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

She did not need any implements—only her hands. Perhapsher 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 sawwhat actually was there—and yet what was there was certainly as bizarre as her pictures of rods and slender pins, rings and discsand 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, exceptthe 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 silverchaos of the Gate like a half-made necklace.

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

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

It was like waking from sleep, gently and totally, withoutdisorientation.

She stepped away and lowered her arms, eyes still closed.

The Gate was whole. It was like a galaxy—like jewelry—like—like nothing on earth. But its entirety was obvious. It was

a smashed window where every pane of glass was back in place.There was no doubt. Then Tanaquil opened her eyes, and after all, she saw the Gate. Saw it as now it appeared, visibly, in her world.

You could no longer look through the arch. A dark, glowingmembrane filled it, that might have been water standing on end,and in the stuff of it were spangles, electrically coming and going.

Tanaquil was not afraid of it, but she was prudent. She moved back a few more steps. And frowned.What was it? Something, even now—not incomplete, yetmissing.

She turned round and walked out of the arch.

The sea had drawn off again, as the tide of night came in. As she moved out on the sand beyond the rock she heard the hugemidnight bell from the palace in the city borne on silence, thin asa thread.

She remembered Lizra, Zorander, She remembered Jaive. But in front of her was the unicorn. It had walked down almost to the arch. It was all darkness. The horn did not blaze; even the pale cloudy moon was brighter.

“I’ve done what I can,” said Tanaquil. “Only there’s someother thing—I don’t know what.”

The unicorn paced by her, to the entrance. It gazed in at thesequined shadow. She saw its eyes blink, once, garnet red. Thenit lowered its head to the ground, opened its mouth—she caught the glint of the strong silver teeth she recollected from its skull.But two other items glimmered on the wet sand.

Tanaquil went across, keeping her respectful distance fromthe beast, although it had once dragged her by the hair, to seewhat had been dropped.

“Did you kill him for these?”

The unicorn lifted its head again. It gave to her one obliquesideways look. She had never confronted such a face. Not hu man, not animal, not demonic. Unique.

Then it dipped the horn and pointed it down, at the base of the cliff. The horn hovered, and swung up. It pointed now toward the clifftop twenty feet above Tanaquil’s head. After a second, the unicorn sprang off up the sand. It returned to its place of waiting. It waited there.

Tanaquil bent down and took up the two cream-white whorledfossils the unicorn had dropped from its mouth: the Festivalcloak pins of the Prince. Which it must have ripped from the

sharkskin. And long ago, had they been ripped from this cliff-side? These then, the last components of the Gate.

Tanaquil knelt where the horn of the unicorn had first pointed.Old, wet, porous, no longer the proper shape, a wound showedin the cliff that might once have held a circling whorled shell.

“What do I have?” Tanaquil searched herself, Lizra’s silkdress lent for the procession. It had no pockets or pouches for aknife, its pendant topazes unsuitable, its goldwork too soft. Fi nally she rent the bodice and forced out one of the corset bones—asshe had hoped, it was made of bronze. With this she began toscrape at the rotted rock, using now and then a handful of therougher sand for a file.

“One day I shall tell someone about this, and they won’tbelieve me.”

She had managed to get the fossil back again into its settingin the rock base. The fit was not marvelously secure, but it wasthe best she could do. She had studied the Gate. The liquid shadow had not altered. Spangles came and went.

Tanaquil sighed. She stared up the stony limb of the cliff,toward its arched top like a bridge. It had been plain, the gestureof the unicorn. If one fossil was to be set here, the other had its origin aloft.

So, in her awkward dress and useless palace shoes, Tanaquilstarted to climb the rock.

She was glad the wind and storm had finished, for the rockwas slippery and difficult, much harder to ascend than the hillsbeyond her mother’s fort.

As she climbed, she thought of the unicorn dying therebeneath the arch in the desert that so exactly resembled the archof the Gate. Perhaps the likeness had soothed it, or made worse its pain, trapped in the alien world. Maybe it had scented, withits supernatural nostrils, the old sea that once had covered thedesert. Or maybe, wilder yet more reasonable than anything else,everything had been preordained—that the unicorn would liedown for death under the hill, and she come to be born half a mile from its grave, a descendant of the city princes, its savior.

“I hope I am. After all this, I’d better be, for heaven’s sake.”

Her skirt in shreds, her feet cut and hands grazed, shereached the summit of the cliff.

She thought of the shell she had seen in the rock, in the

desert, held firm in the stone. Would the situation of this fossil be the same?

No. It would lie to the left