neetha Napew - Son Of Spellsinger

“You’re forty-one, Jon-Tom. That’s hardly old.”

He stiffened slightly. “I didn’t say it was. Why, by now Mick Jagger must be . . .” He changed direction. “Never mind. This doesn’t tell us what happened here.”

She shrugged. “Maybe I mixed something wrong. Maybe I whistled a happy tune the wrong way. Maybe some netherworld entity has a grudge against you from some years-old encounter you’ve long since forgotten.”

“I could check the records,” he murmured thoughtfully, “but as near as I can remember all old conflicts have been resolved, all numinous debts paid off.”

“You’re sure you haven’t offended any important deities or spirits recently? Trod on the toes of some easily offended Prince of Darkness?”

“Clothahump and I are careful to observe all protocols. We’re very proud of our work habits. Before signing any contracts we run them through half a dozen legal spells and have at least three eternally damned lawyers check them for errors. I’m clean, darling.

“Even if there was a serious problem somewhere, the provoked entity would take up the quarrel with me, not you.”

“I don’t know about that,” she countered. “All I know is what went on in my kitchen. Unless you isolate the causality, it could happen again.” She shuddered slightly.

“I know that.” He put a reassuring arm around her. “Interdimensional manifestations of pure evil don’t just happen. There has to be a reason.” His lips tightened. “It has to be something I’ve done. Or haven’t done.”

They fell silent. After a moment Talea looked up. “Listen.”

In the absence of conversation or chaos a faint, rhythmic moaning became audible. A distinctly unpalatable, eerie, pulse-pounding rise and fall of verbalizations that verged on the incomprehensible. The sound issued not from the Nether Regions, but from above. From upstairs.

Jon-Tom followed his wife’s gaze. They exchanged a look.

“There it is, then,” she told him confidently. “You haven’t offended any paranormal princes, and it’s not a consequence of random chance. The Plated Folk aren’t involved, and neither are the Inimical Outer Guards of Proximate Perdition. It’s much, much worse than that.” Her gaze rose, tracking the inhuman discord.

“Jon-Tom, you have got to do something about that kid.”

CHAPTER 2

As he mounted the spiral staircase cut into the heart of the interdimensionally expanded tree, the music, if such it could be called, grew steadily louder. Actually, some of what he could hear through the heavy-handed, sound-dampening spell was no worse than borderline awful. The awkwardness of the lyrics, however, made him wince.

Standing just outside the room, he was better able to judge the volume within. He estimated that it fell somewhere between deafening and permanent brain damage.

Steeling himself, he hammered on the solid door.

“Buncan! T\irn that racket down and open up! I’ve got to talk to you.”

There was no response from within. Either his son couldn’t hear him over the din, or else he was pretending not to. The instrumental work wasn’t bad, Jon-Tom decided, but as usual Duncan’s voice was excruciatingly off-key. In fact, his singing was so bad he made his father sound like a La Scala heldentenor by comparison.

He pounded on the wood afresh. “You hear me, Buncan? Stop that wailing and open this door!”

Something was coming through the barrier. Jon-Tom retreated to the far side of the hall and watched with interest as a two-foot-long white whale emerged, glanced to right and left, then swam off down the hall. It was attached by a thread to a small wooden boat crewed by half a dozen nautically garbed mini-imps wearing tormented expressions. There was barely room in the boat for their tails.

Standing in the bow was a wee fiend with skin the hue of pea soup. His forked tail flicked wildly back and forth, metronoming time for his crew to row by. One leg was fashioned of white ivory, and his expression was suitably demented.

Chanting a plangent tune, he directed his reluctant rowers in pursuit of the retreating mini-whale. They drifted off toward the stairway and disappeared below.

The inevitable scream reached him a moment later, followed by the outraged and angry voice of his wife, who, from the tenor and tone of her voice, he could tell had had it up to the proverbial here.

“Jon-Tom, you make your son quit that now!” This time he kicked the door. “Last chance, Buncan! Open up. Or I’ll cast an all-encompassing blanket of silence on your room that’ll last for weeks!”

The music within, together with its decidedly unpleasant caterwauling accompaniment, abruptly ceased. With a reluctant creak, the door opened slightly.

Avoiding a cluster of hovering eyeballs that blinked as they looked him over, Jon-Tom pushed his way inside.

“It’s all right,” said a voice from across the room. “It’s just my dad.”

Jon-Tom shut the door behind him. “Don’t get funny with me, young man. I’m not here on funny business.”

Buncan sat up on his bed. “You’re right, Dad. Existence is tragic as hell, isn’t it?”

Jon-Tom walked over to the single oval window, stared out at the neatly kept grounds and the river beyond. After what he felt was a sufficiently lengthy pause of suitably solemn significance, he turned to regard his son.

Buncan balanced the duar easily in his lap. That had to be the source of the trouble, Jon-Tom knew. Using his own singular duar as a template, with the aid of Lynchbany’s finest craftsfolk he and Clothahump had fashioned the new instrument as a gift for Buncan’s twelfth birthday. The boy had kept it close at hand ever since. While no match for Jon-Tom’s own instrument, it was quite capable of propagating a conjuring nexus at the point where the two sets of strings intersected.

Until recently, however, Buncan had not acquired sufficient skill to do anything other than make music with it. This morning’s events showed how drastically that had changed. Making magic with music was one thing. Controlling it, as Jon-Tom probably knew better than anyone else alive, was something else again.

Given Buncan’s genuinely appalling voice, it represented a bona fide threat to anyone unlucky enough to come within hearing distance.

Over the years Buncan had added some decorative modifications of his own to the instrument. Instead of the graceful, curving lines of Jon-Tom’s duar, his son had grafted on spikes and fake claws. Bright green and red parallel lines gave the instrument the look of a runaway migraine.

But it worked. He could see the nebulous blend of reality and nonreality fading at the stringed nexus even as he spoke. Occasional sparks flared and vanished. Yes, his son’s carefully crafted duar functioned like the magical instrument it was.

It was Buncan who didn’t always function properly.

Which, since he was only eighteen, was to be expected. After all, Jon-Tom had been considerably older and more experienced when he’d first made the acquaintance of the mysterious duar and its remarkable capabilities.

He left the window and approached the bed, sitting down near the end and promptly sinking clear to the floor. That seemed to rouse Buncan. The boy mumbled a few off-key words and the bed promptly reinflated. Jon-Tom wished he could say the same for his son’s attitude.

Buncan was clad entirely in gray with emerald accents. Spiral stripes wound down his pants, as though his legs had been thrust into a pair of green tornadoes. His low-top day boots were bright red.

He was shorter than Jon-Tom, a consequence of his mother’s genes, but he retained his father’s red hair. It was cut in a short, stiff brush with twin arcs shaved in the sides ! above and behind each ear. A lanky, almost disjointed build corraled a carefully constructed air of adolescent indolence.