Unicorn Western

by Sean Platt

“Thankoo,” said Clint.

  “They might be ruined,” said Gregori. “I’ve had them under a sheet, beneath a pile of turkey manure for a month.”

  Clint had never heard anyone call turkey leavings “manure” before, but it didn’t matter.

  “You could have stored them in a vat of acid for a century,” said Clint. “These are marshal’s bullets.”

  “Well, that’s good,” said Gregori, “because here are the rest of them.” He handed Clint a soggy box containing the rest of his bullets. “I thought the sheet would keep the box dry, but I was wrong. Sorry for the reek.”

  Clint tipped the bullets into a leather pouch, handed the box back to Gregori, and hopped onto Edward’s back. Then he tipped his hat — his actual hat this time — to Gregori.

  “What will you do if you don’t find them?” Gregori asked, squinting into the early morning sun.

  “Keep looking,” said Clint.

  “And if you look forever and still don’t find them?”

  “If that happens, I will keep looking.”

  “But what if you never, never find them?”

  “I will,” said Clint.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because forever is a very long time, and a man’s guard gets too tired to hold up forever. Some day Kold will feel confident enough to stop, and that’s when I’ll walk up behind him with my pistol drawn. There was a sage once — I forget his proper name, but he was a duke of some sort — who said that a bad man never reckons on a critter that will just keep on coming. I am that critter. I will stop only when my heart does.”

  “You are both more patient than I,” said Gregori.

  “Speak for one of us,” Edward said to Gregori. “I will give up one day and leave the fool marshal to die alone. But for now I’ll ride with him, because this man is the most amusing, most hilarious person I could imagine being with.”

  “I am that,” said Clint, in gravel and monotone.

  “Go with Providence, gunslinger,” said Gregori.

  “Yar, and you as well,” Clint replied.

  “We’ll see you in NextWorld.”

  “Yar,” said Clint. “I’ll be the rider following the man on the dark unicorn.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN:

  LOST AND FINDINGS

  They made a day’s ride out toward the ridge and the site of the dooner attack. Edward, who didn’t have a fantastic sense of direction, said everything seemed familiar but that he couldn’t be sure. Clint had been unconscious during this leg of the trip and had to trust his mount.

  Eventually they arrived at a rock outcropping and a ridge. At their feet, they also saw what appeared to be a skeletal severed arm sticking up from the dirt.

  Edward said, “Either this is the place, or someone else has misplaced an arm.”

  “Dooner?” Clint nodded at the arm.

  “Yar. If we sifted through the sand, we could find the other pieces. It’s like a puzzle nobody would ever want to solve.”

  “So Kold was heading off that way,” Clint said, pointing. He stopped, scratching his head, certain of a direction that didn’t seem right.

  The unicorn said, “I think so.”

  They started walking, under the ridge and past a rock shaped like a giant finger that seemed familiar enough as far as rocks shaped like giant fingers tended to go, then off past several rock formations Clint thought he would have remembered, but didn’t. A month had passed, so there was no way to tell anything by looking at the ground, or by Edward’s sniffing out any sort of dark magic residue. Edward said he still couldn’t sense any other unicorns, though there used to be a few shrinking herds out this way. The shifting had probably sent them to greener pastures, or at least ones not made of sand.

  Eventually they passed a jagged rock that was shaped like a donut on end.

  “This, I remember,” said Clint.

  “From the dooner attack?”

  “Nar. From just after we left Rank. It should be far, far behind us.”

  “Well, here it is again,” said Edward.

  “But we passed it already. Back that direction.” He pointed.

  Edward shrugged. It didn’t seem like a unicorn should be able to shrug, but Edward managed it just fine.

  “I hate to voice a cliche,” said Clint, “but I think we’re going in circles.”

  “So it’s shifted,” said Edward. “What do we do?”

  “We go on.”

  “But if we do that, we’re going backward.”

