Farslayer's Story Read online

  THE

  FOURTH BOOK

  OF LOST SWORDS

  FARSLAYER’S STORY

  By

  Fred Saberhagen

  Copyright Page

  The Fourth Book of Lost Swords : Farslayer’s Story Copyright (c) 1989 by Fred Saberhagen

  Cover Art : Harry O. Morris

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions.

  Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Tor paper edition: ISBN: 0-812-55284-9

  Electronic edition

  JSS Literary Productions

  ISBN: 978-1-937422-01-1

  The Ardneh Sequence

  Empire of the East series

  The Broken Lands

  The Black Mountains

  Changeling Earth /Ardneh's World

  ( three titles also published in a heavily-revised omnibus form as Empire of the East)

  The Book of Swords

  The First Book of Swords

  The Second Book of Swords

  The Third Book of Swords

  The Book of Lost Swords

  The First Book of Lost Swords: Woundhealer's Story

  The Second Book of Lost Swords: Sightblinder's Story

  The Third Book of Lost Swords: Stonecutter's Story

  The Fourth Book of Lost Swords: Farslayer's Story

  The Fifth Book of Lost Swords: Coinspinner's Story

  The Sixth Book of Lost Swords: Mindsword's Story

  The Seventh Book of Lost Swords: Wayfinder's Story

  The Last Book of Lost Swords: Shieldbreaker's Story

  Ardneh's Sword

  Swords Anthology

  (original invitational anthology edited by Fred Saberhagen)

  An Armory of Swords

  Blind Man's Blade . . . . . Fred Saberhagen

  Woundhealer. . . . . Walter Jon Williams

  Fealty. . . . . Gene Bostwick

  Dragon Debt. . . . . Robert E. Vardeman

  The Sword of Aren-Nath. . . . . Thomas Saberhagen

  Glad Yule. . . . . Pati Nagle

  Luck of the Draw. . . . .Michael A. Stackpole

  Stealth and the Lady. . . . . Sage Walker

  Prologue

  In the middle of the day the black-haired mermaid was drifting carelessly in a summery river, letting herself be carried slowly through the first calm pool in the Tungri below the thunder of the cataract. It was a pool that was almost big enough to be called a lake, surrounded by the greenery and bitter memories of the shores.

  Her name was Black Pearl, and she had been a mermaid now for something like six years, even though she had been born with two good legs and no tail at all, into a family of fisherfolk seemingly as far removed as anyone could be from magic.

  Black Pearl’s pale face, now framed by the water, held an expression of intent listening, as if she might be trying to read some information from the open sky. Her black hair swirled in the water around her head, her small breasts poked above the surface. Drifting immobile now, holding her tail perfectly still, she was allowing the current to carry her out of the broad pool which was almost a lake, on a course that would take her between the two islands that were the most prominent features of this portion of the river.

  To judge by the expression on Black Pearl’s face, if the sky was indeed trying to tell her anything, she did not care for the message it conveyed.

  Mermaids’ Island, overgrown now with summer’s own green magic, slid by to the mermaid’s north, on her left hand as she floated on her back. Magicians’ Island, somewhat smaller and stranger and somewhat less green, with a certain aura of the forbidden about it, would soon be passing to her south.

  According to her own best calculation, Black Pearl had recently turned eighteen years of age, at the beginning of the summer. She knew, therefore, that she had not very many years of life remaining. Mermaids, fishgirls, of her age never did. Black Pearl’s mother would be able to remember her age with accuracy, she supposed. But for years now her mother had no longer wanted to come to the shore and talk with her. If, indeed, her mother was still alive. A long time had passed since Black Pearl had tried to see any of her relatives.

  As for the bitter memories—

  Somewhere to the south and west of where she drifted now, no more than a few kilometers over the water, was Black Pearl’s home village though it was home to her no longer. Now, the only semblance of a home she knew was Mermaids’ Island. Her only family were the two dozen or so other fishgirls inhabiting this stretch of the Tungri, and with many of them Black Pearl did not get on at all.

  If she made the effort, and sent her mind groping under a cloud of black and evil magic for the appropriate memories, Black Pearl could vaguely recall being caught, lured ashore from these waters three or four years ago. Caught in a net, and sold, and carried upstream riding in a tank of water carried in a wagon driven by strangers. Upstream, she had first become part of some small traveling show.

  And then, somehow, she had been with that relatively innocent traveling show no more. But still she had been upstream, somewhere, so far that there the Tungri bore a different name. There she had been under the domination of a terrible and evil magician, whose face she could recall but not his name. A magician who had used her. There were certain gates of memory beyond which she was always afraid to go.

