by Sean Platt
Clint waited. The liftbox opening was three inches high. He waited longer, then longer. At four inches. Edward strolled over and peered into the narrow opening between the box’s top and sand.
“Slow down,” he said. “I don’t have the stomach to ride a lift this fast.”
Rank slowed down.
“I was kidding,” the unicorn said.
Rank stopped cranking entirely so that he could slap his knee again, bellowing laughter and adding to the wind’s whistle.
It took another twenty minutes of steady cranking for the liftbox to rise high enough for Clint and Edward to climb inside. Clint tried to drop in early, figuring Rank could use a break, but the old man yelled at him in panic, screaming at him to stay outside because the box was already incredibly heavy, and he didn’t want to hoist Clint’s bulk as well.
When it was fully risen, Edward and Clint stepped inside the box, and Rank started cranking in the opposite direction. Only this time, gravity made the going easier.
Clint said, “Build this lift yourself?”
“Yar. It weighs as much as the sun. I haven’t used it since that one night. You remember that?”
“No,” said Clint.
“Me too,” said Rank. “Took me weeks to figure out the gear ratio needed to allow me to crank it myself. The answer was: Infinity! The wheel on the other side is the size of the moon. The wheel behind this crank is the size of a fly’s fart.”
Clint said he had no knowledge as to the various sizes of farts. Rank stopped cranking, slapped his knee, and bellowed laughter again. Then he resumed cranking, and as the liftbox descended, Clint asked Rank if he’d seen a dark man on a black unicorn come through this area recently.
“Yar,” he said. “I seen him, but I kept my lids tight. Didn’t like his look, and I could feel his malice through the sand, so I stayed hidden. I have a spyglass, what sees around corners, so I watched him pass. I thought the unicorn would sense me, because the riderless unicorns who come through this place sometimes can, but he didn’t flinch.” He looked at Edward. “Did you sense me?” he asked.
“In retrospect, yar, I did,” said Edward. “But it was more like a smell in the air. A clot of garbage in an otherwise pure stream.”
Clint flinched, but Rank didn’t seem to notice the insult. “Nar, they didn’t know I was here, and for that I was glad,” he continued. “Just kept marching. There was something wrong with ‘em. They looked stunned and weak, like you, like most who come by, because of the way things are here. But there was more to it. It was like they were… not quite there.”
“Like they were in a trance?”
“Like they weren’t quite there,” Rank repeated louder, as if volume was the problem.
Clint looked at Edward, but the unicorn shrugged, not knowing what that might mean any more than the humans.
“They riding with a woman?” Clint asked, his heart hurting for Mai.
“Yar. Pretty lady. She looked the worst. Plodded on like the dead, she did. It was as though she was wearing a tether, but she weren’t wearing no tether. She walked like her legs were in chains — didn’t ride high, like her beau — and whenever she fell behind, she jerked forward like she was snapping against a rope. Looked painful, but didn’t register no pain. Like she was bitten by a poison needle.”
Clint turned to Edward again, and this time, he nodded. Clint didn’t need an explanation of the magic involved — which the unicorn would have ordinarily been all too happy to bore him with if Rank weren’t around — to get the gist: Mai was with them as a captive, and freeing her wouldn’t be nearly as simple as cutting cords and shooting cuffs.
CHAPTER FOUR:
KNEE-SLAPPING DOONERS
Once the liftbox settled at the bottom (Clint estimated its round-trip trip took around an hour) Rank stepped out, waved the gunslinger and the unicorn out of the box, and showed them around his home: a natural cave beneath the sand, probably a large air pocket from when the ground had cooled.
The ceiling was low, and Edward kept scraping his horn on the rock above, releasing a torrent of verbal abuse on Rank each time. Clint sat on a natural seat in the rock, accepted a mug steaming from some sort of hot liquid, and raised the mug toward Edward.
“You’ll have to excuse my friend’s lack of gratitude,” he said to Rank. “We’ve been out here for too long a spell, and it plays with my friend’s mind. He’s barely hanging on.”
