Unicorn Western

by Sean Platt

  “I can’t read this,” he said. “Though I dearly wish I could.”

  Edward, over his shoulder, said, “It’s written in the Old Language.”

  “Can you read it?”

  “No. But I understand now where we are and what all of this must mean.”

  “Do you know where the Orb is?”

  “Yar,” said Edward, walking over to stand beside the cage. He dipped his head toward it. “It’s this cup.”

  Clint looked at the cup. It was singularly unremarkable, chipped around the rim and looking like it had been dragged up from the bottom of a muddy ditch.

  “Go ahead,” said Edward. “Take it out of the cage.”

  “Get it your dagged self,” said Clint.

  Edward was right beside the cage. The unicorn was the one who knew what was going on and, as usual, was playing coy rather than simply telling them what he knew. Edward held all of the cards. The fact that he wanted Clint to retrieve something that was right beside his nose was infuriating.

  “I can’t get it,” said Edward.

  Across the chamber, footfalls echoed into the cathedral space. All three of the travelers turned to find the source of the noise.

  It was Parson Jarmusch, his body broken into an inhuman shape of twisted terror.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN:

  THE ORB

  Jarmusch was still in his parson’s robes, but only barely. The white garments were shredded to tatters and blackened with soot. His neck seemed to turn in a sharp hook to one side, his ear flat against his left shoulder. His right arm was in front of him instead of at his side. His right leg had at least two more joints than it should have, and the foot on that leg was facing backward. From where Clint stood, Jarmusch’s left arm appeared to be totally gone. His torso was twisted and bent, like a corkscrew that had failed to penetrate rock. His skin, visible below his scorched robes, appeared raw and blistered.

  “I’m beginning to suspect that someone may have lied to me,” said the Jarmusch-thing.

  Clint drew his guns, but Jarmusch laughed.

  “Don’t bother,” he said. His voice was somehow different and strange, as if it had doubled but that the two halves of his voice hadn’t synchronized correctly. The effect was strangely alien, almost mechanical. “You can’t kill me, and none of those you could have killed came with me.”

  “Where are your people?” asked Willick.

  “Dead,” said the thing that had once been Parson Jarmusch, flapping a broken hand with a disinterested air. “Or trapped, soon to be dead.”

  “Trapped where?”

  “In the mine. You played a good game, gunslinger. You got almost all of us… with a little help from your friend.”

  Clint hadn’t lowered his guns. Each was trained on one of the monster’s eyes. “My friend?”

  “The dark rider. Our party and Dylan’s party went in. The rider and his mount alone came out. Then the rider blew a great load of dynamite and burning petrol at the entrance to the shaft, as if he’d been expecting us and had set it up from the start. The mine collapsed. Petrol spilled. Everything burned. You can guess the rest.”

  Clint stared at the creature across the cathedral chamber. “And you?”

  “I crawled through the cracks,” he croaked. His body convulsed. Something cracked. A small black belch of what looked like smoke drifted from a rip in his robe before striking the skin under his chin and vanishing again.

  Jarmusch advanced. Clint fired. The shot struck him in the chest, but he continued to advance.

  “Like I said,” the Jarmusch-thing growled, “don’t bother.”

  Clint eyed the cup in the cage — the thing Edward seemed to think was the Orb of Malevolence. Jarmusch was eyeing it too, shambling straight toward it.

  “There’s more,” he said, and this time, black smoke poured from his open mouth before circling his head and re-absorbing into his scalp. “The Orb wasn’t in the mine. But it also was. Now the dark rider has it. I saw him on the horizon after I came through the rockfall at the entrance.”

  Two more shambling steps. Clint stepped in front of the cage, as if to hide it.

  Clint whispered to Edward. “What’s he talking about?”

  “It’s the water,” the unicorn whispered back.

  “It’s the water!” Jarmusch echoed, apparently having heard just fine. “The entire dagged aquifer that’s been under the town the entire time!” He laughed with a corpse-like rattle.

