“Don’t bother.” I looked at Ariel, who nodded. She snorted, tossed her head, and looked up.
The falcon settled gently onto her back.
Leatherjacket’s jaw dropped. The other two looked at him wide-eyed, almost as if they were afraid for him.
“No one—I was told nobody could order that bird but me!”
I just smiled.
Leatherjacket’s eyes formed two slits. He lifted the whistle to his mouth and blew. The bird didn’t move from Ariel’s back.
“Let her go, Ariel,” I said.
Ariel tossed her head and snorted. The bird flew off and glided to Leatherjacket’s shoulder. He was still glaring at me, and the other two looked on with their mouths pressed into angry lines.
“Let’s go, Ariel.”
We went.
*
“That was a damned stupid thing to do,” observed Ariel once we were out of earshot.
“Sue me.”
“I’m serious. Let me do the talking, you said. We don’t want them knowing anything more than they have to, you said. So what do we do? We show off! Now there’ll be talk, and if word gets around that we bypassed an obedience spell—even if it was just a bird—people will get curious.”
I said nothing.
“It was a childish thing to do.”
I glared at her but remained silent.
“Well? Why’d you want to show off like that?”
“I was embarrassed,” I muttered.
“You were what?”
“I was embarrassed, dammit!”
“Why? What was there to be embarrassed about?”
“I’m a virgin.”
“So am I.”
“That’s different. You’re not a human. You aren’t a man. See, human males have this … this … . Oh, forget it.”
“Pete, there is great virtue in being pure. If you weren’t a virgin, you couldn’t have me.”
“Look, just drop it, okay?”
“All right.” She fell silent, and neither of us said another word until we found the library.
*
The library was of ultramodern design—few windows and now-useless electric glass doors. I looked around for something I could break in with.
“Don’t bother,” said Ariel sullenly, and she ran for the glass front door, head down and horn aimed straight ahead.
“No!”
But I was too late. She had already bolted up the steps, sparks streaming from her hooves, and leapt into the air. Her horn hit the glass and shattered it; her momentum carried her through.
“You idiot!” I ran up the steps to find her standing quietly amid the broken glass. “What are you trying to do, turn yourself into hamburger?”
“I got us in, didn’t I?”
“So what? You could have waited another two minutes while I found something to bust it open with, rather than jumping through like some comic-book hero. You could have cut yourself badly. I don’t have any way to treat you if you ever really hurt yourself, you know that? What if you snapped your horn?”
“It can’t snap. Not while I’m alive. Besides, unicorns avert harm. We rarely get injured, and when we do, we heal fast.”
“Oh? And how, may I ask, did you manage to get your leg broken nearly in two, despite all this ability to avert personal injury?”
Her nostrils flared. “I don’t want to talk about it.” Her coal eyes blazed.
“Why not?”
“Why don’t you want to talk about your virginity?”
“Oh, go to hell.”
She snorted and walked farther into the library.
Three
Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep. Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?
—Shakespeare, King Henry IV
Nobody ever thinks to use a library. Most people feel they’re too busy trying to stay alive to take time to fool around with books. They’re right, to some extent, but libraries have given me books on camping, food storage and preservation; backpacking, arms and armor, self-defense, magic, mythology, and mythological animals—to name but a few. Libraries have probably saved my life a dozen times. Even before I met Ariel I went to them to read books on how to survive, and after she came along I also read books on magic and mythology. I read anything that might help me understand what the world had become.
I remember the librarian at my junior high school who always reprimanded me for not being quiet. She and all the librarians in the world now had their revenge: the place was like a tomb. I smiled: a tomb for tomes.
Ariel and I checked upstairs and down to make sure the building was empty. The clocks had all stopped at four-thirty.
Before dark I looked through the card catalog and gathered what books were new to me, piling them atop a desk in a corner of the first floor. I would read them over the next few days. Most of the books I wanted weren’t there.
