to form an insect phalanx, she sent them against La Señora and the unicorn. She hoped to catch them with their defenses unemployed.
La Señora and the unicorn perceived the oncoming disease bearers as mice. La Señora conjured five virtual cats to consume the horde of rodents. In her trance, Vanna perceived a large spray can labeled with the name of a popular insecticide. Round one to La Señora. La Señora and the unicorn waited; it was not yet time to launch an attack of their own.
Vanna drew on dark energies that suffering jail inmates had oozed, over decades, into the concrete prison walls. She gathered these as a mighty force to send against La Señora. She shaped it in her mind into a huge rolling pin that could flatten the lump of pallid dough she perceived La Señora to be.
La Señora perceived the dark energies as a giant black swan. She swiftly created a gaucho avatar for herself, and, fashioning a noose from a stream of light particles, she flung a lariat over the swan’s head and around its neck. The swan took ponderous flight into the bowels of nothing. Hand over hand La Señora pulled herself along the lariat toward the swan’s back. Over the tail she clambered, and then made her way, barb by barb, up the swan’s back feathers, to the joint between its neck and body. The swan’s body trembled with the mighty beat of the wings as La Señora extracted a small silver knife from her belt and plunged it into the swan’s neck. With a great rush of air, the black swan tumbled from the bowels of nowhere like a broken balloon. La Señora woke from her trance, thirstily drank the tepid Darjeeling in her cup, and went back under.
The collapsing swan sucked energy from Vanna’s psyche. She needed to rest. She raised minimal defenses to alert her to any attack from La Señora and the unicorn, and fell into a shallow sleep. La Señora and the unicorn rested as well.
Vanna, renewed in strength after a short rest, conjured a great, slavering beast, with dripping jaws and blood stained claws. She sent it rampaging after the feeble damsel on a spavined donkey, for so she saw La Señora and the unicorn in this essay of psychic force. The beast snatched up the damsel and her steed, caging them in its claws. Roaring foul breath, it lifted them to its fetid maw, where its fouled fangs waited. From her pocket the damsel produced a thorn, a tiny thing that swelled and grew as she neared the beast’s mouth. As the beast prepared to crunch her bones, the damsel thrust the thorn into its upper gum. With a scream, the beast dropped the damsel and the donkey, and shrank away into the bowels of nothing.
La Señora experienced the attack as a horde of stinging wasps descending on her. She snatched up a smoldering torch that lay conveniently to hand and singed the wasps’ stingers, rendering them powerless to hurt her. When she had smoked the wasps away, she determined to go on the offensive. She began speaking a low three note chant. It echoed in the emptiness around her. Bit by bit she gathered scattered bits of the cosmos together, and began to weave a net around Vanna’s seething spirit. She thought of it as encasing a black onyx stone in a glittering silver chain.
Vanna felt fiery ropes wrapping around her flesh. The more she struggled, the more the ropes wrapped around her and burned her. Great stinking smells of burnt flesh assailed her nostrils. Vanna shrank, and the ropes shrank to bind her. Vanna panicked, and called on the virtual cockroach she had hidden earlier in La Señora’s psyche. She summoned it to attack La Señora’s greatest vulnerability.
La Señora concentrated on her chanting. She had her eyes closed, until a mocking laugh forced her off the rhythm of her chant. She saw, not the cockroach of Vanna’s perception, but a leering and bullying face, a man, her own father, laughing at his cleverness in foiling Reggie’s courtship. Rage she thought she had stilled and sublimated roared through La Señora’s psychic nerves. Flame, dark and searing at the same time, surged along the connection she and Vanna and the unicorn had forged during their conflict. Pure hate that yearned to burn and kill flooded from La Señora into the web, and fried Vanna’s psychic abilities. In a brief instant she lost, for that time, her power to harm anyone.
Regrettably, as La Señora later made clear to her supporters, the rage also ran backward, and damaged the unicorn and La Señora beyond healing.
Spent
“I should have maintained control,” La Señora said. “It was not for me to destroy Vanna; I am a Keeper of the Balance. It is for me to bind that which unsettles the Balance to stabilize the cosmos.” La Señora spoke this the next day, when she had recovered a little. “How is my unicorn, Willy?” she asked.
