Errantry: Strange Stories

The Return of the Fire Witch

Insensibility, melancholia, hebetude; ordinary mental tumult and more elaborate physical vexations (boils, a variety of thrip that caused the skin of an unfaithful lover to erupt in a spectacular rash, the color of violet mallows)—Saloona Morn cultivated these in her parterre in the shadow of Cobalt Mountain. A lifetime of breathing the dusky, spore-rich air of her hillside had inoculated her against the most common human frailties and a thousand others. It was twelve years since she had felt the slightest stirring of ennui or regret, two decades since she had suffered from despondency or alarm. Timidity and childish insouciance she had never known. There were some, like her nearest neighbor, the fire witch Paytim Noringal, who claimed she had never been a child; but Paytim Noringal was wrong.

Likewise, Saloona had been inoculated against rashness, optimistic buoyancy, and those minor but troubling disinclinations that can mar one’s sleep—fear of traveling beyond alpen climes, the unease that accompanied the hours-long twilight marking the months of autumn. Despair had been effaced from Saloona’s heart, and its impish cousin, desire. If one gazed into her calm, ice-colored eyes, one might think she was happy. But happiness had not stitched a single line upon her smooth face.

Imperturbability was an easy emotion to design and grow, and was surprisingly popular with her clients. So it was, perhaps, that she had inhaled great quantities of the spores of impenetrability, because that was the sole quality that she could be seen to possess. Apart, of course, from her beauty, which was noted if not legendary.

This morning, she was attempting to coax an air of distinction from a row of Splendid Blewits, mushrooms that resembled so many ink-stained thumbs. The blewits were saprophytes, their favored hosts carnivorous Deodands that Saloona enticed by bathing in the nearby river. She disabled the Deodands with a handful of dried spores from the Amethyst Deceiver, then dragged them up the hillside to her cottage. There she split each glistening, eel-black chest with an ax and sowed them with spores while their hearts still pumped. Over the course of seven or eight days, the sky-blue sacs would slowly deflate as the Splendid Blewits appeared, releasing their musty scent of woodlice and turmeric.

After a week, she could harvest the spores. These became part of an intricate though commonplace formula usually commissioned by men with aristocratic aspirations—in this instance, a dull optimate of middle years who sought to impress his much younger lover, a squireen who favored ocelex pantolons that did not flatter him.

It was no concern of hers if her clients were vain or foolish, or merely jaded by a terminal ennui that colored their judgment, much as the sun’s sanguine rays stained the sky. Still, she needed to eat. And the optimate would pay well for his false magnificence. So: arrogance and feigned modesty; a dash of servility to offset the stench of self-love… a few grains from the Splendid Blewits, and the physic would be complete.

But something was wrong.

Yesterday evening, she had unrolled nets of raw linen fine as froghair, arranging the filmy cloth beneath those indigo thumbs to catch the spores they released at nightfall. Morning should have displayed delicate spore-paintings, the blewits’ gills traced upon the nets in powdery lines, pollen-yellow, slate-blue.

Instead, the gauze bore but a single bruised smear of violet and citron. Saloona bent her head to inspect it, holding back her long marigold hair so that it wouldn’t touch the cloth.

“You needn’t bother.”

She glanced aside to see a Twk-woman astride a luna moth, hovering near her head. “And why is that?” Saloona asked.

The Twk-woman tugged at the moth’s antennae. It fluttered down and settled on one of the dwarf conifers that kept the fungus garden in shade.

“Give me salt,” she said.

Saloona reached into her pharmacopoeia bag and handed the Twk-woman a salt pod, waiting as she lashed it to the moth’s thorax. The Twk-woman straightened, adjusted her cap, then struck a pose like that of Paeolina II in his most well-known execution portrait.

“Paytim Noringal came here at moonfall and shook your spore-net. I watched unobserved. The resulting cloud gave me a coughing fit, but my leman swears I appear more distinguished than this time yestermorn.”

Saloona cocked her head. “Why would Paytim do that?”

“More I cannot say.” The luna moth rose into the air and drifted off, its bright wings lost amid the ripple of jade and emerald trees crowding the hillside. Saloona rolled up the spore-net and set it with those to be laundered. She was neither perturbed nor angered by Paytim’s action, nor curious.

Still, she had to eat.

She had promised the optimate his physic two days hence. If she captured another Deodand this evening, it would be a week before the spores were ripe. She secured the spore-nets against rain or intruders, then walked to the paddock beside her cottage and beckoned her prism ship.

“I would see Paytim Noringal,” she said.

A moment where only dappled sunlight fell through the softly waving fronds of cat-firs and spruce. Then the autumn air shimmered as with heat. There was a stinging scent of ozone and scorched metal, and the prism ship hovered before her, translucent petals unfolding so that she could spring inside.

“Paytim Noringal is a harlot and a thief,” said the prism ship in a peevish tone.

“She now appears to have become a vandal as well.” Saloona settled into the couch, mindful that her pharmacopoeia pouch was not crushed. “Perhaps she will have prepared lunch. It’s not too early, is it?”

“Paytim Noringal will poison you in your sleep.” The ship lifted into the air, until it floated above the hillside like a rainbow bubble. “If you’re hungry, there are salmon near the second waterfall, and the quince-apples are ripe.”

