Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances (24 page)

“Sun’s gone out,” said Balthasar the Tardy to his son.

Farfal said, “So this is it, then. This is the end.”

It was chillier, now the sun had gone out.

Balthasar said only, “It soon will be. We have only a handful of minutes left. It is well that I have made provision for this day.” He held the fish-oil lamp up high, and walked back into the cottage.

Farfal followed his father into the tiny dwelling, which consisted of one large room and, at the far end of the dwelling, a locked door. It was to this door that Balthasar walked. He put down the lamp in front of it, took a key from around his neck and unlocked the door.

Farfal’s mouth fell open.

He said only, “The colors.” Then, “I dare not go through.”

“Idiot boy,” said his father. “Go through, and tread carefully as you do.” And then, when Farfal made no move to walk, his father pushed him through the door, and closed it behind them.

Farfal stood there, blinking at the unaccustomed light.

“As you apprehend,” said his father, resting his hands on his capacious stomach and surveying the room they found themselves in, “this room does not exist temporally in the world you know. It exists, instead, over a million years before our time, in the days of the last Remoran Empire, a period marked by the excellence of its lute music, its fine cuisine, and also the beauty and compliance of its slave class.”

Farfal rubbed his eyes, and then looked at the wooden casement standing in the middle of the room, a casement through which they had just walked, as if it were a door. “I begin to perceive,” he said, “why it is that you were so often unavailable. For it seems to me that I have
seen you walk through that door into this room many times and never wondered about it, merely resigned myself to the time that would pass until you returned.”

Balthasar the Tardy began then to remove his clothes of dark sacking until he was naked, a fat man with a long white beard and cropped white hair, and then to cover himself with brightly colored silken robes.

“The sun!” exclaimed Farfal, peering out of the room’s small window. “Look at it! It is the orange-red of a fresh-stirred fire! Feel the heat it gives!” And then he said, “Father. Why has it never occurred to me to ask you why you spent so much time in the second room of our one-room cottage? Nor to remark upon the existence of such a room, even to myself?”

Balthasar twisted the last of the fastenings, covering his remarkable stomach with a silken covering that crawled with embroideries of elegant monsters. “That might,” he admitted, “have been due in part to Empusa’s Invocation of Incuriosity.” He produced a small black box from around his neck, windowed and barred, like a tiny room, barely large enough to hold a beetle. “This, when properly primed and invoked, keeps us from being remarked upon. Just as you were not able to wonder at my comings and goings, so neither do the folk in this time and place marvel at me, nor at anything I do that is in any wise contrary to the mores and customs of the Eighteenth and Last Greater Remoran Empire.”

“Astonishing,” said Farfal.

“It matters not that the sun has gone out, that in a matter of hours, or at most weeks, all life on Earth will be dead, for here and at this time I am Balthasar the Canny, merchant to the sky-ships, dealer in antiquities, magical objects, and marvels—and here you, my son, will stay. You will be, to all who wonder about your provenance, simply and purely my servant.”

“Your servant?” said Farfal the Unfortunate. “Why can I not be your son?”

“For various reasons,” stated his father, “too trivial and minor even to warrant discussion at this time.” He hung the black box from a nail in the corner of the room. Farfal thought he saw a leg or head, as if of some beetle-like creature, waving at him from inside the little box, but he did not pause to inspect it. “Also because I have a number of sons in this time, that I have fathered upon my concubines, and they might not be pleased to learn of another. Although, given the disparity in the dates of your birth, it would be over a million years before you could inherit any wealth.”

“There is wealth?” asked Farfal, looking at the room he was in with fresh eyes. He had spent his life in a one-roomed cottage at the end of time, at the bottom of a small hill, surviving on the food his father could net in the air—usually only seabirds or flying lizards, although on occasion other things had been caught in the nets: creatures who claimed to be angels, or great self-important cockroach-like things with high metal crowns, or huge bronze-colored jellies. They would be taken from the netting, and then either thrown back into the air, or eaten, or traded with the few folk that passed that way.

