The Song of the Musophage: The Musomancer, #2

By Bing Turkby

In Palmerston North, Aotearoa, an evil music-wizard is messing with the fabric of reality, and the only person who can stop him is a bumbling guitarist called Jareth. Luckily, Jareth has a solid road crew to help him: his scientist sister Rosetta, a friendly policeman called Benton, and two musicians unwittingly caught up in events. They have to figure out what's happening, and why, before the evil wizard embarks on a symphony of destruction.

Has Jareth grown into his powers yet? Does he have what it takes to save the world a second time? And why does his car stereo keep cutting out?

 

A high-stakes tale of music-magic, friendship, and some mighty fine guitars.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bing Turkby
• Release date: Dec 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9780473532291

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

‘Can it wait?’ said the Mayor of Palmerston North. ‘The rugby's just started.’

On the other end of the phone line, Daniel Slade, the Mayor's Executive Assistant, sighed. ‘I know, Geoff. I'm sorry, but I wouldn't have called you right now if it wasn't important.’

‘What could be more important than provincial rugby?’ the Mayor huffed. ‘Wait, did the town of Palmerston in Otago try to change their name to Palmerston Best again? Because Palmerston North is the best, and everybody knows it. They better watch themselves.’

‘No, Geoff, it's not that.’

‘That's good, Danny, because I have some moves left in me, you know. I told them so on my social media account, and the post got thirteen likes.’

‘I remember it. You stood over me at my desk until I agreed to click the thumbs-up, Your Worship.’

The Mayor sucked in a breath between his teeth. ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘you only call me that when I'm in trouble.’

‘Listen,’ said Daniel. ‘I've just taken a call from a lawyer in Auckland...’

‘Awww, jeez,’ the Mayor groaned. ‘Here we go again! How many times do I have to say it? I bought that Ford Falcon station wagon from a nice old lady in Hamilton two years ago. I never had so much as a flat tyre that whole time, so I'd never even looked in the spare tyre compartment until the Police pulled me over. It was a complete surprise to me as well!’

‘Mmm-hmm, yep, I know the story well, Geoff, but it's not about that this time.’

‘Thank goodness,’ said the Mayor. ‘Okay then, what do you have for me?’

‘The lawyer says she represents a large mining company. They want to buy mining rights to a parcel of land in Palmy.’

‘Yessss!’ roared the Mayor.

‘Whoah,’ said Daniel, ‘don't you want to hear their offer first?’

‘Oh, sorry, Dan, the Turbos just got a drop goal. What were you saying, mate?’

‘Come on! Focus, Geoff! This is serious. They're offering a lot of money, but you won't be happy when you hear where they want to mine.’

‘Oh really? Okay, hit me with it.’

‘The Railway Land.’

‘What? The big green space in the centre of town where trains used to run?’

‘Yes, Geoff. That’s why it’s called the Railway Land, I believe.’

‘Right-o. How much of it do they want? Land in the middle of town is worth quite a bit.’

Daniel exhaled heavily. ‘They want all of it.’

‘What?’

‘Yep, they basically want to buy a large chunk of the middle of town and dig it up. Perhaps even go beyond the Railway Land, and knock down some of the CBD.’

‘Wow,’ said the Mayor. ‘I mean, that'll cost them an arm and a leg. Maybe more.’

Dan told him the price the mining company was offering.

The Mayor sat down heavily on his sofa. The muted rugby game continued to run on the TV in front of him but he no longer saw it.

‘Sweet Georgia Brown! With that kind of money, we could put a roof on the stadium, and still have a bit left over for a new wing in the Rugby Museum. Haha!’ He chuckled. ‘Wing. Rugby. Geddit?’

‘Yes Geoff, I get at least the first five-eighths of that joke.’ Daniel’s witty rejoinder went right over the Mayor’s head, lost in a fiscal dreamstate as he was. ‘Ahem,’ Dan continued. ‘But I don't think the residents of Palmy are going to see that as a fair trade. And the local Māori representatives from the Rangitāne iwi will probably have a very strong view on the matter. But the lawyer said she needs an answer. What shall I tell her?’

‘Tell her she should come here so we can talk it over in person.’

