by Sean Platt
And now, as the six Conspiracists waited for his sage advice, Clint didn’t know what to think. He didn’t know what to tell them.
“Do you have an army to help us on the other side?” Clint asked Oliver.
“The Realm has an enormous army under the control of the Ministry,” said Morph, stepping forward. “But… um… aren’t we on the side of this army? Wasn’t getting reinforcements against the marshals holding your unicorn the reason we came here in the first place?”
Of course. He was on Kold’s side. He fought with his archenemy, not against him. He was on the side of the psychopath who had tortured his bride for over four years and now wanted to destroy the worlds, not on the side of the pleasant paradise. That was why he’d shouted to Churchill to close the door — because he was happy that he had his reinforcements, and was on Kold’s side.
Flip-flop. Flip-flop. It was exhausting.
Clint sighed, shaking his head. He’d never wished more for Edward’s counsel, or Mai’s.
“Lesser of two evils, I suppose.” Clint turned to Oliver. “I don’t reckon there’s a word in the prophecies about choosing between two equally bad choices?”
Oliver shook his head.
“Just so you understand, I’m not ‘on the side of this army.’ Nor am I on The Realm’s side. I’m on my side. I don’t want to help anyone other than me and Edward.” It was the most selfish thing Clint could have thought, but under the circumstances, it was also the only truth he could muster.
“Well,” said Oliver, “that’s our side, too.”
There was a stack of rifles in a corner. They appeared painfully inadequate given the artillery that had just left the crater and all the artillery Morph implied was waiting to meet it. Still, Clint walked over and hefted one of the guns. It had a glowing recharge pack in the stock, like Sly’s scatterguns. He could only carry one because it wasn’t sawed off like Sly’s, but if he would never have to reload, one would be enough to die fighting with.
Clint tossed a gun from the pile to each of the Conspiracists. They wore scimitars as did all paladins, but the rifles would give them the ability to punch from a distance. Even though it was nothing… well… at least it was something.
Clint sighed once more. “Just the seven of us,” he said. He remembered his magnificent seven fighters in Baracho Gulch, smiled, and then added, “Again.”
“Eight,” said a voice from behind.
Clint turned to see an old man floating a foot above the ground, wearing ornate eastern robes and an elaborate goatee the color of fresh snow that was long enough to brush his belt. His hair was equally white, long and pinned up with a stick.
It was Rigoberto Montoya, holding Clint’s gunbelt in his hands.
CHAPTER ELEVEN:
THE CRUMBLING OF
THE WALL
There was no time for a tearful reunion, even if gunslingers were capable of tears. There was no time to ask Rigo how he’d ended up with Clint’s guns. There wasn’t even time, regretful though it was, to ask Rigo how exactly he was managing to float above the ground. Kold had told his armies to be ready in thirty minutes, and at least ten were already gone. The volcano’s crater was massive, and they’d need every remaining minute to reach where the Army of the Triangulum had massed if they wanted to join the party.
So they jogged forward, pacing themselves because they had no idea how far they’d have to run after reaching the tunnel on the mountain’s far side. The six Conspiracists carried their rifles two-handed across their chests. Clint kept touching his pistols, reassuring himself that the two seven-shooters were back where they belonged. Rigo carried nothing. He was standing with his arms crossed, gazing straight ahead, flying along at the same pace as the rest of the group. When Clint had last seen Rigo, he’d been thirteen or fourteen years old and had been able to do incredible, almost superhuman feats with his body. Was it really so surprising what sixty additional years of practice had done for him? He was clearly in touch with something that only Edward, if he were here, might be able to understand.
“They were in the magic,” said Rigo, floating alongside Clint.
The gunslinger was feeling out of breath, but noticed with satisfaction that he wasn’t nearly as out of breath as Morph, Oliver, Borico, and Brooce, all of whom were probably half of Clint’s apparent age. Z, as usual, was inscrutable. He could be exhausted or full of vigor. Or, like Churchill, he could be a machine.
