Black Unicorn (Dragonflight) (11 page)

There was only one. Tanaquil looked up and beheld that a thing with two heads and elephant ears and the eyes of frogs sat on its huge stomach and obese tail in the fireplace.

"Come,"
said Epbal Enrax the cold demon, and cracks slid up the walls. It put out arms like elephant trunks and lifted Tanaquil, and the claw-attached peeve, from the floor.
"Red-Hair, we go,"
said Epbal Enrax. And they went.

10

Under the stormy sky, the sea bubbled and lashed like liquid mauvish copper. The colors of everything were wrong. The sand looked like cinders from some awful fire. The palms were black, and groaned in the wind. The beach did not seem to be any place in the world, but some sort of other world that was a kind of Hell. And out of the cinders and the cooper waves, the rocks rose up like the carcass of something petrified.

From the dune where she had arrived, Tanaquil surveyed the scene. She had been told of demon flights before, though never experienced any. The breath had been knocked out of her, but she was flustered rather than shocked. She understood quite well that she had been rescued from probable death at the hands of Gasb's soldiers. There was a confused memory of a chimney, thousands of roofs below, lightning casts like spears, and descending in a whirlwind. She grasped that this dreadful spot was the sea beach, and through the explosions of brown and puce foam, she made out the unicorn arch, the Sacred Gate. The peeve was seated nearby, washing itself over-thoroughly. Tanaquil glanced behind her. Epbal Enrax balanced on the dunes, apparently up to the pelvis in sand. It seemed pleased—mauve, of course, was the demon's favorite shade.

"Who sent you to fetch me?" said Tanaquil. A demon was at the beck and call of anyone powerful enough to summon it. Disquieting visions of Vush and the artisans hiring a sorcerer went through her mind.

But Epbal Enrax said, "
Lady other Red of Hair. Yonder.
"

There was something standing on the sea.

Tanaquil had taken it for a figment of the weather, a cloud, a water spout. Now she got up slowly and started to walk toward the violent edges of the water. The peeve rose to follow, decided against it, and began to burrow into the sand.

The thing on the sea wavered like a flame. It had a flamy red top. The ocean had come further in, and now the thing drifted inland too. It stopped about ten feet from the shore, and from Tanaquil. It hardened, took shape. After half a minute, Jaive the sorceress stood on the water. Her hair blew madly, like a scarlet blizzard in miniature. She was wrapped in a theatrical black mantle sewn with silver and jasper locusts. Her face was fierce. She was silent.

"Mother," said Tanaquil.

Jaive spoke. "Yes, that's right, I'm your mother."

After this unsensible exchange, they braved the storm and stared at each other.

Finally Tanaquil said, stiffly, "So you decided to search me out after all. I thought you wouldn't bother. I mean, after you left me in the desert and so on."

Jaive frowned. Her eyes flashed. "Stupid child! If you knew the difficulties I've had."

"Poor you."

"The unicorn—if I had realized—the magic, the mystery—I thought it was some toy of yours, made up out of bits of clever crystal, bone, wheels and cogs, your usual paraphernalia."

"I don't make things, I repair them," said Tanaquil. Jaive flapped her hands dismissively. The sea ruffled and spat at her feet. "And
must
you stand on the water?"

"Am I?" Jaive looked about. "This isn't myself. It's a
projection
of my image. I can't manage anything more. My sorcery is in disarray. Had I known—would I, a practiced mistress of the magical arts, have flung my power at a real
unicorn?
The damage to my ability was very great. Only now have I begun to recover my skills."

"I see," said Tanaquil. "You mean you didn't search for me sooner because you couldn't. It wasn't merely uninterest or pique?"

"How dare you doubt your mother?"

"It's easy."

Jaive's face wrinkled up, and a flickering went all over her. Tanaquil was not sure if this was due to faulty magic, rage, or something else.

"I say nothing," shouted Jaive, "of your coming to this city. I say nothing about the palace in which I located you."

"Zorander's palace," said Tanaquil. Jaive's image pleated, twirled. "I'm sorry. If you'd trusted me . . . I know, I mean I know—"

"That man is your father," shouted Jaive. In the pleats and twirls, all of her seemed now to flame. "I renounced him."

"Yes, mother."

Jaive stopped shouting, and the pleats and twirls gradually smoothed out.

"I can overlook your behavior," said Jaive, "because I comprehend that it was the unicorn that brought you here, and the unicorn that needs and demands your service."

Tanaquil's mixture of feelings spun off and left only one question. "Why? What does it want? Mother, do you really know?"

Jaive smiled. It was not like any smile Tanaquil had ever seen before on her mother's face.
She
is
beautiful, the awful woman.

"I thought all along you were
his
daughter," said Jaive. "Obsessed with things, mechanical gadgets. But you're mine. Tanaquil, you're a sorceress."

"Here we go," said Tanaquil, impatient. "Of course I'm not."

"Your sorcery," went on Jaive relentlessly, "lies in your ability to
mend.
You can mend anything at all. And once mended by you, it never breaks again. Since you were a little child, I've seen you do this, and it never came to me that it wasn't some cold artisan's knack, but a true magic."

"
Mother!
"

Jaive held up her imperious hand. "Think, and tell me honestly. When you repair a thing—a clock, a bow, a doll—what do you do?"

"I—look at it. And then I pick up the proper tools—and I—"

"How do you find the fault? How do you know which tool will correct it? Who, Tanaquil, taught you?"

"No one. I can just do it, mother."

"When I was ten," said Jaive, "I summoned a small sprite out of a kettle. They said: 'How did you do it, who taught you?' I said, 'No one. I just can.'"

