Unicorn Western

by Sean Platt

  Through their many travels, Clint and Edward had never heard of a city that could faithfully and regularly see The Realm. Yar, Meadowlands was thought of as Realm-adjacent. But that had come before the fractures and the leaking. Today “Realm-adjacent” meant simply that it was still rich with magic — and even that was only a relative thing. But as Clint listened to the bartender, he found himself believing things he’d previously thought impossible. Was Kold actually doing what he’d set out to do? Had he truly found a source of power capable of building a bridge?

  “Pompi is a good worker,” the giant’s voice said. Listening, Clint sharpened his focus. He could almost hear Edward behind those words. Edward, like Clint, had gotten a good bead on the bartender’s temperament and biases from what he’d just said, and was surely now crafting a way to mine information from him.

  “Sure, sure,” said the bartender. “Every giant I’ve ever met is a good worker. That’s why I don’t understand the way you’re all treated.”

  “Pompi wants to stay out of trouble.”

  “Of course.”

  “But Pompi sees things on the secret project…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Pompi wonders if some of it is okay by the law, and Pompi has thought about going to the marshal…”

  The bartender looked appropriately concerned, but in political situations like in Meadowlands, there was always a love/hate relationship with those in charge. Clint (and of course Edward, who was feeding Pompi his lines) would understand that half of Meadowlands’ citizens would hate Diamante and complain about what he was doing to change things in the city, but would trust him because they had to — because they relied on him. Those who complained couldn’t sift sand or carry guns or do hard work. If not for Diamante, what would their lives be like? So it was perfectly reasonable for a giant to find something about his job questionable while doing it anyway, and it would be sensible for a bartender to express doubt about the baron’s upstanding nature while still praising his work.

  “Old Fat Ziggy? Nah, don’t go to Ziggy.” The bartender looked around conspiratorially, holding his voice low so that only the worried giant who worked on the big man’s secret project would hear. “Fat Ziggy is in Diamante’s pocket. How can a man do the things the baron has done in the time he’s done ‘em — right up to opening relations and trade with a floggin’ fantasy world — without greasing a few wheels? Not that I blame him, understand. Great men, they don’t always pay heed to law. Look at Nikolai Peculiar. I heard he has a spark generator in his loft that durn near sets the building on fire when he turns it on. But he’s got the whole place to himself so he ain’t nar hurting no one. Folks say half of Nikolai’s research budget goes to Fat Ziggy, to the building inspectors, to the judges, whoever else he has to pay to keep them off his back. All black money, see? But I say that without Peculiar, we wouldn’t have nar a spark of light here. And without Boehringer, who has the same issues, we wouldn’t have steam washers and engines to power our flickershows. They say you have to break a few eggs to fry an omelette. Well, with Diamante, it’s the same. If he has to do some borderline stuff and pay the marshal in order to do what he does for the city, I say yar, that’s okay.”

  It was too much information, but that was without question why Edward had Pompi speaking to a bartender rather than someone more official. Bartenders were used to talking, and often ended up with many a foot in their large mouths.

  “Oh,” said Pompi.

  “What’s the problem, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  There was another pause. Clint imagined Edward instructing Pompi, telling him what to say. Finally the giant said, “Pompi doesn’t know how the big man has the power to do what he’s doing.”

  “Nobody does, do they, friend?” said the bartender. “But you’re a step ahead of the rest of us. At least you know what you’re working on. The rest of us get the tease on the late flickers. ‘Imagine free trade with The Realm!’ ‘Imagine the ability to partake of The Realm’s majesty!’ ‘Imagine the return of magic to the Sands!’ They’ve got us ‘imagining’ everything, but seeing nothing. It’s enough to drive a fellow mad. Does it have something to do with the train? Can you tell me that? Me and my buddies, we think it must, since they speak of trade, but then there’s the thing about magic’s return. But that’s not possible, is it? How can it be? But then, they used to say The Realm couldn’t be reached, and out in the Sands, they still say it can’t even be found. So is the big project related to the railroad you work on?”

