Safely You Deliver

by Graydon Saunders

  Benton, observing the music stands being set up, pulls over a large crate, sits it near Halt’s table, finds some ledger books and something to sit on and starts doing accounts with the crate for a desk.

  They can really play. Halt’s stopping to listen, not just knitting silently.

  Just about when the musicians are agreeing to break for lunch, there’s a strange strangled whistle and the unicorn goes from comatose to something better.

  Halt brings me a cushion, I can get my lap back. Still, well, let’s say they’re asleep. Is sleep a regular thing for unicorns?

  “In exhaustion, Zora dear,” Halt says.

  Chapter 6

  Zora

  Feeding a unicorn isn’t complicated.

  That’s not the same as easy, or straightforward, or well-understood.

  Healthy unicorns of this species, Unicorn Four, consume ambient Power, Power of any kind, one of the few times “ambient magic” might be a meaningful phrase. They’re capable of being selective but Power not strong enough to refuse is all food, and not very much is strong enough. Not even every Independent, I have to take a deep breath and be disciplined and remind myself it’s something like one in twenty Independents who can effectively refuse. Individual unicorns, healthy ones, are strong. What the Line calls a battalion problem, because doing it by companies is risky.

  Music is food — performed music where there’s a thinking mind doing the performing sorts of music — birdsong doesn’t work. It has something to do with an imagination of beauty and order, and when all five of us expressed various degrees of doubt at Blossom, we got reminded that it doesn’t matter if we believe it, it works fine if the unicorn does. Really good declaimed poetry works, too, but is hard on the declaimer and often the poet, in ways that music isn’t, for either the performers or the composer.

  I get to dread finding which book I should eat to know why people know these things so precisely. Sometimes it’s careful compilation of incidents. Usually it’s something dire, and about half the time it was meant to be dire.

  Other things aren’t precisely food, or at least no one in the Commonweal and maybe not any unicorn knows why they eat metals or shiny rocks. “Full-witted and talented is not easy to hold,” Halt says, and points out that whoever made these unicorns might not have been finished, might have had an unrealized intention for the jewel-teeth and extremely strong jaws.

  It’d be easier if we could make the poor thing a bunch of apple-sized sapphires, but not only isn’t that nourishing food, it might be like giving someone nearly dead from starvation powerful stimulants, or possibly hallucinogens.

  Or both. No reason it wouldn’t be both.

  No new proverbs, Dove says, smiling quietly at me from twenty kilometres away.

  I can’t leave, a starving unicorn around average amounts of talent will kill people without intent or effort. I’m providing enough from penumbra, I notice if I pay careful attention. I think a direct feed would kill them, full output and they would burn. Grue’s upset but not too upset to hand me a complex construct that’s how to have Power interactions with unicorns. Not sure why Grue’s upset, being approximately invulnerable hardly seems necessary for one unicorn. Plus Halt’s been looking judicious and been reassuring. Even so, not leaving means I have to get the others to eat some books for me, Edgar for preference.

  Books Ed eats, you can feel the texture of the paper, you can count the individual strands of flax in the linen thread the backing is sewn on with, you can tell how old the book was when Ed ate it from the colour of the glue. You’re going to get every ink-blot, smudge, finger-print, marginal note, and unfortunate grease-spot in the original. The only thing that ever alters is that the printed letters that were meant to be black come out an utterly opaque black, as if the void bled, whatever the actual book had. None of that late-in-the-day muddy grey. It’s more than worth the creepy feeling that the book has come to my awareness through a part of the otherworld where, every now and again, some creature’s skin will panic and flee its flesh.

  Books Dove eats, you don’t always get all the words. All the diagrams and pictures come out brighter, with better colours, and you always know the original’s exact mass. All the concepts, the actual ideas, are always there, and they’re clear and perfect and shining and they’ve been related to each other in ways that have heft, I really can’t describe it better than that. It’s not something you could ever get back out on to paper, or into a mind with a material principal substrate.

