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‘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 i
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 labour 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 honour 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.’
Farfal trembled with fear. Time, he thought. I need Time. He made his voice as deep as he could, and he called out, ‘One moment, Luthius Limn. I am engaged in a complex magical operation to purge your stones of their negative energies. If I am disturbed in this, the consequences will be catastrophic.’
Farfal glanced around the room. The only window was too small to permit him to climb out, while the room’s only door had Luthius Limn on the other side of it. ‘Unfortunate indeed,’ he sighed. Then he took the bag his father had given to him and swept into it all the trinkets, oddments, and gewgaws he could reach, still taking care not to touch the green flute with his bare flesh. They vanished into the bag, which weighed no more and seemed no more full than it had ever done.
He stared at the casement in the centre of the room. The only way out, and it led to Nothing, to the end of everything.
‘Enough!’ came the voice from beyond the door. ‘My patience is at an end, Balthasar. My cooks shall fry your internal organs tonight.’ There came a loud crunching against the door, as if of something hard and heavy being slammed against it.
Then there was a scream, and then silence.
Luthius Limn’s voice: ‘Is he dead?’
Another voice – Farfal thought it sounded like one of his half brothers – said, ‘I suspect that the door is magically protected and warded.’
‘Then,’ boomed Luthius Limn, decisively, ‘we shall go through the wall.’
Farfal was unfortunate, but not stupid. He lifted down the black lacquer box from the nail upon which his father had hung it. He heard something scuttle and move inside it.
‘My father told me not to move the casement,’ he said to himself. Then he put his shoulder against it and heaved violently, pushing the heavy thing almost half an inch. The darkness that pervaded the casement began to change, and it filled with a pearl-grey light.
He hung the box about his neck. ‘It is good enough,’ said Farfal the Unfortunate, and, as something slammed against the wall of the room, he took a strip of cloth and tied the leather bag that contained all the remaining treasures of Balthasar the Ca
And there was light, so bright that he closed his eyes, and walked through the casement.
Farfal began to fall.
He flailed in the air, eyes tightly closed against the blinding light, felt the wind whip past him.
Something smacked and engulfed him: water, brackish, warm, and Farfal floundered, too surprised to breathe. He surfaced, his head breaking water, and he gulped air. And then he pushed himself through the water, until his hands grasped some kind of plant, and he pulled himself, on hands and feet, out of the green water, and up onto a spongy dry land, trailing and trickling water as he went.
***
‘The light,’ said the man at De
‘And now?’ I asked.
‘I sell the carvings,’ he said. ‘And I seek another casement.’
‘You want to go back to your own time?’
He shook his head. ‘It’s dead,’ he said. ‘And all I knew, and everything like me. It’s dead. I will not return to the darkness at the end of time.’
‘What then?’
He scratched at his neck. Through the opening in his shirt I could see a small, black box, hanging about his neck, no bigger than a locket, and inside the box something moved: a beetle, I thought. But there are big beetles in Florida. They are not uncommon.
‘I want to go back to the begi
He took the napkin in his hand then, and reached into the leather bag with it. Taking care to touch it only through the cloth, he pulled out a flute-like instrument, about a foot long, made of green jade or something similar, and placed it on the table in front of me. ‘For the food,’ he said. ‘A thank-you.’
He got up, then, and walked away, and I sat and stared at the green flute for so long a time; eventually I reached out and felt the coldness of it with my fingertips, and then gently, without daring to blow, or to try to make music from the end of time, I touched the mouthpiece to my lips.
‘And Weep, Like Alexander’
The little man hurried into the Fountain and ordered a very large whisky. ‘Because,’ he a
He looked exhausted, sweaty and rumpled, as if he had not slept in several days. He wore a tie, but it was so loose as to be almost undone. He had greying hair that might once have been ginger.
‘I’m sure you do,’ said Brian.
‘I do!’ said the man. He took a sip of the whisky as if to find out whether or not he liked it, then, satisfied, gulped down half the glass. He stood completely still, for a moment, like a statue. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Can you hear it?’