  It was too confusing. They could be going backward, or not. There might be any number of shifts ahead, and the combination could lead them forward, backward, far off, or near. They could brush within a hair’s breadth of The Realm or skirt the very limits of the Sprawl. They could go forward, riding for two days before finding themselves staring up into the Otel window back in Solace, or Sojourn.

  Or they could go backward and find the same.

  It was even possible that a two-day journey to Solace lay both in front and behind, or that there were currently no trails to Solace left in the Sands.

  Being blind turned them turkey stupid.

  Clint said, “All we can do is go on.”

  So they did, following the setting sun for a week, in a straight line, until Edward, whose head was higher, saw a landmark to orient him. Clint saw it soon after — a ridge near a rock that looked like a giant finger.

  “Go on,” said Clint, refusing to allow either of them to state the obvious. But before the end of the day, still following the path of the setting sun, they saw clear to a large flat rock, sitting crooked atop a shallow gully, far in the distance. There seemed to be a turkey coop and a small barn beside it.

  Clint sighed, and Edward matched the sigh with his own equine version.

  They might as well stop for the evening, then leave again after they’d gotten a hot meal in their bellies, a soft bed under their backs, and a palaver to occupy their tangled minds. Riding on blindly wouldn’t change the fact that after more than a week, they’d ended right where they’d started.

  Clint, who was still somewhat weak in both body and atrophied determination, felt defeated despite himself.

  He and Edward had been riding now for close to three years, including vast stretches of time during which they’d pursued nothing but rumor — whispers of a dark rider on a unicorn of a different color — seeking the path of misery and chaos that Kold left like a reek behind him. But even during the bleakest of those times, they’d known that Kold rode with purpose, and that he rode more or less in a straight line. They knew that if they kept to that line, they’d at least be riding in roughly the right direction. But now, this far out, the world beneath their feet had become a lie. It was like they were playing that game where you were blindfolded and spun three times before trying to hit a dried pumpkin with a stick in order to spill the candy from inside of it.

  Now, their pursuit was no longer a matter of persistence and grit. They’d gone in a circle by going straight, and that had stripped Clint’s hope to the bone. There were too many directions in the world, and all of them were probably wrong.

  Instinct suddenly slapped the gunslinger on the back of his head. His thinking ground to a halt.

  As they drew closer, they realized that the hovel’s roof was askew, nearly caving in. The turkey pen was busted open like a dried pumpkin, and there weren’t any turkeys inside. The barn looked like it had been licked by a fire; its structure had mostly collapsed, with the remainder black and painted in ash. The drapery across the hovel’s front was partially ripped, and there was a piece of smashed furniture visible through the fresh hole.

  “What is this?” said Edward.

  Clint had already hopped off and was walking slowly toward the hovel, his stone face set. Something boiled inside him — fear or anger, he wasn’t sure.

  The pen wasn’t completely empty. One turkey, dead and skewered by an arrow, remained inside. The arrow through the turkey matched the one that had struck Clint in the shoul
der five weeks earlier. Edward saw the arrow and immediately cast an umbrella of protection over them both. If the dooners were around and struck Clint with another poisoned arrow, he would surely die.

  As Edward extended his protection, Clint, heedless, walked straight out from under the umbrella, toward the barn, and was once again left vulnerable. Edward trotted closer and re-placed the umbrella over him.

  The barn was still smoldering, sufficient that Clint wondered why he and Edward hadn’t noticed smoke on the horizon earlier. He reached for the door handle and found the iron still warm to the touch. His fingers fell from the heat, and the entire door, still in its frame, collapsed inward and displayed the remains of the barn’s broken and burned interior. Sunlight poured into the structure from every direction — through what remained of the walls and missing roof — and garishly splashed onto the hard-packed dirt floor. All of Gregori’s machines and tools were gone or destroyed. His turkey feed had vanished.

  Clint circled the barn. All of the pumpkins had been smashed, rather than taken.

  Clint’s face was still a stone of emotion. He knew not what he felt, if anything.

  “Let’s go,” said Edward, still trying to keep up with Clint in order to keep him under the umbrella.

  “No.”

