by Sean Platt
Clint had left a note for Willick inside the envelope of cash that briefly explained what he aimed to do with the day. It wasn’t much of a departure from the plan they had laid after first meeting him; details and times had simply been added. And so when they arrived, the pastor was already prepared. In one hand he held an oversized shotgun that was almost as long as Willick was tall. In the other was a sledgehammer.
“What we’re after has managed to remain hidden for time eternal,” Willick explained, hefting the sledgehammer. “I can assure you, we’ll need to smash something to get at it.”
“True,” said Edward, “but I have five implements that are much more powerful.” He stomped his hooves. His horn glowed.
Willick shrugged and set the sledgehammer inside the door of the church beside a long brass candle snuffer. The two implements looked odd together, and Clint wondered if that was where the hammer had always been stored. He got a sudden mental image of the stocky priest lighting candles during a church service, then pulverizing a watermelon like an ancient Realm funnyman whose name he couldn’t recall.
“And that?” said Clint, gesturing toward the shotgun.
“For leftover bandits,” said Willick. “I’ve lived in Precipice long enough without raising a finger. Maybe there’s a bit of Jarmusch in me after all.”
“Wouldn’t you prefer something smaller?” the gunslinger asked, referring to the gun.
“Precipice is plenty small,” said Willick, referring to the town.
Clint shrugged. If the parson wanted to lug an eylifant gun on their errand, it was none of his affair to say otherwise.
Once Willick had closed and locked the church doors, the two men prepared to climb onto Edward’s back. The parson, however, was too small to climb up by himself, so Edward magicked him up. Then, to spare Willick his dignity, he magicked Clint on as well, as if this were the normal way things were done. Then the unicorn ran.
It took ten minutes to reach the Rancho Encantato. It bothered Clint to spend the minutes (they didn’t have long before the parties at the mine saw the ruse and returned, probably with Kold and Cerberus), but Edward was far too spent to attempt another fold. When they arrived, a single bandit dressed in cliche black ran out and fired at them. Clint returned fire and the man fell quickly. After that, the ranch was theirs.
They searched the house first, but it quickly became obvious they were wasting time. The Dylan gang had lived in the house for years, and every room and facility had been used in full. The house also had a human feel to it, and Edward assured them that those who had hidden the Orb would have given it more dignity. That was the word he used: dignity. Clint, who had been a human all his days, repressed an urge to reply to the unicorn’s oft-implied suggestion that “human” and “dignity” were downright opposite.
Edward, who couldn’t enter the house unless he blew out its walls (something he’d suggested but that Clint had vetoed) stood outside yelling commands. As he did, Clint found himself recalling what Edward had said about the sand dragon during a middle-of-the-night palaver just prior to entering the Dinosaur Missouri:
It needs human hands to get into a place that it can’t reach, and to do things that a dragon’s hands 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.
And suddenly, as they searched the house, Clint realized that they — the two human men — were Edward’s hands.
Dragons and unicorns.
Darkness and light.
Dharma Kold and Clint.
Cerberus the ebony and Edward the ivory.
The dragon had required the dooner shaman… but so had Edward required Clint — both in the short term and for the duration of their partnership through life.
It was all very Yin and Yang. There were always two sides to everything.
“Come out!” Edward shouted through a window. Then in a lower voice when he saw Clint approach: “It’s not in there, which I more or less knew from the start.”
“What about the basement?” Clint asked.
“It’s not in there, I said.”
“Then why did we waste time searching the house at all?”
“It’s taking me a while to tune in,” said Edward. “This is ancient magic. Now that we’re here, I can feel it and think I might be able to home in on it, but when we first arrived, I was flying blind.”
Clint and Willick emerged from the house moments later. Edward tossed his head toward the rancho’s rear. “Come on,” he said. “I think it’s this way.”
Edward began walking with his nose to the ground as if sniffing, but it seemed like he was actually leading with his horn. As he marched forward, its tip, pointed directly forward, pulsed like a heartbeat in deep maroon. The color of blood.
