by Sean Platt
“You can stay with him,” Edward suggested. “Like Cheesy.”
“I’m not staying.”
Clint and Edward kept walking. Teddy seemed torn, but scampered to catch up as Pinto kept whining behind him.
“It’s going to give us away!” Edward hissed.
Pinto made a bona-fide “hee-haw,” like a donkey, and started pawing the dirt.
“He,” said Teddy. “He is going to give us away.”
“He is about to get magicked into an embolism,” said Edward, his horn already glowing a dull pinkish yellow.
Teddy jumped between Edward and Pinto, as if he anticipated Edward would fire a projectile. “Don’t you dare!” he cried, watching as the pink-yellow glow slowly faded from the unicorn’s horn. Clint waved a hand at Teddy, who looked like he was on the verge of saying something new about gunslingers and unicorns being sort of fruity.
Teddy was too close to Pinto’s mouth. The horse started chewing on his master’s pants.
Clint approached Teddy and put a hand on his shoulder. “Look. We need stealth. I know you want to come with us, but your mount is too unpredictable.”
“He’ll be fine if he stays with us,” Teddy insisted.
Pinto ripped off one of his pockets and chewed loudly.
“Stay here with him,” Clint said. “That’s an order, as your marshal. If you’re my deputy, then it’s your duty to stay here with your mount while we surveil. Yar?”
Teddy looked back into the gunslinger’s eyes with a surprisingly mature intelligence. “Marshal, what happens if while you’re down there, they pick up and decide to ride on to Solace?”
Clint’s head picked up and his mouth fell open. He felt suddenly old. His oversight was rudimentary enough to hurt. The riders would crest the hill, only to find a kid and his broken pony. That might be fine — Teddy could argue he was only out riding and got lost — but even if it was okay, and even if the riders didn’t kill him outright, Teddy’s presence so near their meeting hole would be enough for them to stop and give a good look around. They wouldn’t have to squint to see two more sets of tracks, one equine and another human.
Clint looked back at Edward to see if he’d heard what the kid had said. Edward gave a small nod, indicating that if he wasn’t allowed to give Pinto a fatal embolism, he should be able to cover them as they sneaked down to the stew hole.
“Come on,” Clint said, gesturing. “We’ll show you how a marshal, his deputy, and two mounts can get the drop on five men.”
CHAPTER SEVEN:
THE STEW HOLE
Two minutes later, Clint, Teddy, Edward, and Pinto crested the hill from the side, aiming their ride toward the men in the stew hole. Edward’s horn was at the highest point in their two-rider formation, and glowing. What looked like a shower of sparks blossomed from the horn’s tip, cascading over their procession like an umbrella. The surrounding magic was clear, but made everything appear pinkish yellow, making the Sands shimmer as if seen through a haze of heat, and lightly twinkle as though sprinkled with pixie dust.
“This is the manliest stakeout I’ve ever been on,” Teddy said, staring at the fairy sparkles.
Edward snarled. “I can let you out of the umbrella if you’d like.”
“I mean, it’s cool, but it’s just so…”
“Keep your voice down,” Clint whispered. “They won’t be able to see us, but they can hear us, and we’re still making tracks. That’s why we walked to the side and obscured our prints up top.” Pinto, under Teddy, was perfectly mute now that it seemed the boy wouldn’t leave him.
“How are we going to hear them?”
“By listening.”
“With magic?”
“I’m occupied,” said Edward, nudging his nose around at the sparkly umbra. “Use your ears.”
As they rode closer, communication between the two-man posse drifted to gestures. Pinto was surprisingly quiet, making it easy for the party to get reasonably close.
The five men at the stew hole were dressed in dusty trail shirts, each with a bandana slung around his neck to help filter the endless dust and winds forever whipping through the Sands. They were all unshaven, with skin the color of cowhide. All wore two guns, which was illegal for men who weren’t marshals, and which more or less validated Clint’s suspicions that the men were part of Stone’s posse. He was glad to see the irons were all six-shooters, comforted that the taboo of trading or using magic guns was still respected in the Sprawl.
