by Sean Platt
“Back up, marshal.”
Clint paused. His face registered offense, as if he’d been socially rebuked.
“You’re riding with the Devil,” he said. “If you weren’t, you’d realize how futile this is. You’re under the influence of dark magic. Five men, Stone? You face me with five men? Have you forgotten our last encounter, and your yeller embarrassment at the end? Did you really think you could shoot me before I shot you twice?”
The barrel of Stone’s gun began to shake visibly, almost violently, as if the iron were suddenly too heavy. “Your unicorn can’t help you,” he said. “Kold’s horn carrier is preventing it.”
“I don’t need a unicorn to draw on you,” said Clint.
“Don’t you?” Stone growled. “This time I’ve got magic on my side.”
“This showdown,” said Clint. “It’s not a showdown. It’s amusement. I know Kold better than you ever could. He’s watching — through magic if not with his eyes — waiting to see how this will end. But he doesn’t care which direction it takes. You were his distraction. And I’m sad to say it worked, that I got distracted.”
“Step back.”
“I know how this ends, Stone. As long as it’s me versus you, I win. Put down your gun. I’d rather the afternoon not end with you killt. Not when you have information I want.”
“You’ve some nerve, gunslinger,” said Stone.
Clint watched, waiting for a crack in Stone’s concentration.
Stone’s eyes flicked behind Clint, probably to his pile of fallen men. It was enough. Clint drew both guns and fired twin clouds of dull red gunsmoke. The bullet from the right gun split the cylinder of Stone’s pistol, causing it to spin from his hand and spilling two of its bullets into the dirt. Clint’s second slug caught Stone in the right shoulder. The impact spun him like a top, giving Clint enough time to lower his head and launch himself in a sprint toward Stone. He landed his shoulder in the small of the outlaw’s back and drove him into the blacksmith’s hitching post.
Clint had already reholstered his guns and drawn his handcuffs. In a single fluid motion, he seized Stone’s wrists and shackled them, criss-crossed, around the hitching post. The criss-cross position pulled him so close to the post that his chin pressed against it.
A clap came from above, from the upper window of the Otel. Then another, and another. Clint looked up and saw the face of his old friend, and newest foe.
Dharma Kold had changed in some way. Maybe many ways. “I’m slow-clapping in sarcastic appreciation of your victory over the bandit,” he said.
Clint took several steps backward for a better view of Kold. Edward walked up and stood beside him.
“He’s changed,” Clint whispered.
“He’s gone dark,” Edward said. “Wait until you see Cerberus, wherever he is. It will be far worse on the donor’s end.”
“I can hear you,” Kold called from the window.
“He’s also gotten much uglier,” Clint whispered.
Kold leaned against the window sill, making himself comfortable.
“This is the place where I’m supposed to tell you my plans and backstory, yar?” Kold sneered. He took a bite of something — a giant piece of turkey pie. Kold had liked turkey pie from the start; he’d even ordered it back in The Realm where choices were plenty. “And now, I’m supposed to come down, and we’ll fight. I’ll show you my new tricks — the ones my mount taught me. Your boy there counters. We fire rounds.” Kold faked a yawn.
Clint said, “I don’t have much choice.”
“Oh, of course you do. I’m sure this isn’t a surprise.”
Kold reached to the side of the window and pulled something into view, showing Clint a fistful of dark brown hair, which was attached to Mai.
“She’s lovely, Marshal,” Kold said.
“Go,” Clint barked. “Take what you came for and go. If I challenge you, it could kill us both. Let her go and you’ll have my pardon. I’ll let you leave town, and I won’t pursue you with whatever spoils you choose to take.”
Kold was stroking Mai’s hair. She stood still, giving no resistance.
Kold laughed. “Listen to you! It has been forever. Our relative positions have changed more than you apparently realize. I’m not here to bargain with you, Gulliver. I’m here to tell you what I’m going to do, and what you’ll have to watch.”
“Take what you came for and let her go,” Clint repeated, his voice losing both volume and strength. He watched Mai as she stood in the window with her vacant eyes, staring helplessly up at Kold.