When darkness came I unloaded gear and set up “camp” on the second floor, beside the staircase. I couldn’t light a fire for food, so I opened a packet of dried beef. I drank water from my bota—a kind of kidney-shaped wine flask with a nipple end. I lit two small candles, retrieved from the nether regions of my backpack.
I leaned the crossbow against the banister alter cocking it and readying a bolt. It was a Barnett Commando, self-cocking, one hundred seventy-five pound pull, scope, three hundred yard range. I won’t say how I got it; it cost me dearly.
The nunchakus—two tapered, foot-long pieces of wood joined at the smaller end by a short length of rope allowing it to be used as a flail—were on my left side; the Aero-mag blowgun was on my right, a dart half-loaded.
Ariel watched me quietly, tail swishing rhythmically. She knew I was still mad at her, and damned if I didn’t have good cause to be. Trying to act like some superhero just because she’s a unicorn. That horn of hers must have been embedded deep into her skull, for all she—
“Talk to me,” she said.
“What about?”
“Oh, come on. You’re acting like a little kid.”
“I am not. And besides, how would you know what a little kid acts like?”
She cocked her head curiously. “Now, isn’t that odd? How would I know that?”
Despite my sullenness I was interested. “Listening to me, maybe.” I took another drink of water. “Can you remember what it was like where you came from, before you came here?”
“I—I don’t remember any place but this one.”
“Well, what’s your earliest memory? When did you first become aware of yourself?” I’d asked her this before, but it was before she’d learned to speak well and she hadn’t understood.
“That’s odd—I’ve never really thought about it before.” She sounded distressed. “The earliest thing I can remember is … waking up one day. That’s all, really. I felt warmth on one side and it was the sun, and I stood up—I remember my legs were wobbly—and I looked around. I was beside a railroad track, and even though I didn’t know what it was, somehow—I don’t know—it didn’t seem right, it looked like it didn’t belong. Same for the roads and road signs, and later for houses and buildings and cars stopped on the streets. They didn’t fit.” She looked at me with a strange, half-fearful look in her eyes. “You know, nothing I saw—except for the magical animals I encountered and the things that were, I don’t know, natural, like forests and lakes and the sky—nothing else seemed right. Until I met you.”
“Me?” I hadn’t expected that.
“Yes. You were … .” She stopped for half a minute. “It’s hard to put the feelings into words. I guess you were pure, a virgin, I mean, and you fit in with the kind of creature that I am.”
“How do you know so much about being a unicorn?”
“How do you know so much about being a human? You learn about yourself as you grow. I certainly had enough other things to compare myself to.”
“You were a baby, that day you woke up by the railroad track?�
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“Of course. I was still pretty much a baby when I met you, wasn’t I?”
“Yeah. Those were the good old days, before you knew more than about two words.” She’d also grown a lot. My eyes now came to just above the level of her shoulder.
She snorted. “If I hadn’t come along you’d still be talking to yourself.”
I looked to my left. “You hear that?” I asked, jerking a thumb at Ariel.
“Cute.” She walked to my open pack and nosed it. “Hey—no peppermint!”
“You’re slipping, you horse with a horn. Why don’t you just zap some into existence the way you used to, instead of making me scrounge deep, dark, and dangerous candy stores to satisfy your sweet tooth. Teeth.”
“What little power I have was ill spent when I was younger. Spells shouldn’t be wasted.”
“Easy for you to say. You aren’t dying for a cigarette.”
“Suffer.”
I started to make a retort but froze when a thump and a scuffling came from downstairs. I blew out the candles and whispered to Ariel. “Stay up here. He’ll see your glow if you go down.” Sure, she was quiet as snowfall, but a huge, ghostly white unicorn sneaking around inside a dark library is not inconspicuous. I wiped my fingers on my pants and picked up the crossbow. Listening carefully for a moment revealed nothing more. I was about to tell Ariel to come around behind me when a deep voice reverberated below.
“Hello?”
