by Sean Platt
“I don’t have time to explain. Let me go, Marshal. Have faith for once. Trust what your gut says over the rules set down by a dead paladin you didn’t even know. If Edward the Brave were awake, he would tell you to let me go. Or has he told you that, along the way?”
“Edward the Brave?”
Stone groaned. “Let me go. Release me, Marshal.”
Clint was torn. It made perfect sense to let him go. But to the gang on the street — the ropers terrorizing the town? Nothing good could come of that.
He turned to Buckaroo.
“How long until the window opens?”
“Twelve minutes, sir.”
“So it’s two minutes until three o’clock high.”
Buckaroo gave a mechanical nod, the room’s spark light glinting from his golden skin and brown-painted mustache. “Yes, sir.”
“Okay,” said Clint, standing and walking toward Stone, then removing his shackles. “I’ll let you go, but not to the gang. You’re going to the shimmer.”
Sly, still seated, spread his hands and shook his head. “So how is that letting me go?”
Clint returned to his chair, reached down, and tossed Sly one shotgun, then the other.
“Because you’re entering The Realm armed. With me.”
CHAPTER NINE:
3:10 TO YUMA
The Otel’s lobby had a sheltered breezeway leading to the barn. They stormed through it in a dead sprint, Sly Stone at the lead with one of his shotguns drawn and Clint behind. As far out on a limb as Clint had gone, he wasn’t willing to go so far as to allow a man with a gun to run behind him. Buckaroo kept shockingly close behind, proving his stiff joints could unloosen and be plenty agile if needed.
Nobody was in the hallways, the lobby, or the barn. The citizens had distanced themselves from the criminal and the marshal. The gang hadn’t entered because they knew the marshal had a unicorn. If they’d known the truth about Edward’s confused state, they probably would have stormed the place already.
The rope gang, Stone explained after Clint realized they might be rushing and ducking for nothing, was still very much a problem. They considered Stone to be its second leader, and instrumental to their getting of magic. Without Stone, they’d want for magic to use in their ropes, and to sell. Whether Stone went with Clint willingly or as his prisoner was immaterial. If Stone was leaving the Sands for The Realm, they’d want to stop the gunslinger. They wouldn’t want to kill Stone, but they wouldn’t stand aside, either.
“Keep pretending I’m a prisoner,” Stone told Clint as they took the Otel stairs four at a time. “That way, they’ll only shoot at you.”
“That sounds like a win-win,” said Clint.
The two men and the machine burst into the barn and all three of them climbed onto Edward’s back. The unicorn was napping. He startled when Clint opened the stall and backed him out, but he roused when Clint slapped his rump like a common mount. All three climbed aboard. Clint rode in the middle, sandwiched between Stone in front with Buckaroo in back. The thinking machine could be shot with no foul; he’d easily repaired even a blast from Stone’s magic shotgun back at the vein. And they were protected from the rear because the gang wouldn’t shoot at Stone.
Edward had no idea who or what he was. Clint shouted that he was a mighty, noble, all-powerful unicorn. The unicorn laughed and said that unicorns weren’t real. So Clint shouted, angrily now, that Edward was a horse, a horse who talked, and that his rider was telling him to RIDE, and then Clint kicked Edward hard with the backs of his heels, wishing for spurs. The white, horned horse threatened to rear and topple his riders, but then he broke forward and began to move.
The door to the barn was closed. It opened into the square, where the bandits were. So Clint yelled again at Edward as he crossed the barn, kicking him again, telling him that his rider needed his mighty horse strength and to trust him. Edward, muttering that it was a horrible idea, moved faster toward the closed door. Clint grabbed Stone around the middle — to steady Stone rather than himself — and Stone drew both shotguns, both across his chest from the opposite holsters, and blew the barn door’s heavy wooden cross brace to splinters in a flash of green fire. Edward barreled into the fire, trusting his rider through a loyalty that was buried deep inside him. Edward didn’t know what he was, but the doors did; they exploded outward and fell from their heavy hinges into the dirt. And then suddenly the gang was in front of them, twelve men
(twelve?)
looking back at the barn in shock, their lassos never ceasing overhead as if on autopilot, their mouths dropping open. Stone had already holstered his guns. Clint held one of his pistols to Stone’s head for show and used the other to fell three bandits in quick succession: a short and fat man with a mustache, a man wearing an orange bandana, and a man who was almost pale enough to be an albino. Then, before the other nine could react, they’d turned and were headed back down the street. Shots were fired — not from the bandits, but from citizens. Several hit Buckaroo, who acted surprised, as if the impacts tickled. Clint turned as best he could, now sighting with both his guns, and fired them twice. Four more bandits fell.