His father smirked and stroked his impressive white beard like a man petting an animal. “Wealth indeed,” he said. “There is much call in these times for pebbles and small rocks from the End of the Earth: there are spells, cantrips, and magical instruments for which they are almost irreplaceable. And I deal in such things.”

Farfal the Unfortunate nodded. “And if I do not wish to be a servant,” he said, “but simply request to be returned to where we came from, through that casement, why, what then?”

Balthasar the Tardy said only, “I have little patience for such questions. The sun has gone out. In hours, perhaps minutes, the world will have ended. Perhaps the universe also has ended. Think no more on
these matters. Instead, I shall procure a locking-spell creature for the casement, down at the ship market. And while I go to do that, you can order and polish all the objects you can see in this cabinet, taking care not to put your fingers directly upon the green flute (for it will give you music, but replace contentment in your soul with an insatiable longing) nor get the onyx bogadil wet.” He patted his son’s hand affectionately, a glorious, resplendent creature in his many-colored silks. “I have spared you from death, my boy,” he said. “I have brought you back in time to a new life. What should it matter that in this life you are not son but servant? Life is life, and it is infinitely better than the alternative, or so we presume, for nobody returns to dispute it. Such is my motto.”

So saying he fumbled beneath the casement, and produced a gray rag, which he handed to Farfal. “Here. To work! Do a good job and I shall show you by how much the sumptuous feasts of antiquity are an improvement over smoked seabird and pickled ossaker root. Do not, under any circumstances or provocation, move the casement. Its position is precisely calibrated. Move it, and it could open to anywhere.”

He covered the casement with a piece of woven cloth, which made it appear less remarkable that a large wooden casement was standing, unsupported, in the center of a room.

Balthasar the Tardy left that room through a door that Farfal had not previously observed. Bolts were slammed closed. Farfal picked up his rag, and began, wanly, to dust and to polish.

After several hours he observed a light coming through the casement, so brightly as to penetrate the cloth covering, but it soon faded once more.

Farfal was introduced to the household of Balthasar the Canny as a new servant. He observed Balthasar’s five sons and his seven concubines (although he was not permitted to speak to them), was introduced to the House-Carl, who held the keys, and the maidmen
who hurried and scurried thence and hither at the House-Carl’s command, and than whom there was nothing lower in that place, save for Farfal himself.

The maidmen resented Farfal, with his pale skin, for he was the only one apart from their master permitted in the Sanctum Sanctorum, Master Balthasar’s room of wonders, a place to which Master Balthasar had hitherto only repaired alone.

And so the days went by, and the weeks, and Farfal ceased to marvel at the bright orange-red sun, so huge and remarkable, or at the colors of the daytime sky (predominantly salmon and mauve), or at the ships that would arrive in the ship-market from distant worlds bearing their cargo of wonders.

Farfal was miserable, even when surrounded by marvels, even in a forgotten age, even in a world filled with miracles. He said as much to Balthasar the next time the merchant came in the door to the sanctum. “This is unfair.”

“Unfair?”

“That I clean and polish the wonders and precious things, while you and your other sons attend feasts and parties and banquets and meet people and otherwise and altogether enjoy living here at the dawn of time.”

Balthasar said, “The youngest son may not always enjoy the privileges of his elder brothers, and they are all older than you.”

“The red-haired one is but fifteen, the dark-skinned one is fourteen, the twins are no more than twelve, while I am a man of seventeen years . . .”

“They are older than you by more than a million years,” said his father. “I will hear no more of this nonsense.”

Farfal the Unfortunate bit his lower lip to keep from replying.

It was at that moment that there was a commotion in the courtyard, as if a great door had been broken open, and the cries of animals and house-birds arose. Farfal ran to the tiny window and looked out.
“There are men,” he said. “I can see the light glinting on their weapons.”