  Books Chloris eats get neater, and cleaner. All the margins will be even, and the pages are never roughly trimmed, or sticky. Chloris has to work at it not to lose marginal notes, I agree with the sense of offense, folded single sheets with all your writing on the inside are one thing, but you shouldn’t actually write in a book. We still sometimes need what some sorcerer dead these thousand years scribbled in a margin.

  The tendency to be self-illuminating, to glow on their own even when Chloris materializes a physical copy, I admit I rather like that. It seems appropriately sorcerous and it’s certainly useful.

  But if I have to send someone to the library for me, I want to send Ed. Even if it’s physics texts, which Dove seems to understand without ever letting the contents form words.

  A conversation with the team and an entirely placid and thankfully vocal, hear-with-ears vocal, Halt, and an hour’s wait gets me three books showing up in our internal library, out of the possible five some Commonweal library somewhere should have. Halt hands me a physical volume which wasn’t on the original list. It was printed on heavy iron foil, whatever it was, and I say thank you and decide to leave it for last.

  Benton and apprentice are, extremely politely, willing to have me and the convalescent unicorn sleeping on their shop floor present for the afternoon. The rest of the link has a discussion, quiet and distant, about the possibility and advisability of making wood-working tools out of abstractions of keenness.

  Halt settles into knitting. I settle into reading.

  You have to be impressively dedicated to study unicorns. If they can’t consider you a prey animal, they run away, and they are people, so the Commonweal would rather you left them alone. Just because someone is outside the Peace doesn’t mean you can bother them at your leisure. Nor are unicorns at all weedy, there are a number of weeds unicorns don’t approve of and tend to extirpate. It’d have to be a different, and longer, list of weeds to be really agriculturally useful, but unicorns are still better than crunchers. Unicorns know that the Line will come after them.

  People do study unicorns, it’s not all compilation, there’s research, and all the recent research is Grue’s. Physiology is difficult, unicorns are generally unwilling to be examined, field marks, everyone knows that there are different species of unicorn but telling which one you’re looking at is problematic. Standing still and looking at individual unicorns with focused gaze is past problematic into risky and rash. Some individual unicorns have beaks some of the time, they all exhibit variable gape, some sort of partial shapeshifting’s the accepted explanation.

  Only, as Grue, much-younger-Grue in the text, noted, there’s no such thing, the constraint on shapeshifting is imaginative, the mechanism doesn’t notice if you’re becoming just exactly you without that hangnail or a hexaped with feathers. If unicorns can shapeshift at all, they can shapeshift entirely. Though no one’s ever observed it, and the possibility, first formally noted back in the Year of Peace Six, has had people looking. Coming into habitation and trading for refined metal apparently doesn’t occur to unicorns. Nor attending any music recitals, neither.

  Or they’re cautious, even something fast and powerful has to be somewhat cautious if it lives in the wild. Even a unicorn will notice that people keep bees, we can’t be as collectively helpless as most settlements must look.

  Only cautious externally; among themselves, unicorns are haughty, hierarchical, and violent.

  Problematically violent, intra-specific murder’s their main
cause of death. Nearly all of why they’re rare.

  The book from Halt is a cavalry field manual. For unicorns. For these unicorns, this sleeping unicorn’s species, if I’m doing the species identification correctly whatsoever. It isn’t a copy, it’s the original artifact. It’s, I’m still not very good at this, it’s somewhere around nine thousand years old. Maybe ninety-two hundred.

  “About that,” Halt says placidly, binding on yarn in a shade of green with the entirety of spring in it.

  Cavalry never works. I may not be militant but I can read, I’m part of something the rest of which is exceedingly militant, all the battle standards recognize me. Blossom insists that’s not just because I helped make them, that it’s some sort of transitive property from Dove. Cavalry is about mobility, moving faster. Hardly anything moves faster than the Power, horses are difficult to ward, you have to make the ward something that moves if you want to move fast, and then feed Power to it, and even the battle standards ward better if they’re not moving. Horses panic, anything you can ride panics, people panic often enough faced with the Power, animals have less wit to work with.

