Tales From The Vulgar Unicorn

by Edited By Robert Asprin

  “Now, now,” said Doctor Mernorad, patting the silver-worked lapels of his robe. The older man prided himself as much on his ability to see both sides of a question as he did on his skill at physic—though neither ability seemed much valued today in Regli’s townhouse. “One can’t hurry the gods, you know. The child will be born when Sabellia says it should be. Any attempt to hasten matters would be sacrilege as well as foolishness. Why, you know there are some… I don’t know what word to use, practitioners, who use forceps in a delivery? Forceps of metal! It’s disgusting. I tell you. Prince Kadakithis makes a great noise about smugglers and thieves; but if he wanted to clean up a real evil in Sanctuary, he’d start with the so-called doctors who don’t have proper connections with established temples.”

  “Well, damn it,” Regli snapped, “you’ve got a “proper connection” to the Temple of Sabellia in Ranke itself, and you can’t tell me why my wife’s been two days in labour. And if any of those bitch-midwives who’ve stood shift in there know”—he gestured towards the closed door—”they sure aren’t telling anybody.” Regli knuckled the fringe of blond whiskers sprouting on his jawbone. His wealth and breeding had made him a person of some importance even in Ranke. Here in Sanctuary, where he served as Master of the Scrolls for the royal governor, he was even less accustomed to being balked. The fact that Fate, in the form of his wife’s abnormally-prolonged labour, was balking him infuriated Regli to the point that he needed to lash out at something. “I can’t imagine why Samlane insists on seeing no one but midwives from the Temple of Heqt,” he continued, snapping his riding crop at specks on the mosaic walls. “That place has no very good reputation, I’m told. Not at all.”

  “Well, you have to remember that your wife is from Cirdon,” said Mernorad reasonably, keeping a wary eye on his patron’s lash. “Though they’ve been forty years under the Empire, worship of the Trinity hasn’t really caught on there. I’ve investigated the matter, and these women do have proper midwives’ licences. There’s altogether too much loose talk among laymen about “this priesthood” or “that particular healer” not being competent. I assure you that the medical profession keeps very close watch on itself. The worst to be said on the record—the only place it counts—about the Temple of Heqt here in Sanctuary is that thirty years ago the chief priest disappeared. Unfortunate, of course, but nothing to discredit the temple.”

  The doctor paused, absently puffing out one cheek, then the other, so that his curly white sideburns flared. “Though I do think,” he added, “that since you have engaged me anyway, that their midwives might consult with one of my, well, stature.”

  The door between the morning room and the hall was ajar. A page in Regli’s livery of red and gold tapped the jamb deferentially. The two Rankans looked up, past the servant to the heavier man beyond in the hall. “My lord,” said the page bowing, “Samlor hil Samt.”

  Samlor reached past the servant to swing the door fully open before Regli nodded entry. He had unpinned his dull travelling cloak and draped it over his left arm, close to his body where it almost hid the sheathed fighting knife. Northern fashion, Samlor wore boots and breeches with a long-sleeved over-tunic gathered at the wrists. The garments were plain and would have been a nondescript brown had they not been covered with white road dust. His sole jewellery was a neck thonged silver medallion stamped with the toad face of the goddess Heqt. Samlor’s broad face was deep red, the complexion of a man who will never tan but who is rarely out of the sun. He cleared his throat, rubbed his mouth with the back of his big fist, and said, “My sister sent for me. She’s in there, the servant says?” He gestured.

  “Why yes,” said Regli, looking a little puzzled to find the quirt in his hands. The doctor was getting up from his chair. “Why, you’re much older, aren’t you?” the lord continued inanely.

  “Fourteen years,” Samlor agreed sourly, stepping past the two Rankans to the bedroom door. He tossed his cloak over one of the ivory-inlaid tables along the wall. “You’d have thought the folks would have guessed something when the five between us were stillborn, but no. Hell, no … And much luck the bitch ever brought them.”

  “I say!” Regli gasped at the stocky man’s back. “You’re speaking of my wife!”

  Samlor turned, his knuckles already poised to rap on the door panel. “You had a choice,” he said. “I’m the one who was running caravans through the mountains, trying to keep the Noble House of Kodrix afloat long enough to marry its daughter well—and her slutting about so that the folks had to go to Ranke to get offers from anybody but a brothel keeper. No wonder they drink.” He hammered on the door.

