by Sean Platt
“It’s called a what?” Clint said. He heard his own voice as gravelly and low. It also sounded farther away than it should be, like an echo.
Edward mumbled, “A ‘fancy parallel.’ ”
“Everything you do is fancy,” said Clint. Then he raised his hand to point. In front of him, the man with the long, lined face raised his own hand, also pointing.
“Look, he sees us,” said Clint, his own voice somehow coming out of the man he saw in front of him. “Wow, this is weird.”
“You’ll get used to it,” said Edward.
“Wait, that’s not right,” said Clint. “It’s not ‘weird.’ It’s fancy.”
Edward grunted with irritation. “Let’s get started.”
“Hang on,” said Clint. “If we’re going to be fancy, let me get my tea.” He used two fingers to grasp a tiny imaginary ceramic cup, extending his pinky. He feigned drinking tea. In front of him, the man with the long face (and the surprisingly large hands with surprisingly long fingers) did the same thing.
“Do you want to get into town or not?” Edward huffed.
But Clint wasn’t listening. He was too fascinated by whatever Edward was doing to him. He raised his arms, made odd gestures and faces, stood and turned around, and waved a hand in front of his eyes. In front of him, the man he was looking at did all of the same things. Then Clint closed his eyes, and watched as the man in front of him closed his eyes. But even after Clint felt his own eyes close, he could still see. Specifically, he could see the man with the long face sitting across from him with his eyes closed. But it was too strange. Clint shot his eyes open again, and when he did, his vision didn’t change.
“You still in there, Pompi?” Edward said.
“Pompi here,” the giant replied. Pompi’s voice sounded incredibly loud. Clint could hear it boom inside his own head like thunder.
“And what do you see, Pompi?”
“Pompi sees Mister Clint. Being funny.”
“Do you see me?” the unicorn asked.
“Yar,” said Pompi
“What about you, Clint?”
“I see you,” the gunslinger answered.
“Pompi,” said Edward, “hold your head still. Clint, close your eyes.”
Clint closed his eyes. As had happened the last time he’d closed his eyes, he continued to see just fine. He saw Edward and the long-faced man — the man he was still having a hard time believing was himself. He watched as Edward backed up until he was no longer visible. Then the unicorn said, “Can you see me?”
“Nar,” Clint said.
“Pompi?”
“Nar,” said the giant.
“Tell me when you can see me,” Edward instructed. Then Clint began to hear the unicorn take one step forward at a time.
“Pompi sees you, Mister Edward,” said Pompi.
“Clint?” said Edward.
“Nar. I can’t see you.”
Edward took another step. Then another. Then another.
“Anything yet?” the unicorn said.
“Nar.”
Clint heard Edward take a fourth step, then a fifth. Finally he saw the tip of something bright white appear at the left side of his field of vision.
“Okay,” Clint said. “Now I can see your nose.”
Edward came fully into frame and looked at the gunslinger, but Clint actually saw Edward look at the long-faced man rather than back into the eyes he was now using — Pompi’s eyes.
“Giants’ eyes are much larger than humans’, so your brain is not used to processing the extra information,” Edward explained. “At a distance of twenty feet, you seem to have lost about two feet of peripheral vision all the way around, so you’re only seeing the center of the full picture. Something to keep in mind.” The unicorn turned to look at Pompi. “Pompi, try to look directly at what you want us to see. Clint won’t see it if it’s near the edges.”
“Okay.”
“What about you?” said Clint, looking at Edward. It was odd not only to hear his own gravelly voice (did he really sound like that?), but to hear it from so far away. Usually it was right there in his head.
“I could see myself when Pompi could. I can assimilate all of the information.”
“Great.” Another reminder of how unicorns were better than humans. That was all Clint wanted, especially now that Edward was withholding information he needed and acting belligerent about their mission. “And what if bandits come by while we’re out here sitting on the rocks with our own eyes and ears turned off?”
“I see and hear both sets of senses — Pompi’s and my own,” the unicorn said.