“Pardon?” Clint said to Rigo.
Rigo answered without turning his head. “Your guns. I found them in the magic in our fields. I was meditating, and as I strolled in the Garden of Thoughts, I came across them. My spirit animal said you had crossed the magic, and that you were shorn of your stingers on entry, the same as your partner was shorn. My animal gave me the guns and told me to go to you. And so I came.”
Between heaving breaths, Clint said, “I’ve no idea what that means.”
Rigo’s arms were still crossed on his chest. He held his stare straight ahead as he flew upright beside the gunslinger, his long white goatee and dramatic white eyebrows flapping in the wind of his passage.
“It means you have your guns. And that I am here.”
That was as good an answer as any, so Clint asked no further.
The tunnel at the crater’s far edge was as large as the one at the entrance, and they approached it with ten or twelve minutes remaining. They could see the vast troops at the end of the passage, standing in formation. When they finally emerged, breathing deeply, they found that behind the mountain was a titanic plain — even larger than the crater. It seemed to be artificial, as if Kold’s armies had chipped away a second mountain to create it. Sheer cliffs bordered the space on both sides, with the mountain citadel at their backs. On the open side was a wide path leading gradually upward for mayhap a hundred feet, then ending in what seemed to be a sheer drop-off.
At the end of the path — if the path had continued instead of dropping away, which it didn’t — was The Realm. Clint watched it shimmer in the sky, clearer and more present than ever. With the final Orb now added to the Triangulum, the generator was bringing the worlds closer and more into alignment. It almost looked as if a man on a fast horse might be able to run up the path, leap the gulf, and land on The Realm’s doorstep.
And all around the city in the sky, Clint could see the dusty brown wall. He watched the projected barrier flicker and shake in the magic, as if nearing the end of its days.
Kold stood at the assembly’s head, then climbed onto a plinth. A hush fell over the enormous army, draping every soldier and machine.
“I won’t make a speech,” Kold called out, his voice seemingly amplified by the magic inside him. “I’m not big on speeches. You all know why we are here. You’ve trained your whole your lives for this moment — and some of your ammies and appies trained before you, never seeing the day we could finally enter. Today is that day, and now we will do what we must.”
He turned, fished the black ring off of his partial finger, and seemed to pull it apart from the middle. The black ring widened into an ever expanding circle, the aperture splitting broad enough to eclipse The Realm’s form behind it. Kold gestured, and the black circle started to lighten, growing almost translucent, until they were able to see The Realm again, now through an opaque smear. Then the city actually seemed to come closer, as if they were watching The Realm approach like the end of a tunnel seen from the front of a locomotive. The city in the sky sharpened, growing increasingly real. Then, all at once, it was like a bubble popped. The shimmery, indistinct, unreal appearance of the city vanished and the old door, now stretched and distorted into a sort of portal, laid flat, and became like a bridge. The wall began to shake, to blur and distort like a spark-fueled mirage. Then it cracked, fell into rubble, and vanished entirely. When it was gone, The Realm became nothing more than a destination at the end of a black road.
“The wall has been breached!” Kold yelled.
The army began to move, spilling a
cross the bridge like water over a cliff. At the lead were the unicorns. Behind them were the green vehicles, which someone called tanks; behind the tanks were the two-wheeled vehicles; behind them Teedawges; behind the Teedawges ropers and gunslingers; behind them trolls and elves. The black, spiderlike giants trod above them all, stepping deftly into holes in the regiments so as not to crush them. They bellowed their terrible, echoing shrieks. Zeppelins lumbered into the sky; balloons sailed with them. The spark aircrafts zoomed forward and were circling above The Realm in seconds. Line after line after line of fighting forces surged across the bridge and into the city.
Inside of Clint, Mai began to feel more insistent, as if trying to resurface.
Stay with them, she seemed to whisper.
“She’s right,” Rigo said.
