by Sean Platt
“Keep needing, then,” said Edward. “We have jerky wraps and delicious water. The engraved canteen that’s in your pack, however, is filled with apple brew, and for that, I’ll thank Providence.”
“Unicorns don’t believe in Providence.”
“Of course we do,” the unicorn said. “Providence provides brew. It’s the rest of your stupidity we don’t believe in. Time. Space. How you think that hat looks good on you.”
Clint swung his left leg over Edward’s back and slid to the sand. A plume of dust spit up from the ground and re-coated the clean areas that the friction of Edward’s sides had made on the insteps of his boots. That was another thing about the accursed Edge – the sand here wasn’t quite sand at all.
The gunslinger tugged on his hat. “What’s the trouble you mention?”
“A pain. I feel it in my chest.”
Clint spit. “Too much brew.”
“No. It’s something else, something obscene. I can feel it as we walk — or rather as I walk, with a lazy load on my back. It’s as if there’s a wall in front of us. With every step it feels like I’m driving myself further against some sort of perversion, like I’m slowly walking into a long and rusty spike.”
Clint shook his head.
“I know what you think,” said Edward. “But before you mock me, think on what I’ve not yet said: we may finally be closing in.”
Clint’s icy eyes opened wider as the sun-wrinkled flesh surrounding the whites pulled back. “Mai?”
“Cerberus.”
“Dharma Kold’s unicorn of a different color,” Clint rasped, nodding. He kept his eyes open so he wouldn’t see the obsidian black mount riding across his mind. If Cerberus was near, so was Kold. And where the dark rider went, so did Mai… always assuming, of course, that the gunslinger’s almost-bride was still alive.
“She’s alive,” said Edward, reading Clint’s mind.
“You can sense her?”
“No. But Kold lost a posse and risked your wrath by storming through Solace two years ago trying to abduct her. He wouldn’t do that without reason, and he wouldn’t do it just to kill her or let her die. By Providence, Mai lives.”
Clint’s face formed a scowl. “Why did they take her, Edward? And where — for real, pleasem and thankoo — are they going with her?”
It was the oldest of their many unanswered questions. Supposedly Kold was heading for The Realm, but that was a ridiculous notion since no one knew where The Realm was — and even if a person did know where it was, he’d never find it. Clint understood Kold’s quixotic pursuit, because he once nursed the same diseased longing himself. He fought it still, like a rash forever returning in his mind.
“Dagnit, I don’t know!” Edward said. “I’m not going to know, either, and if you ask again, I’ll run you through with my horn.”
“Sweet relief,” the gunslinger said.
“And then when I arrive at the next town wearing your corpse like a hat, I will eat all the turkey pie myself.”
“Stand down, then, if pie is at stake,” said Clint. “I won’t ask again.” It was the marshal’s version of a joke, but he delivered it with all the humor of an obituary.
After a moment of standing (and sinking slightly) in the sand, Clint said, “If you sense Kold, then we should ride.”
“No. They are in the same direction as the perversion I feel in my chest.” The unicorn bowed his head, pointing his horn at the horizon. The horn glowed a dull yellow, tinged with pink. “There,” he said.
Clint squinted into the distance and saw a crooked spark of red and yellow just below the horizon, barely visible now that the sun was almost set. In the deepest Sands, over by the Edge, sunrises were as abrupt as the sunsets. Whether that was due to the Leaking, the off motion of the planets, or the way time dilated and contracted out where the sand was slippery, none could say.
“We should continue on,” said Clint. “If they’ve stopped, we should close the gap.”
But it was a shell game — something Clint seemed to forget each time he saw Cerberus’ dark smear smudging the horizon or the faded glint of Kold’s fire. Every few days, they’d reach sighting distance of the outlaws, and each time, Clint insisted they push forward. But they were tailing a mirage, and as they marched closer, Kold would always vanish — and when they arrived at the spot of Kold’s camp, the dust would always have swallowed their tracks, turning their presence there to a mere rumor.
