The Karkadann Triangle Read online

  Praise for Patricia A. McKillip

  “McKillip’s is the first name that comes to mind when I’m asked whom I read myself, whom I’d recommend that others read, and who makes me shake my grizzled head and say, ‘Damn I wish I’d done that.’”

  —Peter S. Beagle, author of The Last Unicorn and The Overneath

  “I read—and reread—McKillip eagerly. She reminds me that fantasy is worth writing.”

  —Stephen R. Donaldson, author of the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant

  “Patricia McKillip is the real thing and always has been. She shows the rest of us that magic can be made with words and air; that is it worth doing and worth doing well.”

  —Ellen Kushner, author of Swordspoint and Thomas the Rhymer

  “Ever since finding and loving The Riddle-Master of Hed many years ago, I have read everything Patricia McKillip has written. You should too.”

  —Garth Nix, author of Sabriel and The Keys to the Kingdom

  “Some authors we read for their characters and their plots, others for the beauty of their language. I read Pat McKillip for all three.”

  —Charles de Lint, author of The Blue Girl

  “World Fantasy Award winner McKillip can take the most common fantasy elements—dragons and bards, sorcerers and shape-shifters—and reshape them in surprising and resonant ways.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “This is what great literature looks like: bold, self-incisive, powerfully feminist without drawing attention to anything but the prose, the characters, and the story.”

  —Usman T. Malik, author of The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn

  “Fear, hope, love, hatred, and all that makes us human assume magical forms in McKillip’s characteristically gorgeous prose.”

  —E. Lily Yu, author of “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees”

  “There is a magic and grandeur to McKillip’s focused prose, a kind of resounding clarity that lives and echoes in the mind long after the story is done.”

  —Ben Loory, author of Tales of Falling and Flying and Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day

  Praise for Peter S. Beagle

  “One of my favorite writers.”

  —Madeleine L’Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time

  “Peter S. Beagle illuminates with his own particular magic such commonplace matters as ghosts, unicorns, and werewolves. For years a loving readership has consulted him as an expert on those hearts’ reasons that reason does not know.”

  —Ursula K. Le Guin, author of A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness

  “The only contemporary to remind one of Tolkien.”

  —Booklist

  “Peter S. Beagle is (in no particular order) a wonderful writer, a fine human being, and a bandit prince out to steal readers’ hearts.”

  —Tad Williams, author of Tailchaser’s Song

  “Peter S. Beagle is one of my favorite authors.”

  —Patrick Rothfuss, author of The Wise Man’s Fear

  “Peter Beagle deserves a seat at the table with the great masters of fantasy.“

  —Christopher Moore, author of Lamb and The Serpent of Venice

  “We all have something to learn—about writing, about humanity, about hope—from Peter Beagle.”

  —Seanan McGuire, author of Rosemary and Rue

  “Peter S. Beagle is a master of the magical, but also of the little details of day to day existence that root his characters in the soil, sweat and everyday breezes of their worlds, and make the magical all the more magical when it touches them.”

  —Kurt Busiek, author of Astro City and The Avengers

  “[Beagle] has been compared, not unreasonably, with Lewis Carroll and J. R. R. Tolkien, but he stands squarely and triumphantly on his own feet.”

  —Saturday Review

  “Not only one of our greatest fantasists, but one of our greatest writers, a magic realist worthy of consideration with such writers as Marquez, Allende, and even Borges.”