Saloona stared down at her little farmstead, a pied checkerboard of fungi, cerulean and mauve and creamy yellow, russet and lavender and a dozen hues that Saloona had invented, for which there was no name. “Paytim is a very fine cook,” she said absently. “I hope she will have blancmange. Or that locust jelly. Do you think she will?”

“I have no opinion on the subject.”

The ship banked sharply. Saloona laid a hand upon its controls and made a soothing sound. “There, you don’t need to worry. I have the Ubiquitous Antidote. It was a twenty-seven-year locust jelly. It was generous of her to send me some of it.”

“She means you harm.”

Saloona yawned, covering her mouth with a small freckled hand. “I will sleep, ship. Rouse me when we approach her enclosure.”

The glorious spruce and granite-clad heights of Cobalt Mountain fell away, unseen by Saloona Morn and unremarked by the prism ship, which had little use for what humans call beauty.

The fire witch’s villa nestled in a small valley near the caves of Gonder. The structure had seen better days. It had been commissioned as a seraglio by the Crimson Court lutist Hayland Strife, whose unrestrained dalliances caused three of his aggrieved lovers (one of them Paytim Noringal) to first seduce then subject him to the torment known as Red Dip. When, after seventeen days, the lutist expired, the fire witch prepared a celebratory feast for her fellow torturers, using skewers of oleander for the satay. All died convulsing before daybreak. In the decades since then, the seraglio had been damaged by earthquakes, windstorms, and, once, an ill-conceived attack by Air General Sha’s notorious Crystal Squadron.

And, of course, Paytim’s own mantic enterprises had left the gray marble walls and sinuous columns blackened with soot, and the famous tapestries singed and smoke-damaged beyond repair. She paced now before the ruins of the arras known as The Pursuit of the Vinx, heedless of the geckos and yellow-snouted lemurs that clambered across the backdrop to one of her more notable love affairs.

Paytim disdained magic to enhance her charms, though she had for many decades employed the Nostrum of Prodigious Regeneration to retain the dew of youth. She remained a remarked beauty. Like her neighbor, she was flame-haired, though Paytim’s braid was brazen tigerlily to Saloona’s pale margiold, and Paytim’s eyes were green. Her skin was the bluish-white of weak milk and bore numerous scars where she had been burned while conjuring, repairing the bouche a feu, or carelessly removing a pot from the oven. The scars were a mark of pride rather than shame; also a warning against overconfidence, in particular when dealing with souffles, or basilisks.

Today, her thoughts wandered along their customary paths: concoting a receipt for the season’s bountiful quince-apple harvest; estimating when her young basilisk might be successfully mated; brooding upon various old wounds and offenses. She paused in her pacing, withdrew a shining vial like a ruby teardrop from the pocket of her trousers, and, with a frown, gazed into it.

A dark shape, so deep a red that it was almost black, coiled and uncoiled within the vial. At intervals, the shape cohered into the image of a gysart in scarlet and saffron motley, which would extend its arms—in joy or anguish, she could not say—then, in a voice pitched like a bat’s, exhort her.

“Paytim Noringal, Incendiary and Recusant! Your exile has been revoked, following the abrupt and unfortunate death of Her Majesty Paeolina the Twenty-Eighth. His Majety Paeolina the Twenty-Ninth hereby requests your attendance at the after-ball following his coronation. Regrets only to be tendered by…”

Here the harlequin doubled over in a spasm and began once more to writhe.

Paytim’s frown smoothed into a small smile: for anyone who knew her, a far more alarming sight. She crossed the chamber to a low table, pressed a button that caused a cylindrical steel cage to rise from the floor. The young basilisk slept inside. Minute jets of flame flickered around its nostrils as it exhaled, also a faint sulfurous stink.

The vial bore a summons, not a request. Paytim’s exile had been voluntary, although, in fact, she loathed all of the Paeolinas, going back to their progenitor, a court dancer who claimed to have invented the gavot.

His new Majesty, Paeolina XXIX, was indulging a customarily vulgar display of power. When Paytim had been at court, she had noted the lascivious glances he directed her way. The looks had been easy to ignore at the time—the present Paeolina had been little more than a spindle-necked boy. Now his attentions would be more difficult to deflect.

Despite this knowledge, she had already decided to attend the coronation’s after-ball. She had not traveled beyond the mountains in some time. Also, she had recently made a discovery, an arcane and unusual spell which she hoped to implement, although its success was dependent upon Paytim receiving some assistance.

Not, however, from the monad gysart. She lifted her hand and gazed impassively into the vial, then nudged the steel cage with her foot. The basilisk stirred. It made a soft croaking sound, opened its mouth in a yawn that displayed a fiery tongue and molten throat.

“Inform His Majesty that I will be delighted to attend,” announced Paytim. “May I bring a guest?”

The mote ceased its wriggling to regard her with bright pinprick eyes. Flashes of silver phosphorescence overtook the whorls of crimson and jet. The gysart shuddered, then nodded.

“In that case,” said Paytim, “Please inform His Majesty that I will be accompanied by Saloona Morn.”

“Your reply has been registered with the equerry of invitations. You are welcome to bring one guest. Further instructions will be—”

Paytim’s eyes narrowed. With one long finger, she flicked open a slot in the lid of the basilisk cage. Its inhabitant scrambled to its feet and stretched out its neck expectantly, as she held the ruby vial above the opening. A nearly inaudible shriek stirred the chamber, startling the geckos so that they skittered back behind the tapestry as the vial dropped into the basilisk’s mouth, and, with a burst of acrid steam, disappeared.

