Tales From The Vulgar Unicorn

by Edited By Robert Asprin

  “Thanks. I needed that. Don’t.”

  “I thought you wanted me.” She ceased unlacing, looked at him, her tunic open to her waist.

  “I did. I don’t. Have some krrf.” On his hips rode her scarf; if she saw it, then she would comprehend his degradation too fully. So he had not removed it, hoping its presence would remind him, if he weakened and his thoughts drowned in lust, that this woman he must not violate.

  She sat on the quilt, one doe-gloved leg tucked under her.

  “You jest,” she breathed, then, eyes narrowed, took the krrf.

  “It will be ill with you, afterwards, should I touch you.”

  Her fingers ran along the flap of hide wrapped over her wands. “I am receiving payment.” She tapped the package. “And I may not owe debts.”

  “The boy who pilfered these, did it at my behest.”

  “Must you pander for me?”

  He winced. “Why do you not go home?” She smelled of salt and honey and he thought desperately that she was here only because he forced the issue: to pay her debt.

  She leaned forwards, touched his lips with a finger. “For the same reason that you do not. Home is changed, gone to time.”

  “Do you know that?” He jerked his head-away, cracking it against the bed’s wooden headboard.

  “I believe it.”

  “I cannot believe anything, any more. I surely cannot believe that your hand is saying what it seems to be saying.”

  “I cannot,” she said, between kisses at his throat he could not, somehow, fend off, “leave … with … debts … owing.”

  “Sorry,” he said firmly, and got out from under her hands. “I am just not in the mood.”

  She shrugged, unwrapped the wands, and wound her hair up with them. “Surely, you will regret this, later.”

  “Maybe you are right,” he sighed heavily. “But that is my problem. I release you from any debt. We are even. I remember past gifts, given when you still knew how to give freely.” There was no way in the world he was going to hurt her. He would not strip before her. With those two constraints, he had no option. He chased her out of there. He was as cruel about it as he could manage to be, for both their sakes.

  Then he yelled downstairs for service.

  When he descended the steps in the cool night air, a movement startled him, on the grey’s off side.

  “It is me, Shadowspawn.”

  “It is I, Shadowspawn,” he corrected, huskily. His face averted, he mounted from the wrong side. The horse whickered disapprovingly. “What is it, snipe?”

  As clouds covered the moon, Tempus seemed to pull all night’s shadows round him. Hanse might have the name, but this Tempus had the skill. Hanse shivered. There were no Shadow Lords any longer … “I was admiring your horse. Bunch of hawk masks rode by, saw the horse, looked interested. I looked proprietary. The horse looked mean. The hawk-masks rode away. I just thought I’d see if you showed soon, and let you know.”

  A movement at the edge of his field of vision warned him, even as the horse’s ears twitched at the click of iron on stone. “You should have kept going, it seems,” said Tempus quietly, as the first of the hawk-masks edged his horse out past the intersection, and others followed. Two. Three. Four. Two more.

  “Mothers,” whispered Cudgel Swearoath’s prodigy, embarrassed at not having realized that he was not the only one waiting for Tempus.

  “This is not your fight, junior.”

  “I’m aware of that. Let’s see if they are.”

  Blue night: blue hawk-masks: the sparking thunder of six sets of hooves rushing towards the two of them. Whickering. The gleam of frothing teeth and bared weapons: iron clanging in a jumble of shuddering, straining horses. The kill trained grey’s challenge to another stallion: hooves thudding on flesh and great mouths gaped, snapping; a blaring death-clarion from a horse whose jugular had been severed. Always watching the boy: keeping the grey between the hawk-masks and a thief who just happened to get involved; who just happened to kill two of them with thrown knives, one through an eye and the other blade he recalled clearly, sticking out of a slug-white throat. Tempus would remember even the whores’ ambivalent screams of thrill and horror, delight and disgust. He had plenty of time to sort it out: Time to draw his own sword, to target the rider of his choice, feel his hilt go warm and pulsing in his hand. He really did not like to take unfair advantage. The iron sword glowed pink like a baby’s skin or a just-born day. Then it began to react in his grip. The grey’s reins, wrapped around the pommel, flapped loosely; he told it where he wanted it with gritted words, with a pressing knee, with his shifting weight. One hawk-mask had a greenish tinge to him: protected. Tempus’s sword would not listen to such talk: it slit charms like butter, armour like silk. A blue wing whistled above his head, thrown by a compatriot of the man who fell so slowly with his guts pouring out over his saddle like cold molasses. While that hawk-mask’s horse was in mid-air between two strides, Tempus’s sword licked up and changed the colour of the foe-seeking boomerang. Pink, now, not blue. He was content to let it return its death to the hand that threw it. That left just two.

