Stung, Lalo straightened and managed to focus his gaze long enough to hold his son's eyes. "That time I was ill-" He tried to stop himself but the words flooded out like an undammed stream. "I was with the gods. I can breathe life into what I draw, now."
Wedemir stared at him, and Cappen Varra shook his head. "The wine," said the harper. "Definitely the wine. It really is too bad...."
Lalo stared back at them. "You don't believe me. I should be relieved. How would you like me to make you a Sik-kintair, Cappen Varra, or a troll such as they have fighting in the northern wars?" He shook his head, trying to get rid of the growing ache behind his eyes.
It was not fair-he should not be feeling like this until tomorrow. He had expected the alcohol to deaden his pain, but as his normal vision blurred, he was seeing the truths behind men's veils more clearly than before. That boy across the room-he had killed his own men, and would again.... Lalo winced and looked away.
"Papa, damn it, stop!" said Wedemir angrily. "You sound crazy-how do you think that makes me feel?"
"Why should I care?" muttered Lalo. "If it hadn't been for the lot of you, I would have been free of this wretched town long ago. I'm telling the truth, and I don't give a turd whether you believe me."
"Then, prove it!" Wedemir's voice rose, and for a moment nearby drinkers stared at them. Cappen Varra was looking uncomfortable, but the boy grabbed his arm. "No, don't go! You're one of his oldest friends. Help me show him what nonsense he's talking before he loses what wits he has!"
"All right-" said the harper slowly. "Lalo, do you have anything to draw with here?"
Lalo looked up at him, reading in his face weakness and an extravagant bravery, venality, and a stubborn integrity that even Sanctuary had not been able to wear away, a cynical assessment of women's susceptibility, and devotion to the ideal beauty he had never yet attained. Like Lalo, Cappen Varra was an artist who sought to make songs that would live in men's hearts. What would he think of this? The temptation to impress his old friend and make his cub of a son eat his words was overwhelming. Lalo reached into his pouch, fished among the few coins left there, and brought out a stick of charcoal and a worn piece of drawing lead.
"No paper-" he said after a moment, and sighed.
"Then why not use the wall?" Cappen Varra's eyes were bright, challenging. He gestured toward the scarred plaster, already disfigured by carved initials and scrawled obscenities. "The place will be no worse for some decoration- I'm sure One-Thumb won't mind!"
Lalo nodded and blinked several times, wishing that the blurring before his eyes would go away. Liquor had never affected him like this before-as if he were staring through the harbor's murky waters to a seabed littered with everything the sewers swept out of town.
He struggled up on his knees next to the wall. Cappen Varra was beginning to look interested, but Wedemir's expression was eloquent with embarrassment. /'// show him, thought Lalo, then turned his gaze to the wall, cudgeling his imagination for a subject. Lamplight flickered on the bumps and hollows of its rough plaster, sketching a long curve here, and there a mass of shadow, almost like...
Yes, that was what he would give them-a unicorn! After all, he had already painted one for the sign outside. He felt the familiar concentration narrow his vision as he lifted his hand; he could almost believe himself at home in his studio, drawing a model for a mural as he had done so many times before.
Lalo let the other part of his brain take over and guide his hand-that hidden part that saw the world in relationships of light and darkness, mass and texture and line, directly recording what it saw. And as his hand moved, his awareness reached out to draw the soul of the subject into the picture, as he also had done so many times before. The unicorn-an imagined unicorn? No, the Vulgar Unicorn, of course-the soul of the Vulgar Unicorn....
Lalo's hand jerked and stopped. He shuddered as unwelcome knowledge flooded in. Here in this booth a man had died not long ago-his lifeblood flowing from the stroke of a deftly-placed blade. He had struggled, and blood had splashed the wall-that smear Lalo had assumed was soot before. Without his volition the charcoal swept around it, incorporating it as a blacker shadow within the whole.
And now other impressions buffeted his awareness, the black, sharp fear of men surprised by the raid of the Beysib, an intricate swirling that resonated with the name of the witch Roxane. But there must be some humor-surely there had also been good times here, enough to give a tilt to the unicorn's head, a sardonic glint to its eye. But there were not many such moments to portray, and no recent ones....
