by Sean Platt
“I yield,” said Clint.
“Now tell Edward not to fight.”
Clint looked at the unicorns as if outside of his skin. When Edward and Cerberus had faced off in Solace, there had been a moment where a spell had reversed Clint’s lights and darks and he’d seen the world in negative. When that had happened, he had thought Edward was Cerberus and Cerberus was Edward. Was that happening again? Why should he call off Edward?
“Do it!” Kold repeated, pressing harder with his boot.
“Edward, stop fighting,” Clint croaked. It was barely audible, but the moment he said it, the tumult at the other end of the room stopped. Kold raised his hand, palm down, and lowered it for Cerberus’s eye. The dark unicorn lowered Edward to the floor.
Almost immediately, the white unicorn rocked to his feet, shook, and became as good as new, healed entirely. He walked toward the men. On the way, he gave Cerberus a glance and said, “Buttface.”
Above Clint, Kold said, “I can end you at any time. Do you understand?”
Edward stood between Kold and Cerberus. Despite the room’s condition and the fact that Clint was still in unbelievable pain, it was hard to imagine they’d just concluded an epic battle. Edward didn’t so much as flinch toward Kold or Cerberus, and the dark unicorn didn’t so much as cast Edward a glance.
“Yar,” said Clint.
“You’re a fool, gunslinger,” Kold said, removing the boot.
“Yar.”
Clint felt his bones and skin begin to knit, then looked up at Edward as his horn stopped glowing, cycling down to pearlescent white. The gunslinger stood and brushed himself clean, now nearly as shirtless as Kold. Any more fighting and they’d both have ended up as naked as the unicorns.
“The worlds will die,” said Kold. “The Realm will grow stronger.”
“So what.” It wasn’t a question. It was simply what it was. Clint was beyond tired.
“Talk to Mai. Convince her.”
“Nar.”
Kold shook his head, heaving a heavy, disbelieving sigh.
“It doesn’t make any difference anymore,” Edward said, gesturing around the room with his head. “The battle of wills. He’s shed blood. The decision is cast.”
Clint looked at Edward. The unicorn turned, silent.
“What?” said Clint, finding Edward’s eye.
“You made the wrong decision.”
“Oh, is that what you think?”
Edward seemed too tired to argue. “Yar. That’s what I think.”
“I’ll think about it,” the gunslinger said.
“It’s too late.”
Edward’s manner sparked something inside of Clint. The unicorn seemed defeated, utterly and completely spent, as if the worlds had ended already. Clint had never heard such desperation and resignation from the proud, noble, arrogant creature.
“If you agreed with him, you should have told me,” said Clint.
Edward shook his head. “It had to be your choice.”
“Then I’ll change my mind,” said Clint. “I’ll talk to her. I’ll go to her now, if you think that’s best, if you…”
Edward kept shaking his head. “I told you. Intention matters to magic. Things have been set in motion, and you have consecrated your decision with blood.”
Cerberus shook his big black head and muttered, “Humans.”
Clint turned to Kold. “You should have told her. Not me. Her. When you captured her, you should have explained it. Whatever it was that you thought. Whatever Edward is saying. Mai might have seen it as true. She might have understood.”
Quietly, sounding not at all like himself, Kold’s green eyes looked into Clint’s blue ones and said, “What makes you think she didn’t know? Did you think she found you in Solace by accident?”
“I…”
“Clint, we separated years before Solace. You didn’t want to pursue her. I did. I found her. Years before. Years.”
“I…”
“So she ran. She ran, and she hid, and eventually she sought out the one man who she thought might be able to protect her.”
Clint felt like all the air had fled from his lungs. He wanted to say more, but couldn’t summon the breath. He wanted to fold up and die. It felt like someone had grabbed hold of his entire life and yanked the soul from inside it, leaving his body where it was to carry out its various chemist’s reactions as the elements willed, like a machine.
Kold turned to Edward. “Gather the unicorns,” he said. “It is time.”
Edward nodded his assent. “How many?”