The men sat on a winding row of rocks set around the shallow pool, dipping long stew rods into the steaming water. The gathering had the feel of friends nursing Fantas in a friendly saloon. They weren’t just pausing for a spell at the stew hole. The bandits seemed to be murdering minutes. They were waiting — taking a load off until some time when they were scheduled to depart.
But what — or whose — schedule were they keeping?
One of the men stood, then pulled a wide package from one of the saddlebags on his horse. Inside the package were five smaller parcels, each roughly the size of a brick. He passed them to the other four. One of the men refused, so he took the fifth for himself and sat down to unwrap it.
“Everyone likes turkey pie,” said the first man. “What’s wrong with you, Roger?”
“Turkey and pumpkin mash?” The man called Roger made a face. “That was a town dish in my grappy’s day. Now you take it, toss it into a saddlebag for days with a chunk of ice, and take the chance it won’t infect you with a poison stomach once you get to gnawing. Nar, a real trail man eats jerky.”
Roger reached into his own horse’s saddlebags and pulled out a wrapped package, longer than it was wide, and peeled back the paper to reveal long, flat sicks of cured meat. Probably ostrich.
“Real man. Is that what you are?” said another of the men, fatter than the others, with a stovepipe hat, missing its top half.
“Yar. Says your mother.”
A man across the group wearing thick round glasses spoke up. “The Leaking might be the best thing for manliness,” he said. “People complain about it, but ponder the notion. The Realm’s soft folks got softer, while the hard in the Sands’ve been getting harder. Even townies’ve been getting tough, and those who didn’t get tough up and died. In my grappy’s day, only the most desperate men rode into the Sands, be they filling their saddles with pie or jerky. Now it’s how we all are. I say cheers and yar!”
The man with the glasses raised an imaginary mug, but nobody returned the salute. The circle’s body language, worn on the group like an old coat, told Clint that the man often spoke of things no one cared about, and was so ignored.
“What time is it?” said the man with the jerky.
“You’ve got the watch,” said a man who hadn’t spoken yet. His face was long, like that of a horse.
“I have a watch, but it’s bound in my saddle. That’s why I’m asking you all.”
“You have the watch,” said the man with the glasses.
“I have the only watch?” The man looked suddenly upset. “What if it breaks? The cogs could get sullied with sand. Happens all the time. We could end up telling time by the sun.”
“Then maybe we’ll be late,” said the man who had carried the turkey pie. He took a large bite, and spoke around the food in his mouth. “Stone isn’t a train, so he ain’t pulling into no station at any o’clock. He’ll be there when we meet him, and we’ll meet him when we find him.”
The others around the circle stopped chewing their pie and jerky, apparently as aghast as the first man to learn there was but one watch in the company, and that they were trusting their timeliness to such an unsteady source.
“You haven’t ridden with him before, Bradford. When Stone says 3pm at the High Rock, he means 3pm at the High Rock. Arrive five minutes after three and get a slug in the gut for your trouble. Never mind the loss to the party. I done seen him do it, too. Yar. You keep an eye on that watch, Roger. If it slips, we ride as fast as we can; we make the High Rock and w
e wait. I don’t care if we’re hours early, so long as we’re not a minute late. What time is it now?”
Roger unwrapped the watch from a swaddle of cheesecloth like he was inside Castle Spires handling The Realm’s most delicate plates. He stared at the watch’s face before replying, probably making sure the watch hadn’t stopped.
“Just after noon,” he finally said.
Several of the other men glanced up at the sun and nodded, deciding that seemed about right.
Bradford studied the heads bobbing around the stew hole, chuckling through his mouthful of turkey pie. A swallow’s worth of mush fell from his mouth as he said, “You’re all that a’feared of Stone? He’s just a man. In a party of six, he’s but one.”
Nobody said anything. They just traded empty glances from one to the other.
“You’ve not ridden with Stone,” Roger repeated, his eyes not on Bradford, but rather the group’s only watch as he swaddled it back in the cloth. Then, as an afterthought, he pulled another rag from his saddlebag and wrapped the bundle again.
“And you haven’t yet seen Kold,” said the last man.
