A Game of Horns: A Red Unicorn Anthology

by Gregory D. Little

  Millie paused in her ablutions. Something in the structure of the argument, so rigid Millie could almost have repeated it word for word, changed. A silence of hesitation descended, and then came Father’s voice, so low even Millie could barely hear it through her closed door.

  “There might be another way,” he said with the gravity of the first mass of snow that presaged the avalanche. His words were mysterious, but his tone was Righteous.

  Mother’s answering silence held a thrumming quality of confusion eroding to horror.

  “No!” Her whisper was fierce, thick ice cracking deep. “What possible good could that do?”

  “He’s part of the very covenant that marches against us! He can mark us as friends if we allow Him. He can help us!”

  Righteous fire bloomed in Millie’s breast at his words. She barely stifled delirious laughter.

  “He is not the god of the south, whatever you might believe, Garald. Even if he was, I would never pray to that thing!”

  Millie found herself pressed to the door, one ear resting against cool, smooth wood that smelled of hickory as she flared her nostrils. Her heart raced in her chest. She had never felt so strongly about … anything. What was happening to her?

  “Again, you mean, Bethany?” Father said, his voice full of scorn. “You’ll never pray to Him again? You prayed to Him the same as me. Not quite eleven years ago, if I recall.”

  Something as cold and certain as a grave opened within Millie. The people of the valley always whispered about those times. How badly her parents had wanted a child. How long they’d been trying, how desperate they’d grown.

  How a freak storm the year before Millie’s birth had smashed flat every field save her parents’.

  “Don’t you throw that back in my face,” Mother snapped, barely keeping her voice in check. “I may have gone along for our family’s sake, but it was all you. I was never happy about it. I never imagined for a moment it would work.”

  “But it did work,” Father said, his voice conciliatory, reasonable. “It could work again.”

  “You swore to me never again, Garald. You swore.” Millie heard actual tears in her mother’s words, and Bethany Carver was not a woman given to emotional display.

  “All right, all right,” Father relented. “We’ll think of something else. You’ll see. It’ll be all right.”

  His words were unworthy, as was his intent. But his desire …

  It was so very Righteous.

  O O O

  The days of Mother’s predicted week passed. Father’s frown-lines deepened. Mother’s clenched jaw tightened beneath the pallor of her face. The house divided into armed camps, a mummery of the war coming to their doorstep.

  They no longer pretended peace for Millie’s sake.

  “The Covenant soldiers pillage every place they pass,” Father remarked once over steaming honeycake desserts turned bitter from the poison in the air.

  “All the better not to trust in any god of such men,” Mother replied, as if to stop his heart with sweetness.

  “It worked once before,” Father said a different time, while stacking wood on the hearth for a fire. It was his lone defense, the only one he required, Millie knew.

  “Yes, my love,” Mother said, looking up from mending a tear in Father’s coveralls. She had spent the days mending, gathering, and bundling their possessions. The ones she said they couldn’t leave behind. The ultimatum was clear in her actions even if she never spoke it in Millie’s hearing. “But you did not have to endure the fruit of that aid. Let the old stones sleep where we found them.”

  Millie was forced to stop judging her parents’ words and tones, so fraught with contradictions they had become.

  On the fifth night of Mother’s predicted seven, Millie was sent to bed early, a rare accord between her parents. She had to thread her way between the bundles strewn throughout the little house’s back hallway. Those would be tied to the mules come morning if Mother had her way. Millie entered her room, but after letting the door shut with an audible thump, she pulled it open again on freshly oiled hinges. A wedge of firelight was visible through the crack.

  There she listened as the same arguments were spun again, once, twice, thrice. At last Mother stalked off in disgust, and Father took up a vigil at the kitchen table, clutching his face with knotted fingers. After a time he stood, disappearing from Millie’s view for several minutes. When he returned, he added fresh logs to the fire and brought a kettle of water to a boil. He was going to make tea for Mother.

