“I have nothing to wear.”
A wisp of white smoke emerged from the fire witch’s left nostril. “It would be a grievous day indeed when a Cobalt Mountain witch could not conjure attire suitable for paying court to a ruler of such legendary incompetence as Paeolina the Twenty-Ninth.”
“And if my incompetence outshines his?” Saloona stabbed irritably at her omelet. “What then?”
“It will be for such a brief moment, only you will be aware of it. Unless, of course, your spells of confusion fail, and the Ubiquitous Antidote is deficient against The Black Peal. In which case…”
Paytim’s voice faded into an uncomfortable silence. The two witches looked at each other, contemplating this unsavory prospect. A spasm assailed Saloona, and she clapped her hands to her ears.
“Do you hear that?” she cried.
The fire witch paled. “I hear nothing,” she said, then added, “but I suspect the Velvet Bolt has expired. We must not speak of the musical charm again. Or even think of it.”
Saloona bit her lip. She prodded her omelet with her fork, and reflected unhappily on how little joy she had taken from Paytim’s cooking in the last day and a half.
This too is due to that malign spell, she thought.
Before another fit of trembling could overtake her, she began to eat, with far less avidity than had been her wont.
Sky and shadows mingled in an amaranth mist as twilight fell that evening. At the edge of the forest, the prism ship had for some hours kept up a high-pitched litany of admonition, interspersed with heartrending cries. Since Saloona now seemed to possess a heart, the ship’s lament frayed her nerves to the snapping point, and drove the fire witch wild with anger. Twice Saloona had to physically restrain her from reducing the ship to smoking metal and charred wire.
“Then silence it yourself!” demanded Paytim.
“I cannot. The neural fibers that give it sentience also propel it and govern its navigation.”
Paytim’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “Then we will walk.”
“And arrive tomorrow,” said Saloona with impatience. “Perhaps this is an opportune moment to test your beeswax plugs.”
The fire witch exhaled with such force that the hem of a nearby curtain curled into gray ash. Saloona ignored this and returned to her bedroom.
Clothes were strewn everywhere. Stained lab tunics; an ugly crinoline diapered with paper-thin sheets of tellurium that whistled a jaunty air as she tossed it aside; an ancient silk kimono, never worn, embroidered with useless sigils; rubber booties and garden frocks; a pelisse she had made herself from a Deodand’s skin, which still gave off a whiff of spoiled meat and blewits.
Saloona stuffed these back into the armoire from which they’d emerged, then sat brooding for some minutes on the edge of her little carven bed. She had lived here alone, had taken no lover for many years now, and had virtually no interest in fashion. Still, a sartorial cantrap was well within her powers.
But if one lacked an affinity for fashion, or even a mild interest, what use was such a spell? Might not the attire it procured turn out be inelegant, even fatally offensive? Certainly it would be unsuitable for an affair of such magnificence as the after-ball.
Saloona was, in fact, naive. She shared the province’s general disdain for the ruling dynasty, but she had never visited court, or entertained the notion that she someday might. Her anxiety at the prospect was therefore extreme. She once more flung open the door of her armoire, inspected the garments she had just rejected, and continued to find them wanting.
After a fraught quarter-hour, she still wore her faded lab tunic.
“Are you ready?” Paytim’s voice echoed shrilly down the hall.
“Another minute.”
Saloona bit her lower lip. She undressed hastily, retaining only her linen chemise and crimson latex stockings—the color, she thought, might be viewed as a sign of admiration. She pulled on a pair of loose sateen trousers, a deep mauve, and then an airy silk blouson, white but filigreed with tiny eyes that opened to reveal scarlet irises whenever bright light shone upon the fabric.
“Saloona!” The fire witch sounded almost frantic. “Now.”
Saloona gave a wordless cry, swept her marigold hair into an untidy chignon that she secured with a pair of golden mantids whose claws tugged painfully at her roots. A final glance into a mirror indicated that she looked even more louche than she’d feared. The subtly glowing necklace of toxic vesicles around her throat seemed particularly out of place, its false bijoux glowing like Viasyan adamant. The entire effect was not mitigated by her worn leather slippers, which had long curling toes that ended in orange tassels.
