by Sean Platt
This was the wrong thing to say. Edward didn’t like being told to “woah” like a common mount. He advanced, his horn glowing. But Clint put a hand on his chest and gave him a meaningful stare. The stare said, This man is crazy, and he’s our host. Let it go.
Edward stared daggers at Rank for a moment, then rolled his big equine eyes and took another long sip from his coffee bowl.
“You just watch out,” said Rank, unconcerned with Edward’s malevolence.
“Yar,” said Clint. “We will.”
“I’m not impressed,” Edward said an hour later, staring at a distant and uninteresting ridge.
They’d left Rank’s company to resume pursuit of Kold, Cerberus, and the captive Mai. Twenty of the past sixty minutes had been spent in Rank’s hand-cranked liftbox with Rank cranking away at the metal wheel and refusing help. Edward kept offering magic assistance, but Rank wouldn’t accept it, saying he was their host and would do his duties as such. But with Edward on board in addition to the tremendous weight of the lift itself, even the ridiculous gear ratio didn’t keep the cranking from being as slow as molasses. Eventually Edward traded asking for action and magicked the lift to the top of the sand. But afterward, Rank failed to take up the slack in the chain, so when Edward and Clint stepped out and the unicorn released his hold on the liftbox, it fell precipitously, jerking to a heavy stop twenty feet below with a horrible clanging and a sound like a side of beef being thrown through a wall — probably Rank hitting the floor of the box when it stopped.
“Rank!” Clint yelled, finding the edge of the trap cover and lifting it enough to peer inside the shaft.
“I’m fine!” Rank’s shaky coot voice rippled to the top. He whistled loud, cackled, “What a ride!” and then slapped his knee loud enough for them to hear it at the top.
Now, watching Edward watch the ridge, Clint said, “What aren’t you impressed by?”
“These dooners.”
“You can see them?”
Edward nodded. “I can sense them. They’re watching us from the ridge, just as our crazy old friend said they would.”
“Are they aiming to attack?” said Clint.
“I don’t know, but if they know anything, they’ll know they shouldn’t. We’re a man and a unicorn. Not only is it doubtful we’d have much of value, but their weapons are nothing next to this big pearly horn.”
“I’ve never asked you,” said Clint. “But let’s just say I cut off your horn. Could you still magick?”
“Of course. My horn is Dumbo’s feather.”
“What’s a Dumbo?”
“It’s an ancient unicorn legend. But no matter, the magic is in me, not my horn. Or more accurately, the magic comes through me, rather than through my horn.”
They walked for a few minutes in silence. Edward was more lucid than he’d been for weeks. He’d predicted that their way would be easier once they were past Rank’s cave, and so far that had borne true.
“Rank said some of the dooner tribes are peaceful,” said Clint.
“Yar.”
“But if this one isn’t one of those, you can protect us?”
“Can, yes. Whether or not I will is dependent on you allowing me our last slice of turkey pie.”
“Sands to that; that pie is mine,” said Clint. “I don’t need your protection. I have my guns.” He touched the seven-shooter on his right hip.
“You do. And from what I can tell, there are only seven men on that ridge. I might sit this one out and let you do the clearing for a change. Providence knows this journey has seen me shouldering most of the load.”
“Yar,” Clint agreed. “You’ve done much.”
They’d found Kold again quickly, following the pain in Edward’s chest. As they neared the ridge, he was barely visible on the horizon as a dark shadow, but Clint didn’t fear being discovered should Kold look back. With the light brown sand, brown cliffs, and blue sky as a background, Kold wouldn’t be able to see Edward’s white coat or Clint in his light clothing from the same distance, and Cerberus was too occupied defiling Mai’s soul to see them with magic.
“How is your pain?” Clint asked.
“Bad. But I’m learning to adjust. It’s better without the mental fog. At least all I feel now is this spike in my chest.”
“And you can bear it.”
“Yar. And no matter how bad it is for me, I need to remember it’s a hundred times worse for…”
Clint went rigid.
Edward changed the subject. “Those fools on the ridge are still watching us,” he said.