From the air, Paytim’s villa resembled a toy that had been kicked to bits by a petulant child. Ivy and snowmoss covered heaps of hand-painted tiles fallen from the roof. The entire east wing had collapsed, burying solarium and manta pool. The collection of musical scrolls Hayland Strife had painstakingly assembled when not dandling some fawn-eyed courtesan was ash, destroyed when lightning struck the library tower. Its skeletal remains rose above the north wing like a blackened scaffold. Spiderwebs choked the famed boxwood maze, and the orchards of pomegranate trees and senna grew wild and blackly tangled. Saloona spied a thrasher’s nest atop a quince-apple, the white bones of some unfortunate snagged in its branches like a broken kite.

Only the kitchen-wing was intact. Smoke streamed from its five chimneys, and the windows gleamed. Troilers wheeled through the herb and root-vegetable gardens, harvesting choi and sweet basil and yams. Saloona gazed down, her mouth filling with saliva.

“Poison,” hissed the prism ship. “Ergot, chokecherry, baneberry, tansy!”

“Fah.” Saloona waved a hand, signaling that they should descend. “Remain in the garden and do not antagonize her. I smell braised pumpkin.”

Other, less attractive odors assailed her as she approached the dilapidated household, scents associated with the fire witch’s metier: sulphur, burnt cloth, scorched hair, gunpowder; the odd sweetish reek of basilisks, reminiscent of barbecued peaches and fish. Paytim stood at the entrance to the kitchen wing, her wild hair barely restrained by a shimmering web of black garnets, her trousers flecked with pumpkin seeds and soot.

“Mother’s sister’s favored child.” Paytim used the familiar, if archaic, salutation favored by the fourth caste of witches. “Will you join me for luncheon? Port-steeped pumpkin, larks-tongues in aspic, I just picked some fresh cheeps. And I saved some of the locust jelly. I remember how much you liked it.”

Saloona dipped her head. “Just a bite. And only if we share it.”

“Of course.” Paytim smiled, revealing the carven placebit she’d made of the lutist’s finger-bone and implanted in her right eye-tooth. “Please, come in.”

Over lunch, they made polite conversation. Saloona inquired after the newest litter of basilisks and feigned dismay to learn that only one had survived. Paytim wondered innocently if the prism ship had been confiscated during the most recent wave of enforced vehicular inspections.

When the dishes were cleared and the last of the locust jelly spooned from a shared bowl, Paytim poured two jiggers of amber whiskey. She removed a pair of red-hot pokers from the kitchen athanor, plunged one into each jigger, then dropped the spent pokers into the sink. She handed a steaming whiskey to Saloona, and, without hesitation, downed her own.

Saloona stared at her unsteady reflection in the simmering liquid. When it cooled, she took a sip.

“What a remarkable cook you are,” she said. “This is utterly delectable. And the aspic of larks-tongue was sublime. Why did you shake my sporenets last moonfall?”

Paytim smiled unconvincingly. “I long for company. I wished to invite you for luncheon, and feared you would refuse an invitation.”

Saloona thought on this. “Probably I would have,” she conceded. “But your invitation has cost me a week’s worth of spores I need for a client’s physic. I can’t afford to—”

“Your cantrap is a childish game,” exclaimed Paytim. She could forestall her habitual impatience for an hour, no more. “I have discovered a charm of immense power, which Gesta Restille would have slain her own infant to possess! Eight sorcerers and twice that many witches died in their efforts to retrieve this spell. Do not think you can thwart me, Saloona Morn!”

“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 wanings 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’ court to attend the coronation after-ball.”

“I was unaware the Queen was ill.”

“The Queen was not aware of it either,” replied Paytim. “Her brother poisoned her and seized control of the Crimson Messuage. He has impertinently invited me to attend his coronation as Paeolina the Twenty-Ninth.”

“An occasion for celebration. The charm is then a gift for him?”

“Only insofar as death is that benefaction offered by envious gods to humankind. My intent is to destroy the entire lineage of Paeolina, so that I will never again be subjected to their abhorrent notions of festivity.”

“It seems excessive,” suggested Saloona.

“You have never eaten with them.”

For several minutes, they sat without talking. The prism ship hummed high above the trees, arrowing homeward. A red-dimmed fog enveloped the sky as the dying sun edged toward the horizon, and the first mal-de-mutes began to keen far below.

Finally, Saloona turned to the fire witch, her gray eyes guileless. “And you feel that this—spell—will be more provident than your own fire charms?”

“I feel nothing. I know that this is a charm of great power that relies upon some subtle manipulation of harmonics, rather than pyrotechny. In the unlikely event that there are survivors besides ourselves, or an inquest, I will not be an obvious suspect.”

“And my innocence?”

A flurry of sparks as Paytim made a dismissive gesture and pointedly looked away from Saloona. “You are a humble fungalist, awed by the very mention of the Crimson Messuage and its repugnant dynasty. Your innocence is irrefutable.”

The mal-de-mutes’ wails rose to a fervid pitch as the prism ship began its long descent to Saloona’s farmstead, and the humble fungalist gazed thoughtfully into the enveloping darkness.