  Mernorad tugged the white-faced Regli back. “Master Samlor,” the physician said sharply.

  “It’s Samlor, dammit!” the Cirdonian was shouting in response to a question from within the bedroom. “I didn’t ride 500 miles to stand at a damned doorway, either.” He turned to Mernorad. “Yes?” he asked.

  The physician pointed. “Your weapon,” he said. “The lady Samlane has been distraught. Not an uncommon thing for women in her condition, of course. She, ah, attempted to have her condition, ah, terminated some months ago … Fortunately, we got word before … And even though she has since been watched at all times, she, ah, with a spoon … Well. I’d simply rather that—things like your knife—not be where the Lady could snatch them, lest something untoward occur…”

  Within the bedroom, a bronze bar creaked as it was lifted from the door slots. Samlor drew his long dagger and laid it on an intaglio table. Only the edge of the steel winked. The hilt was of a hard, pale wood, smooth but wrapped with a webbing of silver wire for a sure grip. The morning room had been decorated by a former occupant. In its mosaic battle scenes and the weapons crossed on its walls, the room suited Samlor’s appearance far better than it did that of the young Rankan lord who now owned it.

  The door was opened inwards by a sour, grey-haired woman in temple garb. The air that puffed from the bedroom was warm and cloying like the smell of an overripe peach. Two branches of the sextuple oil lamp within had been lighted, adding to the sunlight seeping through the stained glass separating the room from the inner court.

  If the midwife looked harsh, then Samlane herself on the bed looked like Death. All the flesh of her face and her long, white hands seemed to have been drawn into the belly that now mounded her linen wrapper. A silk coverlet lay rumpled at the foot of the bed. “Come in, brother dear.” A spasm rippled the wrapper. Samlane’s face froze, her mouth half open. The spasm passed. “I won’t keep you long, Samlor,” she added through a false smile. “Leah, wait outside.”

  Midwife, husband, and doctor all began to protest. “Heqt’s face, get out, get out!” Samlane shrieked, her voice rising even higher as a new series of contractions racked her. Her piercing fury cut through all objection. Samlor closed the door behind the midwife. Those in the morning room heard the door latched but not barred. Regli’s house had been built for room-by-room defence in the days when bandits or a mob would burst into a dwelling and strip it, in despite of anything the government might attempt.

  The midwife stood, stiff and dour, with her back to the door. Regli ignored her and slashed at the wall again. “In the year I’ve known her, Samlane hasn’t mentioned her brother a dozen times—and each of those was a curse!” he said.

  “You must remember, this is a trying time for the lady, too,” Mernorad said. “With her parents, ah, unable to travel, it’s natural that she wants her brother—”

  “Natural?” Regli shouted. “It’s my child she’s bearing! My son, perhaps. What am I doing out here?”

  “What would you be doing in there?” the doctor observed, tart himself in response to his patron’s anger.

  Before either could say more, the door swung open, bumping the midwife. Samlor gestured with his thumb. “She wants you to fix her pillows,” he said curtly. He picked up his knife and began walking across the morning room towards the hall. The midwife reeled back into the bedroom, hiding all
but a glimpse of Samlane’s face. The lampstand beside the bed gave her flesh a yellow cast. The bar thudded back in place almost as soon as the door closed.

  Regli grabbed Samlor’s arm. “But what did she want?” he demanded.

  Samlor shook his arm free. “Ask her, if you think it’s any of your business,” he said. “I’m in no humour to chatter.” Then he was out of the room and already past the servant who should have escorted him down the staircase to the front door.

  Mernorad blinked. “Certainly a surly brute,” he said. “Not at all fit for polite company.”

  For once it was Regli who was reasonable. “Oh, that’s to be expected,” he said. “In Cirdon, the nobility always prided itself on being useless—which is why Cirdon is part of the Rankan Empire and not the reverse. It must have bothered him very much when he had to go into trade himself or starve with the rest of his family.” Regli cleared his throat, then patted his left palm with the quirt. “That of course explains his hostility towards Samlane and the absurd—”

  “Yes; quite absurd,” Mernorad agreed hastily.

