Songs of the Dying Earth

—and at that instant a shaft of sunlight struck the Watchman’s medallion.

Graebe stared at the shining medallion, the smile frozen on his misshapen, soul-sucking lips. Suddenly he emitted a howl of anguish that echoed through the moor, and held his hands up to shield his eyes from the vision he saw.

Finally, he lowered his hands and stared once more at his image in the medallion.

“Can that be me?” he whispered in shock.

Pelmundo, puzzled, held the sword motionless.

“I was a man once,” continued Graebe, still barely whispering. “I made a bargain, but not to become…this! It is more than I can bear.”

“Have you never seen your reflection before?” asked Pelmundo.

“A very long time ago. When I was…as you.” Graebe stared hypnotically at his face in the medallion. “The rest of me,” he said, “is it the same?”

“Worse,” said Pelmundo.

“Then do what you must do,” said Graebe, lowering his hideous hands to his side. “I cannot go on. Do your worst, and claim your golden reward, little joy may it bring you.”

The creature lowered its head and closed its eyes, and Pelmundo raised his sword high and brought it down swiftly. A moment later, the head of Graebe the Inevitable rolled on the ground, but when Pelmundo looked at it, it was the head of a man, not handsome, not especially ugly, but a man, not a creature of darkness and horror.

Pelmundo squatted down next to the severed head, frowning. He felt no regret about having killed the thing that had become Graebe the Inevitable. He felt no guilt about the fact that in death it had metamorphosed into a man. But he felt outrage that he could not prove to Lith that he had indeed slain the creature of the moor and should be given that most coveted reward.

“It is Umbassario’s doing,” he growled, and he made the decision to confront the mage, and either get him to change the human head back into the hideous Graebe, or at least testify to Lith that he had performed the task she set for him.

But when he stood up he felt somehow strange, not as if he had drunk too much at the Place of the Seven Nectars, but as if the world had somehow changed in indefinable ways. The colors seemed different, darker; the birds and insects louder; the mud weaker, as if it had finally decided to relinquish its hold on him; and he could sense the unseen presence of three Twk-men, two mounted on dragonflies, a third sitting on a branch high above the ground.

He began the trek to Umbassario’s cave, finding himself strangely unwinded as he climbed over the rocky outcroppings that led up to it. He reached up, gaining purchase on a rock, and his hand seemed to be a claw.

“A trick of the light,” he growled, blinking his eyes rapidly. But the hand did not change.

“Come in,” said Umbassario’s voice from within the cave, and he entered.

“I have come—” he began.

“I know why you think you have come,” said Umbassario of the Glowing Eyes. “But you have come because I called to you.”

“I heard nothing,” he said.

“Not with your ears,” agreed Umbassario. “You have killed my pet, my servant, he who did my bidding, and I demand reparation.”

“I have no money. You know that.”

“I said reparation, not tribute,” said the mage. “And you shall supply it. I warned you not to harm my creature, and you ignored me. I must have a servant. It shall be you.”

“I cannot,” he said. “I have my duties as the Watchman—and I have a reward to claim.”

“You shall never claim it,” said Umbassario. “The golden witch will shrink from your touch as she shrinks from no other. As for you, nolonger-Watchman, your servitude to me has already begun, and will last until the sun finally burns itself out. Study your hands well—and your feet. Place your fingers to your face, a face that would have frightened even Graebe. You are mine now.”

He felt his face. The contours were strange, inhuman. He screamed, but it came out as an inhuman howl.

“And because the golden witch is the reason you disobeyed my orders and killed my creature, she shall serve you as you must serve me. You will never touch her, but you will use her. Her beauty, her sensuality, will attract an endless stream of admirers. Men will come from as far away as Erze Damath and Cil and Sfere to gaze upon her, and I will allow you this one freedom, this one happiness: in your rage and jealousy, I will allow you to kill these men that she attracts. You will thread their unseeing dead eyes upon a cloak, and when the cloak is full, when it cannot accommodate one more eyeball, then perhaps we shall talk about restoring you.” A crooked smile. “But I suspect by then you will not want to return the weak, puny thing of flesh and blood that you once were.”

He tried to speak, but words felt strange in his mouth.

“I intuit that your name tastes of guilt and shame upon your tongue,” said Umbassario. “You shall need a new sobriquet.”

