Wilva.” He gestured toward the Shiolko boys to fire, even as his lips chanted a spell and his fingers played the air as if it were the captain’s three-tiered piano.

  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 Banderōz 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.”

  “Why haven’t we struck the cliffs around us and died?” asked Derwe Coreme. Once again, Shrue noticed, the only overlay was of mild curiosity.

  “We are going dead slow, floating with the breezes,” whispered Shrue. “Also, I devised a little instrument—there, you may notice our good captain paying close attention to those four dials I jury-rigged from Meriwolt’s calliope.”

  The warrior chief looked at the wires running from the device toward something in a box set near the binnacle, chuckled and shook her head. “Boys and their toys. But what’s to keep Faucelme and his pelgranes from striking the surrounding rocks in the dark?”

  “Ahh,” breathed Shrue. “They know where they and where we are to a much finer degree than we do, I’m afraid. Pelgranes are nightflyers. They navigate by sound waves bouncing back from objects. That’s what my ‘little instrument’ is connected to—our unfortunate pelgrane visitor’s vibrating thorax. The creatures also ‘hear’ through their thoraxes…it’s why I let our friend come so close and behave true to pelgrane form earlier.”

  “You needed his thorax.”

  “Yes.” He squeezed her hand. Her skin was very cold and damp but her hand was not shaking in the least. “You can sleep if you want, my dear,” he whispered. “I have nothing to base it on but a hunch, but I don’t think the Red and Faucelme and the three Yellows and three Greens and their pelgranes will make their move tonight, in the dark.”

  “Sleep?” whispered Derwe Coreme, former princess of the House of Domber. “And miss all this? You must be joking.” Spreading a blanket, she slid under Shrue’s outer robe and pulled him down next to her.

  Captain Shiolko glanced over in their direction once, grunted softly, and then returned his attention to the emulsifier and thorax dials.

  · · ·

  The nose began spinning at first light, when the clouds first showed a milky pre-dawn glow and then parted as the red sun struggled to rise. Captain Shiolko brought the galleon to full stop and then allowed it to rise more than three thousand feet.

  The Second Ultimate Library was on a rocky promontory overhanging a vertical drop four thousand feet or more to the wooded valley below it. There was no moat at this version of the library, but wooded wilderness stretched away between high peaks for uncounted miles to its west.

  “You can set down in that glade near the front door,” Shrue said to the captain. “Then let us out and go on to deliver the rest of your passengers.”

  Shiolko grinned. “I know better than that, Master Magician. That Faucelme devil and the red thing what pulls his strings won’t let us go, no matter what. We’ll drop you off if you want, then we’ll moor nearby to that huge old tree near the waterfall where we can refill our casks, but we’ll watch and help if we can. Our fate is your fate. We know that.”

  “I am sorry it has come to that,” Shrue said sincerely.

  Captain Shiolko shrugged. “Somehow I think I’m speaking for everyone on the ship and perhaps for everyone on the Dying Earth. How it came to this, I don’t know…and don’t especially care. But we could have done worse than have you as our standard-bearer, I think, Master Magician Shrue. I don’t see no stinking kid’s birthday party anywhere near.”

  · · ·

  The ten pelgranes landed in the glade even as Steresa’s Dream hovered and let down its gangplank. Derwe Coreme went down first, followed by her six Myrmazons leading sluggish and sleepy megillas just wakened from their sorcery-induced, three-week-long naps, straw from the livestock pens on the middle deck still clinging to their scales.

  Faucelme laughed as Shrue descended the gangplank, leading the tall robed and veiled figure by his hand. “Your daihak looks a little wobbly there, diabolist!” called Faucelme as the robed form felt gingerly with his foot before stepping to the soil.

  “Well,” said Shrue. “He’s been through a tough fight. At least he’s more solid than your pathetic Purples.”

  Faucelme’s laughter stopped but his broad grin remained. “You’ll soon see how solid my Purples are, dead man.”

  All of the Elementals had dismounted by now—the three Yellows, three Greens, two Purples, and the towering Red. The ten pelgranes began bellowing and surging—they’d obviously not been fed fresh meat or blood all through the long chase.

  “Silen
ce!” bellowed the Faucelme puppet and froze the pelgranes into an icy block of steaming Temporary Stasis with a single wave of his upraised palm.

  Shrue blinked at the ease with which Faucelme—or, in truth, the Red—had effectuated such a difficult spell.

  Faucelme stepped closer. Indeed, his clumsy, bowlegged steps did resemble those of a poorly handled puppet—although, thought Shrue, three weeks in a pelgrane saddle would create the same effect.

  “Faucelme,” said Shrue. “Where is your apprentice?”

  “Apprentices,” growled the little magus. “Bah! You know apprentices, Shrue. They always overreach…always. It’s why you’ve never had one of your own.”

  “True,” said Shrue.

  “Give me the nose,” demanded Faucelme, “and I may let your pet soldier-whore live. I might even allow the sky galleon to depart in one piece. But for you, Shrue, there is no hope.”

  “So my mother often told me,” said Shrue. He reached into his robes and withdrew the nose box. “Do you give me your word, Faucelme…and your word, Elemental Red of the True Overworld’s Eleventh Realm?”

  “You have our word,” said Faucelme and the Red in perfect unison.

  “Well,” said Shrue, holding the box with the nose’s nostrils toward them, “then it saddens me a little to know that both your words combined aren’t worth a steaming pile of pelgrane shit. KirdriK!”

  The tall figure in the blue monk’s robes pulled back its hood and veil with its huge, six-fingered hands revealing its red crest and purple feathers, then ripped the robes to shreds and stepped free. KirdriK’s dorsal flanges flared ten feet wide and glowed orange from internal heat. There were new, raw scars running across the daihak’s white-fuzzed brow and chest and upper thigh, but the creature seemed taller, stronger, more muscled, meaner, and more confident.

  “He followed me home during the night,” said Shrue. “I decided to keep him.”