The Last Continent- New Tales of Zothique by John Pelan

Author:John Pelan [Pelan, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0966566246
Publisher: ShadowLands Press / Bereshith Publishing
Published: 1999-01-15T08:00:00+00:00

BLUE ROSES, RED RED WINE

t. Winter-Damon

And so it came to pass that Cirdaith and the chimera-ship weathered out a wild and savage storm, her sturdy, supple, wyvern-hide sails billowing and snapping as the fierce gale winds brutally buffeted them, the ship and her crew braving the distant, uncharted eastern waters of the Ilozian Sea, far past the isles ofSotar, Uccastrog, the infamous Isle of the Torturers, and Tosk, and, battered yet still seaworthy, found themselves washed close upon the shore of a dark and brooding isle—a jagged, broken tooth of black basalt thrusting skyward from the lashing blood-red of surf…

The sailors, a superstitious lot, as sailors ever are, attributed their survival of the ocean’s unleashed fury to the warding talisman of the wild-eyed, wilder-maned visage of Basatan, Zothique’s tempestuous Trickster-Sea God, stitched in laborious detail upon her massive sail.

“Land ho!” the lookout, Bleeth-Olnoolb, serving his time aloft, cried out.

“And none too soon,” Ar-Pphoorbhb One-hand, the Storesmaster, said, addressing no one in particular. “The water casks are all but drained, the sea biscuit’s gone to mold, and we’ve naught for meat but two butts of saltpork, some spice-dried goatmeat, and of course,” he laughed harshly, “the slaves belowdeck. But there’s little ‘cept bones and skin there—”

“Just a bit like eating chickens’ feet,” Cirdaith mused, “which, though considered a delicacy in far Sotar, I’m told, seems right poor fare!”

Cirdaith was curled, catlike, in the hollow of piled nets and coiled rope cluttering the deck around the base of the heavily carved mainmast. He toyed with the strings of Shadowdreamer, drawing a loose flow of darkling notes from his strangely carved harp.

His hair billowed out around his shoulders in the shoreward breeze—rich, dark, woody brown, the kind of hair that women loved to stroke and twist about their fingers.

In the gloaming, his eyes still burned with mad, poetic fire, sparking flecks of ocean green that contrasted, in strange counterpoint, with the blood-red hue of the waves that slapped and spumed around the gunwales.

So Cirdaith teased the strings of Shadowdreamer, those strings like spidersilk, and drew forth a tune of poisonous beauty that was not wholly raised from strings…

For as he coaxed her with his loving fingers, and crooned to her with his voice of oak-and-honey—aptly was he named as “Cirdaith of the Silver Tongue”—that risked at new and powerful inflections in each oft-sung verse, the dark wood of the harp-frame wakened and pulsed, spilling forth wild notes from the lips of the Enchantress-in-the-Harp—

That face of sullen, haughty tempting flared from the graceful neck of the harp, her hair twining in lustrous waves of nightblack, her chin tilted, upturned into the spray and wind.

There was no other harp like this one in the kingdoms of men, for she was Shadowdreamer, The Demon Harp, the black fire that dwelled in the hollow of Cirdaith’s bartered soul.

Cirdaith raised the bowl of the gilded skull in his left hand, tilted it to his lips, and drained a swill of heady mead into his mouth, then bent his

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