by Sean Platt
“To the Devil with the Realm,” Clint growled.
“Kold is heading toward The Realm. With your bride-to-be, who lives each day in mortal agony.”
“Yet, she does indeed live,” said Clint.
“Exactly. The others are gone. What have you to gain by pursuing this tribe?”
Clint removed his hat, shook it out, and set it back on his head. “The dooners have Cari,” he said.
“And Kold has Mai! What is Cari to you?”
“An innocent. A girl robbed of all she’s ever had, and everything she’s ever believed in. A girl who did no wrong, yet now believes she’s doomed to remain forever stuck in the Sands and never enter her NextWorld. She believes her kin were denied entry to their nirvana as well. Shall I go on?”
Edward huffed. They’d had this discussion repeatedly since leaving what remained of the hovel. Edward thought it made more sense to pursue Kold, but Clint’s will was as unyielding as his barrels. The unicorn no longer had the strength to fight the gunslinger. Arguing with Clint was like trying to bend iron with unmagic hands.
The dooners had left a clear trail, but they didn’t know it. They didn’t have a unicorn among them, and apparently didn’t understand them. That proved their savagery, said Edward. There had to be unpaired unicorns around even if Edward couldn’t always sense them, and unpaired unicorns paired with people of merit. The fact that Clint and Edward hadn’t seen or heard of any unicorns with dooner parties (Edward had asked) suggested that they hadn’t found any souls of merit among them.
The dooners didn’t know true white magic, which meant they didn’t know about the trail that Cari was leaving in the sand. But Edward could see it — a pure, radiant blue to his eyes; magic crumbs of unbearable sorrow. Edward saw the trail immediately… after they’d set out, leaving behind the rest of what they’d found at the burned-out hovel. The trail started behind the destruction and ran out in the opposite direction. Edward hadn’t said anything at first because he’d thought that if he did, Clint would want to follow. But the gunslinger was unshakable even before he’d known the trail was there.
When Edward, seeing that Clint was going to pursue with or without magic help, finally told him about the blue in the sand and admitted he’d seen it from the start, Clint came at him with his fists. Edward easily held him at bay, picking him up with magic and carrying him while he hovered six feet in the sky, yelling and thrashing. That had gone on for two days, but eventually Clint tired himself out, Edward had released him, and they’d settled into their usual routine of amiable loathing.
Clint said, “Are we at least getting closer?”
“I don’t know. I can’t tell,” said Edward. They’d been moving quickly, but never saw the dooners on the horizon. Based on the hovel’s condition, Clint figured the dooners had a one-day head start at most. But despite riding with fury, they hadn’t seemed to close the distance.
“How can they move faster than us? We’re only two, and you’re magic.”
“I don’t know. But based on the few actual tracks we’ve seen, there can’t be more than five in their party, and they know the area.”
“Can’t you fold to catch up?” Clint knew Edward could fold space over reasonable distances and close miles quickly. It took much from the unicorn, but he could do it, and they had plenty of food and brew to refuel him after.
“I keep telling you, no. Not in an area this unstable. Do you want me to fold us into the middle of a rock cliff? Or into a limitless void? If that happened, we’d float forever and there’d be nothing for me to do but talk to you for eternity.” He shivered theatrically. “Oh, the horror.”
Despite already moving at a rapid pace, Clint nonetheless insisted they move faster. They agreed that if all signs pointed to a small party of dooners holding Cari, that party was most likely heading toward a meetup with the rest of their pack. No matter what Edward had done to the dooners at the ridge, there was no way the entire pack was decimated to five.
Sand followed sand. Mesas followed mesas. Where they went looked exactly like where they had been, but Edward was nonetheless strangely upbeat. The blue line in the sand stayed fresh. They had passed the fault line area… either that, or the odd, anonymous dooner magic was still keeping the world intact as they crossed. They’d seen no signs that they were riding in circles since leaving the destroyed hovel, which tremendously bolstered their mood. It was satisfying, for the time, to simply set miles behind them.