Clint rolled his eyes, but because he was seeing through the eyes of the giant, the movement was awkward. Pompi was too far from Clint to determine if he’d successfully rolled his eyes. It was unsettling to roll his eyes and not have his vision roll with them.
“One other thing,” Edward added. “Pompi can hear me in his head. But because it’s entirely too tricky to establish a connection with you too — giving you his sight and vision are taxing enough, but I’d say it’s necessary — you won’t hear me when I speak to Pompi. You’re an observer, nothing more. Understand?”
“Yar.”
Edward explained that it would be like watching a flicker talkie back in The Realm, sitting in a dark room and seeing sights and sounds that had been recorded by someone else. Clint reminded Edward that he remembered almost nothing of his time in The Realm. Edward reminded Clint that he didn’t remember much either but asked how he could forget flickers.
“Stop talking to me, Edward. Talk to Pompi. This is so disorienting.”
“You will sit and watch. I will be talking to Pompi inside of his head, telling him where to go and what to say. Like this, Pompi.” He apparently said something to Pompi, inside his mind so only the giant could hear.
“P.T. Anderson,” Pompi said out loud.
“That was a joke,” Edward said. “I didn’t think you’d ever been to The Realm.”
“They show flickers in Meadowlands. Sometimes outside at night, so the giants can see too.”
“Don’t try to reply to me once you’re in town,” Edward said. “I can’t hear thoughts without trying, and I refuse to try. I don’t want you speaking to me out loud. Just listen and do. Then come back when I say. Understand?”
“Pompi understands.”
Pompi entered town, walking down the long and shallow rolling grass hills into the outskirts.
It took Clint a while to adjust to the viewpoint since Pompi’s eyesight showed him as standing so much taller than normal. Then he realized that the viewpoint wasn’t all that different from riding atop Edward’s back, so he forced himself to ignore the clumsy two-step of Pompi’s walking and mentally superimposed Edward’s four-beat walk instead. With that adjustment, things seemed more normal. As he sat on the rock in the prairie, Clint couldn’t feel the vibration coming through Pompi’s legs as he walked (or what Edward telegraphed up into his crotch as they rode) but could instead feel his own human hands on his human legs, but as long as he didn’t move his human body much and pretended he’d gone numb, Clint found he could fall into the role as if he were right there with Pompi.
He/Pompi entered the newer section of Meadowlands (an area Pompi had called NewTown) and walked down a street covered in a flat, perfectly smooth surface that was a bit like rock. He stepped up onto a slightly higher surface covered in the same rocklike finish (one of the paths Pompi had called a “sidewalk” earlier), now closer to the glass and alloy buildings. It was like walking along the boardwalk in a Sands town, but Clint wanted to see the entire area. He wished he could tell Pompi to look around, and wished he could urge the giant to walk on the street instead of off to the side.
There was a humming sound from behind him and something like a stagecoach passed Pompi, except that the stage had no horse to draw it — similar to the wrecks they’d seen by the sides of the streets in San Mateo Flats, but newer and slicker and actually working. It roll
ed by on wheels made of a black substance, and its innards made a sort of purring noise. Another of the machines followed the first. Then another came from the opposite direction, and Clint realized that Pompi, who’d spent time in Meadowlands, understood something Clint hadn’t — a man walked to the side unless he wanted to be in the vehicles’ way, and unlike a stage, these vehicles looked like they might run out of control and strike you if you stepped in their path. There were stagecoaches on the streets, too — slick, new-looking stages — and riders on horseback, but even these stayed to the side, in special lanes.
Pompi either knew where he was going or was being directed effectively by Edward. He reached a point where one street crossed another (there were strange posts at the corners where Pompi stood, watching before crossing; the posts would ding and swap one flag for another before the giant would cross), turned, and walked further. He turned again and again, losing Clint entirely. Buildings grew larger and smoother. Clint wondered what the air there smelled like. The vehicles (which were now more plentiful) belched thick black smoke. He wondered if the billows carried the scent of gunsmoke.
Pompi came to a larger vehicle, open all the way around like a coach with only side rails, no windows, and a large rectangular roof. A fair number of people were inside it, some sitting and some standing. A few held onto vertical poles made of a yellowish alloy.
