by Sean Platt
Clint spread the map on a flat expanse of stone at a rock outcropping that offered shade from the angled afternoon sun. They’d purchased the map in Beauregard, a town they had passed through a week before. The thing was closer to leather than parchment, and unrolled with a whisper instead of a crinkle.
“I was afraid of that,” said Edward. “Where do you reckon we are?”
“Here,” said Clint, pointing toward a red dot on the map. The dot said, YOU ARE HERE.
“Not even close,” said Edward. “We are actually here.” A new dot appeared on the map. Edward was projecting it from his horn and using it the way a man would use his finger to point.
“But this dot says we’re here,” said Clint, pointing at the YOU ARE HERE dot. “It moves, because this is a magical map.”
“There isn’t another dot,” said Edward. “Just like there are no wrecked flying machines or style man in the sand.”
“Yes there is,” said Clint, insistent. “It’s right here, near this chicken.”
Edward looked down at Clint, seeming to weigh whether or not Clint was joking. Clint was not. He put his finger on the drawing of a chicken on the map, then tapped it, increasingly agitated.
Clint felt something like a hand under his chin and could make out a dull yellow glow at the limit of his vision. The invisible hand gently turned his head up to look at Edward.
“No dot,” said Edward, looking into his eyes and then releasing the magical hand. “No chicken. No wrecks. No man. Look at me carefully, gunslinger. Do you believe I speak true?”
Clint knew that unicorns couldn’t control minds any more than they could truly read them (unless they were willing to cross into perversion, of course), but their gaze was persuasive enough to earn the nickname, “The Look of Truth.” Clint felt his head start to clear. Because unicorns were such pure sources of white magic, staring into their eyes was like seeing the world as it was supposed to be. It was like hypnosis, except that subjects could not be manipulated.
“You speak true,” Clint repeated dutifully.
“Now look at the map.”
His head slightly dazed, Clint returned his eyes to the battered tan map. There was no giant red dot or drawings, save the ones that were supposed to be there. His eyes found the smaller dot projected by Edward, showing their location as just outside Beauregard. He also saw the ink dot near the map’s top left corner, which was marked PRECIPICE.
“Okay,” said Clint. “I see the truth.”
“Do you see the region we’re entering?”
Clint looked at the nothing between Edward’s dot and Precipice.
“No,” he replied. The area was entirely blank. Suspiciously so, seeing as the rest of the map was flooded with irrelevant landmarks.
“Seems like there should be something in there, right?”
“Must be empty desert,” said Clint.
“I don’t think so. Hang on.”
Edward’s eyes fell shut as his horn started glowing a soft purple. It was rare for the unicorn to close his eyes outside sleep, and Clint could count on one long-fingered hand the number of times he’d seen Edward close his eyes to make any sort of magic. Shuttered lids meant he was doing something especially delicate or thoughtful.
Clint looked out into the sand where he’d seen the man in banker’s clothes and could almost sense the magic reaching out from Edward into the sand, as if he were using a long hand to search for something beneath it. A large section of sand maybe three hundred feet away began to vibrate and shimmer. Then, as Clint watched, something massive emerged from beneath the desert’s surface. The massive thing was a dull, smooth white, easily as large as Edward.
“Do I see that?” said Clint, already doubting his vision.
“Yar. I’m raising it from the sand.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a dinosaur bone.”
“Bollocks. Dinosaurs are legends, like leprechauns.”
“No,” said Edward. “They were real, and they looked just like in your storybooks. I’m afraid we are entering the Dinosaur Missouri.” The unicorn reached out and tapped the map with his front hoof. “And unfortunately, we’re going to have to cross it to get to Precipice. The ways around are months of detour. We’d have to go around this lake if we went east, and around the river canyon running from that lake if we went west. It’s why the dinosaurs bottlenecked here. They were held back from the holy city, and many died.”
“I don’t understand,” said Clint.
Edward said, “Well, get used to that.”