Finally, Edward paused. His horn sparked. Then he started moving again, faster.
The gunslinger squinted. “What is it?”
“I’d prefer to be dramatic,” Edward said, then closed his giant lips and said nothing more for an hour, until they crested a hill and the unicorn nodded to the valley below.
“There,” he said.
And sure enough, at the very limit of the horizon, they could see a tiny row of moving shapes.
“You sensed them,” said Clint.
“Yar. As with Mai, I can feel Cari’s torment. It’ll take us hours to reach them, but we will reach them. The question is, how far are they from their destination?”
“You mean: How far are they from rejoining the rest of their pack?”
“Yar.”
“And: How large is their pack?”
Clint didn’t wait for a reply. He pushed his heels into Edward’s side and leaned forward as if anticipating the unicorn’s launch. It was as if he hadn’t been riding him for decades and thought Edward was a horse he could spur into action. But Edward was excited himself, so he let the question hang in the air and complied with Clint’s quiet order, taking the hill at a gallop. When they reached the bottom, they slowed to a canter, then to a trot, and then to walking, still with hours to go.
By the time the sun moved lower in the sky (Clint found he was enjoying the increased reliability of days; the sun seemed to stay overhead, and temperatures were more or less predictable), Clint decided that they were close enough for the party of dooners to soon be able to see them approaching. So Edward cast a camouflage umbrella over them, allowing the pair to further narrow the gap. And after another hour, with dusk approaching, they were close enough that their footfalls might give them away. They could eliminate the sound by moving slower, but that would widen the gap.
“We’ll attack at the next rise,” said Clint, suddenly decisive. “No more hiding.”
They got as close as they dared, then picked up the pace the minute the dooners (who they could now see had a captive figure tied to one of the horses, draped in a canvas hood) disappeared over the hill’s top. Edward thundered to the top, knowing the hill itself would muffle the noise.
They set themselves to crest the hill and rain death on the dooners from above, but when they reached the top of the hill, they stopped under their umbrella and stared at what stretched before them.
The party holding Cari was riding into a gigantic settlement of dooner huts.
The gunslinger and his unicorn were too late.
CHAPTER NINE:
KILLING
They sat at the top of the hill beneath their iridescent, yellow-pinkish umbrella — which was sparkling and strangely beautiful in the sun — for over an hour. Edward complained the entire time about the concentration required to sustain their invisibility and urged Clint to back off and let the hill be his sightline protection. But Clint wouldn’t budge.
The gunslinger watched the pack of dooners, taking in their swishing robes and weapons, counting numbers and drawing diagrams of their settlement in the sand. Finally he stood, sighed, and walked down the opposite side of the hill, where he sat to rest on a rock. Edward let the umbrella fall, magicked a slice of turkey pie and an apple brew from one of the bags, and began to eat it.
“There was a day,” said Edward, “when I ate other things besides pie and brew. In the wild, we ate Magellan root. And in The Realm, we both ate breaded meat sticks with caviar.”
“There are at least a hundred down there,” said Clin
t, ignoring the unicorn. “But I see nar their shaman. There was a chief on the ridge that first day. According to Cari’s family, the shaman chief sources their scant magic, and oversees the brew of their dark elixirs. They’ll ride without his protection, but they don’t like to. Makes them superstitious and edgy.”
“So you’re saying we should have overtaken them earlier by donning sheets and pretending to be desert ghoulem?”
“The shaman could be in one of the huts, but Cari also said a shaman’s duty is to patrol the settlement and keep an eye on its borders to keep the pack blessed, especially when there’s flux in and out of those borders. Yet a scavenge party rejoined just them, and I never saw the shaman.”
“If you’re not going to listen to my thoughts or laugh at my jokes,” Edward said, “I’m going to stop.”
“Please do.”
Edward sat, then sloughed onto his side and rolled himself with sand, whinnying his contentment until he was wearing a fine sweater of grit. He stood and shook every grain of sand from his coat until he was back to a radiant white.
