“Excellent, my dear Kisia. You’ve done well,” he said, stroking the horns and wondering if it was true what the legends said of such horns having aphrodisiac properties.
“I don’t need you to tell me that. Uncle,” Kisia seethed. “I need you to help me find out why there are two and which one belongs to that girl who is responsible for the deaths of my parents and the theft of my property.”
“You are impetuous, little one,” he said, laying the horns aside in order to rise from the soothing bath of rose-colored gelatinous mud from the fragrant swamps of the Haidian rain forests. Having dismissed his valet at Kisla’s insistence, the count was forced to wrap himself in his massage robe of the deepest purple plush. He then made himself comfortable on the bed-like couch that bracketed the gel pool. “While it is certainly possible that one of these may belong to Acoma, I believe word of her death would have reached us, and it has not. However, these horns might -well belong to one of the others other kind.”
“What others?” Kisia demanded.
“Why, the other unicorn people who came to fetch the girl a few months ago.”
“I knew nothing of this,” Kisia said.
“My dear, you were still distracted with grief. That and the legal affairs your late lamented father left concerning your legacy. I did not feel it was a proper time to trouble you with the news then. Oh, yes. Four others, I believe. It seems Acoma was not a goddess, as the little child laborers believed, but simply an alien creature who, being as highly evolved as they are all generally supposed to be, took it upon herself to correct what she considered our less fortunate social behaviors and economic practices.”
“These horns could belong to them then, to those other unicorn aliens who came to get her?” Kisia asked. She could see a plan dawning in Uncle Edacki’s eyes.
“Oh, yes. Or any others of her race, though they were unknown to our species before your little friend arrived.”
“She’s no friend of mine.” Kisia spat.
“No, of course not. I was being facetious. The junk man will have to be questioned, of course. If there are two of these, there may be more, and he must tell us where he obtained them.”
“I’ll take care of him,” Kisia said.
“Yes, my dear. But be careful. We don’t want him to die before we’ve learned all that we need to. In the meantime, I think we really must sacrifice one of these to determine its properties and composition. I have heard miraculous things about Acorna. That her horn could heal and purify and even no, now I’m confusing rumor with ancient legend.”
Kisia had seated herself on the edge of the couch beside his head and now she leaned over him and spoke into his ear. “Don’t misunderstand us, Uncle. If there is a profit to be made from these, we want it, Daddy and me. But most of all we want that girl, and all of her family, and all of her friends dead, the same way she killed my family and chased away all of my friends.”
The count smiled up at his ward. The truth was, Kisia had never had any friends at all, but it would do no good to mention that. Nor to point out that she had, in the same breath, referred to the late Baron Manjari, her adopted father, as if he was still alive, and yet also admitted that her whole family was dead.
Count Edacki patted Kisla’s hand. “Have no fear, child. I think that if these horns prove as useful as they are said to be, Acorna and her kind will soon become hunted throughout the galaxy as any other creature with a builtin treasure would be hunted. There are already those who seek them. But with these”-he tapped one of the horns-“and the use of a bit of research and a few contacts used -wisely, I believe -we may contrive to be the first to find them.”
Once the skinny girl disappeared, and her henchmen had loaded Becker’s container with the goods she’d bought and left, RK crept out from under the table where he’d hidden, jumped up on its surface, and scattered the stones there as he made himself comfortable among them.