  There’s some use to mounted archers or lancers with critters, there’s a tradition there, some use, mostly because people will insist to try, for mounted scouts whose job is to run away very fast from the scary thing, the First Commonweal had that. But not for an army. If you have an army you’re going to have to fight a sorcerer, and you get your cavalry stampeding back over you in blind panic if you’re lucky.

  So someone wanted to fix that, never mind riders, never mind the cost in food of large organisms, never mind being the least kind of sane, and made something that was a sorcerer, something that would obey and fight and be mighty enough to be a real problem.

  Something near enough antithetical to the Peace, you can, yes, you really can, there’s enough information in one of Grue’s monographs, you can model unicorn society as an unstable tension between individual survival odds benefiting from the group and straight up blood-lust.

  I think the people trying to make unicorns that would suppress weeds were being more sensible, and they certainly weren’t thinking the whole thing through carefully. Weeding’s dangerous, it’s not just hard work. Having a compulsion isn’t a sufficient reason to be really dedicated about it.

  This one’s cavalry, not weeds. A species that doesn’t do social well, even worse than you’d think from arriving battered and starving. Battered as though it had lost several battles, those scars were not all the same age. Descended from an unfinished and not especially competent effort to create something that would slaughter assigned enemies, it’s hard to imagine anyone so inept as to create monsters they didn’t at least believe themselves able to direct.

  I’m sure it’s happened, but unicorns are dangerous, really dangerous, they’re not like all the critters where, once you know what that is, there’s recipe for how you deal with it, or even like crunchers. You can kill crunchers with skill and spears, it’s not easy, no one wants to have to do that, but crunchers are not a battalion problem.

  Why am I wondering how to feed a battalion problem? The manual talks about orchestras, about tact and politeness and habits from a young age, because wards are just another sort of ambient magic, just as readily devoured.

  “Permitting a person to die of wounds and starvation,” Halt says, and doesn’t need to note that I’m not going to do that. I might have to ask for help to arrange a peaceful death, but not going to leave anyone to lingering death by pain and starvation.

  Might not have to ask for help, it’s not a fight, it would be like weeding. There’s a metabolism in there, it’s not especially material, but not all weeds are material, either. Doesn’t seem difficult to shut down.

  “Yet you do not want to.” Halt’s not smiling at me, but the words come out in tones of pure approval.

  “Everybody ought to get their chance at the Peace.” Being a unicorn won’t help, neither nature nor the ghastly culture of origin will help, it’s a risk, but it can be a risk mostly to me.

  I think I’ll scream if I have to and Halt produces a tiny smile.

  If I have to scream at all. Two hours later, Eirene’s expressing tactful worry about the risks involved, and Halt says “Grant me a modicum of forethought.” Things lurking under Halt’s considered tone make me shudder; Eirene has to sit down. Halt wasn’t trying for that, Eirene gets some rather apologetic tea, but the point stands. It doesn’t take much of Halt’s attention to obliterate a unicorn, and a little bit more of that attention will be following me around, nearly invisible, a flat plane of fluttering darkness, invisible edge-on. Invisible even while it’s a host of hastening knife-shapes, or worse.

  It can get so very much worse.

  It doesn’t, the unicorn wakes up, leaps to its feet, looks panicked, then resigned, then utterly doleful, then less doleful when Halt whistles. It sounds like music, and it goes on at length. The unicorn stares at Halt the whole time and gets progressively crumply and abashed, head down and tail still and horn dimming.

  I can’t understand Unicorn, and I certainly can’t understand Halt’s undertone, not if Halt isn’t carefully thinking in the one language I do understand. Ed can, though, and I can reach for that in the link and get, at the end, This one is inclined to kindness. Do not act to make kindness folly.

  “Explanations around No ill shall befall you do not bring upon yourself” Halt says, to Eirene as much as to me.