But she had no time to change her shoes. As Paytim’s footsteps boomed down the corridor, Saloona grabbed the silk kimono and rushed from her room.
“I’m ready,” she said breathlessly, wrapping herself in the kimono’s folds.
The fire witch scarcely glanced at her; merely dug her fingers into Saloona’s elbow and steered her out the front door and toward the paddock. “Your ship knows the way?”
An answering retort, midway between a turbine explosion and the shriek of a woman in childbirth, indicated that the prism ship was aware of the destination.
Saloona nodded, then glanced at her companion, her eyes widening.
The fire witch rewarded her with a compressed smile. “It’s been such ages since I’ve worn this. I’m surprised it still fits.”
From her white shoulders to her narrow ankles, Paytim was encased in a gown of pliant eeft-skin, in shades of beryl, sea-foam, moonlit jade. Where twilight touched the cleft between her breasts, opalescent sparks shimmered and spun. Wristlets of fiery gold wound her arms, wrought like adders and fileels. A comb of hammered copper, shaped like a basilisk’s head, restrained her shining hair so that only a few golden tendrils fell saucily against her cheeks.
“Your attire becomes you,” said Saloona.
“Yes.”
The fire witch smiled mirthlessly, displaying the placebit carved from her lover’s finger-bone; then raised her hand. The wand that had confounded even Resta Gestille glowed as though it were an ingot just hauled from the flames. It was so bright that Paytim blinked and looked aside.
More discomfiting to Saloona Morn were the sounds that emanated from the wand. A subtle, refined yet cunning cascade of notes, at once bell-like yet ominously profound, as though played upon an instrument whose tympanum was the earth’s very skin, its sounding rods the nearby crags and stony spires. The notes rang inside Saloona’s skull, and she gasped.
But before she drew her next breath, the sound faded. The ensuing silence, fraught with malign portent, Saloona found more disturbing than the uncanny music.
She had no time to ponder her unease. With a soft command, Paytim urged her toward the paddock. As they approached, the air grew increasingly turbulent. The evergreens’ heavy branches thrashed. Dead fir needles and bracken rose and whirled in miniature wind-funnels. Fenceposts buckled, then exploded into splinters. A flock of mal-de-mutes rose from the topmost branches of the tallest spruce and fled screaming into the darkening sky.
“Can’t you control it?” Paytim shouted.
Saloona shielded her eyes against a bolt of violet plasma. “I don’t think it wants to go.”
As she spoke, the air thickened until the ship’s outlines grew visible, coruscant with lightning.
“BETRAYAL DEPRAVITY DISSOLUTION DESPAIR,” the ship thundered. “INIQUITY CATASTROPHE DOOM DOOM DOOM.”
“I’ll speak to it.” Saloona hurried past the fire witch, beckoning the ship open. Translucent petals emerged from the air and she slipped onboard.
“You must bear us to the Crimson Messuage without delay.” Saloona pressed her palm against the navigational membrane. “We are, I am, a guest of his Majesty Paeolina the Twenty-Eighth.”
“TWENTY NINTH,” boomed the ship, but, as Saloona exerted more pressure upon the porous membrane, its violence abated and its voice dropped to a rasp
. “A chaotic and incestuous heterarchy, their lineage is damned!”
“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?”
Paytim recoiled. She clutched the Black Peal, now disguised as a mottled nosegay, to her breast.
“Why not?” she replied. “You yourself admitted that you needed to get out more. Come, this seat is uncomfortable to the extreme, my leg is badly cramped.”
The ship’s petals expanded and the fire witch disembarked, hobbling. Saloona followed. The ship trembled beneath her footsteps, and she patted it.
“There, there, don’t fret, I will be back. Wait here. I won’t be late.”
The ship gave a final disconsolate shudder. Its violet plasma-field faded to a metallic gleam. Then the entire vessel retracted into the grass, evident only by a cloudy glister as of a circle of snail-slime.
