by Sean Platt
Clint sat up on his elbows. His leg burned fire, but at least he could still move. “You wanted to get caught,” he said.
Stone nodded, almost apologetic. “Yar.”
“Because they’d take you to The Realm, for your trial.”
“That’s the size of it, Marshal.”
Gunther Jethro surveyed the scene, waiting for Stone to say more, to lead them, to give them a course of action. Clint found himself wondering if Jethro was a co-leader at all, or if Stone had headed the gang, fully, from the beginning.
“We’ve got to clean up these loose ends, boss,” said Jethro, nodding to Clint, Edward, and Buckaroo.
“Yar,” said Stone. He looked at the gunslinger, an apology on his face.
“So you are a criminal,” said Clint.
Stone nodded. “Yar, I am.”
Still looking down, Stone drew both of his shotguns. He pointed both at Clint, but then he swung them around, one to each side. One found the chest of each of the rope bandits. There was a belch of green fire, and both men evaporated in twin swirls of purple smoke.
He looked down at Clint.
“Can you walk?” he said.
It took a moment for Clint to say, “Yar, I can.”
“Then go to your partner. Wake him. And we’ll ride.”
CHAPTER TEN:
BLUSH COLORED TATTERS
Clint’s leg didn’t seem to be broken, but some of the bones in his left hand as well as a few ribs most certainly were. One felled hand bothered Clint more than two broken legs. Some of his tendons seemed to have snapped, and he found that he couldn’t move his thumb or grip a pistol.
Sly Stone was much better off. They didn’t visit anyone who could tell them for sure, but it appeared Stone was only bruised and cut after their tumble. Buckaroo, given the time and the space, easily unfolded himself and returned more or less to full function, except that he had a wrinkle in his front that would probably remain for the rest of his service lifetime. Once he’d buffed out what he could and had run several rounds of redundant checks on his processors, Buckaroo looked at the wrinkle and said that it was okay, since every Sands man should have a scar to show the world what he was made of.
Edward had taken the brunt of the injuries. He’d hit the clothesline at full gallop, and after stopping and spilling his riders, he’d rolled over and over and collided with a wall. He’d fractured his horn, so he’d insisted that Clint stow it in a saddlebag for sentimental reasons even though he was still addled and didn’t know what it was — except that it had once been a part of him. He’d risen from the rubble, covered in the reds and blues and yellows and purples of his own blood, thick with stiffness and in pain. He seemed to have somehow magicked his own flesh wounds without realizing how or why, but he didn’t understand the trick well enough to fix the rest of himself, or to fix Clint. None of his legs were broken, though, and he could walk. So he did.
The men and the machine didn’t try to ride the broken unicorn. They left Aurora Solstice on foot, directly through the town’s center, through a crowd of townspeople milling along Main. The townspeople’s eyes were hard to read. They no longer looked menacing, probably because Gunther Jethro and the rope gang were no longer a threat and could offer no reward. Still, they averted their eyes and watched as the party of four limped past. They didn’t menace them. Clint’s single drawn seven-shot pistol and Sly Stone’s magic shotguns convinced them that doing so would be a very bad idea.
Strangely — possibly because a thinking machine’s emotions were different from a man’s — Buckaroo seemed to hold absolutely no resentment toward Stone for what he’d done to his crew or the stitcher. Buckaroo, in fact, seemed to be coming into his own. As they marched out, he kept talking about the fact that as a damaged machine, he’d never be allowed to work on a Realm operation again. He was an appliance, nothing more. If he reported to his chief, the chief would scrap him and send in a new commissioner for stitching operations in the sector. And, said Buckaroo, he normally wouldn’t have been bothered by being scrapped. It was a machine’s duty to do its job until it was no longer needed, and then to shut down when its term of service ended. But for some reason, he no longer felt quite that compliant. He was no longer identical to the other commissioners. Now he was marked. He was no longer just a metal man. Now he was the metal man with the scar — the scar he’d gotten when his sir and his sire had led him into battle, where he played his part proper.
