by Sean Platt
Clint didn’t totally understand, but figured he would in time, as he processed.
“Yar,” he said. “But the Darkness could have opened the cage, had we not been there.”
“But we were there,” said Edward.
“We might not have been. And if we hadn’t been, it would have gotten the cup.”
“It didn’t, because we were there.”
“But we might not have been,” Clint repeated.
Edward shook his head. “I’m trying not to mock you, but it’s difficult to refrain.”
They rode in meditative quiet for many minutes, with no sound save for Edward’s hooves in the sand. Finally Clint said, “But the Darkness did get the water. And right from the source, even without the cup.”
“Yar. It got the Orb in the way Kold got the Orb — which is the same way your idiot companion Yates got his schooling back in The Realm.”
Clint didn’t remember much from his time in The Realm. Most of his early years were a void in his mind, as if erased by a chalk wiper. But he remembered Yates.
The highest schools in The Realm conferred special papers which decreed that a man was schooled once he’d completed a certain number of years. Yates hadn’t completed his years, but his wealthy family had used their money to purchase a paper for him. Yates would be able to do anything with his paper that a properly schooled man could do with his, but it was nar the same.
“You’re saying they cheated,” said Clint. “That their Orbs won’t ‘work,’ whatever that means.”
“Yar. And nar. They’ll ‘work’ just fine.”
“So what does it matter? How is the water in our sack any different from theirs?”
Again Edward shook his head, as if bearing the blunt weight of a ride with such stupidity.
“I’ll just sit back here and be an idiot,” said Clint, hearing the pout in his voice.
“You do it so well,” said Edward.
“And I’ll let your brilliance take us to wherever. To get the second Orb, which will probably be some magic dirt we can use to plant magic beans.”
Edward stopped.
“I haven’t told you about the second Orb,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“What about the second Orb?” said Clint, still pouting.
“Kold already has it.”
Clint looked down at Edward’s neck, saying nothing.
“I felt it when we left the cathedral and took new sips of the pure Orb. The energy of one Orb shows you the way to the next, and what I saw when I drank was Kold. The second Orb is already in his possession.”
“When did he get it?”
“He’s had it all along. He apparently took them out of order.”
“What is it?” Clint asked. His voice had changed from pout to plea. The sky’s colors were suddenly wrong, starting to swirl.
“It’s called the Orb of Benevolence. It controls the action of the first — or, if its user wants, refrains from controlling it.”
“But what is it?” said Clint, afraid he already knew.
Edward dropped his head, his nose close to the sand, almost apologetic.
“It’s Mai,” he said.
UNICORN
WESTERN 4
CHAPTER ONE:
THE REALM MACHINE
“Look at this,” Clint said, stretching a leg from his mount’s pristine white side to kick a leaning, faded sign beside the trail as they passed. You are approaching Nazareth Shiloh, home of the Sands’ best chili brewfest. “Now that’s a blast from the past. When’s the last time you heard of anyone brewing chili?”
Edward grunted. There were many things across the world that had turned to legend and gone missing forever. Chili was the most appetizing among them. The sign did indeed advertise a long, long, long forgotten and delicious event, but Edward’s grunt seemed to suggest that Clint was pointing out the sign specifically to irk the unicorn. Which, of course, he was.
“That sign means we’re entering the Lakes,” said Edward, “and there are other things that the Lakes are home to that you should be more concerned about than chili.”
“Mmm, chili,” Clint said, rubbing his stomach theatrically.
Edward said nothing. It felt as if the two of them had been riding together forever. It was almost true — in Clint’s mind, anyway. He was no longer sure how long it’d been since his exile from The Realm, but he knew the few memories from before his exile were tumbleweeds in the sands, probably at least in part from all of the leaking and slippage. As far as the gunslinger’s memory was concerned, he and the unicorn had been riding together forever. Just one very long trail, pocked with brief stops for a chance at love and the certainty of sorrow.