“Leave your mercurial vessel,” commanded the fire witch. “We will have our choice of all these conveyances, if we survive.” She gestured at the waiting cabriolets and winged caravans, parked alongside the bridled destriers and sleeping gorgosaurs that lined the long curving drive.
Saloona cast a last, woeful look at her ship, then continued after Paytim.
Her heart felt leaden. She could no longer pretend that her decades-long emotional abeyance had not been undone, perhaps irrevocably, by a few days’ exposure to the rod that contained the Black Peal. For the first time in her life, she found herself recalling earlier, more clement times, experiences she had not realized were avatars of happiness. A green sward dappled with hundreds of tiny, milk-white umbrellas, first spore-rich fruits of warm summer rain; the song of thrushes and rosy-breasted hawfinches; a magenta cloud peeling from the surface of the dying sun and disintegrating into violet shreds, harbinger of Earth’s final days. All these things Saloona had glimpsed, and thousands more; yet never had she shared a single one with another person.
This is regret, a voice whispered inside her skull. This is what it means to have lived alone.
“Quickly now, Saloona Morn—we’re late as it is.” The fire witch grabbed Saloona’s arm. “Here—”
The fire witch thrust a packet into her hand, turned, and hastened toward an immense carven arch that opened onto a hallway larger than any manse Saloona had ever seen. Liveried janissaries leaned against the fortress walls, and several guests milled outside the entry. A bearded wench; an obese man with wattles like the dewlaps of a lichened sloth; glass-skinned gaeants from Thrill whose faces were swathed in a white haze that obscured their features while still suggesting an enigmatic beauty.
In dismay, Saloona examined her own attire—trousers hopelessly rumpled, the absurd curling-toed slippers soaked with dew; shapeless kimono drooping from her shoulders. Only the toxic necklace seemed remotely suitable for an enterance into the Crimson Messuage. She turned to stare resentfully at the fire witch.
Paytim shrugged. “You’re with me,” she said, and approached the gate.
Saloona clenched her fist, crushing the packet Paytim had given her. Its contents were not damaged, as she discerned when she opened it and found that it contained two yellowish blobs, the beeswax earplugs Paytim had provided against the Black Pe
al. In her fury, Saloona considered grinding them into the dirt, but was reluctant to further despoil her slippers.
“Your invitation?”
Saloona looked up to see the fire witch confronting a young man costumed as a harlequin.
Paytim raised her hand. “My invitation?”
One serpentine wristlet raised itself as if to strike, then opened its mouth. Out spat a glowing ruby bead that hung in the air as a ghostly, high-pitched voice began to recite.
Paytim Noringal, Incendiary and Recusant! You exile has been revoked, following the abrupt and unfortunate death of Her Majesty Paeolina the Twenty-Eighth. His Majesty Paeolina the Twenty-Ninth hereby requests your attendance at the after-ball following his coronation.
The fire witch dropped her hand. The serpent retracted, the apparition disappeared in a sparkle of gold flame.
The harlequin inclined his head. “Paytim Noringal. Forgive me.”
“My guest, Saloona Morn, a renowned Cobalt Mountain witch,” said Paytim, and brandished her false nosegay. “Now bid us enter.”
They walked down a narrow corridor carved from the soft red stone. Antic music beckoned them, and the scents of burning hyssop, sweet clistre, tangerine peel. A short distance away, within the atrium, Saloona glimpsed revelers in sumptuous dress, garlanded with salya-blossom and ropes of garnet. As they drew near the entry, the fire witch abruptly stopped and grasped Saloona’s arm.
“I find your garb increasingly inadequate for a celebration of this magnificence—I fear your presence will draw undue attention to the both of us and prevent the implementation of our implacable charm.”
Saloona nodded, and, with precipitate steps, turned to depart. “I could not agree more, I will await you outside.”
“There is no need of that. A simple cantrap will ensure your modishness. Shut your eyes lest a disarming glitter blinds you.”
Saloona paused, disappointed, but agreed. Behind closed eyelids, she detected a subtle evocation of fireworks, then felt her clothes ruffled into slight disarray before arranging themselves into a pleasing texture.
Songs of the Dying Earth Page 54