“No,” Edward said. “I don’t know what I’m feeling in the Sands, but I don’t like it.”
Clint shook his head and snarled. “I’ll go on. You stay here and do your nails. All four of them.”
Clint took a dozen steps toward the distant fire before Edward called out to him.
“We’ll never reach them, you know,” he yelled. “I’d think two years of getting the rug yanked from under your feet would have taught you that. You’re like that bald child in the ancient funnybooks, forever kicking at an oblong that’s always pulled away.”
Clint turned, struggling with something before turning toward Edward. “What would you have me do?”
“Anything else,” Edward said.
“So why do you walk beside me, if you think this is a fool’s errand?”
“Walk beside you? I carry your lazy bones on my back, gunslinger,” Edward said. “But to answer your question, I do it because you always lead me to pie and apple brew.”
Clint stared at Edward’s white head and pearlescent horn for an especially long beat, trying to think of a suitable reply, until his shoulders finally sagged and he walked back.
“We’ll make camp, then,” he said, sitting and gesturing at the sand. “Magick us a fire. I’m cold. Not all of us are filled with magic and warm fuzzies.”
Edward made a mocking, horselike sound.
“You really are tired. You know we can’t make a fire. He’ll see it.”
“Behind the rise?”
“He’ll see the smoke,” said Edward. “There’s a moon.”
Clint sighed. He was a hard man, but he felt a thousand years old. He could take defeat, and he thought that when the time came, he could accept his own killing. What he couldn’t accept was the constant torment of pursuing something that couldn’t be caught.
“Tomorrow, we’ll approach,” said Clint. “Tomorrow, we’ll see her.”
Edward said nothing. Then, just when Clint thought he wouldn’t reply, the unicorn said, “I need to understand the perversion I feel before I can go to where they are. I don’t know what it is yet, but I can’t walk into it. You need to understand and accept that. We may have to loop around, meet them further on. They may be crossing a place of dark magic. Such places are common out here. The Ghryst worship at them.”
Time passed. How much, neither could say. Timepieces didn’t work so close to the Edge because of the Leaking and Slippage. They only knew that the sun was down and the air was icy. Kold’s fire still sparked, taunting them with kisses blown from the horizon.
Clint pulled his warm coat lower around his shoulders, and then both of them, once Edward laid down, squeezed beneath the giant turkey-feather blanket they’d bought from a crooked trader and his roaming donkey mercantile several months before. That was back when the weather had started changing for the worse, for the third season in a row.
“I think I may know what’s ahead,” said Edward suddenly.
Clint was behind Edward’s head, on the far side of his sharp horn. Spooning behind a unicorn was a tad strange, but it was far better than spooning on the side that was all sharp and kicky. On that side, kicks sometimes happened by accident, when Edward dreamed, and sometimes happened on purpose, because Edward was being Edward.
“You mean the feeling in your chest?” said Clint. “Let me guess. Is it cowardice?”
Edward bucked his head back, then rolled onto his side to stand. In the process he smacked Clint hard on the jaw, probably not on accident.
“Indigestion?” Clint tried again.
“You know how I said it was a perversion?”
“Like bad brew. Like ballet at game of oblong. Like a fart in church.”
Edward nudged Clint with his nose — the equivalent of a slap or a splash of cold water. Magic this far out was slippery, and he wasn’t sure whether Clint was merely joking or losing his grip. More than one man had been confused by the slippery magic and had been driven mad.
“I see the problem,” Edward said, dead serious. “I know the feeling in my chest. I know why I thought it obscene.”
“Dark magic?” said Clint.
“Worse.”
“We’ll go around, then, like you suggested,” Clint said.
“Go around the bad spot, you mean, and meet them on the other side?”
“Yar. Like eating around an apple’s sore.”
Edward shook his big white head. “We haven’t been this close before, and the proximity has let me see something new,” he said. “This is the nearest we’ve come after two long years.”
