Lifted Masks Book

And so things end on a bit of a wistful note, in a volume that kind of splits the difference between the original Mazirian the Magician: and the Cugel books. Again, as with Cugel, it's a collection of short stories about the same character (the eponymous Rhialto); in this case, it's three longish stories (one, "Fader's Waft", is long enough that it probably could've been published as a standalone back in the 1960s) and, unlike Cugel, there's no larger narrative connecting the stories.

Rhialto is one of a group of magicians living in the last aeon of Earth's existence. The magicians are all ... well, "eccentric" seems entirely too mild a term. In a lot of ways, they reminded me of the wizards of Pratchett's Unseen University, albeit slightly less ridiculous. Rhialto himself, although a bit of a popinjay, is probably the most normal. (He's also much less of a sociopathic scoundrel than Cugel, at least in what we're shown here.)

Interestingly, much of the book happens in places other than the Dying Earth proper -- in "Fader's Waft", Rhialto spends much of his time several aeons in the past, and in the final story, "Morreion", he and the other wizards end up traveling across space to the very edge of the universe. (To do so, they all gather in one wizard's palace, which he then causes to fly.)

As always, much of the joy is in Vance's prose -- slightly stilted and formal, the dialogue filled with circumlocution, and with not infrequent moments of true beauty:

Through clouds and constellations they moved, past bursting galaxies and meandering star-streams; through a region where the stars showed a peculiar soft violet and hung in clouds of pale green gas; across a desolation where nothing whatever was seen save a few far luminous clouds. Then presently they came to a new region, where blazing white giants seemed to control whirlpools of pink, blue and white gas, and the magicians lined the balustrade looking out at the spectacle.