Kold looked around the room, at Cerberus, at Clint, and finally back at Edward.
“All of them,” he said.
UNICORN
WESTERN 8
CHAPTER ONE:
THE MAN IN THE MIRROR
The man in the shack stared into the mirror above his sink. He’d built the shack with his own two large hands, back when such things had mattered. When he’d finished the house, the man’s wife had decorated the place in a way that suited her, and appalled him. The mirror was one such appalling item. It had a heavy wooden frame with ornate, scrolled edges, painted in garish colors ranging from red to blue to orange to yellow. It was an ugly, ugly thing. Mayhap as hideous as the face of the man in the mirror.
The top of the mirror’s frame was a blue, darker than midnight and pocked with pinpricks of white that were supposed to be stars. That symbolized eternity. The bottom was green, symbolizing the ground, grass, or world. Mayhap worlds. The other colors were somewhere in between. There was something on the mirror that looked like a white horse, though if anyone made that observation, the something would have been deeply offended. Guns were scrawled on the mirror, but their shapes looked clumsy and stupid. The mirror, when taken as a whole, was a child’s rendering of the man’s life: all rainbows and good times when viewed through one set of eyes, but very little happiness when seen through the eyes of the truth.
The man’s face was long and deeply creased — more wrinkled than the man himself remembered. He wore a gray beard, streaked here and there with stubborn strands of brown that refused to surrender to age. The man reached up and ran his hand across the beard, thinking as he did each time he saw it that he should shave. The thing was scraggly, not at all trimmed. His neck was covered in stubble, with nothing beneath but tendons and rough skin like the skin of the turkeys in his pen out back. The face in the mirror was deeply tanned, testimony to a life lived under the unforgiving sun. The man’s hair was the only thing that had more or less held firm. It was brown flecked with gray rather than the other way around, as his beard had chosen. The hair looked strange to the man because he almost never saw it. On the rare occasions the man had seen the whole of his head in a mirror, he’d worn a hat — flattened, beaten, and brown — that was almost as much a witness to his life as his own two eyes.
The man leaned forward, peering into the blue eyes that were set deep in the leathery old face. Those hadn’t changed, and had remained piercing and cold. As the man watched himself, meeting those eyes, he imagined them as the eyes of an enemy — which, in a way, they were. He tried pretending he was staring down a foe, trying to put himself in the shoes of the many men for whom those same eyes had been the last things they’d ever seen. He tried seeing past the gray beard and wrinkled skin and into the eyes themselves — into the soul of the gunslinger who’d protected The Realm, roamed the Sands, pursued his foe, then spent decades trying to forget it all. Everything was there. Looking close, feeling weightless, the man could see it writ in those blue eyes like words in a long book.
He pulled back, again running a hand through his beard. The beard made him look older than he was, and he was plenty ancient. For the thousandth time, he decided it wasn’t worth the effort to fill the sink, wet the blade, or make the lather. He never looked in the mirror anyhow — not when he could avoid it. He hated the mirror almost as much as he hated the face.
The man turned from the mirror, walked back into his s
mall bedroom, and pulled on the same basic outfit he’d worn nearly every day of his life: denims, a long-sleeved shirt (today’s was brown), and a vest. He pulled on his boots. He kept his pistols in their holsters, left the holsters on his gunbelt, and left the gunbelt with his hat, slung over a chair. Once, someone had come to the shack to tell him he should turn them in, that he was no longer a marshal and would no longer be able to carry those guns. That stranger had told him that he’d have to trade them both in for a single six-shooter. At that time, the man had still worn the guns on his hips whenever he was awake, so as his visitor had blathered on, he’d rested one hand on his right pistol — not at all agitated but also not at all moved — and had told the small, bald official that one time in the past, he’d used a single six-shooter and what he’d done hadn’t made a difference. The twin seven-shooters, he’d continued, always had. Then he’d spread his arms and told the official that regardless, if the ex-marshal would no longer be allowed his guns, then the man should go ahead and take them from him. The man had looked at the man, had looked at the pistols, and then had left without a word or whistle.