  A peace offering, or so Millie thought. But Father added a dash of powder to the steaming, amber liquid in the mug. Millie’s nose caught the barest hint of acrid stain in the air wafting from that mug. Smiling with satisfaction, Father carried the tainted tea toward Mother, sitting in her favorite chair. Millie heard murmured words of thanks and a strained sort of reconciliation. Father indicating that he had given in.

  Sometime later he emerged into view again, this time cradling Mother’s limp form across his chest as he passed Millie’s room and headed for his own. Millie noted with a dry relief that Mother’s chest still rose and fell.

  Alive. Asleep. Quite without realizing it, Millie soon followed suit.

  She woke from a dreadful nightmare of beating drums filled with rippling blood to an assortment of pains in her neck and back. Whispers filled the air around her. The whispering wall was talkative tonight.

  It had always drawn her, the panel along the back hallway where the plaster was brightest and thickest. It never ceased its murmurings. Mother and Father never commented on it, though she caught Father’s gaze drifting toward it every now and again when he was feeling his most Righteous. But the whispers, though enticing, had always been wordless before, even to Millie’s keen ears.

  She emerged from her room and froze. Even in the dim, pre-dawn light, she could see the newly formed, ragged, man-sized hole occupying the whispering wall’s center, beyond which lay some deeper darkness. In addition to the whispers, she heard other words rising up from the darkness.

  Words spoken in her father’s voice, but in no language Millie had ever heard.

  O O O

  A narrow tunnel lay behind the wall, a rough-cut, spiral stairway leading downward through the rich, black soil and into the bedrock beyond. The passageway must be far older than her parents’ little house.

  With every step, the hairs of Millie’s arms and neck stood more at attention, only partly because of the cold. The whispers grew louder, and the voice of her father as well, both speaking words in the same impossible language.

  Millie emerged into a dank, roughly spherical chamber carved from the slate gray of living rock. It was outlined in the flickering light of candles set into hollows in the chamber walls. A smell of mold and rot permeated the air.

  A strange altar of stone occupied the chamber’s rear. The statue atop it was of a shape Millie could neither describe nor truly understand—all wide eyes and spiraling horns protruding from a mass that seemed to defy creation. To look upon it disturbed Millie, made her nauseous. It filled her with a Righteous ecstasy so powerful she sagged to her knees.

  Father knelt already, shirtless and sweating despite the cold, his forehead pressed against the stone of the idol, which glowed with red light where his skin touched it. His strange, muttered words filled the air, the stone chamber somehow catching and magnifying his whispers.

  At some sound Millie could have sworn she didn’t make, Father turned from his crouch and regarded her with mute horror. Millie stared unblinking into the sudden intensity of his gaze. They stood there, their faces frozen mirrors of one another. Then, slowly and without speaking to Millie, Father turned back to his altar and continued his prayer. Millie’s heart swelled with pride.

  Father concluded his prayer, voice rising in a crescendo, then he stood and brushed past Millie without a word. He refused to meet her eyes as he passed, but his brimmed with unworthy shame and relief. He retreated back up the stairs; Millie hear
d his footsteps mounting the stone steps then pausing.

  “It was here when we built the house,” he said from above. “When we dug the foundation. Waiting for us. I wish …” He trailed off. Then his feet squeaked on the wooden planks of the hallway floor, and he was gone.

  Millie turned to regard the idol.

  The thing they prayed to for me.

  She had a sudden, staggering sense that every aspect of her life had possessed a hole in it that she’d never before seen. A million pieces of her life, a million moments, yet all the holes were the same shape, like the missing piece of a puzzle.

  Staring at the little stone idol, Millie thought she could guess the shape of the missing piece.

  Above her the house creaked in a sudden, stiff breeze. Millie couldn’t say how, but the sound reminded her of a smile, the parting of wooden lips around gritted stone teeth.

  “What are you?” she asked, her voice croaking from disuse. She spoke so seldom that she forgot how seldom she spoke.