The days recycled, never ending. Even after his years in the Sands, Clint never grew used to it — at least not entirely. Day followed day. One mesa chased the next. Nothing changed, save the occasional one-horse town. When they passed through a dusty burg for a belly full of turkey pie and brew, they never stopped longer than needed to refill their supplies and for Edward to insult the local horses. Then Clint would pat his replenished belly and they would head on out, one day again following another, with one mesa chasing the next.
“You’re magical,” Clint said to the back of Edward’s horned head below him, suddenly feeling the weight of his endless journey sitting on his heart as they arrived at Buddha’s Thumb — a giant freestanding boulder out at the edge of the Gobe Forest. The Thumb was near 6,000 squared lengths, and rose almost eight Otel floors straight to the sky. “So because you’re magical, maybe you can tell me: does this ever end? Or do we wander forever?”
“We wander through the Lakes O Plenty as planned, then on to the Meadows. That’s all I know,” said the unicorn.
“And after the Meadows, we catch the bad guy.”
“Catch. Catch,” Edward mocked. “That’s your fantasy, not mine. If you ask me, we’re never going to catch Kold and Cerberus. Or save Mai. We’re just going to walk until we crumble to dust.”
Clint tittered, suddenly feeling giddy in the face of such unending tedium. “Tell me the name of the Meadows again,” he said.
“The Meadows,” said Edward, shaking his big white head, as pristine as if he’d just come through a Realm conveyance washing station. Edward could walk through a sandstorm and come away clean enough to sleep on silk bedding — assuming he could lose the brown-coated rider on his back.
“What Meadows?”
Edward sighed. “Elf Meadows.”
Clint cackled a dry, humorless laugh.
They’d been heading steadily for a region originally frolicked by the unicorns and which, according to legend, had been Realm-adjacent back before the first fracture. The entire region, having been settled by unicorns, had names that Clint found imminently mockable: Rainbow Fields. Puff Valley. The Plains of Delight. Making fun of unicorn nomenclature was all Clint had to counter Edward’s constant insults.
And now they’d entered the Lakes O Plenty, which Clint was already mocking-o-plenty since there were no lakes. But despite the mockery, the feeling that their quest had run forever and would never end, and Clint’s suspicion that Kold’s captive — Clint’s once-bride-to-be, Mai — could no longer be the woman he’d once known, Clint couldn’t suppress a spark of hope. Rumor surrounding Elf Meadows suggested that the land there never shifted. Ever. If that was true, it would mean that despite the fractures and the leaking, Elf Meadows would still be Realm adjacent, even today.
Nobody can find The Realm, said a voice in his head.
Somebody can, because people still live there, Clint answered himself.
He let it go. It was an argument for another day. If The Realm couldn’t be found, that was both good news and bad. It would mean that Clint would never find himself back behind the wall, but it would also mean that Kold wouldn’t, either. It would mean that Kold might not find the third Orb, thus possessing the entirety of the Triangulum — an object that Edward still refused to fully explain. If The Realm cou
ldn’t be found, it would mean that both the gunslinger and the unicorn might die on the sand… but at least the world, such as it was, would march on.
Edward stopped, so suddenly that Clint found himself pitched forward and had to grab Edward’s neck to keep from spilling to the dirt. If Edward had been looking up, Clint would have been impaled on the unicorn’s horn, which Edward would likely have found hilarious.
Because Clint was feeling irritated, he used the backs of his heels to kick Edward’s sides, clicking his tongue at him like he would a horse.
“Witty,” said Edward, not looking back at his rider. His eyes were fixed in the distance, as if he’d just heard or scented something.
“What is it?” said Clint.
“Magic. A lot of it. It suddenly filled the air like a strong cologne.”
Clint wanted to enter into snide banter with Edward, but they’d seen too much of magic’s dark side over the past years to take it for granted that Edward sensing magic was a good thing. He might be sensing the Orb of Malevolence (a vial filled with water that they carried in their saddlebags) reacting to the presence of another, even more malevolent Orb. He might be reacting to the presence of Cerberus, Dharma Kold’s black unicorn. He might even be sensing the Darkness, which they’d last seen fleeing the old cathedral under Precipice in the form of hundreds of soaking wet rats.
