Black Unicorn by Tanith Lee (best electronic book reader TXT) 📗

Tanaquil shut the door quickly, hearing the demon’s criesand apologies all the way down the first flight of steps.

The fortress was in near-blackness now, an occasional lamp

left alight over the staircases and at the turnings of corridors, stars

in windows, and brazier flicker.

Tanaquil opened her door and hesitated.

Through the darkness and through the cover of the quilt, a faint soft glow floated upward from the floor. The starry bones shone like the stars. Fingers to the spark of fire—had the demon really meant herself and what she did? What did she do? What sorcery beyond her grasp might she be unleashing?

She went into her room and stood shut in the night of it.

“Peeve,” she called softly, “what are we up to?”

No answer. Tanaquil said, “There’s to be a dinner. I’ll get you a gorgeous meat bone—” and saw that the shutter had been nudged wide at the window. In the feathers on the floor were the marks of fat-sticky paws. The peeve was gone. Drawn by dark ness, it had returned to the hollow hill in the desert.

Tanaquil felt a pang of anxiety. She was responsible for the peeve. They shared this adventure. No, that was silly. Who could control a peeve?

She lit her lamp and the glow of the skeleton faded.

“I’ll just get on,” she said aloud.

She thought of the sand giving way in the hollow hill and the peeve disappearing. Grimly, she got up on her work table and started once more to arrange the hooks.

How slowly the night passed.

Had she ever had a sleepless night before? Tanaquil could not remember one. Dissatisfaction and boredom had made her sleep. Now she was not bored at all, but alert, eager, very worried.

She had done all she could with the tools at her disposal. Tomorrow she would seek the blacksmith, who was one of the soldiers, hoping he was not too drunk to get the forge going. To her specifications he should be able to create for her those parts she needed to repair the beast of bone. A wild idea had come to her, too. Cogs and wheels, hinges and tiny shafts of bronze and copper might be incorporated into the skeleton, its legs, neck and spine. Perhaps it would be possible to make it move, to trot and leap, paw the ground, shake its head and twitch its slender tail. If she was canny, the blacksmith would only think she was at work on another, more complex, clock.

When she had done all she could, the night had swum out into the black hours of early morning. The moon had come and

gone. The snow had fallen and frozen. Still shivering, Tanaquilhad set a fire on her hearth and lit it. She left the shutters ajar. Sometimes they creaked and shelooked up—but the peeve was not there.

In the morning she would go and look, along the roofs, inthe hill. Hopeless to try now; the cold would be impassable. Shecould not even find her wool jacket or cloak.

Finally, in the dull firelight, she put another quilt over the skeleton to hide its mysterious glow, doused her lamp, and wentto bed.

She lay and looked at the normal glow of the fire on theceiling.

Then she was out in the desert, hurrying over the rimy snow towards the fortress, and from above she heard the shouts of the soldiers, and they fired their crossbows at her but missed. Tanaquilhalf woke then, and heard the soldiers in reality clattering aboutand calling. But that was not so novel. They were always seeingthings that did not exist and shooting at them. She picked up adim cry: “It’s only ghost-light on the snow, you idiot!”

Then she was asleep, and standing on the hollow hill like abridge. On the western horizon the moon, which had sunk, wasrising again. She watched it, and then she opened her eyes.

Some more time had passed. The fire was out. The roomshould have been in darkness, but it was filled with light. Themoon had come in at the window.

And then Tanaquil saw the peeve standing on the foot of herbed. It was almost the scene of the previous night, except that shehad left the way open for it. Except that now it held in its mouth a thing too large to have been carried with ease, long, and whorled like a great shell from the ocean, spiralled to a pointthinner than a needle. And it shone, this thing, it flamed, turning the whole room, the peeve, Tanaquil, the air itself, to silver.

Then the peeve dropped its burden gently on the bed, andthe vast light diminished, until it resembled only the starlight ofthe beast of bones. And so Tanaquil saw properly that what thepeeve had brought her, from the sand under the hill, was a horn.And never having seen such a horn, she knew it, as would anyone who ever lived in the world.

“Oh, peeve,” said Tanaquil. “By the God. It’s a unicorn.”

3

When Tanaquil opened her eyes five days later, the first thing she saw was not the painting of Jaive. Instinctively, Tanaquil had turned in her sleep, and lay facing her work table. And thereabove, hanging in space, spangling the sunshine from the win dow, was the finished skeleton of the unicorn.

It was eerie and beautiful, less like bones than some feymusical instrument. The replacement discs and tubes of bur nished copper did not spoil it; they were only sunny patches of warmth against the crystal, and the hoof was a dot of fire. Theskull of the unicorn was like a pale rainbow, and the horn, whichby daylight seemed only a giant shell made of pearl, had beenattached to the forehead with pins of bronze; a coronet.

The unicorn stirred faintly in an early morning breeze. The chains that held it from the beam were a bright rain. It was a sortof exquisite mobile.

In the joints of it were the thin shining levers and the wheelsTanaquil had fastened there at midnight.

Under the skeleton, on the table, sat the peeve.

The soldiers had remarked on the