The Fourth Book Of Lost Swords : Farslayer's Story (Saberhagen's Lost Swords 4), Fred Saberhagen [100 best novels of all time TXT] 📗

surprise the mermaid observed that she might actually be about to drift ashore on it, where only moments ago she had expected to pass at a good distance.

      Drifting still, Black Pearl raised her head slightly from the water, looking down almost the full length of her body, white skin above the hips and silver scales below. Skin and scales alike were as magically immune to summer’s sun as they were to winter’s watery cold. As she raised her head, the ends of her long black hair floated about her delicate white breasts.

      Once Zoltan’s hand had touched her there.

      Thoughts of Zoltan abruptly vanished. Only now did Black Pearl realize that there was a kind of music, Pan music, pipe music, in the air, and that for the last several minutes she had not been drifting in such perfect freedom as she had imagined. Rather the music had been drawing her unawares, influencing her ever so slowly, and gently inducing her to steer herself by subtle movements of her tail toward the island.

      The music was coming—had been coming, for now it ceased—from somewhere among the greenery and rocks that made up the irregular shoreline, all strange projections and hidden coves, of Magicians’ Island.

      And now abruptly the musician became visible. A young man, one Black Pearl had never seen before, a well-dressed youth, stood staring at her from behind some of the tall reeds of that unpredictable shoreline. One of the young man’s hands was holding the panpipe, letting it hang loosely as if it had been forgotten. Though the instrument was silent, the subtly entrancing music it had produced seemed still to be hanging in the air.

      This young man was nothing at all like Zoltan. She had a good look at this one now, and his intense dark eyes returned her stare as she came drifting past him at a distance of no more than ten meters.

      “I have been trying to summon up the spirits of sunlight,” he called to the drifting mermaid in a rich tenor voice, at the same time holding up the panpipe carelessly for her to see. “Trying to call into being an elemental, composed of summer and the river. And, lo and behold! Success, beyond my fondest hopes! What a vision of rare beauty have I evoked to gaze upon!”

      “Even in summer,” Black Pearl said and with her tail moving underwater she stopped her drifting motion gracefully “even now the depths of the river are dark and cold, and full of hidden, ugly things. Are you sure you really wanted to raise an elemental of that kind?” A careless wave of the panpipe in the young man’s hand dismissed the idea altogether. Judging by the animated expression on his face, a busy mind was rushing forward.

      “Will you sit near me for a few moments?” The question was asked of the mermaid in tones of the gravest courtesy, even though he who asked it did not bother to wait for a reply. Instead he came stepping toward her through the muddy shallows, with little concern for his fine boots or clothing. At the very edge of the current he sat himself down cross-legged on a flat rock whose top was no more than a few centimeters above the restless surface of the river, and once he was seated there gave trial of a few more notes upon the pipes of Pan.

      This time, thought Black Pearl, if it was indeed a magical net that had drawn her to this island, it was a very subtle one. Not like that other time, when she had been sold upstream like so many kilograms of fish.

      Curiosity overcame caution. With a surge of her body and a spray of droplets, Black Pearl came sliding lithely out of the water to sit, mermaid fashion, upon another rock, a little bigger but very similarly situated, about three meters from the one where the young piper had settled. She thought he was a few years older than herself, and now that she looked at him closely she could see by his jewelry and clothing that he possessed at least some of the outward trappings of the magician. It was a subject in which she had firsthand experience.

      But if this youth was indeed a wizard, still somehow she found nothing about him frightening. “Now that you have caught me,” she asked saucily, “what do you mean to do? Sell me up the river to live in a tank, for country folk to goggle at in fairs?”

      “I? Sell you? No, not I.” And the young man seemed not so much scornful of that idea as hardly able to comprehend it. It was as if the ideas of capturing and selling lay so far from the place where his thoughts were occupied that he could not accept them as entirely real. “And you have gray eyes,” he murmured, looking at her closely.

      And he raised the panpipe to his lips again and tooted on it, displaying moderate skill. He sat there on the rock wearing his ill-fitting wizard’s paraphernalia, which somehow looked as if it did not truly belong to him at all. He was very handsome, and though he was almost as young as she, somehow Black Pearl had already caught the flavor or image of something tragic about him.

      She said challengingly: “I’ve been sold up the river, you know, once already.”

      The dark eyes fixed on her again. “Really? I didn’t know that. But I did think from my first look at you that there was something…” He put the silent panpipe away, letting it fall into his pocket, and made a polite gesture toward rising, which was hard to accomplish neatly on his slippery rock. He said, as if introducing himself to an equal: “My name is Cosmo Malolo.”

      Malolo. He was a member, then, of one of the valley’s two contending clans, whose domain included her home village among others. But it had been people from the other clan, or so thought Black Pearl, who had sold her