I cradled the Barnett and crept down the stairs, hugging the banister.
“Hello, is anybody here?”
I saw him now, a faint, fairly large figure in front of the card files. His back was to me. I brought the Barnett up, resting it on the banister. “Don’t move,” I said, knowing full well that when he heard my voice he would move anyway. Sure enough, he turned toward me.
“Don’t move,” I repeated, “or I’ll kill you.”
That stopped him. I’d figured that, too.
“I don’t want any trouble,” he said. “I’m looking for a kid. Came in today with a unicorn.”
“Why?”
He stepped toward me. “Hey, is that a rifle you’re holding? Don’t you know that guns won’t—”
“It’s not a rifle.”
“Oh.”
“You were saying.”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. This guy—I guess you’re him; nobody else would be in here—you and your buddy—”
“She’s not a buddy. She’s my Familiar.”
“Sorry. You and your Familiar managed to override my buddy’s obedience spell. I want to find out how you did it. I never heard of it happening before; the guy who set the spell for me said it couldn’t be broken.”
“You were on the overpass? With the leather jacket?”
“Yeah.”
Snap decision: “Hungry?”
“Since you mention it, yes.”
“I’ve got some food upstairs. Come on over here, but keep your hands where I can see them and move slow.”
He did as I said and stopped in front of me. “Oh,” he said, seeing the Barnett, “a crossbow. I shoulda known. Stupid of me.”
I didn’t bother to contradict him.
“Name’s Russ Chaffney.”
I lowered the crossbow. “Pete Garey.” He held out his hand. We shook.
“Food’s upstairs,” I said. “You’ll have to go first. Ariel won’t like it if I go ahead of you; she’ll think you might have a weapon at my back.”
He agreed and I called to Ariel that we had company and were coming up. At the top of the stairs he hesitated, seeing Ariel watching him warily. She saw me behind him with the Barnett and relaxed.
“Ariel, this is Russ Chaffney,” I said. “Chaffney, my Familiar, Ariel.”
He looked at me as if I were crazy, then looked at Ariel. “Um, how do you do?” he managed.
“Do what?”
He gaped. He stood there, speechless. Looking at him, I told Ariel, “It’s just a figure of speech. It means, how are you?”
“Oh. I’m wonderful, except I want some peppermint candy. You wouldn’t happen to have any, would you?”
“I, uh, no, I don’t have any candy. Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “She eats too much of it anyway. She’s getting fat. I’m going to ditch her in someone’s stable if she doesn’t leave the stuff alone.”
She lifted her nose. “Unicorns don’t get fat.”
“Don’t believe her,” I stage-whispered. “She used to be skinny. Now look at her.”
“I was not skinny!”
I shrugged. “Have it your way.” To Chaffney: “She’s always been fat.”
“Do you two always talk like this? I mean, I didn’t know unicorns could talk.” He was having trouble coping.
Ariel pounced on the chance to use the old joke. “We can’t talk. The hairless monkey over there is a ventriloquist.”
“Who you calling a hairless monkey, conehead?”
Chaffney folded his arms and looked at her critically, trying to appear unfazed. “I also didn’t know they could do magic,” he said.
“Magic?” she asked innocently.
“Yeah. At the overpass this afternoon. Asmodeus—my falcon.”
“Oh. I thought I recognized you from somewhere. Humans all look alike to me.”
I made a rude noise.
“Come on,” I said. “I’m still hungry.”
*
I leaned against the marble balustrade, listening to Ariel and Chaffney discussing magic. He still didn’t understand how she could have bypassed a loyalty spell.
“Look,” she explained patiently, “a loyalty spell is nothing. You could weave one. Pete could weave one.”
I let it pass with merely a sneer.
“All it involves is fixing the animal’s attention on you,” she continued. “The dumber the animal—that is, the smaller the brain size—the harder it is to get its attention, but the easier it is to keep it. It has no will to fight back.”
