Read Songs of the Dying Earth for Free Online Page B

that the flask will yield only to the volition of its inscribed owner, who at present is myself. If the flask senses that my volition is impaired, it will refuse to permit opening. Indeed, if it becomes aware that I am placed under extreme duress, the wine itself will be destroyed.”
    “What do you request of us, then?”
    “Free my arms. I will bring the bottle from its nest and open it for you, and you may partake of it, and I wish you much joy of it.”
    “And then?”
    “You will have had the rarest experience known to the soul of man, and I will have been cheated of the opportunity to give the world the epic poem that you claim so dearly to crave; and then, I hope, we will be quits, and you will leave me my little trinkets and take yourselves back to your dreary northern caves. Are we agreed?”
    They looked at one another, coming quickly and wordlessly to an agreement, and Kesztrel Tsaye, with a grunt of assent, signalled to Malion Gainthrust to intone the counterspell. Puillayne felt the bonds that had embraced his arms melting away. He extended them in a lavish stretching gesture, flexed his fingers, looked expectantly at his captors.
    “Now fetch the celebrated wine,” said Kesztrel Tsaye.
    They accompanied him back through chamber after chamber until they reached the hall where his finest wines were stored. Puillayne made a great show of searching through rack after rack, muttering to himself, shaking his head. “I have hidden it very securely,” he reported after a time. “Not so much as a precaution against theft, you realize, but as a way of making it more difficult for me to seize upon it myself in a moment of drunken impulsiveness.”
    “We understand,” Unthan Vyorn said. “But find it, if you please. We grow impatient.”
    “Let me think. If I were hiding such a miraculous wine from myself, where would I put it? The Cabinet of Meritorious Theriacs? Hardly. The Cinnabar Vestibule? The Chrysochlorous Benefice? The Tabulature? The Trogonic Chamber?”
    As he pondered, he could see their restiveness mounting from one instant to the next. They tapped their fingers against their thighs, they moved their feet from side to side, they ran their hands inside their garments as though weapons were hidden there. Unheeding, Puillayne continued to frown and mutter. But then he brightened. “Ah, yes, yes, of course!” And he crossed the room, threw open a low door in the wall at its farther side, reached into the dusty interior of a service aperture.
    “Here,” he said jubilantly. “The True Vintage of Erzuine Thale!”
    “This?” said Kesztrel Tsaye, with some skepticism.
    The bottle Puillayne held forth to them was a gray tapering one, dust-encrusted and unprepossessing, bearing only a single small label inscribed with barely legible runes in faint grayish ink. They crowded around like snorting basilisks inflamed with lust.
    Each in turn puzzled over the writing; but none could decipher it.
    “What language is that?” asked Unthan Vyorn.
    “These are Nolwaynish runes,” answered Puillayne. “See, see, here is the name of the maker, the famed vintner Erzuine Thale, and here is the date of the wine’s manufacture, in a chronology that I fear will mean nothing to you, and this emblem here is the seal of the king of Gammelcore who was reigning at the time of the bottling.”
    “You would not deceive us?” said Kesztrel Thale. “You would not fob some lesser wine off on us, taking advantage of our inability to read these scrawls?”
    Puillayne laughed jovially. “Put all your suspicions aside! I will not conceal the fact that I bitterly resent the imposition you are enforcing on me here, but that does not mean I can shunt aside thirty generations of family honor. Surely you must know that on my father’s side I am the Eighteenth Maghada of Nalanda, and there is a geas upon me as hereditary leader of that sacred order that bans me from all acts of deceit. This is, I assure you, the True Vintage of