Daniel gave a low whistle. ‘You're actually thinking of going through with this?’

‘Well, if we get her to come here in person, we might be able to sell her on a different block of land. You never know.’

‘I don’t think that’s very likely,’ said Daniel. ‘They must have a reason for specifically asking about the Railway Land.’

‘And that’s the other thing,’ mused the Mayor. ‘Maybe we can find out why they want that land. There’s never been a hint of anything valuable under there before. Just rocks, railway sleepers and the dead dreams of steam trains. If they’ve found something valuable enough to try to buy the whole centre of town, I want to know what it is. This is a game of two halves, my friend.’

In the pause that followed, the Mayor felt that he could almost hear Daniel thinking it over.

Eventually Daniel replied. ‘Okay, Your Worship. You've got a point there. I’ll call them back and tell them we need to meet to hash things out, kanohi ki te kanohi.’

‘That’s right, mate, face to face. That’s the only way you can see their play. See you at the office tomorrow.’

‘See you then, Geoff.’

The Mayor ended the call and sat quietly, looking at the phone in his hand as he pondered this development. ‘I wonder what these Aucklanders are up to? Well, come ruck or come maul, keep your eye on the ball, as my Dad used to say. Game on.’

CHAPTER TWO

‘Shall we try A minor 7?’

Jareth McHendry rubbed his face wearily. ‘Millie,’ he sighed, ‘we've already tried A minor 7, remember?’

She tapped a finger on her lips as she mulled over more options. ‘How about A minor 11?’

Jareth's head snapped up. ‘You know, I don't think we've tried that.’ He grabbed the Heartfield guitar that lay next to him, on a worn, comfy old sofa. They were in the library of McHendry Manor, the house he shared with his sister Rosetta.

Jareth tried to suppress the excitement he was feeling. Odin only knows how many times he'd got all worked up before, thinking he might have found the key to reversing the transmusification of Millie's bandmate Glam Dave, only to have his hopes dashed when it didn't work out. Musomancy was a damnably tricky thing to master, and Jareth had no-one to guide him, to teach him, to kick his lazy butt. Well, actually, now he had Millie to do that last thing. She was quite happy to do a bit of butt-kicking when the opportunity arose.

Anyway, the point is, he was feeling his way into musomancy, one mistake at a time.

Millie had taken up residence in McHendry Manor ever since Millie's friend Glam Dave had fallen prey to a musomancical trap laid by Jareth's former butler, Franklin. The wicked spell had performed a transmusification on Glam Dave, which is to say, it had used the power of music-magic to transform Dave into a book on one of the library's shelves. When he’d entered the library, he had been a human-shaped... well, human. But once he triggered the spell, even though his friends had fought valiantly, he had been bound stitch by stitch into the form of a codex. He made a fine-looking book, to be sure, but Jareth disapproved of people being transmusified without their consent, on principle. So he was damn well going to reverse the spell if it was the last thing he ever did.

Millie wasn't going to leave without getting her guitarist back, either. Her band The Argonauts had been on tour at the time everything had turned custard-shaped, and they were still keen to keep up the momentum. But, given that Glam Dave was now a book, and that Millie had been threatened by various terrifying monsters, including but not limited to, a demonically-possessed road bridge, and a music-dragon (aka Draccus Melodicus), the remaining two band members had graciously decided to call a time-out for a while.

The drummer, Truck, had suggested to Phil, the bass player, that they could form a side project called the Naughts, and just play instrumental versions of their songs. After one catastrophic gig, where the duo really lived up to their name, Phil decided from his hospital bed that they wouldn't do that again. He had sustained a broken arm and a couple of cracked ribs when the bored and angry crowd had rushed the stage to demand their entry money back. They hadn’t attacked him personally, but he’d slid underneath his monster Ampeg 8x10 bass rig to try to protect it as someone pushed it over. Luckily, the amp was fine.

While all this was going on, Jareth and Millie were back at McHendry Manor, trying to free Glam Dave from the evil enchantment.

While they hadn't sprung him from the trap yet, they were definitely learning more and getting closer each day. Using Jareth's collection of arcane grimoires and apocryphal texts, they were piecing together the components of the magic that had collated and bound Dave. So far, they had discovered enough to loosen his spine, and Millie swore she had seen Dave's appendix start to de-paginate.