Paytim was understandably disgruntled over the destruction of her home, and, to Saloona’s chagrin, showed little interest in preparing breakfast the next morning, or even assisting her hostess as Saloona banged about the tiny kitchen, looking for clean or cleanish skillets and the bottle of vitrina oil she’d last used three years before.

“Your cooking skills seem to have atrophied,” Paytim observed. She sat at the small twig table, surrounded by baskets of dried fungus and a shining array of alembics, pipettes, crucibles, and the like, along with discarded circuits and motherboards for the prism ship, and a mummified mouse. Luminous letters scrolled across a panel beside the table, details and deadlines related to various charms and receipts, several of which were due to be completed the next morning. “I miss my basilisk.”

“My skills never approached your own. It seems a waste of time to improve them.” Saloona located the bottle of vitrina oil, poured a small amount into a rusty saucepan, and adjusted the heating coil. When the oil spattered, she tossed in several large handfuls of dove-like tricholomas and some fresh ramps, then poked them with a spoon. “You have yet to advise me as to how I will address the customer whose charm you ruined.”

Paytim scowled. The divining rod sat upon the table beside her, still wrapped in its Velvet Bolt of Invisibility. She waved her hand above it tentatively, waited until the resulting flurry of silver sparks disappeared before replying. “That flaccid oaf? I have seen to him.”

“How?”

“An ustulating spell directed at his paramour’s bathing chamber. The squireen has been reduced to ash. The optimate’s need to retain his affection has therefore diminished.”

Saloona’s nostrils flared. “That was cruel and unwarranted,” she said, and tossed another bunch of ramps into the skillet.

“Pah. The optimate has already taken another lover. You are being uncharacteristically sentimental.”

Saloona inhaled sharply, then turned back to the stove. Paytim was correct: this was more emotion than Saloona had displayed, or felt, in decades.

The realization unnerved her. And her dismay was not assuaged by the thought that this unaccustomed flicker of sensation had manifested itself after Paytim had uttered aloud the names of the harmonic spell that was, for the moment, contained by the Velvet Bolt.

Saloona shook the saucepan with more vigor than necessary. Since that moment in the tower, she continued to hear a low, tuneless humming in her ears, so soft she might have mistaken it for the song of bees, or the night wind stirring the firs outside her bedroom window.

But it was only late afternoon. There was no wind. There were no bees, which were unnecessary to propagate mushrooms and other fungi.

Yet the noise persisted. Saloona almost imagined that the humming grew more urgent, almost minatory.

“Do you hear that?” she asked Paytim. “A sound like hornets in the eaves?”

The fire witch cast her a look of such disdain that Saloona turned back to her stove.

Too late: the ramps were scorched. Hastily she dumped everything onto a single pewter dish and set it on the twig table.

“This—charm.” Saloona pulled a stool alongside Paytim and began to eat. “Its potency seems great. I don’t understand why you have need of my feeble powers to implement it at the Crimson Messuage.”

Paytim regarded the mushrooms with distaste. “Your false modesty is unbecoming, Saloona. Also, I need your ship.” She glanced out the window to where a maroon glow marked the onset of dawn. “The Crimson Messuage is gravely suspicious of me, as you well know, but that’s never stopped them from wanting me to join their retinue as Court Incendiary. In addition, I have a torturous history with this particular Paeolina. He made disagreeable suggestions to me many years ago, and, when rebuffed, grew surly and resentful. I am certain that his invitation will lead me into a trap.”

“Why didn’t you refuse it, then?”

“It would merely have been tendered at another time. Or else he might have attempted to take me by force. I tire of their game, Saloona. I would like to end it now, and devote myself to more pleasurable activities. My basilisk.” She dabbed at a sizzling tear. “And my cooking…”

A sideways glance at Saloona became a more meaningful look directed at the blackened saucepan. Saloona swallowed a mouthful of tricholomas.

“I still don’t—”

Paytim banged her fist against the table. “You will be my Velvet Bolt! I need you to sow clouds of unknowing, of rapture, forgetfulness, desire, what-have-you—whatever you wish, whatever distractions you can conjure from this—”

She stormed across the cottage to the window, and pointed at the ranks of neatly tended mushroom beds, flushed with the first rays of morning. “Disarm the Paeolinas and their subordinates, so that we enter the court unaccosted, and with the Black Peal intact. During the evening’s entertainment, I will enact the spell: their corrupt dynasty will fall at last!”

Saloona looked doubtful. “What is to keep us from succumbing as well?”

“That too will be your doing.” The fire witch cast a sly glance at the pharmacopoeia bag hanging at Saloona’s waist. “You possess the Ubiquitous Antidote, do you not?”

Saloona ran her fingers across the leather pouch, and felt the familiar outline of the crystal vial inside it. “I do. But very little remains of last year’s tincture, and I must wait another month before I can harvest the spores to infuse more.”

Paytim sniffed.

Saloona finished the last of the mushrooms and pushed aside her platter. The faint pricklings of emotion had not subsided when her stomach was filled. If anything, she now felt even more distressed, and ever more reluctant to commit to this hapless venture. Paytim’s must be a very powerful spell, to so quickly undo decades of restraint and self-containment. It would be dangerous if the fire witch were aware of Saloona’s sudden lability.

“You require the use of my prism ship and my fungal electuaries. I remain uncertain of the benefits to myself.”

“Ungrateful slut! I saved your life!”

“After you attempted to wrest it from me!”