“I am…I am…” He tried to pronounce “Pelmundo,” and the word died on his tongue.

“I am…” He fought to force the words out. “I am…the…son of…” He stopped again.

“Once more,” said the mage.

“I am…” His tongue felt thick and alien. “I am chun of…”

“So be it,” replied Umbassario, who knew his creature’s name all along. “You are Chun.”

“Chun,” he repeated.

“You are Chun the Unavoidable. You have one day to put your affairs in order. Then you will do my bidding. Now begone!”

And Chun found himself standing in the darkened street between the Place of the Seven Nectars and Leja’s House of Golden Flowers.

At first, he was disoriented. Then he saw a figure lurching drunkenly down the street, and he knew that his cloak would soon begin.

An instant later, Taj the Malingerer felt a presence beside him in the night.

“I am Chun the Unavoidable,” said a deep, inhuman voice. “And you have something I need.”

AFTERWORD:

ONE OF the very first science fiction books I bought as a kid was Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth, in its original paperback edition published by Hillman. (It cost me a quarter; it goes well over $100.00 on eBay these days.) I became an immediate fan, picking up Big Planet and all the other Vance titles—but then, as now, I had a special love for his tales of the last days of a dying Earth in a worn-out solar system. (So did a lot of other writers—not just the ones in this tribute volume, but dozens of writers over the years have emulated his style and borrowed some of his concepts, not as plagiarists, but as a loving tribute to his skills and his enormous influence throughout the field.)

When Carol and I decided, back in the 1970s, to enter a few Worldcon masquerades, the very first costume we chose to make was Chun the Unavoidable and his shill, Lith the Golden Witch. We won at Torcon, the 1973 Worldcon in Toronto…and now, thirty-six years later, it’s a pleasure to go back and offer my literary thanks to Chun and Lith, two of Jack’s more unforgettable characters.

—Mike Resnick

WALTER JON WILLIAMS Abrizonde (#ulink_b67784de-1310-58c3-ab77-ea147a22339d)

WALTER JON Williams was born in Minnesota and now lives near Albuquerque, New Mexico. His short fiction has appeared frequently in Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Wheel of Fortune, Global Dispatches, Alternate Outlaws, and in other markets, and has been gathered in the collections Facets and Frankensteins and Other Foreign Devils. His novels include Ambassador of Progress, Knight Moves, Hardwired, The Crown Jewels, Voice Of The Whirlwind, House Of Shards, Days of Atonement, Aristoi, Metropolitan, City on Fire, a huge disaster thriller, The Rift, a Star Wars novel, Destiny’s Way, and the three novels in his acclaimed Modern Space Opera epic, “Dread Empire’s Fall,” Dread Empire’s Fall: The Praxis, Dread Empire’s Fall: The Sundering and Dread Empire’s Fall: Conventions of War. His most recent books are Implied Spaces and This Is Not a Game. He won a long-overdue Nebula Award in 2001 for his story “Daddy’s World,” and took another Nebula in 2005 with his story “The Green Leopard Plague.” He also scripted the online game “Spore.”

In the fast-moving and suspenseful story that follows, we journey with a student architect headed through the mountainous Cleft of Abrizonde to the school in distant Occul, who inadvertently gets caught up in a war between the Protostrator of Abrizonde and the rulers of Pex and Calabrande, and who finds that opportunity can come along at the most unexpected of times—and that you’d better seize it when it does!

Abrizonde WALTER JON WILLIAMS (#ulink_b67784de-1310-58c3-ab77-ea147a22339d)

The student architect Vespanus of Roë, eager to travel to the city of Occul in the country of Calabrande, left Escani early in the season for an ascent of the Dimwer, the deep river that passes through the Cleft of Abrizonde on its way to the watery meads of Pex, the land where Vespanus, waiting for the pass to open, had passed a dreary winter in the insipid flat callow-fields of the brownlands.

The local bargemen claimed an early ascent was too hazardous for their craft, so Vespanus traveled upriver on a mule, a placid cream-colored animal named Twest. The Dimwer roared in a frigid torrent on the left as Twest made her serene ascent. There was still snow in the shadows of the rocks, but the trail itself was passable enough. The river bore on its peat-colored waters large cakes of ice that, Vespanus was forced to admit, would in fact have posed something of a danger to barge traffic.