by Sean Platt
Edward spun, eager to tell another dissident that he could go or stay, but that the unicorn and the gunslinger were heading out tonight, here, as the sun set. But when he turned, he found himself looking at Clint.
“He’s right,” Clint repeated, now sounding more like himself. “What’s happening here is part and parcel. You agreed the Darkness is in the birds and Lee, and the Darkness is after…”
“I didn’t agree to that at all. I said I could sense the Darkness in the desert.”
“Which is where the birds are roosting. This isn’t just another random outlaw, Edward. You didn’t see him. If it were, I’d have laid him flat back at the saloon. Lee is afraid of Pompi, but Pompi — who I’ll remind you sensed that same dark power in Elf Meadows and is in touch with the magic as you are — wouldn’t engage him. There’s more to the story here. This isn’t like Solace. I stayed in Solace for duty, but I’ve had four years to see new shades in old resentment. This isn’t about a lawman’s duty. This is something else.”
Edward stared at him, nostrils flaring. Clint knew he was trying to decide whether or not to storm off with Stone, but the gunslinger knew he wouldn’t pair with Sly even if he didn’t have an orange ball of hair. Clint was his and he was Clint’s, two halves of a whole.
“Fine,” said Edward. “We sleep. We end this. And then we leave tomorrow.”
“We leave when the job is done,” said Clint.
Edward stared at him for a second longer, then turned away, annoyed.
“So,” said Stone, climbing down and apparently not as perturbed as the unicorn, “back to the Otel?”
Clint nodded.
A few minutes later, the most motley crew ever assembled was up in the Otel room, magically levitating the wheezing Mai (whose eyes kept flapping open, creeping Clint out) into the soft bed. Whitney planned to bunk in the second bed. Stone would make himself a nest on the floor and Buckaroo would lean in a corner and power down to recharge. The only place Edward could bunk was in the barn, and the only way Edward would allow himself to bunk in a loathed horse barn would be if Clint bunked there too, thus pretending it was suitable for all species. Pompi, who was uncomfortable in confined spaces, said he’d join them. Clint didn’t understand that, but when they were inside, he saw why Pompi considered bunking with the gunslinger and unicorn so acceptable: one of the stalls was filled with Pompi’s belongings, indicating that he’d been staying in the Otel’s barn since he’d come to town.
On the trail, it usually made sense to rise and settle with the sun, regardless of the hour. So they all laid down in their rooms and stalls, ready to sleep and wake early to learn what they could.
An unknown amount of time later, they awoke to the sounds of birds.
CHAPTER SEVEN:
THE BIRDEMIC
The sun had set. The barn was black. Clint hadn’t thought to bring a lantern. He’d left his matches in his bag, and his bag was up in the room because at first he’d been planning to bunk there. The gunslinger had his guns as always, but what good would they do when he couldn’t see?
“Birds,” said Clint, groping around the barn for Edward or Pompi, unable to find either of them.
“I hear them,” came Edward’s groggy voice. Clint couldn’t see the unicorn, huge and white as he was.
“Make light. Give me a ball of light.”
“Nar. Light will give us away. Nobody knows we’re here. They’ll be focused on the Otel.”
“The Otel!” Clint blurted. “They’ll get Mai!” He scrambled to his feet, suddenly desperate. But before he could get proper footing, a hoof struck him square in the chest. The blow was precise, as if Edward could see exactly where the gunslinger was.
“Sit down, you fool. Think. If you run out there screaming, they’ll be all over you. Same if we make light. These are birds, not bandits. They won’t be afraid, and there will be many of them. I can’t protect you from all of them if they’re the Darkness. Remember how they overwhelmed us under the Rancho in Precipice, back when they were rats? You’ll have to reach the others and rally their help, but you must do so quietly. Like a big, ugly mouse.”
There was a stirring to Clint’s right. He heard a voice. The voice was muffled, and he remembered why he hadn’t been able to grope to find the giant. Pompi was in the next stall, a wall of rough-cut boards away.
“Pompi help,” said the voice.