  —The American Culture

  Also by Patricia A. McKillip

  Series novels

  The Riddle-Master trilogy

  The Riddle-Master of Hed (1976)

  Heir of Sea and Fire (1977)

  Harpist in the Wind (1979)

  Kyreol

  Moon-Flash (1984)

  The Moon and the Face (1985)

  Cygnet

  The Sorceress and the Cygnet (1991)

  The Cygnet and the Firebird (1993)

  Winter Rose

  Winter Rose (1996)

  Solstice Wood (2006)

  Other Novels

  The House on Parchment Street (1973)

  The Throne of the Eril of Sherril (1973)

  The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (1974)

  The Night Gift (1976)

  Stepping from the Shadows (1982)

  Fool’s Run (1987)

  The Changeling Sea (1988)

  Something Rich and Strange (A Tale of Brian Froud’s Faerielands) (1994)

  The Book of Atrix Wolfe (1995)

  Song for the Basilisk (1998)

  The Tower at Stony Wood (2000)

  Ombria in Shadow (2002)

  In the Forests of Serre (2003)

  Alphabet of Thorn (2004)

  Od Magic (2005)

  The Bell at Sealey Head (2008)

  The Bards of Bone Plain (2010)

  Kingfisher (2016)

  Short fiction collections

  Harrowing the Dragon (2005)

  Wonders of the Invisible World (2012)

  Dreams of Distant Shores (2016)

  Also by Peter S. Beagle

  Fiction

  A Fine and Private Place (1960)

  The Last Unicorn (1968)

  Lila the Werewolf (1969)

  The Folk of the Air (1986)

  The Innkeeper’s Song (1993)

  The Unicorn Sonata (1996)

  Tamsin (1999)

  A Dance for Emilia (2000)

  The Last Unicorn: The Lost Version (2007)

  Strange Roads (with Lisa Snellings Clark, 2008)

  Return (2010)

  Summerlong (2016)

  In Calabria (2017)

  Short fiction collections

  Giant Bones (1997)

  The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche (1997)

  The Line Between (2006)

  Your Friendly Neighborhood Magician: Songs and Early Poems(2006)

  We Never Talk About My Brother (2009)

  Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle (2010)

  Sleight of Hand (2011)

  The Overneath (2017)

  Nonfiction

  I See By My Outfit: Cross-Country by Scooter, an Adventure (1965)

  The California Feeling (with Michael Bry, 1969)

  The Lady and Her Tiger (with Pat Derby, 1976)

  The Garden of Earthly Delights (1982)

  In the Presence of Elephants (1995)

  As editor

  Peter S. Beagle’s Immortal Unicorn (with Janet Berliner, 1995)

  The Secret History of Fantasy (2010)

  The Urban Fantasy Anthology (with Joe R. Lansdale, 2011)

  The New Voices of Fantasy (with Jacob Weisman, 2017)

  The Unicorn Anthology (with Jacob Weisman, forthcoming, 2019)

  The Karkadann

  Triangle

  PATRICIA A. MCKILLIP

  PETER S. BEAGLE

  TACHYON PUBLICATIONS LLC

  SAN FRANCISCO

  The Karkadann Triangle

  Copyright © 2018 by Patricia A. McKillip and Peter S. Beagle

  This is a collected work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any rese
mblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the publisher.

  Cover design and illustration by Thomas Canty

  Interior design by Elizabeth Story

  Tachyon Publications LLC

  1459 18th Street #139

  San Francisco, CA 94107

  415.285.5615

  www.tachyonpublications.com

  [email protected]

  Series Editor: Jacob Weisman

  Project Editor: James DeMaiolo

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61696-311-8

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-61696-313-2

  First Edition: 2018

  Unicorn Triangle © 2017 by Patricia A. McKillip. Originally published as a Humble Bundle e-book exclusive, 3/8/17. First print appearance.

  “My Son Heydari and the Karkadann” © 2017 by Peter S. Beagle. Originally published as a Humble Bundle e-book exclusive, 3/8/17; First print appearance in The Overneath (Tachyon Publications LLC: San Francisco).

  CONTENTS

  1.

  Unicorn Triangle

  Patricia A. McKillip

  13.

