The Guiding Nose of Ulfant Banderoz

by Dan Simmons

  “My Purples,” said the Red even as the two projections winked out.

  “Your Purples were good to the last drop of ichor,” rumbled KirdriK. “Their energy is in me now, along with their bones and viscera. Perhaps you can tell, Elemental.”

  Faucelme only stared as the Red moved forward quickly in three huge strides. “No sandestin-daihak half-breed ever decanted can stand up to an Elemental Red of the True Overworld’s Eleventh Realm!” roared the huge shape.

  Before the daihak could speak, Shrue said softly, “KirdriK is daihak-bred from the order of Undra-Hadra. Do you really want to gamble your actual existence on the hope you can best him? Is the Ultimate Library so important to you?”

  “Pah!!” roared the Red. “The Ultimate Library means nothing to me. All the spells in all the books in all the lost Aeons of the Dying Earth cannot equal the inbred knowledge of a Red fresh out of its egg!”

  “Shut up, salamander,” rumbled KirdriK. “And fight. And die….”

  Both the daihak and Elemental blurred around their extended edges as they prepared to flash to any of a dozen dimensions.

  “Pah!” cried the Red again. “You and your library and your Dying Earth have less than twenty-four hours of existence anyway, diabolist. Enjoy it if you can!” The Elemental made a dismissive gesture and imploded out of existence on the plane of the Dying Earth. The Yellows and Greens followed in less than a second. The pelgranes remained frozen in their block of solidified Temporal Stasis.

  Alone, twitching and staggering from the withdrawal of the Red from his nerves and brain and guts and muscles and sinews, Faucelme took a confused step backward.

  Shrue allowed himself to grow until he was twenty feet tall. The morning wind rippled his spidersilk robe like a gray banner. “Now,” rumbled the giant, “do you still have business with me, Faucelme, waylayer of vagabonds, murderer of night-guests and cows and old women?”

  The short magus shook his bald head and looked around like a man who had mislaid his teeth.

  “Go away then,” said Shrue. He waved his arm and Faucelme flew into the air, and in less than five seconds had become a speck disappearing over the western horizon. Shrue resumed his normal size.

  Meriwolt had descended the gangplank. His already rubbery-looking legs seemed especially wobbly after the three weeks of sky-galleon flight. Shrue pocketed the nose box, removed a heavy key from his pocket, and turned to KirdriK, Derwe Coreme, and Meriwolt. “Shall we look inside this library now? KirdriK! Bring my traveling chest.”

  · · ·

  Everything looked precisely as it had in the first Library: the same benches, shelves, and thin windows, the same indecipherable books in the same places.

  There was a scurry and scuttling in the shadows and the female twin of Mauz Meriwolt—Mauz Mindriwolt—came hurrying forward with a shriek to embrace her brother. The two hugged and kissed and passionately embraced with a duration and intensity not totally proper for a brother and sister, at least—if judging by the glance flashing between them—in the opinion of Derwe Coreme and Shrue the diabolist. KirdriK, still carrying his master’s huge trunk, showed no opinion.

  After a moment, Shrue cleared his throat repeatedly until the two untangled themselves.

  “Oh!” cried Mindriwolt in a squeaky voice only an octave or so higher than that of her brother’s, “I am so glad to see all of you! It has been so terrible—first the Master, Ulfänt Banderōz, turning to stone, and then the earthquakes and the fires and the red sun with its poxed face each morning—oh, I’ve been terrified!”

  “I am sure you have, my dear, and as the Red Elemental outside reminded us, there’s nothing we can do to stop the reconvergence in time and space of your Library and the first Library within a day or less. The Dying Earth may truly meet its end before tomorrow’s sunset. But we are still alive and should celebrate small victories while we can.”

  “We should indeed,” squeaked Meriwolt. “But first we should go up and pay our respects to this stone body of Ulfänt Banderōz, Master Shrue. May I borrow the nose box for a moment? Our Master—Mindriwolt’s and mine—should not lie there without a nose.”

  “You are correct, my little friend,” Shrue said somberly. “And if I’d not needed to find this place, I never would have used the chisel in the way I did.” He removed the nose box but hesitated and then pocketed it again. “But at this moment, Meriwolt, my old bones ache from the voyage and my nerves quiver from the terror of the near-showdown with the Elementals. Is there any place in this stone keep where we can step outside into sunlight for a moment of relaxation and refreshment before paying our respects?”

  “The terrace at the end of the hallway outside our Master’s bedroom?” said Mindriwolt in her tiny, sweet, uncertain voice.