Faster and faster moved the artist's hand, covering the wall with a scrollwork of figures that writhed one into another, contorting the outline that contained them. Here was the face of a woman raped to death in one of the upper rooms, there the desperate clutch of a man robbed of the coppers that would have saved his family. Feverishly the charcoal traced the lineaments of hatred, of hunger, of despair. ...
Lalo was vaguely aware of others around him, not only Cappen and Wedemir, but the men who had been drinking at the next table, and others from elsewhere in the room, even Shadowspawn, looking over his shoulder with startled eyes.
"That's Lalo the Limner, isn't it-you know, the fancy painter who did all that work up at the Palace," said one voice.
"Suppose One-Thumb's commissioned him to do a little daubing here?"
"Not bloody likely," answered the first voice, "and what's that he's drawing? Looks like a beast of some kind."
Lalo hardly heard. He no longer knew who had left the tavern, who had come in. At one point he felt a tug on his arm; peripheral vision showed him Wedemir's pale face. "Papa-it's all right. You don't have to go on."
Lalo pulled free with a gutteral denial. Didn't the boy understand? He could not stop now. Hand and arm moved of themselves to the next line, the next shadow, the next horror, as all the secrets of the Vulgar Unicom flowed through his fingers onto the wall.
And then, suddenly, it was finished. The nubbin of charcoal dropped from Lalo's nerveless fingers to be lost in the filth of the floor. He forced cramped muscles to function, eased off the bench, and stepped slowly back to see what he had done. He shivered, remembering the moment when he had stepped back to see the soul of the assasin Zanderei, closed his eyes briefly, then forced himself to look at the wall.
It was worse than he had expected. How could he have spent so much time in the Vulgar Unicorn and never known? Perhaps the normal barriers of the human senses had protected him. But, like a glory-hunting warrior, he had thrown his shields away, and now all the evil that had ever taken place within the tavern was displayed upon its wall.
"Is this what you were trying to tell us you could do?" whispered Wedemir.
"Can't you wipe some of it off, or something?" asked Cappen Varra in a shaken voice. "Even here, surely you don't mean to leave it that way...."
Lalo looked from him to the uneasy faces of the others who gazed at what the leaping lamplight revealed, and suddenly he was angry. They had watched, condoned, perhaps participated in the acts from which this portrait was made. Why were they so shocked to see their own evil made visible?
But the harper was right. Lalo had destroyed work before, when it was unworthy. Surely, though his portraiture had never been so true, this picture deserved destruction.
He stepped forward, part of his cape bunched in his hand, and lifted it to the distorted, flat-eared head with its evilly twisted hom.
The eye of the unicorn winked evilly.
Lalo stopped short, hand still poised. How had that happened? A bulge in the plaster or some trick of the light? He peered at it and realized that the unicorn's eye was red. Then his hand throbbed. He looked down and saw new blood welling from the old cut on his thumb.
"Sweet Shipri, preserve us!" muttered Lalo, realizing whose blood was coloring that obscenity on the wall. His hand darted forward, again was stopped before it touched the plaster; for if this was his own blood, what would happen to him if the picture was destroyed? What was he d
oing, meddling with this kind of power? He needed a professional!
And still the eye of the unicorn mocked him, as Gilla had mocked him when he went through the door, or like a more familiar mockery that he had seen in a mirror once in a face whose mixed good and evil frightened him all the way into the land of the gods. But he had embraced the good, and surely the evil was gone! Desperately, Lalo ransacked his memory for visions of the beauty of the gods.
But there was only darkness and the wicked eye that enticed him more surely than the eyes of the sorceress Is-chade, because it was his own.
Closer and closer Lalo came; his right arm hung nerveless at his side. "/ also am your soul," whispered the unicorn. "Give life to me, and you shall have my power. Did not you know?"
Lalo groaned. The breath of his lungs hissed out and stirred the charcoal dust upon the wall. The red eye of the unicom began to glow.
Lalo saw and choked, trying to withdraw his breath again. Wedemir clutched at his arm, but Lalo shook free and swiped wildly at the wall, recoiled as a wave of heat blasted him, and fell back into his son's strong arms.