  “Yar, Pompi drives spikes on the rails, but…”

  “I know, I know, you can’t say,” said the bartender, waving his dishcloth like a flag of surrender. “But if you lay rail, that tells me more than I knew before you came in.” He winked. “Pleasem and thankoo, as they say in the Sands.”

  Clint, who’d spent most of his remembered years in the Sands, made a mental note not to utter ‘pleasem and thankoo’ once he himself entered Meadowlands. Or ‘tall closet,’ probably. Or speak of water readers. Edward could magick them new clothes and make them scrubbed and clean when the time came, but Edward couldn’t change Clint’s way of speaking, which would give him away just as easily.

  As Clint watched, the world became suddenly black. For a moment, Clint thought his connection to Pompi had broken, but then the world returned and he realized that the giant had just winked back at the bartender. Because giants weren’t known to be coy, Pompi wasn’t especially good at winking. He’d done it with both eyes at once.

  Pompi upended his brew, and then Clint saw his vision move up and down as the giant nodded to the bartender. “Thankoo for the brew,” he said.

  “And thanks for the insider information.” The bartender winked again. This time Pompi didn’t try to wink back.

  The giant stood. Clint saw his vision swing around as Pompi turned and walked toward the door. The same giants he’d noticed as he’d come in were still there, still staring moodily into their mugs with the giant handles.

  Pompi left the saloon, turned right, and resumed walking down the road into NewTown Meadowlands. A man on horseback passed him, tipping his hat as he did. The man must have been from out of town, since the locals didn’t seem to feel like kindness to giants was necessary. Pompi returned the nod, then rounded the corner and moved back out of the giant-scale alcove. Humans began to avoid him again. Clint pictured himself riding high, atop the unicorn’s back.

  Toward the center of the city, the already-tall buildings grew even taller. The air became louder. Clint caught snippets of conversations as the giant breasted the crowd. Twice he heard debates involving steam versus spark power. Once he heard a woman blabbing on to another woman about a magic cooker she’d purchased for an absurd price. Three other times he heard groups talking about matters involving The Realm, Diamante and his train, trade, or all of the above. The crowd was excited. Meadowlands was booming; the rich were getting richer; the horizons held nothing but promise.

  Once Pompi made it through the crowd’s thickest ribbon in the largest alloy-and-glass part of the city (which still boasted many horses and carriages; their contrast against the slick, speedy vehicles was downright bizarre), the citizens walking the stone walkways became fewer again and the buildings shrank again in size. Glitz slowly gave way to older structures, and Clint realized that Pompi was now headed back out of town, nearing Meadowlands’ original section, which he’d referred to as OldTown.

  As he rounded a corner, two giants, six albinos (Clint recognized them as more of the Teedawge archetypes they’d faced in Baracho Gulch), and a small, fat, bald man stepped in Pompi’s way.

  “Hold on there, feller,” the small man said, flashing a star. “I’d like you to come with me.”

  “Why?” said Pompi.

  “Ain’t nothin’,” he said, extending his arm to indicate a shallow alcove between two buildings. “Just step in here for now, and we’ll go down to the station later if the situation warrants.”

  Pompi paused, then sa
id, “What did Pompi do?” Clint found himself amused to note that although Edward had surely fed him the line, Pompi hadn’t been able to recite it without substituting his name for “I.”

  The plump man didn’t answer. Instead, the giants and Teedawge archetypes came to Pompi’s side and nudged him into the alcove, where the sky was mostly hidden and it was darker. Pompi looked down and watched as the small man sat back to lean against the wall. The archetypes milled, chuckling, staring down at their hands. The giants drew large tarps from a concealed pocket and started to shake them. Clint realized with surprise that the tarps were actually gloves, and that they were pulling them onto their massive hands.

  “Your name is Pompi Bobo,” said the fat man. It wasn’t a question.

  “Yar.”

