by Sean Platt
A beat of silence held Clint and Edward’s consideration.
“Where is Jarmusch now?” the gunslinger finally said.
“I hear he started a new church with his followers — followers who are more like an army than a holy assembly, armed and willing to do whatever their leader asks. They’re said to meet in the old town hall. There hasn’t been any need for the town hall for years around here anyhow, seeing as there’s no law.”
“And yet,” said Edward, looking with respect at the small parson, “you have stayed.”
Willick shrugged. “There are people even in the darkest places who need someone to help them keep hoping.”
“And do those people still attend your services, since the rider arrived and Jarmusch tipped?”
Willick gestured into the sanctuary. “It’s Sunday, and my pews are empty,” he said. “Just as there are always people who need hope, so is there a limit to hope’s allowance.”
Edward, who seemed to command Willick’s respect, took a step forward. “What if I told you that you could yet make a difference?” he said.
“What do you have in mind?” Willick asked.
Edward told him.
CHAPTER SEVEN:
DOWN TO BUSINESS
After parting company with Parson Willick, Clint and Edward walked side-by-side down the center of Providence’s main street. Willick had told them that the street headed directly toward the bank, then curved to the left and sloped gently downward for a winding half mile until it finally dead-ended at the Rancho Encantato, where Dean Dylan and his men made headquarters.
The rancho itself was enormous, sprawling for untold acres, but Clint and Edward could see from a long distance that most of those acres had gone to scrub and desert. Back in the days when the rancho harbored magic owners, those magicians might have been able to provide water for crops or magically cause their land to blossom, but between the magic owners’ departure and the negligent Dylan gang’s arrival, everything seemed to have fallen into disrepair. There were three sheds and a barn that Clint and Edward could see, and the roofs had caved in on all three. One additional structure seemed to have been burned. There were skeletons of what might once have been livestock in the fenced yards, now free to roam if they wished because the fences had been felled by wind, wanton behavior, or other forms of destruction.
The main house, where the gang made its beds, was in far better shape. It was three stories tall, making it taller than any building in Precipice’s town center. Clint and Edward had a long time to study the house as they approached because it was huge enough to be visible well before they arrived at its door. Clint counted twenty-six windows across the front on one level alone, many of them large picture windows. The rancho wore the look of an old estate that had been curiously unbrushed by time.
The appearance of harmony started to vanish as they drifted closer. The house itself was old and classic, but its front yard was studded with dead machines made of a new-looking alloy that gleamed like diamonds in the sun. The largest alloy object had a huge handle that gleamed so fiercely that it seemed to be generating its own light. The gunslinger and unicorn were forced to squint, shielding their eyes to see past it. The estate was covered in white split-rail fences, and had a manual well with a bucket wound to the top just like the town’s well — except that the base of this one was made from a shiny silver substance that looked like crinkled minerals. The front door of the house was a quaint ranch red, but the accent color was repeated in strange arches and angles that protruded whimsically from the structure. Clint’s eyes, which were sharp, even picked out flashing lights on a contraption mounted to the rancho’s side wall. It almost looked like something from The Realm — a sort of spark pack that might once have powered a thinking machine.
Clint’s eyes picked out something else while they were cresting the final hill, too, but Edward was first to mention it.
“They’re watching us,” he said.
“I see them,” Clint said, nodding. He’d been watching the drapes shift for several minutes. He also thought he might have seen the glint of reflected light up ahead, from the lens of a spyglass.
“Should we approach in some way other than walking straight at the front door?”
“Of course not,” said Clint, still marching. “I earned my invitation.”
Edward gave an annoyed grunt. “The suspense is killing me.”
Edward was being sarcastic, but Clint was indeed beginning to find their march tiresome. The approach to the ranch was so long that the house had been in front of them for over fifteen minutes and didn’t seem to be drawing closer. He could feel the eyes of Dylan’s gang on them, and it annoyed the gunslinger that the men inside probably thought they were being subtle and sly. He wanted to let them know he wasn’t fooled if nothing else, and to get the meeting underway as quickly as possible.
“I’ll bet I can rush it along,” said Clint. “Watch this.”
He drew his right gun, sighted, and fired a single shot.
The ranch was easily five hundred yards distant. The best Sands rifleman couldn’t have hit the house (let alone hit it accurately), but Clint was a marshal, and even the best riflemen didn’t use a marshal’s gunpowder or have Realm rifling in their barrels.
There was what appeared to be a tiny puff at the front door and, a few seconds delayed, the sound of splintering wood. Immediately, the door was thrown open and a man began sprinting toward them, yelling, waving his hands above his flopping hair. It took several minutes for the man to arrive, but when he did, Clint saw that it was one of the bandits from in front of the saloon. He was holding a huge metal mug with a bullet hole through both sides.
“Wait! Wait!” the man shouted. “Don’t shoot!”
Clint was still holding his pistol, more because he liked the feel of it in his hand than because he had any intent to use it again. He looked at the shouting man, amused, then re-holstered the sidearm.
