Tales From The Vulgar Unicorn

'If I had met you long ago, or if you liked horses, there would be a chance. You have done me a great service. More than that pouch holds. I am seldom in any man's debt, but you, I own, can call me anytime.'

'You paid me. Hell Hound. I am content,' Hanse had demurred, confused by weakness where he had never imagined it might dwell. Then he saw the Hell Hound fish out a snuffbox of krrf, and thought he understood.

But later, he went back to Amoli's and hung around the steps, cautiously petting the big man's horse, the krrf he had sniffed making him willing to dodge the beast's square, yellow teeth.

4

She had come to him, had Cime. She was what she was, what she had always been.

It was Tempus who was changed: Vashanka had entered into him, the Storm God who was Lord of Weapons who was Lord of Rape who was Lord of War who was Lord of Death's Gate.

He could not take her, gently. So spoke not his physical impotence, as he might have expected, but the cold wash of wisdom: he would not despoil her; Vashanka would accept no less.

She knocked and entered and said, 'Let me see them,' so sure he would have the stolen diamonds that her fingers were already busy on the lacings of her Ilsig leathers.

He held up a hide-wrapped bundle, slimmer than her wrist, shorter than her forearm. 'Here. How were they thieved?'

'Your voice is hoarser than I have ever heard it,' she replied, and: 'I needed money; there was this man ... actually, there were a few, but there was a tough, a streetbrawler. I should have known - he is half my apparent age. What would such as he want with a middle-aged whore? And he agreed to pay the price I asked, without quibbling. Then he robbed me.' She looked around, her eyes, as he remembered them, clear windows to her thoughts. She was appalled.

'The low estate into which I have sunk?'

She knew what he meant. Her nostrils shivered, taking in the musty reek of the soiled bedding on which he sprawled fully clothed, smelling easily as foul. 'The devolution of us both. That I would be here, under these circumstances, is surely as pathetic as you.'

'Thanks. I needed that. Don't.'

'I thought you wanted me.' She ceased unlacing, looked at him, her tunic open to her waist.

'I did. I don't. Have some krrf.' On his hips rode her scarf; if she saw it, then she would comprehend his degradation too fully. So he had not removed it, hoping its presence would remind him, if he weakened and his thoughts drowned in lust, that this woman he must not violate.

She sat on the quilt, one doe-gloved leg tucked under her.

'You jest,' she breathed, then, eyes narrowed, took the krrf.

'It will be ill with you, afterwards, should I touch you.'

Her fingers ran along the flap of hide wrapped over her wands. 'I am receiving payment.' She tapped the package. 'And I may not owe debts.'

'The boy who pilfered these, did it at my behest.'

'Must you pander for me?'

He winced. 'Why do you not go home?' She smelled of salt and honey and he thought desperately that she was here only because he forced the issue: to pay her debt.

She leaned forwards, touched his lips with a finger. 'For the same reason that you do not. Home is changed, gone to time.'

'Do you know that?' He jerked his head-away, cracking it against the bed's wooden headboard.

'I believe it.'

'I ca

'I ca

'Sorry,' he said firmly, and got out from under her hands. 'I am just not in the mood.'

She shrugged, unwrapped the wands, and wound her hair up with them. 'Surely, you will regret this, later.'

'Maybe you are right,' he sighed heavily. 'But that is my problem. I release you from any debt. We are even. I remember past gifts, given when you still knew how to give freely.' There was no way in the world he was going to hurt her. He would not strip before her. With those two constraints, he had no option. He chased her out of there. He was as cruel about it as he could manage to be, for both their sakes.

Then he yelled downstairs for service.

When he descended the steps in the cool night air, a movement startled him, on the grey's off side.

'It is me, Shadowspawn.'

'It is I, Shadowspawn,' he corrected, huskily. His face averted, he mounted from the wrong side. The horse whickered disapprovingly. 'What is it, snipe?'

As clouds covered the moon, Tempus seemed to pull all night's shadows round him. Hanse might have the name, but this Tempus had the skill. Hanse shivered. There were no Shadow Lords any longer ... 'I was admiring your horse. Bunch of hawk masks rode by, saw the horse, looked interested. I looked proprietary. The horse looked mean. The hawk-masks rode away. I just thought I'd see if you showed soon, and let you know.'

A movement at the edge of his field of vision warned him, even as the horse's ears twitched at the click of iron on stone. 'You should have kept going, it seems,' said Tempus quietly, as the first of the hawk-masks edged his horse out past the intersection, and others followed. Two. Three. Four. Two more.

'Mothers,' whispered Cudgel Swearoath's prodigy, embarrassed at not having realized that he was not the only one waiting for Tempus.

'This is not your fight, junior.'

'I'm aware of that. Let's see if they are.'

Blue night: blue hawk-masks: the sparking thunder of six sets of hooves rushing towards the two of them. Whickering. The gleam of frothing teeth and bared weapons: iron clanging in a jumble of shuddering, straining horses. The kill trained grey's challenge to another stallion: hooves thudding on flesh and great mouths gaped, snapping; a blaring death-clarion from a horse whose jugular had been severed. Always watching the boy: keeping the grey between the hawk-masks and a thief who just happened to get involved; who just happened to kill two of them with thrown knives, one through an eye and the other blade he recalled clearly, sticking out of a slug-white throat. Tempus would remember even the whores' ambivalent screams of thrill and horror, delight and disgust. He had plenty of time to sort it out: Time to draw his own sword, to target the rider of his choice, feel his hilt go warm and pulsing in his hand. He really did not like to take unfair advantage. The iron sword glowed pink like a baby's skin or a just-born day. Then it began to react in his grip. The grey's reins, wrapped around the pommel, flapped loosely; he told it where he wanted it with gritted words, with a pressing knee, with his shifting weight. One hawk -mask had a greenish tinge to him: protected. Tempus's sword would not listen to such talk: it slit charms like butter, armour like silk. A blue wing whistled above his head, thrown by a compatriot of the man who fell so slowly with his guts pouring out over his saddle like cold molasses. While that hawk-mask's horse was in mid-air between two strides, Tempus's sword licked up and changed the colour of the foe-seeking boomerang. Pink, now, not blue. He was content to let it return its death to the hand that threw it. That left just two.

One had the thief engaged, and the youth had drawn his wicked, twenty-inch Ibarsi knife, too short to be more than a temporizer against the hawk-mask's sword, too broad to be thrown. Backed against the Lily Garden's wall, there was just time for Tempus to flicker the horse over there and split the hawk-mask's head down to his collarbones. Grey brains splattered him.. The thrust of the hawk-mask, undiminished by death, shattered on the flat of the long, curved knife Shadowspawn held up in a two-fisted, desperate block.