Clint reached out, still seeing nothing. The dark was a black velvet curtain. His hands felt along boards toward the voice. He set his face to the planks, and whispered through a crack.
“Not yet, Pompi. I need to tell the others. We have three more guns up there, and one is a canon. The birds will go for the others first, and they will require help. I need to bring them down here, or at least make them ready. Lee might not know where they are, and probably thinks he’ll find me or you up there with them. I don’t know if the birds are capable of knowing anything.”
“Mai,” said Edward’s voice from the blackness.
“What about her?”
“You can’t carry her down without killing her. And I can’t float her all the way down from here. Even if I could reach that far, I’d rack her into every wall on the way down. I can float something, and I can steer blind. But I can’t do both at once.”
“You’ll have to go up there and get her, then,” said Clint.
In the dark, Edward actually snickered. “You’re funny.”
“I’m not losing her again!”
“Don’t worry, hero,” said the deep, disembodied voice. “I can project a small bubble from here. Enough to keep the birds away from her, but not enough to stop bullets. Keep Lee away from the Otel room and we can leave her where she is. But doing so will make me somewhat useless, so you get to decide. I can protect Mai and not help the rest of you very much, or I can do my best to fight beside you, and leave her exposed.”
“Protect Mai.”
“Okay.” Something was wrong with Edward. He’d agreed to something without judgment, mockery, or irritation.
“You agree?”
“Yar. It’s the right choice.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Clint shuffled to his feet, then stretched his arms blindly around in the blackness. His eyes had adjusted as much as they ever would, and he still couldn’t see. A sliver of moon sliced the night, and as San Mateo slept without spark, it took little to snuff the scant light.
Straw rustled underfoot and made the gunslinger unstable without eyes to keep him level. Eventually he found the wooden stall door, which was open, and shambled through. Pompi started to say something behind him, but Clint shushed him and said to stay back. He had to make it to the Otel. He had to do it without letting Lee — or his murder, if it were capable of thought — know that he was afoot. He had to get the others’ guns ready, and had to prepare them to fight. Mai couldn’t be extricated. If they fled, the birds would have her. And the gunslinger, after all of this time, wouldn’t allow that.
Clint stumbled through the pitch black barn, one hand in front of him and the other on his right gun. The bird noises were growing — not as if the birds were becoming agitated and speaking louder, but as if there were more birds gathering. And when he reached the barn door, he saw them.
Birds were everywhere.
Ominous shadows pocked the dark courtyard past the barn. Clint could see what looked like thousands of black crows, like a pound of pepper scattered across a swath of snow. They freckled every building, stumbling over one another for footing and milling on the ground. They perched on lantern posts; they crowded the now-quiet horse-drawn vehicles. They filled every doorway and haunted every bin, storage box, and roof.
Beyond the courtyard, a single lantern was lit. That had to be where Lee was since the birds steadily increased density in that direction. The path from the barn — which was situated well behind the Otel — to the back door was clear. Lee didn’t know Clint rode with a unicorn. He’d seen a man, and must eithe
r not know that Realm marshals had unicorn companions or had assumed the marshal had lost his mount along with his star. But shouldn’t the Darkness know about Edward? He didn’t know how it worked. Edward said the black magic had to periodically submerge back to the Core for refreshing. When it did, did it resurface with memory? Was it exactly the same bit of Darkness in the way that Clint was the same man he’d been yesterday? Or was it more generic — dark magic instead of “The Darkness” as its own unique being? Would it remember Precipice? In Precipice it had remembered meeting Clint earlier, as a sand dragon. So it did have memory.
Regardless, the way from the barn was clear. He’d be able to cross the courtyard on foot.
Clint shook his head, his vision improving slightly. It didn’t matter why the birds were filling the street. In time, they’d spread to the barn. He could see them still arriving, hundreds a minute, flying like a great black manta from the west.
The west.
Clint looked to see that they were coming from where he’d predicted — from some roosting spot in the thinning desert between San Mateo and Elf Meadows. From where Edward had said he’d felt an ominous presence, from out of the dark and toward the light.