“You’re going to lead us directly to it, aren’t you?” said Willick.
“Yar. So it seems.”
“So how has the Orb remained hidden so long?”
Edward stopped and briefly considered Willick. It was the first time the parson had said the word “Orb,” thus revealing he knew more of the lore than Edward had thought. Clint watched the short, bald priest and the unicorn as they looked at each other. With each of them in bright white, they looked like malformed twins.
Finally, Edward seemed to reach a decision about Willick. “Because it wanted to stay hidden,” he said.
“And now it wants to be found?”
Clint winced. The wincing was instinctual. When Clint asked Edward questions, he was answered with scorn, denial, and sarcasm. But Edward seemed to have decided on a short-term species of respect for the parson, so he answered him straight.
“I guess it’s more correct to say that we unicorns didn’t want to find it,” said Edward. Then, when he saw the perplexed look on Willick’s face, he went on: “No offense, but you can’t understand unicorns because you are a human. Humans could never keep a secret that any human was capable of knowing, but we can. Any white unicorn, unclouded by dark magic, could have come to this place and found the Orb. But only now, for the greater good, has one decided to look.”
“I can’t believe that,” said Willick.
“You don’t have to believe it,” said Edward. “But it’s true.”
He led them through a pasture, past the barn that had housed Dylan’s horses, over a fence (Clint climbed it, but Edward simply obliterated it when it was his turn), and into an untamed area that had probably once been rolling acreage for livestock. The notion that the magic royalty of this place had kept actual livestock beyond a gaggle of turkeys was absurd, but the evidence was in the barn.
“How can ‘pure’ unicorns be so in-tune with such a dark object, while black unicorns like the one ridden by the dark rider be unable to sense it?” said Willick. “I mean, you speak like it’s a unicorn artifact, which would make it pure, but the thing is called ‘The Orb of Malevolence.’ ”
“Nothing is quite that simple,” said Edward.
Clint smirked. It was as obtuse an answer as the unicorn would have given to him. The parson, however, was undaunted.
“What do you mean?”
“What is in your hands, Parson?”
Willick looked down. “A rifle.”
“Could you use it to obtain meat for your family to eat?”
“If I had a family, yar.”
“Could you use it to kill a good man who has done you no harm?”
“A bad man could do that, yar.”
“There you go,” said Edward.
Minutes passed. They parted tall grass, passed an outer fence, and began walking along a short but steep hillside. As they walked further, the hill’s grassy side crumbled to rock and they found themselves with a sheared-off section of land to their right, as if Providence had cleaved the hill down the center to expose its granite center. Eventually, Edward stopped where a sheer expanse of rock was embedded in the hill. It seemed a massive boulder had falle
n to the ground from the sky, and that the hill on either side had grown out away from it.
The rock was perfectly flat, like a wall in a throughway between two of The Realm’s massive buildings of stone and metal. A huge mural covered every inch of its surface. To the left side of the mural was the head of a tiger, its mouth open, its sharp white teeth frozen in a snarl. To the right was a wizard wearing blue robes. A pointed hat was atop the wizard’s head, and both of his hands faced forward, palms up. One hand held a crystal ball. The other fired a lightning bolt. Between the wizard and the tiger’s head was a lithe woman in a two-piece garment that exposed her stomach and long legs. This woman wore black boots with very long, spiked heels and was holding something in her hand that looked kind of like a pistol except that it appeared more plastic than metal and had lights painted all over its curvy surface. The word ZAP! was written near the barrel of the weapon in a pointy yellow starburst.
“I was wrong,” said Edward, looking at the mural with disgust. “Apparently unicorns couldn’t be trusted to keep away from the Orb. So the ancient ones created this painting to drive them away.”
“I like it,” said Clint, admiring the woman’s firearm.
“You would,” said Edward.