  “There’s nothing here. Maybe they were run off.”

  Clint stared at the unicorn. Neither of them thought that the family had been “run off.” It was an insult to pretend that they did.

  “Can’t you sense anything?” said Clint.

  “A shaman was here,” said Edward.

  “That’s not an answer!” Clint screamed, tendons in his neck standing up like sentinels.

  The gunslinger composed himself, grew stoic again as if his outburst were a lie, and resumed strolling the property without waiting for the unicorn’s response.

  “Can you or can you not see what happened, using magic?”

  “Not yet. But it’s coming.” Edward’s face wrinkled with effort, and his horn shifted from yellow to red to blue, then back to yellow as it repeated the sequence.

  Clint strolled toward the hovel’s entrance. On the way, he kicked aside a splintered piece of wood that had a second splintered piece of wood clinging to it on a bent nail. He recognized it as a piece of Cari’s jewelry box. She’d told him that her grammy had given it to her, and that her grammy’s grammy had owned it before that. Clint looked around where he stood. He couldn’t see the rest of the box, or any of the jewelry once inside it. The baubles were worthless outside of sentimentality — common desert rocks, polished pretty. The sorts of things a poor teenage girl with nothing else would know no better than to like.

  Clint raked aside the curtain at the hovel’s front. The rod holding it bent in half and fell away, revealing something like a cave that gaped like an open mouth.

  “Sweet Providence,” Edward whispered.

  The unicorn never vented surprise, nor really any emotion other than the closest thing he had, which was sarcasm and insulting wit. He also never whispered. But what he saw in the hovel shocked him as much as it had the gunslinger.

  Clint stepped over debris, looking down at the vaguely human shapes at his feet. His stone face said nothing.

  “Cari isn’t here,” he finally said.

  “Clint,” said Edward. “Let’s go.”

  The gunslinger spun. He’d drawn both guns and was pointing them at Edward. Both barrels shook. “I said, Cari isn’t here! Where is she, you dagged horse? Why would we leave? Why would we go anywhere without answering that question first?”

  “Holster your weapons and get a hold of yourself,” said Edward.

  A bookcase had half-spilled to the floor. Clint kicked its wooden remainder to shards, then fired a bullet from each gun into its splintered belly, shoulders slowly rising and falling as he holstered his weapons.

  “She’s been taken.”

  “You don’t know that,” Edward said carefully. The unicorn was usually in charge of their palaver, but Clint had drawn the upper hand and was threatening to rip it off if Edward said anything else he didn’t like.

  “Of course I do. She’s not here. She’s young. This is what roving gangs have always done.”

  “Not to set you off again,” said Edward, “but we should leave. There’s nothing we can do here.”

  Clint ignored him. He kicked aside a small mountain of splintered wood. A can of apple brew. And then, when he reached the back wall of the hovel, he saw it.

  Part of a small, ornate arch made of desertwood, painted in rainbows and covered in costume jewels. A rectangular chunk of stone, split in half. A cracked ball of cut glass.

  The family’s shrine to NextWorld had been destroyed. There was a large dent in the shape of the business end of a war hammer gaping from the wall behind where the shrine used to be. What remained of the shrine was mostly buried. Clint had to dig in the rubble to extract all its pieces.

  “They destroyed this first,” Clint said quietly, turning half of the shrine’s glass doorknob over and over in his hands, as if worried he might break it further.

  “Clint…”

  “THEY DESTROYED THIS FIRST!” Clint yelled. Heat rushed to his cheeks, making them hot. He could feel the poison still in his system like a stew, weakening his body as his blood rolled to a boil. “THEY SMASHED IT IN FRONT OF THEM! THEY MADE THEM WATCH!”

  “You don’t know…” Edward began, backing out from the hovel.

  “This was a message. A message to us. It was payback for what you did when they attacked us out on that ridge. Cari said a tribe was adjacent. She thought you’d scared them off, but you didn’t scare them off at all. They’ve been watching us, all this time. Waiting. When we left, they came back. She told me their shaman can sense the shifting, and predict how the world’ll turn next. It’s how they navigate the Edge without getting lost. They knew the way the sand was spinning, and knew we’d circle back. This is for us. All for us!”