“Yar. And that’s why we need to take what they give us, and overtake them while they sleep… once they’re clear of the sore.”
“No,” said Edward. “It’s why we can’t overtake them. Why we can’t get clear of the sore.”
Clint said, “I don’t follow.”
Edward nodded toward the rise, toward Kold’s fire and beyond. His horn sparked, as if underlining his speech. “They are the sore,” he said.
“I don’t follow,” Clint repeated, although he was starting to believe that he actually did.
“It’s Cerberus,” Edward said. “He’s dipped his horn deep inside of Mai’s soul.”
CHAPTER TWO:
CHEST PAINS
Clint waited for Edward to explain, but the unicorn said no more. He waited, staring at the horizon, his head barely high enough to see above the swell they’d sheltered behind.
“Go on,” said Clint.
“No.” Edward shook his head, still staring into the distance.
Clint shoved the unicorn with both hands, not wanting to play the game of Sullen Edward or draw the story out any longer than needed. The unicorn was a good friend (as far as Sands friends went), but Edward carried an infuriating pride. He had to be drawn out, like a courting, before he’d give up what he had to say.
“Explain,” said Clint.
“No.”
It had been an endless trip through the Sands, and Clint had held himself together reasonably well, but time and futility had worn him to crust. His nerves were thinner than Sands magic, and now Edward was telling him they were close to what they’d been searching for but could inch no closer because something hideous was being done to the woman he’d nearly hitched.
Clint reared back and punched the unicorn hard in the cheek. Edward’s head snapped sideways, seemingly unsurprised. Clint’s hand smarted, but he wouldn’t satisfy Edward with a wince. After years together and countless punches, the gunslinger refused to learn one of his most consistent lessons: unicorns had no soft spots on their bodies.
“No,” Edward repeated.
Clint punched him again, this time in the nose. Edward blanched. Then, grinding his giant teeth, he turned to look at the gunslinger. Clint thought for a second that Edward might magick him, or try to gore him with his horn. Instead he said, “Fine. Have your tantrum. I’ll tell you.”
Clint felt his sore hand unclench. It would require ointment in the morrow, but for now, although his hand hurt, it was a fair trade for his settling temper.
Edward shifted his weight, cocking a rear hoof onto its tip for rest.
“You know how I’ve told you I can’t read minds, even though I can sense where people are and get a feel for their mood, even from a distance?”
“Yar,” said Clint, sitting on a rock that was jutting from the Sand like a giant gnarled tooth.
“Well, it’s not entirely true. I can read minds. Every unicorn can.”
“So why have you lied, when knowledge from the heads of our enemies might have helped us? Think on Solace, Edward. Why wouldn’t you read the minds of the bandits at the Stew Hole, and save us from being out of at High Rock with our pants at our ankles as if we were sitting in a tall closet as Kold and Stone stormed into town, laughing?”
“For the same reason you don’t break into a person’s house and rummage through their underwear while they’re away,” said Edward. “For the same reason you don’t waylay every woman you fancy, or kill a child when he kicks you in the shin, no matter how much it hurts.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t,” the unicorn said. “You’re human. You’ve never dug your horn — sorry, your fingers — in another’s mind and stumbled on something they’ve meant to keep hidden. You’ve never plundered the depths of a soul, which falls about a thousand lengths lower than that.”
“You’re saying it’s taboo.”
Edward nodded. “Beyond taboo. Like desecrating a shrine is taboo, or worse. It’s like you’re inside another, soiling their very identity. Everything they are, you pollute with your hoofprints. The thought of such an egregious trespass is so abhorrent to a balanced unicorn like myself that it causes physical pain. That’s what I’ve been feeling. I won’t probe another’s soul without permission just to get information. You can’t understand that. Humans have a very limited understanding of magic. You only see the practical sides of coins — what you need, versus how quickly you can get it, and sands to the cost.”
