The Last Days Of The Edge Of The World Read online

  Title: The Last Days of the Edge of the World

  Author: Brian Stableford

  ISBN: 0441470777 / 9780441470778 USA edition

  Publisher: Ace Books

  *** A biggles scan *** Paperback to ebook ***

  Intro:

  They stood together in the north-west tower, looking out at the lands of World’s Edge, its forest and hills, its ruined cities.

  The enchantments that overlaid the land weren’t visible to the ordinary senses, but they were nevertheless real. Curses and spells and hauntings sat upon the earth like a miasma of decay. The land was dying.

  “Look,” said Sirion Hilversun softly. “Here we stand by the world’s very edge, forgotten people in a forgotten land. To the east is the great cliff, and chaos____To the west there are whole continents free from the terrors and uncertainties that haunt our land…”

  “It wasn’t like that once,” Helen said, interrupting him.

  The enchanter smiled. “Perhaps,” he said. “But that was before either of us were born. You and I came to a world that was already lost, already wrecked by wars of enchantment____I should have sent you away years ago.”

  “No!” she said sharply. She repeated it in a softer tone, almost a pleading tone. “No.”

  Brian Stableford

  The Last Days

  of the Edge of the World

  For Ken and Jo Wild

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sirion Hilversun was waiting for a letter. He was not sure exactly when it would arrive, but he remembered that it would be in the near future. The waiting bothered him, because his memory was so bad these days that he would have to wait until the letter arrived before he could find out what was in it.

  Sirion Hilversun was, by birth and by profession, a man of magical means—an enchanter. But he was also very old, and magic does not stand up well to the ravages of time. In his youth he had been able to remember quite clearly all of his past and quite a considerable fraction of his future: in those days he had always known when he was. Nowadays he lived in the midst of an awful turmoil of yesterday and tomorrow. His daughter Helen, who kept the calendar and had the only unmagical (and therefore trustworthy) clock in Moonmansion, always had to remind him which slice of his life he was actually in the process of living.

  Moonmansion was Sirion Hilversun’s home. It was very large, having to accommodate the customary complement of secret passages and hidden chambers as well as the more mundane facilities. It resembled a castle, with great grey towers and neat battlements, but that was just for show. No army had ever occupied the mansion, and none had laid siege to it. All the real castles in the lands of the World’s Edge had been reduced to ruins in the wars of enchantment over two centuries before.

  While Sirion Hilversun waited for the mysterious letter he paced the battlements, trying desperately to sort out what was what (or possibly when was when). Today was Tuesday, and the letter had arrived—was to arrive— on a Tuesday. It could hardly be last Tuesday, but it might be next Tuesday, although the memory seemed too fresh. These days, whenever he remembered something as if it were yesterday, it was almost always today—or, in extreme cases, tomorrow.

  He shook his head, wishing that time had been organized in a simpler fashion. It seemed so complicated that he wondered how people with ordinary one-way memories managed at all. How could they ever keep their appointments?

  Every time the enchanter reached the limit of the line he was pacing he paused momentarily to stare out over the sprawling lands of the World’s Edge. They were still deep-laden with enchantment, most of which was the legacy of the great wars. In some places there were curses and countercurses stacked six or seven deep, and the overcrowding of ghosts in some of the older ruins was positively awful. These were the last lands on Earth where magic still ruled, and this was the last of the Old World’s seven edges. All the rest had been claimed by science, reason and roundness. Sometimes, Sirion Hilversun wondered how this last little enclave could possibly survive, and always came to the conclusion that, in the long run, it would not. The tide of time was against it. He was reasonably sure that he would not see the day that magic died (although he couldn’t remember, and might be quite wrong), but he did worry about Helen. She hadn’t much magic, but she relied a lot on what she had, and she loved these lands very deeply.

  While he paused slightly longer than usual, his legs tiring somewhat, though his eyes still searched the roads and hillsides for a rider with a mailbag, Helen came out from the north-west tower in search of him.