"No!" he gasped, "I didn't mean it! Go back where you came from-this isn't how it's supposed to be!" Men muttered around him; someone swore as a tremor shook the floor.
"Wizard's work!" exclaimed another. Men began to back away. Shadowspawn spat and slipped quietly out the door.
Coughing, Lalo snatched up his tankard and flung it at the wall. Red as blood in the lamplight, the liquid splashed off a solidifying flank and splattered across the floor.
Wedemir made the sign against evil; Cappen Varra's fist closed around the coiled silver of his amulet. "It's only a picture; a picture can't hurt you-" muttered the harper, but Lalo knew that wasn't true. With every second the Thing on the wall gained substance. The trembling in the floor increased. Lalo took a step backward, then another.
One-Thumb launched himself down the staircase, roaring questions, but nobody paid him any attention. He was calling for Roxane, whose powers, if she had cared to exert them, might perhaps have stopped what was happening now. But this night Roxane had other matters in hand. She did not hear.
And then, with a groan that burst at once from Lalo's lips and the wall, the Black Unicorn shuddered free of the plaster that had imprisoned it and leaped to the tavern floor.
Abruptly Lalo remembered the astonished delight with which he had watched his first creation soar through the azure air. That joy was the measure of his horror now.
Alive, the thing was even worse than it had been on the wall-a desecration of the concept of a unicorn. It paused, stamped with hooves like polished skulls, and the posts upholding the upper floors trembled like trees shaken by a wind. It reared, and staggered forward with Minotaurlike lumberings, then dropped back to all fours, and almost casually plunged its horn into the chest of the nearest man.
The victim screamed once. The Unicorn shook its head, and the body flew free to land with a soft sound like a falling sack of meal on the other side of the room. Blood spiraled down the wicked hom. The Unicorn grew.
Its head came around, red eye fixing on the girl who had been serving the ale. She tried to run, but the monster was too quick for her. Her body was still in the air when Wedemir seized his father's arm.
"Papa, quick-we've got to get out of here!"
Cappen Varra was already slipping toward the door. The Unicorn wheeled, herding two men contemptuously across the room. Fresh blood smeared the old stains on the floor.
"No-" Lalo shook his head uncontrollably. "It's mine, my fault-I have to-" He felt his son's strength suddenly as Wedemir seized him, pinioning his arms, and half-dragged, half-carried him away.
Three men pelted after them into the night; then there were no more, only the screaming from inside the inn that continued as Wedemir dragged Lalo after Cappen Varra, terror lending them its own protection until they reached the harper's dingy room.
The secret hours between midnight and dawn drew on. The Black Unicorn, having finished with the tavern, shouldered out into the street, blotting the night with a deeper darkness, and began to forage through the Maze, emptying the streets more effectively than Imperial order or Beysib curfew had ever done.
On Cappen Varra's dusty floor Lalo dozed fitfully, struggling through dreams of fire and darkness lit by a distant shimmer of crystal wings.
In the luxury of his estate on the east side, Lastel, furious and smarting with pain from a gash across his belly, took a long snort of krrf and waited for Roxane. One death or a dozen in the Vulgar Unicorn did not trouble him unduly, but his alliance with the witch ought to protect him from any other sorcery, and with that Thing that had come off the wall of the Unicorn loose in the city, every mage in Sanctuary would be after his hide. Had the little dauber really done it? Who was using him? Lastel struck at the slave who was trying to bandage him and sniffed at the krrf again. Roxane would know what to do....
The sorceress Ischade lifted herself from silken pillows and the enraptured face of the man beneath her, midnight eyes searching graying shadows. She could feel power eddying in the damp air; the wards she had set between herself and the Nisibisi witch quivered like taut wires in a sudden breeze. Was Roxane moving against her? The disturbance came from the direction of the Vulgar Unicorn, but there seemed no purpose in its meanderings. A word to the black bird perched in the comer sent it heaving into the musky air in a flurry of nightdark wings. "Go," she whispered, "bring back word to me...."