He used his magic to re-roll and stow the map, then resumed walking. Clint scampered to catch up, feeling as usual that he was the lackey in their relationship.
Suddenly the gunslinger’s eyes went wide and he drew both pistols, but before he had a chance to aim them, they were lifted from his hands. The guns hovered in the air for a second, then sailed back down into his holsters. Immediately following this perversion, Clint felt himself be picked up and flown through the air. He dropped to rest on Edward’s bare back.
“What are you doing?” he spat, aghast.
“Letting you ride,” said the unicorn. “You poor, stupid man.”
“And why did you stay my guns?” His tone was angry, indignant.
“What were you going to shoot at?”
Clint opened his mouth but nothing came out. He didn’t remember. What was essential a second before had withered to something he couldn’t put his finger on.
“You don’t remember, do you?” said Edward from beneath him. “There will be a lot of that until we ford the river and cross out of the Missouri. You’re going to need to develop some mental muscle. Everything you think now requires a filter. You must think before you act until we’re through this area, and you must also think before you think.”
It was a simple imperative, but Clint’s brain and training both wanted to refuse. A gunslinger relied on his eyes and hands to share a lightning-fast exchange. Such signals bypassed his brain and went straight to his spine. It had always been the way he was most effective. Asking his thinking mind to weigh in on every fired bullet would make him slow, and an easy target.
“What is this place?” Clint asked, eyeing the massive bone that Edward had unearthed. As they drew closer, he could see that it curved up high until it ended in a point. It looked like the rib of something titanic.
“This is a graveyard,” said Edward.
Clint shook his head dismissively. “I’ve laid many graves.”
“Not like this. Dinosaurs were magic creatures. Forebears to unicorns. They held a primitive, ancient magic. When magic dies, it leaves an echo. This area’s bottlenecks are a massive dying ground for dinosaurs. More died here than anywhere else, by many-fold. This place is unthinkably ancient, and polluted with that old magic.”
“Polluted?”
Edward shook his head slightly. “Matter of perspective. Let’s just say we’re out of tune with it. Or it with us. You especially. It will act on you like any other time you’ve encountered out-of-tune magic, only much more strongly.”
Clint said, “I’ve not encountered out-of-tune magic.”
“Of course you have. You’d call it a haunting.”
“This desert is haunted?”
“The Dinosaur Missouri is, yes. And I’ll be frank with you, gunslinger. You may not be able to take it. Any human would be in danger here. This magic is older than older than old. It came before what you thought of as white and black magic, or surface and core magic. Here, the darkness inside our friend the sand dragon would be an infant, as would the darkness it was trying to assist in bleeding through the fissures.”
“Will it affect you?” said Clint.
“Yes,” said Edward. “But I am better than you.”
They plodded on. Edward’s truth trance hadn’t yet shaken from Clint, so he felt sure the bones he was seeing on the horizon were real. There were a few to the east and west, but most were up north, where they were headed. In that dir
ection lay Precipice — the town in which Clint and Edward hoped to intercept the dark rider and his unicorn of a different color before they reached the Orb of Malevolence, which Edward felt certain Dharma Kold was pursuing.
“We’re only on the apron of the Dinosaur Missouri,” said Edward. “It will take us days to enter its heart. We must be vigilant with our thoughts. And we’ll be fasting.”
“Why do we need to fast?”
“Because the Missouri’s ancient magic is like wet tar, trapping the thoughts of those who go through it, then showing those thoughts back to everyone who follows like carnival horrors. The Missouri is a crossroads penetrating many worlds, like an axle through many wheels. Some of the thoughts we’ll see, having come from other worlds, will be foreign and terrifying to us. But what’s worse, the magic will pluck thoughts from our heads and leave them behind for others to see… but only after showing them to us. And because of how any being — but especially humans — are wired, you can expect your mind’s most dominant thoughts to share space with your fears. You will see what terrifies you. And you will see dinosaurs.”