  “That will do nicely,” said Shrue. “Come along, KirdriK. Do not jostle the refreshments.”

  · · ·

  The Dying Earth was alive with earthquake tremors. Boulders crashed down avalanche chutes and trees vibrated in the thick forest. The sun was laboring harder than ever to climb toward the zenith and even the flickering sunlight felt uncertain. Still, the morning air was bracing as the Mauz twins, the warrior maid, the daihak, and the diabolist stepped out onto the open terrace. In the clearing and orchard below, the six Myrmazons had set up tents for an overnight stay and were exercising the megillas. Shiolko had moored the galleon to the huge tree near the waterfall and his sons were rolling giant water casks up and down the gangplank as the passengers stretched their legs in the meadow.

  “It’s a good day to be alive,” said Shrue.

  “Every day is a good day to be alive,” said Derwe Coreme.

  “Let’s drink to that,” said the diabolist. Despite Meriwolt’s and Mindriwolt’s impatience, he took his time removing a deep bucket of ice from the large trunk KirdriK had set down. From the ice, he slowly removed a magnum of sparkling goldwine. Then he removed four crystal flutes from their careful padding.

  “We should look in on the Master’s body…” began Meriwolt.

  “All in good time,” said Shrue. He handed the brother and sister and then Derwe Coreme their flutes, filled theirs with bubbling wine, and then filled his own. “This is the best of my cellars,” he said proudly. “Three hundred years old and just reached its prime. There’s no finer sparkling goldwine in or on all the Dying Earth.”

  He raised his flute in a toast and the others raised theirs. “To knowing that every day is a good day to be alive,” he said and drank. The others drank. KirdriK watched without interest. Shrue refilled all of their glasses.

  “My dear,” he said to Derwe Coreme, “I’ll be staying here at the Second Library, no matter what happens. Do you have plans?”

  “If the world doesn’t end in a day, do you mean?” she asked, sipping her wine.

  “Yes,” said Shrue.

  Derwe Coreme shrugged slightly and smiled. “The girls and I have discussed it. Our guess is that we’re about as far away from Ascolais and Almery and Kauchique and the Land of the Falling Wall as we could be, without coming closer to home by continuing on eastward, I mean, so we thought it might be fun to ride the megillas home.”

  “Fun?” repeated Shrue, refilling everyone’s flute. “It might take years for you to get home…if any of you survived the adventure, which would be highly doubtful.”

  Derwe Coreme smiled and sipped her sparkling goldwine. Meriwolt and his sister frowned and downed their third flute in an impatient gulp.

  “Well,” Shrue said to the Myrmazon chief, “I hope your megillas can swim, my dear. But then again…if we survive this current crisis…as you said, your adventures would be sung of for a thousand years or longer.”

  “Oh, I think…” began Derwe Coreme.

  “I really think we need to go inside and visit the Master’s corpse,” interrupted Meriwolt. “May I at least look at the nose of our Master, Ulfänt Banderōz? Perhaps there is some way we could reattach it.”

  “Of course,” Shrue said apolo
getically, setting his flute down on the stone balustrade and fumbling in his robes for the box. He handed it to Meriwolt.

  The Mauz twins both clutched the box at once and a change came over their features. Meriwolt struck the box against stone, smashing the glass, and lifted the nose out. Both brother and sister held the nose high and a radiance poured from the stone shard and surrounded both of them. Then the two opened their mouths and a fog flowed forth, surrounding Shrue, Derwe Coreme, and KirdriK.

  Shrue recognized the Moving Miasma of Temporal Stasis by its perfume-stink, but before he could react, his body and muscles were frozen in place. Even the daihak stood frozen over the open trunk.

  Meriwolt and Mindriwolt cackled and writhed and rubbed against one another. “Oh, Shrue, you old fool!” squeaked Meriwolt. “How my darling and I feared that you’d figure things out before this moment! How much useless anxiety we had that you were smarter than you actually are…we sent the Red to Faucelme to distract you, but now I doubt if we needed to have bothered.”

  The two separated and danced around the frozen trio. Mindriwolt squeaked at them, “My darling brother, my darling lover, was never just a clerk, you foolish magus. He was Ulfänt Banderōz’s trusted apprentice in the First Ultimate Library…as was I here in the Second. Ulfänt Banderōz trusted each of us…needed us, since only through our womb-joined minds and twinned perceptions could even he unscramble the time-twisted titles and contents of his many books…and so he taught us a few paltry tricks, but all the time we were learning, learning…”

  “Learning!” roared Mauz Meriwolt. The radiance of power around him had turned from silver to red as he spoke. Pirouetting much as he had when he’d danced to his own calliope, the little figure mumbled a spell, called up a sphere of blue flame, and pitched it at the moored sky galleon. The ship’s reefed mainsail burst into flame. Meriwolt threw another blue-flame sphere and then Mindriwolt joined him.

