by Sean Platt
“Buy guns, then,” said Clint. After saying it, he wanted to throw himself a look. But he couldn’t help it. The kid was charismatic.
“With what, amigo? We have nothing. We have crops, but in a week or two, El Feo and his army will return and then we will not even have those. My father has a watch. Some other villagers have trinkets. We could perhaps offer a few coins as payment. But for what? One gun? How can we face that many men with only one gun?”
By the time Stone argued that hiring men was cheaper than buying guns (which, he reasoned, the villagers wouldn’t know how to use anyway), the conversation had begun to assume that the group would be stopping in Baracho. So to break the chain, Edward paused, waited for the kid to turn, and said, “Kid. Rigo. We feel for your town’s quarrel. But we cannot help you.”
“Oh, but señor,” said Rigo, “you are headed that way anyway.”
“That way, then past,” said Clint. “You can hire other gunmen. We are not for hire. We need to reach Elf Meadows, on a mater of urgency.”
“Why so urgent, señor?”
“There’s something there. That’s the fight we must fight.”
“Bad magic,” said Pompi.
The kid looked at the giant, then Clint.
“But don’t you see? The bandit, El Feo, he comes from the north. Our priest, Father Sebastian, says that one of the reasons El Feo has so many men is because they aren’t really men. They are demons wearing masks. Father Sebastian says that El Feo dances with black magic. El Feo, he claims to want our crops for riches, but what man robs for riches and then robs and robs again, every year, while never growing richer? And El Feo, in the last years, he has become less and less rich-looking. Father Sebastian says it is because El Feo owes a fealty.”
“Fealty?”
“A debt. And he is repaying that debt in the service of dark magic. It’s why he wants our grain. There have been great green fires lighting the horizon. My village, they are scared of these fires. We wear old masks and dance against the demons. Father Sebastian sees this and grows angry, but even he believes in secret. My friend Mauricio and I snuck into his casito and found his mask. My abuela asked the Father what the fires were for, if not for summoning demons. And the Father, he says the fires are our crops burning with the fury of UnderWorld.”
“Why would he take your crops only to burn them?” Clint asked. But already this was sounding familiar.
“The same reason a man would terrorize a town in order to prevent its growth,” Edward said, seeming to read Clint’s mind. “By using a flock of birds, for instance.”
Clint shook his head.
“We have to stop,” said Edward.
“We can’t stop.”
“We have to stop,” Edward repeated, this time more emphatically. “The errands are one and the same.”
“But Mai…”
This time, Rigo interrupted, already excited by what he read as a definitive win. “But señor, that is all the more reason to stop!”
Because Rigo wouldn’t shut up, the party’s mouths had grown loose around him. They’d told him the safe-to-tell parts of their journey; they’d told him about the bond between humans and unicorns; they’d told him Stone was wanted by certain authorities but was actually one of the good guys. And of course, they’d told him about Mai and how she’d been hurt by a unicorn of a different color. They’d explained that originally, they hadn’t expected her to recover… but that the closer they inched toward the magic of Elf Meadows, the better she seemed to be.
“Mister Clint, your woman, she needs magic, sí? And so you go toward the Meadows? But the Rio Verde, it is gordo with magic. Its source is —” He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “— inside The Realm.”
“How is that possible?” Stone blurted.
During their travels, Sly Stone with his ridiculous orange hairdo had proven to be a rather non-ridiculous authority on leakage, shifting, magic veins, and The Realm itself. Clint had never met a man who knew more. It was strange to hear such well-deliberated theories, thoughts, and conjectures regarding the alignment of worlds from a man they’d first encountered sabotaging an operation supposedly intended to keep the worlds from crumbling.
“You can swim upstream forever in the Rio and you will never reach the wall, of course,” said Rigo. “But the water, it comes from inside all the same.”