Then a terrible truth dawned on the gunslinger: There’s nothing I can do.
“Well, see, that’s the problem.” Kold barked another horrid laugh. “Your lady here is what I came for.”
At that moment, a shadow spilled from the Otel’s lobby and poured into the street like black tar. Cerberus was more like a hole in the fabric of reality than a unicorn. His eyes were now a bright, iridescent yellow.
That yellow stare was the last thing Clint saw before the dark unicorn charged.
CHAPTER ELEVEN:
EPIC UNICORN FIGHT
The minute Edward saw Cerberus, his eyes started to flash, and what could only be described as a snarl swallowed his expression. It was beyond profane for a unicorn to surrender its magic to a human. It was an act of deep violation, like giving away a soul. What remained was more shadow than a living being, empty of all it once was.
Edward didn’t just see Cerberus as a foe. He saw him as an insult to everything that he himself stood for.
Edward reared, standing on his hind legs. Clint felt the unicorn’s rage, boiling beneath his skin as if it were his own. Edward wanted to destroy the dark unicorn for the perversion he represented. He wanted to punish Cerberus for the dark mark he’d put across their kind.
Edward was stronger, too, because he hadn’t surrendered any of his own magic.
A blast of bright white light erupted from Edward’s horn and struck Cerberus square in the chest. The impact launched him backward, into the Otel lobby.
Something flew from Cerberus as he hurtled backward. Clint stared open-mouthed as dark tentacles slithered around the white beam. Then the energies collided, crashing with an explosion that cut through the Otel’s lobby like a knife.
The blast battered the Otel’s walls and supports, turning it from a sound structure into a mashed stack of broken mud bricks. The top floor slid to one side and then collapsed, crumbling onto the lobby floor below.
Kold’s face registered a satisfying look of genuine surprise, but then as the walls collapsed, both he and Mai were surrounded by a giant filthy bubble. The Otel’s roof fell onto them, past them, into the lobby level. The walls blew out. When the dust disappeared into the late afternoon air, the entire structure was nothing more than a ramshackle pile of boards.
The dirty bubble rose from the debris, hovering above the street. It floated to the side opposite where Stone was still shackled, with the shadows of Kold and Mai barely visible inside. Then it settled onto the dirt, and the bubble popped.
Kold grabbed Mai by the arm, pulling her roughly around the corner.
Clint started to follow, but the Otel’s rubble blew upward in a fountain as a pillar of black fire emerged, with Cerberus at its base. The dark unicorn marched forward, its yellow eyes wild. Edward was already galloping toward him. The white unicorn drove his entire weight, sidelong, into Cerberus’s obsidian side, knocking the dark unicorn’s body into the rubble.
Another flash of bright light surrounded them, and a hole appeared around the two entangled unicorns.
An explosion of snowy white blew the Otel’s remains spinning toward Clint. The gunslinger fell to the dirt as a fragment of what he thought might have once been a sink whistled over his head. The flash was blinding. Once in the dirt, he looked at his hands to see if he could still see them. What he saw was something like a photo negative, or an X-ray.
It’s white magic, not just light, he thought. Your sigh
t will return.
For now, though, everything was backward.
Black was white.
White was black.
The unicorns had emerged and were dueling before the marshal, wrestling in a melee of legs and hocks and hooves and horns. Small spells strobed around them, meant for close quarters. Clint chewed through his panic, realizing how completely and totally Kold’s black unicorn was dominating his white one. Then he realized that the black unicorn, in his backwards-sight, was Edward. And then it made sense. Cerberus would have some dark tricks, but most of his magic was no longer with him because it had been surrendered to…
Clint looked around at what appeared to be a pitch black street.
Where was Kold?
Clint couldn’t get his bearings, and wouldn’t be able to shoot straight even if he trusted himself to aim his guns against Kold’s magic. Still, he had to try. Kold couldn’t get far.
He stumbled toward where Kold had disappeared with the spellbound Mai, but he’d not seen Edward stampeding toward him. He looked to his side and saw that Cerberus stood nearby. With his vision slowly returning, his world was sepia and grayscale.