Clint hopped off of Edward’s back, then sauntered several paces ahead. The unicorn stopped walking, waiting to see what the gunslinger was up to, what he had up under his hat. Clint turned, walked back to Edward, and stood beside his great white head, staring into the unicorn’s right eye.
“How bad is it, friend? Tell me true.”
“For me, or for Mai?”
“Both.”
“For Mai, it’s unbearable. She’s being subjected to Cerberus’ evil will, and most of what I can feel are echoes of despair. How the dark steed can stand to do it — or how Kold can bear its proximity — I honestly don’t know, no matter how icy their hearts, souls, and minds might be.”
Clint’s tight jaw twitched, his azure eyes turning a harder shade of blue. “And for you?”
“Terrible, near impossible to take. But it could go fathoms deeper before I’d drop.”
“Could you bear it if we moved up on them? Can we end this, one way or another?”
“Nar to the first question,” Edward said. Then he paused, breathed deeply, and spoke again: “But yar to the second.”
Clint’s hand subconsciously fell to one of his guns. Kold wore an identical pair. The chances of Edward and Clint exacting a win over Kold and Cerberus was remote, but so was the chance that Kold and Cerberus would triumph. Most likely the marshals and unicorns would face a stalemate, but there was at least one life that Clint could end if he had to — if doing so would cease her hurting.
“We need to ride,” said Clint, slapping Edward’s side.
“If she dies,” said Edward, “you’ll never find The Realm.”
“Yar.”
“And if Cerberus stops what he’s doing to her and she lives, you’ll never find The Realm.”
“Yar.”
Edward nodded, then shook his giant head. He drew a deep breath and said, “Let’s ride.”
Clint wove a hand through Edward’s mane, readying himself to climb onto the unicorn’s bare back. But before he could leap, a tremendous flare of pain erupted in his left shoulder. He looked down to see the tip of an arrow protruding through his shirt, and found himself having a whole, fully coherent thought: I’ll need this shirt laundered and sewn the next time we see a town, else I’ll be riding through the Sands in long johns.
There were hooting noises behind him. The gunslinger tried to turn, but before he could, another arrow struck him in the side and he fell to the dirt.
Dooners.
Clint looked up to see Edward battling at least a dozen men in long tan cloaks who were wielding swords and axes, some of them with hoods raised like clerics. Edward had taken several arrows and was magicking them away as fast as they ripped into his body. He was too preoccupied with triage to notice or help Clint, so the gunslinger simply lay there watching, feeling the soak slowly spread across his shirt as his head grew woozy.
A man with a raised hood appeared above Clint holding a sword. He raised the blade, but at the top of his swing, a bright yellow bolt of something blew him from Clint’s view and sent him spinning hard into the sand. Clint, his head in a cloud, found the spectacle interesting — if not entirely hysterical.
After another few minutes of yellow bolts, deafening yells, sparking swords, flying arrows, and colorful magic, Clint started to close his eyes, eager for sleep.
He almost smiled at his final thought before the blackout came to claim him: They surrounded you twice before you
knew what hit you.
Clint wanted to slap his knee at the notion, but his mind’s screen went dark, and all he could do was follow his consciousness down into a deep, dark spiraling pit, filled with endless black and too much nothing.
CHAPTER FIVE:
HOVEL, HEAT, AND COLD
Clint opened his eyes to a face like jerky.
The jerky stared down, female and tanned like cowhide draped on a hot rock, wrinkled before its time and dried like an old shoe. There were crease lines at the corners of the eyes and mouth, below her eyes and across her forehead. Yet, the eyes looked not much older than a child’s. Clint longed to ask the blinking soul above him how old she was, but too many other questions crowded to the front.
Who are you?
Where’s my unicorn?
Why are you out in the open Sands?
Then Clint realized he wasn’t out in the open Sands, but that didn’t happen until he had blinked enough to clear his head. There was something above him and the jerky person, gray and smooth and definitely not sky. And there was something else below him, soft but solid. Definitely not sand.