“But the guy who set the spell told me it was impossible to break,” he persisted. “That’s why buddies are so loyal. Asmodeus has been with me for two years now and she’s never obeyed anyone but me. Saved my ass a few times.”
“And she’s still loyal to you. What I did was to change her focus of attention momentarily from you to me.”
“She didn’t come when I called,” he protested, finishing off a can of Vienna sausages and wiping his fingers on his pants.
“I hadn’t released her yet.”
“So, if you’d wanted to, you could have kept her as your buddy.”
“As long as I could make myself her center of attention, yes.”
“Who taught you all this?”
“Nobody. It comes naturally. But it’ll work for anybody who uses it correctly. Ask Pete.”
I shifted uncomfortably. I knew she’d bring it up. Russ was looking at me expectantly, so I told him about it. “One night I tried something stupid,” I said. “I found a book of spells in a library in central Florida. It was an old book; the pages were yellowed and the cover was made out of real leather. It had a ‘Special Collection’ label on the bottom of the spine and on the flyleaf. The spells were in Latin, mostly, though there were some other languages I didn’t recognize.”
“You read Latin?”
“No, I just knew what it was. I didn’t know what the words meant. Ariel read over my shoulder and stopped me on one of the pages. She told me to try one out. It had instructions, and the incantation was beneath it in boldface print.
“We went to a shopping plaza. It was a small town and I hadn’t seen anybody around, though there were probably a few scavengers here and there. I’d bagged a deer that day with the crossbow because I needed food, and I used the drained blood to draw a pentagram on the concrete in the center of the plaza.”
“To draw a what?”
“A pentagram,” supplied Ariel. “A five-pointed star with a circle around it, used in incantations. Supernatural force
s can’t break into or out of one.”
“Anyway, I got five candles from a looted pharmacy and placed one on each point of the star. Ariel watched while I lit the candles and picked up the book. I began reading out loud. It was Latin, I think, but the words sounded ugly. A lot of hard consonants. It hurt to pronounce them.” I shrugged. “I don’t know. They sounded just plain ugly. Once I looked back at Ariel. She was still watching. There wasn’t a moon that night and she was a shadow. She didn’t look real.” I stared into the candle flame, remembering. It was still vivid. “I finished the conjuration and shut the book. Things started happening right away; the air was shimmering inside the circle I’d drawn in blood.”
The candle flame undulated as my breath reached it. It made Chaffney’s face look waxen, highlighting the seams at the corners of his eyes and mouth. Ariel was a pale, ever-changing orange and yellow.
“Something stared forming inside the pentagram, like … like a tea bag in hot water. There was a sound like thunder rumbling. The shape in the circle was darker than the night. I watched it form.”
I paused for a minute, looking at the flame. A bead of wax dripped down to the base of the candle. “I only got fleeting impressions of what it looked like. It was … huge. Muscular. Black. Sharp claws, and eyes like a fireplace. I could feel it hating me. It dripped hate the way a tree oozes sap. All this hit me in flashes, like it was revealed by lightning. I started to feel that I was losing control, that if I didn’t stop it would break out of the pentagram and snatch me in its teeth like a cat shaking a mouse. But I couldn’t move.
“Ariel bolted forward and touched her horn to the blood circle. There was a scream like tearing metal and she flinched, but she didn’t draw back. The thing in the circle threw something. It wasn’t a fireball, it was the opposite; it was some kind of black sponge that would drink her into it, that would absorb her light and her … I don’t know, her soul, I guess. Her horn flared and dimmed. She dragged the tip of it along the concrete, breaking the red circle. The thing bellowed, then it faded away.”
Silence for a long time in the library. I don’t know how long it was before I stopped looking at the candle and saw Chaffney staring at me. “I think I want a cigarette,” he said, shaking his shaggy head.
I frowned. “Ariel doesn’t like to be around cigarette smoke. She won’t even let me smoke. Damn horse.”
Ariel Page 3