Five men ran to their horses and, with barely a pause, were up and pursuing them at a full gallop.
Clint craned his neck toward Buckaroo, who was holding onto him with a death grip as if he weren’t made of alloy and nearly indestructible. Buckaroo hadn’t wanted to go on this suicide mission and had protested the plan, but they needed Buckaroo to track the shimmer and, frankly, he made a fine suit of armor, so Clint had berated him into coming. It wasn’t hard; Buckaroo was used to following orders. And now, with the thundering of hooves underfoot, bouncing hard enough to make the men’s teeth rattle, Clint shouted to the machine, “How long?”
“Five minutes, sir!” Buckaroo shouted back.
A rope shot out from nowhere and caught Clint by the wrist. The world flipped topsy turvy and he felt something solid hit him hard in the side of his face and ribs. He thought he heard a bone crack. He was on the ground, with the gang bearing down on him. His hand was still snared from the side, from a man who’d managed to get around him. He’d held the gun in that hand, but couldn’t move his arm or aim it. He looked over and saw the bandit at the other end of the rope, pulling it taut while laughing.
The group of four remaining horsemen approached and two stopped, one quickly roping and stretching Clint’s other arm akimbo. The other two men thundered on, still pursuing Edward. Clint turned and looked back, still fighting the rope on his wrist. He could see Edward retreating in a cloud, the blue back of Stone’s shirt atop the unicorn. But that was wrong, because Buckaroo’s back was brown. And then Clint realized that of course Buckaroo would have been unhorsed because he was behind Clint, and so he looked over and saw the machine lying at the side of the road, severely dented and muttering daintily.
The new man on the horse approached Clint and looked down. Both of Clint’s arms were out, both large hands holding guns he was unable to aim. The ropes squeezed, and Clint found himself thinking of the alloy faucet they’d torn apart as if it were taffy.
The man in front of Clint had his own rope circling overhead. Clint looked up as the circle turned into the outline of a sword.
“I heard there’s gold inside gunslingers,” he said, moving the rope faster. “What do you say we open him up and find out?”
The man hitched forward with his rope hand, but then there was an incredible booming sound from behind Clint and the bandit flew backward, soaring through one massive stone wall of a building and then another. The building, cleaved, tottered and tipped forward, its roof slamming down onto the packed clay of the street.
The noise had startled both the other rope men and their horses. For a split second, the ropes slackened. It was enough. Clint straightened his wrists and fired both guns to his sides, dropping the remaining men to the dirt. Only when finished, and after he’d pulled the ropes from his wrists, did Clint turn to see Buckaroo standing behind him. His ch
est had dilated open, and protruding from it was what looked like the smoking muzzle of a cannon. As Clint watched, the cannon retracted and Buckaroo’s chest irised closed.
“I see you carry a weapon,” said Clint.
“We work dangerous sands, sir,” said Buckaroo.
“What else can you do that you’ve nar told us?”
Buckaroo grabbed Clint hard by the back of his belt. “This, sir,” he said.
There was a great rumbling sound as twin belches of white fire came from beneath the machine’s alloy boots. Clint felt himself yanked up and off his feet, then was suddenly flying through the air with the buildings of Aurora Solstice floating beneath him. The balance, with Buckaroo holding his belt, wasn’t perfect, and Clint’s body kept wanting to pitch forward. He thought he might slide out of his pants and fall to a hard death below, so he gripped his belt from the front, swung up, and grabbed Buckaroo’s arm.