Under Buckaroo’s direction, they left Aurora Solstice and walked out into the Sands. Their course was hard to reckon and Buckaroo knew little of absolute locations that would make sense to Clint (The Realm didn’t care about town names; they gave all locations outside The Realm as coordinates), but Clint looked at the sun and traced their path backward through his mind: Aurora Solstice, to Nazareth Shiloh and its rumors of chili, to the outskirts where they’d first encountered Stone and his former gang attacking the stitcher. He determined that wherever it was that Buckaroo wanted to take them — to the next shimmer for sure, but he couldn’t explain where or when because too much was in flux — it was all the same to him.
In the end, they found themselves headed in the same direction that he and Edward been heading before the incident at the stitcher. They would travel through the Lakes O Plenty. They would cross into Elf Meadows. Then it would be just like they’d never left their path, slowly closing in on Dharma Kold. Kold would have gotten a much larger head start by now, but at least it all kind of made sense and wouldn’t be subject to shifting. Kold would cross into stable lands. They would follow. Perhaps Kold would find the third Orb before they reached him and perhaps he wouldn’t. The consequences of Kold reaching it first were unthinkable, but Clint was all thought out. Whatever would happen would happen. He was hurt. Edward was hurt. He simply couldn’t expel the energy needed to think on it. And for the time being — despite the fact that the fate of the world might well hang on what happened next — he simply didn’t care.
After about a week of wandering and hurting and not knowing where they were going (“I simply don’t know yet, sir, but it’s in this direction,” Buckaroo replied politely every time he was asked), Edward finally began to have growing moments of lucidity. Neither Stone nor Buckaroo could offer advice, but this seemed like a good thing to Clint. The windows of “true Edward” grew larger and longer. During one, Edward wondered why he was in pain, and then immediately healed himself — starting by restoring his horn. He cleaned himself, magically whisking away his multicolored blood. And when he was as pure and white and whole as he’d ever been, he did what he normally would have done immediately, healing Clint’s hand and ribs.
Being healed was, for Clint, like finally coming up for air after a long time holding his breath underwater. His left hand was finally able to move, and so he drew, reholstered, drew, reholstered. He fired his gun, because nobody other than their party was around to see or hear. He thanked Edward, but the unicorn just whinnied and nibbled at the leaves of a small, pathetic tree because he’d already reverted. It was a start. Clint was willing to wait.
Within another few days, Edward became more and more himself. He noticed, for the first time, that Sly Stone was apparently a permanent member of their party and berated Clint, demanding the entire story. Clint told him. Edward made some remark about how one human was the same as the next to him, and scoffed, saying that both Clint and Sly were incredibly ugly. Clint smiled. He couldn’t help it.
They passed through town after town. They ate turkey pie. They drank apple brew. They trusted no one, and always made camp far out, blocked from naked eye and spyglass alike. The lands remained dusty and dry but the skies grew more stable and less ominous. The shifting stopped. Yet still they walked, and still Buckaroo could not tell them where the next shimmer was. “I simply don’t know yet, sir, but it’s in this direction,” he’d say.
Because he was a machine, he’d answer in the exact same way, using the exact same words, every time. It became a joke between C
lint and Stone. Clint would ask where Stone had stored the spyglass because he needed it. And Stone would reply, in a down-home, syrupy accent, “I simply don’t know yet, sir, but it’s in this direction.” Buckaroo would only smile in the small way a thinking machine could smile, because he didn’t understand that the joke was on him.
Clint began to suspect that Buckaroo didn’t know where the next shimmer was because there were none. But Buckaroo didn’t know. There had always been a shimmer, because he’d always commissioned a stitcher rig and a crew. Now he was a rogue. The idea that new shimmers might no longer open or respond to his calculations was beyond him. Clint asked, trying to provoke him into new ways of thinking. Buckaroo didn’t evade the question, but was unable to answer. It wasn’t in his programming.
