Songs of the Dying Earth

“I have but this instant learned of your spell.” Saloona set her unfinished tumbler of whiskey back upon the table. “I am unlikely to thwart you.”

“Then you agree to assist me?”

Saloona raised a marigold-colored eyebrow. “I am a humble farmer of psychoactive fungus, not a fire witch. I can’t be of any use to you.”

“It’s not an incendiary spell. It’s far more lethal.”

Saloona’s lips pursed oh so slightly. “I have taken a vow not to cause death by intent.”

“Any death would not appear intentional.”

“I have taken a vow,” repeated Saloona.

“I am without transport and require the use of your prism ship.”

“No one but myself may use my ship.”

“The aspic you just devoured was made with tingling spurge and an infusion of castorbean. I took a mithradatic dose two days ago.”

Outside, the prism ship made a keening sound. Saloona began to unloosen the ribbons of her pharmacopoeia bag. “I have the Ubiquitous Antidote…”

“There is no antidote. Save this—”

Paytim opened her hand. In the palm quivered what appeared to be a drop of water.

“That could be rainwater,” said Saloona. “I think you are lying.”

“I am not. You will imbibe the last of your panacea and still die convulsively.”

The ship’s lament grew so loud that the dishes in the sink began to rattle. Saloona sighed.

“Oh, very well.” She extended her tongue to Paytim’s outstretched hand, felt a drop like freezing hail upon its tip, and then a pulse of heat. She grimaced. “What is the spell?”

Paytim bade her accompany her to the ruins of the library tower.

“I found it here,” the fire witch said, her voice hushed with excitement. “I have not removed it, lest someone arrive unexpectedly and sense my discovery. Clans have fought and died over this periapt. My great-great-great- grandame sawed the windpipe from a bel canto singer who was rumored to have possession of it.”

“In his throat?”

Paytim stood on tiptoe to avoid a puddle of green muck. “None knew where the spell might reside. Throats were slashed, golden thulcimers melted down, kettledrums covered with the skin of youths and maidens. Hayland Strife swore his father strangled his mother while she slept, then restrung his lute with her hair. All for naught — all for this.”

She stopped at the foot of a crumbling stair that curved up and up into the skeletal remnants of the library tower. Swiftly, almost girlishly, she grasped Saloona’s hand and led her up the rickety steps. Around them, the structure shuddered and swayed, its exposed struts of hornbeam and maskala tusk all that remained of the tower walls.

Cold wind tangled Saloona’s hair. It carried the smells of fermenting quince-apple and moldering paper, scents overpowered by the stink of smoke and ozone as they approached the topmost level, which shook as though they stood atop a storm-tossed tree. They stepped out into a small platform, inefficiently protected by makeshift panels of oiled silk.

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.

“I am curious as to what use a musical charm might be to one as learned in the incendiary arts as yourself.”

Paytim stared at the rod in her lap. She frowned, then flicked her fingers as though they were wet. A thread of flame appeared in the air, darkened to smoke that, as it dispersed, left a fluttering fold of purple velvet that fell onto Paytim’s knee. Quickly, she draped it around the silver rod. Both rod and cloth disappeared.

“There,” she said, and Saloona noted the relief in her tone. “For a day and a night, we can mention it with impunity.” She sighed, staring down at the foothills of Cobalt Mountain. “I have been summoned to the Paeolinas’