The people wore fancy clothes. They looked like church clothes back in Solace, but cleaner and newer, not beaten and worn down by Sands wind and a thousand washes. Many of the women wore large hats bedecked with bows and ribbons. The men wore hats as well, but not trail hats like Clint’s. These people’s hats were clean — bright bowlers and the occasional top hat. The women had golden hoops and gems dangling from their earlobes, and wore strings of alloys and gems around their necks. The men wore similar (but smaller) accoutrements on pins adorning their vests and piercing strips of fabric hanging from the fronts of their shirts. The women’s faces looked powdered. The men’s faces were smooth, and amidst all of that clean skin, a few wore fussy facial hair. Clint saw big bankers’ handlebar mustaches, small pencil-thins, and large waxed fancy mustaches. The men who wore beards wore them neat and immaculately trimmed. Clint wondered how they could afford a daily barbering.
Pompi stepped onto the car, stretching two giant fingers to grasp one of the vertical alloy poles. The minute he did, the passengers started to protest, waving him off. One pointed to a sign that Clint could read but that Pompi probably couldn’t. It read, No giants or laborers.
Pompi stepped off the strange vehicle and it pulled away with a dinging noise, seeming to ride on tracks buried in the street itself, like a train. Something above it touched a set of overhead wires, which sparked.
“We aren’t supposed to,” Pompi said, apparently speaking to Edward. Clint heard the giant’s voice both outside and inside his head. It seemed loud. But after that, he said nothing more. Edward had probably just reminded Pompi not to reply to him.
Clint watched Pompi’s vision turn as he climbed a shallow hill in the street, the gunslinger still pretending he was riding Edward instead of seeing through the eyes of a giant.
Pompi wound through the streets of Meadowlands NewTown as vehicles passed. The buildings continued to grow larger. The giant looked up. Pompi either hadn’t come into the city much before or things had changed a lot since he’d left, because his gaze was lingering and pondering, as if he were awed by what he was seeing. He looked ahead, then around the street. Many people walked, and the giant had to turn sideways on the sidewalk to avoid crashing into them. He saw a few other giants, but not many. The humans looked at him and at the other giants with expressions that were somewhere between suspicion, fear, and annoyance. Several times, a walker crossed the street to avoid Pompi. Clint found the behavior irritating (he wished he could control Pompi’s hands and that he had guns to draw) but the gunslinger could only watch.
Eventually, amidst all of the glitz and chrome, Pompi found a side street where everything was large. Not large like the other buildings (which were tall), but large in proportion. Doorways were enormous, and the businesses’ ceilings high. Pompi walked down this new street — again either following Edward’s direction or his own memory — and entered what was unmistakably a saloon. Clint felt something inside himself relax. The place wasn’t as unfamiliar as everything else he’d seen during the fancy parallel. It had a lot of glass and alloy and far less wood than was common, but at least it looked like a saloon. Clint suddenly wanted an apple brew and a slice of turkey pie more than anything, and considered rummaging for some in his pack by feel but decided against it. Eating and drinking while not being able to see or hear seemed too disconcerting to try.
The saloon’s tables and chairs were triple the normal size. But because everything in the bar was three times its usual dimensions, Clint barely noticed. The mugs, however, caught his attention. They had relatively normal-looking cups on them, but the handles were gigantic by comparison. The handles were three times as large as the cups they were attached to, and the cups were already large. As Pompi watched, one of the saloon’s giants clutched his mug and took a swallow. In his titanic hands, the handle no longer seemed huge. The cup it was attached to now seemed petite and delicate.
Clint saw Pompi approach the bar and raise a finger. The bartender — who was human and the only thing not three times bigger than normal (something that made him look small and elflike by comparison) said, “You have to pay first.”
“Okay,” said Pompi, seeming to fumble in his pocket for money. Eventually he found some and slapped it onto the bar. The bartender took it and drew Pompi a brew in one of the huge mugs. Pompi sat in front of him. Clint couldn’t see the stool because Pompi never looked down, but it had to be enormous.