  One had the thief engaged, and the youth had drawn his wicked, twenty-inch Ibarsi knife, too short to be more than a temporizer against the hawk-mask’s sword, too broad to be thrown. Backed against the Lily Garden’s wall, there was just time for Tempus to flicker the horse over there and split the hawk-mask’s head down to his collarbones. Grey brains splattered him.. The thrust of the hawk-mask, undiminished by death, shattered on the flat of the long, curved knife Shadowspawn held up in a two-fisted, desperate block.

  “Behind you!”

  Tempus had known the one last hawk-mask was there. But this was not the boy’s battle. Tempus had made a choice. He ducked and threw his weight sideways, reining the horse down with all his might. The sword, a singing one, sonata’d over his head, shearing hairs. His horse, overbalanced, fell heavily, screaming, pitching, rolling onto his left leg. Pinned for an instant, he saw white anguish, then the last hawk-mask was leaping down to finish him, and the grey scrambled to its feet. “Kill,” he shouted, his blade yet at ready, but lying in the dirt. His leg flared once again, then quieted. He tried it, gained his knees, dust in his eyes. The horse reared and lunged. The hawk-mask struck blindly, arms above his head, sword reaching for grey, soft underbelly. He tried to save it. He tried. He tackled the hawk-mask with the singing sword. Too late, too late: horse fluids showered him. Bellows of agony pealed in his ears. The horse and the hawk-mask and Tempus went down together, thrashing.

  When Tempus sorted it out, he allowed that the horse had killed the hawk-mask at the same time the hawk-mask had disembowelled the horse.

  But he had to finish it. It lay there thrashing pathetically, deep groans coming from it. He stood over it uncertainly, then knelt and stroked its muzzle. It snapped at him, eyes rolling, demanding to die. He acceded, and the dust in his eyes hurt so much they watered profusely.

  Its legs were still kicking weakly when he heard a movement, turned on his good leg, and stared.

  Shadowspawn was methodically stripping the hawk-masks of their arms and valuables.

  Hanse did not notice Tempus, as he limped away. Or he pretended he did not. Whichever, there was nothing left to say.

  Chapter 5

  WHEN HE REACHED the Weaponshop, his leg hardly pained him. It was numb; it no longer throbbed. It would heal flawlessly, as any wound he took always healed. Tempus hated it.

  Up to the Weaponshop’s door he strode, as the dawn spilled gore onto Sanctuary’s alleys.

  He kicked it; it opened wide. How he despised supernal battle, and himself when his preternatural abilities came into play.

  “Hear me, Vashanka! I have had enough! Get this sidewalk stand out of here!”

  There was no answer. Within, everything was dim as dusk, dim as the pit of unknowingness which spawned day and night and endless striving.

  There were no weapons here for him to see, no counter, no
proprietor, no rack of armaments pulsing and humming expectantly. But then, he already had his. One to a customer was the rule: one body; one mind; one swing through life.

  He trod mists tarnished like the grey horse’s coat. He trod a long corridor with light at its ending, pink like new beginnings, pink like his iron sword when Vashanka lifted it by Tempus’s hand. He shied away from his duality; a man does not look closely at a curse of his own choosing. He was what he was, vessel of his god. But he had his own body, and that particular body was aching; and he had his own mind, and that particular mind was dank and dark like the dusk and the dusty death he dealt.

  “Where are You, Vashanka, O Slaughter Lord?”

  Right here, resounded the voice within his head. But Tempus was not going to listen to any internal voice. Tempus wanted confrontation.

  “Materialize, you bastard!”

  I already have; one body; one mind; one life—in every sphere.

  “I am not you!” Tempus screamed through clenched teeth, willing firm footing beneath his sinking feet.