Paytim tapped distractedly at the windowpane. The glass grew molten beneath her fingertips, then congealed again, so that the view outside blurred. “The robust holdings of the Crimson Messuage will be ours.”

“I am content here.”

“The Crimson Court has a legendary kitchen. Too long have you languished here among your toadstools and toxic chanterells, Saloona Morn! At great danger to myself, I have secured you an invitation so that you may sample the Paeolinas’ nettlefish froth and their fine baked viands, also a cellar known throughout the Metarin Mountains for vintages as rare as they are temulent. Still you remain skeptical of my motivations.”

Saloona rose and went to stand beside the fire witch. Small flaws now flecked the window, like tiny craters or starbursts. The scents of sauteed mushrooms and burnt ramps faded into those of ozone and hot sand. Her hair rose slightly, tingling as with electricity. If she were to refuse the fire witch, Paytim was likely to exact a disagreeable vindication.

“I will do what I can.” Saloona pressed a palm against the glass. “I have heard that the Paeolinas’ kitchen is extensive and the chef’s repertoire noteworthy if idiosyncratic. But if I fail…”

“If you fail, you will die knowing that you have tasted nettlefish froth, a liqueur more captivating than locust jelly. And you will have heard the Seventeenth Iteration of Blase’s ‘Azoic Notturno.’ Some have claimed that death is a small price to pay for such a serenade.”

“I have never been a music lover.”

“Nor I,” said Paytim. She laid her hand upon Saloona’s shoulder. “Come now. Time for a proper breakfast.”

By the morning of the after-ball, Saloona had devised a half-dozen charms and nostrums of varying power. The fire witch wanted nothing to interfere with her deployment of the Black Peal: her plan, therefore, was to sow the air with sores and spells that would discourage or retard any effort to restrain her once inside the court. The most severe was a spell of Impulsive Corrosion, caused by spores of panther caps, pink mycenas, and fragile elf cups infused with azalea honey and caladium. The rest made ample use of fungi that caused convulsions, temporary paralysis, hallucinations, reverse metamorphosis, spasms, twitches, and mental confusions.

Saloona refused to create any charm that might induce fatality. Still, for many years a favored entertainment had been researching the means by which her crop could depopulate large areas of the surrounding mountains. She grew poisonous mushrooms alongside their benign and sometimes all-but-indistinguishable relatives, and took pride in recognizing the subtle differences between, say, the devil’s bolete and its honey-scented cousin, the summer bolete. Her longtime sangfroid had made this a macabre but innocent pleasure. It had never crossed her mind that she might someday harvest spores and stems and caps from this toxic wonderland.

She took no delight now in concocting her poisons. More alarmingly, she did feel guilt. This too she associated with the long echo of the Black Peal. It must be a most powerful charm, to overcome the emotional inoculation she had experienced from handling so many psychotropic substances for so long.

“It seems inappropriate to sow such tumult among innocent guests,” she observed to the fire witch.

“I assure you, no one within the Crimson Messuage is innocent.”

“I am innocent!”

Paytim held up a deadly gaelerina, a fatal mushroom which Saloona claimed tasted exquisite. “A dubious statement. Innocent? You use that word too often and inappropriately. ‘Naive’ would be more accurate. Or ‘hypocritical.’”

“Hypocritical or not, we will be fully reliant upon your Ubiquitous Antidote,” said Saloona, whose efforts to create a spell to cause temporary deafness had been ineffectual. “If this spell is as powerful as it seems…”

“So few spells are not reversed by your marvelous restorative,” replied Paytim in silky tones. “You are certain there is sufficient to protect us both?”

Saloon removed the crystal vial from her pouch. A small amount of glaucous liquid remained, which the fire witch regarded dubiously. “There is enough to preserve us, if the Black Peal does not prove resistant. Its potency is such that a very small amount is effective. Yes, there is enough—but no more than that. We’ll be cutting it fine, and not a drop can be wasted.”

“If necessary, we can stop our ears with beeswax.”

“If that succeeds, this is a far more feeble charm than previously suggested,” said Saloona, and replaced the vial. Paytim Noringal said nothing; only stood before a deeply recessed window and stared mournfully at the dark line of spruce and cat-fir that marked the horizon.

She was looking for her basilisk. Saloona considered a sharp retort about the unlikelihood of its return.

But pity stayed her tongue, and apprehension at the thought of annoying the fire witch, whose temper was formidable. Saloona had never seen her neighbor exhibit much fondness for other humans. Paytim’s treatment of her former lover, the Court lutist, was not anomalous.

Yet she displayed great, even excessive, affection for the basilisks she bred. They were lovely creatures, otter-sized and liquid in their movements, with glossy, sharply defined scales in vibrant shades of coral, cinnabar, chocolate-brown, and orange; their tails whiplike and their claws sharp enough to slice quince-apple rinds. They had beautiful, faceted eyes, a clear topaz yellow. Unlike their mythological counterparts, their gaze was not lethal. Their breath, however, was fiery as an athanor, and could turn sand to glass at a distance of three paces.

They were almost impossible to tame. To Saloona’s knowledge, only the fire witch had ever succeeded in doing so. Her affection was returned by her charges, who consumed whatever was offered to them, living creatures or inert matter, but showed a marked preference for well-seasoned hardwood. Saloona imagined that was why Paytim’s gaze returned to the nearby forest, despite the inferior quality of the evergreens.

