by Sean Platt
“Where is Cari?” said Edward.
“She’s in the middle of where they were sitting. Heavily drugged, in a sack. Luckily she’s been able to dream, giving us a trail to follow.”
They waited. The dragon was still where it had been below them, occasionally looking up but not yet moving.
“What’s it doing?”
Edward gave a small equine smile. “It’s leaking.”
Without warning, Edward charged forward, directly at the dragon. There were vast patches of glass in his way, so he leapt high in the air, skirting them with the precision of a dancer, and stopped halfway down the slope, a few feet from the dragon.
“You can’t kill one lousy unicorn?” Edward shouted at the dragon.
The dragon made a noise that sounded roughly like, “Meh.”
“Come on, you mighty beast!” His horn glowed and a yellow blast blew from its tip, striking the sand dragon’s side. A large section of sand was blown away, revealing nothing but empty space. The dragon’s side wasn’t black, and it wasn’t transparent. It was simply nothing, like a hole in reality.
Edward fired again, but this time the dragon parried, easily blocking it with a spell of its own. After it countered Edward, however, its giant dragon shoulders collapsed in a sigh. The hole in its side remained a void.
“Come on, is that all you have?” Edward taunted.
The dragon opened its mouth and fire came out of it, but this time, the fire only went a few feet.
Edward stepped back. The fire struck the sand below him, turning it obsidian black. Then, with one eye still on the sand dragon, Edward touched the black patch with his hoof. The glass was only a half-inch thick, and it snapped easily.
Edward fired another blast from his horn. It struck the dragon’s head, knocking another section of sand from the creature, as if Edward had hit it with a pressure washer. The new hole was just below where the shaman was sitting. The shaman looked down, aghast, and shouted something at the dragon.
The dragon twitched its head upward, as if snapping at the chief. The shaman was jostled, but kept his grip.
Edward fired again. And again.
The dragon belched fire at Edward and Clint one more time, but it was a pathetic attempt to save face. The fire fell as if heavy, striking ground near the dragon’s feet.
All at once, the sand that comprised the dragon’s body became weightless and hovered in the air. Then it started to fall as if something had been yanked out from under it — as if the dragon were a bubble, and that bubble had popped.
The shaman found himself seventy feet in the air, sitting on loose sand. He fell through the lower sky, twisting, before he landed in a clump. The remaining sand rained down around him, creating an outline of the dragon in mini-dunes. A massive black cloud rose from the falling shape; shifting, churning, and pooling like liquid, stretching tentacles into the air like an ink-black squid.
Then, impotent, the cloud dissipated like a drop of food coloring in a glass of water, and was gone.
“We won,” said Clint, his mouth hanging open.
“No,” said Edward. “But we didn’t lose.”
CHAPTER TWELVE:
BROKEN GUNS,
BROKEN SHACKLES
The shaman chief slowly returned to consciousness, his eyes confused. Clint cocked a pistol to help him become less confused.
The dooner shaman chief looked up, his eyes turning into saucers, and then scooted back in the sand, away from Clint and Edward, until his rear wedged against the leg of a fallen dooner. He started babbling in a long string of noises that didn’t sound like more than gas and gurgles escaping from his throat.
“Edward,” said Clint. “Translate.”
The unicorn approached the gunslinger and the shaman. His horn glowed briefly, and suddenly the shaman was speaking in Clint’s tongue.
“… didn’t know what I was doing! It came to me and I…”
Clint interrupted him.
“The girl you took. Is she alive?”
But Edward was already answering the question. Clint saw movement in the corner of his eye, then turned to watch as the girl was magically lifted out of the sack the dooners had been carrying her in.
“Yar,” Edward said, “she’s alive.”
“Her family isn’t,” said Clint, his attention returning to the dooner below him. There was a loud blast from the gunslinger’s pistol and a tiny fountain of sand erupted beside the shaman’s ear.
