Piers Anthony - Unicorn Point

But he fired first. She had forgotten that the dragons could move their heads as they fired; they did not have to be straight forward. She had to bank desperately to avoid getting tagged, and did not quite succeed; there was a flare of light at her dragon’s right wingtip, and her ride became ragged. Some of the control circuits had been shorted out, and the wing was crippled.

She was losing in rapid order. It was time to use her final ploy. She guided the dragon upward, and it made erratic progress while the Citizen made a smooth horizontal turn. As his dragon set up for another shot. Sheen gave her mount conflicting commands: climb and dive. It was the kind of error a novice or a flustered combatant would make. A steed who liked its rider and was used to the rider’s ways might have paused, waiting for the correction. This one did not like its rider, so took the pretext to go out of control. It lifted its forepart, let its rearpart drop, blasted with its elevation jets, and spun out of control.

Which was exactly what Sheen wanted.

They plummeted toward the ground, while the Citizen cruised down, orienting for a shot when the repulsor field halted the fall and left the dragon spinning in place. But Sheen started a series of commands just before then, and recovered control. Her dragon had to obey. Instead of crashing in air, the dragon bounced back up, in yo-yo fashion—and as it did, she fired, causing its jet to swing in an arc toward the Citizen’s steed. This was her ploy: to catch the Citizen just when he thought he had a helpless target.

But Purple’s dragon was not hovering, it was circling.

Sheen’s shot missed by a wide margin.

Then Purple’s dragon fired from behind her, and she was unable to get up speed to avoid it. She knew before it struck that she was lost. The Citizen had anticipated her, and the victory was his.

The mock fire did not hurt her physically, of course. But she knew she had failed her husband in this most important contest. She had indeed been overmatched, and Citizen Blue would pay the price. Her emotional circuitry took over, and she wept.

11 - Phoebe

Phoebe perched in her den, desolate. She had done wrong; she knew it. She had let an unharpylike compassion lead her into helping the ‘com-boy Flach escape—and Translucent had caught her at it. Yet the boy was the foal of the unicorn Fleta, who had befriended her and cured her tailfeather itch, and of the Rovot Adept, who had given her a hairdo that had made her the Flock Leader. How could she turn Flach away? She knew that a true harpy would have pounced on the boy and offered him up to the Adepts, gleefully reneging on any debt owed his family. By her action she had proved that she lacked the proper harpy attitude. So now she was barred again from the Flock, and there was to be a scratch-off to select a new leader, and she was in the dumps.

Yet such was her depravity, she knew she would do it again. The rovot and unicorn had given her an illicit taste of some thing virtually unknown in harpydom: friendship. Now she cravenly clung to the notion. She wanted to be among folk who cared for those they were with, instead of perpetually cursing them. So here she was, deprived of the kind of company she no longer desired anyway. She was sorry the lad had been recaptured. It was an irony that he had been hiding from those same folk who had befriended her. But she knew that they did not really want to be on the side of the Adverse Adepts, any more than she did. They too were stuck in a nasty situation.

She went down to her spring and peered at her reflection. Her fright wig was sagging; the rovot’s spell was slowly wearing off. But it had become the mark of her leadership among the harpies of her Flock, and its appeal to her was fading with the appeal of association with the Flock. She was ready to let it dissolve away. But because it was the gift of the rovot, she would not hurry it.

She was hungry, so she hunted. Fortunately for her, this region was rich with small prey, because an Adept enchant ment prevented her from leaving it. They were still mulling over her fate; they might kill her, or they might merely maim her, depending on their judgment. If she had any way, she would flee to the other side for sanctuary, but she knew she could not. She was in the same situation as the near-Adept Tania, who it seemed had now helped or tried to help the enemy twice. Had Tania not been the sister of an Adept, and a rather pretty young woman, too, she might have suffered grievously, the first time. Had she not managed to defect, she would certainly have suffered the second time. Phoebe knew the cause of her problem; it was common gossip in the Flock. She had been so foolish as to fall in love with Bane, the son of the Adept Stile. They were working on the same side, so she had not been able to use her Eye on him and bend him to her cruel will; instead he had bent her to his kind will, and thereby destroyed her nature. Even as Phoebe’s nature had been destroyed. Ah, the corruption wrought by exposure to decency!

She flew low through the forest, and spied a foolish fat rat gnawing on a gourd by day. She gave a rat-terrorizing screech and pounced. The rat jumped away, but she snatched it in mid-leap. Harpies were the champions of snatch! The Harpilympics featured the two-claw snatch and the one-claw snatch and the single, double and triple snatches, and the winners were so fast that the motion of their claws could not be seen; the prey went from ground to mouth seemingly of its own volition. She had seen one prize-winning demonstration in which a mouse, rat and rabbit had been snatched, with the first finishing in the mouth of the second, and the second in the mouth of the third, and the third in the mouth of the harpy, all seemingly in a single blurred motion. Triple snatch galore!

There was a rumble behind her. She flew up, startled, and turned in air to look back, the rat still struggling in her claws. A cleft opened in the ground, and from it rose a fat man in a purple robe. “Purple Adept!” she screeched, astonished and hardly pleased. “Hast come to dispatch me at last, thou bulging sausage?”

The ground closed, leaving him standing, unperturbed.

“Merely to make thee choose, bird brain,” he said equably. “An I had a choice, would I choose to snatch thine eyeballs from thy foul face, and thy tongue too, and wrap them that they squirt not too much when I chomp them,” she screeched.

“An thou not be quiet, hen, willst thou hear not mine oner.”

“This for thine offer, offal!” she screeched, letting go the very foulest of droppings. “An thou meanest not to torture me to death, get thy presence gone from here ere I suffocate from the mere smell o* thee!”

“The offer be this: resume the leadership o’ thy Flock, or be afflicted with the return of thy tailfeather itch, ten times as bad as before.”

He had certainly pinpointed the opposite extremes of her preference! But she knew better than to trust this. “Where be the catch, flatus?”

“There be a task for thy Flock to perform.”

“Harpies perform tasks not!” she screeched. “We be dirty birds o’ prey, not beasts o’ burden!”

“This be a mock combat situation,” he explained. “Thou must engage in a siege ‘gainst a vampire Flock, the one to capture the flag o’ the other and lose not its own.”

“Mock?” she screeched, still looking for the catch she knew was there. “The only one I wish to mock is thee, thou miserable excuse for feculence!”

“Teeth and claws be nulled; their action seems real, but the victim suffers mere loss o’ function, not o’ limb or life, and after the siege be done, all victims recover without fur ther effect.”

“What kind o’ combat be that?” she screeched. “Action without the splatter o’ blood be no action at all!”