“We’re expecting y’all!” the man shouted. “No harm. Friends! You want a job and we have one, pleasem and thankoo. Come yonder.” He tried to smile, but the smile was too large and looked about as carved on his face as one on a statue. “We could use a man like you, yes sir. Let’s ride up to the house together, what d’ya say? I’m beat. Think your horse could handle two riders?”
This was the wrong thing to say. Edward lowered his head and, without hesitation, directed a fierce purple flash at the bandit. The bolt struck him in the chest and he flew sideways, perpendicular to the ranch road, as if flung from a catapult. He struck a six-inch tree, sheering it clear in half. Then there was a second flash from Edward’s horn — this one yellow — and the man groaned and rolled over.
“Don’t worry,” Edward mumbled. “If I didn’t plan to fix his back, I wouldn’t have broken it.”
Clint said nothing as they marched past the moaning bandit, never breaking their gaze from the house.
“He had a point, though. May I ride?”
Edward sighed. “Fine.”
Edward broke into a trot and arrived at the house a minute or two later. The bandit had left the door (with its bullet hole) open, and Clint noticed a strange seal around the door’s edge that glowed with an odd light. Techem, he thought. This is Realm magic — the sort that isn’t actually magic at all.
“I can’t fit through that door,” said Edward, staring at the rancho’s entrance.
Clint dismounted, and, in deference to Edward’s inability to enter the house, sat down on a white-painted metal chair beside what used to be a garden. He turned the chair so that it faced the house and then leaned back contentedly with his legs crossed, looking up at the windows as if the house were a stage show. He pulled two apples from his pack — rather extravagant gifts from Parson Willick — and handed one to Edward. He began to munch the other, taking huge bites and letting the sweet juice spill down his chin.
They waited.
A few minutes later, when it became apparent that the new arrivals wouldn’t b
e entering the house, a large man with broad shoulders stepped through the open door and stood in front of them. He pulled a chair from the garden for himself, then turned it around so that he was facing the gunslinger and the unicorn.
“You’re quite a gun,” said the man after a few long seconds.
Clint took a bite of his apple.
“It’s nice that you have skills and all, and believe me, I want us to be friends,” the man continued. “But at the same time, I don’t want you forgetting who’s boss of this town. And that’s me, Dean Dylan.”
“Seems to be some debate on who runs this town,” said Clint.
“Right now,” Dylan continued, “there are no fewer than ten guns trained on you. You might be able to find and disable most of ‘em, but I guarantee that if you do anything funny, one of those bullets will take you down.”
“If he does anything funny,” said Edward, “rest assured you’ll find yourself laughing uncontrollably.”
Dylan ignored him. “Are we clear?”
“Because he’s so hilarious,” Edward clarified. “I mean, just look at him.”
Dylan looked at Clint’s long, ugly face. He was sitting back with his legs crossed, chewing his apple. He took a bite and said, “A man walks into a bar. Next time, he ducks.”
Edward raised his eyebrows at Dylan. “See?”
“I said, ‘Are we clear.’”
“And if he tries anything dangerous,” Edward continued, still ignoring the question, “you’ll be dead.”
Clint made a gun out of his right index finger and thumb, pulled the imaginary trigger at his host, and said, “Boo!”
A chorus of loud mechanical clicks came from around them like clockwork cicadas. That would be at least ten guns being cocked, Clint thought, and the man was right — he couldn’t see them all. He could make out four or five men without turning his head, but no more.
Clint gave a wry smile, then leaned forward, uncrossing his legs, and put the heels of his palms on his knees. Juice from the apple still clasped in his hand dripped into the dirt.
“Yar, we’re clear about that,” said Clint. “But another thing to be clear about is that my friend and I are here because we want to be here. Your men seem to think my friend is a horse. And they don’t seem to have ever met a marshal. I’ve given them ten percent of what I have, and Edward here, save that one unfortunate fellow further up the hill, has given them none of what he has. So let’s dispense with you pretending to be the big man, and if you’d like, you may pretend that if you tried to kill me right now, you might succeed. And then, with all of that aside, let’s talk business.”
“Business?”
“Dollars,” said Clint.
“How many dollars?”
“As many as you can afford. See, I left a lot behind when I turned my back to the wall. There’s a lot I’m accustomed to, and I ride with a bounty on my head. I have valuable skills, and I deserve to be paid well by the right employer.”
“Maybe I don’t need you.”
“I think you do,” said Clint. “You have a problem with your friend the parson. I assume you’ve heard what he’s up to?”
Pause.
“Yar,” said Dylan finally. “He’s gone around the bend a bit.”
“You’ve known the parson for years. Apparently, you’ve had your troubles with him.”
“Everyone knows that.”
“Thinking of the man you know, can you believe that he’s lost his mind so entirely? And can you imagine why he might lose his grip on reality and on control? He attacked the church; did you know that? It’s true. I’ve spoken to Parson Willick, who these days locks his doors to Jarmusch. Willick says Jarmusch is building an army of armed men who will do whatever he says.”
“I have that situation in hand,” said Dylan.
