by Sean Platt
Clint raised his head, which had fallen between his shoulders. “I thought you couldn’t read minds?”
“I can read you,” said Edward. “Same as you can read me.”
Clint sighed, oppression draping his body like a thousand-pound blanket. He did feel exactly what Edward described — though it was hard to put a long, curled finger on, intermingled as it was with vertigo from the Sands and the simple fatigue that followed a neverending journey.
Clint had never been a cordial fellow, and two years on the Sands had done nothing to improve his demeanor. He’d long ago learned to live with a sadness that had no start or finish, hating most people, and distrusting them from their first breath. It was as if Clint had studied at the feet of the seer-cynic David, renowned across The Realm and the Sands for his far-seeing hatred of mankind.
“Do you know what Cerberus wants? What it is he’s ‘reading’ from Mai, as you say?”
“It’s not what Cerberus wants. It’s what Kold wants.”
“Okay then,” said Clint. “What Kold wants.”
“Yar, I know what it is,” Edward said. “I don’t want to know, but I can’t help it. Once something is ripped from a soul’s center, it pours like blood from a wound, splashing onto anyone nearby with the capacity to receive. Unfortunately, I have the perfect antenna.” The unicorn wiggled his sparkling horn. “It’s another reason I don’t wish to go closer. I can’t control it, or shut it out. It’s like someone’s being gutted, and the guts keep splashing into your lap. I can do nothing to stop them from doing so.”
Clint shook his head, wishing Edward would answer the question rather than going on and on forever as always. The gunslinger didn’t feel like asking any more questions, or dragging information out of the unicorn like a sunken wreck from the bottom of a swamp.
He was too tired, and everything felt far too heavy.
“Then tell me,” said Clint. “Tell me and be on with it, you stupid horse.”
The unicorn didn’t react to being called a horse (and, as a bonus, a stupid one). That said plenty. It was as if Edward were too tired to protest. He probably was. They were both tired — tired through to the core of their bones. The energy of the place was wretched, and just thinking felt like trying to run through sap.
“Mai knows the way to The Realm,” said Edward.
Clint stood. The fog was gone, along with his blanket of fatigue and oppression.
“What?”
“You heard me. She doesn’t know that she knows, but it’s in her blood, and the wind swears it’s true.”
“Where is it?”
Edward looked at the gunslinger without expression.
“The Realm, dagnit! The Realm! Where is it?”
The unicorn shook his neck, making his long, white mane shiver like a halo around him. “What I’m sensing is only an echo of the dark unicorn’s crime. It’s as if I’m looking at the cover of a book. I can read the title of that book, and I can maybe get a feel for what the book might be about. But I’ve no true knowledge of its interior.”
“Then open the book!” Clint hissed.
The unicorn stared into the gunslinger’s eyes for a long while — long enough for Edward’s lack of humanity to reassert itself to Clint. He’d been talking to Edward and more or less only Edward through the rise and fade of two long winters. Doing so made it easy to think of him as human. But now, staring into blue eyes with oval, pill-like pupils, something settled in the gunslinger’s gut. Though Edward and Clint shared much in common, they weren’t at all the same.
“Have you heard anything I’ve said?” Edward asked.
“The perversion. The taboo.” Clint grumbled as though Edward were being unreasonable.
Edward nudged Clint with his nose. “Why are we out here, Clint? What are we chasing?”
The gunslinger said nothing.
“Because I’ve spent two years helping you track the woman Kold took from you, and it sounded to me like you just suggested I harm her further in the interest of…”
“I didn’t mean that,” Clint snapped. But for a moment, that’s exactly what he had meant. Though they’d been searching for Mai two years, he’d been searching for The Realm since his exile.
“They have Mai. They’re going to The Realm. Our intention doesn’t even matter, because either way, we pursue.”