  “—absurd charges he levelled at her,” the young noble continued. “Just bitterness, even though he himself had preserved her from the, oh, as he saw it, lowering to which he had been subjected. Actually, I have considerable mining and trading interests myself, besides my—very real—duties here to the State.”

  The diversion had settled Regli’s mind only briefly. He resumed his pacing, the shuffle of his slippers and his occasional snappish comments being almost the only sounds in the morning room for an hour. “Do you hear something?” Mernorad said suddenly.

  Regli froze, then ran to the bedroom door. “Samlane!” he shouted. “Samlane!” He gripped the bronze latch and screamed as his palm seared.

  Acting with dreadful realization and more strength than was to be expected of a man of his age, Mernorad ripped a battle-axe from the staples holding it to the wall. He swung it against the door panel. The oak had charred to wafer thinness. The heavy blade splintered through, emitting a jet of oxygen into the superheated bedroom.

  The room exploded, blasting the door away in a gout of fire and splinters. The flames hurled Mernorad against the far wall as a blazing husk before they curled up to shatter the plastered ceiling.

  The flame sucked back, giving Regli a momentary glimpse into the fully-involved room. The midwife had crawled from the bed almost back to the door before she died. The fire had arched her back so that the knife wound in her throat gaped huge and red.

  Samlane may have cut her own jugular as well, but too little remained of her to tell. She had apparently soaked the bedding in lamp oil and then clutched the open flame to her. All Regli really had to see, however, to drive him screaming from his house, was the boot knife. The wooden hilt was burned off, and the bare tang poked upright from Samlane’s distended belly.

  ****

  SAMLOR HAD ASKED a street-boy where the Temple of Heqt was. The child had blinked, then brightened and said, “Oh—the Black Spire!” Sitting on a bench outside a tavern across from the temple, Samlor thought he understood why. The temple had been built of grey limestone, its walls set in a square but roofed with the usual hemispherical dome. The obelisk crowning the dome had originally commemorated the victories of Alar hit Aspar, a mercenary general of Cirdonian birth. Alar had done very well by his adopted city—and well enough for himself in the process to be able to endow public buildings as one form of conspicuous consumption. None of Alar’s boasts remained visible through the coating three decades of wood and dung smoke had deposited on the spire. Still, to look at it, the worst that could be said about the Temple of Heqt was that it was ugly, filthy, and in a bad district—all of which were true of most other buildings in Sanctuary, so far as Samlor could tell.

  As the caravan-master swigged his mug of blue John, an acolyte emerged from the main doorway of the temple. She waved her censer three times and chanted an evening prayer to the disinterested street before retreating back inside.

  The tavern’s doorway brightened as the tapster stepped out carrying a lantern. “Move, buddy, these’re for customers,” he said to the classically handsome young man sitting on the other bench. The youth stood but did not leave. The tapster tugged the bench a foot into the doorway, stepped onto it, and hung the lantern from a hook beneath the tavern’s sign. The angle of the lantern limned in shadow a rampant unicorn, its penis engorged and as large as the horn on its head.

  Instead of returning to the bench on which he had been sitting, the young man sat down beside Samlor. “Not much to look at, is it?” he said to the Cirdonian, nodding towards the temple.

  “Nor popular, it seems,” Samlor agreed. He eyed the local man carefully, wondering how much information he could get from him. “Nobody’s gone in there for an hour.”

  “Not surprising,” the other man said with a nod. “They come mostly after dark, you know. And you wouldn’t be able to see them from here anyway.”

  “No?” said Samlor, sipping a little more of his clabbered milk. “There’s a back entrance?”

  “Not just that,” said the local man. “There’s a network of tunnels beneath the whole area. They—the worshippers—enter from inns or shops or tenements from blocks away. In Sanctuary, those who come to Heqt come secretly.”

  Samlor’s left hand toyed with his religious medallion. “I’d heard that before,” he said, “and I don’t figure it. Heqt brings the Spring rains … she’s the genetrix, not only in Cirdon but everywhere she’s worshipped at all—except Sanctuary. What happened here?”

  “You’re devout, I suppose?” asked the younger man, eyeing the disk with the face of Heqt.

