Ilbei Spadebreaker and the Harpy's Wild Read Online Free PDF

hesitation and pointed. “Look,” he said again. “Count her ribs. There are only three pairs visible below the line of her breast. Potameides have only twenty ribs. You can see the missing floating pairs are conspicuously absent. There can be no doubt.” He jerked his scrawny arm forward as if feinting with a short, pale spear. “Just look.”
    Ilbei turned back, glanced at the breathtaking beauty approaching and looked quickly away. He didn’t want to fall under the spell.
    “I can see your future,” she promised Meggins, who was on his feet and heading for the water again. “Can you imagine our happiness together?”
    “I can! I can!” Meggins replied.
    Ilbei backhanded the bewitched private, belting him so hard he was knocked clean out, crumpling as if his body had lost all its bones. “Sorry, son,” Ilbei said, even as he turned back to Jasper—who had made the mistake of looking the nymph in the eyes again. “Son of a jackal,” he swore. He slapped the gangly wizard, more gently than he had Meggins. Jasper blinked back at him, thoughts returning once again. “Go get it then,” Ilbei commanded him.
    “Get what?”
    “The honey. In Hams’ crates.”
    Jasper had to blink a few more times to figure out what Ilbei was talking about, but a glance toward the potameide reminded him. He paused briefly, regarding Meggins lying there motionless, but he went straight off down to the raft after. He jumped aboard, stumbling upon landing, but he managed to catch himself before falling off over the far side.
    Ilbei turned and threatened the nymph with his dagger, taking care to stare at her stomach, which was hardly less compelling than her face, but not so pleasant as to cost him his ability to think. “Stay off my lads, sister,” he said. “They got troubles enough without the likes of you gettin yer hooks into em.”
    “I love them,” she said. “They shine with the beauty of youth.”
    “That they do, and I’m fixin to make sure they rot it off slow, same as I done. Now stay where ya are, or I’ll carve ya up so as ya ain’t so fine to look on no more. Blimey, I will.”
    “I can make them happy,” she promised.
    “Happy for a half minute, then dead. Young fellers like these don’t weigh them both the same—least not once the first is done. But I got the measure of it fine.” He stepped forward with the knife. “Save us both the trouble and swim on along.”
    He looked down to the raft and saw Jasper rifling through Hams’ supplies. He glanced back to his left where Hams stood, still mesmerized. At least she had no interest in the older man. Stunned stupid though he was, he was not easing himself into a drowning death by her attentions. There was some advantage to the invisibility of old age.
    She glided nearer to the shore and put one long, slender leg up onto the bank, the water running down it like a skin of glass.
    “By the gods, woman,” Ilbei gasped. “Climb back into that water afore I have to do somethin will haunt me all my years.” His heart yammered in his chest, his pulse pounding.
    Jasper was running up the bank, his skinny legs visible, as he’d drawn up his robes like a lady saving her skirts from a muddy road. “I have it. I have it,” he called.
    He was panting by the time he’d covered the distance between the raft and Ilbei’s position on the bank. He paused when he saw the long, water-slicked limb of the potameide, and traced the line of Ilbei’s seeming hypnotism from the shapely flesh back to Ilbei’s glazing eyes.
    “Oh dear,” he said. He turned to the idyllic vision of feminine allure and, careful not to look her in the eyes, held out the honey he’d found, twisting off the lid of the jar. “A gift,” he said, staring carefully at the water’s edge. He poured the honey down, the line of it, like Hams’ first line of drool had, lowering itself lazily into the water, a golden thread that thinned as it stretched toward the river flowing by.
    The moment it