Fifteen days out from Aurora Solstice, they came to a small, ramshackle lean-to amidst a clutch of cacti. It had the look of a waystation constructed for travelers and used when needed, but long ago forgotten. The thing was barely large enough for two men to sleep, but it had its own little well. It was too small to use as shelter for their party, but Clint took it as a sign that they were on the right path.
There was a hag inside the lean-to when they passed it. The hag radiated a magic presence that Edward, who was nearly back to normal, could sense. Magic sought magic, Edward explained, and along the correct path, they were sure to run across many seers and fortune tellers.
The woman in the lean-to was deeply wrinkled and appeared to be a thousand years old. She wore an ancient dress that was once probably bright pink but was now nothing but blush colored tatters. She smelled like death. When she looked up at Clint, he saw that one of her eyes was either sealed shut or had gone missing. Her lips were wilted like dead leaves. A dry, rasping noise croaked from her throat as she breathed.
Edward, eager to follow the magic and always looking for Kold’s trail, walked over to the crone. Clint and Stone stayed back, half out of respect and half because the old woman’s decayed appearance frightened them in a way neither would admit, but that each could see in the other’s eyes. Edward spoke to her for a moment, then walked back to the men and the machine.
“Fashion a travois,” said the unicorn. “She’s coming with us.”
Stone looked at Clint. Clint looked at Stone.
“Do it,” said Edward. There was something in his voice that Clint couldn’t quite grasp. It was almost fear. It was almost compassion. It was almost desperation.
Stone looked at Clint, Clint looked at Stone, and both looked at the unicorn.
“Why?” said Clint.
“Because, gunslinger,” said Edward, “we haven’t seen the woman in that lean-to for over four years. She’s sick, she’s hungry, and she won’t last long — and such that we can give it, she needs our help.”
Clint felt his mouth come open. He didn’t move, despite the unicorn’s stare.
“Do it,” Edward repeated. “You near hitched your gunslinger’s heart to her once, almost promised your fealty through sickness and health. Here’s your chance to prove it, to prove whether there’s still a man left inside the marshal.”
The gunslinger fell to his knees in the dust.
Blood coursed from his human heart to his deadly hands.
Mai.
UNICORN
WESTERN 5
CHAPTER ONE:
BONES OF AN AMBUSH
The woman on the travois was fragile, beyond frail. She was a doll made of thin porcelain — or spun from spiderwebs, given her apparent age — and the trail’s every bump and jostle had the gunslinger worried that she would crumble to pieces and spill her innards like dried detritus to the wind.
When they’d discovered Mai in the roadside shack, she’d seemed old, at least at first. She looked like a hag — a witch roughened and aged by a life spent stirring potions in pewter cauldrons. But when they brought her to the travois that would drag behind Edward (the unicorn, unlike Stone and Buckaroo’s horses, could cushion her passage somewhat with a sort of magical pillow), they found that she was more than old. Mai was used, barely a husk. Carrying her was like lifting a scarecrow made of dust. Even with his hands beneath her, Clint worried that Mai might break, and that the woman he’d traveled the Sands for four long years to find would be gone and lost forever.
After weeks of riding, the fields of pure sand around them began to surrender to plains of tumbleweed, but the change of scene did not break the monotony. The posse rode mostly in silence. Clint thought back on the Mai he’d known, and the life with her he’d pondered while inspecting himself in the farback of Solace’s saloon on their hitching day. The Mai who, back then, he’d thought of as imperturbable. Women of the Sands were like the men — dried like raisins. But Mai was different and always had been. Her skin had always looked glowing and water-fat even during the driest of days. No lines on her face, nor a scar on her hands. Rough Sands living hadn’t impacted Mai in the way it had impacted everyone else. She looked radiant enough to grace the cover of one of The Realm’s glossy books, her smile rich and white, comforting like a crackling fire. Mai had always sought the best in everyone — even a particularly grizzled and pessimistic gunslinger — and had found it. That optimism left its mark on Mai like a dimple. She looked like what she expected in all others: radiant.