  The man touched his chest, fingers tented. “Harvey Ziglar,” he said. “Call me Ziggy. Marshal of Meadowlands. Since way back when Meadowlands was but a hollow haunted by you whoppers rather being than served by you, in fact.” He gestured at Pompi and his two largest escorts.

  Pompi said, “Elf Meadows doesn’t belong to humans.”

  Clint winced. Edward had probably muttered that line subconsciously, with no intention for Pompi to repeat it.

  Ziggy cocked his head. “That so?”

  “Pompi didn’t do anything wrong,” he said, back to the script.

  “Well, see, I disagree. We got a ring from a giant friend of ours, says he heard you saying some funny things about my friend Diego in the saloon. Maybe saying too much. The bartender said too much too, but never mind him; one of my deputies is paying him a visit. He also said your name was Pompi, so I looked it up. Turns out we had a deserter a while back with that name.”

  “Pompi didn’t do anything wrong,” he repeated.

  “Maybe Pompi came with a group. With other dissenters.”

  “Nar.”

  “Maybe Pompi isn’t telling me everything he knows.”

  “Nar.”

  Clint’s vision jerked toward the alcove floor as something massive struck Pompi’s midsection. The thing pulled back and Clint realized that it had been one of the other giants’ fists. His vision jerked to the side, sent there by a giant’s knee.

  Fist. Knee. Foot. Fist.

  A massive hand flew toward Clint’s vision, struck Pompi hard in the face, and sent his world to black.

  CHAPTER THREE:

  DULY DISGUISED

  Thanks to Pompi’s tutorial about Meadowlands’ layout, they knew where Fat Ziggy and his crew would take their oversized prisoner. And thankfully — because among the three of them, only Mai was remotely comfortable in larger towns — that prison was outside the tall buildings of alloy and glass.

  From the hills outside Meadowlands, they could make out the town’s odd geography. It had started much like every other town in the Sands — small, dusty, and poor — and that vintage town still existed in the area Pompi had called “OldTown.” The newer, shinier city had blossomed from its northwest side, up where the magic was strongest, nearer to the mountains. The law and oldest businesses clunked on in OldTown while the fancier ones grew out in NewTown. It was like a country and city mouse had set up residence as neighbors, each with a different impression of what living quarters ought to look like.

  After Pompi’s fancy parallel connection went black, Clint felt himself tumbling down a deep corridor of nothingness until he struck the bottom — a rock seat where he found his hearing and vision return to join his tactile sensations, which had never left. His eyes fluttered open, then flinched back to shut as he fought disorientation. His own eyes seemed tiny, his vision incomplete. Everything too low to the ground.

  Slowly he came back to his senses, opening his eyes and ears to see a beautiful, brown-haired woman kneeling in front of him, reaching forward to take his hands.

  “Clint.”

  “It’s okay. I’m coming around now.”

  “You looked like you were going to faint.”

  “Gunslingers don’t faint.”

  She mimicked his voice: “ ‘Gunslingers don’t faint.’ Yar, they almost do. What happened? What did you see?”

  Edward walked into the circle of their dead fire, tossing his head, snorting. “They got him.”

  “They got him?”

  Clint squeezed Mai’s hands before standing — standing slowly, because he was still fighting disorientation after his time as a giant. Her hands were the same, despite the changes she’d undergone. But the things those hands could now do were amazing. Brilliant. Unthinkable.

  “They got Pompi,” Clint explained. “The local marshal and his cronies — two giants and a bunch of those xombie things we fought in Baracho. They beat him up, then…. what?” He looked at Edward. All he knew was that suddenly, Pompi had been unable see.

  “They knocked him out,” said Edward. “One of them probably hit him with something on the back of the head.”

  Mai shook her head. “Why?”

  Clint rummaged in one of the packs, found a waterskin, took a swallow, then returned it. “They knew who he was. And they heard him talking about Diamante.”

  “Ruthless land barons don’t like subversives,” said Edward. “Now I feel responsible.”

  Clint didn’t reply. Edward usually acted like a jerk, but in the end, he was strangely loyal. Of course he felt responsible for getting Pompi in trouble, and of course they’d need to ride into OldTown — where the marshal’s station sat — to rescue him.

