Black Unicorn, Tanith Lee [famous ebook reader txt] 📗

a rushing whistling through the air. It was a thunderbolt crashing on the palace, on this very room—the sol diers whirled away. Tanaquil dropped flat over the peeve androlled them aside against the bed. The chimney croaked and bellowed. And the leaping fire—froze. The flames were points of yellow ice—

Everyone screamed. The thunderbolt landed in the hearth,and ice and soot and bricks and coal flew out, while the room tottered, and plaster left the ceiling.

“Demons!”

There was only one. Tanaquil looked up and beheld that athing 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 slidup the walls. It put out arms like elephant trunks and liftedTanaquil, and the claw-attached peeve, from the floor. “Red-Hair, we go,” said Epbal Enrax. And they went.

Part Three

10

Under the stormy sky, the sea bubbled and lashed like liquidmauvish copper. The colors of everything were wrong. The sandlooked like cinders from some awful fire. The palms were black,and groaned in the wind. The beach did not seem to be any placein 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 roseup like the carcass of something petrified.

From the dune where she had arrived, Tanaquil surveyed thescene. She had been told of demon flights before, though neverexperienced any. The breath had been knocked out of her, but she was flustered rather than shocked. She understood quite wellthat she had been rescued from probable death at the hands of Gasb’s soldiers. There was a confused memory of a chimney, thou sands of roofs below, lightning casts like spears, and descendingin a whirlwind. She grasped that this dreadful spot was the seabeach, and through the explosions of brown and puce foam, she madeout the unicorn arch, the Sacred Gate. The peeve was seated nearby,washing itself over-thoroughly. Tanaquil glanced behind her. EpbalEnrax balanced on the dunes, apparently up to the pelvis in sand. Itseemed 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, awater spout. Now she got up slowly and started to walk towardthe 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 redtop. The ocean had come further in, and now the thing drifted inland too. It stopped about ten feet from the shore, and fromTanaquil. It hardened, took shape. After half a minute, Jaive thesorceress stood on the water. Her hair blew madly, like a scarletblizzard in miniature. She was wrapped in a theatrical blackmantle 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 andstared 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 youleft me in the desert and so on.”

Jaive frowned. Her eyes flashed. “Stupid child! If you knewthe 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 clevercrystal, bone, wheels and cogs, your usual paraphernalia.”

“I don’t make things, I repair them,” said Tanaquil. Jaiveflapped her hands dismissively. The sea ruffled and spat at herfeet. “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 sor cery is in disarray. Had I known—would I, a practiced mistressof the magical arts, have flung my power at a real unicorn? The damage to my ability was very great. Only now have I begun torecover 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, orsomething 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 Iknow—”

“That man is your father,” shouted Jaive. In the pleats andtwirls, all of her seemed now to flame. “I renounced him.”

“Yes, mother.”

Jaive stopped shouting, and the pleats and twirls graduallysmoothed out.

“I can overlook your behavior,” said Jaive, “because I com prehend that it was the unicorn that brought you here, and theunicorn 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 seenbefore 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 mendedby you, it never breaks again. Since you were a little child, I’veseen you do this, and it never came to me that it wasn’t some coldartisan’s knack, but a true magic.”

“Mother!”

Jaive held up her imperious hand. “Think, and tell me hon estly. When you repair a thing—a clock, a bow, a doll—what doyou do?”

“I—look at it. And then I pick