Clint was a hard man, and it scared him to think that the stones in his mind might betray him. He had to make it through with his sanity.
“And the fasting?”
“What would you rather think on — demons, or your own hunger?”
Clint saw his point.
“How long will we be inside the Missouri?” he asked.
“Not long. A few days in its center at most. But it will feel much longer than that.”
“But you say that Kold crossed it?”
Edward managed a horselike shrug. “He went through, or he saw what I saw and decided to go around. Either way, we should proceed. If Kold went through, he could be in Precipice by now. If he went around, he’ll be months getting there and we can arrive before him.”
Clint saw a trio of small, green men fifty feet off, at the base of a cactus. Leprechauns. He forced his twitching hands away from his guns, then closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and exhaled. When he opened them again, the leprechauns vanished.
“Do you want my guns?” said Clint, reluctant to make the offer, but thinking of what might be most safe.
“Either way. You won’t fire on me, and you can’t hurt me anyway because of my white magic. All you could fire on that would do any harm would be yourself. But if you lose that much of your mind, putting a bullet in your brain would be mercy delivered. So you may keep your arms, or you may surrender them. Whichever makes you feel better.”
Knowing he was making a foolish, childlike decision, Clint said, “I’ll keep them.”
After a few more minutes’ walk and a few more bones passed, Edward said, “There’s something else you should be aware of.”
“What?”
“In the interest of full disclosure, I mean.”
“What?” Clint growled.
“There’s a good chance that you may emerge from the Dinosaur Missouri insane.”
“If I lose my mind, then I lose it,” said Clint, keeping his eyes on the big picture.
“That’s the spirit,” said the unicorn. “And on the upside, at least there’s not much there to lose.”
CHAPTER TWO:
INSIDE THE
DINOSAUR MISSOURI
The day ended and a new one began. Then that day ended and a third began, and a fourth and a fifth followed.
On the morning of the fifth day, gunslinger and unicorn passed through a massive ribcage like parasites through a monster’s intestines. Edward declared that based on what he could feel in the magic, they were entering the Dinosaur Missouri’s ancient heart.
“Look at me,” said the unicorn, emerging at the far end of the ribcage, near where the skeleton of the huge thing’s tail had sheared off from a shattered pelvis. “I’m poop.”
Clint couldn’t bring himself to answer Edward’s juvenile humor. He was too hungry. The trail had turned Clint hard, but never had he ridden with food in his pack yet denied himself access to it for so long. They’d subsisted on sips of water from their canteens and waterskins, but Edward wouldn’t even allow a single swallow of brew.
“Nutrition will at least nourish the body and clear the head,” Clint said, dying to at least replenish some of what his body was expending.
“Exactly,” said Edward. “So, no brew.”
On their first day of fasting, the gunslinger’s stomach had rumbled, and he had willed the feeling from his body as he had many, many times before. By the end of the second day, while they palavered over a fire with turkey pie from Beauregard’s Restaurant going bad in his pack, his stomach churned into an angry knot, and still he willed the feeling away. But by the third night, a deep weakness started to set in, and so for a reason he couldn’t explain, he sneaked a few pinches of extra salt with his dinnertime water just to feel something drop into his stomach. The salt didn’t help. Instead, it almost made him want to vomit, but he held it down. Water was precious, and would stay so until the Missouri was cleared.
“Walk faster,” Clint grunted at Edward after they’d passed the huge, skeletal tail and Edward had made his fecal joke. They were both walking, and Clint had taken the lead simply so that he could yell at Edward.
“I can walk plenty faster,” said Edward. “I’ve been sandbagging out of consideration for your slow corpse.” He increased his gait to a trot and put ten yards between himself and Clint.
“Finally, some progress,” said Clint, breaking into a jog.
The day was hot. Clint felt himself starting to sweat as he ran. He looked around, saw giant bones of deceased monsters, and wondered if the bones were actually there. He also wondered how the dancing Asian man in the banker’s clothes and eye shades had caught up, and again what Gangnam style was.