“Fine,” he said. “I am silenced. Now what?”
“Am I right about the shaman?”
“Yar. I noticed it right away. I didn’t mention it because you’re stupid, and not yet entirely healed. I assumed if I told you their shaman was gone, you’d want to charge in and fight.”
“Indeed I do,” the gunslinger said. “I am that stupid.”
“You’ll die.”
“It’s a decent day to die,” said Clint.
Edward magicked one of the remaining cans of apple brew from the sack and sent it flying into Clint’s groin.
“Say more macho things like that and I’ll keep throwing cans.”
“Come on, you grunt,” Clint growled. “You wanna live forever?”
Clint caught the next can before it struck him, opened it, and drank the full brew in one long swallow.
“One day I’ll find The Realm,” said Edward. “And it would be a shame to find it without you on my back just because you got a wild hair over a nice young girl you couldn’t save.”
“I can save her,” said Clint.
“And if you can’t?”
“Then I’ll prevent the torture she’ll fall to if we do nothing.”
“What torture?” said Edward.
“Do I have to paint you a picture?”
Edward kicked the sand. Clint crumpled the can and tossed it into the air. Edward magicked the can apart into its base elements, which then drifted down to the sand.
Clint said, “We have to go in while the shaman is gone.”
“Yar,” the unicorn agreed. “If we must attack, I suppose that now is the time.” He sighed. After weeks of pursuit, Clint wouldn’t let go. He’d either die on the Sands, or ride away with what used to be Cari and die another day. There was no third option.
Clint checked the rounds in his guns, then pushed fourteen additional bullets into two seven-shot speed loaders. He clipped the loaders to his belt, the bullets’ cones pointing out from his sides. Then he nodded, ready. The gunslinger hoped his skills were still sharp enough for something beyond shooting desert rocks.
They ascended the rise, side by side beneath a new pink-yellow magic shield. But when they reached the the top, Clint turned to Edward and said, “Drop the umbrella.”
“That’s stupid. At least wait until we’re close.”
“Drop it. Fogs my vision.”
“They’ll be able to see us.”
“That’s the idea.”
Edward dropped the umbrella and Clint’s vision cleared. He began walking, unhurried, down the hill.
As he got closer, he saw a tall dooner crossing from one hut to another with Cari, so he raised one of his guns and made him disappear. Thunder tore through the desert and rattled the gunslinger’s hand. The dooners leapt in collective fright, most probably never having heard the report of a gunslinger’s weapon before. For a moment, they all gaped.
Clint continued to march steadily down the hill. Two men emerged from huts and began running toward Cari, but their heads snapped to the side as they saw the other dooners looking toward the hill beside the camp. Their eyes fell on Clint as he swiveled around with both guns.
Two shots sent a pair of men falling into the sand. The sand seemed to swallow them, which was curious in itself. The dooners began to rally — standing, running, taking up stations. Some already carried bows. Others already carried spears, and others had rifles. Most carried nothing. These ran, one eye always on the two figures marching toward them, to fetch weapons.
“Weapon-bearers first,” Edward said from behind Clint.
Clint clicked off shots in a steady, unhurried rhythm as he walked: right-left-right-left-right. He fired about two shots per second, regular as a metronome. He needn’t have worried earlier about his unpracticed accuracy. Men fell before his guns as reliably as if the bullets were zooming along rails.
“The sand,” said Clint, watching as the fallen dooners slipped beneath it.
“I see it. I don’t know. Keep firing.”
A spear flew toward them. It exploded in a shower of sparks two feet from Clint’s chest. Arrows struck nothing and fell to dirt. Each time, Edward’s horn flashed. It grew harder for Edward to track all of the projectiles as dooners began to draw rifles, but the dooners fired common shells, and Clint was too far off and too thin to easily strike from a distance. Edward, who was much larger and much brighter, made an easier target. He was struck repeatedly (Clint counted one shot in his side, one in his neck, and two in his hocks), but he simply winced and then healed himself, painting the sand behind him with a trail of multicolored unicorn blood.