  Clint looked over his shoulder at the cup, confused. Wasn’t the cup the Orb?

  “There are degrees to everything,” Edward continued, seeing Clint’s glance. “The spring in this chamber is enchanted, and its ‘Orb nature’ is stronger the closer you are to the source. I should have known, by reading into how the legends are written. Malevolence can’t be contained, so they put it in a form where everyone could sip it but none could wholly possess it. It can be disseminated in such a way because it’s not the whole of the picture. That’s what I meant about how the legends are written: ‘The first Orb spreads chaos. The second regulates and focuses it.’ ”

  “The second?”

  “The second!” the thing stumbling toward them cackled, its voice rising to a maniacal laugh.

  “It’s okay,” said Edward. “I think he already knows.”

  Willick was looking from Edward to Jarmusch to Clint, then back in a circuit. His mouth hung open with the weary look of a man who couldn’t believe what was before his eyes.

  “Your man had a large waterskin slung around his shoulder when he rode off,” said Jarmusch. “I guess this underground river must run out and under the mine.” He looked down and stepped across the bridge. “He found that the mine draws direct from this river, but miles out. I guess he put two and two together around the time we showed, or maybe figured it out and was waiting to kill us. That’s okay. I don’t want what’s in the mine. I want what’s in here.” He tried raising his head to sniff the air, but his neck was clearly broken and useless. Instead his head flopped on his shoulder. “It’s so strong. So dark,” he said, his features twisting in pleasure. “I want to drink from the Cup of Ages.”

  Clint looked to Edward, who shook his head, promising a later explanation. Then Edward, finally tired of Jarmusch’s monologue, stepped up beside Clint, putting himself between the parson’s walking corpse and the cup. His horn began to glow and he said, “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, step aside,” said Jarmusch, annoyed. Billows of black smoke spilled from his mouth. “You didn’t beat me out in the Sands, and all you could do here would be to pulverize this body further. Haven’t you ever heard that energy can’t be created or destroyed? It only changes form.”

  Jarmusch was now only thirty feet away and not slowing. Edward lowered his head, and a blast of blue light erupted from his horn. The blast struck Jarmusch in the chest and burned the front of his robe away. Behind it, Clint saw a black hole opening into nothingness. He couldn’t see the chamber through Jarmusch. He only saw blackness, as if Jarmusch were made of blackness. It was all so familiar.

  “It’s the Darkness,” said Clint. “From the sand dragon.”

  “I figured that out when he walked in as a corpse that had forced itself through a wall of rock and then began belching black smoke,” Edward said with scorn.

  Willick was still staring. He took several steps backward and stumbled against the back wall of the cathedral, falling to a hard sit. The butt of his rifle struck the hard floor, jarring the weapon from his grip. The rifle clattered to the floor, forgotten.

  Edward struck the thing again with another blast of blue light. Half of its head vanished, leaving a large part of him as only silhouette.

  “Thish ish poinlessh,” hissed Jarmusch, now speaking from half a mouth.

  “It’s not pointless at all,” said Edward. “Kold could at least walk off with less-than-pure water. But after I blow off your cover and leave you without human hands, what are you going to do?”

  Jarmusch stopped
and tried to incline his half-head thoughtfully. He failed, and the head lolled.

  “True,” he said. There was a chaotic stirring, and the half-head of Parson Jarmusch seemed to vanish into the neck of his robes. Parts of him began to twist and shift and drop to the ground. At first Clint thought the body was simply crumbling to pieces. But it was actually collapsing into a pile of rats.

  The rats filled Jarmusch’s clothes like a sack stuffed with living stones. The robes writhed, gray and brown forms spilling from the sleeves, underneath, and up from the neck. There were hundreds — greater in total size than Jarmusch. Clint found himself remembering the gargantuan sand dragon, and wondered just how large the darkness could make itself.