"Mother—"

"Enough time's been wasted," said Jaive. "The unicorn came to you because it scented your magic and how it would serve. It came as a bone, a broken skeleton, and you mended it, and made it go. It was my own thoughtless blow that fully revived it—a miraculous accident. Or did the unicorn also use me? I'd rejoice to think so. Nothing can destroy a unicorn, Tanaquil, and only despair can kill it. Once it did despair—yet even then its bones remained, and the life in them. Now it waits. For your help."

"My help. What can I do?"

Jaive smiled again. Warmer than her fiery hair, her smile.

"Do you think unicorns can ever really have lived on this earth? No, their country is the perfect world. The world for which this one was a model that failed. For some reason the unicorn strayed, or was enticed, out of a breach in the wall of its world. And then the gate was closed behind it. It couldn't return. It lived here and it pined. It died the only death it could, sleeping in the desert. Until you found it."

"Actually, a peeve found it."

"The peeve has given itself to you, as your familiar."

Exasperated, believing, Tanaquil said again, "Yes, mother."

"Doubtless," said Jaive, "the one who worked the crime against the unicorn, bringing it from its perfect home, shutting the door on it, was the first ruler of the city. To correct the balance, his descendant must set it free. And you, Tanaquil, are the Prince's daughter." Jaive bridled. Anger and pain went over her face, and she crushed them away while Tanaquil watched. Jaive said, "Accomplish your task."

"I think you mean that the archway in the rock is the gate to the other world—that it's broken, so nothing can go back through it. But I can repair the gate. Yes?"

"Yes, Tanaquil."

"But, mother, there's just air and rock—it isn't bronze and iron. There aren't any pins or cogs or springs or hinges—"

"There are. Only a sorceress of your particular powers could find them."

"Oh, Mother—"

"Don't dare contradict me. I was terrified of the unicorn.
I.
But you have never been. And now, look and
see."
Jaive pointed along the beach. Another new expression was on her face. No longer terror, certainly. It was awe, it was youth and laughing delight. "Look and see and don't make it wait
any longer!
"

The unicorn was on the beach below the rock. Its blackness shamed the shadows, its horn brought back the light. The rain had ended and the sea was growing still.

Torn ribbons . . .

Did you feel that? . . . It was strange . . . Just for a moment—something . . .

This time Tanaquil did not shriek, or run. She was alone. The murky milk of the foam swilled through beneath the arch, and she walked up to her ankles in water. The storm was over, but the day was dying quickly in thick cloud. In an hour it would be night.

She had looked back once, and the flame of Jaive was still there on the darkling sea. It raised its arm and waved to her, as once or twice when she was a child the form of Jaive had waved to her from the high windows of the fortress. But the projected image was faltering, and like the daylight, going out. Epbal Enrax had already vanished. The peeve had hidden in the sand. Tanaquil did not know what she felt or thought of what had happened. Lizra and Zorander and Gasb also had faded. It was the Gate that counted. The unicorn.

The unicorn had drawn away as she approached. Not shy, but precautionary, as if testing her again. She remembered how it had chased the artisans, the moment when it reared upwards on the platform. The unicorn could kill her far more efficiently than Gasb. But it had poised, away up the line of the cliffs, as she entered in under the arch.

Tanaquil moved forward one slow step at a time. The sense of the abyss below the sand was strong. She picked her path, searching after the indescribable sensation that had assailed her, like falling asleep for three heartbeats or five . . . For
that
had been when she had passed across the gate, a gate that led now to nowhere because it was broken.

Going so alertly, so slowly, she touched the rim of its weirdness and jumped back at once.
There.
Unmistakable.

But—what now?

There was nothing to see, save the dim rocks going up from the water, and, the other side of the arch, sand and gathering darkness.

Torn ribbons. She had felt them fluttering round her as she and Lizra ran, going through, coming back.

With enormous care, as if not to snap a spider's web, Tanaquil pushed her arms forward into empty air.

And something brushed her, like a ghost.

She did not like it. She pulled back her arms.

She thought:
Jaive is still a sorceress before she's my mother. She put the unicorn first.
She thought:
I can help a unicorn.

Tanaquil slid her arms back into the invisible something that stretched between the rocks. The brushing came, and she reached in turn and took hold of it.

Her fingers tingled, but not uncomfortably. The elements inside the air were not like anything she had ever touched or handled.

That doesn't matter.
She tried to think what happened when she looked into the workings of a lock, a music box, the caravan's cartwheel, the dismembered snake in the bazaar. Then she gave it up. Still holding on to the first unnamable strangeness, she groped after another along the net of the air. She closed her eyes, and behind her lids she saw a shape like a silver rod, and she swung it deftly over and hung it from a golden ring.

Her hands moved with trance-like symmetry. Objects, or illusions, floated toward her, and she plucked them and gave them to each other .

She did not need any implements—only her hands. Perhaps her thoughts.

Not like a clock or engine. Here everything drifted, like leaves on a pool.

She seemed to see their shapes, yet did not believe she saw what actually was there—and yet what was there was certainly as bizarre as her pictures of rods and slender pins, rings and discs and coils and curves, like letters of an unknown alphabet.

Probably I'm doing it wrong.

She opened her eyes and saw no change in anything, except the darkness came hurriedly now.

The unicorn glowed black against the rock a hundred feet away. The fans of the sea were pale with a choked moonrise.

She shut her eyes and saw again the drifting gold and silver chaos of the Gate like a half-made necklace.

Suddenly she knew what she did. It was not wrong. It was unlike all things, yet it was right. She seized a meandering star and pressed it home—

She had half wondered if she would know, dealing in such strangeness, when the work was finished. Complete, would the Gate seem mended—or would it only have formed some other fantastic pattern, which might be played with and rearranged for ever.

It was like waking from sleep, gently and totally, without disorientation.