His father seemed unsurprised. “Of course,” he said. “Now, I have a task for you, Farfal. Due to some erroneous optimism on my part, we are almost out of the stones upon which my wealth is founded, and I have the indignity of discovering myself to be overcommitted at present. Thus it is necessary for you and I to return to our old home and gather what we can. It will be safer if there are two of us. And time is of the essence.”

“I will help you,” said Farfal, “if you will agree to treat me better in the future.”

From the courtyard there came a cry. “Balthasar? Wretch! Cheat! Liar! Where are my thirty stones?” The voice was deep and penetrating.

“I shall treat you much better in the future,” said his father. “I swear it.” He walked to the casement, pulled off the cloth. There was no light to be seen through it, nothing inside the wooden casing but a deep and formless blackness.

“Perhaps the world has entirely ended,” said Farfal, “and now there is nothing but nothing.”

“Only a handful of seconds have passed there since we came through it,” his father told him. “That is the nature of time. It flows faster when it is younger and the course is narrower: at the end of all things time has spread and slowed, like oil spilled on a still pond.”

Then he removed the sluggish spell-creature he had placed on the casement as a lock, and he pushed against the inner casing, which opened slowly. A chill wind came through it which made Farfal shiver. “You send us to our deaths, Father,” he said.

“We all go to our deaths,” said his father. “And yet, here you are, a million years before your birth, still alive. Truly we are all composed of miracles. Now, son, here is a bag, which, as you will soon discover, has been imbued with Swann’s Imbuement of Remarkable Capacity,
and will hold all that you place inside it, regardless of weight or mass or volume. When we get there, you must take as many stones as you can and place them in the bag. I myself will run up the hill to the nets and check them for treasures—or for things that would be regarded as treasures if I were to bring them back to the now and the here.”

“Do I go first?” asked Farfal, clutching the bag.

“Of course.”

“It’s so cold.”

In reply his father prodded him in the back with a hard finger. Farfal clambered, grumbling, through the casement, and his father followed.

“This is too bad,” said Farfal. They walked out of the cottage at the end of time and Farfal bent to pick up pebbles. He placed the first in the bag, where it glinted greenly. He picked up another. The sky was dark but it seemed as if something filled the sky, something without shape.

There was a flash of something not unlike lightning, and in it he could see his father hauling in nets from the trees at the top of the hill.

A crackling. The nets flamed and were gone. Balthasar ran down the hill gracelessly and breathlessly. He pointed at the sky. “It is Nothing!” he said. “Nothing has swallowed the hilltop! Nothing has taken over!”

There was a powerful wind then, and Farfal watched his father crackle, and then raise into the air, and then vanish. He backed away from the Nothing, a darkness within the darkness with tiny lightnings playing at its edges, and then he turned and ran, into the house, to the door into the second room. But he did not go through into the second room. He stood there in the doorway, and then turned back to the Dying Earth. Farfal the Unfortunate watched as the Nothing took the outer walls and the distant hills and the skies, and then he watched, unblinking, as Nothing swallowed the cold sun, watched
until there was nothing left but a dark formlessness that pulled at him, as if restless to be done with it all.

Only then did Farfal walk into the inner room in the cottage, into his father’s inner sanctum a million years before.

A bang on the outer door.

“Balthasar?” It was the voice from the courtyard. “I gave you the day you begged for, wretch. Now give me my thirty stones. Give me my stones or I shall be as good as my word—your sons will be taken off-world, to labor in the Bdellium Mines of Telb, and the women shall be set to work as musicians in the pleasure palace of Luthius Limn, where they will have the honor of making sweet music while I, Luthius Limn, dance and sing and make passionate and athletic love to my catamites. I shall not waste breath in describing the fate I would have in store for your servants. Your spell of hiding is futile, for see, I have found this room with relative ease. Now, give me my thirty stones before I open the door and render down your obese frame for cooking fat and throw your bones to the dogs and the deodands.”