“We’re only eight people,” Clint said, not bothering to ask Rigo how he seemed to have heard. He was making a mere statement of fact, but he was also voicing his sense of futility. The army’s forces were overwhelming. Already they were being elbowed and shoved, having to jockey just to hold their positions against the push of the army. Passing troops brushed against his guns, raising Clint’s ire nearly enough to make him want to kill the combatants who were, he supposed, the closest thing he had to “on his side.”
“Eight people on a magic carpet,” Rigo corrected.
Before Clint could react, a rectangular patch ripped away from the upward-facing road and began to float beneath them. The swatch of dirt was paper-thin but felt bedrock-solid. They all stopped walking and looked around, nervous. Then the eight people on the floating section of dirt and rock began to speed forward as casually as Rigo himself had flown earlier. Rigo’s feet were on the ground, his gaze placidly forward, apparently steering the carpet of dirt. Below them, the Army of the Triangulum marched forward, eyes steely and teeth exposed, bloodlust in every motion.
Kold and Cerberus had stopped at a crossroads in the path and were directing troops as they crossed the bridge. At first Clint didn’t understand what he was seeing, but as their magic carpet came closer, he realized that the bridge into The Realm was actually a giant and multi-faceted shimmer. There wasn’t only one path ahead. There were many paths. The air around them had turned black, and holes into various parts of The Realm pocked the blackness like a forest of screens in a darkened room. Meadowlands, behind them, had shrunk to a scene through a peephole.
Kold was sending troops into various holes, into various sectors of The Realm. Distributing forces. Fortifying. Planning his attack to control key areas.
“It’s a game of Risk,” said Clint.
Oliver nodded beside him. “The wall has fallen, and now you can see the true nature of what The Realm has hidden even from its own eyes. The worlds have fractured, and yet The Realm has stayed whole. How? And now you see how. They’ve always stitched what is visible, but doing so is like covering rust with a bonding agent instead of fixing the problem. Beneath the surface, their bedrock is shattered. The wall held it together like a thin skin. But now that it’s gone? Well, welcome to paradise.”
Clint looked down and found himself almost wanting to cling to the others. The dark they crossed as they flew toward the holes seemed so absolute. Beneath them, there was only blackness. It wasn’t the blackness of a hole. It wasn’t the blackness of space, where the stars shone. It was the fathomless depths of nothing at all.
“Sands,” whispered Morph. “It’s all falling to pieces.”
Small bridges spun out from the path’s fork, where Kold stood and directed the troops to the shimmers. The largest machines had to narrow to a single-file line, the troops in front of and behind them glancing nervously into the void. Looking around, Clint realized that the falling of the wall had laid The Realm bare. All of its places were accessible at once. They could march to Castle Spires. They could march into homes. They could march through the city streets, near the saloon Otel and Ron House’s book shop. They could march through the edutorium or fields of magically-growing crops or into the Ministry building, or mayhap even into the so-called “Red Room” itself.
Hurry to the stables, Mai said inside Clint’s head.
“We will be there soon,” said Rigo.
“You can hear her?”
The others looked at Clint when he said it, but Rigo only shook his head. “I hear the magic.”
Rigo seemed to know — or to intuit — the way. Their magic carpet sped by the troops, past the flying zeppelins, approaching one of the flicker screens in the void. But as they drew closer, they saw that the shimmer wasn’t so much a hole as it was a cut. It looked like they were inside of a canvas bag that someone had already ripped their way out of using a knife.
The gash in the fabric of reality grew larger. Clint could see the gates of a compound in the distance.
They cleared the rip, watching as the world re-formed. The Army of the Triangulum entered beneath them. Archetypes lumbered onto green grass. Unicorns, now at the lead, spread out, taking up their positions.
Realm marshals were waiting to greet them.
CHAPTER TWELVE:
THE GREAT BATTLE
The marshal compound entrance was lined with endless rows of men and women atop unicorns, wearing heavy twin pistols on their hips.