The girl (he decided she was a girl, possibly in her late teens, despite the wrinkles) patiently waited for him to get his bearings, as if she’d known he’d need these broken minutes to figure out what cloud he’d fallen down from. Clint rolled his head, slowly drifting his gaze from the girl, to the walls, to the ceiling, to the contents of what seemed to be a mostly empty room all around him.
The world spun through his brain’s orbit, slowly, one impossible image of reality overlaying the top of something else, the two offsetting each other like a double-exposure. After a Sands’ forever, one image finally settled into place, killing the other and making everything else come back.
The gunslinger’s hand flew inhumanly fast toward his hip. Then it came back up, his finger twitching at the trigger before Clint’s hand and then his brain — in that order — realized he wasn’t holding a gun. Nor was he wearing his shirt, denims, holsters, boot, or hat. He was dressed in chambray that looked like… pajamas?
“I dislike cliches, but I have to use one,” Clint rasped at the girl. “Where in the crooked gash of the Sprawl am I?”
“You’re with me,” she said, as though it wasn’t the most unhelpful sentence in all of the Sands. Then, after two seconds, the girl seemed to realize her answer was a dud and added, “I’m Cari.”
Clint stared at the smooth gray ceiling. It looked like rock. The far wall was covered by a drape of some sort. Or maybe the wall was just a drape. He thought he heard the outdoors just beyond, and remembered where he and Edward were walking when ambushed — the deep Sands, Edge-adjacent.
“Is this a mesa hovel?” he asked.
Cari clapped excitedly. “Yes! We’re Leisei. I didn’t think you’d know that, being who you are.”
“Who I am?”
“You’re a Realm marshal, aren’t you? You were carrying two guns, and they had… seven chambers.” She whispered it, as if Clint might not know. “And your friend? The unicorn?”
Clint sat up, but Cari gently pushed him back to the mattress he seemed to be laying on.
“He’s fine,” she said, reading his reaction. “In fact, he’s…”
There was a crash from outside, then a large splashing. Someone yelled that someone else didn’t need to be so testy, and that he’d get him his dagged turkey pie and brew.
“… he’s kind of a jerk,” Cari finished.
“Was that your appy?” Clint said, meaning whoever had made the splash, possibly after being magically pushed into something by a hungry unicorn.
“Grappy,” she corrected. “It’s okay. Grammy pushes him into that trough all the time.”
Clint nodded and laid his head back on a pillow that was approximately as soft as a carcass. But it was still better than holding it up to talk, which made him feel lightheaded.
“How did we get here?” he asked.
“Your unicorn walked up to our house with you magicked in front of him. Caused quite a stir with my grappies. Most Leisei have never seen a unicorn in person, even down in the village, in the valley, above the larger aquifer. Grammy fainted when she saw a floating man in a purple cloud coming toward her. Grappy thought it was the end, that the world had finally fractured at the fault lines, like most Leisei have said would happen forever. In fact, he thought the sparks coming off of you were trying to attack him.”
“Sparks?”
“I ran outside just as he was setting you down. There were things moving between you and the unicorn’s horn. Sparks.”
“Phantom sprites,” said Clint, nodding. “That means Edward was trying to heal me, but that for some reason he couldn’t, so he aimed for sustaining until he could find a shaman. Probably means the arrows that struck me were tipped in dark elixir.”
“They looked like fairies,” said Cari.
“Phantom sprites,” Clint repeated.
“It was all very…” Cari began.
“Then I thank you for your help,” Clint said, interrupting her. “Your help, and your shaman’s.”
“I healed you myself,” Cari said with an edge of false modesty. “It was indeed a dark elixir. We’re all shaman out here, at least sort of. Only way to survive. Just enough to ward off ghoulem, and heal wounds when needed. But it’s too hard to sift much more than a sprinkle of magic from the sand these days.”
Clint had heard of the Leisei, but not in years he could count without thinking deep. He’d learned of them when he’d lived in and served The Realm. The Leisei were sand people, living in hovels built in gullies beneath large, flat rocks, like open-ended caves tucked under the sand. They farmed what they could, living so far at the edge of the Sprawl that you could spit into the Edge. They grew pumpkins and raised turkeys like the growers in nearly all Sprawl whistle stops, but also sifted sands and dealt in light white magic. As with all quasi-magic people, the Leisei were an odd mix of hard practicality and superstition. They learned farming and healing, but also spent an intolerable number of minutes learning to defend themselves against nonexistent wives tales, like ghoulem.
