George Martin: Songs of the Dying Earth

“As soon remove my skin,” said Molloqos the Melancholy.

The woman shivered in his arms. “You talk so strangely. You frighten me.” Gooseprickles covered her arms. “What do you have in your hand?”

“Surcease.” He stabbed her through the throat. She sank to her knees, hissing. When her mouth opened, her fangs gleamed in the half-light, long and pointed. Her blood ran black down her neck. A leucomorph, he judged, or something stranger still. The wilds were full of queer things now; mongrels fathered by demons on Deodands, spawn of succubi and incubi, mock men grown in vats, bog-born monsters made of rotting flesh.

Bending over her pale corpse, Molloqos the Melancholy brushed her hair back from her cheek and kissed her; once upon the brow, once upon each cheek, deeply on the mouth. Life left her with a shudder and entered him with a gasp, as warm as a summer wind in the days of his youth when the sun burned brighter and laughter could still be heard in the cities of men.

When she was cold, he spoke the words of Cazoul’s Indenture, and her corpse opened its eyes again. He bid her rise, to stand sentry while he slept. A great weariness was on him, but it would not do to be taken unawares. He would have other visitors before the night was done, he did not doubt.

He dreamt of Kaiin, shimmering behind its high white walls.

A chill hung in the night air as Chimwazle slipped from the inn through a side door. A grey mist was rising off the tarn, and he could hear the waters stirring down below, as if something were moving in the shallows. Crouching low, he peered this way and that, his bulbous eyes moving beneath his floppy cap, but he saw no sign of Twk-men. Nor did he hear the soft ominous trill of dragonfly wings.

They had not found him, then. That was good. It was time he was away. That there were grues and ghouls and erbs out in the wood he did not doubt, but he would sooner take his chances with them than with the necromancer. A few brisk licks of the whip, and his Pooner would outrace them all. And if not, well, Polymumpho had more meat on him than Chimwazle. Grinning ear to ear, he loped down the rocky hummock, his belly wobbling.

Halfway down, he noticed that his cart was gone. “Infamous Pooner!” he cried, stumbling in shock. “Thief! Thief! Where is my cart, you lice-ridden lump?” No one gave reply. At the foot of the steps, there was nothing to be seen but a sinister iron palaquin and four huge Deodands with flesh as black as night, standing knee deep in the tarn. The waters were rising, Chimwazle realized suddenly. The Tarn House had become an island.

Fury pushed aside his fear. Deodands relished the taste of man flesh, it was known. “Did you eat my Pooner?” he demanded.

“No,” said one, showing a mouth full of gleaming ivory teeth, “but come closer, and we will gladly eat you.”

“Pah,” said Chimwazle. Now that he was closer, he could see that the Deodands were dead. The necromancer’s work, he did not doubt. He licked his ear lobe nervously and a cunning ploy occured to him. “Your master Molloqos has commanded you to carry me to Kaiin with all haste.”

“Yessss,” hissed the Deodand. “Mollogos commands and we obey. Come, clamber on, and we’ll away.”

Something about the way he said that made Chimwazle pause to reconsider the wisdom of his plan. Or perhaps it was the way all four of the Deodands began to gnash those pointed teeth. He hesitated, and suddenly grew aware of a faint stirring in the air behind him, a whisper of wind at the back of his neck.

Chimwazle whirled. A Twk-man was floating a foot from his face, his lance couched, and a dozen more hovering behind him. His bulging eyes popped out even further as he saw the upper storeys of the Tarn House a-crawl with them, thick as tasps and twice as veriminous. Their dragonflies were a glowing green cloud, roiling like a thunderhead. “Now you perish,” the Twk-man said.

Chimwazle’s sticky tongue struck first, flicking out to pull the small green warrior from his mount. But as he crunched and swallowed, the cloud took wing, buzzing angrily. Yelping in dismay, the Great Chimwazle had no choice but to flee back up the steps to the inn, hotly pursued by a swarm of dragonflies and the laughter of a Deodand.

Lirianne was vexed.

It would have been so much easier if only she could have set the two wizards to fighting over her, so they might exhaust their magic on one another. That the ghastly Molloqos would make short work of the odious Chimwazle she did not doubt, but however many spells that might have required would have left him with that many fewer when the time came for her to tickle him.

Instead, Molloqos had retired to his bed, while Chimwazle had scuttled off into the night, craven as a crab. “Look what he did to my hat,” Lirianne complained, snatching it off the floorboards. Chimwazle had trampled on it on his haste to depart, and the feather was broken.

“His hat,” said Prince Rocallo. “You lost it.”

“Yes, but I meant to win it back. Though I suppose I should be grateful that it did not turn into a cockroach.” She jammed the hat back on her head, tilted at a rakish angle. “First they break the world, and then my hat.”

“Chimwazle broke the world?”

“Him,” Lirianne said darkly, “and his sort. Wizards. Sorcerers and sorceresses, sages and mages and archmages, witches and warlocks, conjurers, illusionists, diabolists. Necromancers, geomancers, aeromancers, pyromancers, thaumaturges, dreamwalkers, dreamweavers, dreameaters. All of them. Their sins are written on the sky, dark as the sun.”

“You blame black magic for the world’s demise?”

“Bah,” said Lirianne. Men were such fools. “White magic and black are two sides of the same terce. The ancient tomes tell the tale, for those who have the wit to read them correctly. Once there was no magic. The sky was bright blue, the sun shone warm and yellow, the woods were full of deer and hare and songbirds, and everywhere the race of man was thriving. Those ancient men built towers of glass and steel taller than mountains, and ships with sails of fire that took them to the stars. Where are these glories now? Gone, lost, forgotten. Instead we have spells, charms, curses. The air grows cold, the woods are full of grue and ghouls, Deodands haunt the ruins of ancient cities, pelgranes rule the skies where men once flew. Whose work is this? Wizards! Their magic is a blight on sun and soul. Every time a spell is spoken here on earth, the sun grows that much darker.”

She might have revealed even more, had not the pop-eyed Chimwazle chosen that very moment to make a sudden reappearance, stumbling through the door with his long arms wrapped around his head. “Get them off!” he bellowed, as he lurched between the tables. “Ow, ow, ow. Get off me, I am innocent, it was someone else!” Thus shouting, he went crashing to the floor, where he writhed and rolled, slapping himself about the head and shoulders while continuing to implore for assistance against attackers who seemed nowhere in evidence. “Twk,” he cried, “twk, twk, wretched twk! Off me, off me!”

Prince Rocallo winced. “Enough! Chimwazle, cease this unmanly caterwauling. Some of us are attempting to drink.”

The rogue rolled unto his rump, which was wide and wobbly and amply padded. “The Twk-men—”

“—remain without,” said Lirianne. The door remained wide open, but none of the Twk-men had followed Chimwazle inside. Chimwazle blinked his bulbous eyes and peered about from side to side to make certain that was true. Although no Twk-men were to be seen, the back of his neck was covered with festering boils where they had stung him with their lances, and more were sprouting on his cheeks and forehead.