  Outside those ominous gates, memory produced another face, this one with a clear name attached, that she had known briefly in those strange days. It was the face of a young man with curly hair, and who walked upon two legs of course as far as Black Pearl knew, nowhere in the world did there exist any young men who were equipped with tails and scales instead of legs that fate was reserved for females. The name of this young man with curly hair and two strong legs was Zoltan, and though she still sometimes dreamed of him, in recent months such dreams were becoming rare.

  Now, at the pace of the river’s flow, here about that of a walking man, Magicians’ Island was drawing near. With mild 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 seem
ed 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 up the river before.

  “My name is Black Pearl,” she said in turn, remembering the manners of her childhood, those ten or twelve years in which she had been wholly human. But she stared at the young man levelly, being as ready to assume equality as he was. Mermaids were beyond, or beneath, the usual rules of social intercourse, as their families of fisherfolk were not.

  She saw the young magician’s gaze pass, hungrily for a moment, across her breasts, and she made no move to try to cover them with her hair. Mermaids had nothing to hide, very little to lose, and little to fear in the way of rape. Or so Black Pearl thought. She was as far beyond fear as she was beyond courtesy.

  He looked away from her at last, and once more seated himself on his rock, this time settling squarely, knees up, elbows outside knees, staring at the linked fingers of his two hands, on which certain rings of power flashed in the sun.

  “Let me speak to you plainly, Black Pearl,” Cosmo said in a level voice, not looking directly at her. “It was not the spirits of sunlight that I sought to call with my music today, or any elemental of the river. I set out to call up a mermaid, and I have done so. But please believe that my purpose was not to capture you or sell you.”

  There was a pause, long enough so that at last the mermaid felt compelled to ask: “Why, then?”

  “It may be no accident that you, out of all the fishgirls in the Tungri, were the one my little spell attracted. Oh, it’s only a very little spell indeed. Quite gentle. You can break it at any moment, if you wish. Plunge off that rock and swim away.”

  “I know that. I can feel my freedom. But I am still here.”

  “Good. Black Pearl” and here his dark eyes turned full upon her once again “are you happy to be a mermaid? Or would you like to walk the land on two good legs once more?”

  “That is a madman’s question. What woman could ever be happy like this?” And the flatness of her tailfins smacked at the water, with a violence worthy of some much larger creature.

  He looked a question at her.

  Her anger quivered in her voice now. “Don’t you understand? We lived on land, all of us, until we were ten or twelve years old, not knowing that this was going to happen to us, but knowing that it might. All because of some curse pronounced a hundred years ago, in that damned stupid feud between your family and those others. And then one day, like a bad dream really coming true, the curse struck me. And when that happens it is really the end of life. Because what is there for a mermaid to live for? We can never be women. We can never walk, never be away from the smell of the river and of fish. And in a few more years the curse strikes its final blow, and we die, and float down the river like so many dead fish for the turtles to eat. Have you ever seen an old mermaid? One who lived long enough to have gray hair?”

  Halfway through this tirade the young man, Cosmo as he had named himself, had begun shaking his head soberly. When Black Pearl was finished he said quietly: “I believe your answer. Believe me, in turn, that I did not ask the question lightly.”

  “Why then do you ask it at all?”

  “Because I think I may be able to help you.”

  “Help me how?”

  “Help you to cease to be a mermaid.” With a swirl of the short wizard’s cape that hung from his shoulders he stood up on the rock. “How willing and able are you to keep a secret?”

  * * *

  Before the day was over Black Pearl had learned from the young magician of the existence of a grotto on Magicians’ Island. In the island rather; it was a strange cave of a place carved out at some time in the dim past for some purpose of magic or ritual that no one any longer understood or believed in. A daring mermaid could reach this grotto easily by swimming underwater for only a few meters, from an entrance almost un-findable amid the outer limestone rocks of the island’s upstream end, and emerging at last into a pool in the bottom of a roofed cave near the island’s center. Here on this island, as Cosmo said in welcoming her to the grotto, the influences were favorable for good magic.

  But mermaids as a rule kept clear of this small isle entirely, for there were certain frightening things, creatures of magic, who dwelt here. Black Pearl became fully aware of those powers for the first time
only when, at the young magician’s insistence, she was swimming through the tunnel. When the powers came buzzing invisibly around her ears, considerable determination was required for her to go on. Had she not already begun to believe Cosmo’s promises to her, she would have managed to turn around somehow—no matter that the underwater tunnel was barely wide enough for her to pass straight through— and would have hurried back to the open river.

  As it was, she clenched her teeth and swam on, meanwhile hearing and feeling the magic powers as they swarmed about her head and body. They were small, no more intelligent than insects, and like certain insects indifferent as to whether they moved in air or water.

  But the tunnel was really very short, and the guardian powers did not sting, at least in the case of this invited visitor. Black Pearl was intrigued by what she found at the inner end of the tunnel. The small pool and its enclosing cave had rough walls of stone and appeared to be partly a natural formation. Higher up there were a couple of ways into the cave for people who breathed only air, 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.