“Appy and Grappy went out to where the dooners had attacked you as soon as I gave you the potions to let you sleep and heal,” Cari said, now picking clumps of sand from Clint’s scratchy sheets. “They said there was nothing left but body parts. So we also have to thank you, since that dooner tribe has been pillaging us for months. After what your unicorn done to them, I doubt they’ll trouble us again.”
“I need to speak to him,” said Clint.
Cari nodded, shrugged, then patted Clint’s shoulder and rose to her feet. She was wearing a long, flowing lightweight cloak, but it moved with no swish. He remembered that about the Leisei too — so quiet that they were like holes in the sand, and that if they weren’t so vested in the religion of NextWorld and the pacifism that galloped alongside it, they’d make fantastic assassins.
Seconds after Cari left, the drape at the far side of the small room was raked sharply aside and Edward lit the room with his bright white body. Behind him, a soaking wet old man ran over and dragged the drape closed to keep the sand out of the hovel.
“Oh, Providence!” Edward cried, looking at Clint. “The injuries to your face are ghastly! You’re a monster!”
“I’ve sustained no facial injuries,” said Clint.
“Oh, then I guess you’re just ugly.” Edward sprawled on the hovel floor so that his horn wouldn’t scrape the ceiling.
“I heard you shuttled me back on a litter,” said Clint, referring to the purple cloud, the sprites, and the magic.
“I couldn’t heal you. They used helioroot powder on their weapons. We got lucky these people were here to heal you. And gunslinger, I’m sorry. The men on the ridge? They let me see them. They wanted me to see them. I should have known. These people have told me about the dooners while you’ve been recovering. They travel with a powerful shaman, and the shaman can make his presence ‘bright’ insid
e the magic, which makes him stand out in front of their prey… making it easier for another party to approach undetected from the rear.”
“I assume that once I was down, you finished the battle?”
“They hit me many times and cut me a few, but then I gave them something special in return. It radiated out from my body like a grater of cheese. A few survived and promptly ran. Their shaman chief waited for them on the ridge, like a coward.”
“Did you follow?”
“You needed my attention. And friend, you needed all I had to give.”
“How long have we been here?” said Clint, dreading the answer.
Edward sighed, blowing air through his giant white lips.
“How long, Edward?”
“Two weeks,” the unicorn said. “I can no longer feel the pain in my chest, nor feel the breath of Kold or Mai through my own reach, nor any of the unicorns in the area, of which there seem to be none.”
“So…”
“That’s correct,” Edward said, anticipating the gunslinger’s question. “They are gone. Their trail is as cold as the dark rider’s soul.”
CHAPTER SIX:
THE DOOR TO NEXTWORLD
Clint couldn’t convince anyone — not Cari; not Cari’s grammy or grappy or ammy or appy; not even Edward — that leaving the hovel to pick up Kold’s trail was in the same desert as a good idea.
He tried forcing the issue by climbing onto Edward’s back and urging him out toward the open sand, but each time he tried, Edward rolled over and nearly crushed him or magicked things to fly at his head. Then, when Clint announced he didn’t need any dagged horse to carry him and started marching off on his own, Edward pointed out that he didn’t have his guns and wondered out loud if the gunslinger hoped to kill Kold dead by telling him knock-knock jokes. Then Edward pushed him to the ground and set a rock on his chest.
“I didn’t carry you ten miles through the sun to watch you go out and get yourself killt now,” he said, leaving Clint to squirm.
Edward, being a unicorn and therefore impervious to most witch elixirs including helioroot, had already been entirely healed when he’d arrived at the hovel. He wouldn’t be able to completely cure Clint, who had no such constitution, until the poison fled his system. All they could do was wait and give Clint over to rest and to Cari’s attention. Cari was excellent with medicines. She’d learned at the side of her grappy, who learned at the side of his grappy — Angus Groo, one of the most famous Leisei shaman in history.