“The Sands will make you crazy!” said Rank. “I’ve heard tales of people going two kinds of cashew!”
Clint took in the white spike on Rank’s head and his patched overalls with a strap hanging loose. The shirt underneath was on backward — not a small oversight, seeing as it buttoned up the front.
“But the Sands also get into your blood,” Rank went on. “People tell me to move, but I like it here. I ain’t got no home nowhere else, though I could buy one sure as the hot in a dog. But I don’t wanna, since I’m an Edge man. I like to be Realm-adjacent, same way some folks in Realm towers want to be adjacent to nature. I think the Castle puts out signals, and I want to hear ‘em.”
“The Realm is near?”
“Very.”
“Do you know the way?”
“Not exactly, but I know I wouldn’t travel it.”
“Why not?”
“Because the path is so long.”
Clint wanted to dismiss the insanity of Rank’s contradiction, but he remembered that Edward had said the same thing not too long before. The Realm was near. The Realm was far. Somehow it was both.
“What do you mean by signals?” said Clint.
“He’s talking about magic,” said Edward, suddenly beside him.
“Magic?”
Edward nodded. “Where reality is shallow, magic is near to the surface. I can feel it.”
“Does it… heal you? Help you?” He asked because suddenly the unicorn looked refreshed, as if he’d just swallowed his first bite of turkey pie after near starvation. His eyes were clear, too. The fog Clint saw earlier — the thick mist that made Edward’s grasp on reality tenuous at best — was gone.
“That’s not a good thing, the magic being near the surface,” said Edward.
“It doesn’t refresh you?”
“It does, but I’m not talking about ‘good’ or ‘bad’ being in the way it affects me or you. It’s bad because it’s leaking. You’ve got to understand that we’re talking about core magic here, not surface magic. Surface magic was what used to be plentiful. It was what humans and unicorns alike tapped into and used. But core magic shouldn’t be at the surface because it doesn’t replenish. It can’t, because it’s so strong and from so deep. But out here, where the world is fractured, it flows through the cracks and escapes like air from a poorly insulated house. All the magic steaming from this hollow ultimately means less magic everywhere else.”
“I do seem to feel something,” said Clint.
“You would,” said Rank. “I do. It’s like a geyser of magic blowing up your skirt from below.”
Clint decided the expression must be metaphorical, so he didn’t bother to correct Rank on their status as three skirtless creatures.
But yes… Clint could feel the magic in the air. It felt powerful. He imagined that how he felt in Rank’s hollow, out of the cold and with the magic touching him, must be how Edward must feel every day.
The gunslinger fell into a rare smile, suddenly certain of a new ability he could sense growing within him. He reached behind Rank, grabbed a rock from the cave ledge, then smothered it in his large left hand.
“Watch this,” he said.
Clint made some magic movements over his newly enchanted hand while whispering a string of magic-sounding words, then opened his palm to reveal the metamorphosed object.
“Nice rock,” Rank said, looking at the unchanged hunk in Clint’s hand. He snatched it from the gunslinger’s palm and shoved it deep into his dirty overalls pocket, eyes darting around, daring the empty space to challenge him and
his new posession.
Edward snorted, blowing tiny flecks of mucus onto the gunslinger’s sleeve.
“It’s core magic, I told you,” he said. “You can’t use it, no matter how it makes you feel. You’re a man, not a unicorn — pleasem and thankoo to Providence for that.”
Rank continued showing them around, occasionally patting his stolen rock through the pocket of his overalls as if to assure himself that it was still there. Then, after a brief tour and some vittles, Clint asked where he and Edward could lay their heads.
Rank showed them an open room and gave them a pile of blankets that smelled like cheese. Within five minutes, they seesawed into sleep as Rank laughed and cackled like a witch from a distant chamber of the underground cave.
Clint woke with a full bladder as he did every night at precisely 3am, or the equivalent time in a world that had shifted.