“Very tired, Señora, and resting. I’ve got water and feed nearby for her. When I go back, I’ll give her another rubdown, to comfort her, like. She’s fond of a rubdown, you see.”
“We shall be slow recovering,” La Señora said. “Presuming we recover. I do not think, though, Ms. Dee will trouble us for some time.” L Señora coughed. When the spasm ended she said, “I will think about this situation, and what you may do about it. I do think my doing is nearly done.” She closed her eyes and slept. Ben, Dickon, and Willy left quietly. Elke set herself to stand guard over the sleeping woman. Rosa went to the kitchen to make chicken soup, for whatever healing that could bring.
Vanna’s guards woke her. She was listless. She cooperated with all their commands, but showed no initiative and no spark of rebellion. Silently, they thanked whatever prison-guard gods there might be for this change. A young guard opined that Vanna had finally understood her plight, and given up. An older guard warned that the shock was probably temporary. Another guard, neither old nor young, remarked that other guards would have to deal with the aftermath. Las Tumbas was getting rid of Vanna. They all smiled at that thought, and loaded Vanna, with other chained prisoners, into the van for El Serrucho Oxidado.
La Señora’s recovery was slow and incomplete. Her arms and hands were given to sudden and unexpected tremors. She began taking her tea from a half-filled mug; a full porcelain cup tended to slosh all over her if the tremors struck while she held the cup. Elke had a cot moved into La Señora’s bedroom, and she slept there, should La Señora need anything in the night. Occasionally La Señora would cry out in her sleep, and wake only when Elke came to cradle her in her arms. Then La Señora would start to recount the dream that had terrified her, but she could seldom repeat the whole of it. The fragments she remembered were enough to trouble Elke’s rest. Elke lost weight, slowly, over the autumn months. La Señora, also, grew thin and drawn.
The unicorn with the unique horn moved with all the pain of an arthritic body. Where once she had proudly led the llama herd, now they led her, bringing her into the pastures with the sweetest grazing, and deferring to her in choosing sheltered locations for rest. She was grateful for all their care, and frequently blessed them.
La Señora, when she had a little gathered her strength, called a conference. Ben and Dickon, Emma and Haakon, Elke, Notta and DiConti, the Swami, and Malcolm Drye were there. Rosa was at her café. Mae Ling was in Europe again, promoting her latest children’s book, The Tormented Tortoise of Toulouse. The Wong Brothers and the Pitts siblings were busy with the store, café, and gas station.
They met in the library. Willy and Elke had brought dining room chairs in to supplement the overstuffed seating. The wonderful smell of old books surrounded them all, cosseting them. Elke brought La Señora in her wheeled chair and placed her at a vantage point. She set the brakes, and then poured La Señora a half-mug of tea.
La Señora spoke haltingly, and with pauses to collect her breath in the middle of her sentences. Those who saw her only at intervals were shocked with her decline. She briefly greeted them each by name, and offered them a choice of tea, cocoa, and coffee. When Willy had served them all, she began.
“Beloved Villagers, I draw to a close.” At their murmurs of dismay, she held up a trembling hand. Her commanding presence won over the trembling. They all hushed. “This,” she said, “is the proper course of things. I am an old woman, and I’ve done my bit of living.” She paused
for several breaths. They rasped in her throat.
“I must pass my responsibility on,” she said. “It is more than one person should bear.” She smiled. “One will come, indeed, she is on the way,” here she looked at Notta directly and sketched a blessing with trembling fingers in the air, “who will one day take over. For now, all of you must work together to guard the Balance, until she comes into her full power.” La Señora lay back, and stared a moment at the ceiling. A rising wind sang in the shrubbery outside the window.
“Be aware,” La Señora said, “that Vanna is not vanquished, only restrained for a time. She may yet return to do much harm. Be on guard.” La Señora coughed. Elke crouched by her side.
“Don’t overtire yourself, Señora,” Elke said.
“I must finish,” La Señora said. She sat up straight again. “My friends, I have failed you. In my struggle with Vanna on the psychic plane, I let my own dark nature interfere.” She coughed again, but waved Elke’s hovering presence back. “I let a great anger in me pollute my binding of Vanna’s evil. For a time, it has burned out her psychic synapses. Mine it has burned out forever.” She took a sip of tea from
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