Songs of the Dying Earth

“I must go.” Saloona glanced through the rippling plasma haze to where the fire witch stood, her mouth tight and her eyes fixed upon the blood-tinged western sky. “Paytim Noringal wields a terrifying spell. I fear to cross her.”

“What is the spell?”

Saloona lowered her face until her lips brushed the ship’s warm plasmatic membrane, and breathed her reply.

“Paytim Noringal claims it is the Black Peal; the Seventeenth Iteration of Blase’s “Azoic Notturno,” which Gesta Restille committed heinous crimes to employ. In vain,” she added, and directed a cogent look toward the fire witch.

“A harmonic charm of indisputable force,” the ship remarked after brief reflection. “Best I kill you now, painlessly.”

“No!” Saloona snatched her hand from the navigational membrane. “It may be the spell can be averted. If not, I will certainly escape and you will bear me back home.”

Her tone implied that she felt otherwise, but the ship’s power field relaxed, from vivid purple to a more subdued shade of puce.

“Does it know the way?” Paytim Noringal demanded as the petals opened once more so that she could alight.

“Yes, of course,” Saloona said. “Please, recline there upon the couch. I must offer my ship guidance for the first portion of the journey, then I will join you.”

Without speaking further, they took their places in the cabin. Saloona closed her eyes and once again placed her hand upon the tensile membrane.

“Bear us to the Crimson Messuage,” she commanded in a low voice.

The prism ship shuddered, but, after a momentary hesitation, rose smoothly into the air, and banked so that its prow pointed northeast. Lightning streamed from the thickening clouds as the ship sped above the mountains, its passage marked by violent bursts of blue-white flame and pulses of phosphorescence like St. Elmo’s Fire. Those few persons who saw it from the ground took shelter, fearing one of the vicious tempests which shook the mountains from time to time.

Yet as they cowered in silos and subterranean closets, their skin prickled as a faint invidious music seeped into their consciousness, a sound at once aching and desperate. To those who heard it, sleep did not arrive that night, nor for some nights to come. When it did, the sleepers cried aloud, begging for release from the visions that overtook them. Even en passant, such was the power of the “Azoic Notturno.”

The Crimson Messuage first appeared as a twinkling of fallen stars, scarlet and gold and vermilion, scattered within a narrow cleft within the sharp-teethed Metarin Mountains. Once the prism ship began its descent, Saloona discerned the outlines of conch-shaped towers and minarets, outer gates with crenelated battlements built of crumbling soft cinnabar, and the extensive mazed gardens where great tusked maskelons prowled, and, it was said, fed upon bastard Paeolina infants.

“Is that it?” she wondered aloud.

“It is,” said Paytim Noringal. She had been silent until now, her energies devoted to creating and maintaining a masking spell that would disguise the rod until they had gained entry to the after-ball. “Once, this was a great peak of friable red stone. An ambitious ancestor of the present King began its construction an eon ago. Twelve hundred slaves spent fifteen years clearing forest and rubble from the mountaintop. It was another half-century before the present structure was carved from the vermilion rock, and it took the endeavors of a giant tunneling wang-beetle to create the innermost donjons and chambers of state within the edifice.”

“A great many slaves must have died in the process.”

“True, though their bones are not interred here or anywhere else. Wang beetles are prodigious and indiscriminate eaters, though I was told that this one expired from gluttony and its carapace remains wedged within a forgotten corridor some hundreds of ells below us.”

“You possess a great deal of lore pertaining to this fortress,” observed Saloona.

“Hayland made a hobby of learning all he could of this accursed place. Better he had found entertainment elsewhere.”

The fire witch’s tone suggested that she had forgotten who initiated her lover into the rigors of the Red Dip. Saloona was too despondent to point this out.

“I could remain within the ship and await your return when the festivities are over,” she said as the prism ship hovered above a grassy hollow near a drive clotted with other conveyances. “That might expedite our safe return to my farmstead.”

“Our safe return is neither assured nor necessarily desirable.” the fire witch retorted. “Far nobler it is to bring down a despot’s throne! What cost thus are our petty lives, expended to further such a worthy enterprise?”

The ship grounded itself with a bump.

“What cost?” Saloona turned, furious. “I do not share your suicidal impulses, and my presence is certainly unnecessary for you to achieve them. Why did you engage me in this improvident venture?”