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
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.
“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 Peal. 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.
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