  Chapter 7

  Zora

  It takes a gean meeting, and everyone’s uncomfortable.

  Well, except Halt, and the rest of us. Unicorn took one look at Dove, got a little more crumpled, and stayed that way. Constant wasn’t manifest. Chloris and Edgar weren’t being threatening at all but Death and Strange Mayhem don’t need to be.

  Dove, it’s not even certainty, it’s just knowledge, no unicorn is a fundamental challenge. The unicorn can tell, if I’ve got any grasp of the body language they’re nearly frightened enough to bolt. Don’t know how to be reassuring; patting on the withers, which might work for a horse, might convey something unkind to a unicorn. Don’t know them well enough to try, medical treatment’s not social permission.

  Halt whistles something cheery, and there’s a slightly calmer look.

  It’s still uncomfortable watching our gean, host-gean hasn’t seemed like a factual statement in years, no matter how much it’s formally true, try to decide if they can cope with a unicorn. Even an abashed unicorn, trying not to stare at its delicate translucent hooves. Neat paired hooves, no dewclaws whatsoever.

  A large unicorn, I don’t know if unicorns are all regular mass but I’d guess somewhere around seven hundred kilogrammes, two and a half metres at the shoulder. Then I remember the notes in the cavalry manual about river crossings, very dense muscle and no tendency to float. So closer to nine hundred.

  Something to have in common, ancestors whose muscles and bones some sorcerer improved until you can’t float and have trouble swimming.

  The meeting mumbles at itself for a bit, and then one of Eirene’s aunts declares forcefully that if we can have Edgar at table, a unicorn guest-behaving on pain of Halt shouldn’t reach the status of a formal question. The apology to Ed is pro-forma; Ed’s dismissal of the necessity isn’t, Ed’s still surprised we don’t have a problem with what Ed actually is.

  Silly old fright.

  The refectory has a very large speaker’s corner, up on the balcony. A balcony so people could light the lamps when the place was built four centuries ago, and a speaker’s corner so everybody could hear announcements. It gets used for the annual meeting’s reports from gean offices and not very much else these days when everyone can read, but the acoustics are good and Eirene’s intensely against anybody having to watch others eat while going hungry. The rest of the meeting isn’t as intense but agrees on principle.

  So we wind up hoisting a piano up there, don’t even have to move the railing, and Benton gets this look because the piano
’s still in tune, despite floating through the air. The gean agrees that playing for a whole sitting may count as refectory service, and various musicians would clearly rather play for an audience than peel potatoes or dice turnip. Musicians from other geans can swap services around, just like everybody does for dishwashing after a celebration or let’s-pickle-fifty-tonnes-of-onions days.

  Who pays for the piano tries to turn into a wrangle, but even Eirene can’t argue with Dove getting focused about something, and this is Dove with active backing from Halt.

  I feel a little better about more than three years of no dishes or service, but only a little. Apprentice sorcerers being forbidden kitchens doesn’t help at all, and never has. None of us has ever botched field-cooking.

  Dove’s habit of melting and reforming cookware in preference to scrubbing pots wouldn’t go over well, but still. It’s work we ought to do.

  Plenty of work for only you, Zora dear Halt says, and I realize I don’t know what to call the abashed unicorn.

  Asking anybody for their name is notably rude, reputationally rude, in the Commonweal, when everyone’s name has been safe in the Shape of Peace for five-hundred and thirty-nine years. For a sorcerer to ask a unicorn guest of that Peace for their name can’t possibly be polite. Still, “the unicorn” doesn’t work very well, someone is going to mean a completely different unicorn by that any time there’s a sighting.

  “Would you mind being called Pelōŕios?”

  That gets me a look from the unicorn, whistling from Halt, a distinct unicorn nod, complete with after-image of the moving horn, and something like a snicker through the link from Chloris. Old-poetry for “gigantic” might be excessive, but I think it fits, and never mind lists of creatures larger than unicorns.

  Chapter 8

  Zora