by Sara King
Suddenly, all the little pouches, all the little talismans hanging from her sister’s golden belt took on another meaning to her. She had thought the gemmed belt to be mere decoration, but now the dozens of little charms had other, more nefarious uses in her mind. Energy repositories? Enchantments? Soul-traps? Just how many immortals had Zenaida killed? How many powers had she leeched away, for her own use? Over how many centuries?
“You realize I’m letting you flee, don’t you?” Zenaida laughed, too close. “I want to see how far the great Blade of Morning will run from me before she turns to face her demise.”
Kaashifah pounded her wings harder, willing the energy of the earth to propel her faster. Behind her, Zenaida only laughed.
She’s close, Kaashifah thought, afraid to look. Too close.
It was the winds over the Matanuska Valley that saved her. Like warm hands buoying her wings, they dragged her onward, southwest, towards Anchorage, giving her the lead. She was hitting the outskirts of Wasilla, knowing that Zenaida would not give her the leisure to fly around the city, when something small and sharp hit her from behind, embedded in her left arm.
Almost immediately, Kaashifah’s arm went numb.
Oh no, she thought, as her left wing suddenly gave out. Frantic, knowing it was too late to divert her trajectory—right into the middle of downtown Wasilla—Kaashifah tucked her right wing, rolled awkwardly to her back, and yanked a signpost from the frozen sidewalk as she hit the ground and tore a furrow into the concrete of the four-lane highway. Charging the sign with her energy, she hurled it at her sister, then twisted to yank the poisoned dart from her shoulder as she was still grinding to a halt amidst the metallic crash of veering traffic.
Lying on her back, Kaashifah sniffed the dart, praying it wasn’t hydra venom. It was. She would recognize that pungent fishy-almond stench anywhere. She tossed it aside in disgust.
“You upset the balance!” she screamed up at her sister, stumbling to her feet, one arm and one wing hanging limp from her body, gravel imbedded in the boils in her skin. Zenaida, meanwhile, had taken the signpost through one enormous wing, knocking a dozen radiant feathers free over the congested mass of traffic, bringing her awkwardly to the ground. She down-formed, reshaping the wing to suit her, then, with a sneer, started stalking towards Kaashifah.
“The balance?” Zenaida, now returned to half-form, snorted. Kaashifah felt the sudden mental assault as the writhing, undead snakes twisted in her thoughts like a nightmare, but managed to force it to the back of her mind before the terror could take root. “Oh, I’m sorry. Not only is the great Blade of Morning trying to run from me, but she thinks I’m cheating?” She tisked as the snake-heads roiled around her face. “Surely you, of all people, would know… All’s fair in love or war, sister.”
“I told you, this isn’t war!” Kaashifah snapped. “I’m not trying to kill you! I’m trying to talk.”
Zenaida laughed, much too confident. “So you say.” She picked up a car and threw it at her.
Kaashifah rolled out of the way of the SUV, wincing at the sound of crushing glass and crunching metal as it tumbled past her and pancaked into a parking-lot beyond the highway.
All around them, mortals were gathering in droves, pointing, taking pictures. The fools. Raising her sword at them, Kaashifah flared her wings at them and screamed, “Get out of here!”
Some of them backed away, some ran, but the vast majority continued to stand watching them like statues.
No, Kaashifah realized, horrified, they were statues, their flesh and clothing glinting like polished stone, their bodies transfixed by Zenaida’s gaze.
Laughing, Zenaida grabbed several more vehicles and, with seemingly no intent other than to make Kaashifah duck, threw them one at a time across the highway, arcing them into other cars, buildings, and light-poles.
“Zenaida, stop it!” Kaashifah snapped, knowing that people were trapped in those cars, dying. In a nearby SUV, she could see a family of four hanging upside-down, dangling from their seatbelts, limp, either dead or in shock.
Her sister laughed and threw another car much too hard, lobbing it across the far parking lot, dropping it through a box-store, caving in the snow-covered roof.
She’s just destroying for the pleasure of it, Kaashifah realized, stunned. She watched her sister put her fist through another engine block in preparation to hurl an empty Ford truck, and hastily kicked down a nearby light-post so that it toppled on the bed of the pickup, pinning it to the asphalt.
