Cugel's Saga is a picaresque fantasy novel by American writer Jack Vance, published by Timescape in 1983, the third book in the Dying Earth series, the first volume of which appeared in 1950. The narrative of Cugel's Saga continues from the point at which it left off at the end of The Eyes of the Overworld (1966).
The Internet Speculative Fiction Database calls Cugel's Saga "[t]wice as large and less episodic than Eyes of the Overworld", and catalogs it as a novel rather than a fix-up, but also qualifies that label. "This is marketed as a novel, but there is a table of contents, and some of the parts were previously published (although none are acknowledged thus)."
Plot summary
The story begins on Shanglestone Strand, a desolate beach far to the north of Almery, where Cugel had been dumped at the end of The Eyes of the Overworld by a winged demon after he mispronounced the spell intended to inflict the same fate on his nemesis, Iucounu the Laughing Magician. Avoiding the village of Smolod, the scene of his first adventure in The Eyes of the Overworld and where "memories are long", Cugel heads down Shanglestone Strand and arrives at Flutic, a manse owned by the avaricious Master Twango, whose business is salvaging the scales of an Overworld entity named Sadlark from a miry pit in his back garden. The scales are sold to the firm of Soldinck and Mercantides, who trans-ship them to a customer in Almery. Taking employment at Flutic, through sheer luck Cugel obtains the Pectoral Skybreak Spatterlight, the most valuable of all the scales, as it constitutes Sadlark's central node of force, or "protonastic centrum". The Skybreak Spatterlight, which absorbs every living creature with which it comes into contact, imprisoning them in limbo, is central to the plot of the novel since it is coveted by none other than Iucounu, the mysterious final customer for the scales, who believes himself to be Sadlark's avatar and is trying to reconstruct the Overworld entity scale by scale. (Chapter I.1)
After defrauding Twango of a substantial sum, only to be double-crossed by Yelleg and Malser, Twango's "scale divers", Cugel absconds from Flutic, still in possession of the Skybreak Spatterlight. At the nearby port of Saskervoy he takes employment as a lowly worminger (a crew member responsible for the maintenance of huge marine worms) aboard the worm-propelled Galante, a merchant ship owned by Soldinck and Mercantides, hoping to reach Almery by sea. On the island of Lausicaa, where he is to be replaced by a more competent worminger and thus remain stranded, Cugel hijacks the Galante, kidnapping Soldinck's wife and three comely daughters. Madame Soldinck, to whom Cugel naively entrusts the duties of night helmsman, outwits her captor by turning the ship in the opposite direction every night while Cugel is asleep after dallying with her daughters. To evade retribution at the hands of Master Soldinck, who is pursuing the Galante in a lubberly cog, Cugel runs the ship aground on the Tustvold mud flats and wades ashore. (Chapters I.2, II.1, II.2, II.3)
At the nearby village of Tustvold he falls in with a quarryman and antiquarian named Nisbet, whose trade is the construction of columns atop which the idle husbands of the industrious village women bask in the rays of the dying sun. The height of the columns is a status symbol and so the village women vie with each other to have Nisbet erect taller and taller columns for their husbands. With the aid of Nisbet's gravity-repellent boot dressing, Cugel comes up with a scheme whereby he surreptitiously removes the bottom segments of every column in order to resell them to the women. The ruse is discovered and he flees the village before the women can lynch him. (Chapter III.1)
Travelling onward, in the countryside between Tustvold and Port Perdusz, Cugel narrowly avoids a sticky end at the manse of Faucelme, a magician who recognises the Skybreak Spatterlight and, when Cugel refuses to part with it, attempts various underhand ways of doing away with its present owner. Arriving at Port Perdusz, Cugel discovers that sea passage to Almery is impossible. Using Nisbet's magical boot dressing to render it immune to gravity, Cugel steals a ship, the Avventura, and joins a caravan led by Varmous. The caravan, towing the Avventura and its "premium" passengers through the air, arrives, after various adventures, in Kaspara Vitatus, the City of Monuments, where the vessel's original owner, Captain Wiskich, and his crew finally catch up with it. (Chapters III.2, IV.1, IV.2)