Their faces were impassive despite the army gathering at their doorstep. They were unsmiling, hands resting on their hips. The unicorns beneath them ranged in color from dull alabaster to a grave shade of charcoal, indicating they’d turned away from pure. None were as dark as Cerberus, but none were anywhere near as pristine as Edward. The marshals waited, their eyes assessing the group in front of them. Clint could sense coldness wafting from them in a wave, pressing against the exposed skin at his neck and hands. They all looked young and strong and deadly, all lending warmth to the term “cold-blooded.” Clint remembered what Oliver had said earlier about modern gunslingers being trained from birth, raised on violence and retribution. Clint himself had had a family once, even though he could remember nar an eye color nor a smile. These men and women never had. They’d known pain, iron, and nothing more.
As the white unicorns stepped through the crack and spread out like a fan, Clint wondered at the confidence he read in the battalion of gunslingers. There were hundreds of them, yar (he could see more circling the stables’ perimeter; they had the place locked up nicely), but there were tens of thousands in the army marching on The Realm along with all manner of machines. Why were the marshals so sure? And was this really all The Realm could muster to stand against the Army of the Triangulum?
Then Clint looked back toward the rip and realized why the marshals weren’t flinching: of those tens of thousands of troops, only a portion had come through with them. The unicorns seemed to have come, along with Kold’s version of gunslingers. He could see ropers and Teedawges and a single tank. But the vast legions were nowhere, and Kold had sent none of the largest machines. Where had they all gone?
“The Realm is a big place,” said a voice behind him. The voice startled Clint, but it was only Morph.
“He sent troops through too many different holes,” said Clint, surveying the standoff with fresh eyes. It would be thousands versus hundreds, but they were facing marshals. It wasn’t enough.
“Mayhap,” said Morph. “But he needs to control a few key areas or he’ll be overrun by Realm forces. Probably still will be. But personally, I’d be concerned about the Armory, the Ministry, the Core, and a dozen other places.”
“The Core?” The word shocked the gunslinger. It was a word Edward used to describe the center of all worlds, the place from which magic sprung.
“Not that Core,” said Oliver. “Our Core. It’s what generates the wall. Another artifact nobody understands. It’s at the city’s center, and this army will want to make sure they don’t raise the wall again.” Clint noticed how Oliver said this army rather than our army.
Clint looked around. They had mayhap fifty white unicorns on their side. Three or four hundred Teedawge archet
ypes. A regiment of elves. One lone giant. Seemingly all of the gunslingers, numbering about as many as the Teedawges, though they all had ordinary pistols. Mayhap fifty ropers. And the tank.
The Realm marshals sat on their mounts and waited, their hands resting comfortably on their guns. No one was willing to fire the first shot.
Beyond the stone-faced marshals, Clint could see the sprawling stable lands. If not for all of the weapons and troops, the place would have looked downright tranquil. There were rolling acres of green grass, one flowing into the next. The place had to be large; the proud unicorns always insisted on having room to roam. To one side was a long, beautiful white ranch house that, strangely enough, had housed the marshal program even back in Clint’s day. The house, he seemed to remember, was larger inside than outside and rich with magic. There was an indoor shooting gallery. There were training facilities for the body. The gunslinger seemed to remember training facilities for the mind, too, but his brain didn’t want to think on those, and so he buried the memory.
Beside the white house were the stables — all red wood, accented with white. The sprawling building looked like a barn from the outside, but the stalls, he knew, would be lush and lavish. They would be like Otel rooms, lined with pillows and thick floor coverings. The food in those stalls would not be hay or oats. It would The Realm’s finest fare.
Clint could see white heads inside those stalls, visible through the windows. He wondered if Edward was one of the heads he could see. Edward was all that mattered. Nothing else mattered at all. The Realm would collapse if they won, and Kold would kill and burn the city, exacting his revenge. If The Realm won, the wall would rise again and magic would continue leaking, and conditions in the Sands would worsen until faults sheared the world into pieces. The apocalypse was coming regardless of who was victorious.