The Guiding Nose of Ulfant Banderoz by Dan Simmons

Author:Dan Simmons [Simmons, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Jack Vance, Fantasy, Dying Earth, sword and sorcery
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Published: 2012-10-28T06:00:00+00:00

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And thus began what Shrue would later realize were—incredibly, almost incomprehensibly—the happiest three weeks of his life.

Captain Shiolko was true to his word and Steresa’s Dream lifted away from its docking cradle just as the red sun began its own tortured ascent into the deep blue sky. The galleon hovered for a moment like a massive wood-and-crystal balloon some thousand feet above as what looked to be the entire population of Mothmane Junction turned out to watch its departure, and then Shiolko’s eight “sons” (Shrue had already noticed that three of them were young women) shook out the canvas sails, the captain engaged the atmospheric emulsifier at the stern—which thickened the air beneath the sky galleon’s hull and rudder sufficiently to allow it to make way and to tack against the wind—and, following Shrue’s directions after the diabolist had consulted his little box holding Ulfänt Banderōz’s nose, set the ship’s course south-southeast.

All forty-six of Shiolko’s original customers as well as Derwe Coreme and her Myrmazons, Meriwolt (still in his robes), and Shrue himself then pressed to the railings of the mid-deck or their private stateroom terraces and waved to the shouting crowds below. At first, Shrue thought that the thousands of Mothmane Junction residents, peasants, shopkeepers, and rival sky galleon workers were roaring their approval and best wishes up to the voyagers, but then he saw the low morning sunlight glinting off arrows, crossbow bolts, rocks, and a variety of other things flung up at Steresa’s Dream and he realized that the first departure of a sky galleon in more than two years was not an occasion held in unalloyed affection and approval. But in a few moments, the galleon had gained several thousand feet in altitude and, after first following the River Dirindian south for a few leagues, banked off southwest above the wooded Kumelzian Hills and left Mothmane Junction and its muted roars far behind.

For the next several days and then weeks, Shrue’s and the ship’s routine blended into one.

At sunrise each morning, the diabolist would rise from his place in the double hammock he shared in the comfortable suite with Derwe Coreme and—even before meditating according to the Slow Discipline of Derh Shuhr—Shrue would scramble up the manropes to the Gyre’s nest near the top of the mainmast and there use Ulfänt Banderōz’s guiding nose to take a new course reading. That course would be checked via the nose box several times during the day—Captain Shiolko was a master at making the slightest adjustments—and for the final time, by the light of the binnacle (when one of Shiolko’s male or female sons was at the wheel), just at midnight.

Steresa’s Dream itself was one of those rarest of avas in the later Aeons of the Dying Earth—a machine with complicated machinery inside it—and on the first day of the voyage, Captain Shiolko proudly showed off his beautiful ship to Shrue, Derwe Coreme, robed Meriwolt, and many of the other interested passengers and pilgrims. Shrue immediately then

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