  No, you are not. But I am you, sometimes, said the nimbus-wreathed figure striding towards him over gilt-edged clouds. Vashanka: so very tall with hair the colour of yarrow honey and a high brow free from lines.

  “Oh, no…”

  You wanted to see Me. Look upon Me, servant!

  “Not so close, Pillager. Not so much resemblance. Do not torture me, My God! Let me blame it all on You—not be You!”

  So many years, and you yet seek self-delusion?

  “Definitely. As do You, if You think to gather worshippers in this fashion! O Berserker God, You cannot roast their mages before them: they are all dependent on sorcery. You cannot terrify them thus, and expect them to come to You. Weapons will not woo them; they are not men of the armies. They are thieves, and pirates, and prostitutes! You have gone too far, and not far enough!”

  Speaking of prostitutes, did you see your sister? Look at Me!

  Tempus had to obey. He faced the manifestation of Vashanka, and recalled that he could not take a woman in gentleness, that he could but war. He saw his battles, ranks parading in endless eyes of storm and blood bath. He saw the Storm God’s consort, His own sister whom He raped eternally, moaning on Her couch in anguish that Her blood brother would ravish Her so.

  Vashanka laughed.

  Tempus snarled wordlessly through frozen lips.

  You should have let us have her.

  “Never!” Tempus howled. Then: “O God, leave off! You are not increasing Your reputation among these mortals, nor mine! This was an ill-considered venture from the outset. Go back to Your heaven and wait. I will build Your temple better without Your maniacal aid. You have lost all sense of proportion. The Sanctuarites will not worship one who makes of their town a battlefield!”

  Tempus, do not be wroth with Me. I have My own troubles, you know. I have to get away every now and again. And you have not been warring, whined the god, for so very long. I am bored and I am lonely.

  “And You have caused the death of my horse!” Tempus spat, and broke free of Vashanka, wrenching his mind loose from the mirror mind of his god with an effort of will greater than any he had ever mounted before. He turned in his steps and began to retrace them. The god called to him over his shoulder, but he did not look back. He put his feet in the smudges they had left in the clouds as he had walked among them, and the farther he trudged, the more substantial those clouds became.

  He trekked into lighter darkness, into a soft, new sunrise, into a pink and lavender morning which was almost Sanctuary’s. He continued to walk until the smell of dead fish and Downwind pollution assailed his nostrils. He strode on, until a weed tripped him and he fell to his knees in the middle of a damp and vacant lot.

  He heard a cruel laugh, and as he looked up he was thinking that he had not made it back at all—that Vashanka was not through punishing him.

  But to his right was the Vulgar Unicorn, to his left the palimpsest tenement wall. And before him stood one of the palace eunuchs, come seeking him with a summons from Kittycat to discuss what might be done about the Weaponshop said to be manifesting next to the Vulgar Unicorn.

  “Tell Kadakithis,” said Tempus, arduously gaining his feet, “that I will be there presently. As you can see…” He waved around him, where no structure stood or even could be proved ever to have stood “… there is no longer any Weaponshop. Therefore, there is no longer any problem, nor any urgency to attend to it. There is, however, one very irritable Hell Hound in this vacant lot who wants to be left alone.”

  The blue-black eunuch exposed perfect, argent teeth. “Yes, yes, master,” he soothed the honey-haired man. “I can see that this is so.”

  Tempus ignored the eunuch’s rosy, outstretched palm, and his sneer at the Hell Hound pretending to negotiate the humpy turf without pain. Accursed Wriggly!

  As the round-rumped eunuch sauntered off, Tempus decided the Vulgar Unicorn would do as well as any place to sit and sniff krrf and wait for his leg to finish healing. It ought to take about an hour—unless Vashanka was more angry at him than he estimated, in which case it might take a couple of days.

  Shying from that dismal prospect, he pursued diverse thoughts. But he fared little better. Where he was going to get another horse like the one he had lost, he could not conjecture, any more than he could recall the exact moment when the last dissolving wisps of Vashanka’s Weaponshop blurred away into the mists of dawn.