“Is it the Orb?” said Clint.
“No. It’s so familiar I almost didn’t recognize it. White magic. The kind that once permeated the world’s surface, back before the leaking. It feels sweet.” Edward’s nose moved up as if scenting the breeze, as a man would to draw a particularly fine fragrance to his nostrils. “Oh, it’s been so long,” he said with something like a sigh of pleasure. “This was what it once smelled like everywhere. Back when I was young.”
Clint, who only smelled dung, said nothing to sour Edward’s nostalgia.
“It’s ahead,” said the unicorn.
Edward sounded like he’d been transported back through many years, perhaps to a time before he’d grown so cynical and jaded. He sounded — and Clint had to triple-check his mind’s assessment before allowing the conscious thought — happy.
The unicorn’s feet began to move. Clint, on his back, found himself wanting to drop back. He’d never seen Edward like this.
Within a minute, they reached the edge of a tall cliff where Clint found himself looking down into a deep valley. There appeared to be a party far below, but Clint couldn’t make out a single detail. He could see a scatter of people, but couldn’t tell who they might be or what they were doing. There was something large in the center of the milling figures, big and winking in the sun’s bright light, as if made of gems or mirrors.
Looking down, Edward’s demeanor flipped like a switch.
“I should have known,” he said. His moment of euphoria had popped like a bubble.
Clint carried a spyglass, so he fished it from his pack while Edward kept staring, a scowl starting to form on his mouth. Then Clint put the glass to his eye and saw what Edward saw below.
There was a long, winding crack along the valley floor that looked as if it were made of light. At first, it had blended in with the sand and sun, but with the glass to his eye, Clint could see there was something glowing beneath the crack — a sort of blue-white fog that was emerging in a light haze, like the smoke from sublimating scientist’s ice. After a moment of observation, Clint could see the smoke wasn’t simply wafting from the crack. The glass was strong and Clint’s hands were steady. His eyes were sharp, and he could see the ghostlike vapor curling up into the air in what looked like tentacles, beckoning to the blue sky above. It looked almost alive.
There was a large alloy machine straddling the largest part of the crack. The machine had great treads like a Realm groundmover, and one tread was positioned on either side of the chasm. The machine’s belly was a man’s height from the ground. What looked like a giant mandible hung below it. The mandible looked like the mouthpiece of a beetle.
There were five men circling the machine, seemingly making adjustments and setting controls. Three were dressed in what appeared to be alloy themselves, but of a mesh, see-through sort. These men wore alloy helmets as well. The two others looked like workmen, dressed in clothing that could have been from any Sands town, albeit much cleaner and not yet worn to threads.
“That’s a Realm machine,” said Clint, still peering through the glass.
Edward, who didn’t need a glass to see every detail Clint could see and more, made a noise from below that sounded like a scoff. “Yar.”
“It’s not running on steam or spark. There’s no smoke pipe.”
“It’s running on magic,” said Edward. “The magic sitting below it.”
Clint took the glass from his eye and looked down at the unicorn. Then, when Edward didn’t acknowledge his surprise, he hopped down and stood beside him.
“You’re saying that’s a magic vein.”
“Yar,” said Edward. “An open one.”
“You don’t seem very happy about it.”
“That’s because it’s not naturally open. They opened it.”
That snagged Clint’s interest. Magic ran beneath the surface of the sand, and like a river system, tiny runnels and tributaries always funneled back to bigger streams of magic. The largest magic streams were like mighty waterways, but none was accessible to a man with a shovel. It took magic to open magic, and based on everything Clint had heard from Edward and other sources, it was never supposed to be opened, especially in a time of great leaking. The fracturing of the land did plenty of opening on its own. One day, to hear Edward talk, what remained of the magic would all evaporate. Making more openings on purpose seemed tantamount to a crime.
“Why did they open it?” asked Clint.