The woman on the travois was none of that. The frail woman was so diametrically opposite the Mai Clint once knew that at times, when he looked back on the thing that didn’t have the strength to moan as its body boiled in inhuman pain, he refused to believe it was the same woman he’d been so near to hitching. But it was. He knew it. Could feel it in his bones just as Edward felt it everywhere.
The first time Clint realized what Cerberus, Dharma Kold’s unicorn of a different color, was doing to Mai, the unicorn warned him they might never get her back. He hadn’t meant that they’d never literally get her back, but that she might never again be the same as she was. She might be irreparably damaged, as she now seemed to be.
Edward was doing all he could to stabilize Mai. A shimmer of light blue energy flowed back from his horn, surrounding the unicorn’s rear half, Clint’s lower half, and the travois. Clint asked if the energy was healing her. Edward said it wasn’t quite healing. More like propping her up.
“Nothing can repair the damage from such a deep soul-plunging as Cerberus has done to your Mai,” he said. “All I can do is to keep her from getting worse, and hope she’ll find a way to repair herself.”
Clint sighed. The end of Edward’s sentence, once upon a time, might have heartened the gunslinger and given him hope, but he had seen little to make him believe in hope since leaving Solace to chase Kold through the Sands and recover his captured almost-bride. The trail had brought him little but heartache. Every task seemed to finish in a way that left him with a new and larger wound.
Nonetheless, he asked: “Will she repair herself?”
The unicorn sighed. “Nar. Kold has drained her very essence. Do you understand that?”
Clint nodded, knowing Edward wouldn’t see him while he rode atop the unicorn’s back.
“Mayhap her soul will grow stronger now that she’s free of Cerberus’s work,” Clint said, not believing his words true even as he heard himself say them.
Edward stopped. For a few hoofbeats, Sly Stone and Buckaroo’s horses kept walking, until the riders noticed the pause and reined their mounts into a halting. The unicorn turned his great white head.
“Clint Augustus Gulliver,” he said, looking at Clint sidelong, his voice shockingly compassionate. “Noble Marshal of the Realm. Gunslinger. You must understand a soul cannot be regrown. If you don’t come to grips with that now, your pain will only be greater once it sinks in, and then two souls will be gone. Kold carried Mai because…”
“Because she carried the Orb of Benevolence,” said Clint, looking at the dirt. “I know.”
“Nar. Because she was the Orb of Benevolence. You wondered how she could know her way to The Realm without knowing she knew? This
is how. The Orb knows magic. Magic knows The Realm. Magic can see through the shifting; it can focus the myriad worlds our one world has become and perceive them as them whole again. It can draw a straight line where there is no straight line. Mai didn’t know her true nature except that she had magic to some degree. Now we know to what degree — she was magic. Magic incarnate. And if Kold has removed the Orb, he has removed all that she was. There’s nothing left in this woman to grow stronger. Nothing in her to regenerate. Kold has scooped her empty like a gourd.”
“But you said you felt magic,” said Clint.
Edward again looked at the trail ahead, at the fields of dead grass and brown shrubs peppering the open desert.
“Magic is in her skin and bones,” he said. “But Kold has taken the Orb. There is still magic in her, yar. And life. But there is no Mai in her anymore. Her body may yet recover, which is why we’ve taken her. We owe her that much, given what we’ve been party to putting her through. But she will not be the woman you knew. She will be ordinary, and nar will she know or love you. She will no longer stand out, and will appear to all as perfectly plain.”
Clint said nothing. Edward started walking, moving past the other horses. The riders nudged their mounts to follow the unicorn, both the criminal and the thinking machine knowing better than to speak.
Clint turned his thought to Mai’s body, hoping it would recover, offering up a plea to NextWorld. It was a pointless hope. It was vain, with no fruit on its tree. But that small hope, such little of it as remained, was like glue for the gunslinger’s soul. Without hope for Mai, Clint would crumble to the dirt, dry up, and blow away. Through four long years, they had ridden with only a glimmer of hope that they might catch Kold and rescue the woman Clint nearly hitched. But it had, nonetheless, been hope. If that hope was gone — if Mai true was dead forever — then what reason would remain for riding on?