Thankfully the flight finished quickly and Buckaroo set them down in the middle of a cluster of three buildings, right where the shimmer was supposed to appear. The space was almost a courtyard. Blessedly, for the time being, they were alone. There were maybe two minutes left to wait.
“You could have flown us here from the beginning?” said Clint.
“I cannot carry a unicorn, sir,” Buckaroo replied, delicately running his alloy hands across his alloy clothes as if to free them of dirt.
“And you could have helped us during that dooner raid?”
“I have a verbal wake command, sir,” he said. “Perhaps you should know it if we are going to work together. It is, ‘Awake, Buckaroo.’ ”
Clint’s attention quickly circled back to the present danger. There were still two bandits out there, and Stone was who-knows-where with Edward. If the shimmer was due in just over a minute and would only last for another two after that, their very narrow window was closing fast, and Stone was yet to return with Edward.
But of course, Clint suddenly realized, Stone wouldn’t return.
The moment’s absurdity would quickly reveal itself to Stone. Without Clint and Buckaroo, the situation had changed such that Stone was now fleeing from his own men. Once that dawned on him, he’d stop and join them, and they’d ride off. Clint would watch the shimmer open and close but would be unable to enter it. Maybe at some point in the future Edward would realize that he wasn’t a horse and would remember Clint, and at that point he’d ditch Stone and they’d find each other again… but for now, another man was riding the gunslinger’s unicorn partner and could do as he pleased. A commoner riding a unicorn was taboo beyond reckoning, and it made Clint feel both sick and deeply saddened.
But as Clint mulled, there was suddenly a great cacophony and what Clint had at first taken for a draped wall revealed itself to be a sheet of bedding on a line. A giant spike pierced the bedding. The courtyard grew crowded as Edward thundered into the circle with Sly Stone atop his back.
Sly hopped down from the unicorn with an apologetic nod to Clint for riding his mount.
“Are they killt?” said Clint.
“Nar. But I lost ‘em. It won’t take long for them to find us. Are we in time?”
Clint turned to the commissioner. “How long, Buckaroo?” he asked.
“One minute and six seconds, sir.”
Clint’s chest was rising and falling. He hadn’t realized until now just how exhausted he was, and how hard his heart was beating.
“We made it,” he said. He looked at the open space in the courtyard as if anticipating a visitor.
Buckaroo was still staring at his timepiece. “Yar, sir,” he said. “But…”
“What?”
“There’s been a shift, sir. It’s…”
“A shift?”
“Yar, sir. I thought it had stopped, but I was wrong. The magic has its own mind, and the calculations aren’t always precise. But it hasn’t moved far. It’s…” He paused a moment, seeming to calculate, and Clint could feel the seconds ticking off with agonizing slowness. Finally Buckaroo jabbed a golden finger back through the torn sheet. “There, sir. Almost line of sight. Three thousand and fifteen feet.”
Clint did the computation in his head. Over half a mile straight out. There were maybe forty seconds left until the window opened, then 131 seconds until it closed again. Just under three minutes total. They’d never make it.
He shoved at Buckaroo and Stone, hopping up onto Edward and then pulling the others after him. Once they were all three on Edward’s back again, Clint leaned and yelled into Edward’s pure white ear at the top of his voice: “RIDE, DAGNIT! IF THERE IS ANY OF EDWARD LEFT IN THIS STUPID HORSE, YOU’LL RIDE UNTIL YOU DIE!”
Something clicked. Horse or unicorn, Edward turned and ran. He ran hard. The wind battering Clint’s chest — in front this time — threatened to unhorse him. The others held to him hard as he lowered his torso to wrap his arms fully around the unicorn’s neck. The movement of Edward’s haunches and head battered Clint in a neverending series of concussive blows, but he held on. This was The Realm they were after. The Realm.
Buckaroo, in the middle, shouted out times. He was a machine; he didn’t seem to need the chronometer.
“The window has opened, sir!”
Clint yelled at Edward to move faster. Amazingly, Edward found a way to comply. They passed houses. Businesses. People. Citizens jumped back as if from lightning. The world was a blur.
“Ninety seconds to closure, sir!”
Faster. Faster.
“Sixty seconds, sir!”
