Modern Magick

Music and Misadventure: 9

'Gods curse it,' I swore, groping for my pipes and my wand. I should have been better prepared, but it had happened so damned fast — Ayllin hadn't even reached the bottom of the staircase.

'Pipes,' barked my mother to me.

'Ayllin—'

'Pipes. Your job is to ruin that damned lindworm.'

I don't know what Mother planned to do, but Jay had his rubescent Wand in hand and was running for the stairs. My mother was going to extract Ayllin with her bare hands, apparently — or hand, anyway.

Me, though. Ruin. Right.

This time when I played, I went for a different song. The last one was a lullaby; my only goal had been to keep the thing pacified long enough for us to escape. Lindworms aren't up there on the same level of rarity as, say, griffins, but we don't wreck them without good cause either.

Considering the state of my mother's dead companions, her missing hand, and now the probable state of our guide, I figured Mum was right. This was good cause.

I blew a swift, sharp blast on my pretty pipes, and the sound split the air with the intensity of a thunderclap. I repeated the sound, twice — thrice. The lindworm was a mass of roiling, scaled flesh by that time, with poor Ayllin wound up somewhere within its muscular coils. The second wave of sound sent a tearing shudder through its miserable carcass. The third brought it to a temporary, shuddering halt.

At the fourth, there was blood.

I went after it, blazing fury, my song growing more intense and more discordant with each shrieking note I played. I forced the damned thing into submission, alternating blasts of my pipes with waves of layered curses shot from the tip of my lovely Sunstone Wand.

By the time I was finished, the lindworm lay insensate, its massive body filling the passage below from floor to ceiling. Blood had leaked from its eyes, its mouth, what passed for its ears, and run all over the stairs. Its jaws hung slack, revealing rows of shark-teeth that would never chew anybody to bits again.

'That's for my mother's gods-damned hand!' I shrieked at it, and kicked it.

Ayllin, mercifully, was alive, though bathed in such a quantity of blood that I feared it couldn't be for long. Once again, I wished fervently for Rob, and cursed my mother's secretiveness. I ran over to Jay and my mother, who were supporting Ayllin between them. I think I hadn't imagined the moment, mid-battle, where Ayllin had popped free of the lindworm's coils and gone sailing into the air, only to float down in a flurry of feathers.

'Will she live?' I gasped.

'Most of the blood isn't hers,' said Mother tersely, checking Ayllin over with a remarkably professional air for someone with zero knowledge of medicine. 'Lindworm's,' she added unnecessarily.

Ayllin groaned, and shook herself. She looked more dazed than destroyed, to my relief — but also to my surprise. The worm had hit her with the force of a train. 'Borrow— your — pipes?' she panted, looking at me.

This time, I handed them over promptly.

She began a lilting song much better suited to their airy, faerie delicacy than the Song of Ruin I'd been playing a moment before. I felt cocooned in sound, and, gradually, refreshed; it was like being wrapped in a warm blanket on a cold winter day, and pumped full of hot chocolate.

Ayllin began to look revived.

Immediate alarm over Ayllin passed, I was at leisure to notice Jay.

'What?' I said.

He blinked his wide, wide eyes, and went on staring at me in... horror? Awe? 'What the bloody hell did you do to that worm?'