Clint fired right-left and then, without slowing, simultaneously flipped his wrists downward at his sides, his guns held sideways. The cylinders fell open. Clint tipped the guns up, spilling empty shells into the dirt, then pulled the guns toward his belt, pushing the open cylinders against the rounds protruding from the speed loaders clipped to his belt. Bullets slid smoothly into their chambers. Clint twisted each, disengaging the shells from the loaders, then flipped his wrists to true, snapping the cylinders back into place.
More dooners fired pistols and rifles. Edward watched the men — and, when he could, some of the slugs they fired — and told Clint when and how to move. Their energies were tangled in the mount-rider bond, so Edward didn’t have to speak out loud. It felt to Clint as if he simply wanted to move, and so he did. It wasn’t perfect. He was winged twice, though Edward magicked both wounds before they finally reached the huts.
“Duck behind this first row,” Edward said.
“No.” Clint shook his head, continuing forward, guns still drawn and pointing. “Give me spots.”
Edward sighed and seemed to concentrate. Two tiny red dots appeared on huts — one in front of Clint, and another to the left. Both were moving. Clint’s fingers twitched as his eyes found the dots, then sent twin reports into the noisy sky. Two gunslinger’s shells spun through wood and mortar, smashing through the huts as if they were nothing until they found their targets.
The second Clint fired, two more dots appeared in different places, on different huts.
More gunshots.
More red dots.
“You’re only giving me warriors with weapons, correct?” said Clint.
“There are no women and children in this camp, if that’s what you’re asking,” said Edward. “It’s as if they reproduce from the sand itself.”
Seven sets of dots came and went. Clint reloaded, still walking.
The gunslinger stopped, his back to a stone wall. He looked at Edward. “What’s happening with the sand? It’s firm enough to walk on, yet swallows the fallen”
“I’ve been thinking about that while keeping you alive,” said Edward. Even during the heat of a battle, Edward’s tone conveyed his burdened annoyance.
“And?”
“And I think you should double-time. Cari is ahead, just past this row
of shacks. I can feel her sorrow. Grab her, and we’ll go. I’ll explain later.”
Clint swung around the wall as three dooners appeared in the open. There were gunshots. The trio fell to the sand and were swallowed.
A moment later, Clint and Edward found themselves in the middle of an open area in the middle of the camp where the sand was especially active. The desert’s floor was vibrating, beginning to churn like a gigantic whirlpool.
“If you’re going to get her, you’d better run,” Edward said, nodding toward the churning sand. “But go around, not through the middle.”
But before Clint could move, the sand started to violently shake up and down, rotating and then rising in a small mound. The mound grew into a tower, then took on the shape of a massive head atop a long and twisted neck. A larger mound swelled below this and became a body, which then grew legs. Loose sand fell from crevices in the sand head and the sand neck, cascading the whole thing into sharper definition.
Scales. Eyes. A row of spikes along the top. Many, many teeth, and a tongue like a serpent.
And atop the back of the sand-thing was the dooner pack’s shaman chief, his spear held high and his eyes bleeding murder.
“Get on my back,” Edward commanded. “NOW.”
When Clint didn’t immediately comply, Edward magicked the gunslinger onto his back. Then he lowered his head, pushing his horn into the air as if against something solid. His horn began to glow red and spark lightly. The world faded to sepia, then quickly to nothing. A moment later, Edward stepped into a quiet area away from the battlefield, surrounded by dunes and rocks and without a dooner in sight.
Clint hopped to the sand, throwing daggers into Edward’s eyes.
Edward rasped, barely able to push words from his throat. “This changes everything,” he said.
CHAPTER TEN:
DARKNESS AND STY
Clint was in a rage, stomping back and forth in the sand, ranting until Edward trotted a few steps forward and rammed him to the ground. Clint looked up at the unicorn, shocked.