  “Devout, devout,” said Samlor with a grimace. “I run caravans, I’m not a priest. Sure, maybe I spill a little drink to Heqt at meals … without her, there’d be no world but desert, and I see enough desert already.”

  The stranger’s skin was so pale that it looked yellow now that most of the light was from the lamp above. “Well, they say there was a shrine to Dyareela here before Alar tore it down to build his temple. There wouldn’t be anything left, of course, except perhaps, the tunnels, and they may have been old when the city was built on top of them. Have you heard there’s supposed to be a demon kept in the lower crypts?”

  Samlor nodded curtly. “I heard that.”

  “A hairy, long-tailed, fang-snapping demon,” said the younger man with a bright smile. “Pretty much of a joke nowadays, of course. People don’t really believe in that sort of thing. Still, the first priest of Heqt here disappeared. … And last year Alciros Foin went into the temple with ten hired bravos to find his wife. Nobody saw the bullies again, but Foin was out on the street the next morning. He was alive, even though every inch of skin had been flayed off him.”

  Samlor finished his mug of blue John. “Men could have done that,” he said.

  “Would you prefer to meet men like that rather than … a demon?” asked the local, smiling. The two men stared in silence at the temple. “Do you want a drink?” Samlor asked abruptly.

  “Not I,” said the other. “You say that fellow was looking for his wife?” the Cirdonian pressed, his eyes on the shadow-hidden temple and not on his companion.

  “That’s right. Women often go through the tunnels, they say.

  Fertility rites. Some say the priests themselves have more to do with any increase in conceptions than the rites do—but what man can say what women are about?”

  “And the demon?”

  “Aiding the conceptions?” said the local. Samlor had kept his face turned from the other so that he would not have to see his smile, but the smile freighted the words themselves sickly. “Perhaps, but some people will say anything. That would be a night for the … suppliant, wouldn’t it?”

  Samlor turned and smiled back, baring his teeth like a cat eyeing a throat vein. “Quite a night indeed,” he said. “Are there any places known to have entrances to—that?” He gestured across the dark street. “Or i
s it just rumour? Perhaps this inn itself?”

  “There’s a hostel west of here a furlong,” said the youth. “Near the Beef Market—the Man in Motley. They say there’s a network beneath like worm tunnels, not really connected to each other. A man could enter one and walk for days without ever seeing another soul.”

  Samlor shrugged. He stood and whistled for attention, then tossed his empty mug to the tapster behind the bar. ‘Just curiosity,” he said to his companion. ‘I’ve never been in Sanctuary before.” Samlor stepped into the street, over a drain which held something long dead. When he glanced back, he saw the local man still seated empty-handed on the bench. In profile against the light, his face had the perfection of an ancient cameo.

  ****

  SAMLOR WORE BOOTS and he was long familiar with dark nights and bad footing, so he did not bother to hire a linkman. When he passed a detachment of the Watch, the Imperial officer in command stared at the dagger the Cirdonian now carried bare in his hand. Still, Samlor looked to be no more than he was, a sturdy man who would rather warn off robbers than kill them, but who was willing and able to do either. I’ll have to buy another boot knife, Samlor thought; but for the time he’d make do, make do…

  The Man in Motley was a floor lower than the four-story tenements around it. The ground level was well lighted. Across the street behind a row of palings, a slave gang worked under lamps scraping dung from the cobbles of the Beef Market. Tomorrow their load would be dried in the sun for fuel. The public room of the inn was occupied by a score of men, mostly drovers in leather and homespun. A barmaid in her fifties was serving a corner booth. As Samlor entered, the host thrust through the hangings behind the bar with a cask on his shoulder.

  Samlor had sheathed his knife. He nodded to the brawny innkeeper and ducked beneath the bar himself. ‘Hey!” cried the host.

  “It’s all right,” Samlor muttered. He slipped behind the hangings.

  A stone staircase, lighted halfway by an oil lamp, led down into the cellars. Samlor followed it, taking the lamp with him. The floor beneath the public room was of dirt. A large trap, now closed and bolted, gave access to deliveries from the street fronting the inn. The walls were lined with racked bottles, small casks, and great forty-gallon fooders set on end. One of the fooders was of wood so time-blackened as to look charred. Samlor rapped it with his knife hilt, then compared the sound to the duller note of the tub beside it.