Edward nodded toward the machine. “That’s a seam-stitcher. This land must still shift out here. The Realm is the only place where magic’s still abundant, but this is their dirty little secret as to why. When the lands shift, it opens fractures and leads to more leaking. But The Realm doesn’t want its flow interrupted, so it uses these machines to seal the fractures.”
“But that’s good, right?”
“Nature finds its own way when it isn’t interfered with,” said Edward. “Even a great fire has a purpose.”
“How about you just tell me what you mean for once instead of speaking in riddles?” said Clint.
Shooting erupted before Edward could reply.
Neither gunslinger nor unicorn, engaged in conversation as they were, had seen the attack party approaching. Clint raised the glass back to his eye as a group of men circled the seam-stitcher and its crew. All but one of the attackers had lassos, and each of the lassos was spinning like a storm overhead. Only the remaining man — an odd-looking fellow with bushy, fiery orange hair standing out from his head like an oversized helmet — had weapons. This last man brandished a pair of what from Clint’s vantage point looked like very long and bulky pistols.
The lasso-bearers demeanor was strange. They wielded the ropes as if they were guns, and the Realm men around the machine backed up, their hands in the air, as if the ropers might shoot them with lassos. But that didn’t make sense. The seam crew had to have weapons among them. If their opponents carried only ropes, why didn’t they retaliate?
The standoff (Clint counted a dozen men with ropes plus the man with the large orange hair facing the stitcher’s crew) held for perhaps thirty seconds before another man ran out from the machine with his hands up, waving frantically and apparently yelling, though Clint couldn’t hear more than faint mutters from this high up. The new man seemed to have been inside the machine. He was wearing a suit that gleamed even more than the mesh suits on three of the others — more even than the seam-stitcher itself.
“That man is covered in metal,” said Edward.
“It’s not a man,” said Clint, scattered memories of his time in The Realm resurfacing in his clouded mind. “It’s a thinking mach
ine.”
The thinking machine was mostly golden in color, with accents of brown and other muted tones across its body. It had the shape of a man, but Clint had seen similar machines before and knew that up close, it would be all alloy and bolts, painted to appear as if it wore human clothes. Clint had never seen a seam-stitching operation before, but he recognized a commissioner when he saw one. Commissioner machines were in charge of every operation outside of the walls because they could be programmed to be authoritative, responsible, and loyal — while also being entirely expendable. The three men in mesh (which Clint assumed were Paladin Infantry soldiers) were there to protect the operation, but Infantry were the lowest level of knights and held no authority. They were grunts in need of a boss — even if the boss was made of cogs and clockwork and operated on steam.
The commissioner machine ran to just past where the two men in common clothing and paladins were holding their ground. All three of the paladins had dropped their hands to their sides like gunslingers, but none had drawn. They were watching the men’s lassos around them, and again Clint found himself wondering why. Their weapons were ropes, for Providence’s sake. Clint could fell a town full of men even with one hand bound. But part of Clint’s reaction was probably due to old prejudice because back in The Realm, there’d been a constant power struggle between knights and marshals. Knights thought that marshals were mercenaries fit only for dirty jobs involving killing. Marshals, in turn, felt that the knights were soft.
A long blue beam of light appeared at the hip of one of the paladins. He’d drawn his scimitar. The closest rope man reacted, but he wasn’t fast enough. The paladin covered the distance between them in three long strides and spun with his light weapon, which lashed like a whip as it neared the man with the rope. The beam seemed to glide right through the rope-bearer, sending him straight to the dirt. Clint couldn’t help but admire the man’s grit. He’d reacted like a marshal.
Immediately, a rope man across the circle flicked his arm toward the knight. The rope in his hand seemed to defy physics, becoming more projectile than lasso, and simultaneously wrapped itself around the paladin’s neck, arms, legs, and torso. The knight’s weapon seemed to cleave in half and turn off, falling to the sand as a useless cylinder of alloy. The rope was taut across the standoff circle, and the commissioner, who had stopped waving his hands in surrender when the paladin had charged with his scimitar drawn, backed away as if the rope were poisonous.