The man walked through the shack, his movements barely noticed, going through nothing more than rote habit. He turned on the spark lights and started a timer on the steam cooker. There was a small spark receiver on the counter that would broadcast music if you turned it just right (they’d begun to re-sing Joelsongs in the city, which the man enjoyed, but they had also changed the beats, which he loathed), but he’d never managed to figure out how to work the thing so he barely noticed it. The receiver, like the mirror, had been bought by his wife.
While his cooker heated, the man dropped to the wooden deck inside the shack and started his daily pushups. His joints popped through the first few repetitions, then warmed and went silent as he hit number twenty. Like always, the pushups started with pain, transitioned into a lulling middle, and ended with more pain. The second round of pain was harsher than the first, but that was the part the man most enjoyed. It was rewarding, and it punished him. Both were good.
By the time the former marshal and one-time gunslinger reached eighty repetitions, his arms and chest were burning in earnest. Lately, his back had also started to scream in protest. The man pushed through the pain, feeling it fill him. He relished it. He closed his eyes, refusing to grit his teeth as pain flooded his frame like an acid burn. With every beat of his heart, the pain told him that he was still alive. The man wanted to remember that. There had been many times when he had wanted to die, but it was more painful to keep living, so the man did his pushups to sharpen the invisible blade that felt as if it were permanently stuck in his chest. The pain reminded his body that his tenure in this world had yet to end, and that life was meant to hurt while he continued to live. It was a man’s duty to bear the pain and to keep breathing. Beyond that, little else mattered.
Once he finished his pushups (topping out and unable to move after 138 repetitions), the man moved on to situps, wedging his feet under the large steam cooker. A kettle boiled on its top as he moved his torso up and down, running through the same routine — popping joints followed by shock-like discomfort, then a lull in the middle, ending with the growing agony of acid seeping into his exhausted midsection, thighs, and hips. His back screamed through the situps but he pushed on anyway. The kettle atop the cooker wobbled as he worked. One day, the kettle would fall, and the boiling water would scald him. Today was not that day.
Because the man had to think on something, he thought every day at this point about what the morning had waiting for him. The answer was the same as every day since he and his partner had retired. The retirement — of both partners in the partnership — had happened quite by default. Neither had planned it. They had simply returned to Meadowlands — the man to his shack and the unicorn to his own abode with his new bride — and then had never gone out riding again. They hadn’t exactly decided to stop heading out into the Sands. They had simply done so.
Secretly, Clint suspected that Edward’s new mare had something to do with their unspoken retirement, but he never outright accused Edward or the mare (her name was Cameron, though Clint preferred to think of her as Yoko — an ancient term referring to a female Judas) of falling into domesticity and growing soft. For one, unicorns were incapable of growing soft. And for another, Clint suspected that whatever resentment he felt had less to do with his own feelings and more with Edward’s bliss. How many years had he ridden with Edward? How long had the two known each other? How much of each other’s souls did the other possess, and how much would live within the other until one of them (that would be Clint, of course) died? And through those many long years, how often had Edward expressed joy, or been kind, or shown compassion, or even been reasonable? Clint could count the number of times Edward had given him a kind word on one finger. That single instance of empathy had happened three years after the encounter in Dharma Kold’s citadel, around the time Clint first realized he hated his mirror true, even though he could nar bring himself to discard it.
But now Edward was a changed unicorn. These days when Clint saw him (which was rare), he accused Edward of blowing pink bubbles, shooting fairy sparks, and not only bleeding rainbows… but now farting them as well. In the past, that kind of observation would have earned the gunslinger a hoof in the chest. Now it brought a laugh that Clint had never heard during his many years atop the unicorn’s back — a laugh that said affectionately that the former marshal had gotten him, and that the marshal spoke true. Edward would nuzzle his Yoko and send bile to rise up Clint’s throat. But instead of gagging, Clint would open the straight slit in his face that passed for a human mouth and mutter something about being happy for his former partner. In the past, the unicorn would have laughed at that too, mocking Clint’s deadpan sentiment and calling him a curmudgeon. But now he never did. Now Edward simply asked after Clint’s turkeys and pumpkins, and inquired about his proficiency at distilling his own brew from the apples that grew from the largest tree in his yard — the tree on Clint’s hilltop, once dry and brown but now bearing fat apples as if magically brought back from the dead.