The room was mostly dark, but Rank had left them a lantern, and the lantern was still burning weakly in a corner. Clint wondered if it was dangerous, leaving a lantern burning with everyone sleeping in an underground chamber. But when he reached the glow, he looked up to see black smoke licking up from the curled wick and drifting toward a small hole in the rock. It seemed to be a natural vent, and the surface wind was drawing air up and through it. Rank had already showed them his air intakes — a series of tubes meandering into the cave from the leeward side of a surface hill. The place had everything.
Rank’s tall closet wasn’t tall and it wasn’t a closet. It was a covered bucket in a small chamber off the front room. Clint used it and then returned to his chamber to find Rank sitting on a rock ledge, staring at Edward’s sleeping body. He’d brought his own lantern — a larger one, hot enough to provide some radiant warmth — and had set it on a small table in front of himself. The lantern’s light threw Rank’s shadow against the wall, casting it as something black and horrible.
Clint said, “It’s never a good idea to let a unicorn catch you watching him unawares.”
“I had a vision,” said Rank. He sounded saner than he had when they’d gone to sleep, as if no joking matter were chewing at his mind.
Clint sat across from him, near the unicorn’s lightly rising and falling body.
“I have them in my sleep sometimes. They let me see behind the walls of The Realm. Your friend would say it’s because of the geyser of magic beneath us.”
Edward stirred in the lamplight, as if he knew Rank was talking about him.
“It’s crumbling,” said Rank.
“What is?”
“The world. The Realm used to be the center, back when the world was whole, and now it’s durn near the only place that has any magic left. Folks like you spend your lives searching for it, your minds sick with the need to find it…”
“We’re after my bride to be, not The Realm,” Clint corrected.
“… pursuing it over everything else, letting it destroy your lives, corrupt your souls, but it’s not the place you left behind, Marshal Gulliver.”
Clint’s head snapped to attention and his blue eyes went steely, fierce as bullets. He’d not told Rank the surname he’d buried in Solace, and would’ve felt like he was spitting curses if he had.
Rank turned and met the gunslinger’s eyes.
“I saw your return to The Realm tonight in my sleep,” the old man said, tugging on his tuft. “Saw you arrive at the wall and watched as you breached it. Then I stared into the end.”
“The end of what?”
“The crumbling, and everything else.”
“Speak in sense, old man,” Clint said, reaching forward to turn up the lamp. He wondered if Rank was somehow hypnotized or sleepwalking; Clint had seen stranger things.
“You were sent off for a reason, Marshal. As was Dharma Kold. You were cut like cancer from The Castle.”
Clint hadn’t given the old man Kold’s name any more than he’d given him his own.
“But you can’t always get at the cancer,” Rank went on. “Sometimes traces are left, like all that you left in The Realm.”
“I don’t remember The Realm. Not beyond the way you’d remember an old dream.”
“I have that dream,” said Rank.
Clint considered telling Rank to talk sense again, but that didn’t seem possible, so he let it go. Rank was a human living on a crack at the Edge, Realm-adjacent. The leakage here had driven Edward nearly insane, and the unicorn was bred to take it. Rank’s mind must have splintered long ago.
“Go to bed, old man,” Clint told him.
Without a word, Rank stood, grabbed the lantern, and walked out of the chamber.
Clint laid his head back down, fell asleep, and dreamed of a precious, fragile object that shattered to pieces over and over again. In the dream, Clint tried to keep the object whole, but his large gunslinger’s hands could never grasp it in time.
Clint woke so groggy and bleary-eyed the next morning that he stumbled straight into Edward, who was standing in the middle of the dark room.
The unicorn was usually hard to miss, but he’d draped several of Rank’s blankets over his back and head — making him look like a gigantic equine monk. Clint, not seeing him in his gray, monk-like garb, smacked face-first into Edward’s rear and nearly fell to the hovel floor. Edward, just as groggy and bleary-eyed, spun with alarm, horn glowing. He seemed to remember where he was and said, “Oh, it’s just you” to the gunslinger. He then returned his rear to Clint’s face and backed up into the marshal, knocking him down.