“Please just talk to me!” Kaashifah cried, as her sister grunted and wrenched her fist out of the hood of the vehicle, abandoning it to the aluminum pole in disgust.
Stepping through the statues, Zenaida stopped ten paces away from Kaashifah, her hundred horrific snake-heads twisting to face her, increasing the petrifying push against Kaashifah’s hasty defenses a dozenfold. “Let me guess,” Zenaida sneered. “You just want to lecture me on my wicked ways.”
My Father’s Sword, Kaashifah thought, quickly diverting her gaze before the unholy stare could crack through her wards. She considered her options. She couldn’t flee by air. She could slip the Void, but that would leave Zenaida free to hunt down her friends before they could reach the compound. She could run, but on foot, with Zenaida free to take wing at any time, she would be like a sitting duck.
But what choice did she have?
Then, she realized, with a coldness pooling in her stomach, there was one choice. Something she had never even considered until the djinni, whose kind were notorious cowards, slipping realms at will. She’d had to do something to keep him at hand, something that would force him to fight.
No, Kaashifah thought, forcing it from her mind. I will not kill my own sister.
She would do anything but that.
Yet, seeing that her sister was not going to listen to reason, that she was killing innocents, Kaashifah had to do something. Reluctantly, keeping Zenaida at a distance with the dragon’s favored sword, she drew her mirror-clean claymore and forced her magic down it, lighting it afire with pure white radiance. She tested its heft, then, steeling herself, she lifted her gaze back to the writhing black mass upon Zenaida’s head. She saw the tiny red eyes, saw the undeath in their gazes, and smiled at Zenaida, making her sister frown. She lifted her blazing claymore between them, the huge, flat blade facing her opponent…
…and pulled her energy back out of the sword.
“You’re yanking my hair,” the beast complained. Though her eyes and ears were telling her that it came from its long, equine mouth, Imelda knew the words had been deposited directly into her mind, care of, she had quickly begun to realize, the most innocent creature she had ever known.
Imelda reluctantly released her grip on the silvery-white mane. “Sorry,” she muttered. “I don’t like—” she caught herself before she said, ‘horses’ and replaced it with, “—riding.”
The unicorn rolled a blue eye back at her. “Why not?” He didn’t seem to trot through the snow so much as dance over it.
“Umm.” With the way the land was passing by in a blur, it was everything she could do not to retch. “My early experiences were not…pleasant.” Imelda fisted her hands on her pantlegs to resist the urge to grab the unicorn by the shaggy silver mane again.
The beast flicked an ear back at her. “Really? Did they bite you?”
“Among other things,” Imelda said, not really wanting to give the beast ideas.
“Probably because they didn’t like the feel of a Fate on their backs,” the beast replied. “I mean, you gave me goosebumps at first, but I couldn’t really dump you off ‘cause you’d die, and you couldn’t really make stuff go wrong because you were asleep.” Then he twisted a big blue eye back at her. “It’s not so bad anymore, though. I got used to the tugging.”
Tugging? Imelda frowned at him through a building headache. “What did you say about Fate?”
“Nobody likes them, really,” the unicorn confessed. “Things go…wrong…ar
ound Fates.”
Imelda let his words settle into her mind for a moment before she said, “I know you’re speaking directly in my mind, not with words, so there’s no way I could have misunderstood… But did I just misunderstand? Did you just call me a Fate?”
“Yes,” the unicorn said. Then he peered over his shoulder, looking genuinely concerned. “You aren’t mad at me for taking you prisoner, are you?”
“A Fate. As in, the Roman Fates.”
“You’re mad, aren’t you?” He looked crestfallen. “I guess we can make it two years, if you are really mad.”
“Why do you say that?” Imelda demanded.
“Well, because if three is too much—”
“No,” Imelda interrupted, “We’re oathbound. It’s three. Tell me why you called me a Fate.”
The unicorn danced to a halt, looking back at her. If he’d had a human brow, he would have been frowning. “I met a Fate before. In Pompeii. They were stoning her to death.”