Willick was about to weigh in with his opinion when there was a huge sound in the distance that shook the ground under their feet and caused a scree of pebbles to fall from the top of the fresco painted on the rock. It was a deep, hollow booming of massive proportions — the sound of a small world ending.
“Look,” said Willick. He was pointing toward the horizon, the sleeve of his long white robe dangling below his arm like a flag. Clint didn’t need to follow Willick’s finger to know where the sound had come from. He’d seen the flash of orange out of the corner of his eye and now saw black, acrid smoke rising from the same spot in the distant hills.
“Dynamite,” the parson explained. “They don’t use it often these days, but there’s plenty still out there, and it makes a noise you don’t forget. Judging by the color of the smoke, I’d say that boom ignited — or was ignited by — a few barrels of oil.”
“Is that the direction of the mine where the dark rider was searching for the Orb?” asked Clint, who’d lost his bearings.
Willick nodded.
“Then I’d say our ruse was discovered,” said Clint.
“What do we do now?” asked Willick.
Edward turned to face the mural on the rock. “We hurry.”
CHAPTER TEN:
THE UNDERGROUND CATHEDRAL
They were in a long, wide tunnel covered in blue and white tile. Except for a few weak spark lights in curious metal cages overhead, the tunnel’s length was devoid of illumination as they descended the slow downward slope. It was like burrowing into the center of the world. Everything echoed — including the light, which bounced off the brilliant tiles like a firefly’s glow. They moved quickly. After the explosion, Clint theorized that one of the warring parties at the mine must have blown its entrance, and the clock running against them would now be ticking.
He could even see those distant events unfold in his head:
Kold is inside the mine with Cerberus. Jarmusch’s group arrives first and storms down the mine’s dark throat to find Dylan’s men, who they believe are already inside. Dylan arrives and ignites the dynamite. The rock collapses. Kold and Cerberus, who can fold space, escape. Shots and magic are exchanged. Those who aren’t trapped or killed realize they’ve been set against each other and that the Orb has not been found. They realize that the stranger with the fast hands hasn’t shown. And the jig, such as it was, is up.
It was only a matter of time before survivors returned, furious like a nest of rattled wasps. If Kold still lived — which he almost certainly did — the situation would become bad quickly. Kold would assume that Clint had lured the others away because he or Edward had found what they all sought. Kold and Cerberus could close the distance from the mine in seconds, and if they did, the gunslinger, the unicorn, and the parson would find themselves outgunned and trapped, like flies in a bottle.
The painted fresco of the tiger, woman, and wizard had concealed an underground chamber. Edward had said that he could feel it, and that he could feel the Orb inside.
“Blow it,” Clint had said in a nervous voice, nodding at the mural.
“I’d blow it even if there was nothing behind it,” Edward had replied, lowering his head and giving the wall a small tap with his horn. The rock face exploded inward, rumbling down the tunnel in an avalanche of rocks no larger than a man’s fist.
That was ten minutes ago. They’d been moving downward since, with no end in sight. The only difference between the way they’d come and the way they were going was the slope under their feet.
The tunnel was floored with smooth, gray rock that had a gritty surface that made their footing sure and easy. It looked artificial. Edward’s hooves clicked when they struck it, and the sound bounced off of the walls and surrounded them like cicadas in chatter. The walls curved up from the floor until they met overhead, turning the entire tunnel into a near perfect semicircle.
Willick kept walking to the tunnel’s edge and touching the tiles, marveling at how they gleamed so brightly considering their age and the fact that they’d almost certainly never been polished. He wondered aloud whether the tiles actually repelled dirt through an ancient magic. The wondering was probably meant for Edward’s ears, but Edward seemed lost in thought.
