Songs of the Dying Earth

The fire witch dropped Saloona’s hand, and, with care, crossed the unwieldy space. A single wall had miraculously survived that long-ago lightning strike, festooned now with cobwebs. Bowed and mildewed, it held row upon row of small round holes, so that it resembled an oversized martinhouse.

“Hayland kept his musical scrolls here,” explained Paytim Noringal. “I use them to start the cookstove sometimes. It was purest chance, or mischance, that I found it.”

She stepped lightly among the desiccated scrolls scattered across the uneven floor. Some had unspooled so that their singed notations could still be read. Others were little more than skeins of dust and vellum. More scrolls were wedged into the wall’s pigeonholes, along with miniature assemblages of circuitry and glass, a theramin wand, coils of lutestrings and ivory lute-keys, stacks of crystal discs, a broken gamelan.

When Paytim reached the wall, she hesitated. A crimson flush spread across her cheeks; a bead of blood welled where she bit her lower lip. She drew a quick breath, then thrust her hand into one of the holes. Saloona was reminded of a time years before, when she had spent an idle afternoon with a lover, catching fileels in the shallows of the Gaspar Reef. The young man had reached into a crevice, intending to grasp a wriggling fileel. Instead, he had inadvertently antagonized a luray. Or so she assumed, as a cloud of blood and pulverized bone bloomed around the crevice and she quickly swam back to their waiting caravel.

No luray appeared now, of course, though there was an instant where an inky blackness spread across Paytim’s arm like a thrasher’s bite. With a gasp, the fire witch snatched her hand back. The stain was gone, or perhaps had never been.

But her fingers were closed tightly around a shining silver rod, slender as a bastinado and half again as long as her hand. It was inscribed with a luminous equation, numerals unrecognizable to Saloona, and which even the fire witch seemed to regard with profound unease.

Saloona asked, “Is that the charm which Gesta Restille so desired?”

The fire witch nodded. “Yes. The Seventeenth Iteration of Blase’s ‘Azoic Notturno,’ known by some as the Black Peal.”

Her lips had barely uttered that final word when a frigid gale tore through the flimsy walls, shredding silken panels and making shrapnel of scrolls and shattered instruments. At the same moment, a strange sound clove the air, a sound which Saloona sensed in her bones as much as her ears: a deep and plangent twang, as though an immense theorbo, too tightly strung, had been plucked.

“Quickly!” gasped Paytim Noringal, and lunged for the spiral stairs.

Saloona ducked to avoid being decapitated by a brazen gong, then followed her. With each step, the stairs buckled and fell away behind them. What remained of the tower walls crumbled into ivory and sawdust. A steady hail of blasted scrolls and blackened silk fell upon their heads, until, at last, they reached the ground and dashed from the tower seconds before it collapsed.

Scarcely had they raced into the corridor before it, too, began to fall away. Marble columns and tiled floor disintegrated as though a vast invisible grinding wheel bore down upon the fortress. Saloona dashed through a narrow door that opened onto the kitchen garden. Paytim Noringal stumbled after her, still brandishing the glowing silver rod.

“Wisdom suggests you should divest yourself of that,” Saloona shouted above the din of crashing stone and brick. She ran to where the prism ship hovered, a rainbow teardrop whose petals expanded at her approach.

“Calamity!” exclaimed the ship. Saloona touched it gently, settling into her seat; but the ship continued to express alarm, especially when Paytim Noringal hauled herself in beside Saloona.

“My poor basilisk.” The fire witch gazed at the ruins of her home. A single tear glistened at the corner of her eye, before expiring in a minute puff of steam.

“Perhaps it escaped,” said Saloona as the prism ship floated upward. In truth, her greatest regret was for the loss of Paytim’s kitchen, in particular the last remaining globe of locust jelly. “It may well follow us.”

She glanced at the silver rod Paytim grasped. The lustre of its glowing numerals had diminished, but now and then a bright ripple flashed across its surface. The sight made Saloona shiver. She seemed to hear an echo of that strange, plangent tone, and once she flinched, as though someone had struck a gong beside her ear. She wished that she had heeded the warnings of her prism ship, and remained at home among her mushrooms.

Now, no matter the imminent danger to herself, Saloona was bound by ancient laws of hospitality. It would be gauche to refuse an offer of refuge to the fire witch; also foolhardy, considering the power of the charm Paytim held. When the prism ship had traveled a safe distance from the fire witch’s demesne, skimming above an endless canopy of blue-green spruce and fir, Saloona politely cleared her throat.