The unicorns had taken wounds, but both instantly healed. They were painted in multicolored blood. Clint, who saw the many colors in different shades of gray, had a moment to note that even dark unicorns bled in vibrant colors.
Edward charged again, but this time Cerberus didn’t counter in time. Cerberus was off balance and reeling when Edward lowered his horn and drove it into the dark unicorn’s side.
Clint flinched back as the huge dark form of Cerberus flew in front of him, across his field of quickly improving vision, and then blew out the barber shop’s side wall.
The wall dripped debris as Cerberus stood and shook himself free of dust. A giant blue flash lit his side where Edward’s horn had struck him, and then he was whole again.
Edward’s horn was now a wet map of colors. He had stopped where he’d struck Cerberus, his nostrils flaring as his chest expanded and fell. Cerberus stared back.
“Okay, enough,” came a voice.
Now that the barber shop was missing a wall, Clint could see Kold and Mai taking refuge in the small alley behind the Otel. The shock was gone from the dark marshal’s face, leaving behind a strange brew of amusement and boredom.
“You horses can stop beating your chests,” Kold said. Edward’s head jerked at the insult. “No matter who wins, I’m holding the ace.” He waved his hand dramatically in front of Mai, as if presenting a prize.
Kold slapped his leg twice. In the barber shop’s rubble, in front of Frank, the barber (who was cowering behind a chair in the corner) Cerberus shook his massive black head and walked over so Kold could mount him and magick the compliant Mai onto the unicorn’s back. Mai wrapped her arms tightly around Kold’s chest.
Thirty feet away, his hooves wearing a carpet of sawdust and cinders, Edward snorted at Cerberus’s servility.
Kold turned to Clint and gave a satirical salute, then slapped Cerberus’s neck. The dark unicorn reared and leapt forward, but never landed. Instead, his black coat became a smudge that wound in a gently curving trail, like smeared ink, toward the horizon. And then they were gone.
Edward shook himself off and trotted toward Clint, his horn glowing, as the gunslinger’s vision returned to normal.
“Sorry about that,” said Edward.
Clint had his eyes bolted to the horizon. The dark stain had vanished. “Can we follow?”
“No. I can fold for reasonable distances, and even then it’s hard. But what Cerberus just did wasn’t a fold. That, my friend, was a prance. Something most humans will never see.”
Clint felt like he’d been beaten into a pile of submission.
“You can’t do that?” he asked. But it wasn’t a desperate question. It was an apathetic question that he felt he should ask. Despite Clint’s anguish and love for Mai, he barely had enough energy left to care.
“I could, in the same way you could trade an arm for a slice of turkey pie.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Any of us can do it, but only dark unicorns ever do. Think of the worst things humans sometimes do, but that the sane among you never would. It’s like that.”
Clint nodded and sighed, his spirit wearing a thousand pounds of defeat.
He walked to the other side of what used to be the Otel, to where Stone was handcuffed to the blacksmith’s hitching post. Stone looked up into his eyes.
“Where did they go?” Clint said.
“To drink cactus juice with your grappy, gunslinger.” Stone spat on the marshal’s boot. The glob of saliva made a clean circle in the dust covering the weathered cowhide.
Clint raised his foot and kicked Stone hard in the ribs. The blow emptied the breath from the bandit’s lungs, leaving him gasping for air.
“Where did they go?” Clint repeated.
Stone coughed, and kept coughing until the gunslinger thought he might spit his lung in the dirt.
Edward walked over and stood beside Clint, looming over Stone. Clint’s boot made another visit before Edward said, “Let me try” and raised a hoof to hover over Stone’s chest.
“Fine,” coughed Stone. “I’ll tell you. It won’t matter, anyhow. Won’t help you none to find them.”
“Where?” Edward said, lowering the hoof so it brushed against Stone’s filthy shirt.
Stone coughed again. “He’s taking her to The Realm.”