“Perhaps it will find its way here.” Saloona wiped fungal detritus from her fingertips. “You have always claimed that they have a well-developed homing instinct.”

“Perhaps.” Paytim sighed. “But this is not its home. And in a few hours, we depart.”

Saloona touched her hand. She hoped the gesture was reassuring—she was out of practice with such things. She very much needed the fire witch’s assistance during this final stage of assembling each spell. Since breakfast, they had worked side by side in the small, steel-and-glass-clad laboratory that stood in the darkest corner of Saloona’s farmstead, deep within a grove of towering black spruce.

There, beneath glowing tubes of luminar and neon, Saloona utilized an ancient ion atomizer that reduced spores and toxic residues to a nearly invisible dust. The fire witch then used Saloona’s telescoping syringes to inject the toxins into a series of jewel-toned vesicles. Paytim strung these gemlike beads onto a chain of finest platinum, which would adorn Saloona when she entered the after-ball. Saloona and Paytim had taken mithradatic doses of each poison.

When the last vesicle had been strung, they returned to Saloona’s cottage. There she decanted half of what remained of the Ubiquitous Antidote into a vial and gave it to the fire witch. Paytim then organized lunch. Saloona continued to express reservations regarding the night to come.

“I received no personal invitation to this celebration. Surely they will not be expecting me.”

Paytim stood beside the stove, preparing two perfect omelets laced with sauteed ramps and oryx bacon. “My response to the court was clear: you will be my guest.”

“I haven’t left this place for nine years.”

“You are well overdue for a journey.” Paytim slid an omelet onto a copper plate and set it in front of Saloona, alongside a thimble-sized lymon tartlet and a glass of fresh pepper jelly. “There. Eat it while it’s hot.”

“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 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.

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 blind 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.

“There,” said Paytim with satisfaction.

Saloona opened her eyes to find her inadequate garments replaced by folds of ice-colored silk and her hair enclosed by a stiff taffeta net in the shape of a chambered nautilus. Instead of the absurd tasseled slippers, her feet were shod in silver-toed mules trimmed with living gleamants—equally ridiculous, but far more modish. The toxic necklace, at last, seemed well-partnered with the rest of her wardrobe. Instinctively, her hand reached for her waist. She was reassured by the touch of her pharmacopoeia pouch, now disguised as an eeftskin reticule, and her fingers traced the familiar outline of the crystal vial within that contained the Ubiquitous Antidote.

“Come now,” said Paytim. “Perhaps the King himself will desire you as a partner in the gavot.”

Saloona paled at this suggestion, but her companion had already swept into the atrium. As Saloona followed, she was assailed by additional fragrant odors and a raunchier, underlying smell of sweat, along with strains of laughter and genial music. Overhead, a heaven’s-worth of lumieres shone in crepuscular eddies of violet and firefly green. Dancers engaged in the complex turns of Spur-Your-Master, or coupled recklessly in recessed alcoves where they were observed by crapulous onlookers sipping canisters of nettlefish liqueur and crimson lager.

“Is the King in evidence?” inquired Saloona.

Paytim gestured diffidently at a gilded platform. “He disports himself there, clad in the Punctilious Trousers that are his mark of office. As Earth has declined into senescence and valetudinarian decay, so too have the Paeolinas. Last of a debauched line: none will mourn his death.”

Saloona observed an urceolate figure who held a jeroboam of frothing liquor. Bedraggled yellow feathers clung to his distended torso. The remnants of a lacy filibeg clung to the twisted circlets of the Crimson crown, its garnets glinting dully, and the Punctilious Trousers bore unpleasant stains.

Still the King capered and shrieked with laughter. He staggered between equally bibulous guests who shoved him back and forth as though he were a dandle-ball.

“It is not an impressive sight,” Saloona concurred. “Yet surely not all of these assembled are without virtue, and deserving of destruction?”

“You think not? See there! Lalula Lindinii, as debased as she is lovely behind that wimple—she skewered her entire family as they slept, then fed their corpses to the grues. And there, milky-faced Wanfredo della Ruiz, who shares his bed with a gloth. And there, the conjoined twins Dil and Dorla Klaxen-Haw, whose erotic contortions involve mewling infants and a plasmatic whipsaw. There is not a one here whom Zandoggith the Just would not condemn to ceaseless torment, if She were among us now.”

“How then will we escape punishment?” asked Saloona. “You have yet to reveal your stratagem for our escape.”

“Fortunate indeed are we that Zandoggith is not in evidence.” The fire witch ran her fingers across the false bijoux at Saloona’s throat, glancing at the malign nosegay in her other hand. She then gave Saloona a crafty look, and pointed across the crowded room. “I believe you will find refreshment at that banquette. Fortify yourself with nettlefish froth, then sow your fungal confusions amongst this swaggering crowd. I will perform an appraisal of this space and its egress; after that, the Black Peal will ring, and you and I can manage a hasty departure.”

Before Saloona could protest, Paytim darted into the crowd and disappeared from sight. Saloona wasted several minutes searching for her in vain, before deciding to avail herself of the Paeolinas’ noted gastronomy.

This she found to be disappointing. The black-backed porpoise infused with essence of quince-apple and juniper was cloying, the matalusk-hooves insipid, and a locust blancmange grossly inferior to Paytim Noringal’s jelly.