“Blood for blood!” yelled the shaman, holding his hands up. “You killt ours! We claimed vendetta!”
“We killt yours only after you attacked us,” said Clint. His pistol went off again, this time striking a small semicircle of sand in the hollow between the shaman’s chin and his shoulder.
Clint looked at the gun. “Why does it keep doing that?” he said. Then he pointed the gun at the shaman’s groin and added, “Hopefully it doesn’t do it again.”
The shaman tried to roll away, but once his body found motion he groaned sharply, grabbing his left arm.
“You hurt?” said Clint.
“Yar.”
“Good.”
Clint used his other hand to reach into a pouch on his holster. His hand returned with a toothpick. He nudged it between his teeth and started to chew, staring placidly down at the shaman, his gun aimed and unmoving.
After a few moments of silence, Edward spoke to the shaman.
“This creature you thought you commanded. What did it want of you?”
“It didn’t want anything,” said the chief. “I summoned it as a weapon.”
“A weapon that slowly devoured your people?”
“A weapon that was all I needed, with or without packmates.”
Edward made an impatient grunt. “Listen closely,” he said. “You didn’t summon it. It summoned you. It took the form of a dragon, but it wasn’t a dragon. Do you understand?”
The shaman said nothing, his expression stuck somewhere between disbelief and anger.
“It lied to you. It took the form of something you thought you understood, but it wasn’t that thing. It was darkness wrapped in sand, but it stayed topside too long in one shape, and it traveled too far. Once it was exhausted and out of magic, it abandoned its shape. It’s still out there, though you’ll never see it again.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll be dead,” Clint answered.
“I want to know where you were going,” said Edward. “Tell me that, and maybe we’ll let you go.”
“To make war with the East Edge dooners,” said the shaman.
“And why are you following a dark rider on a unicorn of a different color?”
The shaman looked confused. “I… I don’t…”
Edward turned to Clint. “He’s worthless,” he said.
Clint aimed his pistol higher.
“Wait!” said the shaman. “It wanted to steer us through Precipice. It didn’t talk, but I could hear it in my head. We don’t like towns; we prefer staying in the Sands. My will tried to steer it around Precipice, which is a more direct route to the East Edge and into our rivals’ pack, but the dragon resisted. Precipice! Maybe that’s what you seek. But I know nothing of this rider of whom you speak.”
“He’s ahead of you,” said Clint. “A half day at most.”
Edward was circling the clearing, gathering supplies from the fallen dooners and adding them to the saddlebags he’d reluctantly started wearing to handle their load. Clint turned to the unicorn for confirmation of Kold’s lead on the dooner tribe. Edward nodded.
“I know nothing of this rider,” repeated the shaman.
“Do you know how to rouse the girl?” said Clint, nodding toward where Edward had uncovered Cari’s sleeping form.
“She’s being given a smelling potion that causes sleep,” said the shaman. “As long as it stops being given, she’ll wake on her own within a day.”
“And when she awakes, what will you tell her about the murder of her family?”<
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“Sands Law!” shouted the shaman, obstinant. “Blood for blood! We were justified!”
“Your interpretation of the law concerning the murder of innocents is shaky, considering that the conflict was between your pack and mine, not theirs,” said Clint. “I should know. I’m a marshal.”
Clint drew several deep breaths, his gun centered on the shaman. Edward was still picking up supplies and had already magicked together a travois for Cari, to drag her until she awoke. Finally he walked over to Clint and said, “I have all of the food and water. There is nothing else of value here. We can go.”
The shaman looked up at the gunslinger. His arm was at a funny angle, and now that Clint looked down, so was his leg. Maybe both legs. He’d fallen quite a distance from the dragon’s back.
“What are you going to do with me?” the shaman asked.
“Arrest you, of course,” Clint told him. “Can you walk?”
“No,” said the shaman.