Clint’s chin rose. He turned and looked into the distance, to where the black smear had vanished. Just because Stone headed for the hills didn’t mean that was where Clint should go to meet them. There was a reason no one could find The Realm, since the Leaking had started. Lines were no longer straight, and forward was too often backward.
“That’s not possible,” said Clint.
“It is what it is,” said Stone.
With the melee finished, the citizens of Solace surfaced from hiding and drifted out into the street. They looked to the Otel ruins, then over to the dead men lining the street. Clint saw George Telford, Nicholas Willings, and Hattie McDonnough. He saw Earl Lancaster, who just ran a tack shop. He saw Bill Maynard, who didn’t want to stir up trouble with Hassle Stone where there was none otherwise.
Edward’s nose poked at Clint’s shoulder, urging him into motion.
Clint set his hand across Edward’s back, then stopped before kicking up onto his mount. He turned his gaze to the town and its people, all of whom were staring at the gunslinger who had saved them. Again.
He took the keys for Stone’s handcuffs from his belt, used the same hand to unpin the marshal’s star on his chest, and dropped both into the dirt.
Without another glance or comment, Clint climbed onto Edward’s back.
The gunslinger touched his guns. They felt right at his sides.
Edward’s horn glowed. Space folded.
Then the gunslinger — and his unicorn — left Solace forever.
UNICORN
WESTERN 2
CHAPTER ONE:
THE PURSUIT
The gunslinger and the unicorn crossed the Sands, with nothing in front and nothing behind.
After two long years of wandering the great wide open, exposed to the biting wind and angry dust that swirled through the Sprawl as though it owned it, the marshal’s skin was like leather, as if he’d been tied, beaten, tanned, and then beaten again. His hands were large and scarred, with long digits that curled like a skeleton’s. As big as his hands were, they were still the fastest part of him — and with Clint Gulliver, as with any other marshal of The Realm, his slowest part was faster than the fastest part of most any other man.
The gunslinger stared out at the world through the piercing blue eyes of a predator, under drawn, V-shaped brows that arched above a cruel nose. His eyes were shaded from the sun by a battered brown hat that looked a hundred years old — faded, torn, and pierced in several places as if by bullets. A scowl creased his face like a c
ut.
The unicorn, on the other hand, was as clean as the man was dusty. His coat was a bright white, brilliant enough to be blinding. Where the man looked weathered, the unicorn looked untouched. Where the man looked unkempt, the unicorn looked immaculate. Where the man appeared poisoned with anger, the unicorn looked purer than snow in The Realm.
The unlikely pair plodded through the Sprawl as they had each day for nearly as long as either were willing to remember. Days were never different from one another. They would walk until their legs were willing to carry them no further, and then they would make camp and fall quickly asleep. Sometimes the man would ride atop the unicorn, eyes forward and mouth set, bareback and without reins or any other tack. To keep the man in place, a filthy hand would bury itself in the unicorn’s opulent mane. When the gunslinger pulled his hand away, the mane would fall neatly into place, unsullied by tangles, dirt, grit, or grease. Other times, the man would walk beside the unicorn, since even a gunslinger’s legs required the occasional stretching.
Sometimes they spoke, but mostly they didn’t. In the two years spent trudging from one empty spread to the next and never nearing their destination (finding The Realm was like finding a splinter in the Sands) anything that needed saying had been said at least twice.
When there was talking to be done, Edward usually started it.
“Something’s wrong,” the unicorn said, pausing in a cactus-pocked spot of desert behind a small rise, just as the sun was starting to set. The sun was dumping a bucket of bright tangerine all over the dusty desert — a sure sign, once upon a time, that they were walking west. But the days when a compass could be trusted were gone. Thanks to the shifting of the ground that occurred out this far, moving straight ahead could lead a man backward, and the sun might rise in any of the world’s four corners.
Clint’s hand twittered at his side, instinctively moving toward the stock of the seven-shooter on his right hip.
Edward said, “Not that sort of wrong.”
“Wrong is if we don’t make camp soon,” the gunslinger said, letting his hand hang limp at his side. “I’m tired and hungry. I need a bed and a slice of turkey pie.”