Enas Yorl saw the fragile structure of the spell he was working begin to ripple as the dimensional distortion reached it, and extinguished it with a swift Word. What had happened? The power he sensed was at once alien and shockingly familiar. Automatically he summoned his familiars and sent them scurrying through the twisted streets. Then he began to robe himself, but even as his hand closed on the rich velvet he saw it changing. Swearing in frustrated agony, the sorcerer subsided in a transformation that took from him even the semblance of humanity. By the time Wedemir banged on his brazen door, there was only the blind servant Darous to answer it with the enigmatic assurance that the sorcerer was not at home....
Lythande, lost in timeless contemplation in the Place That Is Not, felt the indefinable tremor and sent her trained awareness winging back to the austere chamber in the Aphrodisia House where she had left her physical form. Yes, there was a new power in Sanctuary, but it was no threat to her, thank the gods. She had already rested here too long, but even as she contemplated her next journey, the Adept of the Blue Star had to suppress a professional curiosity regarding who had created the thing, and why....
And the Black Unicorn, having killed two mercenaries and a beggar at the edge of the Maze, as the sun rose began a destructive foray through the busy streets of the Processional. Terror depopulated them as rapidly as they had filled, and the Unicorn turned, its darkness staining the bright day, and began to slash its way up Slippery Street toward the Bazaar.
"So, you came back...."
Lalo slumped against the doorframe, his cape slipping from strengthless fingers to the floor. "The Unicorn-" he whispered, "they said it was coming here...." Blinking, he looked around him, seeing the kitchen just as he had left it one endless day ago. There were the flaking whitewashed walls, the sloping, well scrubbed floor, and the bright faces of his children; even Vanda's friend Valira was here with her child, staring at him from their seats about the room....
And Gilla, standing in the midst of them like the statue of Shipri All-Mother in the Temple of Ils. Shivering, he forced himself to meet her eyes. The apologies he had rehearsed through all the stumbling rush of his run here trembled on his lips, but he could not find the words.
"Well," said Gilla finally, "you don't seem to have enjoyed your debauchery!"
A croak of laughter forced its way from Lalo's chest. "Debauchery! I only wish it had been!" A sudden horror shook him as he looked around the peaceful room. The Unicorn was his-what if it tracked him here? He choked, put his hand on the doorla
tch, gathering his strength to go.
"Papa!" cried Wedemir, and at the same moment Gilla's face changed at last.
"There's a monster loose, you fool-you can't go out there!"
Lalo stared at her, hysterical laughter building beyond his ability to control. "I... know...." He sobbed for breath. "I created it...."
"Oh, you dear wretched man!" she exclaimed. With a swift step she was beside him, and he looked up fearfully. But already her big arms were enfolding him. He glimpsed Wedemir's astonished face beyond her as his head found the haven of her breast.
And then, for a moment, everything was all right again. He was safe at that still point of rest where he and Gilla were one. He sighed explosively. Tension, fear, unchan-neled power flowed from him through her to its grounding in the earth below. Then from the distance came a scream of agony, and Lalo stiffened, remembering the Unicorn.
"I'll go outside-" said Wedemir. "I'm a good runner, and maybe I can lead it off if it comes this way."
"No!" cried Lalo and Gilla as one. Lalo looked at his son, his face shining in the morning light like a young god's, and all his resentment of the night before transformed to agony. In the boy's proud strength there was such awful vulnerability.
He turned to Gilla. "When you looked at that portrait of me, did you see a madman? I have embodied half the evil in Sanctuary and set it free! I tried to get help from Enas Yorl, but he's not there-Gilla, I don't know what to do!"
"Enas Yorl's not the only wizard in Sanctuary, and I never liked him anyway," said Gilla stoutly. But Lalo could feel her fear, and that, more than anything else that had happened, frightened him.
A soft voice stirred the silence. "What about Lythande?"
The reknowned Madam of the Aphrodisia House was no more imbued with civic responsibility than anyone else in Sanctuary, but this Thing that was rampaging through their streets might succeed where curfews and death squads had failed-it might even affect trade. And she knew Valira ro be an honest girl-had even offered her a place in the House, though the girl insisted on staying in lodgings with her child. It was enough to gain Valira's friends a hearing, once the little prostitute had poured out her garbled tale. And once Myrtis had heard, to make her their advocate to Lythande.
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