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

and walked on land. Through those openings enough daylight was coming in now, on a bright day, to make the place almost cheerful.

      Still Cosmo had a small oil lamp burning, at least partly for magical purposes, as Black Pearl supposed.

      There was an easy, sloping ledge on each side of the little pool in which the tunnel terminated, and at the magician’s invitation Black Pearl sat on one of these flanges of rock. She and the young magician talked for a while, and as the minutes passed she gradually came to feel at ease.

      They discussed, among other things, her history. In general it was rare for any mermaid to come back to this valley after having been sold away. Rare, but not unheard of. And in Black Pearl’s case, at least, no complaining purchaser had so far come looking for her. That had been known to happen in other cases in the past.

      Cosmo expressed his own quiet outrage over the whole situation, his own quiet determination to find a way by which the mermaid curse could be ended for good and all.

      Only then, when the mermaid had begun to feel fully at ease with him, did Cosmo’s magical tests begin.

* * *

      Words were chanted, incense was burned. By the power of the young wizard invisible forces were gathered in the air of the grotto and then dispersed again. Black Pearl’s tail remained firmly in place, and she gave no sign of growing legs. The problem, said Cosmo, as he had expected from the beginning, was proving to be a difficult one, and a single session of course was not enough to develop a proper counterspell.

      Again and again, on that day of their first meeting, before Black Pearl swam away through the narrow tunnel, Cosmo pleaded and threatened and urged absolute secrecy upon her. He assured her again and again that his magical investigations, her hope of ever being cured, depended entirely upon that.

      Black Pearl kept the secret until their next session on the following day. Even her friendship with the mermaid Soft Ripple was not enough to induce her to talk about this, though she had the impression that Soft Ripple sensed that something in her had changed, and was trying to puzzle out what it was.

      And on the following day, during Black Pearl’s second visit to the secret grotto, in a pause for rest, Cosmo said to her: “You are a strange girl, I think, even for a mermaid. Perhaps it is because of the unhappy experience you had with that magician upstream.”

      “He was a much stronger magician than you are.”

      Cosmo did not appear to be upset by the comparison. “I don’t doubt it. I know that there are some whose powers exceed mine.”

      “But he was wicked, and I hated him from the start. And yes, I think that you are right, there has always been something out of the ordinary about me.”

      “Why do you say that?”

      The mermaid shrugged her ivory shoulders. “I don’t think my parents were even surprised when I became a mermaid. It happens only to about one of four girls, you know, in the villages. No one knows in advance which girls the curse will strike, but I don’t think anyone was surprised when it struck me.”

      “I admit that I have been intrigued by you, since I first saw you.” Suddenly the eyes of Cosmo blazed, so that it seemed remarkable that his voice could remain steady. “Have you kept the secret of our meetings? Even from the other mermaids who sometimes swim about with you?”

      “I have kept our secret,” she said softly.

      “See that you do. We have already progressed too far, much too dangerously far, for the secret to be revealed to anyone else.”

* * *

      Another day, another meeting.

      Cosmo had been stroking with his fingers, making magical passes, across her shoulders and her hair. Then suddenly he let her go. “The aura, the touch, of his powers—I mean that one upstream—still clings about you.”

      Black Pearl shuddered slightly, through her whole body down to the tip of her scaly tail, as she lay exposed on the flat ledge of rock. “Then cleanse me of it, if you can.”

      “I will. I will, as much as possible. But still…”

      “Still what?”

      “I find it intriguing.”

      Her pink lips snarled at him. “You’ve said that before. His touch was evil!”

      “Oh, I agree, his was an evil magic, to be sure. But now it is gone. Only the flavor, the aura, the smell of it remains. Weak enough to be attractive. Like a pungent seasoning in food.”

      “If you can’t wash it away, don’t speak of it.”

      “Oh, I can wash some of it away at least. I am not totally incompetent, and there is much that I can do. But let us thank all the gods that the power of that evil wizard is gone. And I am sure that it was evil. I can sense the impression that it left on you as if you had been clamped tightly in some great, iron fist.”

      “Sometimes I think that I can still feel the pressure of that fist around me.”

      “No, the power of it is gone. But what I would learn of it are the shaping, the ingredients, that made it so powerful. So that my own magic, which is intended to do good, may be strengthened.”

      The mermaid, lying beside the little pool that was not much bigger than a bathtub, looked up at him doubtfully.

      Cosmo asked, almost pleading: “Does it seem to you that I am a bad man?”

      Despite the feelings she had begun to have for the magician, it took Black Pearl a long time to answer that. “No,” she said at last.

      “Then trust me. Will you trust me? It will be very hard for me to help you otherwise.”

* * * * * *

      It was during that same meeting, only their third magical session in the hidden grotto, that Cosmo first slipped over Black Pearl’s head the fine chain that held the amulet. She held it