Only the nettlefish froth exceeded her expectations, a pinkish liqueur of wonderful clarity and astringent flavor. Three glasses eased her anxiety to the extent that Saloona momentarily forgot the reason for her presence at the celebration: she wandered listlessly among the throng, enjoying glimpses of her own silk-clad form in the highly polished walls, and the occasional admiring glance she received from an inebriated courtier or dame.

It was after one such had made excessively libidinous suggestions to her that Saloona, aggrieved, unclasped the necklace, muttered an activating charm, and crushed the first of the toxic vesicles beneath his nostrils.

“A sumptuous odor,” the courtier leered. Immediately, he loosed a disarming squeal and fell onto his back, wriggling arms and legs agitatedly before expiring into a sudden, deep slumber.

Saloona regarded her handiwork, then began to make her way across the crowded atrium. Every few steps, she would remove another vesicle, invoke the appropriate incantation, and crush the gemlike receptable between her fingertips. She did not pause to look back until she had made a circuit of the room and deployed every fungal poison. Only then did she turn and, with a self-satisfied smile, note the startling perturbation in the crowd.

First one and then another merrymaker leapt into the air, thrashing and whirling as with St. Vitus Dance, and as quickly dropped to the floor, insensible. Others froze in place like costumed statuary. Still others began to laugh with rash hilarity, then, with maddened eyes, tore off their garments and raced through the atrium, crowing like cockerels and gargle-doves.

“Sweet Bentha’s hips, the King’s lunacy has contaged them!” a courtier exclaimed.

Saloona stood on tiptoe, and observed a tall figure racing toward the royal dais. The fire witch dashed onto the platform, flinging aside dancers and musicians and janissaries until she stood before the King, who screamed with laughter when he saw her.

“Here’s a cormorant to be caught by tickling!” he cried, and attempted to grasp her by the waist. “Long have I awaited your return to our jolly company! Come, dance with me, sweet sot!”

“Cymbolus Paeolina!”

The fire witch’s voice rang through the atrium. Gasps could be heard at the sound of the King’s given name, and a few improvident guffaws. But the King only swayed back and forth, laughter burbling from his flaccid lips as the fire witch raised her arm.

“Witness now the destruction of your witless lineage!” she cried. “Let bones and sinews be the harmonium upon which your last gavot is played!”

Dreadful light candled Paytim Noringal’s eyes. Her wristlets melted into strands of hissing gold; the basilisk comb bared its teeth. She lifted her hand, displaying a wand of glaring adamant, aflicker with abstruse numerals and unknown symbols. A fiery line traversed its length, and the rod split in two parts, each ablaze with clefs and breves and mediants, forking clews and fabrudans; every one an eidolon of some arcane note or tongue or hymn.

Saloona blinked, too stunned to flee or even move, as with a piercing cry the fire witch raised the wands above her head and struck one against the other. Silence, save for the ragged breathing of the King.

It is a fraud, thought Saloona, and from within the crowd heard similar sighs and expressions of relief.

Quickly, she turned to go, deeming this an expeditious time to return to her ship, when from somewhere high above sounded a single note of penetrating sweetness.

Saloona froze, enraptured. Such a note might Estragal have blown upon his yellow reed when he first played morning to the Earth, and roused dawn from deep within the dreaming sea. She began to weep, recalling a girlhood afternoon when she fell asleep among a field of coral fungus and fairy clubs, and woke to a sky painted with shooting stars.

Never had she heard such music! The lingering note suffused her with benevolence, a taste as of hydromel upon her tongue; and every face she saw reflected her own, mingling rapture and regret, desire and satiation; transport and pensive yearning.

All save Paytim Noringal’s. With acrobatic intensity, she dismounted from the dais, paused to imbibe the contents of a small vial, and fled toward the door.

Saloona frowned. Her rapture faded into a dim memory of something less pleasant, a more astringent flavor upon her tongue…

The Ubiquitous Antidote.

Frantically, she sought within the folds of her silken gown for the reticule containing her pharmacopoeia. Her fingers tore at its ribands, dug inside to retrieve the crystal vial. Saloona unstoppered it and brought it to her mouth.

Only a droplet touched her tongue. In disbelief, she tapped it against her lips, then inspected it more closely.

The vial had been emptied.

Perfidious fire witch!

Too late, Paytim’s betrayal grew plain: she had insisted that Saloona come along solely to make use of her prism ship and steal her share of the Antidote, doubling her own protection. At this moment, she would be stealing another conveyance outside, while her naive neighbor perished from Paytim’s treachery. Desperately, Saloona sucked at the crystal tube, attempting to absorb some particle of resistance before she succumbed to the Black Peal.

But even now a new and haunting tune replaced the melancholy note. Fairy horns and tambours, flutes and sonorous oblelloes joined a bolero that swelled and quickened then died away, only to resume in a frenzied, even brutal, cadence. Saloona stumbled toward the room’s perimeter, as around her dazed revelers batted fretfully at the air and stumbled past each other, like children playing Find Your Lady.

“Variana! Oh fair Variana, what betrayal is this?”

“Never shall I part from you, Capiloso, you have my heart.”

“Essik Longstar, oh my poor sweet child…”

The air rang with wrenching cries: all mistook the living for those long dead. The music dissolved, only to return, with renewed and clamorous vigor. Mothers lamented slain children; betrayed lovers gouged their own cheeks and breasts. Janissaries rent their livery and grappled, mistaking colleagues for adulterous sweethearts, and Saloona paused in her ill-timed departure.

