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

      Gelimer dropped the handle of the empty travois he had been dragging, and with his shovel still clutched in one hand hurried back under the trees. The spot of impact was impossible to miss. Something had cratered the black dirt and the spring flowers, sending earthy debris far and wide. The flying Sword had landed directly on the site of the last grave but one that he had dug.

      The hermit ran forward. Regardless of the slippery mud, regardless of the protests of his own painful body, he plunged his shovel into the cratered ground and began to dig again.

      Presently the smell of old death, as if at some opening of hell, came surging up to meet him. He choked on it, but persisted.

      In a few moments he was sure of what had happened. He could see now that the body of Cosmo Malolo, which had been decomposing for the past month inside its crude blanket-shroud, had for a second time been pierced through the heart by the Sword of the Gods.

      Gelimer threw down his shovel. His muddy fingers, trembling, closed upon that black, mud-spattered hilt. With that contact his fingers ceased to tremble. Muttering half-finished prayers of gratitude to Ardneh, and perhaps to other, darker gods as well, the hermit carried the Sword up out of the shallow, blasted pit.

      Exactly who had thrown the Sword this time, and why vengeance had been wasted upon a victim already dead, were questions that did not now even cross his mind.

      The grove around him was as silent and tranquil as ever. Though the day was bright, here under the trees it was almost dim with their heavy shading. Standing erect, Gelimer saluted the grave of Geelong with the Sword. Then, gripping the knurled hilt in both hands, the hermit began a ponderous, spinning dance—

      His dance was carrying him, step by step, out of the grove and into the open air, where you could see for kilometers in all directions except that of the mountain whose shoulder he was standing on. He had not whirled thrice beyond the trees before there appeared to him, standing only forty or fifty meters away in sunlight, the image of the demon Rabisu. The demon came in the guise of an armored man, tall as a house, half transparent but immense, who ran forward threateningly, raising some blurred weapon—

      Gelimer saw the approaching shape, and uttered a hoarse cry. In the next instant he felt the Sword fly free, tearing itself by its own power out of his grip, an instant before he would have let it go.

      The blade passed straight through the demon’s image as through a mirage, seeming to do no harm. Then, like an intelligent arrow, Farslayer curved its own pathway in mid-flight. But not back toward the apparition. Instead the Sword went down on the north side of the river, somewhere over the Senones stronghold.

      The figure of the demon had stopped in its tracks, and turned to watch that darting descent. Now it turned back to confront Gelimer. Rabisu’s assumed countenance, which had been recognizable as the semblance of a human face, was now chaotic, indescribable. The apparition stood as if paralyzed, and from its demonic throat there issued a last cry, a great howl that went on and on.

      That outcry lingered in the air even after the image of the demon had disappeared.

* * *

      The mermaid, Soft Ripple, had plunged into the river immediately after she threw the Sword. But she surfaced again very quickly, risking retaliation by the angry men around her, unable to resist the attraction of watching the weapon in flight. Not that there was much to see, a mere rainbow flicker toward the slope of the mountain to the south.

      A moment of silence hung over the boats and the island. It was broken by another loud outcry, near at hand.

      This scream had come from the throat of a woman Zoltan had never seen before. Her thin figure, wrapped in the robes of a sorceress, came tottering forward from a recess among the rocks of Magicians’ Island. Facing the mermaid, this apparition halted, and uttered another hoarse scream. “Not Cosmo! No! You shall not kill him!”

      Bonar raised a hand and pointed. “That is the Lady Megara Senones, the bitch- sorceress. We must take her prisoner. Gesner, can you deal with her magic?”

      Gesner opened his mouth and closed it again, making no promises, not even of effort.

      But Prince Mark was paying little attention to his immediate companions. “My lady,” he called to the figure on the rock. “Are you in need of help?”

      The woman Bonar had called Megara, the supposed sorceress, turned a distracted gaze in Mark’s direction. And Zoltan, as he got his first full look at her face, took her for an old woman, even older than Yambu perhaps. At a second look he was not so sure of her age, but certain that she had been through terrible things.

      Soft Ripple, thrashing in the water nearby, shrilled at her “I know who you are, old woman. Your Cosmo is dead now! Even for you there can be no stopping that Sword. Not even you damned arrogant magicians can manage that!”

      Slowly, in small jerky movements and little slumps, Megara standing on her rock relaxed from a posture of rage and anger into one of weariness and despair.

      When she spoke again, she glanced toward the mermaid, and her voice was very tired. “I fear that you are right, fishgirl. If Cosmo was not dead before this…” Then she saw Bonar glaring at her in something like triumph. She cried to her hereditary enemy: “Will you kill me, then? Strike, if you will, there is nothing to prevent you now!”

      Ben edged a little nearer Bonar, ready to restrain him from accepting this invitation.

      Mark, still speaking calmly, told the lady: “We are going to the south shore, after the Sword. Come with