The impact of the unicorn shook the stone. The horn was buried deep in the rock, about where Morlock's heart would be, if the stone had been his torso.
And it was stuck. The unicorn planted its delicate cloven hooves and pushed against the rocky ground, but it could get very little purchase.
Morlock pocketed the cold-light as the unicorn watched him with frenzied gaping red eyes. He drew Tyrfing from the baldric over his decaying shoulder.
"I'm sorry, Swift One," Morlock said. "Need drives me." He struck at the base of the horn and cut it cleanly through, about a thumb's width above the brow.
The docked unicorn leapt back and stared bemusedly at Morlock. It looked at the stump of its horn sticking out of the stone and stepped back farther.
"I hope it will grow back," said Morlock, not supposing the unicorn understood him, or would care if it could. Resting Tyrfing against the stone's side, he drew the cold-light and tossed it as far and as fast as he could.
The unhorned unicorn followed the arc of the light with delighted angry eyes and immediately ran after it. Morlock had actually thrown it harder than he intended: the cold-light landed in the river of molten stone. The unicorn dove in after it and disappeared from sight. Presently it appeared again, spraying fire from its nose and mouth. When Morlock turned away, it was still diving about like a porpoise in the fiery river.
Morlock picked up Tyrfing and began to hew away at the top of the stone. If he could have used two hands, he would have. But eventually he had split the top of the stone and was holding the red horn of the unicorn in his hand. He tucked it away in his cloak and walked away from the river of fire.
He came to the place where he felt the impulse clouds swirling through the air like leaves in autumn. He lay down among the stones and the corpses and, holding tightly to Tyrfing as his focus, summoned the rapture of vision.
It did not come easily, but he was in no hurry this time. He focused and unfocused. He thought and he dreamed. He unwove his consciousness and in its place spun a vision as deep as his wounded powers could permit.
When he was deep in rapture, he began to draw impulse clouds to him. They flocked to him like birds to scattered grain, eager to be directed by a living will. When he was densely cocooned with the shadowy clouds, he directed them to lift him upward.
As he rose through the cone of the dead volcano, he saw much with his inward eye that had been hidden before. He saw a network of underground channels like dark rivers, leeching impulse clouds from the Well of Shadows. He saw the unlife of the fiery beast to the north and the thousand winters it carried in its cold veins. He saw the colonies of were-rats up and down the slopes of Mount Dhaarnaiarnon. More were dead than alive: the cruel weather had been deadly for them, too.
The impulse clouds lifted him above the lip of the crater. It was night, and they began to disappear in the open air; they could not carry him much farther. He unbound them from his will and let them dissipate in the faint misty starlight.
He knew, rather than felt, that his body slid down the side of the volcano for a while until it came up against a tumble of stones. Carefully, as deliberately as he could, he rewove his conscious connection with his dying flesh. It took a long time, and he didn't have much time, but he was strangely unconcerned.
He had come looking for knowledge and for vengeance. He was leaving with knowledge and guilt-and a unicorn's horn. That added up to something very like hope.
Chapter Thirty-one: Plans and Devices
Morlock made his way back to his cave past the necropolis covering the eastern face of the city. No moon was aloft, but there were faint lights moving among the tombs, no doubt from citizens who had taken refuge in the graveyard, or were robbing the graves for meat. The slopes of the city were outlined in fire. Morlock wondered if the city was on fire. But he was not especially concerned: his friends would be safe enough in the outlier settlement. As he climbed the ridge above the silver-waste fields, he saw that at least two mesas of the city were stained with fire-Iuiunioklendon and Nekkuklendon. The outlier settlement, in contrast, was unusually dark and quiet-there were usually some citizens abroad during the night, but tonight it seemed almost funereal. Perhaps they were helping fight fires in the city.
He was deeply weary when he reached his cave, but he set immediately to his task. He could not afford to rest; he might wake up dead, or unable to work. The fragmentary page he had purchased from Iacomes described a mirror made from a unicorn's horn, but not how to use it. He was fairly sure he could make the mirror, anyway.
He broke up the unicorn horn with Tyrfing and ground the shards to powder with a diamond mortar and pestle. The powder had a gritty sandlike quality, and he hoped to melt it like sand to make glass for the mirror. He eventually succeeded in doing so, though it took his entire choir of young flames working for hours in a reflective furnace. He poured the bloodred molten glass into a shallow mold, cooled it, polished it, and cut it into an octagon, to match the form sketched on his fragment.
He had intended to treat the back with quicksilver or some other reflective agent. But the glass, though thin, was opaque. Its redly opalescent surface was not especially reflective, even when polished.
He picked it up with his right hand and looked intently at the faint image of himself he saw on the surface. It seemed faint and ghostly.
On impulse, he tried to pick up the mirror with his left hand. The drifting mist that were the fingers of his left hand, unable to move anything more substantial than a leaf, closed on the red glass and easily hefted it in the palm of his left hand.
Fairly easily. It felt heavy-heavier than it should-heavier than a dead body. But he could hold it.
And the image of himself on the red surface suddenly became much clearer. It was indeed ghostly, a drifting mist in Morlock's image. But the gray eyes were luminously clear, even through the red glass, and his mirrorleft hand and arm looked hale, unharmed.
The mirror-Morlock met his eye and said, "So it's come to this. I have to save you."
It occurred to Morlock that his reflection was drunk. His heart sank. He would have spoken, but he found he could not.
After brooding a while, the mirror-Morlock said resentfully, "You'd never do it, you know. If our positions were reversed. You hate me. You'd rather die than be yoked to me forever. Well, I hate you more. But I'm not an idealist, like you are. The only way I can go on living is if you do. So buy me a drink, sometime; we'll call it even."
The mirror-Morlock reached through the mirror with his misty rightreversed hand and past Morlock's eye, pushing the misty fingers deep into his skull. Morlock would have backed away or protected himself somehow, but he could not move: his free will seemed to have been wholly seized by the mirror-Morlock.
The mist-fingers moving through his brain were searing agony. But eventually he felt them close on something, an alien presence, like a splinter of glass or metal lodged in his mind. The fingers drew it forth. This, too, was agony, but also a relief, like a weapon being drawn from a wound. At last, healing could begin.
He briefly saw the dark splinter in the mirror-Morlock's misty hand before he passed out.
When he awoke, it was still night. Or perhaps, it was night again. His head was pounding like a drum; his throat was as an old shoe buried in the desert; he was hungry enough to eat a live stoat and too weak to chase one even if it were right in front of him.
But he didn't care about any of that. Because the wound in his spirit was gone; his arm and hand were whole again, and even without summoning the rapture of vision, he knew his Sight had been healed as well.