There were giant signs everywhere around him — the kind of things they called billboards back in The Realm — but the signs displayed things that Clint didn’t understand. One sign showed a woman smoking a tiny white tobacco pipe and read, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” But the woman didn’t appear to have come from anywhere, and Clint imagined himself being on the sign because he had come a long way, and then suddenly the woman from the sign was walking beside him, except that she had the low, deep voice of a saloon blues singer, and she said, “You’ve come a long way, gunslinger” before punching him in the face and sending him sprawling to the dirt.
Edward didn’t look back until he was a good distance ahead. Then he stopped and turned and laughed. Clint looked around. The woman was gone. Nobody had punched him. He’d tripped on a rock.
Edward said, “Humans are so slow and clumsy.”
“Hurry up, horsey,” whistled Clint, regaining his feet and, suddenly furious with the unicorn, breaking into a sprint.
Edward ran. Clint ran. Then they hit a stiff downward slope and both fell, rolling to the bottom. Clint stood and found himself totally brown, covered in clay and dirt from head to toe. Edward, by contrast, looked pristine and spotless, like the sun.
“Such a pretty boy,” said Clint, staring with disdain at the unicorn.
“Look at yourself,” said Edward. “You’re perfectly filthy.”
“You think you’re better than me?”
“I don’t even think that’s a real question.”
Clint shoved both hands hard into Edward’s side. Not even one of Edward’s twelve hundred pounds budged. Clint’s strong arms felt like twigs about to snap.
“You’re pathetic,” said Edward, huffing, trying to catch his breath after the sprint and the tumble down the hill.
“No, you are,” said Clint, also huffing.
Then something clicked inside his mind, cutting through the Missouri’s fog, sinking its fingers into the soft meat of the gunslinger’s brain.
“It’s hunger,” he said. “We shouldn’t be fighting. We’re just hungry.” He hoisted the pack from his shoulder and started unwrapping a slice of turkey pie.
“Don’t eat that.”
<
br /> “Sands to you,” said Clint.
“You’re weak. Mentally weak. Don’t be such a wimp. Be a unicorn.”
Clint gave him an insolent look. “So you forfeit your half then.” He raised the unwrapped pie in front of him and licked his lips, his eyes on Edward.
“Don’t.”
“You aren’t my mother.”
“If you’re fed, you’ll be able to think of demons.”
Clint stuck his tongue out at Edward — something he’d never, ever done, and which he marveled at even as he felt himself doing it — then opened his mouth to invite the pie inside. But before he could, something heavy knocked the pie from his hand, grazing his face on the way. There was a very hard, very blunt pain that Clint barely registered. He watched the turkey pie fall into the dirt, into a desiccated pile of manure.
“You think I won’t eat manure pie?” said Clint.
But Edward was staring at it too, and not just to keep Clint from grabbing it. Clint could see his lips and mouth working, trying to fight the urge to extend his neck and swallow it.
“Don’t you dare take it,” said Clint, watching Edward’s white lips smack.
Then Clint dove toward the pie, which had broken apart on impact and become enmeshed with manure and sand. Edward was faster. He extended his neck, but then seemed to regain some control and spun, sitting down hard onto the pie. There was a squelching sound as it mashed underneath him.
“You think I won’t eat unicorn-sat-on manure pie?” said Clint.
A diffuse glow came from below Edward’s enormous rump.
“What are you doing?” Clint blurted.
“Baking it,” said Edward. He stood and what used to be the pie fell from his rear in charred black flakes.
“I have more in the packs.”
Edward looked Clint fully in the eye, but something inside the gunslinger was already starting to shift. He’d had a moment of delirious weakness, but he knew the unicorn was right. Spiritualists had used hunger and fasting as methods for self-control since humans were barely humans. If he couldn’t resist hunger, he’d never be able to resist whatever mental slide show the Dinosaur Missouri had in store.
