Tales From The Vulgar Unicorn tw-2

by Robert Lynn Asprin

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, 0 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! 0 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: '0 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 Sanc-tuarites 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. Except 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-hellp,' 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.

  'You see?' he said, showing teeth. 'I have no desire for your blood, understand me? Only this bauble.'

  The bracelet remained cold in his palm and when it moved he jerked his hand instinctively. Fast as he was he was only human, not a striking serpent; the bracelet, suddenly become a living snake, drove its fangs into the meaty part of his hand that was the inner part of his thumb. It clung, and it hurt. Oh it hurt.

  The thief's smile vanished with his outcry of pain. Yet he saw her smile, and even as he felt the horror within him he raised the throwing knife to stab the filthy bitch who had trapped him.

  That is, he tried to raise the knife, tried to shake his bitten hand to which the serpent clung. He failed. Almost instantly, the bite of that unnatural snake ossified every bone and bit of cartilage in his body and, stiffly, Gath the thief fell down dead.

  His victim, still smiling, squatted to retrieve her property. She was shivering in excitement. She slipped the cold hard bracelet of gold onto her wrist. Its eyes, cold hard stones, scintillated. And a tremor ran all through the woman. Her eyes glittered and sparkled.

  'Oooohh,' she murmured with a shiver, all trembly and tingly with excitement and delight. 'It was worth every piece of silver I paid, this lovely bauble from that lovely shop. I'm really glad it was destroyed. Those of us who bought these weapons of the god are so unique.' She was trembling, excitement high in her and her heart racing with the thrill of danger faced and killing accomplished, and she stroked the bracelet as if it were a lover.

  She went home with her head high in pride and continuing excitement, and she was not at all happy when her husband railed at her for being so late and seized her by the left wrist. He went all bright eyed and stiff and fell down dead. She was not at all happy. She had intended to kill only strangers for the thrill of it, those who deserved it. Somewhere, surely, the god Vashanka smiled.

  'The god-damned city's in a mess and busy as a kicked anthill and I think you had more than a whit to do with it,' the dark young man said. (Or was he a youth? Street-wise and tough and hooded of eyes and wearing knives as a courtesan wore gems. Hair blacker than black and eyes nearly so above a nose almost meant for a bird of prey.)

  ' "God-damned" city, indeed,' said the paler, discomfitingly tall man, who was older but not old, and he came close to smiling. 'You don't know how near you are to truth, Shadowspawn.'

  Around them in the charcoal dimness others neither heard nor were overheard. In this place, the trick was not to be overheard. The trick was to talk under everyone else. A bad tavern with a bad reputation in a bad area of a nothing town, the tavern called the Vulgar Unicorn was an astonishingly quiet place.

  'Just call me Hanse and stop being all cryptic and fatherly,' the dark young man said. 'I'm not looking for a father. I had one - I'm told. Then I had Cudget Swearoath. Cudget told me all I -all he knew.'

  The other man heard; 'fatherly' used to mean 'patronizing', and the flash of ego in the tough called Shadowspawn. Chips on his shoulders out to here. The other man did not smile. How to tell Hanse how many Hanses he had known, over so many years?

  'Listen. One night a while ago I killed. Two men.' Hanse did not lower his voice for that statement-not-admission; he kept it low. The shadow of a voice.

  'Not men, Hanse. Hawk-masks. Jubal's bravoes. Hardly men.'

  'They were men, Tempus. They were all men. So is Hanse and even Kadaki - the prince-governor.'

  'Kitty-Cat.'

  'I do not call him that,' Hanse said, with austerity. Then he said, 'It's you I'm not sure of, Tempus. Are you a man?'

  'I'm a man,' Tempus said, with a sigh that seemed to come from the weight of decades and decades. 'Tonight I asked you to call me Thales. Go ahead, Hanse. You killed two men, while helping me. Were you, by the way? Or were you lurking around my horse that night thinking of laying hands on some krrf?'

  'I use no drugs and little alcohol.'

  'That isn't what I asked,' Tempus said, not bothering to refute.

  Dark eyes met Tempus's, which impressed him. 'Yes. That is why I was there, T Thales. Why "Thay-lees"?'

  'Since all things are presently full of gods, why not "Thales"? Thank you, Hanse. I appreciate your honesty. We can -'

  'Honesty?' A man, once well built and now wearing his chest all over his broad belt and bulging under it as well, had been passing their small round table. 'Did I hear something about Hanse's honesty? Hanse?' His laugh was a combination: pushed and genuine.

  The lean youth called Shadowspawn moved nothing but his head. 'How'd you like a hole in your middle to let out all that hot air, Abohorr?'

  'How'd you like a third eye, Abohorr?' Hanse's tablemate said.

  Abohorr betook himself elsewhere, muttering - and hurrying. Both Hanse's lean swift hands remained on the tabletop. 'You know him, Thales?'

  'No.'

  'You heard me say his name and so you said it right after me.'

  'Yes.'

  'You're sharp, Thales. Too ... smart.' Hanse slapped the table's surface. 'I've been meeting too many sharp people lately. Sharp as...' .

  'Knives,' Tempus said, finishing the complaint of a very very sharp young man. 'You were mentioning that you were waiting for me to come out of that house-not home, Hanse, because you knew I was carrying. And then Jubal's bravoes attacked - me -and you took down two.'

  'I was mention
ing that, yes.' Hanse developed a seemingly genuine interest in his brown-and-orange Saraprins mug. 'How many men have you killed, Thales?'

  'Oh gods. Do not ask.'

  'Many.'

  'Many, yes.'

  'And no scars on you.'

  Tempus looked pained. 'No scars on me,' he said, to his own big hands on the table. Bronzed, they were still more fair than Shadowspawn's. On a sudden thought, he looked up and his expression was of dawning revelation and disbelief. 'Hanse? You saved my life that night. I saved yours - but they were after me to begin with. Hanse? How many men have you killed?'

  Hanse looked away. Hair like a raven, nose of a young falcon. Profile carved out by a hand-axe sharper than a barber's razor, all planes and angles. A pair of onyxes for eyes, and just that hard. His look away was uncharacteristic and Tempus knew it. Tempus worked out of the palace and had access to confidential reports, one of which not even the prince-governor had seen. He wouldn't, either, because it no longer existed. Too, Tempus had dealt with this spawn of Downwind and the shadows. He was here in this murkily-lit tavern of humanity's dregs to deal with him again.

  Hanse, looking away, said, 'You are not to tell anyone.'

  Tempus knew just what to say. 'Do not insult me again.'

  Hanse's nod was not as long as the thickness of one of his knives. (Were there five, or did he really wear a sixth on one of his thighs? Tempus doubted that; the strap wouldn't stay up.)

  At last Hanse answered the question. 'Two.'

  Two men. Tempus nodded, sighing, pushing back to come as close to slumping on his bench as his kind of soldier could. Damp. Who would have thought it? The reputation he had, this dark surly scary (to others, not the man currently calling himself Tempus) youth from the gutters he doubtless thought he had risen so far above. Tempus knew he had wounded a man or two, and he had assumed. Now Shadowspawn said he had never slain! That, from such a one, was an admission. Because of me he has been blooded, Tempus mused, and the weary thought followed: Well, he's not the first. I had my first two, once. I wonder who they were, and where? (But he knew, he knew. A man did not forget such.