  “It’s time for lunch,” she told him.

  “Lunch?” he repeated. The word couldn’t quite penetrate his fog of thought, and he turned it over in his mind as if it were something strange—a sound devoid of meaning.

  “You know,” she said. “Food. Sandwiches. Cups of tea. Things to eat.”

  The last word broke through.

  “Eat!” he said. “I can’t eat! Important events are about to get under way. There’s important news winging its way here right now. I know it’s important, though I can’t for the life of me remember what it is. Terribly important.”

  “Impatience won’t help,” Helen pointed out. “Pacing up and down will only make your feet sore. These battlements are cold. And I’ve told you before about those silly slippers with the curled-up toes. If the wind changes you’ll get rheumatism again.”

  “I’ve got a spell to cure rheumatism,” muttered the enchanter. “And these slippers are very fashionable.”

  “The letter will come just as quickly if you wait inside,” said Helen firmly.

  Sirion Hilversun looked at his daughter, trying to muster a stern paternal frown. He couldn’t manage it. He sighed.

  He allowed Helen to lead him down into the heart of Moonmansion, by winding stairs and twisting corridors. It always seemed that one had to go a long way to achieve a short distance. He often wondered—especially when he got lost—whether the gnomes who had built the place had followed his blueprints properly.

  When they finally reached the dining room Sirion Hilversun all but collapsed into his chair.

  “Watch your elbows,” complained the chair. “Where d’y’wannago?”

  “Nowhere,” said Sirion Hilversun. “I just want to eat my lunch.”

  “Aw,” said the chair, “you’re no fun any more. What’s the point of having a wishing chair if all you do is sit on it to eat your lunch? You haven’t taken me out in a year. I have feelings, you know. I’ve a good mind to go on strike.”

  “You can’t,” said the enchanter. “That’s the clock’s job. Or it was until I mislaid his chimes.”

  “Never mind talking to your chair,” said Helen. “Eat your lunch.”

  The enchanter sighed. Helen had a distinctly down-to-earth attitude to life. It was not surprising in one so young, especially one so young who had only a one-way memory. But sometimes he wished that she had just a little more magic about her. It was not the fact that she could only conjure little things that worried him so much as the fact that she couldn’t see the future at all. It gave her the wrong attitude to life. No foresight.

  He ate his lunch, slowly and carefully. He forgot what he had eaten while he was still in the middle of it.

  Meanwhile, in the city of Jessamy, the capital of the utterly unmagical land of Caramorn, there was something of a crisis. Owing to a geographical accident Caramorn was the unmagical nation that lay closest to the lands of World’s Edge. In the not-too-distant past Caramorn had actually been a land where magic was welcome, but nearly a hundred and fifty years before the great king (Rufus Malagig I), had published a royal decree banishing it from the land. Ever since that day the fo
rtunes of Caramorn had been on the wane. The once-rich kingdom had become steadily poorer, until by now the nation had passed through all the many stages of mediocrity and was, not to put too fine a point on it, at rock bottom. The present king, Rufus Malagig IV, was in conference with his ministers, facing utter and ultimate ruin.

  “Basically,” said Alcover, “we’re bankrupt.” Alcover was the chancellor of the exchequer—a small, wizened man with a wonderful head for figures. He looked very unhappy, mostly because the figure that was occupying his wonderful head right now was a zero of positively horrific proportions.

  “That’s impossible,” said the king, a tall, imposing man with a perpetual expression of wide-eyed innocence. He had inherited from his auspicious forefathers a habit of saying “That’s impossible” whenever he was faced with a serious problem, confident that it would thus disappear. Lately, however, he had discovered that the limits of possibility are not determined by royal decree.

  “Your majesty has his own key to the treasury,” murmured Alcover patiently. ‘Take a look. If your majesty can find a single brass farthing, he is most welcome to it. It will represent the entire extent of the kingdom’s riches.”