From the other direction, past the gathering flock (murder, he reminded himself; it’s called a murder), the sun was just starting to rise. It seemed only a short time ago he’d been watching the same muted red blush the horizon toward Meadowlands. Now he could see it in the other direction. They were supposed to send Whitney off, headed that way, today. If, that is, he was still alive.
Sunrise seemed in a hurry, so Clint scuttled across the courtyard while he still had the cover of darkness. Five more minutes and San Mateo would be awash in a dull red — plenty enough to see a running gunslinger by. He made the back door, slipped through it, and ran up the back stairs. The travelers weren’t used to locks, so the boarding room door opened on the knob.
When he opened the door, Clint found himself staring at two circles of alloy.
“I didn’t ask for a wake-up,” said a voice.
Clint pushed the circles apart, feeling cold iron under his hands. Sly Stone’s pale face stared at him from behind them, with its sideways grin and giant orange hairdo.
“You’ve been up all night?”
Sly scoffed, insulted. “I was dead asleep. You think I’m so unfit to guard this group that I’d need to be awake to do it?”
“Good. You’ll need your energy for Lee.”
“Lee?” His ears made a report to his brain: the bird noises outside. “I see. How many?”
“Many.” Clint looked around the room, surveying the sparse arsenal to see how far he could stretch it. Mai was motionless on the bed beside the window, Edward’s yellow shimmer already visible around her. Whitney was in the closer bed, between Mai and Clint. Stone’s nest on the floor was at Clint’s feet. Buckaroo stood in a shadowed corner, dark like an appliance without any spark.
He kicked at Whitney. “Wake up, Pilgrim.”
The lawyer grunted, trying to turn over and sleep. Clint kicked him harder, making no effort to spare his toe. Eventually Whitney popped up, his hair in corkscrews. His eyes were afraid. After a few moments of resistance, he’d snapped from sleep to full awareness in one gestalt leap. He could hear the birds. He’d drawn the lines and connected the dots. Of course he was terrified.
“Birds,” he whispered.
“Yar,” said Clint. “A world of them. Like a bird epidemic.”
“I’ll fight them.”
“Don’t be stupider than you usually are,” Clint hissed. Then, louder: “Awake, Buckaroo.”
In the corner, small lights pocked the shadows. Steam belched through an exhaust vent. Alloy clanked.
“Yar, sir,” said Buckaroo. “Good morning.” His metal head looked around in a way that, were he human, would seem confused. “Sir?”
“We have a bit of a bird issue,” Clint said, explaining.
“I don’t do well with birds, sir. The acid they spew is one of the few things that will erode Realm metal. Fatally so… such as the word means to a machine.”
“Birds don’t spew acid.”
“Oh, but…” Buckaroo started to say, but stopped when he saw how Clint was staring at him. The older thinking machines wouldn’t have known how to interpret a look like that, but the newer ones were intuitive. Buckaroo lowered the arm he’d raised in protest.
Stone was clicking something into the butts of his guns. It was a sort of glowing pod, throbbing in the dark room like a heartbeat. Finished, he looked up at Clint and nodded. The gunslinger looked at Whitney, whose hair and fussy professional’s pajamas were an absurdity. He sat on the bed, waiting for a command. His feet, for a man who’d just awoken, were strangely filthy.
“You,” said Clint. “Watch her.” He nodded toward Mai.
“With what?”
“Your eyes.”
“I meant, using what? I don’t have a weapon. How will I protect her?”
“I don’t recall saying to protect her,” said Clint, managing to stifle his insult by wrapping it inside a laugh. The idea of Whitney protecting Mai was worse than ridiculous.
“What good will watching her do?”
“It will keep you out of the way.”
“I want to fight!”
Clint shook his head. “That’s noble, Pilgrim. But you don’t have a weapon, and if you had one, you’d be just as likely to kill one of us.”
“I want to fight!” he repeated.
“You’ll be a target.”
