Songs of the Dying Earth

“Why not break the door down?” asked Lirianne. “A big strong man like you…” She squeezed his arm and smiled. “Unless you would rather give pleasure to a hoon?”

Chimwazle shuddered, though even a hoon might be preferable to this itching. Glancing up, he saw the transom. It was open just a crack, but that might be enough. “Rocallo, friend, lift me up onto your shoulders.”

The prince knelt. “As you wish.” He was stronger than he looked, and seemed to have no trouble hoisting Chimwazle up into the air, for all his bulk. Nor did the nervous trumpet notes emitted by Chimwazle’s nether parts dismay him unduly.

Pressing his nose to the transom, Chimwazle slid his tongue through the gap and down the inside of the doorframe, then curled it thrice around the wooden plank that barred the way. Slowly, slowly, he lifted the bar from its slot…but the weight proved too great for his tongue, and the plank fell clattering to the floor. Chimwazle reeled backwards, Prince Rocallo lost his balance, and the two of them collapsed atop each other with much grunting and cursing while Lirianne skipped nimbly aside.

Then the door swung open.

Molloqos the Melancholy did not need to speak a word.

Silent he bid them enter and silent they obeyed, Chimwazle scrambling over the threshold on hands on feet as his fellows stepped nimbly around him. When all of them had come inside he closed the door behind them and barred it once again.

The rogue Chimwazle was almost unrecognizable beneath his floppy hat, his toadish face a mass of festering boils and buboes where some Twk-men had kissed him with their lances. “Salve,” he croaked, as he climbed unsteadily to his feet. “We came for salve, sorry to disturb you. Dread sir, if you perhance should have some unguent for itching…”

“I am Molloqos the Melancholy. I do not deal in unguents. Come here and grasp my staff.”

For a moment, Chimwazle looked as he might bolt the room instead, but in the end he bowed his head and shuffled closer, and wrapped a soft splayed hand around the ebon shaft of the tall sorcerer’s staff. Inside the crystal orb the True-Seeing Eye had fixed on Lirianne and Rocallo. When Molloqos thumped the staff upon the floor, the great golden eye blinked once. “Now look again upon your companions, and tell me what you see.”

Chimwazle’s mouth gaped open, and his bulging eyes looked as though they might pop out of his skull. “The girl is cloaked in shadows,” he gasped, “and under her freckly face I see a skull.”

“And your prince…”

“…is a demon.”

The thing called Prince Rocallo laughed, and let all his enchantments dissolve. His flesh was red and raw, glowing like the surface of the sun, and like the sun half-covered by a creeping black leprosy. Smoke rose stinking from his nostrils, the floorboards began to smoulder beneath his taloned feet, and black claws sprang from his hands as long as knives.

Then Molloqos spoke a word and stamped his staff hard against the floor, and from the shadows in a corner of the room a woman’s corpse came bursting to leap upon the demon’s back. As the two of them lurched and staggered about the room, tearing at each other, Lirianne danced aside and Chimwazle fell backwards onto his ample rump. The stench of burning flesh filled the air. The demon ripped one of the corpse’s arms off and flung it smoking at the head of Molloqos, but the dead feel no pain, and her other arm was wrapped about its throat. Black blood ran down her cheeks like tears as she pulled him backward onto the bed.

Molloqos stamped his staff again. The floor beneath the bed yawned open, the mattress tilted, and demon and corpse together tumbled down into a gaping black abyss. A moment later, there came a loud splash from below, followed by a furious cacophony, demonic shrieking mingled with a terrible whistling and hissing, as if a thousand kettles had all come to a boil at once. When the bed righted itself the sound diminished, but it was a long while before it ended. “W-what was that?” asked Chimwazle.

“Hissing eels. The inn is famous for them.”

“I distinctly recall the innkeep saying that the eels were off the menu,” said Chimwazle.

“The eels are off our menu, but we not off theirs.”

Lirianne made a pouty face and said, “The hospitality of the Tarn House leaves much to be desired.”

Chimwazle was edging toward the door. “I mean to speak firmly to the landlord. Some adjustment of our bill would seem to be in order.” He scratched angrily at his boils.

“I would advise against returning to the common room,” said the necromancer. “No one in the Tarn House is all that he appears. The hirsute family by the hearth are ghouls clad in suits of human skin, here for the meat pies. The greybeard in the faded raiment of a knight of Old Thorsingol is a malign spirit, cursed to an eternity of purple scrumby for the niggardly gratuities he left in life. The demon and the leucomorph are no longer a concern, but our servile host is vilest of all. Your wisest course is flight. I suggest you use the window.”