  Clint felt like his heart was trying to pound through his ribcage. Adrenaline coursed in an unstable current through his system. He wanted to punch through a wall, through the very roof of the hovel. The only thing reining his rage and keeping him from laying waste to his fists was the knowledge that those hands could inflict far more damage with pistols if he could keep them unharmed.

  Edward was watching the gunslinger. He didn’t seem to know what to think. His ears twitched and his eyes blinked. Clint thought that he’d never seen him look so much like a horse.

  Clint clutched the remaining half of the shrine’s doorknob in his fist, careful to neither break it further nor cut his deadly hands. He walked out of the hovel and past Edward without looking back. He stopped only once he was past the property, where he looked out into the desolate loneliness of the empty Sands.

  “Bury it,” he said. “Bury it in the sand before I turn around. Burn what remains. They’re gone. Make it all gone, Edward. Make it a memory.”

  Clint closed his eyes, gripping the glass tightly in his twitching hand.

  There was a flash of shamrock-colored light that Clint could see through his closed eyelids, even with his back turned. The color reminded him of The Realm, and further fueled his fury. He slowly opened his eyes, rubbing moisture from the bottom lids and coating them with hard, caustic grit.

  He left the sand in his eye, painful though it was.

  The gunslinger turned. The hovel was gone, and in its place a shallow dune like any other. There was no scent of magical smoke from magical fire. All that remained was a single stone marking nothing at all. It was shaped like a rectangle, and whole. Something under the rectangle had lifted one of its long edges, like a door ajar. Shadow lay beneath, looking like an entrance to some other place.

  “Now what?” Edward said. He’d just taken several commands from his rider and was asking for another. Edward had never, never, never taken commands from any man.

  “Today we ride,” said Clint. “Tomorrow, we kill.”

  He laced
a hand through Edward’s mane and swung onto the unicorn’s back.

  His heart rate had returned to normal.

  The gunslinger felt poisoned no more.

  CHAPTER EIGHT:

  THE SEARCHERS

  The gunslinger and the unicorn rode through the Sands, with nothing in front and nothing behind.

  The man’s face was hard and unforgiving. His hands were large, and the right hovered perpetually — almost superstitiously — above a seven-shot firearm at his hip. He had a red bandana tied loosely around his neck, like a bandit.

  The bandana once belonged to someone else, and still carried the flowery scent of her hair. Occasionally, the man would smell it, then sniff the air, like a blooddog on a trail. A piece of cowhide string was visible beneath the bandana, slapping the chapped skin at the man’s open collar. From the leather, under his shirt, against his heart, hung a broken half-sphere of glass, its edges rounded by magic.

  It had been two weeks since the events Clint would no longer speak of. They’d been traveling in a straight line, and the land between them stayed true and unchanging. Edward said he thought a magic influence was holding the fault lines in place for a purpose. Clint asked if he thought the magic could be a shaman’s. Edward said that yar, it could be. It could be a dozen things. A shaman. A herd of unicorns. Ghoulem. A sand dragon. The Realm itself.

  “It’s them,” said Clint. “They’re holding it steady so they can cross. It means we’re close.”

  After two weeks, Edward had regained his caustic attitude to balance Clint’s subsiding fury. “Why are you suddenly an authority on magic?” he said.

  “Fine,” said Clint. “Then you tell me. What I just said… does it make sense?”

  “Maybe.” Edward shrugged — a human affect he’d learned from Clint. The unicorn’s rising shoulder blades nearly unseated his rider. “But I have to ask again: What are we doing? Have you forgotten why you’re out here? You’ve steered us from towns, and sent us into open plains following the faintest of tracks. You’ve not spoken to a soul other than me since… well, since. We’ve ridden away from fracture rather than towards, when we know full well that the world fractures more the closer one gets to The Realm.”