Imelda frowned. “You told me you were alone all this time.”
“I have been,” the unicorn replied. “That was right before the ash came and killed us.”
Imelda gave the beast a long, considering look. She knew that many of the demons—immortals, she corrected herself—had misconceptions about Heaven and Hell, and that, with a select few of them, their long lives and faulty memories had given way to the belief that they had experienced more lifetimes on this particular rock than the one they were living.
“That’s…interesting,” Imelda said. “So, in this ‘past life,’ you were a unicorn?”
“No,” he gave her a half-cocked look, like she was confusing him. “I was a street-sweeper in Pompeii.”
Long lives, she had found, often spawned insanity. Obviously, he had shifted to human form to mingle with the mortals around the time of Christ and gotten caught under the blast of Mount Vesuvius, then the decades—or more??--of loneliness he had experienced trying to pull his way free from under fifteen feet of ash had given rise to his current lack of social skills. The simplest answers, she knew, were often the closest to the truth.
“So did you like sweeping streets?” she asked.
“Not really,” the unicorn replied. “It was normally my husband’s job, but he fell from a ladder and broke his ankle. I was pregnant and we needed money, so I swept the streets while he made shoes for his uncle.”
Imelda froze. The unicorn had not worn a shred of clothing since they’d met, and she was sure she had seen some very visible evidence he was male. “Are unicorns hermaphrodites?” she asked.
“What’s that?”
“Are you girls and boys?” she asked.
“Oh, sure,” he replied. Then he hesitated. “Well, I think. I haven’t seen a mare yet. I think the Inquisition got them all here, and the ones in the Second Lands are all either in bridles serving feylords or fled to the deep forests.”
“No, no,” Imelda said. “I mean, do you have both parts? Male and female?”
“Uh…” By the hesitancy in his voice, if he’d been a human, he would have flushed red. “I honestly don’t know what a girl’s…parts…look like. So maybe?”
Imelda then thought of something else. “Could you get pregnant now, if you wanted to?”
He gave a startled snort. “No. I’m a boy.”
“But you could get pregnant in Pompeii.”
“I was a girl in Pompeii.”
“Okay,” Imelda said, backing up, deciding it wasn’t really important which life the unicorn thought it had been. “You said you saw a Fate? How many are there?”
“Well, legends say three, but they’re never in one place. That’s very bad.”
“All right,” Imelda said, reasoning with him, “So this Fate was getting stoned to death? Did she die?”
“Of course she did. They were stoning her. You ever been stoned?” He said the last with indignance, like he’d had personal experience with it.
“Um,” Imelda said, “no.”
He slowed and twisted to peer at her, and Imelda had to lean out of the way of his horn. “Not once?” he cried, sounding like he didn’t believe her.
“Um,” Imelda said, “I can’t say I’ve had that misfortune, no.”
He snorted. “That’s weird. Fates get stoned a lot.”
“All the more evidence I’m not a Fate,” Imelda said, forcing a weak grin. Her innards, however, were starting to do revolutions in her gut. Something was nagging at her, something from an old memory… Then a more important question came to her. “Why do Fates get stoned a lot?”
He was still busy frowning at her, peering at her like he thought she was lying to him. “You know, prisoners have to tell the truth,” he said finally.
“As far as I know,” Imelda said, “Your horn prevents people from lying. Unless that’s just legend?”
“No, it does,” the unicorn said. He was still peering at her dubiously. “How have you never been stoned?”
The way he said it, Imelda got the feeling that he fully believed that people would stone her at present, given half the chance. She cleared her throat carefully. “Maybe you could help me understand. Why would people stone a Fate?”
“Oh,” he said, “because Fates make things go wrong.” He started skating over the snow again, as if that explained everything for her.
“Can you tell me more?” she urged. “I haven’t had anything go wrong.” Then she thought of the escaped djinni, the wolf that turned out to be a Fury, the unveiling of a fallen angel in the order, the death of an entire helicopter crew, Jacquot’s murder, a Third Lander escaping with Herr Drescher, probably under the guise of her… About the only thing that had gone right for her was becoming the ‘prisoner’ of a unicorn.