Rank was back to the zany character he’d been when they’d first met. The shift into crazy guy from last night’s seer/doomsayer was so dramatic that Clint almost asked him about it, but then decided not to. He didn’t particularly want Rank to start reciting prophecies again, nor did he want Edward to hear them. The unicorn’s mind was still too fragile. Besides, if Rank repeated what he’d said in the night’s middle, Edward might decide that it was true, since his memories of The Realm weren’t any clearer than Clint’s.
“Thankoo and pleasem for your hospitality,” said Clint. “We’ll leave you with our memory, soon as we’ve filled the bare in our bellies.”
“Ain’t nothin’,” said Rank. “I like the company. You want beans? I’m making beans.”
Rank was cooking his beans over a tiny fire under another of the natural rock vents. The beans were still in a can, still sealed and with the label still on it. The label was burning, but Clint could tell that the picture on it was of corn.
“We’ve imposed on your generosity enough,” said Clint. “I’ve plenty of rupees. What I’d like is to buy some of your stores, if you can replace and spare them.”
“Take ‘em!” said Rank with a hiccup, his white spike of hair bouncing with excitement. “I have more stores than I need, and the dooners are always leaving more when they raid parties coming through.”
“Dooners?” said a voice gravelly with sleep.
Clint turned as Edward edged into the room wearing his gray monk’s garb. He’d already used their gear and some of Rank’s fresh water to brew his morning coffee in their chamber. Edward’s cup was a giant metal bowl, floating before him in a wide rosy pink bubble. Edward looked surly, half-asleep, and in desperate need of caffeine.
Rank lowered the tongs holding the beans that were actually corn for long enough to slap his knee. He was wearing an ancient pair of red full-body long-johns, with only one of the buttons working hard enough to bury his rear. The flap of thin fabric bounced as he spoke.
“That’s right!” he said. “I meant to tell you about them. The dooners are natives of the Sands. Lawless. Lethal. If they see you, they’ll want to see you killt. You should try and avoid that.”
Edward scoffed. Then his horn glowed for a moment and the bowl of coffee floated toward him until it was hovering just under his mouth. He drank, then magicked it back away.
“Don’t laugh, horsey!” Rank cackled. “Not one party comes through here that the dooners don’t at least watch. If it suits them, they
fall onto those parties and take what they want and some of what they don’t, never caring who lays behind killt. They kill their prey with sharpened metal weapons. Some say they’re nar human at all. Travel in packs, small usually, but always with a larger band behind them, just over a hill should they be needed. They communicate by magic. Magic! Can you believe that? Not a lot of magic, of course; ain’t like we’re outside The Realm. But each dooner tribe is led by a shaman warrior who can sift what’s left from the sand.”
“Wow, beings who can use magic,” said Edward. “That’s impressive.” He magicked a massive boulder away from the wall and managed to take an incredibly awkward seat on it, looking like a circus elephant perching on a tiny platform.
“Thankoo, Rank,” said Clint. “We’ll keep our eyes on the horizon, and high and low all around it.”
Edward wouldn’t be put off so easily. He’d had a rough few days, a horrible night, and clearly now an inexcusable morning. He didn’t want to hear about mysterious humans or human-things that set the whole region afeared, who were more worth mentioning than wild unicorn herds that could level whatever hovels the dooners had in seconds if they had a mind to.
And besides, he really hated being called “horsey.”
“Wait, wait,” he said. “They’re fearsome warriors, hunting with projectile weapons. Maybe swords and axes. That makes them a match for unicorns? Or even just one unicorn?”
Rank nodded. “Sure thing. They fight without souls or mercy. They’ll surround you twice before you know what hit you once.”
“How does a person get surrounded twice?”
“It’s an expression.”
“And are you aware I can extend a bubble of protection?”
“Is it a pink bubble?” said Rank.
“Are you aware I could cause a man to use his ‘fearsome weapon’ on himself?”
“Woah, boy,” said Rank. “Easy.”