Songs of the Dying Earth

After years away, Martin made a triumphant return to the print world in 1996 with the publication in 1996 of the immensely successful fantasy novel A Game of Thrones, the start of his “Song of Ice and Fire” sequence. A free-standing novella taken from that work, “Blood of the Dragon,” won Martin another Hugo Award in 1997. Further books in the “Song of Ice and Fire” series. A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons (forthcoming), have made it one of the most popular, acclaimed, and bestselling series in all of modern fantasy. His most recent book are a massive retrospective collection spanning the entire spectrum of his career, GRRM: A Rretrospective, a novella collection, Starlady and Fast-Friend, a novel written in collaboration with Gardner Dozois and Daniel Abraham, Hunter’s Run, and, as editor, two new volumes in his long-running Wild Cards anthology series, Wild Cards: Busted Flush and Wild Cards: Inside Straight.

Here he takes us to The Land of the Falling Wall, through a haunted forest and across a bleak and desolate tarn, for a dangerous and surprising night of hospitality at the Tarn House (famous for their Hissing Eels), in company with a strange and varied cast of colorful characters — none of whom are even remotely what they seem.

A Night at the Tarn House

George R. R. Martin

Through the purple gloom came Molloqos the Melancholy, borne upon an iron palanquin by four dead Deodands.

Above them hung a swollen sun where dark continents of black ash were daily spreading across dying seas of dim red fire. Behind and before the forest loomed, steeped in scarlet shadow. Seven feet tall and black as onyx, the Deodands wore ragged skirts and nothing else. The right front Deodand, fresher than the others, squished with every step. Gaseous and swollen, his ripening flesh oozed noxious fluid from a thousand pinpricks where the Excellent Prismatic Spray had pierced him through. His passage left damp spots upon the surface of the road, an ancient and much-overgrown track whose stones had been laid during the glory days of Thorsingol, now a fading memory in the minds of men.

The Deodands moved at a steady trot, eating up the leagues. Being dead, they did not feel the chill in the air, nor the cracked and broken stones beneath their heels. The palanquin swayed from side to side, a gentle motion that made Molloqos think back upon his mother rocking him in his cradle. Even he had had a mother once, but that was long ago. The time of mothers and children had passed. The human race was fading, whilst grues and erbs and pelgranes claimed the ruins they left behind.

To dwell on such matters would only invite a deeper melancholy, however. Molloqos preferred to consider the book upon his lap. After three days of fruitless attempts to commit the Excellent Prismatic Spray to memory once again, he had set aside his grimoire, a massive tome bound in cracked vermillion leather with clasps and hinges of black iron, in favor of a slender volume of erotic poetry from the last days of the Sherit Empire, whose songs of lust had gone to dust aeons ago. Of late his gloom ran so deep that even those fervid rhymes seldom stirred him to tumescence, but at least the words did not turn to worms wriggling on the vellum, as those in his grimoire seemed wont to do. The world’s long afternoon had given way to evening, and in the dusk even magic had begun to crack and fade.

As the swollen sun sank slowly in the west, the words grew harder to discern. Closing his book, Molloqos pulled his Cloak of Fearsome Mien across his legs, and watched the trees go past. With the dying of the light each seemed more sinister than the last, and he could almost see shapes moving in the underbrush, though when he turned his head for a better look they were gone.

A cracked and blistered wooden sign beside the road read:

TARN HOUSE

Half a League On

Famous for Our Hissing Eels