The experiments they had performed on other books had left McHendry Manor with several small book-sprites – tiny homunculi conjured out of old Terry Pratchett paperbacks, odd-looking peripatetic broccoli stalks magicked from vegetarian cookbooks, and even a strutting one-inch-tall, long-haired keytar player named Jurgen, brought to life from a 1980s Yamaha magazine advertisement. Jareth promised Millie he'd put them back in their respective tomes, but in actual fact he'd been drilling them into a hot little rhythm and blues revue. He figured they'd be the perfect touring band – food expenses would be so low as to be almost non-existent, and the novelty factor would be a huge draw to the punters. With the band members being so small, each venue would feel much bigger by comparison, so people in the audience at a normal-sized bar would feel like they're at a huge arena, without all the attendant hassle. No long queues for drinks and lavatories, for one thing. While he focused on Glam Dave's predicament, he sent the Little Bitty Blues Band out to pay their dues on the local Chippin' Circuit (so named because all the venues were located above, next to, or inside a fish'n'chip shop).

Back in the library, Jareth tuned his guitar carefully. To bring Glam Dave back in perfect health required perfect pitch. One wrong note and he might materialise as a lumbering cyclops with a penchant for effect pedals, rather than the Dave they knew of old. Even if he was physically unharmed, his mind and his very soul could be affected. Jareth knew that Millie wouldn't thank him for returning her guitar player as a psychotic bunny-strangler, no matter how tidy his arpeggios were.

To add to this pressure, Jareth had been doing research on two other pressing musomancical matters whenever he could spare a minute.

Matter the first: Before being eaten by the aforementioned Draccus Melodicus in an emotionally-charged musomancical battle, Jareth's erstwhile butler Franklin had occupied an underground thaumaturgical grotto which lay beneath Palmerston North’s clock tower. As Franklin lay beaten next to his Lucifender Phlegethon guitar (the most evil-looking pointy guitar ever invented), waiting for the hand of doom to erase him from existence like a spelling mistake hit with a barrage of backspace keystrokes, Jareth was too busy trying to contain the dragon to question him about the origin of the cavern and its contents. By the time he regained his equilibrium, it was too late, as the music-dragon had ingested the maleficent butler and then disappeared.

So, who - or what - had caused the underground magic-chamber to be created in the first place? The specially chosen site of Franklin’s last big summoning spell, it possessed unique musomanciary properties that allowed him to wield much more power than he would otherwise have been able to handle. To construct such a cavern in Palmy (as Palmerston North was affectionately known) would have taken considerable time and resources. If it had been done recently, Jareth had to assume the person responsible must be rich, as well as musically powerful. And possibly still sitting in the wings, with unknown motives. On the other hand, if the cavern had been around for ages, that might still not be great news. The original creator might be long gone, but for what purpose did they delve? Was there a latent spell waiting there to wreak havoc? If so, Jareth and his friends were Palmy’s only line of defence. Sigh...

Matter the second: Where was Crumbs McGuigan, the apprentice to Franklin? Crumbs was the one who had built the Fuzzmour Gilface guitar effect pedals which had started off the whole musomancical brouhaha in the first place. Jareth would sleep a lot better once Crumbs was tracked down. Was he a musomancical threat himself, or had he simply assembled the magically-infused parts under Franklin’s evil instruction?

Jareth's new friend Benton Airey, a sworn officer of New Zealand's Police Force, and all-round decent, normal bloke, had been drawn into the world of musomancy when he was investigating multiple fatalities which turned out to be related to the Fuzzmour pedals. From that beginning, he’d ended up being drawn into Jareth’s campaign to stop Franklin’s malignant musical rampage. Benton's belief in normality had been badly shaken by the events surrounding Franklin's vanquishing, and he had spent the last few months coming to terms with the fact that there was more to the world than what he'd seen on Fair Go and the six o'clock news. Luckily, Jareth had long been of the opinion that odd was in the eye of the beholder. His maxim was normal is a spectrum.

Putting these intriguing yet vexacious thoughts aside, Jareth focused on the task at hand – would the A minor 11 chord be the final piece of the puzzle they needed to rescue Glam Dave?