“But let’s say that tomorrow, I find a way to get closer to them instead of continuing to follow from afar. If that happens, should we storm their camp? Should we rescue Mai and thus foil Kold’s journey to The Realm? Should we save her, and therefore allow her knowledge about The Realm’s whereabouts to remain locked within her, where it belongs?”
Clint huffed, trying to convey his indignation at Edward having the gall to ask such a question. Of course they’d go in and rescue Mai if given the chance!
“Can you go closer?” he said, not trusting himself to answer the question.
“No.”
“Then don’t ask stupid questions.”
They were quiet. Heavy implications hung between them. Edward kept watching the gunslinger as he sat on the rock, staring at the shine long lost from his boots.
Finally, in a smaller, humbler voice, Clint answered Edward’s question.
“Mai,” he said. “We’re out here to get Mai, Realm be riddled. If there’s a chance — tomorrow or any day after — to ride in and save her, we take it.”
Edward kept looking at Clint, seeming to mine any truth from his words. “Good,” he finally said.
“So what do we do now?” Clint asked.
“We follow.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
“Until what happens?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will you ever be able to get closer?”
“I don’t know, gunslinger.”
Clint kicked a small litter of rocks with his boot’s toe and sent them in a skitter across the sand, down the rise, leaving snakelike trails behind them. If it wasn’t Kold that had her, Clint could storm their camp and take her alone, with one gun drawn and the other in its holster, even if she were held by a dozen men. But it was Kold, and Kold had once been a Realm marshal, no different from Clint. A Realm marshal whose unicorn had surrendered control of its magic mostly to him — a perversion as horrible as whatever that dark unicorn was doing to Mai right now. And in that case, without Edward’s help, he was facing a stalemate at best.
What Clint didn’t say out loud was that as long as the stalemate persisted, following Kold would lead them toward The Realm — a not-insignificant silver lining.
“What he’s doing to her,” said Clint. “Will it kill her?”
“No,” said Edward. “But it may permanently ruin her mind. You might have to surrender the Mai you knew. She might not be the same person, and even if she is, she might be changed such that a hitching’s impossible. I don’t know. There aren’t enough examples in the past to draw from. This simply does not happen. Ever.”
Clint thought for a moment, then rose to standing with a decision on his face.
“Okay,” he said. “You cannot approach, and I cannot fight him without you. That leaves us with only one option, and that’s follow, as close as we dare. We’ll keep him in our sights. If for an instant his guard goes down — if Cerberus stops what he’s doing — we’ll ride in, and we’ll fight. And if we die, we die.”
“So you’re saying that if you must reach The Realm in order to save her, you’re willing to make that sacrifice,” Edward said dryly.
“You get over your little boo-boo, and I’m ready to ride in and face them now,” Clint countered.
Again, Edward stared into the gunslinger’s eyes. Having a staring contest with a unicorn was nothing like holding one with a human. Since equines couldn’t see straight ahead, Clint always found himself staring at Edward in profile, and often accused him of blinking the eye he couldn’t see.
“Fair enough,” said Edward. “I’ll let you know if
and when I find the will to move in on them.”
They collapsed to the shifting sand without any words, and fell asleep beneath an absent moon.
CHAPTER THREE:
SANDS COOT
A month passed, and with it went sixteen nights and two moons.
It grew warm, then cold again, as if seasons were as hungry to change as the weeks.
In the mornings of the hottest days, there was frost. And on those hottest days, Edward often said it was hot enough to fry an egg on a rock. So, on one particularly trying day, Clint removed one of the turkey eggs he’d bought in a small one-pump town they’d passed about three moons past and cracked it open on a slab of rock where they sat for their midday meal. Edward laughed while Clint, who was indeed trying to be funny, never cracked a smile. The egg cooked in a few minutes, and they ate it, with the weathered gunslinger finally smiling.
That night, it was cold enough to freeze the water in the corner of Clint’s eyes as he slept.