  Rufus Malagig IV stared into space for a few moments, contemplating the awful idea of poverty. He couldn’t quite believe it. He was a king, and kings were never, ever poor.

  “Well,” he said, “it’s up to you chaps to do something about it. That’s what ministers are for. That’s what I pay you for.”

  The prime minister, Coronado—a long, lean man with a lantern jaw—coughed politely. “At the moment,” he commented, “your majesty isn’t exactly paying us at all. But the point is that there’s nothing more we can do. We have, so to speak, shot our last bolt.”

  “Collect a tax!” said Rufus, with an airy wave of the hand. “That’s what my father always did. Make the public pay!”

  The home secretary, whose name was Hallowbrand, leaned forward. The chair on which he sat creaked under the strain: a great deal of weight had to be redistributed when Hallowbrand changed his position. “The simple fact, sire,” he said, “is that the public can’t pay. They haven’t got any money either. This is the third year running the harvest has been poor, and for the last thirty years we’ve known that two or three years without a wheat surplus would see us over the edge____”

  “The money must be somewhere,” the king interrupted, rudely. “It can’t just have disappeared into thin air.”

  “It has all gone to pay moneylenders and merchants,” said Alcover, gently. “Foreign moneylenders and merchants. Even when the harvest is bad the people have to eat. We have to import what we need… and we have to pay for what we import. All the gold in Caramorn—all the gold that was in Caramorn—is in the Western Empire now, mostly in Heliopolis. When I say that we are bankrupt I mean that the whole kingdom is bankrupt. The situation is so desperate that if we don’t pay the wages of the palace guard soon there is a definite danger that they might walk out, or even turn against us… in which case certain unruly elements in the populace would almost certainly…”

  The king stared at him. The chancellor trailed off, leaving the rest to the royal imagination.

  “A revolution?” whispered the king.

  “I fear,” said Hallowbrand, “that it’s a possibility.”

  “But my people love me,” protested Rufus. “I’m a good king. It’s not my fault we’ve had bad harvests.”

  “Actually,” said Coronado, “you aren’t such a bad king, as kings go. But when times are bad it’s the king that tends to take the blame, whether he deserves it or not. It’s an old saying—the crown carries the can.”

  “Oh,” said the king. Then he lapsed into silence. He could think of nothing more to say.

  “We have already begun what might be termed emergency measures,” said Alcover, trying to break it as gently as possible. “We’re selling the silver, and the horses. We would have had to sell the queen’s jewellery, except that when we approached her majesty we learned that it had gone to Heliopolis already—a private deal, if you know what I mean. The very last thing which is of any real value is the library. The university at Heliopolis is very interested in it because it contains a lot of material relating to magic and the like—biographies of the enchanters, histories of haunting, things like that. A local boy who is studying at the university has come home to catalogue it.”

  “The silver!” said the king, faintly. “My horses! Even the library! I can keep my crown, I hope?”

  “That,” grunted Bellegrande, “is the object of the exercise.” Bellegrande wore a perpetual expression of great sadness and was much given to bitter comments. He was, however, very good at languages.

  “The thing is,” said Alcover, “even this won’t be enough. It will keep us going until next spring, but even if there’s a bumper harvest we’ll still have our backs to the wall. We’re done for unless we can find something else to turn the tide in our favor.”

  “What do you suggest?” said the king, acidly. “Inviting the enchanters back?”

  There fell upon the conference table a deep and profound silence. The king looked at each of his ministers in turn. They each looked back, with faces that seemed to be carved from stone.

  “Oh dear,” said the king, weakly realizing what the silence meant. “You do want me to invite the enchanters back.”

  The king was rather nervous of magic. The thought of wizardry and curses and hauntings and the like had always frightened him rather more than somewhat.