Clint leaned low so he could see Edward’s eye. The unicorn glanced at him and said, “It’s true. Before The Realm built the wall, water from the Rio Verde flowed into the Lakes O Plenty. Then the lakes ran dry, and for a while, we wondered what would come of the Rio. Would it form a lake inside the wall? A kind of moat? Water always finds its way, and this water found itself in a sort of permanent shimmer, though different. It flows out in a way I cannot explain, but does flow out, probably because it must go somewhere. It’s only water, you understand. But it is also a controlled, safe form of leakage. The current carries magic.”
“Could we drink from it?” asked Clint. “Like from a sty?”
“You could, but there’s no need,” Edward said. “You have me. But I cannot give magic to Mai because there is nothing left inside her that I can touch. Right now, she’s being lit by the magic in the air in the way you’d be warmed by a fire. The closer she gets to the magic’s source, the more awake she may become. I’d planned all along to have her drink from the Rio. I can’t touch whatever is in her, but water? Well, that can go anywhere. It becomes part of you. That’s why we’ve come this way, as opposed to the other. I… suspect we may benefit from the diversion.”
“What other way is there?”
“We could have kept south of the dry lake for longer, then skirted the edge and headed north. Instead, we went up farther west, toward the middle of the lake bed, where the Rio Verde still fills a basin before vanishing underground. It was a bit out of the way, because after drinking, we’d have to head south again — then west — before resuming our trek to the north.”
“But señor!” said Rigo. “You can cross the river. You do not need to head south.”
Edward considered the boy. “Ridiculous.”
“Not by swimming or fording, of course. By boat. My uncle, he has a flatboat he uses to ferry goods from the rare Elf Meadows trader who wants what El Feo leaves us. It is a large and stable boat. I’m sure he’d be happy to take you across.”
An unspoken “if” hung in the air: He’d be happy to take you across… if you help us.
Clint turned in his saddle and addressed the gold-skinned thinking machine. Buckaroo was now severely battle-worn. He had a huge ripple across his front from being bent nearly in half back in Aurora Solstice and a spattering of unrepairable acid burns from the Darkness-filled birds back in San Mateo Flats. But none of the scars bothered Buckaroo. He wore his flaws as badges of honor — as life experiences he’d earned through hard-fought adventures.
“Buckaroo. How long would it take us to reach Elf Meadows if we went to the river, turned south, then skirted the lake as Edward described?”
Buckaroo beeped, calculating. “Twenty-one days, sir.”
“And how long if we can take a boat across?”
“It depends on the boat, sir, but based on a hand-oared riverboat at the Verde’s narrowest known point — and this is based on the old maps, you understand, so I cannot verify that the land hasn’t shifted…”
Edward said, “Elf Meadows has never shifted.”
“Three days, sir.”
Clint looked down at the unicorn. “You want to stop anyway.”
“I don’t want to stop. I am stopping.”
“And if this errand costs us fewer than eighteen days, there’s no loss in time.”
“Nar a loss,” Edward said.
“And how do you know this El Feo will show while we’re in town?” said Clint, addressing Rigo as his final reluctant objection.
“Oh, do not worry, Señor,” said Rigo. “He left us a bell to ring.”
CHAPTER THREE:
; BARACHO GULCH
It took only another few minutes to reach Rigo’s village on horseback, once Stone pulled the kid onto his mount and allowed him to ride behind him.
They would have passed within a half mile of Baracho Gulch if they’d headed directly to the basin where the Rio Verde vanished underground as Edward had planned. But instead, rather than passing within a half mile, they swerved down a worn dirt road bordered with bright white marigolds and rich pink lavender, then entered the dusty town.
Clint’s reservations about helping the village — despite Edward’s argument that El Feo was likely as in league with the Darkness (and maybe Kold) as Independence Lee had been — vanished the minute he saw the place and met the men, women, and children who lived there.
Their shacks were built of mud brick and topped with thatched straw and wood. Rigo said the village didn’t get much rain but that the roofs did a good job of keeping the bricks together on the rare occasions when it did. He explained that water for the crops and drinking came not from the sky but from the river. They didn’t need to run hoses; the lake’s bed extended below the village in the form of an aquifer their wells tapped after a mere ten feet of digging. It was a wonder that their village hadn’t spilt and washed away given that it was practically sitting on a lake, but when Clint made that observation, Rigo said, “The water is magic” as if pointing out an obvious fact to a very dense and unobservant person.