  The rats began to climb Clint’s legs, biting at him in a thousand places at once. It was impossible to defend against them all. They bit his fingers. He tried to swat them off and keep his big hands clenched, but the bites were too many. His guns fell to the floor and made a sound that broke Clint’s heart. He tried reaching for them, but rats swallowed them with their bodies. Then, in a rush, there were rats up his pants, down his shirt, and in his hair.

  Darkness from Jarmusch split into too many pieces to fight. Edward wore a sweater of rats. He magicked many away, but the swarms were nearly as thick as the air, and already inside of whatever shield the unicorn might raise. His legs were three times wider than normal, covered in fluid moving bodies. He stepped high, stomping the ground to jostle them. Some fell, but whenever a few scattered, more climbed up.

  Clint clawed at his body. The pain was disorienting. The rats were on his head, climbing toward his face, his mouth, his eyes.

  But then everything stopped.

  There was a brilliant blue flash and a thousand rats squealed at once. Clint saw piles of the creatures fall dazed to his feet and to Edward’s hooves. Not one rat remained on them. A few were trapped in Clint’s clothes, but they were stunned as if hit with sleeper gas. Clint shook them out, looking down. He kicked rats aside until he could recover his guns. They felt good in his hands, and he promised himself that no matter what came at him in the future, he’d never drop them again.

  He looked at Edward, silently asking how the unicorn had managed a spell to repel the rats, but Edward shook his head. It hadn’t been his magic at all.

  Below them, the dazed rats stirred. They looked up, seeming to regard the man and the unicorn before diving in vast waves into the river spilling from the Orb spring.

  “Step on them!” Edward shouted. “Shoot them if you can!”

  Clint began to stomp as Edward, with his heavy front hooves, did the same. The gunslinger drew his pistols and started to fire. His hands were lightning, but there were way, way too many rats. Between the two of them — three, once Willick summoned his strength and raced over — they put an end to dozens, and each time they smashed or shot one, black smoke puffed from the small bodies like from a boot tip kicked into a spore fungus.

  The river filled with rats as their guns and stomping feet went silent, and shortly thereafter the creatures emerged from the underground river on the other side, soaking wet.

  Then they turned — a thousand tiny heads rotating at once — and regarded the unicorn, the gunslinger, and the parson. They seemed to smirk, and then the entire gray and brown mass ran back through the tiled passage toward the exit, leaving a slick of wetness on the ground behind them.

  Clint quickly reloaded and holstered his guns. It was finished. Whatever this had been, it was over. Dead rats lay in a carpet. The river seemed momentarily polluted, but quickly cleared. Willick retrieved his rifle.

  Edward sighed. “When those rats squeeze themselves off, it’s going to make the last cup of water I’d ever want to drink,” he said.

  Clint mopped his brow. “I don’t understand what happened here.”

  “What happened is that the bad guys both managed to seize the Orb. But it’s okay.” The unicorn nodded toward the ornate cup still on the dais, as if they hadn’t just been rudely interrupted. “Get the cup.”

  Clint turned. The latch on the front of the cage was like nothing he’d ever seen, and it took him several minutes to figure his way into opening it. Doing so, once he reasoned it, required six fingers and two distinct hands. He had to slide two fingers of each hand through brass loops on either side of the door to raise pins that kept the latch closed, then use another two fingers to pry against one another and free the catch.

  Once the door was open, Clint reached inside and grabbed the simple stone cup.

  “Use the cup to fill a waterskin, then mark that waterskin carefully,” said Edward.

  Clint did as Edward told him.

  “Now, shatter the cup.”

  Clint waited a moment to be sure Edward wasn’t going to change his mind about destroying a timeless unicorn artifact, then shrugged and threw the cup hard against the floor, where it broke into shards.

  The gunslinger turned to the unicorn. “Now what?”

  “Now we ride,” said Edward.

