Errantry: Strange Stories (34 page)

“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?”

Uncle Lou

Nina’s Uncle Lou lived in Hampstead, on a narrow, leafy side road that overlooked the Heath—from this vantage, a seemingly endless sweep of green, studded with ancient oaks where ravens clacked and acorns rained down to be gathered by small children and, sometimes, over-eager dogs loosed for a run. Nina could remember collecting acorns with her parents when she was that age, not much bigger than a small dog herself, and carefully piling them where squirrels could find them.

Back then, she’d found this part of London vaguely sinister. The trees, probably, so gnarled and immense and reminiscent of a disturbing illustration in one of her picture books. Now of course she knew it was an impossibly posh area, late-model hybrids and Lotuses and Volvos parked in the drives, Irish and Polish nannies pushing Silver Cross prams, women slender as herons walking terriers that could fit in the palm of Nina’s hand. Hampstead had been posh when she was a girl, too, but then the burnished brick houses and wrought-iron fences had possessed a louche air, as though the Kray twins might be up to something in the carriage house.

Nina was fourteen when she realized that rakish edge emanated not from Hampstead but from Uncle Lou himself, with his long hair, bespoke suits from Dougie Millings, and gold-tasseled Moroccan slippers that curled up at the toes like a genie’s. He was her favorite uncle—her only uncle, and her only relation except for a centenarian great-great-aunt supposedly entrenched in a retirement community on the Costa del Sol. Nina was an only child, with no first cousins and grandparents long dead. Her divorced parents were dead too, years ago when Nina was still at university.