They followed the tunnel down, down, down. It made Clint nervous to watch daylight disappear from overhead. He wanted one of them to stand watch at the entrance in case their enemies returned, found the Rancho purged, and followed their trail back through the fields. Edward told him that leaving someone behind was a stupid idea. They didn’t know what they faced, and each of the three in their party were needed. Edward understood the magic that had created the place and guarded the Orb. Clint was needed to protect their backs, wherever their backs might wander once underground. And Willick (setting aside the fact that he’d make a terrible guard, which Edward was at least kind enough not to mention) was there because he knew Precipice and its history, knew of the people who’d once lived at the rancho, and knew the characters comprising both warring posses Clint and Edward had sent to the mine.
Once fully underground, the downward-sloping tunnel evened out and they continued walking horizontally, now seemingly headed back toward the rancho. The frequency of the spark lights — and, thankfully, their brightness — increased, allowing the trio to see their surroundings better. There were framed placards on the wall, and the placards were so lifelike that at first Clint feared they were real people, or enchanted windows. One showed five scantily-clad women with garish clothing and worse hair frozen in the act of jumping. Across the top was the legend THEY DON’T JUST SING. Below this, in a black oval: SPICEWORLD. Along the bottom, taking up nearly half the placard, were the words THE MOVIE. Another placard was black and displayed only a strange text character Willick identified as a letter in a distant tongue called pie. Below this were the words FAITH IN CHAOS. Clint objected that the strange letter wasn’t pie at all, but the mention of pie made him hungry, and he had to resist the urge to dig into his pack.
Every once in a while, their path branched off into other paths and chambers. Clint attempted to peek into these, but they were all entirely dark. The sounds of rushing air and, sometimes, a distant and great engine-like roar, came from the darkness. The sounds were disturbing, and soon all three of the travelers stopped inspecting side chambers and simply kept walking along the straight path through the center, which the makers had clearly meant to be the main one.
“Do you still feel the Orb?” Clint asked Edward. Three rats scampered over his toes, seemingly unafraid of the gunslinger’s tromping feet.
“Yar. Its presence here is suffocating.”
“Are you okay?” asked Willick.
“It’s suffocating like the air in your face when you run very, very f
ast,” said Edward. “Suffocating in a way that isn’t unpleasant — as if you can’t breathe, but for some reason, you don’t mind.”
Clint, who’d ridden atop many a galloping horse and exactly one unicorn, knew the feeling.
Barely a minute later, just as the gunslinger was about to remind Edward that it wouldn’t take the mine stragglers long to find them and that they needed to set awe aside in favor of hurry, the long tunnel and its odd, whooshing side chambers opened into a massive room with a high ceiling. The ceiling was so high, in fact, that Clint could barely see its top. He looked up for a while, trying to see the roof of the cathedral-like chamber, but eventually he looked down because it was raining in the room, and the grit from his face was running into his eyes.
“How far did we go down?” asked Willick, also looking up.
“At least that far,” said Edward, jerking his head toward the ceiling. “I’d guess we’re back under the house. That’s why I felt it so strongly when we first came here. It was right under us.”
“So we should have checked the basement,” said Clint.
“I don’t think so,” said Edward. “This is a magic place. I’d wager if you dug straight down under the house, you’d find nothing but dirt.”
“But you said we were under the house right now.”
“Yar,” said Edward. “We are.”
Clint waited for further explanation, but as usual, the unicorn offered none.
Edward strolled away from the two humans and across a small but sturdy bridge that crossed a small, natural river running through the cavern in which the massive cathedral-like structure was housed. The bridge was wide, just like the tunnel. It was as if the place had been made for unicorns.
In the center of the room was a massive stone dais. Atop the dais was a cage with an elaborate latch on its front. It seemed as if it closed and opened with no key required. In the center of the cage was a simple stone cup. The cup appeared to be empty.
Edward and Willick, side by side, walked to a small altar near the dais. There was a large, ancient book open atop the altar. Edward was gazing down at it and Willick, who was too short to easily see the top of the altar, was attempting to gaze up. Finally he found a rock, stood on it, and looked at the book’s pages.