  The wooden pilings of the house groaned anew from above as wind howled through the house’s eaves. Dust rained from the chamber’s ceiling, tickling Millie’s throat as she breathed. These things were not words, yet they layered slivers of meaning atop one another to form ideas that she somehow understood.

  She was asking the wrong question.

  “What am I?” She felt the warmth radiating from the stone even as the last syllable left her throat. The little idol with its many eyes and horns was pleased. The house squalled, the wind shrieked, and the stone beneath her feet vibrated.

  “I am a piece of you,” she said, giving voice to the voiceless. “But what am I to do?” She wasn’t sure how she meant the question. Soldiers were coming to burn their lands and raze their home. Her father had drugged her mother. And Millie apparently owed her existence to prayers offered to some dark, twisting form that peered out from a stone idol deep beneath her home.

  An orifice opened in a nook between two of the idol’s eyes, forming so gradually Millie couldn’t be certain it hadn’t been there all along. At first she thought the hole was bleeding before realizing it was disgorging something long and spiraling and red as blood.

  It emerged straight and rigid, first as long as her palm, then as long as her forearm, and finally nearly the full length of her arm. She dashed forward and plucked it up before it could fall. It was a horn. Narrow and tapered and delicate, it looked to be made of some cross between ivory and marble, but was a uniform blood red color, even looking wet though it was dry to the touch.

  The world shifted around her as she gazed at her prize, speaking in its wordless voice.

  “This is for me,” she said. “And I am to take it to the capital.”

  O O O

  Millie shifted her pack from one shoulder to the other, trying to relieve the pressure on the growing knot at the base of her neck. The bloody point in the air hovered at the upper left of her vision. She’d gotten used to it easily enough, noticing it only when the world wept a drop of blood at her horn’s intrusion.

  The howling winds and booming thunder had taught her how to press the horn’s tip against the skin of the world, which lay everywhere, even in the air itself. Once pierced, the horn slid into the world’s meat easily and stuck there, always in her sight yet invisible but for the dribble of blood it exacted in payment for its touch.

  She had emerged from the hidden shrine back into the house and made directly for her parents’ room. There she had found her mother locked in the tortured sleep of some drug, the older woman’s face pinched and pale, her teeth bared in a rictus. Pity had overwhelmed Millie.

  Her mother was unworthy to her bones. Millie was more certain of that than ever. But Mother had once withstood the weight of Righteous seed and born Righteous fruit. A single touch of the horn upon her mother’s brow had eased her slumber, relaxing taut muscles and adding peaceful rhythms back into her breathing.

  Millie found her father cowering in the corner opposite the bed. Righteous in desire but weak in deed. The touch of the horn to his skin had produced decidedly different results.

  The road out of the valley was crowded now, and growing more so by the hour with wagons dragged by mismatched teams of horses and soldiers walking in small clumps, their packs and weapons hefted over shoulders slumped with exhaustion. They came in two flavors, some uniforms the color of rust and others a white soiled to gray.

  Only the once-whites had weapons, and they watched the rusts with hands twitching about hafts. The once-whites’ baleful eyes brimmed with hope and suspicion, as if they could not believe their good fortune. The rusts carried only supplies, though their shoulders slumped all the more despite their lighter burdens.

  The two warring armies, marching north toward the capital and not killing one another. Millie avoided both sides, needing no outside urging to do so. Their hollow stares sparked something close to fear in her. Once she risked drifting close to a family riding a ramshackle, two-wheeled wagon pulled by a stinking nag of a horse. Millie was on the verge of speaking, but they read the question in her face.

  “It’s peace,” the mother called down hoarsely from her perch. She indicated a clump of rusts with a jerk of the shoulder. “Them of the Southern Covenant surrendered last night.”

  Odd. Millie had thought they were winning only the day before. She nearly said as much, but the world around her shifted, grasses and clouds swirling in previously unfelt winds, providing her the answer.

  Father had prayed for peace.