“You’re missing the point,” said Clint. “What matters isn’t his army. What matters is what might cause a good, kind-hearted, pacifist of a parson to build an army in the first place.”
Dylan looked at Clint. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, both eyes singing a different song.
“You’re looking for something,” said Edward. “You’re searching the town for a dark magical object that is desired by the dark rider.”
Dylan said nothing, but his unshifted expression implied agreement. At least Dylan himself knew who was actually in charge in Precipice.
“But despite all that looking, you haven’t found what you seek,” Edward continued.
Again, Dylan said nothing.
“So I ask again,” said Clint. “Can you think of anything that might turn a quiet parson so bad, so fast?”
Dylan chewed at his lip. “You’re saying that he found the dark object we’ve been looking for?”
“What we’re saying,” said Edward, “is that if he’s found it, you don’t have a needle’s chance in sand of fighting him and taking it back before the dark rider returns. So here we are — a gunslinger with fast hands and a unicorn bursting with white magic — for hire.”
Dylan stared from Clint to Edward. Edward to Clint.
“So,” said Clint, spreading his arms and leaning back in his garden chair. “Let’s talk business.”
CHAPTER EIGHT:
BLACK CHURCH
Edward said, “He’s sitting on it.”
They were in the cleared hollow of an abandoned house on the far opposite side of the town from the Rancho Encantato, a half mile outside of what passed for the city limits. The house had a barn, but Edward, who refused to bunk like a common horse, had blown out a crumbling wall of the ramshackle structure and magicked several bales’ worth of straw inside to lay on. Then he’d made himself comfortable on the floor, looking extremely horselike (though Clint would never say it) as he rolled back and forth, his heavy hooves swaying in the air and crashing back down onto the wooden planks. Clint lay on what had once been a padded bench along the opposite wall.
Both gunslinger and unicorn looked tired. They’d set out from the Rancho with a wad of Dylan’s cash and with the intention of going directly to find Parson Jarmusch, but they’d detoured here instead out of exhaustion and by unspoken mutual consent. Edward said it seemed that they were always walking, carrying palavers with their six feet still moving. From Solace to the Edge to the Dinosaur Missouri to Precipice, it felt like all they’d done for the three years on Kold’s tepid trail was to walk. They’d had their stay-over with the Leisei family, but Clint said that didn’t really count, seeing as he was sick at the time, and everything had ended in death.
They’d stopped at the house because they wanted a place of their own to rest their weary bones… just for a while.
Clint longed for the stability he’d felt in Solace prior to Hassle Stone and Kold’s arrival. He also longed for the emotional security he’d nearly felt with Mai, and which he hoped he’d one day feel in full once he and Mai had been properly hitched. On the day of their intended hitching back in Solace, it had struck Clint how strange it felt to feel happy. Now, soul-tired, he missed that strange happy feeling. He’d been so blinded by vengeance and rage over the past three years that he’d grown calluses on his heart. Still, deep down Clint longed for Mai, for the hitching, and for the life he wondered if he’d ever have.
“What do you mean, ‘He’s sitting on it’?” Clint asked.
The unicorn’s giant white form dominated the floor of the small, broken-down house. He replied without lifting his head. “I mean that Dean Dylan sits on what he seeks,” he said. “The Orb of Malevolence is at the Rancho. Couldn’t you feel it?”
“Nar.”
“I know you’re not magic, but… wow,” Edward said. “I could barely speak for the power I felt there.”
“So why did Cerberus lead Kold to the mine outside of town that Willick mentioned, if its presence at the Rancho is so obvious?” Clint said.
“I don’t know. Perhaps he’s clouded by the perversion he is perpetrating on Mai. Or perhaps because this is the Or
b of Malevolence, its power is less obvious to Cerberus, who radiates a stupendous amount of malevolence of his own. That would make feeling the Orb like trying to hear a coin hit the ground in a room filled with the blasting of Joelsongs. But regardless, it’s obvious that none of Dylan’s gang knows it’s there. They’re randomly tearing through Precipice as if they have nothing to lead them.”
Clint nodded. “So we bust our way in. We search. We find the Orb. And then we take it, before they realize it’s under their noses.”
Edward rolled halfway up, now in the equine version of a sit. Then, because he was never comfortable in a half-laying position, he rolled up to his feet. He looked down at Clint, who was still on the couch.
“That may not be a good idea. Malevolence breeds malevolence. I know you could feel the men’s menace when we were there.”
“Yar,” said Clint. “That, I felt.”
“There are dozens of his gang there. They have a whole house to hide in, and they’re being influenced by a dark force they don’t understand. That’s making them jumpier, angrier, and deadlier than they’d be otherwise. We could take them in an open area, but attacking them in that house would be like attacking bees in a hive. We also don’t know exactly where the Orb rests, which means that we will need time to search for it.” He shook his head. “No, we need to get them out of there.”
Clint stood, checked his guns, and shrugged. “We were on our way to see the parson, so let’s do that,” he said. And then, with no preamble and without consulting Edward, he rose, stepped through the open end of the house, and hooked back onto the road leading into Precipice. Edward trotted behind until he caught up.