Clint tensed from head to toe. The hairs on his neck started to dance.
“Or seen Kold and Stone together,” the man continued. “It’s like a haunting, I shiv you not.”
“That’s another thing,” said Bradford. “I was hired on a six-way split. Now there’s this other man handing out orders, and if I can add — which I can, up to ten — that’s seven shares.”
“Kold doesn’t want no share,” said the man who’d spoken earlier. “He has his own aims in Solace.”
“Exactly. His own aims. Aims which will conflict with ours, thankoo and pleasem. Say his aims are the General Store. Well, that means the store’s contents are less in the way of spoils for us.”
“That’s not what I meant. Kold wants something else. Nobody knows what, but it’s something specific and nothing in our interest. Says Stone, anyway.”
Bradford snickered. “Why so mysterious?”
The men around the stew hole must not have known, because they shook their heads. Bradford was the only one who seemed to find anything worth laughing about.
Beside Clint, under the umbrella of sparkly pink energy, Teddy was drawing his index finger across his throat, silently asking if they should go ahead and kill the bandits.
Clint shook his head.
Teddy repeated the gesture, pointing to Clint’s guns, then his own.
Clint shook his head again.
Pinto collapsed on his side and closed his eyes, waiting for sleep, or maybe death. Teddy rolled into the dirt rather gracefully when it happened, as if it were a common occurrence.
Teddy stood up. He was acting as if Clint hadn’t understood. He mimed himself holding an invisible gun, then racked off imaginary shots at each of the bandits. His invisible gun was extremely powerful. The recoil after each shot drove his hands high enough to give him an imaginary concussion. As he finished each shot, his cheeks puffed out. Even though he had to be quiet, he couldn’t resist making as much of the “boom” as he could.
Clint took Teddy by the arm, guiding it until the boy had slipped his imaginary gun back into the real holster on top of his real sidearm, then he pointed at his own head and tapped it.
Below them on the ground, Pinto farted.
“What was that?” said the bandit with the glasses.
Teddy made a face at Clint, both an apology and an insistence that it wasn’t his fault. Edward rolled his eyes, the umbrella still flowing out from his glowing horn.
“Phantom fart,” said Roger, his voice full of tumbleweeds and mystery, as though speaking of a legendary beast.
“Don’t tell me you’re worried about ghoulem. They’re just an old wives’ tale!”
“Your problem, Bradford,” said the man who’d mentioned Kold earlier, “is that you’re not worried about anything.”
“You bet,” Bradford said. “One day you women might learn to appreciate the levity that comes from such a free mind as mine.” He laughed.
“A good gunman needs to be at least a little a’feared all the time. Else what reason does he have to aim true?”
“Poetic. That’s beautiful, Owen. Like a handful of sunflowers. Can you sing me a song?”
“You’d better get a little a’feared. You talk that way when we meet with Kold, and you’ll find trouble.”
Bradford said, “He’s just a man.”
Teddy tugged on Clint’s sleeve, making the throat-slitting gesture more urgently.
“Look at this pie,” said one of the men whose name hadn’t been given, holding up the package Bradford had handed him earlier. “It’s moldy.”
“So eat the mold,” said Roger. “It’s good for you.”
“No it’s not,” the man disagreed.
Once discussion drifted to pie and mold rather than bosses, Clint looked down at Teddy, then pointed behind them, indicating that they should regroup. Edward kicked Pinto and the horse rose slowly back to his hooves. They walked, still under Edward’s umbrella, back to their earlier dismount point on the far side of Flat Rock.
CHAPTER EIGHT:
DHARMA KOLD
Safely out of sight, Edward let the umbrella collapse and vented the unicorn version of a sigh. His eyes grew heavy and twitching, as his color subtly shifted from a radiant, almost glowing brilliant white to a more common bright white, almost snowy.
Clint ran a hand down the unicorn’s back, starting between his ears, then repeated the gesture twice more, gently. As he finished, Edward looked at Teddy, then Pinto.
“I should kick your mount to death,” said Edward. “That fart was careless.”