“Marshal,” said Whitney in an earnest voice that he probably used in the courtroom, “if it’s Lee out there, he’ll be after me as much as you. And if he doesn’t find me, don’t you think he’ll search? And if he sends his birds through the buildings to find me, don’t you think your woman here will be in danger?”
Clint opened his mouth to retort but found himself with nothing to say.
“I know.” Whitney ran to the closet, yanked it open, and grasped a rod that was mounted between the walls inside it. The small man began to yank and pull, apparently trying to break it away. Stone and Clint watched as he wrapped both hands around the rod and propped one foot against the back of the closet. Still, the rod wouldn’t budge. Finally he climbed up inside the closet, with both feet now off the ground, prying against the rod. If it gave now, he’d collapse to the floor in a heap. But it held firm.
Whitney dropped to the floor, put his hands on his hips, then perked with inspiration. Several triangles of twisted wire were in the closet. They had been a mystery to Clint on arrival, but Whitney had used them to hang his clothes. Now, he pulled one of the heavy wire triangles from the rod, held it by the corner, and wielded it like a machete.
“This will do,” he said. His ears perked toward the window, where they could now see the dark forms of birds flying by through the dawning morning. The sounds outside were changing. They could still hear the chatter of crows, but another odd sound had joined it — a sort of screeching, dying noise like diving flying machines.
“Those aren’t just birds,” said Stone, looking back.
“You heard me tell Edward about the Darkness?”
“Yar.”
“Well, let’s just say they’re magic birds, in a way. They might bite and scratch, but who knows what else they might do?”
In the corner, Buckaroo clattered with fear.
Stone racked one shotgun, then the other. The auxiliary packs he’d added to the stocks glowed as the large weapons sat at the ready in his holsters. “Well,” he said, “I have some magic, too.”
They made their way downstairs, closing the door behind them and leaving Mai in her bubble. Clint took the lead. Sly was behind him, then Buckaroo (who, being both alloy and poorly jointed, wasn’t quiet on the stairs), then Whitney at the rear. Whitney held the wire triangle (he called it a “coat hanger”) as if it were the most deadly instrument known to man.
When they emerged into the square, Lee was waiting.
The tall bandit stood in the street’s middle. The birds had given him a small, cleared circle about the width of his spread arms. Lee held the circle, standing in its middle as the sun rose behind the buildings. He twirled his mace on a lanyard attached to the bottom of its handle. In the early light, the mace looked blood red.
“Aah,” he said. “Nothing like waking to the sound of chirping birds, am I right?”
Clint looked around. The crows were everywhere, but were no longer sitting and watching as they had back in the Valance. They circled overhead, swooping, diving. It was all for show; there was nothing to dive into. Not yet, anyway.
“I guess this is the part where you deliver a speech,” Clint said.
“Nar,” Lee disagreed, shaking his head. “This is the part where I either kill or drive you out of town. I’m in charge here, see. And after last night, I think you and that big galoot might’ve left some of the townspeople with the thought that I wasn’t. That won’t do. They might start failing to listen, and mayhap start their little projects again.”
Birds rustled, flapping feathers and cawing, as if this were all a performance, and the birds were playing their rehearsed parts.
“Just so we’re clear, Marshal,” said Lee, “you did take me by surprise the other day. A Realm marshal! Here! That was a head-scratcher. But as you see, I’ve quickly recovered.” He spread his arms as the birds chattered. One started circling Whitney, who stabbed at it with his coat hanger as he looked wildly around.
“You know I could kill you before you could draw that rusty sidearm,” Clint said, nodding toward Lee’s weapon.
“Oh, sure,” said Lee. “But then, what would happen with my birds? Would they lose their cool? Destroy this town? Could you kill all of them?”
“I could,” said a voice.
A squawking noise sang from the rear. Clint’s head turned to see Edward emerge from the barn. He’d just stepped on a bird. Pompi, ducking to clear the barn door, appeared beside and towered above him. He slapped his hammer into his palm.
Lee blanched — long enough for Clint to wonder if Lee knew that Edward couldn’t kill all of the birds any more than he’d killed all of the rats under Precipice — but then he recovered quickly.