He ran through an A minor 11 scale on the fretboard a few times. Because actually, he knew A minor but he didn't want to admit in front of Millie that he couldn't remember what the 11 meant. On an amp's gain control it meant rocking good times, but in a chord name, it always entailed lots of mathematics for Jareth. An octave was eight, so nine was like the next note up from the octave, so... eleven minus eight was three. But actually, you had to say eleven minus seven, because the octave doesn't count because you already have the root note... ummm.

Jareth turned his back on Millie as he played an open A string, hit the octave on the seventh fret of the D string, and then counted up: nine, ten, eleven – aha! It was just a suspended fourth after all! With a triumphant grin he turned back to the bookshelf.

‘Did you know you say the numbers under your breath when you count?’ said Millie, staring at him with her hands on her hips.

Jareth felt his face fall, forlorn at being found out like a fraudulent faker. Still, he didn't feel too bad. He'd come a long way from his beginner days, when he didn't even know what an octave was. He’d once asked his dad what was the difference between a guitar and a bass, and been given the answer that the bass was an octave lower than the guitar. That had gone completely over Jareth's head, so for a long time all he knew was that the bass was boom boom boom and the guitar was screech, screech. In fact, Jareth still thought that was pretty much the whole story right there.

‘At least I can say numbers,’ said Jareth, sulkily.

‘What?’ said Millie. ‘You think I can't say numbers?’

‘I don't know. I don't know if I've ever heard you try.’

‘Fifteen,’ said Millie triumphantly. ‘Three hundred and seven.’

‘Well, okay, so you're good at saying numbers,’ Jareth conceded. ‘Maybe I'm better at seeing colours than you are.’

‘How could you possibly be better at something like that?’

He shrugged. ‘Practice?’

Millie slumped into a nearby armchair and put her head in her hands.

She gave a muffled groan. ‘Could we just try this latest spell on Glam Dave please?’

‘Sure,’ said Jareth. ‘But did you know that the official colour of this guitar is called Blue Sparkle? It looks plain black, right?’ He lifted the guitar to catch the light. ‘But some people can see flecks of metallic blue in the finish. Ahem! Right, spell-casting time.’

Standing to attention, Jareth began his preparations.

‘Safety precautions please.’

Millie leapt from the chair and picked up a pair of overalls that had been doused with one of Rosetta's anti-entheogen solutions. Manufactured from a particularly potent psychedelic mushroom, but in reverse, it protected the wearer from any unwanted musomancical collateral damage. If a spell went spectacularly wrong, the magick could rebound on innocent bystanders. Jareth had no idea what an un-transmusification spell would do to a normal person, and he didn’t want to find out the hard way. So he always asked Millie to wear the protective apparel just in case. So far nothing that remarkable had occurred, thank goodness.

Jareth flicked on the Fender Pawn Shop Excelsior amp that sat next to the sofa. Why that amp for this job? Well, it seemed to Jareth that if you’re going to pit yourself against an evil transmusification spell, it couldn’t hurt to have something called Excelsior on your side. A big old funky brown cabinet with 50’s styling held a sturdy fifteen inch speaker. The wattage was low, but the Excelsior had a forthright, direct sound that projected musomancy particularly well. Sometimes it wasn’t so much about volume and physical power, but more about style and intent. Musomancy was seventy-seven percent skill and twenty-three percent panache.

While the amp warmed up, Jareth centred himself with a tai chi standing exercise. To anyone watching, it was literally just a guy standing there, but Jareth’s attention had turned inwards, and there was a lot going on inside. He paid attention to his breathing. He checked his posture. He let the soles of his feet talk to him so he could find just the right balance. He gathered the musomancy that swirled through his body and set it in his abdomen at the dantien point, so it would be ready to call forth in a potent, relaxed stream when he needed it.

And now... now was the time to call it forth.

Jareth split his attention. Part of his mind was still in calm, relaxed control of the magic roiling inside, but another part now focused on the transmusified tome in front of him. Reaching out with his musical senses, he felt the shape and mass of the book that Glam Dave had been turned into, as well as its musomagical heft. It pulled on the area around it like a magical gravity