She knew this wild lullaby—surely it had been sung to her in her cradle? She hesitated, and her feet began to pick out a series of complex steps upon the tiled floor.

Yet some speck of the Ubiquitous Antidote still moved within her. She kicked the unwieldy silver-toed mules from her feet and fought her way to the wall. There she paused for breath, and gazed about the atrium for sign of Paytim Noringal.

The fire witch had disappeared. On the royal dais, groping masquers surrounded the King, who stood with mouth agape as though to catch the cascading notes upon his tongue. Trills and subtle drumbeats, a twanging volley of zithers and bandores, sweet mandols and violones—all swelled to a deafening roar, as the savage rhapsody employed the bewitched guests as its orchestra.

The King’s gaping mouth unhinged. Strands of pliant flesh unfurled from his sallow face to form a crimson lyre. Ribs sprang from his chest like tines and commenced to play a mesmerizing glissando. With an echo of kettle-drums, his skull toppled from its gory spindle and cracked, and the garnet-studded Crimson Crown rolled across the tiles.

So it was that every guest in that company became an instrument upon which Blase’s notturno played—all save Saloona Morn. Sanguine piccolos shrilled, accompanied by lyres strung with sinew and hair, the clatter of skull castanets and sternum manichords tapped by fleshless fingers. An audience of one heard this macabre symphony, sustained by the power of even the small amount of the Ubiquitous Antidote she had been able to consume; though gladly would she have missed the performance.

The infernal symphony swelled to a crescendo. With each note, a fragment of the fortress toppled, a rain of crimson stone and painted tiles crashing around Saloona’s motionless form. Overwrought as she was, she could not move; only watch as the fortress was reduced to a vast ruin of cinnabar and garnet, slick with blood, where the gleam-ants fed. So ended the rancorous line of Paeolina, which had begun with a gavot.

The Black Peal ebbed. The sanguine orchestra fell silent. Saloona Morn started, her ears throbbing, and with alarm noted what remained of the edifice crumbling behind her. The wall fell away, to reveal a violet turbulence.

“RUINATION CATACLYSM DOOM DOOM DOOM.”

With a cry, Saloona recognized her prism ship, petals unfolding as it hovered in the dust-choked air. She lunged into it with a gasp.

“Thank you!”

The ship’s plasma field surrounded her. Saloona pressed her hand upon its membrane to impart the proper coordinates.

But the ship had already banked. Silently, Saloona stared down at the wreckage of the Crimson Messuage. Cabrielots and destriers lay buried beneath smoking heaps of stone. Of the fortress, nothing remained save a glowering wreck of vermilion rock wreathed in somber flame. Despite the fire witch’s perfidy, Saloona sighed in remorse.

“I told you so,” said the prism ship, vexed, and bore her home.

The ship returned just as magenta dawn stained the sky above the foothills, and the last mal-de-mutes roosted, whispering and fluttering, among the topmost branches of the evergreens.

“You may sleep now.” Saloona touched the ship’s membrane. It whirred softly, then settled into a quiescent state.

Saloona hopped out. The mossy ground felt deliciously cool beneath her bare feet. She lifted the hem of her silken gown, hastening toward her cottage, then wrinkled her nose.

A short distance from the front door, the ground was charred. Moss and lichen had been burned away in a circle an ell in diameter. Saloona looked around, confused, until she spotted a small sinuous form crouching behind a blackened rock. She winced.

The basilisk.

Saloona bit her lip, then held out her hand and made reassuring chuffing sounds. The basilisk hissed weakly, tail erect with distrust, turned and slunk toward the forest, a trail of singed bracken in its wake.

In the days that followed, Saloona attempted to lure it with tidbits she thought might be enticing—spruce planks, knots of hardwood, the rails of a broken chair. The basilisk only stared at her reproachfully from the edge of the trees, and sometimes scorched her spore nets for spite.

I’m surprised it hasn’t starved by now, she thought one chilly afternoon, and began to assemble another desultory meal for herself. Moments later, a commotion rose from the prism ship’s paddock.

“HALLOO! BEWARE! EN GARDE!”

Saloona peered out the window. A tall, black-clad figure strode through the mossy field, the basilisk in its arms.

Saloona met her at the door. “Mother’s sister’s favored child,” she said, and watched in trepidation as Paytim stooped to let the basilisk run free inside the cottage. “Your arrival comes as a surprise.”

Paytim ignored her. She straightened to gaze with disapproval at the usual farrago of unwashed dishes and dried fungus scattered around the kitchen. Her clothing was disheveled, her black robes smirched with ash and rust-colored stains. There were several unhealed scars upon her arms and face. After a moment, she turned to Saloona.

“You have a wholesome look,” she observed coolly. A second, garnet placebit now winked beside the one formed of the lutist’s fingerbone. “Your antidote is indeed more powerful than I imagined.”

Saloona said nothing. The basilisk nosed at a basket of dried tree-ears, sending up a plume of smoke. When Saloona tried to shoo it off, it yawped at her. Yellow flames emerged from its mouth and she quickly retreated.

Paytim shot Saloona an imperious look, then marched across the kitchen to the hearth.

“Well then.” With a flick of her hand the fire witch ignited the cookstove, then grabbed a saucepan. “Who’s ready for lunch?”