A Game of Horns: A Red Unicorn Anthology

by Gregory D. Little

  Huang Fa formed his question for the gods: “Can I escape the Sorcerer Battarsaikhan’s curse?”

  O O O

  The wind shrieked outside the tent, drumming at the silk and tugging at the pegs and stays. Inside the pavilion, all was dark and strangely cold. The only light came from eight sticks of incense that rose from holes in the turtle shell. The sweet scent of jasmine curled up from the cherry coals until the dusty room bore a cloying air.

  Huang Fa lay in a troubled dream, shaking from chills. He dreamt of children crawling stealthily through the storm, faces bared to the wind. They dragged something large and bulky behind them as they crawled, something with hair, though the dim light defeated Huang Fa’s vision.

  It is the mare’s head, Huang Fa thought unreasonably, and whimpered in horror.

  But the children came on—toddlers with knives in their hands, and young girls in nothing but loin clothes. There were fierce boys with sharpened teeth and eyes that shone with their own inner light, as if stars might burst from them.

  They reached the door flap of the pavilion and crept inside, dragging their hairy burden. Huang Fa felt vaguely detached as they neared his bed, even though he expected them to plunge their daggers into his flesh.

  “I meant no harm,” he apologized. “I did not know your need.”

  The feral children gave no answer.

  A chill swept over him, as if an icy wind blew up from the caverns of hell and rippled up his spine. His muscles felt as rubbery as dead eels.

  A half a dozen children stood above the hairy thing. By the light from the incense, Huang Fa could see an animal hide rolled up and tied into a bundle.

  It is the hide from my horse, he thought. They will put it upon me so that I catch the anthrax.

  He felt torn between the desire to run, to fight, or simply to lie still and accept whatever fate the feral children deemed fit.

  Three children uncut the strings that bound the hide and unrolled it, almost celebrating with excitement. Even in the dim light Huang Fa could see that it was not the hide of his fine red mare. This skin was a deeper red, like the bark of red pines in the mountain.

  Four waifs spread the great hide over him with great ceremony, and Huang Fa breathed in the luxurious scent of a well-tanned hide. The fur upon it was like heaven, like a banked fire that warmed him through and through.

  The children turned to leave; Huang Fa suddenly roused to a sense of danger. His eyes flew open, and he stilled his breathing to listen for the sound of stealthy motion.

  The room was dark, the dead air heavy with dust. Outside, the storm had quieted. Nothing moved in the pavilion. The only sound was the soft snoring of a trader on the far side of the tent, hidden beneath a sheepskin.

  Droplets of sweat stood out on Huang Fa’s forehead and made his shirt cling to his chest. Briefly he worried that he had caught anthrax, but then realized that he had been lost in a fever dream and that his fever had broken.

  For days he had been sick with worry, and now he felt suddenly released. He leaned up on one elbow, peered around the room. There were no feral children here.

  He touched the pelt spread upon him, a fine animal hide unlike any that he could recall seeing. The fur was thick, luxurious, and the animal was huge.

  Perhaps it is from some kind of yak, he wondered, and then realized that someone must have discerned just how chilly the night had become and laid the hide over him. His fever had turned a kindness into a nightmare.

  Huang Fa pulled the hide over his head and wished that he could lie beneath it forever, smell the clean scent of the leather, fall into the embrace of its everlasting warmth.

  O O O

  At dawn, Huang Fa woke to the scent of tea brewing. Sunlight streamed through the tent. Someone had gone outside and was using a branch from a bush to sweep dust from the walls of the pavilion.

  “Good news,” the monk said. “The storm blew out last night, and the bad air is clearing. The sun came up as red as a phoenix this morning, but all is well.”

  The merchants were up and bustling about in their colorful silks, packing kegs of precious oils and spices outside. Master Wong merely sat drinking his tea, his face looking drawn and hard.

  Huang Fa got up and stretched, pulling the deep-red hide up to him. He then looked upon a small trunk to where the turtle shell lay. The brown lines upon its curved back looked like cracks in the mud after a river dries. The stubs of eight incense sticks poked out from it.

  Huang Fa felt good, full of light and hope. He nodded to the shell and begged the wizard, “Have you checked the oracle bones?”

  Master Wong gazed at him for a long moment, his face stoic. He finally nodded a bit and said evenly. “You cannot escape your fate. I’m sorry. We cannot always escape the consequences of our errors, no matter how bitterly we regret our deeds.”

  At that moment, Huang Fa felt a strange sensation. His face was growing numb, and he noted that the skin on his forehead itched. He reached up and touched the side of his head—and felt a distinct nub protruding sharply up, stretching his skin taut.

  “What?” he asked, fear lurching in his stomach. He noted something odd about his hand. A fine soft fur had begun to grow out of it, as dark red as the darkest cedar wood.

  Huang Fa screamed in wordless terror and leaped out from under the hide.

  “The animal spirit has entered you,” the wizard said apologetically. “Battarsaikhan’s spell is more powerful than I could have dreamed. It is not just your nature that will change.”

  Huang Fa scrambled away from his bed, shoving the great red hide away. He peered at the luxurious fur.

  “In the land of the Kazakhs,” Master Wong explained, “the animal that wore that skin is called a ‘giant deer,’ and its meat is treasured as the sweetest of all venison. Its hide is as dark at the trunks of the red pines in the mountains where it lives, and its wide antlers are valued by all, but it is so rare that some believe it to be only a myth. Here near the Altai Mountains, a few still survive, but even in our tales it is hardly more than a myth—the Xie Chai. Though it has two horns, some insist that it is a type of unicorn.”