Clint reached deep into his bag and pulled out an ancient pair of shackles he’d had since years before Solace. They weren’t rusted and seemed to work fine. He locked one of the manacles around the shaman’s wrist, then the other around the dead dooner’s ankle beside him.
“Oops,” Clint said, looking at his own wrist as if expecting a second shackle. “I guess these are broken, too.”
Clint stood and climbed onto Edward’s back. Then the gunslinger, the unicorn, and girl on the travois rode up the next rise, following the pounding ache in Edward’s chest.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN:
PALAVER
The gunslinger, the unicorn, and the girl rode through the Sands, with nothing in front and nothing behind.
The next evening, when the sun started to set, they made camp. Cari already felt her strength returning, so she helped by breaking down the travois on which Edward had carried her until the dooner potion finally wore off. After waking, she’d ridden behind Clint, wrapping her hands around his slim, dusty waist. At first, her grip was weak and tentative, but after a few hours, it grew stronger and tighter.
When she felt a little better, she’d started to cry. Clint said nothing. Sometimes, tears needed husking, and until she asked for the gunslinger’s comfort, he’d let her shed them in private, onto the shirt covering the backs of his shoulders.
Eventually she stopped and they rode on, none among their trio eager to break what felt like a period of quiet meditation. The day offered no distractions. There was sand and there was more sand — and there was the unicorn’s pain, growing harder to bear with every passing mile.
Eventually, as the sun dipped below the horizon and the sky gathered an angry smear of red inside it, Edward told them that Kold had stopped. They walked slightly farther, until they could see the glow of the dark rider’s fire, then backed up a quarter mile, out of sight, so that they could build their own.
“I have something for you,” Clint said to the girl.
Cari looked up at him, the firelight running across her face like something liquid.
Clint reached behind his neck, untied the leather string beneath his shirt, and pulled out the polished half-knob that once adorned the door of Cari’s NextWorld shrine. He held it out to her, and Cari’s hand flew to her mouth as her eyes rimmed with tears. One spilled onto her cheek as she reached for the simple necklace with both hands.
“I watched them destroy it,” she said. “Now my people will wander forever.”
“Yar’m, they destroyed it” said Clint. “But there’s something you don’t know.”
Cari looked up at the gunslinger.
“Do you remember how your grappy kept asking me about The Realm and what was behind the wall, because I’m a Realm marshal?”
“Yar.”
“And do you remember what your father said to me over dinner that one night, about how there are wanderers in the Sands, here to shepherd the worthy to NextWorld?”
“Yar.”
“Remember the parts of the legends about how those wanderers from the magical cities are guardians? How not only would they act as guides, but as protecters… and, if necessary, as avengers? And how the judgment of the wanderers trumped the need for a shrine, since they could guide departed spirits to NextWorld?”
“Yar,” she said, nodding faster as a fresh tear fell onto her cheek.
“You will see your people there one day,” he said.
He rose from the fire’s perimeter, then laid beneath his blanket for sleep without waiting for Cari’s reaction. A marshal, no matter what crossed his mind, was never supposed to show weakness.
When Clint awoke at 3am with a full bladder and walked with gummy eyes to the edge of their campsite to do his business, he ran into something large and white.
Edward said, “Right on time.”
“Give me a minute,” said Clint, rubbing at his eyes.
Clint returned to Edward a minute later, sat on a rock, and waited to see what the unicorn wanted.
“We need to talk,” the unicorn said. “And what we need to discuss is not for her ears.”
“We can trust her,” said Clint.
“This isn’t for your ears either,” Edward said. “But I have no choice. You’re all I have.”
“Thanks.” Clint yawned, not at all awake.
Edward paced, tossing his head. “I’ve been trying to figure out why the sand dragon would go to so much trouble to partner with humans, and all I can figure is that it needed human hands to get into a place that it couldn’t reach, and to do things that a dragon’s hands, such as they are, can’t do. A place of doors and locks and shackles. A place where something might be locked away that the dragon would want, but that it wouldn’t be able to reach on its own.”