The village was meager, with a handful of houses in what passed for its “town center” and a small mercantile for trading. There was also (of course) a saloon specializing in frijoles, chili, and a drink called tequil. From the town center, farms sprawled out like patches on a blanket. From the mercantile, they could see other houses below, perched in the middle of vast, hand-tended fields. Some of the fields were already reaped, the corn stalks formed into cone-shaped bunches instead of growing in rows. Other fields were being reaped as they watched — all by hand rather than with the help of Realm technology. The traffic through town and on the farm roads was comprised solely of donkeys pulling carts or hefting riders. The village was so poor, it couldn’t afford even the skinniest horses.
“It is okay, amigos,” said Rigo. “Donkeys are better for farm work. Donkeys are not smart, but horses are.”
Edward laughed loudly, then made a series of jokes about how stupid horses were, going so far as to butt the other two horses in the party (Socks and Leroy, ridden by Stone and Buckaroo) with his nose to goad them. The horses didn’t object, which made Edward laugh harder. Then he made more jokes about wanting to meet some of these donkeys so they could all play cards together, allowing Edward to earn a fortune. Clint and Stone rolled their eyes. Buckaroo beeped. Pompi didn’t notice. Rigo laughed along, although it was obvious that he didn’t remotely understand why what Edward was saying might or might not be funny.
When they reached the town’s center, Rigo pointed to its tallest structure — a three-story bell tower with an ancient, ugly-looking bell at its top.
“There it is, amigos. That is the bell El Feo gave us.”
Rigo explained that the bell was simultaneously the village’s most holy and most loathed relic. It had been in the village since before Rigo was born and was, said Rigo, magic. It had been carted from the north, from beyond Elf Meadows, from a monastery deep in giant territory.
When Pompi saw the bell, he immediately verified Rigo’s story, explaining that the bell was made for summoning. He made a delicate hand-shaking motion with his table-sized hands to underscore his point. Eventually Stone laughed and said it must be like when a rich man wants something and rings a tiny bell for his servant. In a giant’s hand, the massive bell in the bell-tower would indeed be easy to ring like a hand bell, despite how large it appeared on the streets of Baracho Gulch.
“Summoning, yar,” said Pompi, nodding. He then explained that in the mountains, magic was so common that it had become an inexorable part of giant culture. The bells didn’t just make noise to alert one group of giants about something needed by another. Instead, the bells conveyed signals by magic. Ringing one bell caused another bell — its twin — to ring, no matter how far apart the two bells were. Then Edward, eager to show off his superior knowledge, jumped in to say that the bells were actually the same bell, not two distinct bells, so of course ringing one would ring the other. Nobody understood, so Edward tried to further explain via spatial folding and complex magic concepts, but nobody cared. So the unicorn huffed off, choosing instead to insult a group of nearby donkeys.
“El Feo has the twin of this bell,” said Rigo. “When our harvest is finished, we ring the bell from our side, and his rings to tell him to come.”
Clint was thunderstruck. “You ring a bell to tell a bandit it’s time for you to be robbed?”
“Yar, señor,” said Rigo, shrugging. “This is how it has been for always. El Feo will come anyway, but in this way we benefit. If we ring the bell, he can come at a time of our choosing, take his supplies, then be gone. If we are honest and give him the proper amounts, we can even leave his take in the streets and never face him or his demons.”
“And if you are dishonest?”
Rigo’s happy face grew dark. “El Feo always knows. We have learned not to try and deceive him.”
“What happens if you don’t ring?” said Stone.
“We always ring,” said Rigo, his expression small and guarded. There was so much unspoken pain in the kid’s simple answer that neither Stone nor Clint felt the need to pry.