  Huang Fa felt a sudden excruciating pain in his ankles as bones twisted. He fought against a strange compulsion to stand on all fours. He knew the name of the Xie Chai, of course. It was said that the unicorn could smell good and evil and was attracted by the scent of righteous men while it punished the evil. The Buddhists said that it often carried the book of law in its antlers.

  “Haaaawlp!” Huang Fa cried, but the words twisted in his mouth, and only an animal’s mewling cry escaped his lips.

  “This is your fate—the fate that Battarsaikhan, the peaceful sorcerer, has placed upon you,” the wizard said sadly. “You shall roam the land upon four hooves and be doomed to paw beneath the snow for lichens and grass at the feet of the Altai Mountains. You shall never know the love of a woman, for you are among the last of your kind.

  “You shall be hunted all the days of your life, by both barbarians and by true men, by wolves and snow leopards in the mountains, by cheetahs on the plains. There is no escape for you, oh man with a gentle soul, nowhere that you may hide. I fear you will not last the winter, for most of all you shall be hunted by the feral children, from whose mouths you have taken their livelihood, and it is the will of the sorcerer that you shall be found.

  “At the very last, you shall feed the feral children with your own flesh.”

  An image of Yan flashed before Huang Fa. He saw her at the foot of a screen, painting an image of a phoenix upon black silk. She looked up toward sunlight streaming in through a window.

  Huang Fa lunged toward the flap of the tent and lurched through it into the dusty air. His new animal instincts made him yearn for freedom, to run under the open sky, and he clattered the last few steps upon hooves that slipped upon the silk beneath him. His growing antlers caught in the flaps of the tent and threatened to break his neck before he tore free. The sky outside was filled with dust and h
ad a surreal glow to it, as red as if lit by the Sun God’s fires.

  Yan, he thought.

  Huang Fa snorted and whirled, his feet kicking up dust, and peered into the tall grass near camp. There he saw tiny figures—the sprawling bodies of half-starved children, hiding in the grass, teeth filed sharper than daggers.

  He turned and bounded away, his tail raised high like a flag of warning, his feet exploding with power as he ascended into the air, dipped to the earth, and then soared upward again.

  O O O

  In late winter, Yan woke one night. The lunar New Year had just begun, and it was the night of the lantern festival. A great red lantern hung from the rafters on her porch, streaming a little light through her window.

  She’d dreamt of Huang Fa again, and the excitement of the holidays was dulled by a sense of loss. He had never come home. She feared that he was trapped in the snowy mountains, or that he had died while crossing the desert.

  Yet tonight her heart told her that he still lived, and she imagined that he had come to her bed.

  She inhaled deeply, trying to catch the scent of him. She tried to remember the light in his eyes, his broad handsome smile, but the memory had faded.

  Yan untangled herself from her bedsheets, from the arms of her little sister whom she feared might waken and beg for breakfast. She went to the door. The red lantern hung above her head, burning gaily in the night.

  She gazed out across the wooden bridge in front of her house, toward the bamboo grove whose leaves rustled in a light wind.

  A beast stood there—huge and dark, its fur a deep red. It was so large that at first she thought it was a horse. Then she saw that it dwarfed even a stallion. Its broad antlers were like those of an enormous elk, yet webbing stretched between the tines, as if to catch the light of the full moon.

  It tiptoed toward her, into the circle of light by the door, and she knew it for what it was—a Xie Chai unicorn.

  It extended its snout, as if to catch her scent, and she put forth her hand, hoping that it might enjoy the allure of the rosewater perfume she wore. Such animals could discern a man’s heart. It would tell her if she was good or evil.

  She longed to be good, but she knew her love for Huang Fa was too great.

  The unicorn stepped near, and she was astonished at how huge it was. She saw its eyes, shining in the light of the lantern, filled with some unimaginable desire.

  Suddenly she could smell the musky scent of a young man that often haunted her dreams. She knew that scent intimately, knew the young man’s clean limbs and sweet breath.

  “Huang Fa?” she wondered aloud.

  The beast looked startled. The muscles in its shoulders began to bunch, as if it would leap away.

  She knew then what had happened. Huang Fa had turned into this magical beast, and, yearning for her, he had come to her at last.

  But how had this happened?

  Inside the house, her little sister woke in the night. “Yan?” she cried. “Yan, I’m hungry!”

  In that instant the unicorn grew afraid. There was no more coherent thought in its head, only nameless animal fear that took over.

  The proud beast whirled and bounded, leaping through the stream.

  “Huang Fa!” Yan called, rushing to the edge of the porch.

  A low fog covered the ground, and the unicorn bounded through it, as if leaping upon clouds, until it disappeared into the plum orchard, lost under a silver moon.

  About the Author

  David Farland is an award-winning, bestselling author with more than fifty novels in print. He has won the Philip K. Dick Award for his novel On My Way to Paradise and over seven awards for his novel Nightingale. He is best known for his New York Times bestselling series The Runelords.

  About the Editor

  Lisa Mangum has worked in the publishing industry since 1997 and is currently the Managing Editor of Shadow Mountain Publishing in Utah. She is also the author of four award-winning young adult novels (The Hourglass Door trilogy and After Hello) as well as several novellas and short stories. She lives in Utah with her husband, Tracy.