The cooker was still heating, so the gunslinger curled his long, thin fingers around the doorjamb overhead and started his pullups. He wanted triple triples (having gotten 138 pushups and 141 situps), but he’d never managed more than 48 fingertip pullups, then another 34 from the bar before his arms finally quit. Today he managed 49 and 35, but they felt like a lie, since Clint knew the numbers he wanted to achieve and had subtly cheated to make them.
He dropped to the floor and bent forward to stretch, feeling every muscle scream. He was six-foot-three and weighed 145 pounds. It was far too little. He had no fat on him, with nar enough muscle. He barely ate and lived too lean, and his body had been trained not to allow him to gain more tissue than was strictly necessary. His body felt it was inefficient and greedy to carry more than a man needed. To hoard tissue was to do as The Realm did, hoarding magic. But then again, Meadowlands was becoming a lot like The Realm, too.
Edward felt that the comparison was a bit much, and said so on the rare occasions when they palavered like the old days. Clint grumbled that Meadowlands had grown soft, that Kold had turned his playground of a city into a miniature Realm. Edward said that while The Realm pinched magic away from its source (and the Sands, of course) in order to sustain itself, Meadowlands was fueled by the twin (and still warring) factions of steam and spark. Kold had funded both enterprises, just as he’d funded the training of doctors under Mercy Barlowe and just as he’d continued to fund those doctors so that they could provide their services to the people of the city for free.
Kold no longer even used birds or bandits to funnel wealth into the city. That was something Clint pretended he’d persuaded the baron to do, but in truth, the baron had done it on his own after the Darkness, for reasons unknown, had vanished into the desert… or into the Core below it. Ever since Kold had failed to breach the wall and the train project had stalled (because
how good was a Sands/Realm train when one couldn’t reach The Realm?), Kold had turned the incomplete power of the Triangulum Enchantem toward the city. The Triangulum’s magic was at least balanced, Edward said. Clint felt that he was being naive.
Beside the old gunslinger, the steam cooker dinged. Clint pulled his pie from the cooker’s compartment, let it cool, then took a slice and poured himself a cup of tea from the kettle. The old Edward would have mocked the tea, but tea had become a part of Clint’s ritual. The tea comforted him in ways that he’d never admit to wanting — mayhap needing.
He took his mug and went outside, staring out across his vast field of grass, past the pen of squawking turkeys and into Meadowlands. The Realm was always visible now, thanks to the Triangulum’s power. But without the full strength of the Orb of Benevolence, The Realm would remain nothing more than a shimmer bewitching the sky. A city no one could reach, unknowingly (or uncaringly) brewing an apocalypse that none on the Sands side of the wall could prevent.
Behind Clint, there was the distinctive clicking of a pistol being cocked.
It was the kid. The kid he’d heard approach. The kid he could smell on the wind. The kid whose presence he could feel in a way he couldn’t explain, in the way that he always, nowadays, simply felt the presence of people around him.
A voice said, “You don't look like no rootin-tootin’, finger-twitchin’, cold-blooded killer.”
Clint sipped his tea and sat down, looking out over the city, slowly deciding whether to kill the kid or allow him to keep breathing.
CHAPTER TWO:
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
“You’re only twenty feet in back of me,” Clint told the voice behind him without turning, “but if you pull the trigger in the way you will pull it, with an unpracticed dominant hand, you will anticipate the kick and compensate for it without meaning to. You’ll miss high and to the right.” Still looking out toward Meadowlands and the wavering shimmer of The Realm behind it, Clint raised a long, bony finger and pointed at a lantern hanging from a beam above the porch. “You will hit that lantern. And if you do, I’ll have to lay you stone dead, because I love that lantern.”