  Millie kept asking questions inside her mind, and the world kept providing her with answers, but it wasn’t really the world. It was the little idol, or the greater something the idol represented. And the further Millie got from that moment of contact with the cold, writhing stone, the more its wishes seemed indistinguishable from her own.

  Soon enough a pleasing weight settled upon her mind, bearing down with a pressure that comforted like swaddling. She stopped asking questions, as the answers were already waiting inside.

  O O O

  Millie came upon the herd two days later, the valley well behind her. Despite the awesome sight of so many horses, she felt no surprise. Indeed, she found she’d been expecting it.

  Hundreds of horses moved in a great, seething mass headed north. Huge warhorses, piebalds and chestnuts, blacks and bays, duns and roans and palominos. Some were bareback, some still bore saddle and bridle, but all those of the herd were riderless. A loose ring of soldiers, once-whites riding chargers of their own, surrounded the horses, keeping them pointed unerringly north.

  They are bound for queen and capital. One side will call them a gift of good faith, the other the spoils of war.

  Millie shadowed the herd’s left flank for hours, the effort of keeping up with the horses leaving her legs loose and shaking. At last a halt was called from somewhere toward the front of the mass.

  Millie waited until dusk to approach the nearest soldier, who was maintaining his solitary vigil upon this sector of the herd, a lonely cook fire banishing a small swatch of the night. Almost gagging at the overpowering stench of horseflesh, Millie made her approach obvious, angling so that he could easily see her coming in the light of the small fire. She still appeared to be a young girl.

  No man with any spine would see a true threat.

  The once-white’s slump stiffened to alertness, and he stood at her approach. That too was good. He would fear her less if he could loom.

  “You there, girl,” the once-white said, lowering the nicked and notched tip of his spear just enough so that firelight played hypnotically along its length. “Are you alone? What possessed you to wander about at night?” His brows twitched, furrowing and straightening, unable to decide how Millie should be treated.

  Pinching the bloody welt in the air to the left side of her vision, Millie withdrew her horn, allowing the man to see it appear seemingly from nowhere. The once-white blinked and scrubbed a gauntleted hand across his eyes, as if to clear them.

 
; “I found this,” Millie said. The red horn shone with false wetness, looking freshly bathed in blood though it was dry and roughly textured to the touch. “See?” She proffered it to the man, cradled upon her palms. Firelight sent flickering orange highlights dancing across the wet red surface, and for just an instant, Millie could smell the iron tang of the blood the horn promised.

  Ignoring the alarm that revealed itself upon his face, the man leaned in, trying to see what it was she held. In a smooth motion, Millie gripped the horn’s wider end and flowed forward, drawing its tip from the bottom of the man’s left eye down his cheek, leaving a red line of blood in its wake.

  Millie turned away as the horn did its work.

  After a heartbeat, the once-white began to scream, but it cut off quickly once the mechanisms required for screaming no longer fit together. Millie burned what remained of his body upon his own fire, sitting so the wind carried the caustic smoke away from her.

  She adopted his small camp for her own, stuffing his food stores into her pack atop her dwindling ones and touching the horn’s tip primly to anything she didn’t want to keep. Once the camp had been set in order to her satisfaction, it was time to see to the horses.

  The first was sleeping, and the prick of the horn against its flank did nothing more than make it grunt, as if it knew this was both its destiny and for the best. Red rushed outward from the wound in all directions, hugging the creature’s flank as it transformed the hide from dun to the same scarlet of the horn.

  Moments later, a horn identical to hers erupted from the red horse’s forehead with the sound of cracking bone. The animal turned to regard her briefly with an eye the same ice-blue of her own, and she felt a swell of mutual understanding and kinship pass between them.

  Now you and I are one, each said to the other. Then the horse—unicorn now—turned and lowered its head so that its horn pricked its neighbor.

  Smiling with satisfaction, Millie found her way to the soldier’s blankets and fell into deep sleep.