He could see it. By providence, he could see it. At first it appeared to just be a window of white light in the middle of nothing. But then as his eyes and brain adjusted to the jarring ride and the approaching light, he could see details: a haloed entrance from one world to another. Aurora Solstice’s dusty, forgotten street gave way to verdant, lush and rolling knolls. He could see small flowers waving in a gentle breeze. Yuma Province. Maybe even behind the wall.
“Thirty seconds, sir!”
The doorway in front of them grew and grew as they rode. The shimmer was as large as a barn door, easily big enough for all of them. The could simply ride right through. It was barely across a square now. They were going to make it.
Suddenly there were twin flashes of brown, so perfectly synchronized that Clint at first thought The Realm’s beauty had reached out into Aurora Solstice to greet them. But it wasn’t beauty. It wasn’t Realm magic. It was ropes — two of them, each screaming from one side. The ropes met in front of Clint, in front of Edward, and seemed to shake hands. They made a knot and pulled taut.
Edward was going too fast to stop. His chest struck the ropes with tremendous force. Clint had time to see walls on either side of the square crumble and collapse in unison; the ropers must have tied the ends off because they knew they couldn’t hold them against Edward. Even the bindings on the walls gave way, but it was enough. Edward’s feet tangled under his body. Clint, Stone, and Buckaroo found themselves airborne.
Buckaroo collided with the corner of a dry fountain and bent nearly in half. Clint and Stone had the training or presence to tuck, and the gunslinger felt himself beaten by the ground for the second time in ten minutes, his core and neck protected but his skin grated raw. Edward took the brunt. He had been so committed to the run that there was no controlling his collapse. He became a deadly ball of hooves and momentum. He struck a wall. With a sound as big as the world, Clint looked up in time to see his horn snap at its midpoint, now cleaved in half.
Clint rolled up to a sitting position as two dusty men emerged. His big hands immediately went to his belt, reaching for his guns but realizing too late that they’d been pulled off as he’d fallen. He could see them now, halfway across the square.
The men walked forward, ropes still entangled. Clint realized that each man did, however, carry a sidearm. Six shots. Less than half of what a marshal had, but plenty to do the job.
Silently, without ceremony, the window into The Realm closed. It slid down
from the top, Aurora Solstice’s backdrop replacing Yuma’s grass fields inch by inch.
Then it was gone, as if it had never been there.
The men stood above Clint. He hurt. His leg might have broken, or his back. He looked toward his guns — too far to retrieve. He looked at the white lump that had to be Edward, stirring vaguely and covered in multicolored unicorn blood. He could see half of Edward’s horn laying in the street. It looked dusty and dirty, as if being shorn from its source had turned it into a mere spiral of ivory. Buckaroo hadn’t stirred. He was halfway into the fountain, his carriage bent almost in two.
The men above Clint didn’t draw their guns. They had all the time in the world.
Sly Stone stood. He was scratched and battered and his hair had flattened, but he seemed otherwise whole. One of the men turned to Stone. Stone’s guns had come off as well and had landed at the bandit’s feet. He stooped to retrieve them, still in their holsters.
“You okay, boss?” said the man.
“Yar,” said Stone, rubbing his neck. “I think so.”
“Sorry for the tussle. It was the only way to stop the unicorn. We couldn’t get him earlier. When the other two fell off, he was too fast and lost us.”
“I’ll be fine, Gunther.”
The man handed the guns to Stone. Stone buckled them back in place, then stretched.
“We kept you from the window,” he said. “I’m sorry. But the situation changed. We didn’t reckon on no lawman’s unicorn. We reckoned on a sheriff. It was too risky.”
“They didn’t send a sheriff,” said Stone. “I figured they wouldn’t. It would have been the paladin, and that machine over there.” He nodded toward Buckaroo.
Clint, still on the ground, still hurting, still casting his eyes from the dazed Edward to the beaten Buckaroo to Stone and the bandits, folded his brow.
Gunther Jethro looked at where the shimmer had been. “You gonna wait in town, or…?”
“We’ll take out another stitcher. Maybe this time, they’ll send someone more competent.”