  Captain Shiolko threw down the gangplank and cast off the mooring lines, but it was too late—the Steresa’s Dream was burning in a dozen places. Meriwolt and his sister danced and capered and laughed as the burning sky galleon listed to one side and lost altitude, trailing smoke behind it, smashing through trees as Shiolko attempted to guide it into the waterfall.

  Meriwolt turned, stalked up to Shrue, stood on the railing, and tweaked the time-frozen diabolist’s long nose even as he held up the stone nose of his former Master.

  “This…” the pibald rodent cried, holding high the stone nose, “was our last worry. But that worry’s past, as are your lives, my helpful fools. Thank you for reuniting my darling and me. Thank you for insuring the end of the Dying Earth as you knew it.” Meriwolt danced to the oversized hour glass near the door. “Twenty-two hours and the Libraries converge…”

  “…and this world ends…” squeaked Mindriwolt.

  “…and the new age begins and the Red and other Elementals join us, their Masters in…” squeaked Meriwolt.

  “…in a new age where…”

  “…where…a new age where…”

  “…where…why does my belly ache?” squeaked Mindriwolt.

  “…a new age where…mine does as well,” squeaked Meriwolt. He rushed at the frozen Shrue. “What have you done, diabolist? What…where…what have…speak! But try a spell and…die. Speak!” He waved his white-gloved, three-fingered hand.

  Shrue licked his lips. “Apprentices always overreach,” he said softly.

  Meriwolt cried out in pain, fell to the ground, and doubled over with cramps. Mindriwolt fell atop him, also writhing and screaming, their short tails twitching. In fifteen seconds, the writhing and screaming ceased. The pibald bodies were totally entangled but absolutely still.

  The Temporal Stasis fog began to disperse and Shrue banished the last of it with a murmur. KirdriK rumbled into consciousness. Derwe Coreme half-staggered and touched her pale brow as Shrue supported her.

  “Something in the sparkling goldwine?” she said.

  “Oh, yes,” said Shrue. “You may feel a little unsettled for a few hours, but there will be no serious side effects for us. The potion in the wine was quite specific as to its target…an ancient but very effective form of rat poison.”

  · · ·

  Meriwolt had bragged that they only had twenty-two hours left until the end of the world: Shrue and Derwe Coreme used ninety minutes of that remaining time helping Shiolko and his sons and passengers douse the last of the flames and attend to the superficial burns of the firefighters. Most of the damage to Steresa’s Dream had been limited to its sails—for which it had replacements—but there would be days if not weeks of labor finding, cutting, replacing, sanding, and varnishing new planks for its deck and hull.

  Then the diabolist and warrior and daihak used another two of their few remaining hours hunting through Ulfänt Banderōz’s cluttered workshops and personal rooms looking for a tube or jar of epoxy. Shrue knew more than fifty binding and joining incantations, but none that would work as well with stone as simple epoxy.

  It was KirdriK who found the tube, tucked away with some suspicious erotic paraphnernalia in the lowest drawer of a seventy-drawer cluttered desk.

  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 Banderōz 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 Banderōz 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 Banderōz 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 Banderōz. “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 Banderōz 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 time-space separation of the two Libraries to rights?” asked Shrue. “And can I help in any way?”

  “Time?” repeated Ulfänt Banderōz 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 Banderōz.

  “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 s
ay, 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 Banderōz, 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-magi 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 Banderōz. “Goddamned untrustworthy, those vermin. No exceptions.”

  · · ·

  To Shrue’s and every other human being on the Dying Earth’s way of perceiving it, the time-space 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.

  When the Myrmazon leader looked sharply at him, Shrue explained. “Things have been out of balance on our dear Dying Earth for far too long,” he said softly. “Millions of years ago, the imbalance benefited political tyrants or merchants or the purveyors of the earliest form of real magic called science. For a long time now, wealth and power have been preserved for those willing to isolate themselves from real humanity for long enough to become a true sorcerer. For too long now, perhaps, those of us who are—let us say—least human in how we spend our time and with whom we associate, have owned too much of the world’s literature and fine food and art and wealth. Perhaps the Dying Earth has enough years and centuries left to it that we can move into another, healthier, phase before the end.”