  “I’ll go,” said Mai.

  “Nar.” Clint shook his head. “Kold barely left you living.”

  “I’ve changed since then.” Mai extended her hand and a can of beans zoomed into her palm.

  “Mayhap too much,” Edward said. “That’s the problem. I suspect Kold does indeed control the Triangulum. My guess is that he found the third Orb months ago, and has been using it to power the city. But that poses a problem for us. The Triangulum will call to you and you will call to it.”

  “So I can help you find it,” said Mai.

  “In time. But you can and will also expose us while we’re trying to rescue Pompi. Try to understand, Mai. To the Triangulum, you shine like a beacon.”

  Mai put her hands on her hips. Clint knew that look well. It meant that she understood, but that understanding didn’t fence her irritation.

  “I see. And nobody else here is enchanted?” Mai stared at the magical unicorn.

  “I was getting to that.” Edward looked at Clint for a long, serious moment. “I must do something to hide myself. And just so you’re warned, this will disturb you.”

  Edward’s coat started to shimmer. Then from its bright white, dirt-repellant color, it faded to a dusty gray. Light smoky spots began to blot his rump. He left a white splotch — now an ordinary, non-glowing white — down his nose, creating a blaze amidst the gray.

  “That doesn’t disturb me,” said Clint.

  “I’m not done.”

  The unicorn’s horn began to glow, then shrink. But nar, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t shrinking. It was retracting. The entire horn was descending into Edward’s head as if being pulled down from the inside. Clint watched it happen, his mouth open. Edward’s horn was longer than his head was thick. Where was it going? Into his neck?

  When the horn was gone, its old spot shimmered and became gray hair. Edward, the magical unicorn, was now a horse.

  “I don’t know what to say.” It was as if Clint were looking at someone else. He felt stupid even speaking to Edward, since the equine before him clearly wasn’t a unicorn. Who spoke to a horse, except for that talking horse of the old songs — coincidentally also named Edward?

  The horse said, “Don’t say anything.”

  “I didn’t know you could do that.”

  Edward grunted. “It wouldn’t be the first time unicorns have had to hide their true appearance.”

  “You look like a horse.”

  “I can still magick you into every rock on the way down,” said Edward. “I’d have to p
eek my horn like a turtle from its shell, but I’ll risk the exposure to hurt you if you say that again.”

  Mai couldn’t stop herself from slowly circling the no-longer-a-unicorn and stroking his sides. Luckily Edward appreciated the touch of a human woman, or else he’d see what she was doing for what it was — assessment of a common mount.

  “This will hide your magic?”

  “My horn is like an antenna. Without it, I don’t broadcast.”

  Clint slapped Edward’s gray neck. “You’re going to need a saddle.”

  “I know.”

  “And a bridle. And reins. Ooh! And a bit!”

  “If you try to put a bit in my mouth, I will bite off your fingers and swallow them without chewing.”

  “What kind of cowboy rides without a bit? And spurs?”

  “The kind that rides with commoner’s guns.”

  The remark felt to Clint like what Clint’s “horse” comment must have felt like to Edward. His mouth hung open. He felt his belt seem to lift, looked up to see a small glowing spot on the top of Edward’s head with a tiny tip of horn peeking out, then looked down and saw his gun belt unbuckling itself. It fell without ceremony into the dirt.

  “Leave them with Mai,” Edward said. “And Mai, don’t try to shoot them.”

  Clint’s jaw was still open. “I need my guns!”

  “We’re entering Meadowlands. No magical Orb woman, no unicorn, no marshal’s guns with their magical powders. You can’t sense the strength of the Triangulum’s enchantment. Even if you could hide the fact that you had two guns and that they had seven-shot tumblers, the mere presence of your bullets’ powders might give us away. And if we get into trouble and you fire a shot, that definitely will. So now you’re a commoner. Pretend it’s the academy days. You can still fire a six-shot iron, can’t you?”