After showing them what little there was to see of the town’s geography, Rigo led the posse to a small, two-room mud dwelling where he introduced them to a man named Jose, who wore a giant drooping mustache and who Rigo identified as his father. Rigo then introduced them to Maria, his gray-haired grandmother. They smiled with their emaciated faces, reminding Clint of beaten animals that were too stupid to know that life could and should be better than it was.
Not that the gunslinger found Jose, Maria, Rigo, or any of the other villagers stupid, though. It was quite the contrary. None appeared to be learned in the educational style of The Realm, but all had a deep understanding of farming and the things that blossomed with life.
Privately, Edward told Clint that these people were magical — quite literally — but that they would likely never know that they were, or allow themselves to see it. They drank from one of the purest sources outside of The Realm, and because of that, their bodies were saturated with magic. When their crops grew, they grew in part because the villagers expected them to grow and believed that they should. This idea perplexed Clint, but then Edward said something that Clint had heard him say many times before: Intention matters to magic. With every seed planted, the village farmers were performing tiny acts of wizardry — particularly powerful acts because they were returning the magic to its source for use by other life, rather than siphoning it off for their own selfish desires.
“Like others have done, and still do today,” Stone said, waving a hand at the river.
Stone and Clint sat in small, handmade, fragile-looking wooden chairs surrounding a block of bricks draped with a tablecloth. Atop the cloth were clay mugs filled with tequil and wedges of bread. Edward stood beside the men, making a place for himself at the table and drinking tequil from a shallow dish beside the clay mugs.
“What is it with you and The Realm?” said Clint. “Edward and I were exiled. But what did they do to you?”
“What did they do?” said Stone as if he couldn’t believe Clint would need to ask.
“To make you hate them so much. Most people in the Sands regard The Realm as an unreachable paradise, like a NextWorld that they might — but of course never will — reach without dying. Others hate it in a jealous way, because The Realm has so much and the Sands has so little. But your hate is different. You carry the loathing of a radical.”
Stone kicked back on his chair. Clint was suddenly sure it would collapse beneath him. “Oh, I’m a lover, not a fighter,” he said.
“What were you doing back beyond Nazareth, when we found you with the rope gang? Were you just thieving magic for your guns? Or was it something else?”
Stone settled all four legs of his chair on the ground, then looked from Clint to Edward, then back to the gunslinger.
“I’ll put it this way, Marshal. My guns use magic, but they would fire just fine without them.”
“So?”
“The people in this village? They work their hands until their callouses are bloody. But if there was no magic, do you think they would starve? Nar. They would dig roots from what survived. They would hunt. They would collect dew to drink if they had to. They would work harder. Magic makes them better farmers, but if it vanished from the world, they would still farm.”
Clint hated indirect answers and fancy metaphors. Edward’s diatribes were thick with them, and it was obnoxious. The gunslinger was a straightforward man. Walking with Edward was like walking with a riddler, and walking with Stone was like walking with a riddling lawyer.
“And?” he said.
“If the magic vanished,” Stone continued, “these honest people would survive. You would survive. I would survive. But what would become of The Realm?”
Clint shook his head.
“Isn’t it interesting that in any sustained economy, it’s those who have the most that are soon the only ones who truly need the currency?”
When Clint said nothing, Stone stood, tipped his hair like another man might tip his hat, then left the casito and wandered into the pueblo’s center.
Over the first twenty-four hours, the gunslinger, bandit, cynical unicorn, slow giant, and even the thinking machine fell in love with the people of Baracho Gulch. The villagers worked in the fields as long as they could and returned as the daylight dimmed, dirty and smiling, to greet the newcomers as if they’d been born in the Gulch themselves. They shook hands with their rescuers, thanking them for coming, and whenever they did, Clint found their palms rougher and even more callused than his own. The simple people seemed to truly need almost nothing. They ate a few spoonfuls of beans for dinner and were joyous. They woke at dawn to work the fields and were near to giddy. The town children — timid at first, then increasingly curious about the white men, sleeping woman, machine, talking horse with the horn, and the giant — began to follow all of them around and hide behind corners when someone caught them looking.
