Songs of the Dying Earth

Insensibility, melancholia, hebetude; ordinary mental tumult and more elaborate physical vexations (boils, a variety of thrip that caused the skin of an unfaithful lover to erupt in a spectacular rash, the color of violet mallows) — Saloona Morn cultivated these in her parterre in the shadow of Cobalt Mountain. A lifetime of breathing the dusky, spore-rich air of her hillside had inoculated her against the most common human frailties and a thousand others. It was twelve years since she had felt the slightest stirring of ennui or regret, two decades since she had suffered from despondency or alarm. Timidity and childish insouciance she had never known. There were some, like her nearest neighbor, the fire witch Paytim Noringal, who claimed she had never been a child; but Paytim Noringal was wrong.

Likewise, Saloona had been inoculated against rashness, optimistic buoyancy, and those minor but troubling disinclinations that can mar one’s sleep — fear of traveling beyond alpen climes, the unease that accompanied the hours-long twilight marking the months of autumn. Despair had been effaced from Saloona’s heart, and its impish cousin, desire. If one gazed into her calm, ice-colored eyes, one might think she was happy. But happiness had not stitched a single line upon her smooth face.

Imperturbability was an easy emotion to design and grow, and was surprisingly popular with her clients. So it was, perhaps, that she had inhaled great quantities of the spores of imperturbability, because that was the sole quality that she could be seen to possess. Apart, of course, from her beauty, which was noted if not legendary.

This morning, she was attempting to coax an air of distinction from a row of Splendid Blewits, mushrooms that resembled so many ink-stained thumbs. The blewits were saphrophytes, their favored hosts carnivorous Deodands that Saloona enticed by bathing in the nearby river. She disabled the Deodands with a handful of dried spores from the Amethyst Deceiver, then dragged them up the hillside to her cottage. There she split each glistening, eel-black chest with an ax and sowed them with spores while their hearts still pumped. Over the course of seven or eight days, the sky-blue sacs would slowly deflate as the Splendid Blewits appeared, releasing their musty scent of woodlice and turmeric.

After a week, she could harvest the spores. These became part of an intricate though commonplace formula usually commissioned by men with aristocratic aspirations — in this instance, a dull optimate of middle years who sought to impress his much younger lover, a squireen who favored ocelex pantolons that did not flatter him.

It was no concern of hers if her clients were vain or foolish, or merely jaded by a terminal ennui that colored their judgment, much as the sun’s sanguine rays stained the sky. Still, she needed to eat. And the optimate would pay well for his false magnificence. So: arrogance and feigned modesty; a dash of servility to offset the stench of self-love…a few grains from the Splendid Blewits, and the physic would be complete.

But something was wrong.

Yesterday evening, she had unrolled nets of raw linen fine as frog-hair, arranging the filmy cloth beneath those indigo thumbs to catch the spores they released at nightfall. Morning should have displayed delicate spore-paintings, the blewits’ gills traced upon the nets in powdery lines, pollen-yellow, slate-blue.

Instead, the gauze bore but a single bruised smear of violet and citron. Saloona bent her head to inspect it, holding back her long marigold hair so that it wouldn’t touch the cloth.

“You needn’t bother.”

She glanced aside to see a Twk-woman astride a luna moth, hovering near her head. “And why is that?” Saloona asked.

The Twk-woman tugged at the moth’s antennae. It fluttered down and settled on one of the dwarf conifers that kept the fungus garden in shade.

“Give me salt,” she said.

Saloona reached into her pharmocopia bag and handed the Twk-woman a salt pod, waiting as she lashed it to the moth’s thorax. The Twk-woman straightened, adjusted her cap, then struck a pose like that of Paeolina II in his most well-known execution portrait.

“Paytim Noringal came here at moonfall and shook your sporenet. I watched unobserved. The resulting cloud gave me a coughing fit, but my leman swears I appear more distinguished than this time yestermorn.”

Saloona cocked her head. “Why would Paytim do that?”

“More I cannot say.”

The luna moth rose into the air and drifted off, its bright wings lost amid the ripple of jade and emerald trees crowding the hillside. Saloona rolled up the sporenet and set it with those to be laundered. She was neither perturbed nor angered by Paytim’s action, nor curious.

Still, she had to eat.