Clint turned to Teddy. “It’s hard for him to cast an umbrella that large for so long,” he explained. “It takes a lot of concentration. Your horse laying down and then…being distracting makes it harder.”
“He’s a horse,” said Teddy, as if that explained everything.
“Then get on your horse,” said Clint.
“What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to High Rock.”
Teddy looked back toward the crest of the hill, his eyes full of confusion.
“Get on your mount,” Clint repeated.
Teddy did. Clint climbed onto Edward’s back and they started off as they’d come. After they’d put some distance, a scatter of sparse trees, and a few hills between the posse and High Rock (and after Edward verified that the bandits were still back at the stew hole) Clint allowed the group to talk.
“You wanted to kill those five men out of hand? Fine. Let’s assume you could work that pistol. And let’s assume we could get all five before they got us — which we could, and by ‘we,’ I mean ‘me.’ And I also means ‘while trying to avoid getting shot by you.’ Let’s also assume it’s okay to break Sands Treaty and spill blood at a stew hole, which it most certainly isn’t and never will be. What do you think Stone and the rest of the big, bad men would have done when their soldiers didn’t show?”
Teddy shrugged.
“Stone is bad. He’s emptied towns without blinking; he subdued Solace for years before we arrived and drove him out. But Stone is only a man. You change this story so it’s Stone and five men coming to town, and we could handle it easily. But there are things we don’t know, and things we do. For one, how could we be sure those five represented all of Stone’s posse?”
“I just assumed…” Teddy began.
“That’s the problem with people in general,” said Edward. “You assume everything. You assume that all creatures are beneath you, and yours for subduing. Do you know why the marshal rides me? Because I allow it. Because I choose to be here. He has not tamed me.”
“Really? Because I always heard that —”
“You assume, you figure, and then you pass your tales from one idiot to another,” said Edward, with more rancor than usual. We are not your pets. Not usually, anyway.”
Teddy’s face scrunched at that la
st part, but Clint continued before he could ask what the unicorn meant.
“Stone could have groups of men coming from all over,” he said. “They could all be meeting at High Rock. It’s a convenient place, accessible from every direction, and sitting just outside of Solace. The way trails across the Sands cut into one another, High Rock’s like the hub of a wheel. If Stone has a dozen groups of five and one don’t show, might they not decide someone was onto them, and adjust their plans?”
Teddy nodded. “I suppose?”
“It’s what I’d do. We predicted Stone would have dozens of men, after all. But I don’t think that’s what’s happening. Now, if I ventured a guess, I’d say it’s just that half-dozen minus one, plus Stone and Kold. You heard them talk about splitting their spoils into six. They’re treating it like a bank job rather than something as tangled up as the taking of a town. There might be more men coming, hired guns not entitled to a share, but the odds are against it. I’d say it’s us versus seven.”
“So you can handle them,” said Teddy.
“It’s long odds.”
“Well, that’d be straight-up truth if you didn’t have a unicorn,” said Teddy. “But you do, so…” He started making shooting motions with both of his hands, nearly falling from his mount as he did.
“Problem is, we’re not looking at seven normal men,” said Clint. “You couldn’t know this, Theodore, but the man they were stewing on — Kold — has gotta be Dharma Kold, who I unfortunately know too much about. His presence is troubling like a drought. You’ve heard of The Realm?”
“Of course. Where everyone wants to go. The city that broke loose in the fracture, and now is nowhere.”
“The things you believe about The Realm are mostly true,” said Clint. “It’s the one place left where there’s still abundant magic, without the need for unicorns to produce it and carry it. They have riches they don’t appreciate, and it turns them a sort of sour they can’t help, or get blame for. I was a marshal in The Realm, a long time missing, as was Dharma Kold. We were banished, and found ourselves on the dusty side of the wall. Once we were driven out a half mile into the Sands and could no longer see the wall, The Realm disappeared, gone to us forever. Even if we’d retraced our steps, we wouldn’t have been able to find it. Looking drove us mad. The Realm works on you, kid, making you forget there’s life outside it. So Kold and I, who once counted each other as friends, were united in anger and hatred. We plotted to return to The Realm. But we went about it different than most.”