The slippage in the weather, along with slippage in the days and nights and moons, continued to play tricks on their minds. Clint lost track of time, and Edward, still more or less in constant pain from their proximity to Cerberus and Mai, grew increasingly irritable. They fought often, with Edward bemoaning the length of time Mai’s rescue was requiring, especially now that he was hurting so badly. Clint said it had only been a week since Edward had first noticed the pain, and to man up. Edward told him unicorns were anatomically incapable of “manning up,” and then questioned that it had only been a week, because it felt much longer.
Edward had to stop and tune into the movement of the planet to know the true time — the time the world would experience if magic were still stable, rather than leaking and slipping — to see the truth: that they’d been walking for thirty-three days since the night Edward first felt the pain in his chest.
“I can’t abide this for long,” said Clint, peering into a small hand mirror while shaving his face one cold morning.
“You’ve been ugly for forty trips around the yellow star,” Edward said. “You’ll manage to abide it a while longer, I suppose.”
“This problem with time, I mean. The way the days and seasons change as if it were nothing.”
“It’s the Edge,” said Edward. “We’re getting close to where The Realm broke loose. You can’t see it except in the days and temperatures, but I can feel it everywhere. It’s as if the ground were shifting beneath our feet. You’ll either adjust or go mad. Either way it’ll eventually stop bothering you.”
“Either one, huh?”
“Yar.”
“I honestly don’t know which to root for,” Clint said, turning back to the mirror.
Edward often spoke of The Realm, the Leakage, the Great Cataclysm, and the slippage of worlds, and even sprinkled all sorts of conversation — polite and otherwise — with flecks of unicorn history. It seemed almost neurotic, as if Edward were the one who feared losing his mind, and was using incessant speech to hold insanity at bay. He seemed compelled to explain every small feeling to Clint, and said he felt as if he were walking on sponge, then gelatin, then as if he were climbing a cliff despite the fact that his hooves never left the flat plain. Sometimes he spoke of Cerberus’s defiling of Mai — an omnipresent feeling inside him — but said he could draw nothing else about their path from the defiling, outside the fact that they were headed toward The Realm.
“I’ve never felt The Realm so strongly,” Edward whispered with awe. “We truly are close.”
“How close?” Clint asked, trying to suppress his sudden jolt of enthusiasm.
“Mere miles,” Edward answered. “Or many, many centuries at a gallop.”
Clint stopped, grabbed Edward’s head and stared down his nose with a serious expression.
“Edward,” he said, drilling his eyes into the unicorn’s. “Are you okay? Be honest with me, now.”
Edward was under constant intolerable stress, unable to trust even his footing. Clint feared for his safety and sanity both, especially when he said nonsensical things like he’d just said. Clint also feared for his own safety and sanity, since without a unicorn, Clint would never find his way out, face Kold, or save Mai.
“Who said that?” Edward said. “Whoever it is, I’ll bet half my horn and all its ridges he’s as ugly as the Devil in drag.”
Clint turned Edward’s head so that he was looking at only one eye.
“Oh, it’s you, ugly,” said Edward.
“How’s your brain, other than filled with the slop that falls from your rear?”
“Addled. Confused. But I’ll make it. This area is thin, but we’re nearly through it. It can’t be easy on Cerberus either. They’re moving fast, clearly trying to cross it. Once we’re past, much of this mental fog will fade. We may even return to one moon per month.”
“They’re almost through it? But you said The Realm was near.”
“It is. It was. It’s… hard to explain. Space doesn’t always make sense along fault lines, or near The Realm. Something can be close and also far, depending on the path you take to reach it.”
“Which path are we taking?”
Edward said, “The one we can.”
“So it’s close?”
“Yes. But more accurately, I don’t know.”
Clint released Edward’s head, deciding for the moment that Edward’s odd answers were strange because the truth was strange, not because Edward’s mind had come unhinged.