Clint opened his mouth to protest, but Edward spoke over the gunslinger.
“Oh, don’t even start,” he snorted. “I’m not criticizing you. It’s not your fault you’re human and can’t see how we’re all connected. But whether you see it or not, that’s how it is. All souls touch, in one way or another. There’s a force stitching existence. Pulling at the strings of that force is how we do what we do. Those magic strings harmonize with life’s energy, and that of all conscious souls. Doing magic of any sort is the same as killing, which we all have the power to do, and creating, over which we all have limited dominion.”
Clint stared at the unicorn, knowing he couldn’t say anything. That was the way it always was, once Edward got to speechifying.
“Every moment I ride with you, I brush against strings that, were I to pull them, would allow me to see you better than you’ve ever seen yourself. I could answer questions you’d once known but had long forgotten with no more effort than it takes to kick a rock. When you infuriate me as you do, I could know easily whether you’re lying. But I don’t, and I never will. Like every unicorn, I shrink from those strings because they’re poison to the touch. We flinch from things that ought not be done far more than we act on those things that need doing. Every unicorn lives around others in constant fear of pulling one of those strings, either by accident or during a weak moment, overwhelmed by curiosity. I’ve heard of unicorns doing the unthinkable, but can count that number on one hand.”
“You don’t have hands.”
Edward kicked the dirt, glancing with visible scorn toward the spark of Kold’s fire. “I’ve hand enough to count to one.”
The night was already darkening. Though Clint hadn’t seen the moon descend, there it was, nearly down.
Slippage.
“Cerberus,” said Clint.
“Cerberus,” Edward agreed. “I didn’t want to believe it. I’d felt the stabbing in my chest long before I said it aloud, keeping silent as long as I dared. Even after I told you, knowing full well what it was, I refused to admit it. Like I was looking at the red sun, trying hard to convince myself it was only a white moon. But I couldn’t. Sun is sun, simple as pie. Cerberus is doing is something I’ve never known any to do, though I shouldn’t be surprised – not when his dark hooves have ridden beneath Kold’s
black long enough to grow forever dark. He dares to prance, as he did when leaving Solace, as though he were no longer a unicorn. Who knows? He might actually be that dog that guards the underworld, disguised in an outward skin I’m ashamed to share.”
Clint sat, his back against a rock as his mind marinated in new information. A wolf howled in the distance. As he often did when pensive, Clint unholstered one of his seven-chamber guns, and idly spun the cylinder.
“Why is he doing… whatever it is that he’s doing?” he finally said.
“Information,” said Edward. “What Cerberus is doing is sticking his horn — by which I mean his magic — into her soul. It isn’t torture, exactly, although it’s that too. It’s more like ransacking. He’s looking for something in her soul’s house, and not caring what he breaks while searching.”
“What is he looking for?” Clint asked, knowing there was more.
“Not looking,” said Edward. “He’s found what he seeks. But he can’t pull the information from Mai like a book from a shelf, to read later at his leisure. Neither the soul nor the mind are so simple. He must read the information live, like listening to a record he can’t touch or control.”
Clint closed his eyes, not letting Edward see. This was the woman he loved, and Edward’s words might as well have been literal: Mai impaled through the heart on Cerberus’s black horn, her limp body hanging bloody from either side of the dark unicorn’s head like damp clothes on a crooked hook. Clint supposed he should feel more anguish or anger, but Edward was articulating a despair that was too desolate for Clint to process. He wanted to surrender.
For the first time in forever, all Clint wanted to do was to lie down and die.
“You’re feeling it too,” said Edward. “For me, it is a literal pain in my chest. For you, it is a bottomless sorrow — a certainty that nothing will ever improve. Stick in the gummy sphere of this perversion for too long, and you’ll start to feel desperate and angry. You’ll hate your fellow man and distrust everyone, no matter the innocence of their intentions or bearing. It will grow increasingly worse until it becomes unbearable, either crushing us or forcing us to walk away.”