“Of course not,” the unicorn said. “You’re still locked down.”
Imelda froze. “Excuse me?”
“I can see it when I look at you. You’re all bound up, like someone wrapped you up real good inside. Can see a bunch of knots. Pretty ones. Look Celtic.” He cocked his head at her. “They’re fraying, though. Around the head, especially. It’s started unraveling there, working its way down. Got the idea the one who put them there probably died.”
Imelda forgot to breathe. She remembered that sunny window on the shores of the Mediterranean, scooping clam chowder into her mouth as quickly as she could manage it. Fate is with you, child. Over the years, her Padre had made many such comments, and she had always just considered it a quirk of his nature. But now, she gave it another look. The last one she could remember left her with a hollowness in her soul. She remembered how…final…it had felt. However we poor humans stumble in our attempts to serve our Lord, the Fates will right it in the end. For a long moment, she couldn’t speak.
Then, softly, “What are the Fates supposed to do?”
“Oh,” the unicorn said, “that’s easy. If the energy of the land is going sour, they make it sweet again.”
Imelda didn’t want to know, but found she had to. “How do they do that?”
“Well, the one in Pompeii set off the volcano.” The unicorn sighed. “I wanted to have my baby, but I can see why she did it. No one was very happy. There was lots of people making babies, all the time, even in the streets. They even brought in slaves to make more babies. And they used a lot of stuff to try and make them happy—wine and beer and something you smoked—but it didn’t work very well. They all kinda started thinking a lot about money, and how they were going to afford their clothes and their smokes and their babies and nobody really was very happy. I was happy, but I didn’t have much money to start with. My husband and I were really young. Maybe fourteen summers?” The unicorn cocked its head as if in thought. “Yeah, I think. My momma said my baby was going to come around my birthday, so I was really excited.”
“Uh…” Imelda said, not sure how to talk to a male unicorn about a baby he thought he’d carried in Rome. “So she ‘set off a volcano.’ How’d she do that?”
The unicorn frowned
at her. “How do I know? I’m not a Fate.”
“Have you ever been a Fate?” she demanded, turning his own argument against him. He had been a pregnant street-sweeper and a unicorn…surely there was some bridge between the two.
But he chuckled. “No, the Fates are just the Fates. They show up when they’re needed.”
“Uh…” Imelda said, “I think you’ve mistaken me for someone else.”
He twisted to look at her, once again coming nerve-wrackingly close to touching her with his horn. “Nope. I’m pretty sure.”
Imelda thought of Mount Redoubt, St. Augustine, Mount Spurr, and all the other Alaskan volcanoes that were part of the Ring of Fire. “And you think I’m going to set off a volcano and smother Anchorage.” The unicorn, clearly, had spent a bit too much time alone.
“Well, the whole place is really sour,” he replied. “As soon as you start getting close to the roads, you can feel it.” Then he hesitated, glancing back at her, sounding unsure. “…can’t you?”
“Um, no,” Imelda said.
“Oh,” he said. “Well, hmm. It’s kind of like a rot that’s spreading. It just feels…wrong. I don’t like to get real close, but when I do, it kinda makes me feel tired. I get real sick, if I stay too long without a break.”
Like there’s too many people out there making babies and not a lot of happy, Imelda thought, with a tingle of unease. “Um,” she began, “so this Fate who was getting stoned… The volcano went off because they were stoning her?”
The unicorn cocked its head. “Well, before the volcano, I remember hearing rumors that she was staying at one of the inns with her priests. My uncle knew the innkeeper, who was really upset because nobody would stay at his inn with a Fate staying there. He said she was meeting with the politicians every morning, but they weren’t telling anyone what they were saying. But I think they started stoning her after the volcano. I remember digging through ash to find rocks.”
“You stoned her?” Imelda cried.
The unicorn grunted. “Like I said… I wanted to have my baby.” Then the unicorn sighed and said, “I don’t hold it against you, though. You were doing what you had to. Just like this time… Whatever you’re gonna do, I don’t hold it against you.”