Tanith Lee - Unicorn 01 by Black Unicorn

Author:Black Unicorn
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-12-12T02:16:39+00:00

7

The wall under the letters, hammer, and chisel changed. Then, quite easily, it parted. There again were treetops and a darker, bluer sky of wilder stars. Pernickety as a cat, the unicorn came, as if on shoes of glass, in through the opening, down across the hall. There was no violence, no speed. It moved to the rhythm of an elder dance, putting all the rituals of the world to shame. Black, silver, gold, and moon-opal, night and sea, fire, earth, air, and water.

This time I did call it. Or every time I did.

At her feet Tanaquil heard the peeve swallowing the whole fish in one gulp. And the unmuffled drum of her own heart.

Then one of the artisans shrieked.

“It’s the Sacred Beast! Fly! Save your lives! The city’s lost!”

And somehow the mechanical chairs were knocked over, and the shut door to the corridor was wrenched open, and out of it the artisans sprang and sprawled with masked shouts and frightened thumps.

The unicorn, mild-mannered as a deer, trotted lightly after them. It went by Tanaquil like a wave of stars. She thought she heard the music of its bones and of a night wind wrapped about the horn.

As the unicorn passed through the door and along the corridor toward the outer exit, the peeve tugged on its lead to follow. And once more Tanaquil was propelled to chase the night-dream thing.

In the corridor the plaster heads turned and poked out their tongues irrelevantly, and then there was the street beyond the opened pillared door. And down the street rushed the artisans in their secret regalia, revealed, speechless now in the single-mind-edness of panic. With the unicorn dancing after.

Tanaquil hauled on the leash. “No—let it go—I shouldn’t have—no—no—” And the leash snapped and the peeve bounced out into the street, pursuing maybe only its old fantasy of a meal or a treasure—the bone—and Tanaquil walked after. She forced her mind to do some work, while her feet tried not to run.

How had the unicorn entered the city? She saw it leap from the sky like a falling planet. But no, the event had been more simple. She seemed to see the narrow gate through which she had come in, and one soldier asleep by a wine flask, and the other standing idle, regarding something come quietly up out of the groves and orchards of the plain. A horse? Yes, a fine horse lost by some noble. And the horse came to the gate, and the soldier who was not drunk enough to be asleep smiled on it, and tried to pet it, and somehow could not. But he undid the entry to the city, and like a vapor the unicorn went in. “Horse-horse,” said the soldier fondly. “One day, I’ll have a horse.”

There were torches burning along the street at intervals, and here and there a lamp hung in a porch or a lit window gave its stained glass brilliance.

Through cold arches of shadow and cold blasts of light the fleeing artisans milled.

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