  “We’ve thought it over carefully,” said Coronado, “and we think there’s one chance. Not a clay’s ride from here is the home of Sirion Hilversun, a place called Moonmansion. He was one of the enchanters banished by your great-grandfather, but prior to that banishment they were friends. I don’t think the enchanter took it too hard—I think he understood (King Rufus I’s) reasons. But the point is that he has a daughter—a very young daughter. By all accounts the lands of magic aren’t what they used to be, and it may be that Sirion Hilversun could be persuaded to return, under the right circumstances, and the right circumstances might involve making a reasonable marriage for his daughter. Do you see what I mean, sire?

  King Rufus Malagig IV bounded to his feet and thumped the table. “Of course I see what you mean, you loathsome toad!” he bellowed. “You want to marry Prince Damian off to a witch!”

  “Please calm down, sire,” urged Coronado. “We must try to be sensible and level-headed about this. I assure you that the girl doesn’t have green scales or purple wings or warts, or even a black cat and broomstick. She’s very beautiful, and it’s rumoured that she has very little magical talent—which is another reason why Sirion Hilversun might think it a good idea to find her a secure place in the Western World. I’m afraid, sire, that things being as they are you don’t have a lot of choice. Prince Damian is the only asset we have left—the kingdom’s only hope. If he doesn’t make this marriage, he might not be a prince much longer… and you might not be a king.”

  Hallowbrand drew from the vast pocket of his cloak a letter, already sealed. “We have taken the liberty, sire,” he said, ponderously, “of preparing the proposal. If you will give your approval now, I will send it at once.”

  The king looked down at his seated ministers. They were all so calm and so deadly serious. The rage ebbed out of him, and his face went quite grey.

  “Is it really the only way?” he whispered.

  “The only way,” intoned Coronado.

  “Have you told Damian?”

  The prime minister shook his head. “We thought… a job for his father.”

  “Oh,” said the king. He sagged rather than sat back down into his chair. “Oh, of course.” His eyes fell, until he was staring down at the bare tabletop. “It’s impossible,” he murmured.

  Then he remembered who he was, and he looked up again.

  “For the good of the kingdom,” he said, sternly. “Send it.”

  CHAPTER TWO

/>   “I won’t do it,” said Helen, firmly.

  Sirion Hilversun peered at her over the rims of his bifocals. His expression was very serious.

  “It’s a very polite letter,” he said. “And I don’t see why it’s such a terrible idea. Most girls would be quite attracted to the idea of marrying a prince.”

  “I’m not most girls,” she said.

  “No,” murmured the enchanter, “you aren’t.”

  There was a long pause. They stood together in the north-west tower, looking out of the windows at the lands of World’s Edge—its forests and its hills, its valleys and streams, its ruined cities and sunken roads.

  The enchantments that overlaid the land weren’t really visible to the ordinary senses, but they were nevertheless real, and no one with a hint of magic in his (or her) eye could possibly be ignorant of them. Curses and spells

  and hauntings sat upon the good earth like a miasma of decay. Moonmansion was a tiny haven in a world of dark coverts and corners, shadows from another existence. The land was dying, although it was frozen in time. There was little that was good and bright out there now.

  In the far west the sun was sinking towards the towers of Heliopolis, which lay beyond the horizon. It would still be lighting the cities of the New World, standing high above the Western Empire, bright and beautiful in a coach of fine, white clouds.

  “Look,” said Sirion Hilversun, softly. “Here we stand by the world’s very edge, forgotten people in a forgotten land. To the east there is the great cliff, and chaos… a grey emptiness that walls us in. To the west there are whole continents free from all the terrors and uncertainties that haunt our land–-“

  “It wasn’t like that once,” said Helen, interrupting him.

  The enchanter smiled. “Perhaps,” he said. “But that was before either of us were born. You and I came into a world that was already lost, already wrecked by the wars of enchantment. It’s the only world you and I have ever known. It’s the only magical world there is, now. Perhaps, once, there was a Golden Age… but when you get to my age you’ll wonder. To me, it doesn’t matter. I’ve lived my life as I chose. But for you, I think there has to be something better. Something brighter.”