Free Serpent's Silver by Piers Anthony Page B

day chatting until finally, assisted by a dozen pairs of willing hands, Kelvin and St. Helens were at last properly launched and on their way on the river. The water was aglow with the lichen’s eerie luminescence. Kelvin only hoped that this strangeness did not foreshadow the nature of their mission.

Chapter 7
    Flopear Magic
    “I understand,” Kian said over lunch with his host and the girl who so resembled the girl he now longed to wed. Funny that it had taken this otherworld twin with round ears to make him realize this.
    “You understand flopears,” Jac said, chewing thoughtfully on a leg bone of a desert fowl. “But do you really? From what you say, there is nothing like them in your world.”
    “Only legends,” Kian said. “Old legends—stories, really. We heard them as children. The small immortal people who once lived in the mountains and invented gold smelting. They were supposed to have gathered up the scales the dragons shed. No one really believed it, but they were nice stories for children. We all got those tales along with stories of knights and dragons and magicians and castles. Some of those last were true.”
    “Hmm. But here we have the serpents. Acid flows in their mouths. Their teeth crush rocks. They tunnel constantly, only coming to the surface to shed their skins and collect their yearly sacrifice. Flopears collect the skins, and have from time immemorial. Our government has always traded with them, though they live as a race apart.”
    “Intermarriages?” Kian mused.
    “Unheard of. It may be possible, but then again it may not. The flopears seem much like the serpents in that they’re somehow of a different, more magical nature. I can’t imagine any normal human wanting to unite with a flopear. But the objects they make from the silver are beautiful. They never do art objects picturing themselves. Another name we have for them is serpent people.”
    “The ear flaps keep little serpents out,” Matt Biscuit said. “If there’s one death more horrible than being devoured by a giant serpent, it’s having one of those little ones tunneling away, little by little, into your head. A man with one of them in his brain lives for a long time, but he doesn’t live sane.”
    “Little ones? I’ve never heard of little dragons. I mean, of course when they first hatch they’re smaller, but even so they wouldn’t tunnel into a head, they would snap the head up entire.”
    “Well, the serpents may be different. It’s believed they take many centuries to grow big and that if the big ones keep growing they will eventually be the size of hills.”
    Kian shuddered. “Has anyone—”
    “In legend, of course. But that one you described is as big as is known. That was gigantic, and I don’t see how you survived.”
    “It was—” Kian hesitated, not wanting to reveal too much about the gauntlets. “Luck.”
    “More than that, I’d say,” Jac said. “You should have seen this man. He ran right up the serpent’s back and grabbed the spear and worked it in deep into the eye. Blood and poison spat all over, but he jammed the point right on into the brain before he let go. Then I pulled him out before the dying convulsions crushed him. We outlaws have slain serpents from time to time; we rope them and drive our spears in both eyes. But we never tackled anything even half the size of that one. It was big!”
    The others were gazing on Kian with new respect. This embarrassed him. “Will the flopears follow us into the Barrens?” he asked, trying to divert their interest.
    “They never have. Probably they can’t take the sun. Once we’re in the Barrens we’re safe.”
    “Don’t the soldiers of the king come after you?”
    “Not often. The Barrens, as you may have noticed, isn’t a particularly inviting place.”
    Heeto, the misshapen dwarf, ran to the fire carrying a bright silver vase. Unasked, he carried it to Kian and held it out to him.
    Kian looked at his host.