Clint suddenly felt bad as he looked over at the unicorn. Edward was pursuing Mai because Clint wanted her, not because Edward wanted her. Edward’s pain was caused by a favor granted to a friend. And sure, Edward felt that he had a score to settle with Cerberus — if for no other reason than being the obscenity he was — but under different circumstances, Edward would have let him go, and would have let the obscenity pass.
But he hadn’t let it pass. He’d gone on this journey because Clint had wanted it, and now his torture seemed unbearable.
Clint himself felt fine, other than adjusting to the strange days, nights, and changes in weather. Edward assured him that he wouldn’t remain stable if they stayed long. He’d adjust on a surface level, but underneath, the extreme leakage and shifting was working on his mind and soul, same as it worked on everything else.
Clint meant to ask what would happen to a person who stayed for too long in an unstable area, but he soon found out.
A few days later, the night became so frigid and the wind became so fierce that they couldn’t crackle a fire. But Kold had a blaze; Clint could see it whenever he ventured far enough forward to look. Kold had found the one ridge on the entire plain that would shelter his flame. Clint and Edward had no such ridge. But just when it seemed like they might freeze to death, a square section of the sand lifted straight upward, revealing a man beneath it with wild white hair, wound in a corkscrew pointing toward the sky. Even the harsh winds of the Edge couldn’t manage to flatten the tufts.
“Horsey!” said the man, pointing at Edward.
The unicorn was too cold to protest.
The odd man was standing inside a hatchway of some sort under the sand. The square section of rising sand appeared to actually be a steel trap door topped with some sort of carpeting which, when dusted with sand, entirely vanished.
“Greetings,” said Clint. The “T” sound in the word came out twice through his chattering teeth.
“Howdy!” said the man. “I’m Rank. Don’t smell that way, though.” He said the second part like he had said it countless times before.
Clint wondered if his mind had finally cracked, or if he really was seeing a head sticking out from the sand in the freezing night, making conversation as if there were turkey pie and brew between them. He turned to Edward, who read his question and nodded in the affirmative.
Clint asked the man, “Do you live under the sand?”
The man said, “Yar. So where you comin’ from?” He ran a hand through one of his tufts. There was a glow ble
eding up from beneath him. Clint would’ve thought it a lantern, but it seemed too bright, so he decided it was probably a spark generator instead.
Clint ignored him. “I don’t suppose you have more room under there?”
“And a larger entrance?” Edward added.
Rank made an odd jerking motion as a smacking rose above the wind’s holler. Clint could only see his head, but was fairly certain Rank had slapped himself across the knee.
“Lawds! And where are my manners?” he said.
The trap door closed. Within seconds, blowing sand had swallowed the carpet on top.
Five minutes passed.
Finally Edward said, “I liked that guy.”
Clint stood and drew both guns. “I wonder if I can shoot true enough to find that trap door.”
He didn’t have a chance to find out before a great shudder ran through the ground, and a large rectangular section of the sand was rising from the desert floor as if tired of being part of the plain, and planning to escape into space slowly so that nobody would notice. It raised a half inch, then a full inch. It was moving so slowly that Clint had to keep telling himself he wasn’t imagining it.
After the desert rectangle raised two or three inches, Clint saw that the sand on top of it was mostly carpet, just like the top of Rank’s hatch. Below the carpet, Clint saw a narrow band of yellow, maybe a flicker of lamplight, and heard a steady, rapid clanking, like chain dragged across the edge of a steel strongbox.
An inch later, Clint finally grew tired of waiting for the dramatic reveal. He walked over to the slowly growing line of lamplight, stooped low, and peered inside the giant box rising from the sand.
It was a giant liftbox, like the ones which lifted folk to the tops of tall structures in The Realm, except that this liftbox was gigantic — at least three unicorns wide and one deep.
Inside the liftbox was Rank, turing a crank with fury, so quickly it looked like he was in the midst of a fit. The clanking sound brayed from the crank, as a small catch struck a row of small grooves in the wheel beneath it. The spike of hair on Rank’s head bounced with his swaying head.