Clint nodded.
“I had ideas from the time we first encountered the dragon, but I dismissed them as fancy. But then, back at the magic sty, we saw that Kold and Cerberus were on the same path as the dooners. Then both parties left, headed in the same direction, neither aware of the other. Quite a coincidence, wouldn’t you say? They’re not together, so the only explanation is that they’re seeking the same thing. They are both headed to the same place, to get something that a sand dragon and a unicorn of a different color would need to achieve what they wanted.”
“Precipice?”
“The Holy City of Precipice, as it’s known amongst unicorns,” Edward said, nodding.
Clint shook his head. Precipice was the proverbial one-horse town. There was absolutely nothing interesting or special about it. It was smaller than Solace and Sojourn, and with less civilization. There was a bank and businesses and people, and from what he heard, there was little law and constant fighting. It wasn’t near gold or anything else of value. Why would unicorns consider it holy?
“What would they want in that dump?” said Clint.
Edward sighed as if weighing a difficult decision. Then, apparently reaching a reluctant conclusion, he answered.
“Dragons want to open faults and release darkness. Kold and Cerberus want to reach The Realm, but even once they reach it, they’ll have to breach the walls. Either task calls for an unthinkable source of black magic.”
“I don’t follow,” said Clint.
“Regardless of the discomfort I feel in my chest, we must charge on until we overtake Kold,” said Edward. “We have to reach him before he reaches Precipice — before he can find what I’m afraid he’s after.”
“What’s he after?” said Clint.
“I think Kold has discovered the resting place of the Orb of Malevolence,” said Edward.
Clint’s breath caught in his throat.
Somewhere in the darkest part of the Sands night, a coyote howled to mock them.
UNICORN
WESTERN 3
CHAPTER ONE:
THRESHOLD
Clint only fired on the Asian man wearing banker’s clothes and dark eye shades after he strutted forward, yelling in some garbled language, and failed to heed the gunslinger’s or
ders to retreat. The shot sounded like a cannon as a billow of faded red marshal’s gunsmoke belched from his seven-shot revolver. A bullet screamed into the yelling Asian man and he vanished with a puff.
“What is Gangnam style?” said Clint, perplexed.
The unicorn turned a disdainful blue eye toward the gunslinger. “What are you talking about?” he said.
“That easterner was yelling about style,” said Clint, gesturing to where the man used to be.
Edward looked, then turned back to Clint. His horn looked sharp and malevolent. The unicorn himself seemed deeply disinterested.
“There is no easterner.” He looked the gunslinger over, head to toe, taking in his dusty, road-weary desert-walker’s wardrobe. “No style, either.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve not seen him,” said Clint. “He’s been on the horizon for miles. Hiding behind cacti, and the wrecks of those flying machines.”
Something changed in Edward’s large equine eye. Clint would have called it a “softening” if he didn’t know Edward, and knew him to be mostly incapable of such. The unicorn stared out at the open expanse of sand, then at Clint, then again at the sand.
“Do you see wrecks of flying machines now?” he asked.
“Of course,” Clint said, pointing. “Are you blind?”
Edward looked, then turned to Clint. “Give me the map,” he said.
Clint rummaged through his pack, eager to make use of the map despite his annoyance at the unicorn’s obtuseness. After spending the previous year wandering the unstable lands near the Edge, the gunslinger was always happy to touch the map, to consult the map, or to even catch sight of the map when rummaging in his pack for pie or brew. The Edge had shifted constantly, changing and moving every time they turned around. That shifting had abated somewhat by the time they’d dropped the girl Cari off with her remaining kin in a Leisei settlement, and it had disappeared entirely several weeks after that. Where they were now — desolate and dusty as it was — was blessedly mappable. The simple luxury of traveling in an area that remained the shape it was supposed to be was deeply, soul-pleasingly satisfying.