  Shadow’s Pawn

  By Andrew J. Offutt

  SHE WAS MORE than attractive and she walked with head high in pride and awareness of her womanhood. The bracelet on her bare arm flashed and seemed to glow with that brightness the gods reserve for polished new gold. She should have been walking amid bright lights illuminating the dancing waters of a fountain, turning its sparkling into a million diamonds and, with the aid of a bit of refraction, colourful other gemstones as well.

  There was no fountain down here by the fish market, and the few lights were not bright. She did not belong here. She was stupid to be here, walking unescorted so late at night. She was stupid. Stupidity had its penalties; it did not pay.

  Still, the watching thief appreciated the stupidity of others. It did pay; it paid him. He made his living by it, by his own cleverness and the stupidity of others. He was about to go to work. Even at the reduced price he would receive from a changer, that serpent-carved bracelet would feed him well. It would keep him, without the necessity of more such hard work as this damnable lurking, waiting, for—oh, probably a month.

  Though she was the sort of woman men looked upon with lust, the thief would not have her. He did not see her that way. His lust was not carnal. The waiting thief was no rapist. He was a businessman. He did not even like to kill, and he seldom had to. She passed the doorway in whose shadows he lurked, on the north side of the street.

  “G’night Praxy, and thanks again for all that beer,” he called to no one, and stepped out onto the planking that bordered the street. He was ten paces behind the quarry. Twelve. “Good thing I’m walking—I’m in no condition to ride a horse t’night!” Fourteen paces.

  Laughing giddily, he followed her. The quarry.

  She reached the corner of the deserted street and turned north, onto the Street of Odours. Walking around two sides of the Serpentine! She was stupid. The dolt had no business whatever with that fine bracelet. Didn’t have proper respect for it. Didn’t know how to take care of it. The moment she rounded the corner, the thief stepped off the boardwalk onto the unpaved street, squatted to snatch up his shoes the moment he stepped out of them, and ran.

  Just at the intersection he stopped as if he had run into a wall, and dropped the shoes. Stepped into them. Nodded affably, drunkenly to the couple who came around off Stink Street—slat and slattern wearing three coppers’ worth of clothing and four of ‘jewellery’. He stepped onto the planking, noting that they noted little save each other. How nice. The Street of Odours was empty as far as he could see. E
xcept for the quarry.

  “Uhh,” he groaned as if in misery. “Lady,” he called, not loudly. “My lady?” He slurred a little, not overdoing. Five paces ahead, she paused and looked back. “H-hello,” he said, right hand clutching at his stomach.

  She was too stupid to be down here alone at this time of night, all right. She came back! All solicitous she was, and his hand moved a little to the left and came out with a flat-bladed knife while his left hand clamped her right wrist, the unbraceleted one. The point of the knife touched the knot of her expensive cerulean sash.

  “Do not scream. This is a throwing knife. I throw it well, but I prefer not to kill. Unless I have to, understand.me? All I want is that nice little snake you’re wearing.”

  “Oh!” Her eyes were huge and she tucked in her belly, away from the point of several inches of dull-silvery leaf-shape he held to her middle. “It—it was a gift…”

  “I will accept it as a gift. Oh you are smart, very smart not to try yelling. I just hate to have to stick pretty women in the belly. It’s messy, and it could give this end of town a bad name. I hate to throw a knife into their backs, for that matter. Do you believe me?”

  Her voice was a squeak: “Yes.”

  “Good.” He released her wrist and kept his hand outstretched, palm up. “The bracelet then. I am not so rude as to tear such a pretty bauble off a pretty lady’s pretty wrist.”

  Staring at him as if entranced, she backed a pace. He flipped the knife, caught it by the tip. His left palm remained extended, a waiting receptacle. The right hefted the knife in a throwing attitude and she swiftly twisted off the bracelet. Better than he had thought, he realized with a flash of greed and gratification; the serpent’s eyes appeared to be nice topazes! All right then, he’d let her keep the expensive sash.

  She did not drop the bracelet into his palm; she placed it there. Nice hard cold gold, marvellously weighty. Only slightly warmed from a wrist the colour of burnt sienna. Nice, nice. Her eyes leaped, flickered in fear when he flipped the knife to catch it by its leather-wrapped tang. It had no hilt, to keep that end light behind the weighted blade.