“It’s the owner’s policy,” said the bartender.
Clint’s vision shifted as Pompi looked up. The bartender had hair around his ears and the back of his head, but was bald on top.
“I’d allow you to start a tab. But the owner, he’s… well, you understand.”
Edward had probably orchestrated all of this. Clint didn’t know how, but Pompi had ended up in a giant saloon with a sympathetic human bartender. A stalwart human would have been useless, and a giant bartender would also have been useless because giants were so slow. Pompi’s own bovine pace was the reason they’d done the fancy parallel in the first place. Pompi would never have remembered what to ask, wouldn’t have noticed the same details as a gunslinger or unicorn, and would have forgotten what he’d observed before he could return and tell Clint and Edward about it.
“Pompi is new in town,” the giant said.
“You’ll find that humans are rude to you everywhere here,” said the bartender, shaking his head disapprovingly. “I don’t like it, personally. Giants dug the foundations of these buildings. Giants lifted the girders. Giants are building the railroad. You work on the railroad?”
There was a pause. Edward was probably telling him what to say in reply.
“Pompi works on the railroad. And on the baron’s new project — the project for trade.”
The bartender’s eyebrows rose. A man didn’t become a bartender unless he was interested in gossip and hearsay, if only for the sake of catching his share and passing it on.
“The big thing? What they’re talking about on the flickershows?”
“Yar.”
The bartender whispered low. “What is it? The project, I mean.”
“Pompi can’t say.”
The bartender straightened, pulled a rag from his shoulder, and started wiping the bar top. “Oh, of course you can’t. Of course. And it’s not like I need to know. Diamante keeps things secret for a reason, you know. For our common good. I understand that. Everyone’s upset, saying ‘Diamante shouldn’t keep secrets from the people in his city,’ but if everyone knows everything, those things get messed up. Because it has to do with The Realm, right? And without Diego Diamante, would The Realm even be talk
ing to us out here at the lip of the Sands? How long has The Realm been just a shimmer on the brightest days, no more than a mirage? How many people have tried to reach it, only to find that a year’s worth of walking didn’t bring it closer? How many of those people went out in search of that mirage, fell asleep, and woke up to find the mirage now behind them? But now? The other day, I looked up and I could see parapets. Actual parapets! My wife and I told my kids the fables about Castle Spires, of course, but they’re just fairy tales, right? Now, with The Realm growing clearer and clearer by the day, it’s like the unreachable fairy tale city is a haven true, and we might someday actually get there!”
Clint felt his human heart beating hard in his human chest outside of the city, up on the grassy hill. They can see buildings in The Realm! The gunslinger had never heard of anything like it. Not this level of surety. Not this level of detail. Not this plainspoken, non-rumor-laced, factual recounting of seeing The Realm true as if it were just another place to which one might travel. It was unheard of.
What the bartender described about men seeking The Realm was painfully familiar. Clint and Kold had found themselves chasing the same shadows and the same vague outlines in the clouds from the second they’d surfaced on the wrong side of the wall. They would chase the city’s halo for days, then find it suddenly behind them. Then they’d turn and chase it again, but it never drew closer, regardless of their ride’s fury. The most difficult thing Clint had ever done had come after a few weeks of that back and forth: he, Kold, Edward, and Cerberus had turned around, putting their backs to the city in the sky. They’d walked off as The Realm loomed at their rear, seemingly just a few days’ away behind a thin cloud. It had taken tremendous faith — no, it was the opposite of faith — to convince themselves they would never reach it, and that all they were doing was driving themselves mad. So they’d walked, refusing to look over their shoulders, and a few hours later they’d found themselves staring around at nothing but sand. Looking back, Clint thought it was probably the turning away that had finally broken Kold and started the chain reaction that ended in his co-opting Cerberus’s magic, turning both of them dark. Deliberately turning their backs on the kingdom’s promise had been like abandoning a child of their own blood. It would have been easier if there had never been a choice — if The Realm had simply vanished. But nar, giving up had required a conscious decision, and that decision had felt like a knife in the gut.