  My Son Heydari and the Karkadann

  Peter S. Beagle

  I GET FLASHBACKS now and then. What it was like. Then. Before. The moonlight a path of diamonds and ivory, suspended between the mist of trees whose names I knew, every one of them, as well as who had dropped what nut that made this tree, that meant this name. My watching eyes as dark as night, my pelt as sleek and perfect as the moon at full, my hooves and spiraling horn forged of that dream, that glittering. All the scents and secret whisperings: water, brambles opening flowers, sharpening thorns, bracken crumbling oh so slowly, a sift, a shift of a splinter of wood, a break of driest leaf spending a timeless moment edging apart, resettling itself like a dreamer fitting itself into sleep, into earth. The sound of the wings of the Luna moth fluttering toward that white fire, spellbound by the moon.

  Then. I almost remember my name.

  Then someone says a name, over and over, until I realize it must mean me.

  Erin heaves a sigh, and squeezes air out of a pillow to wrestle it into its shroud. Case. Whatever.

  “Jeez Louise, Lisa, I swear your brain lives in a different time zone.”

  That seems so likely, that different time zone, that I go there to test its truth. It is a step away, but farther, I guess, than anyone even close can see. A pillow brings me back, bouncing off my head.

  “Lisa! We’ve got eight more rooms before check-in!”

  Maybe so, but I suddenly flash back to the sorcerer’s face, his final expression, the last he could ever say with it before he flung the spell out of himself with his dying breath—so strong it was even his fingernails splintered and his eyelashes fell out—and I was left standing alone, staring at the little wicked smile frozen in his eyes. My horn, which had pierced his heart, turned to moon-mist and disappeared. So had my forelegs, my lovely hooves. I lost all balance, toppled forward into the rose of blood blooming out of his chest.

  Now here I am, changing sheets, emptying little refriger-ators of half-eaten chip dips, sloshing brushes around in the bathroom, vacuuming sand, tossing shells people had carried back to the room and then forgotten to pack. Over the balcony they go, despite Erin’s protests. I haven’t hit anybody yet.

  Listen, I was trying to say when they discovered me in the brambles, when they asked my name. List. Lis.

  So. That’s what I’ve become.

  I didn’t know what language to speak those first words. I’ve been nearly everywhere in the world, though not entirely. Not, I think, in that ancient land where mountains have crumbled to the bone and tall, feisty, hornless creatures abound, whose young peep out of pouches on their bellies. Nor in the coldest places, though it is—or was—said that I swam in the sea. I tried that once, tangled in some sailor’s dream of horns and unicorns. I didn’t like it; I smelled brine for days, though it had only been a dream.

  In other lands, I go disguised. I wear the face and features of the creatures they know as unicorn: it seems polite. In one, my horn might be colored like a rainbow; in another I have a beard, and my hooves are cleft. In yet another, I have scales like a lizard and my single horn branches like a tree. In some, I speak words of wisdom; in others, I just rage and bite. In those where I belong to earth and time, I am gorgeously ugly. In most, I am mostly seen in tale and memory. I am made of dreams, of thread, of colored ink. I am ancient yet unforgotten; everyone recognizes me and no one ever sees me.

  Except the sorcerer.

  I managed to get a few words right when I was found; the sorcerer’s blood on me did the rest. They thought I’d tumbled into some blackberry brambles along the hillside below the hotel. They have never—not even Erin—decided what land I came from, what language I spoke when they found me, or even if my tongue is tangled by my slow wits or by my bad translation.

  I see no point in trying to tell the truth.

  Nobody knew what to do with me after they found me. I couldn’t tell them: I had no idea, either. I understood them, but I could barely speak. I kept trying to find my balance, and falling over. Where’s the rest of me? I asked, or tried to. I had just impaled a sorcerer through his heart with my horn; I was still enraged, still trembling with the exhausting battle to elude his sorcery. I wanted to run as far, as fast as I could down the bridge of light between the sea and the setting moon until that placid, ancient face calmed me. Instead I was tangled in hair and kept falling down. I had hands where my forehooves had been. I had seen enough humans to know that they weren’t slender, graceful, pampered ladies’ fingers, either. They could have heaved a sack of flour, or swung an ax. Hair the color of my vanished pelt, ivory and moonlight, tumbled out of my head and spilled over me like a cloak to my great, ungainly feet. It hid at least some of my unclothed skin, at which I stared in horror and fascination. As did others, until a modest young virgin tried to pull some morning glory vines over me.