  CHAPTER TWELVE:

  THE SECOND ORB

  They left the subterranean cathedral and rode out of the rancho the same way they’d entered, then rode to Willick’s church to drop him off before resuming their journey. Willick sprinted up the steps when they reached their destination, unlocked the doors and threw them wide, then removed the furniture barricading the entrance. Then, once Edward assured him the Darkness had better things to do than possess another of Precipice’s townfolk, Willick vowed to do what he could to help the town move on and restore its hope. He said it had been a long time since Precipice had last managed to hope, but that with both warring bosses out of the picture and with a fat stack of their cash, anything was possible. Clint was skeptical of such shameless optimism and Edward made a biting remark about how Willick could fart rainbows, but secretly both were pleased, and rode on as satisfied as a gunslinger and a unicorn could be.

  As they rode from town, they passed the stone well where they had paused to drink on their way in. Edward nodded toward it.

  “I understood once I saw the book in the underground cathedral — which I couldn’t read, but which I recognized the symbolism of — and once I saw the spring,” he said. “The spring itself is the purest source of ‘Orb of Malevolence’ in Precipice. The mine, fed by the same underground river, is third purest. Kold must have figured that out, and decided that ‘third purest’ was good enough for his purposes, and it is. Between the two, this well — which taps directly into the aquifer without filters or intervening stone and is closer to the source than the mine — is second purest.”

  “We drank from it on the way into town,” said Clint. “It was here all along.”

  “Yar, and drinking from it may have saved our lives. Energy from the old artifacts isn’t passive, just as magic isn’t passive. It has its own intelligence, and it responds to the will and character of those who use it. The Darkness can take its share of the Orb to use for nefarious purposes. It did take its share on the backs of those rats, and it will attempt to use it for nefarious purposes… but at the same time, Darkness can’t stand against that same energy if the energy is within noble souls — which in this case was a Realm marshal and a unicorn.”

  Clint looked at Edward. Then he said, “The bright flash that stunned the rats and made them stop attacking us. That was Orb magic in our blood repelling the Darkness?”

  “Yar, it was.”

  “You’re saying that The Orb of Malevolence was on our side?”

  “There are two sides to everything,” said Edward. But beyond that simple sentence, he said nothing more.

  They came to the top of the hill and looked briefly out at the river separating Precipice from the madness of the Dinosaur Missouri. They wouldn’t be heading in that direction, but would instead be skirting the Missouri to one side, hoping to loop back and make up some time on Kold — and, if it was traveling mortally, on the Darkness.

  “What about the cup and cage?” said Clint.

/>   “It’s complicated.”

  Clint leaned forward and punched Edward below the ear. “It’s time you started trusting me, and time you stopped shilling this puzzle a piece at a time.”

  Edward, unperturbed, kept walking. “Don’t punch me again, and try to understand that you may not be able to understand what I’m about to tell you.”

  “You’ve made your thoughts about the stupidity of humans abundantly clear,” said Clint.

  “It’s not about stupidity,” said Edward. “What I mean is that some unicorn matters are beyond the actual human capacity to understand. You are limited. It’s not a bad thing, but it’s how you are. To take a simple example, humans can’t understand infinity. What is beyond the stars? And then what is beyond that? You are literally unable to comprehend the idea of forever. You’ve nar the power to grasp it.”

  “I get it. Go on.”

  “The answer to your question begins with the fact that intention matters to magic,” said Edward. “Earlier, Willick asked how we, as pure creatures, could be associated with an Orb named for its power to cause chaos. But we don’t see things as black and white. The Orb was once part of a powerful force of creation, but like all powerful things, the Orb can be twisted and perverted in the wrong hands. You’re wondering why there was an elaborate, hidden cathedral beneath the Rancho Encantato to house the Orb when any man could have simply sipped from the well? It’s because anyone can take possession of the Orb, but only the sort of soul that the Orb would want to possess it would be willing to go to the trouble to find the cathedral. Those who built the shrine beneath the Rancho wanted a team of two to carry the Orb — a magical creature who’d be able to breach the wall at its entrance, and a mortal man with fingers able to open the cage. Drinking from the cup is only symbolic, but in the case of magic, symbolism matters enough to make the difference. Do you understand?”