  He said, “Somebody call the police.”

  “Hospital,” a woman said briefly. “Look at the blood on her.”

  “It’s not mine,” I said, or tried to; they looked at me with complete bewilderment. “It’s the sorcerer’s.”

  “Russian?” somebody guessed.

  “Doesn’t sound like my high school Spanish.”

  “Something Nordic?”

  “It’s more lilty—maybe French?”

  A little girl, staring at me, pulled the finger out of her mouth and said, “It is the language of bells.” She smiled at me, as though we shared a secret, and I wanted to kneel then and there and lay my head in her lap.

  But.

  There was more chatter, more of me falling over, more alarmed voices, then more vast, wailing alarms. The little girl vanished. As the hours passed, I grew to understand the lights, the buildings, the uniforms, the things done to me, why they asked the questions they did, over and over, until I fell asleep and then fell off my chair, and woke up again to more of everything all over again.

  They argued incessantly—yes, no, yes—about me: as in what to do with. I finally stopped listening, sat drooping in ugly garments and gave myself up to my memories, my yearnings, my overwhelming despair. I was a unicorn without a horn slumped in a chair, with no name and nowhere to go.

  I had won the battle and lost my life. And I had not a starglint of an idea why the sorcerer had attacked me. It was not the familiar human motive: to kill me and cut off my horn to use for cleaning sullied waters or detecting poison in unexpected places. The sorcerer had fought to his death when he could have run; he used his last breath to destroy us both.

  Why? I wondered, in my morass of bewilderment, regret, pain for my lost limbs, my lost life. What had I ever done to him?

  They prodded me; I got up. They asked yet more questions; I stared at them blankly, asking them why I should care. They moved, nudged me again; I followed.
More talking, face to face, face to phone, more standing, more papers signed, more talking. Phones sang, gabbled, sang again. Then a voice on one of the tiny phones screeched like a raven and even I stood up a little straighter.

  One of the uniforms took the phone. Every time he tried to speak, the voice again, like a hoof grating on rock, like wood tearing itself raggedly in two. Finally, he said the only words he was allowed: “Yes, ma’am.”

  The voice cooed like a dove in love and went still. So here I am in the hundred-year-old beach hotel, changing sheets and bars of soap, and wondering what to do with myself. I’ve learned to form more useful words with my unfamiliar lips. Understanding words and those who spoke them was never the problem; I was around at the beginning of their language. I know what they want from me—a detailed human history from birth to here—and I haven’t one to give them. For a long time, a time of full moons, bleak skies, tossing ships, new moons, warm rain, golden days, sandy footprints on the carpets, I even forgot to wonder whose train-wreck of a voice had brought me to that place.

  Then the phone rings in a room Erin and I are cleaning; Erin answers it.

  “Yeah?” She listens, then hangs up and says to me, “Geegee wants you.”

  “Who?”

  “Geegee. In the office. Now.”

  So I go. I don’t have the slightest who Geegee is, nor do I care. Maybe, I think without hope, this Geegee will fire me, and I can spend the summer among the brambles, foraging for wild fruit, then lie me down in the lace of tide as the chill winds rouse, and let the sea drift me to the moon.

  Nobody is behind the registration desk. The inner office door is open. I peer into that, and my heart tries to grow wings and fly.

  The young girl’s eyes meet mine, seeing me, knowing me. Only this time they are in a face with lines like a walnut shell, all rippling together as she smiles. She is a small bundle of old bones in skirts and various scarves and sweaters, sitting in a rocking chair by a window, her feet dangling above the floor.

  She says my name.

  I feel my bones try to rearrange themselves, trying to remember the shape they once knew. But, powerful as that voice she has is, it can’t pull me out of what I have become. The lines on her face shift, hope and power blurring into rue.